ground. I know that those feet can kick as hard as a horse, and I've been told that a mature bird isn't afraid to take on a lion. An ostrich's toes are hardened from a lifetime of running across the savanna, so it's a foregone conclusion that the man sitting on the ground yelping in pain has a badly injured knee. When a couple of his friends lift him up by the arms, he immediately sits back down. By now, most of the children have slid off their mounts, all but one girl and one boy who hold on tenaciously. Rivulets of sweat smear the paint on their taut faces until they look like artists’ palettes. The boy is clutching the joint connecting the ostrich's wings to its body as he bounces up and down with every step the bird takes. He holds on to the wings even when his rear end is up in the air; but then the ostrich makes a mad dash and he slips sideways under the mouth-gaping, eye-popping stares of the people round him, none of whom makes a move to come to his rescue. A moment later, he's lying on the ground clutching two fists full of feathers, until someone walks over and picks him up. He bites his lip as the tear dam bursts. Meanwhile, the riderless ostrich has rejoined the herd and is breathing heavily and noisily through its open mouth. The girl still has her arms wrapped round the neck of her bird, though it is trying its best to dislodge her. But she's too much for it, thanks to a panic attack and, in the end, she gets it to slump to the ground, neck and head lying in the dirt, tail end pointing skyward, flinging mud behind it as it paws the ground in vain.
All that pork lay heavily in my stomach, churning and grinding like a litter of soon-to-be-born piglets. But of course I was no sow, so I couldn't possibly know what that felt like. The belly of the pregnant sow at Yao Qi's nearly scraped the ground when she grunted her way over to the snow-covered garbage heap in front of the newly opened Beauty Hair Salon, to root out edible titbits. Lazy, fat and carefree, she was, as anyone could see, a happy sow, in a different class from the two skinny-as-jackals, moody, human-hating little pigs we'd once raised. Yao Qi made sausage out of meat so fatty that even the dogs turned their noses up at it, filled with sweet potato starch and red-dyed bean-curd skin, to which he added chemical ingredients no one knew about. The end result was a product that looked good, smelt nice and sold well; the money rolled in. He raised pigs as a hobby, not as an investment, and definitely not for the fertilizer produced, the way people once did. So his pregnant sow came out early in the morning, every morning, not to scavenge food but to play in the snow, take leisurely strolls and get a little exercise. I sometimes saw Yao Qi on the steps of his house (which didn't look as good as ours but was actually as sturdy as a fortress), left arm tucked under his right armpit, a cigarette in his right hand, squinting dreamily at the meanderings of his pig. Rays of light from the red sun turned his angular face into a slice of barbecued pork.
I'd eaten so much pork that the mere memory of Yao Qi's pig made me ill. The hideous outline of the pregnant sow undulated in front of my eyes, the stench of garbage churned in my stomach. All you sordid representatives of humanity, how can you think of filling your bellies with pork? Pigs feast on garbage and shit. Therefore, so do you! The day I become supreme ruler, I'll cast all the world's pork eaters into sties and turn them into muck-swilling pigs. I'm tormented by regret, shamed by ignorance. How could I have coveted that pig's head that Mother cooked without condiments, the one covered by a layer of white fat? The filthiest, most shameful thing the world has ever seen, good only for feeding the wild cats that live out their lives in the sewers…Ah—ugh—I actually picked up chunks of that foul, wiggly stuff with my filthy claws and stuffed them into my mouth, transforming my stomach into a garbage sack…Ah—ugh—I'm going to stop being a ruminate…Ah—ugh—I vigorously deposited what I'd brought