Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (49 page)

You weren’t witness to what happened after that, though I’m sure you heard all about it. An epidemic spread quickly through the farm and infected more than eight hundred pigs, including the twenty-eight pregnant sows. I was a rare survivor, thanks to my highly developed immune system and to the quantity of garlic Ximen Bai added to my feed. Sixteen, she said repeatedly, it’s peppery, but go ahead and eat it. Garlic protects against all kinds of poisons. Now I knew this was no common sickness, and eating some garlic was a cheap price to pay to avoid it. During those days it would have been more accurate to say I survived on garlic than on pig feed. Each peppery meal was accompanied by tears and sweat, and raised hell with my mouth and stomach. But the garlic did the trick — I survived.

After the Red Death decimated the pig population, several more veterinarians crossed the river to our farm. One of them was a brawny, hardy woman with a bad case of acne whom everyone called Station Chief Yu. She had a firm hand and dealt with things decisively. When she placed a phone call to the county from the farm office, you could hear her a mile away. Under her supervision, the veterinarians gave the sows shots and drew blood from them. I heard that around sunset, a motorboat came up the river with badly needed medicines. But none of that kept the majority of pigs alive, and that spelled the doom for the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. Carcasses were piled so high there was no way they could be cremated, so a burial ditch was dug; but once again, water rose to the surface a couple of feet down, so that was out. Driven to desperation, farm personnel had no choice but to wait until the veterinarians left and, in the fading light of dusk, load the carcasses onto a flatbed wagon and haul them down to the river, where they were tossed into the water to float downstream — out of sight and out of mind.

The disposal of pig carcasses wasn’t wrapped up until the early days of September, following a series of heavy rainfalls that eroded the shabbily constructed hog house foundations. Most of the buildings collapsed in a single night. I heard the loud laments of Jinlong in the northern row of buildings. Obsessively ambitious, he had hoped to move up the promotion ladder by displaying his talents during activities scheduled for the delegation from the Military Region Logistics Command, whose arrival had been delayed by the rainstorms. But now that would never happen. The pigs were dead, the farm was in ruins, and I was heartsick as I reflected on the glorious days now a thing of the past.

On the ninth day of September, an event occurred that was as cataclysmic as a mountain collapsing or the earth opening up. Despite all attempts to save him, your Chairman Mao passed away. I could, of course, have said
our
Chairman Mao, but I was a pig at the time, and that would have sounded disrespectful. The river behind the village had overflowed its banks and sent floodwaters that toppled a utility pole and snapped the phone line, turning the village phone into a mere decoration and muting the loudspeaker. So word of Chairman Mao’s passing came to us from Jinlong, who’d heard the news on the radio. That radio had been a gift from his good friend Chang Tianhong, who’d been taken into custody by the Military Control Commission for the crime of hooliganism, only to be released owing to a lack of evidence. He was in and out of trouble until finally being appointed assistant troupe leader of the county Cat’s Meow Drama Troupe. As a music academy graduate, he was an ideal choice for the position. He plunged enthusiastically into the work: not only did he adapt the eight model revolutionary operas for the Cat’s Meow stage, but he followed current trends by writing and directing a production of
Tales of Pig-Raising
based upon events at our Apricot Garden Pig Farm — in a postscript to his story “Tales of Pig-Raising” Mo Yan referred to this development, even claiming that he had been a coauthor, but I’m pretty sure that’s a bunch of bull. It’s true that Chang Tianhong came to our pig farm to get a feel for life here, and it’s true that Mo Yan tagged along behind him like a parasite. But coauthor? No way. Chang let his imagination soar for this contemporary Cat’s Meow production, giving the pigs speaking parts and separating them into two cliques, one of which advocated extreme eating and shitting to get fat in the name of revolution; the remaining pigs were hidden class enemies, represented by Diao Xiaosan, with Butting Crazy and his friends, who ate without putting on weight, as accomplices. On the farm it wasn’t just humans pitted against humans; pigs were also pitted against pigs, and these swine struggles comprised the production’s central conflict, with humans as the supporting cast. Chang had studied Western music in college, with a concentration on Western opera. His contributions to the Cat’s Meow production were not limited to innovations in content; he also introduced drastic changes to traditional Cat’s Meow melodies, including an aria for the major positive male role of Whitey, a truly wonderful movement. I always assumed that Whitey was a dramatic version of me, but in “Tales of Pig-Raising” Mo Yan wrote that Whitey symbolized a vital and upward-moving, healthy and progressive, freedom-and-happiness-seeking force. Man, could he stretch the truth, what nerve! I knew how much effort Chang put into creating this production, integrating local and Western traditions, brilliantly merging romanticism and realism, creating a model of serious ideological contents and moving artistic form that brought out the best in each. If Chairman Mao had died a few years later, there might well have been a ninth model opera: the Gaomi Cat’s Meow version of
Tales of Pig-Raising.

