It was Lao Lan who invented the scientific method of forcing pressurized water into the pulmonary arteries of slaughtered animals. With this method, you could empty a bucketful of water into a two-hundred-jin pig, while with the old method you could barely empty half a bucket of water into the carcass of a dead cow. The amount of money that the clever townspeople have spent on water from our village when they thought they were paying for meat in the years since will never be known, but I’m sure it would be a shockingly high figure.

Photograph by Tim Klein / Gallery Stock

Lao Lan had a substantial potbelly and rosy cheeks; his voice rang out like a pealing bell. In a word, he was born to be a rich official. After rising to the position of village head, he selflessly taught his fellow-villagers the water-injection method and served as the leader of a local riches-through-ruse movement. Some villagers spoke out angrily and some attacked him on wall posters, calling him a member of the retaliatory landlord class, which was intent on overthrowing the rule of the village proletariat. But talk like that was out of fashion. Over the village P.A. system, Lao Lan announced, “Dragons beget dragons, phoenixes beget phoenixes, and a mouse is born only to dig holes.” Sometime later, we came to realize that he was like a kung-fu master who will never pass on all his skills to his apprentices—who holds back enough for a safety net. Lao Lan’s meat was water-injected, like everyone else’s, but his looked fresher and smelled sweeter. You could leave it out in the sun for two days and it wouldn’t spoil, while others’ would be maggot-infested if it didn’t sell the first day. So Lao Lan never had to worry about cutting prices if his supply did not sell right away; meat that looked as good as his was never in danger of going unsold.

My father, Luo Tong, told me it wasn’t water that Lao Lan injected into his meat but formaldehyde. My father was much smarter than Lao Lan. He’d never studied physics, but he knew all about positive and negative electricity; he’d never studied biology, but he was an expert on sperm and eggs; and he’d never studied chemistry, but he was well aware that formaldehyde can kill bacteria, keep meat from spoiling, and stabilize proteins, which is how he guessed that Lao Lan had injected formaldehyde into his meat. If getting rich had been on my father’s agenda, he’d have had no trouble becoming the wealthiest man in the village, of that I’m sure. But he was a dragon among men, and dragons have no interest in accumulating property. You’ve seen critters like squirrels and rats dig holes to store food, but who’s ever seen a tiger, the king of the animals, do something like that? Tigers spend most of their time sleeping in their lairs, coming out only when hunger sends them hunting for prey. Similarly, my father spent most of his time holed up, eating, drinking, and having a good time, coming out only when hunger pangs sent him looking for income. Never for a moment did he resemble Lao Lan and people of that ilk, who accumulated blood money, putting a knife in white and taking it out red. Nor was he interested in going down to the train station to earn a porter’s wages by the sweat of his brow, like some of the coarser village men. Father made his living by his wits.

In ancient times, there was a famous chef named Pao Ding, who was an expert at carving up cows. In modern times, there was a man who was an expert at sizing them up—my father. In Pao Ding’s eyes, cows were nothing but bones and edible flesh. That’s what they were in my father’s eyes, too. Pao Ding’s vision was as sharp as a knife; my father’s was as sharp as a knife and as accurate as a scale. What I mean to say is: if you were to lead a live cow up to my father, he’d take two turns around it, three at most, occasionally sticking his hand up under the animal’s foreleg—just for show—and confidently report its gross weight and the quantity of meat on its bones, always to within a kilo of what might register on the digital scale used in England’s largest cattle slaughterhouse. At first, people thought my father was just a windbag, but after testing him several times they were believers. His presence took blind luck out of the equation in dealings between cattlemen and butchers, and established a basis of fairness. Once his authority was in place, both the cattlemen and the butchers courted his favor, hoping to gain an edge. But, as a man of vision, he would never jeopardize his reputation for petty profits, since by doing so he’d smash his rice bowl. If a cattleman came to our house with a gift of wine and cigarettes, my father tossed them into the street, then climbed our garden wall and cursed loudly. If a butcher came with a gift of a pig’s head, my father flung it into the street, then climbed our garden wall and cursed loudly. Both the cattlemen and the butchers said that Luo Tong was an idiot, but the fairest man they knew.

