Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Ximen Nao, shot in 1950 for the crime of having been a landlord, protests his innocence to the underworld's Lord Yama with such stubbornness that he's returned to earth again and again, first as a donkey, then an ox, a pig, a dog, and finally a human child, each life dropped back into the same village and the same unfolding decades of land reform, collectivization, famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Mo Yan uses the reincarnation device less as fantasy than as a documentary trick: an animal's-eye view of Chinese history lets him narrate atrocities and absurdities that a purely human narrator, embedded in the ideology of any given decade, might flinch from or rationalize.

Anchoring all five lives is Lan Lian, Ximen Nao's former hired hand, who refuses to join the agricultural collective and keeps farming his own small plot independently through every campaign that follows, an act of quiet, apolitical stubbornness that costs him constantly and that the novel treats as the era's one unbroken thread of integrity. Ximen Nao's animal incarnations orbit Lan Lian's farm across the decades, ox and donkey laboring beside him, pig and dog watching his family's fortunes rise and fall, so that the reincarnated landlord ends up a witness to precisely the kind of resistance his own class position never allowed him to practice.

When Ximen Nao is reincarnated as Lan Lian's ox during the height of collectivization, the animal becomes a proxy target for the political fury the village can't safely direct at Lan Lian himself, beaten and worked half to death by cadres eager to punish the farmer's refusal to collectivize through an animal that can't file a complaint. Mo Yan lets the ox's physical suffering carry an argument the era's human characters mostly can't afford to say aloud, that the campaigns supposedly aimed at correcting class injustice kept finding new, deniable ways to inflict the same cruelty on anyone who wouldn't fall in line.