I recall one moonlit night when Chang Tianhong stood beneath the crooked apricot tree holding a libretto of
Tales of Pig-Raising,
with its squiggly musical notations, as he sang Whitey’s aria for the benefit of the youthful Jinlong, Huzhu, Baofeng, and Ma Liangcai (who was then principal of the Ximen Village Elementary School). Mo Yan was there too, with a water bottle in a holder of woven red and green plastic threads. Steeping in the bottle were a pair of medicinal fruit seeds, and Mo Yan was ready to hand the bottle to Chang if and when he needed it. In his other hand he held a black oilpaper fan with which he was fanning Chang’s back — I found his fawning behavior thoroughly disgusting. But that’s how he participated in the creation of the Cat’s Meow version of
Tales of Pig-Raising.

Everyone recalls how the villagers had once given Chang Tianhong the insulting nickname of Braying Jackass. Well, after the passage of more than ten years, the villagers’ outlook had gradually broadened, and a new understanding of Chang’s singing artistry had emerged. The Chang Tianhong who returned this time to get a feel for life in the village and create a new drama was a changed man. The superficiality and haughtiness people had found so off-putting was gone. There was a sense of melancholy in his eyes, his face had an ashen quality, stubble decorated his chin, and his temples had turned gray; he looked a lot like one of those Russian Decembrists. The people viewed him with reverence as they waited for him to sing, and with one front hoof on the quivering apricot branch and my chin resting on the other hoof, I settled in to enjoy an enchanting evening performance by the lovely youth. Laying her left hand on Huzhu’s left shoulder and resting her chin on her sister-in-law’s right shoulder, Baofeng gazed at Chang’s thin, moonlit face and naturally curly hair. Although her face was in the shadows, the moonlight revealed the sad helplessness in that look. On the farm even we pigs knew that Chang and Pang Hu’s daughter, Pang Kangmei, who’d been assigned out of college to the county production headquarters, were romantically involved and, we heard, to be married on October 1, National Day. She’d come to see him twice while he was on the farm. Endowed with a lovely figure and bright eyes, and refusing to put on airs as an urban intellectual, she made a fine impression on both the people and us pigs. Each time she came she inspected our production station — after all, she worked with livestock at the production headquarters — and looked in on all the farm animals, mules, horses, donkeys, oxen. I was pretty sure Baofeng knew that Kangmei was slated to marry Chang, whom she had fallen for, and Kangmei seemed aware of Baofeng’s feelings. Around dusk one day, I saw them talking under the crooked apricot tree, and watched as Baofeng laid her head on Kangmei’s shoulder and wept. Kangmei, who also had tears in her eyes, stroked Baofeng’s head consolingly.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the story I’m telling. What I really want to talk about is that radio, a Red Lantern transistor radio made in Qingdao, which Chang Tianhong had given to Jinlong. No one said it was a wedding present, but that’s what it was. And while Chang gave him the gift, originally, Pang Kangmei had brought it back with her when she was sent on temporary assignment to Qingdao; and though Jinlong was the recipient, in fact Pang Kangmei personally gave it to Huang Huzhu and told her how to install batteries, how to turn it on and off, and how to find radio stations. Given my penchant for roaming, I saw it on the night of Jinlong’s wedding. For the wedding banquet, Jinlong had placed it on a table with a lit lantern. It was tuned to the loudest and clearest station he could find. Farm personnel — boys and girls, men and women — gathered round to listen excitedly Everyone felt like touching the obviously expensive object, but no one could get up the nerve to do it. What if they broke it? After Jinlong wiped the sides with a piece of red satin, the people crowded round to listen to a thin-voiced woman sing. What she sang did not concern them. They were too busy trying to figure out how she’d gotten into that little box. I wasn’t
that
stupid, since I was somewhat familiar with electronics. I not only knew that there were many radios in use in the world, but that there was something even more advanced — television. I also knew that an American had landed on the moon, that the Soviet Union had launched spaceships, and that the first animal to go into space was a pig. By “they” I was referring to the regular pig farm personnel. That did not include Mo Yan, who had learned many things by reading
Reference News.
There was, of course, another “them,” the critters that hid in or behind our haystacks. They too were mesmerized by the sounds emerging from the strange box.

