news of my father. ‘Xiaotong,’ he'd say, ‘your father is an upright man.’ And when I went to buy his bristles (I resold them to make brushes), he'd say: ‘You don't have to pay for those, just take them.’ Once he even gave me a cigarette. He never treated me like a child but always with respect. And I intended to repay his kindness within the limits of my authority.
Cheng Tianle led a big black local animal—it had a sagging belly that swayed from side to side, like a sack of ammonia. It was long past its working age, and either its owner or a merchant who specialized in old animals had fattened it up with hormone-laced feed. No good meat with high nutritional value could come from that. But the taste buds of the city-dwellers had deteriorated to such a point that they could no longer distinguish good meat from bad. There was no sense in giving them high-quality meat—it was wasted on their inferior palates. They were easy marks too. If we told them that the meat of a chemically fattened animal came from one raised on grazing land, with an abundance of spring water, they'd smack their lips and say how good it tasted. I had to agree with Lao Lan, who had nothing good to say about the city-dwellers; he said they were evil and stupid, and that gave us the right to feed them as full of lies as we wanted. We weren't happy about that; but they didn't want to hear the truth and were prepared to take us to court if we so much as tried.
The second animal Cheng Tianle led up was a milch cow with a spotted belly, also well up in years. Since it was too old to produce milk, the dairy owner had sold it as a beef cow. Beef from a milch cow is as poor as pork from a breeding sow—tasteless and pulpy. The sight of those loose, dried-up teats saddened me. An old milch cow and an old draft cow, two animals that had served man and served him well. They should have been put out to pasture to live out their lives and then been properly buried, with a marker if possible, perhaps even a headstone.
There's no need for me to describe all the animals that followed. During my tenure, thousands of cows made their death march through the meat-cleansing building, and I remember each of them, body and face. As if a set of drawers in my head contains each of their photographs. They are drawers I don't like to open.
The men knew the drill. So after leading the animals into the enclosures, they barricaded them in, with steel rods in the rear, to keep them from backing out during the treatment. If we'd set up a trough in front of the cages, our meat-cleansing station would have looked like a bright, spacious feed building. But there were no troughs in front of these animals, and they were not there to feed. I doubt that many of them knew what lay in store—most were blithely ignorant of their imminent death (which is why they stopped to graze before entering a slaughterhouse). It was time to inject the water, so I reminded the men to keep at their jobs. To dispel any misgivings, I reminded them that we were cleaning the animals’ inner organs—not pumping them full of water.
The workers began by inserting rubber hoses up the animals’ noses, down through their throats and into their stomachs. The animals could shake and twist their heads as much as they wanted but the hoses stayed in place. The job required two men, one to raise the animal's head and the second to insert the hose. Some of the animals reacted violently to the invasion, others remained docile. But all resistance ceased once the hose was in—perhaps they finally realized it was too late. Hoses inserted, the men stood in front of the cows and awaited my order.
‘Start the water,’ I said, unemotionally.
The taps were turned on. Two hundred and fifty, give or take ten, gallons over twelve hours.
The system still had a few defects, as we discovered that first day. Some of the cows collapsed after taking in water for hours, others had coughing fits and vomited. But, whatever the problem, I always found a solution. To keep the animals from collapsing, I had the men insert a frame of steel rods under their bellies. And