and low and still be frustrated in your search for animals untainted by poisons in their sheds cotes sties and pens, finding instead only hormonal cows, chemical sheep, garbage pigs and prescription dogs. But we are clean, Xiaotong, we have been brought here from deep in South Mountain by Huang Biao on orders from your father. We are we are cows and sheep that have grown to maturity grazing grassy fields and drinking spring water, we are pigs that ran wild in remote mountain ravines and we are local dogs that have grown to adulthood eating bran and wild plants. Not once, either before or after being slaughtered, were we subjected to the injection of water, and we never came into contact with a drop of formaldehyde. You will not easily find meat as pure and uncontaminated as us. So hurry up and eat, Luo Xiaotong. If you don't, Huang Biao will. Though he pretends to be a dutiful son, though he treats a cow as his mother and though he supplies his dogs, his hormonal animals, with her milk, he injects his butchered dogs with water and he's the last person we want to eat us…’
I was nearly moved to tears by how the meats poured out their hearts to me. But before I could cry, anguished wails erupted from their counterparts in the pot. ‘Luo Xiaotong,’ they said, ‘please eat us too. Even though that bastard Huang Biao doused us with his urine, we're still much cleaner than any meat on the street. We are free of toxins, we are highly nutritious, we are clean. Please eat us, Xiaotong, we beg you…’
That did it—my tears dripped onto the pieces of meat on the platter, and that made them even sadder. They rocked back and forth in anguish, causing the platter to bounce on the stool and nearly breaking my heart. That's when I finally grasped the reality that the world is a very complicated place. No matter what he's dealing with, even if it's a piece of meat, a person must let love flow from his heart if he is to be repaid in kind—that is the only way to truly appreciate what is good and decent. In the past, I'd hungered for meat but had not loved it enough, even though meat had been so good to me, the person it had picked out of the vast sea of humanity to be its friend, to my enduring shame. I surely could do better. All right, meats, dear meats, the time has come for me to feast on you so as to be worthy of your abiding love. To be loved and respected by such fine, uncontaminated meat has made Luo Xiaotong the world's happiest person.
With tears in my eyes, I began eating you. I heard you cry in my mouth but I knew that you were shedding tears of joy. Tearfully I ate the tearful meats, and felt that we had embarked on the path to spiritual awakening. This was a first for me, and my relationship with meat underwent a fundamental change. As did my approach to my fellow humans. I heard an old greybeard from deep in the mountains say to me: ‘There are many paths a human can take to achieve immortality.’ ‘Is eating meat one of them?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he replied with a sneer, ‘and so is eating shit.’ I understood everything, then. The day I found myself able to hear meat speak I knew that I was different. That was one of the reasons I'd left school. What could I learn from any teacher that I couldn't learn from meat?
While I ate, Huang Biao stood watching me like a fool. I had neither the energy nor the interest to look at him. As I continued my intimate relationship with the meat, the kitchen and everything in it ceased to exist. But when I came up for air, those glittering little demon's eyes of his were reminders that he too was a living creature.
Little by little, the plate grew empty at the same time as my stomach grew full. Soon I realized that if I ate any more I wouldn't be able to breathe. But the remaining meat kept calling out to me, while the meat in the pot continued its complaints in loud, grudging tones. My dilemma suddenly became clear—my stomach could hold only so much, but the amount of meat in this world stretched out into infinity. And all that