The Story
The order comes from policy, but the bullet comes from a neighbor. Huang Tong, a local activist eager to prove his revolutionary zeal, is the man who actually pulls the trigger, killing Ximen Nao at close range before the assembled village.
Dragged before Lord Yama in the underworld court, Ximen Nao refuses to confess. He was a fair landlord, he insists, not a class enemy, and no torment will make him admit a guilt he never earned.
Yama searches the ledger of Ximen Nao's life and finds no real sin, only a stubborn refusal to let go of his anger. Unable to punish a crime that doesn't exist, he instead punishes the grudge itself, exiling him into an animal's body.
So on January 1, 1950, Ximen Nao is born again — not as a man but as a donkey, dropped into his own former village, among the same fields and faces he ruled over just months before as their landlord.
Among those faces is Lan Lian, an orphan once tied to the Ximen household as a servant boy. Land reform reclassifies him a poor peasant, and he receives a share of the very land his old master once owned.
Yet when the government later herds every household into the People's Commune, Lan Lian will not go. While the whole village pools its land, tools, and labor, he alone keeps farming his own small plot, by himself.
His household soon includes Yingchun, once a maid inside the Ximen family compound. Land reform has scrambled every old hierarchy, and the former servant and the former hired orphan marry, building a life together on the plot he refuses to surrender.
Yingchun's new household absorbs Ximen Nao's own orphaned children from his executed life, including his son Jinlong. So the dead landlord's blood grows up inside the very family that inherited his fields, under a woman who once served him.
Year after year, as collectivization tightens around him, Lan Lian remains the village's sole holdout — the last man farming for himself. Neighbors mock him, officials denounce him, campaigns target him, yet decade after decade he will not join.
Inside the donkey's skull, fragments of the executed landlord still flicker — memories of silk robes, of tenants bowing, of the gunshot that ended it all. The grudge is still sharp, though each day of braying and plowing wears it down further.
Alongside Ximen Nao's inherited children, Lan Lian and Yingchun have a son of their own, Lan Jiefang. So one household now raises the dead landlord's children beside the living farmer's, blending two bloodlines under one stubborn, unpopular roof.
The peace does not last. As the Great Leap Forward curdles into famine, hungry villagers turn on the animals around them, and Ximen Nao's donkey body is killed and eaten — his second death, as violent and unjust as his first.
Across the village, the Great Leap Forward's grand promises collapse into mass starvation. Fields planted for slogans instead of harvests yield nothing, and desperate families strip bark, boil roots, and bury their dead through the leanest years anyone can remember.
Lord Yama is not finished with him. He sends Ximen Nao back once more, this time as an ox — and delivers him straight into the hands of Lan Lian, the one farmer still refusing to bow to the commune.
Ox and farmer become a matched pair of stubbornness. While collectivized fields are plowed by exhausted committees, Lan Lian and his ox work their private strip alone, side by side, an image of two creatures who simply will not yield.
Huang Tong, the man who once pulled the trigger on Ximen Nao, has since risen to commune official. Now it is Lan Lian he leans on, demanding again and again that the last holdout surrender his land and his ox.
When Lan Lian still refuses, the pressure turns physical. Forced into a collective plowing demonstration, the ox balks, and it is beaten to death in front of the village — a second execution, echoing the gunshot that first killed Ximen Nao.
Once more Yama sends him back, this time as a pig, born just as the Cultural Revolution sweeps through the countryside. A new decade of upheaval begins, and Ximen Nao enters it on four legs instead of two.
By now Jinlong, Ximen Nao's own son, has grown into a militant Red Guard leader, all fervor and slogans. He denounces the village's old ways as backward — including, pointedly, the household that raised him and its stubborn head, Lan Lian.
Even branded backward by his own foster son, Lan Lian does not bend. Public denunciation, humiliation, struggle sessions — none of it moves him off his single plot, and he keeps farming alone while Jinlong's zealotry consumes the rest of the village.
Meanwhile the pig incarnation thrives. Ximen Nao's animal self rises through sheer size and cunning to become the dominant boar of the entire village herd, ruling the pigsty with the same commanding presence he once held as a landlord.
Elsewhere, Ximen Nao's daughter Baofeng, also raised in the Lan household, has grown into the village's barefoot doctor and midwife. Through famine, denunciation, and chaos alike, she remains a steady point of competence, delivering babies and tending wounds no one else can.
Then the river floods, sweeping village children into the current. Rather than flee to safety, the boar throws his great bulk against the water, shoving child after child toward the bank, until the flood finally takes him too, and he drowns.
That drowning marks a turn inside him. For the first time since his execution, Ximen Nao's animal spirit acts not from fear or grudge but from pure sacrifice, and the rage he has carried since his death begins, almost imperceptibly, to loosen.
Lord Yama takes note. For his fourth return, he sends Ximen Nao back as a dog, born into the Reform-era household of Lan Jiefang, Lan Lian's own son, now grown and stepping into a life of his own.
Lan Jiefang has by now become a local official, married with a household of his own. He carries forward the family's tangled inheritance — Lan Lian's stubbornness, Yingchun's steadiness — into a China rapidly opening toward markets and money.
But official respectability does not hold him. Lan Jiefang begins a consuming affair with Pang Chunmiao, and what starts as a private indulgence soon eclipses everything else in his life — his marriage, his post, his standing in the village he serves.
The affair cannot stay hidden. It erupts into public scandal, and the fallout is total: Jiefang's marriage collapses, his career is ruined, and Pang Chunmiao vanishes from the record afterward, her ultimate fate left unresolved by the story that exposed her.