People trusted him implicitly. If a transaction reached a stalemate, the parties would look at him to acknowledge that they wanted things settled. “Let’s quit arguing and hear what Luo Tong has to say!” “All right, let’s do that. Luo Tong, you be the judge!” With a cocky air, my father would walk around the animal twice, looking at neither the buyer nor the seller, then glance up into the sky and announce the gross weight and the amount of meat on the bone, followed by a price. He’d then wander off to smoke a cigarette. Buyer and seller would reach out and smack hands. “Good! It’s a deal!” Once the transaction was completed, buyer and seller would come up to my father and each would hand him a ten-yuan note and thank him for his labors. What must be made clear is that, before my father showed up at the cattle auctions, the deals had been negotiated by old-style brokers, dark, gaunt, wretched old men, some with queues hanging down their backs, who were proficient in the art of haggling by finger signs hidden in wide, overlapping sleeves, thus lending the profession an air of mystery. My father effectively drove the shifty-eyed brokers off the stage of history. This remarkable advance in the buying and selling of cattle on the hoof could, with only a bit of exaggeration, be called revolutionary. My father’s keen eye was not limited to cattle but worked on pigs and sheep as well. Like a master carpenter who can build a table but can also build a chair and, if he’s especially talented, a coffin, my father had no trouble sizing up even camels.

Early one summer day, Father carried me on his shoulders over to the threshing floor. We were still living in the three-room shack we’d inherited from my grandfather. Our shack looked particularly shabby and awful now that it was tucked in among a bunch of newly built houses with red tiled roofs, like a beggar kneeling in front of a clutch of landlords and rich merchants in silks and satins, asking for a handout. The wall around our yard came barely up to an adult’s waist and was topped by weeds. Thanks to my lazy, gluttonous father, we lived a life of extremes, with potfuls of meat on the stove during good times and empty pots during the bad. Whenever he was the target of Mother’s frantic curses, he’d say, “Any day now, very soon, the second land-reform campaign will begin, and you’ll thank me when it does. Don’t for a minute envy Lao Lan, since he’ll wind up like that landlord father of his, dragged off to the bridgehead by a mob of poor peasants to be shot.” He’d aim an imaginary rifle at Mother’s head and fire off a round: bang! She’d grab her head with both hands and go pale with fright. But the second land-reform campaign didn’t come and didn’t come, and poor Mother was forced to bring home rotten sweet potatoes that people had thrown away so she could feed the pigs. Our two little pigs never got enough to eat and they squealed hungrily most of the time. It was annoying.

That morning, Father had railed angrily, “What the hell are you squealing about? Keep it up and I’ll toss you two little bastards in a pot and have you for dinner!’

Cleaver in hand, Mother glared at him. “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “Those are my pigs. I raised them, and nobody will harm a hair on them. Either the fish dies or the net breaks.”

“Take it easy,” Father said, with a gleeful laugh. “I wouldn’t touch those skin-and-bones animals for anything.”

I took a long look at the pigs—it was true that there wasn’t much meat on either of them, but those four fleshy ears would have made for good snacking. To me, the ears were the best part of a pig’s head—no fat, not much grease, and tiny little bones with a nice crunch. They were best with cucumbers—the thorny ones with flowers—and some mashed garlic and sesame oil. “We can eat their ears!” I said.

“I’ll cut off your ears and eat them first, you little bastard!” Mother said. She grabbed hold of my ear and jerked it hard, while Father tried to pull me free—by the neck—and I screamed for all I was worth, afraid my ear would be ripped off. My screams sounded like the squeals of pigs being slaughtered in the village. In the end, Father, with his superior strength, managed to yank me free.

Rage turned Mother’s face waxen and her lips purple; she stood at the stove shaking from head to toe. Emboldened by my father’s protection, I cursed, spitting out her full name: “Yang Yuzhen, you stinking old lady, you’re making my life a living hell!”

Stunned by my outburst, she just stared at me, while Father chuckled, picked me up, and took off running. We were already out in the yard by the time we heard Mother’s shrill wail. “I could die, I’m so mad, you little bastard. . . .”

Father rapped me on the head and said softly, “You little imp, how did you know your mother’s name?”

I looked up into his swarthy, sombre face. “I heard you say it!”

“When did I ever tell you her name was Yang Yuzhen?”

“You told it to Auntie Wild Mule. You said, ‘Yang Yuzhen, that stinking old lady, is making my life a living hell!’ ”

Father clamped his hand over my mouth and said under his breath, “Shut up, damn you. I’ve been a pretty good father so far. Don’t you go and ruin things for me now.”

Mother came out of the house, cleaver in hand. “Luo Tong,” she shouted, “Luo Xiaotong, you two sons of bitches, you scruffy bastards, I wouldn’t care if I died today if I could take the two of you with me. Today will see the end of this family!”

The terrible look on her face announced to me that this was no joke. My father may have led a dissipated life, but he was no fool. The smart man avoids danger. He swept me up, tucked me under his arm, turned, and ran toward the wall and all but somersaulted over it, putting my enraged mother and a whole lot of trouble behind us. I harbored no doubts about her ability to scamper over the wall, as we’d done, but she chose not to. Once she’d driven us out of the yard, she stopped chasing us. She jumped about for a while at the foot of the wall, then went back inside to finish chopping the rotting sweet potatoes and fill the air with loud curses. It was a brilliant way to let off steam: no blood and no mess, no falling afoul of the law, yet I knew that those rotten potatoes were surrogates for the heads of her bitter enemies.

