Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
A man comes back as a donkey comes back as an ox comes back as a pig comes back as a dog comes back as a monkey comes back as a big-headed baby.
There’s a line from Jung Chang’s excellent intergenerational memoir, Wild Swans, that I often return to when trying to understand the effects of communism on ordinary people. Chang describes how her mother and father were criticized by party officials for sneaking out to see each other in the middle of the night; she explains that “the idea was that everything personal was political; in fact, henceforth nothing was supposed to be regarded as ‘personal’ or private.” The new political ideologies of the modern era are often described as being a sharp break from the past (consider the attacks on organized religion in the USSR or PRC), but these ideologies just as often ended up reenacting older, more traditional forms of power, hierarchy, and cruelty.
In Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Mo Yan is grappling with the changes that convulsed China in the second half of the twentieth century. He does so by forcing a series of karmic punishments upon his narrator and protagonist, Ximen Nao, who is reborn five times in animal form before being winning back his humanity. It’s not a huge leap to see these rebirths as allegorical, representing the many rebirths of China during this time (and as a critique as well, suggesting that to live in China 1950-2000 meant an exhausting existence in a purgatory where society’s rules and an individual’s fortunes could change on a whim).
It’s a strange book, perhaps better loved by my one-year old son (who greatly enjoyed identifying the animals on the cover) than me, although I was deeply impressed throughout by Mo Yan’s quick wit, creative plotting, and patience as he let his characters grow, struggle, and ultimately die in Ximen Village, always around the apricot tree. I had trouble at times when trying to reconcile the human and animal stories, and there are a lot of animal stories in this novel. Do you want to know if Ximen Nao will become accustomed to his animal lives? If he will aggressively pursue a female donkey in heat? Be terrorized by the local castration expert’s knife? Suckle at the teat of his pig mother? Take advantage of his human intelligence to rule over his fellow beasts? If so, you’re in luck, it’s all there in the text, including this little nugget of piggish acceptance and exceptionalism:
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.
In spite of the often dark historical backdrop, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is almost always funny. It continually satirizes both the past and itself, undermining collective agriculture, the deification of Mao Zedong, traditional Confucian family norms, and China’s return to a market economy. Consider the following lament by Ximen Pig, the sixteenth and mightiest of his litter, who sees his own existence at risk when learning of the death of Mao Zedong:
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!
Another of my favorite moments came as Ximen Nao’s son considers the possibility of opening a Cultural Revolution themed resort upon the loosening of China’s economy in the 1990s:
He wanted to paint new slogans on walls where they had been removed, reinstall loudspeakers, build another lookout perch in the apricot tree, and erect a new Apricot Garden Pig Farm on the site where the old one had been ruined in a rainstorm. Beyond that, he wanted to build a golf course on the five thousand acres of land east of the village. As for the farmers who would lose their cropland, he proposed that they act out the village tasks they’d had during the Cultural Revolution, such as: organizing criticism sessions, parading capitalist-roaders in the streets, performing in Revolutionary Model Operas and loyalty dances. He wrote that Cultural Revolution artifacts could be turned out in large quantities: armbands, spears, Chairman Mao badges.
As an American reader with a superficial understanding of Chinese history, I imagine that a lot of the allusions and jokes went over my head1, but not this one! Colonial Williamsburg, eat your heart out.
Beyond the satire, it’s hard to find a core message at the center of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. The narrative is unstable, thanks to the voices of multiple narrators in and out of conversation with one another, filtered through the human and animal personalities alike. A fictional Mo Yan exists within these pages as well, first as an author whose stories are cited and quoted, then as a despised minor character who actions often help propel the plot, and eventually as the third and final narrator of Life and Death. At one point the real author Mo Yan warns us, through the voice of the narrator, Ximen Nao, about his fictional double:
Mo Yan, always ready to deceive people with heresy, is in the habit of mixing fact and fantasy in his stories; you can’t reject the contents out of hand, but you mustn’t fall into the trap of believing everything he writes.
This warning has the paradoxical effect of making the other voices in the narrative seem more trustworthy: by telling us the truth about Mo Yan, their tales, by contrast, appear reliable, no matter how strange they are and despite the fact that they too are the creation of a person called Mo Yan2. These critiques of Mo Yan also operate as literary criticism of the novel within the novel itself, and I believe the moment that follows points us towards some conclusions about the author’s intent:
In the words of Mo Yan: It was a romantic stroll and it was a tortuous trek; it was a shameful passage and it was a noble action; it was a retreat and an attack; it was surrender and resistance; it was weakness and strength; it was a challenge and a compromise. He wrote more contradictory stuff like that, some of it on target, some just trying to be mystifying. What I think is, leaving home, supported by Chunmiao, was neither noble nor glorious; it just showed we had courage and honesty.
There’s a funny echo of the famous opening to A Tale of Two Cities here and a repudiation of it: the real Mo Yan doesn’t want us to fall for the pretty stories or doublespeak of his doppelgänger. The characters in his novel aren’t consistently courageous or honest, but they do engage in courageous and honest private acts even when to do so means a kind of public death. In the end that’s what he leaves us with: individual actions in the face of the cruelty of human systems and the ways in which these acts play out against the complex backdrop of family, tradition, and history. It’s never simple, but it makes for a fascinating story.
There’s a reason that the New York Times enlisted Jonathan Spence, one of the best known historians of modern China, to review Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.
Which, while we’re at it, happens to be a pseudonym.