Through all of it, the dog watches. Ximen Nao's fourth incarnation lies at the edges of every argument and humiliation, a silent witness to the household he is bound to tearing itself apart over Jiefang's betrayal.
Jinlong, meanwhile, sheds his Red Guard fervor as easily as he once wore it, reinventing himself yet again — this time as an opportunistic entrepreneur, riding the market era's sudden appetite for money with the same zealotry he once gave to ideology.
Huang Huzhu, daughter of the man who once shot Ximen Nao, becomes entangled in the younger generation's romantic tangles, drawn into the orbit of Jiefang's and Jinlong's overlapping households as old grievances and new desires blur together.
Whether Huang Huzhu finds happiness afterward, the record never quite says. Her story threads through the younger generation's chaos and then simply fades, one more life the village's turmoil leaves unresolved and unaccounted for.
The dog lives on into the Reform era proper, watching shopfronts and money-lenders sprout where communes once stood. Ximen Nao's fourth self observes the village's rapid commercialization with the same patient stillness he brought to Jiefang's collapsing marriage.
When death finally comes for the dog, it comes gently — old age, not violence. After an execution, a butchering, a beating, and a drowning, this quiet natural death shows how far Ximen Nao's original fury has faded.
Lord Yama is almost done. He sends Ximen Nao back one more time, briefly, as a monkey — a short, transitional life, less a punishment now than a final formality before something larger is allowed to happen.
The monkey's life is brief by design. It lives only a short span before dying, clearing the way for the rebirth Ximen Nao has been working toward, whether he knows it or not, through five lifetimes of suffering.
Threaded through all of this is a minor village figure, a writer whose fictional fragments about the family occasionally surface in the telling. He has no blood tie to anyone involved, and his account is never treated as fully reliable.
Back on the human side, Lan Lian is now old, and still, after decades of pressure, farming his single plot by himself. Every campaign that swept through the village has come and gone; he alone has not moved.
Jinlong's ambitions, meanwhile, have outrun him. The market era he embraced so eagerly turns out to reward corruption as readily as it rewards zeal, and the same appetite that drove his rise now begins closing in around him.
Lord Yama reviews the full accounting: a donkey butchered, an ox beaten, a pig drowned saving children, a dog dying peacefully of old age. Across five lifetimes, the fury Ximen Nao carried out of his execution has finally, fully worn away.
For the first time since the killing, Yama grants what Ximen Nao always wanted — return to human form. The judgment comes at the turn of the millennium, around the year 2000, fifty years after the first gunshot.
He is born again as a human boy, given the name Lan Qiansui, marked from birth by an unusually large head, as if it were straining to hold everything his many lives had witnessed and could not forget.
Pointedly, he is not born a Ximen. He comes into the world as a Lan, grafted into the very family — descended from the orphan Lan Lian — that inherited his land and his name's erasure after his execution fifty years before.
Inside him, memory survives, but garbled — the donkey's hunger, the ox's stubbornness, the pig's flood, the dog's quiet years, all tangled together with fainter traces of the landlord he once was, none of it fully sorted or clear.
With this birth, the cycle that began at his execution finally closes. The revenge Lord Yama once punished him for holding onto has not been avenged in any worldly sense — it has simply dissolved into a new, ordinary human life.
Back in the human timeline nearing its end, Jinlong finds himself overextended, his market schemes stretched past what they can support, old debts and old enemies from every ideological phase he ever rode now catching up with him at once.
The rise built on riding every wave — Red Guard fervor, then capitalist hustle — finally tips over into downfall. The precise manner of his ruin stays uncertain in the telling, but disgrace, not triumph, closes his story.
Lan Jiefang, for his part, is left with a ruined marriage and a wrecked career after the Chunmiao scandal broke over him years earlier. He does not recover his old standing, but he endures, carrying the damage forward rather than being destroyed by it.
Lan Lian lives to a very old age and dies still working the single household plot he refused to surrender, fifty years of pressure never having moved him an inch from the ground he first claimed after land reform.
He never once rejoins the commune, not for a single season. When the Reform era later dismantles collective farming and returns land to individual households nationwide, his lifelong holdout is quietly, unceremoniously vindicated by history itself.
Yingchun, his loyal wife since the earliest days of land reform, lives out her own long life beside him, raising his children and hers, and dies in old age much as he does — steady, undramatic, unbroken.
Jinlong's story ends the way it was always heading: in disgrace rather than lasting success, his exact final fate uncertain in the telling, but the arc unmistakable — a man consumed by the very ambition that once seemed to serve him so well.
Huang Tong, who pulled the trigger that killed Ximen Nao at the very start, is never formally punished for it. He rises instead through commune politics and beyond, and no reckoning for that first killing ever comes.
The affair between Jiefang and Chunmiao remains the era's emblematic moral rupture, a private betrayal that mirrors the larger corruptions of the age. Her final fate is never made certain, left as one more thread the story refuses to tie off.
Lan Jiefang survives all of it into old age, eventually becoming grandfather to the very boy who is Ximen Nao reborn — Lan Qiansui — closing a family loop that neither of them fully understands as it happens.
By the story's end, the narration itself has split into two intertwined voices: the aged Lan Jiefang, carrying fifty years of memory, and the boy Lan Qiansui, carrying garbled fragments of five other lives before this one.
Together, grandfather and boy recount the whole fifty-year saga — landlord, donkey, ox, pig, dog, monkey, boy — to a listener in the village, leaving some fates, like Chunmiao's and Jinlong's exact ends, deliberately, permanently unresolved.
What it means
What the whole cycle finally says is this: hatred does not end with a verdict, a punishment, or a single act of forgiveness. It wears away slowly, life after life, through suffering endured and small mercies given, until one day it is simply gone.
🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.