Here’s a rough summary of what happened at two o’clock that afternoon: We’ll start with the sky, which was, for the most part, clear, though there were some dark clouds. Gale-force winds blew from the southeast and served as a key to open up the sky, as northern peasants all know. As the clouds were blown across the sky, moving shadows skittered past Apricot Garden. Then there was the steaming ground, over which large toads were crawling. Finally, there were the people. A dozen or so farm personnel were spraying liquid lime over the still standing pigpens. Hardly any pigs were left alive, and the scene of desolation had thrown the people into a deep depression. They scrubbed the top of my wall with the liquid lime and did the same to the low-hanging apricot branches over my quarters. Was that going to kill off agents of the Red Death? Hell no! What a joke. From their conversation I discovered that, including me, only seventy pigs or so had survived. I’d pretty much stayed put while the epidemic was raging, so I was curious to learn as much as possible about the seventy other pigs that survived. What type were they, and were any of them my siblings? Were there any wild boars like Diao Xiaosan? Well, just as I was exercising my brain over such thoughts; and just as the farm personnel were trying to figure out what the future held; and just as the abdomen of a pig that had been buried burst under the blazing sun; and just as a bird with a brightly colored tail, one that even I, with all my knowledge and experience, had never seen before, flew in low and landed on the crooked, waterlogged apricot tree, which had lost all its leaves; and just as Ximen Bai spotted the bird, whose colorful tail hung down nearly to the ground, and shouted excitedly, her lips quivering, “Phoenix!” Jinlong stumbled out of his wedding chamber, clutching the radio to his chest. His face had lost its color and he looked like someone whose soul had left him. Staring wide-eyed, he announced hoarsely:

“Chairman Mao is dead!”

Chairman Mao is dead. Are you joking? Spreading a rumor? Launching a vicious attack? Saying that Chairman Mao is dead is like signing your own death warrant! How could Chairman Mao be dead? Doesn’t everyone say that he could live at least 158 years? Doubts and questions swirled in the people’s minds when the news broke. Even me, a pig, was puzzled beyond measure, finding it hard to believe. But the tears in Jinlong’s eyes and the solemn look on his face told us that the news was true. The mellow voice from Central People’s Broadcasting Station had a slightly nasal quality as it solemnly informed the Party, the military, and people of all ethnic groups in the country of the death of Chairman Mao. I looked up at the sky, where dark clouds were roiling, and then at the trees, with their bare branches, and finally at the clutter of collapsed pigpens, and I listened to the incongruous croaking of frogs out in the fields and the occasional explosion of another ruptured pig’s belly from a shallow grave; my nostrils filled with a variety of foul smells as I saw images of all the strange things that had happened over the course of several months, including the sudden disappearance of Diao Xiaosan and all the mysterious things he’d said, and I knew conclusively that Chairman Mao was dead.

What followed was this: Holding the radio in his hands like a filial son carrying his father’s ashes, Jinlong walked solemnly toward the village. Pig farm personnel dropped what they were doing and fell in behind him, somber, respectful looks on their faces. The death of Chairman Mao was a loss not only for humans but for us pigs as well. With no Chairman Mao there could be no New China, and with no New China there could be no Ximen Village Production Brigade Apricot Garden Pig Farm, and with no Ximen Village Production Brigade Apricot Garden Pig Farm there could be no Pig Sixteen! That is why I followed Jinlong and the others out onto the street.