I laughed off his threats and told him I accepted his challenge, that I’d be waiting: There can only be one tiger on a mountain, and two donkeys cannot be tethered to the same trough. The Earth God’s pecker may be made of stone, but his female counterpart does not have a clay receptacle. A pig farm can have but one pig king, and the day will come when you and I will fight to the death. Today’s run-in doesn’t count. It was just one louse pitted against another, pig against pig. But the next time it’ll be out in the open. In the interest of fairness and transparency, just so there’ll be no doubt as to the outcome, we can select several fair-minded, ethical old pigs who are familiar with the rules of competition and widely knowledgeable as judges. Now I ask only that the gentleman leave my quarters. I raised a front leg and saluted him, my hoof looking as if it were carved from fine jade in the light of the bonfire.
I’d expected the wild bastard to leave in spectacular fashion, but he disappointed me. He merely made himself as thin as possible and squeezed through the metal slats of the gate. His head was the hardest to get through, and required lots of bumping and clanging, but once that was through, the rest of his body followed easily. I didn’t have to see to know that was how he’d reenter his own pen. Crawling through openings to get into something is the way dogs and cats do it; no proper pig would ever lower himself to that sort of behavior. If you’re going to be a pig, then your schedule should be: eat and sleep, sleep and eat; fatten up for your owner, get good and meaty for your owner, then be taken by your owner to the slaughterhouse. Otherwise, be like me: Have a good time doing something that shocks them when they finally see it. And so, after seeing that mangy dog of a pig, Diao Xiaosan, slink his way through the slats of my gate, his stock plummeted in my eyes.
25
A High Official Speaks Grandly at an On-site conference
An Outlandish Pig Puts on a Show beneath an Apricot Tree
Sorry I’m only now getting around to talking about the glories surrounding the pig-raising local on-site conference. The entire commune was caught up in preparations for the gathering for a whole week, and I devoted an entire chapter to it.
Let me begin with the pig farm walls, which were newly whitewashed – to sterilize them, we were told – then covered with slogans in red, all pig-related, but also tied to world revolution. Who wrote them? Who else but Ximen Jinlong! The two most talented youngsters in Ximen Village were Ximen Jinlong and Mo Yan. Here’s how Hong Taiyue evaluated the two of them: Ximen Jinlong had upright talents, Mo Yan had deviant talents. Mo Yan was seven years younger than Jinlong, and when Jinlong was in the spotlight, Mo Yan was building up strength, like a fat bamboo shoot still in the ground. At the time, no one paid the kid any attention. He was almost unbelievably ugly and carried on in the most peculiar ways. Given to saying crazy things that had people scratching their heads, he was to some an annoyance and to others a pariah. Even members of his family called him a moron. “Mom,” his sister often asked their mother, “is he really your son? Couldn’t Father have found him abandoned in a mulberry grove when he was out collecting dung?” Mo Yan’s elder brothers and sisters were tall and good looking, easily the equals of Jinlong, Baofeng, Huzhu, and Hezuo. Mother would sigh and say, “The night he was born, your father dreamed that an imp dragging a big writing brush behind him came into our house, and when your father asked him where he’d come from, he said the Halls of Hell, where he’d been Lord Yama’s personal secretary. Your father was puzzling over the dream when he heard the loud wails of a baby in the next room, after which the midwife came out and announced: “Congratulations, sir, your wife has given you a son.” I suspect that Mo Yan’s mother made up most of this tale to give her son some respectability in the village, since stories like that have been a part of China’s popular tradition for a long time. If you go to Ximen Village today – the village has been turned into the Phoenix Open Economic Region, and the farmlands of those days have been supplanted by towering structures that look neither Chinese nor Western – people still talk – more than ever, actually – about Mo Yan, Lord Yama’s personal secretary.
The 1970s were Ximen Jinlong’s era; Mo Yan would have to wait a decade for his talents to be on display. For now, what I saw was Ximen Jinlong about to plaster slogans over all the walls in preparation for the pig-raising on-site conference. Wearing blue sleeve covers and white gloves, he was assisted by Huang Huzhu, who held a bucket of red paint, and Hezuo, who had yellow paint. The smell of paint was heavy in the air. Before that day, the slogans had all been written in chalk. The funds allocated for the gathering made it possible to buy paint. With his customary mastery of the written word, Jinlong painted the headings in red with a big brush, then outlined them in yellow with a small one. The effect was astonishingly eyecatching, like a woman made beautiful with red lipstick and blue eyeliner. The crowd watching him work was loud in its praise. The sixth wife of old Ma, who was a bigger flirt even than Wu Qiuxiang, said with all the charm she could manage:
“Brother Jinlong, if I were twenty years younger, I’d be your wife no matter how many women I had to fight off. And if not your wife, then your mistress!”
“You’d be last in line for anybody choosing a mistress!” someone commented.
Ma’s sixth wife batted her eyes at Huzhu and Hezuo.
“You’re right,” she said. “If these two fairies were in that line, I’d be last for sure. Shouldn’t you be plucking these two flowers, young man? You’d better move fast before somebody else tastes their freshness first!”
The Huang sisters blushed bright red; Jinlong was noticeably embarrassed too. “Shut up, you slut,” he said, raising his brush threateningly, “or I’ll paint your mouth shut!”
I know how the mere mention of the Huang sisters affects you, Jiefang, but I can’t omit them when I’m turning back the pages of history. Besides, even if I left them out of my narration, Mo Yan would be bound to write about them sooner or later. Every resident of Ximen Village will find himself in one of Mo Yan’s notorious books. So, as I was saying, the slogans were written and the trunks of apricot trees whose bark hadn’t been scraped clean were lime-washed; school kids, who climbed like monkeys, had decorated the limbs and branches with strips of colored paper.
Any campaign that lacks the participation of students lacks life. Add students, and things start to happen. Even if your stomach is grumbling, there’s a festive holiday spirit. Under the leadership of Ma Liangcai and the young teacher who wore her hair in a braid and spoke Mandarin, more than a hundred of Ximen Village’s elementary students scurried in all directions amid the trees, like an assembly of squirrels. About fifty yards due south of my pigpen there were two apricot trees roughly five yards apart at the base but whose canopies seemed to have grown together. Several excited, raucous boys took off their tattered coats and went naked from the waist, wearing only tattered pants, with moldy cotton leaking out of the crotches, like the dirty tails of Tibetan yaks, swinging from tough but pliable limbs like a bunch of monkeys until they were moving fast and far enough to let go and sail from one tree to the other.
Now, then, let’s continue with the gathering. The trees, as we’ve seen, had been decorated to look like old witches, and red banners had been planted every five yards on both sides of the north-south path down the middle of the pig farm. A platform had been raised in the clearing, with rush mats, covered by red cloth, on each side. A banner had been hung horizontally in the center, with writing on it, of course. The words? Given the occasion, any Chinese knows the answer to that, so there’s no need for me to go into it here.