Now, as I think back, I realize that the true bitter enemy in her mind was neither Father nor me—it was Wild Mule, who ran a wine shop in the village. My mother was convinced that the slut had seduced my father, and I simply cannot say if that was or was not a fair assessment of the situation. Where Father and Wild Mule’s relationship was concerned, the only people who knew who’d seduced whom, who’d cast the first flirtatious glance, were the two of them.

Seven or eight cattle merchants were sitting on their haunches at the edge of the threshing floor when we got there, smoking cigarettes as they waited for the butchers to show up. (Once our village had been turned into a huge slaughterhouse, the fields, for all intents and purposes, were left fallow, and the threshing floor had become the place where cattle were bought and sold.) The cattle stood off to the side, absent-mindedly chewing their cud, oblivious of their impending doom. The merchants, most from the western counties, spoke with funny accents, like radio-play actors. They showed up every ten days or so, each bringing along two head of cattle, maybe three. For the most part, they came on a slow, mixed freight-and-passenger train, men and beasts in one car, arriving at the station nearest our village at around sunset. They didn’t reach our village till after midnight, even though the station was no more than ten li away. A stroll that should have taken an hour or two took these merchants and their cattle a good eight. Why did they prefer to reach our village in the middle of the night? That was their secret. When I was young, I asked my parents and some of the village graybeards that very question. But they just gave me stony looks, as if I’d asked them the meaning of life or a question whose answer everyone knew.

The cattle’s arrival was a signal for the village dogs to set up a chorus of barks, which woke up everyone—man, woman, young, and old—and informed us that the cattle merchants were here. In my youthful memories, they were a mysterious lot, and this sense of mystery was surely tied to their late-night entry into the village. On some moonlit nights, when the silence was broken by the chorus of dogs barking, Mother would sit up, wrapped in a comforter, stick her face close to the window, and gaze at the scene outside. This was before Father skipped out on us with Wild Mule, but there were already nights when he didn’t come home. Noiselessly, I’d sit up, too, and look past Mother, out the window, at the cattle merchants driving the animals silently past our house, the freshly bathed cattle glinting in the moonlight like giant pieces of glazed pottery. If it hadn’t been for the seething current of barks, I’d have thought I was observing a beautiful dreamscape; even with the dogs, as I think back now, it seemed like one.

Our village boasted several inns, but the merchants never bedded down in them; instead, they led their cattle straight to the threshing floor and waited there till dawn, even if the wind was howling or it was pouring rain, if the air was bitter cold or steamy hot. There were stormy nights when innkeepers went out to drum up business, but the merchants and their cattle remained in the inhospitable elements like statues, unmoved, no matter how flowery the invitation. Was it because they didn’t want to part with that little bit of money? No. People said that after they sold their cattle they went into town to get drunk and whore around on a spending spree that stopped only when they had just enough to buy a ticket for the slow train home. Their life style could not have been more different from that of the peasants. Their thinking, too. As a child, on more than one occasion I heard some of our more eminent villagers comment, with a sigh, “Hai, what kind of people are they? What in the world is going on inside those heads of theirs?” When they came to market, they brought brown cows and black ones, males and females, fully grown cows and immature ones, and once they even brought a nursing heifer whose teats looked like water jugs, and my father had trouble estimating a price for her, since he didn’t know if the udder was edible or not.

The cattle merchants would stand when they saw my father. They wore mirrored sunglasses early in the morning, which was a spooky sight, though they smiled as a show of respect. My father would lift me off his shoulders, squat down on his haunches ten feet or so from the merchants, pull out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and remove a crooked, damp cigarette. The cattle merchants would take out their packs, and ten or more cigarettes would land on the ground by Father’s feet. He’d gather them up and lay them back down neatly. “Lao Luo, you old fuckhead,” one of the merchants would say. “Smoke ’em. You don’t think we’re trying to buy your favors with a few paltry cigarettes, do you?” Father would just smile and light his cheap smoke.

The village butchers would start showing up then, in twos and threes, all looking as if they were fresh from a bath, though I could smell the scent of blood on their bodies, which goes to show that blood—whether from cows or pigs—doesn’t wash off. The cattle, smelling the blood on the butchers, would huddle together, fear flashing in their eyes. Excrement would spurt from the bungholes of the young cows; the older ones looked composed, but I knew that was for show, since I could see their tails draw up under their rumps to keep them from emptying their bowels. Their legs trembled, like the ripples on a pond in a passing breeze.