Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh (22 page)

One day, while I was out on the road trying to unload the baby, I ran into an old friend from elementary school. He couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, but he looked fifty. When the conversation turned to families, he said sadly, “I'm still a bachelor, and I guess that's how I'll stay.”

“I thought you were well off financially.”

“I'm doing all right, but there just aren't enough women to go around. If I had sisters, I could work a swap for a wife. Unfortunately, I don't.”

“I thought township regulations outlawed that kind of marriage arrangement.”

He gave me a puzzled look. “Just what do those township regulations mean?”

I nodded. When I told him about the baby I'd found and all the trouble that had caused me, he listened in stony silence, without a trace of sympathy in his eyes. He just puffed on the cigarette I'd given him. The tip of the cigarette sizzled, but not a wisp of smoke emerged from his mouth or nose. As far as I could tell, it all disappeared deep down in his stomach.

Five days later he came to see me. With obvious embarrassment, he said, “Why not… why not give me the baby? I'll raise her till she's eighteen. …”

I looked agonizingly into his face, which showed even greater agony, waiting for him to continue.

“When she's eighteen … I'll only be fifty … and who says I can't…”

“Old friend,” I interrupted, “don't say any more, please.”

I bought two more sacks of powdered milk with my own money, to which my wife responded by smashing one of our chipped bowls. Through tears of genuine sorrow, she said, “I've had it! I can't take it anymore! You obviously don't care what happens to us anyway… . I've scrimped on food till I don't need to go to the toilet anymore, just to save money. And for what? So you can buy milk for somebody else's kid?”

“You're my wife,” I said, “so please don't take your unhappiness out on me. You see me go out every day to find a home for her, don't you?”

“You should never have brought her home in the first place.”

“Yes, I know that. But I did, and we can't let her starve.”

“What does that make you, a man with a good heart?”

“Good people don't get what they deserve, do they? After all these years we've been together, I wish you wouldn't nag me. If you've got a solution, tell me, what is it? We can work together to place this child somewhere, what do you say?”

“Yes,” she said, flashing her most fetching pout. “Once we get rid of this child, we can have another one of our own.”

“Have another one?”

“Yes, a son!”

“Another one!”

“Twins would be best.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Go to the hospital and talk to our aunt. Maybe she can come up with something. Widows and widowers from the city are always asking her to help them find children.”

The final battle. If my aunt, who worked in the hospital's obstetrics ward, couldn't help me find a home, the chances were 80 or 90 percent that I was fated to be the baby's adoptive father. If that's how this all wound up, it would be an unending calamity both for her and for me. I lay in bed that night, oblivious to the onslaught of bedbugs, listening to my wife grind her teeth, smack her lips, and breathe heavily as she dreamt; my heart felt as if it had turned to ice. Finally, I crawled quietly out of bed and went outside, where I looked up at the desolate stars in the sky and felt I had, at last, found a bit of understanding. The damp night air wet my back, and my nose ached from sadness. All of a sudden I knew the importance of treasuring my own life; for too long I'd lived for other people, and vowed to reserve some of the love in my soul for myself. Back inside, I heard the gentle, even breathing of the baby in her winnowing basket. Picking up a flashlight, I shone it down on her. She'd wet herself again, and the liquid had seeped through the slats of the basket onto the floor. I changed her diaper. With Heaven's help, this would be the last time I had to do that!

My aunt, who had just finished delivering a baby, was sprawled in a chair in her white uniform, which was covered with sweat and drops of blood, trying to catch her breath. She'd gotten a lot older in the year since I'd last seen her. She bent forward in greeting when she saw me walk in. Her nurse was in the delivery room cleaning up; a newborn infant in its cradle was bawling.

I sat down in the same nurse's chair I'd sat in the year before, directly across from my aunt. A plastic-covered obstetrics textbook for nurses lay on the table.

“What are you doing back here?” she asked lazily. “After you were here last year, you went back and wrote a book that made me look like some kind of demon!”

“It wasn't well written,” I said with an embarrassed smile.

“Want to hear a story about a fox fairy?” she asked. “If I'd known that even a fox fairy tale could wind up in a book, I'd have given you a whole trainful of them.”

Without any encouragement from me, and no regard for how exhausted she was after having delivered a baby, she told me a story. During the previous winter, she began, an old man out gathering manure early one morning encountered a fox with a broken leg. He picked it up and carried it home on his back as a pet. The fox's injured leg was nearly healed when the old man's son came to visit. This son, an impetuous young fellow, was a battalion commander. The moment he laid eyes on the fox, he took out his revolver and, without a word, shot it dead. As if that weren't enough, he skinned the animal and nailed its hide to the wall to dry out. The old man nearly died of fright, but his son merely hummed a little tune, unfazed by what he'd done.

At noon the next day, the old man's son made fox dumplings for lunch: he sliced the meat; chopped up coriander, leeks, and onions; and added sesame oil, soy sauce, pepper, and MSG — a cornucopia of flavors. The skins he fashioned out of turnip flour — white and shiny, like pieces of fine ceramic. When they were all wrapped, he dumped them into a pot of boiling water — once, twice, three times, until they were ready to eat. But when he scooped them out, all that came up were little donkey turds. He scooped up some more. More donkey turds. And again, with the same result. The son's hair stood on end. That night, when every door and window in the house began to rattle, the son took out his revolver; but nothing happened when he pulled the trigger. Finally, they had no choice but to perform funeral rites for the fox.

My aunt knew so many fox and ghost stories it would have taken her three days and nights to tell them all, and since the time, place, and other details were based on fact, you had to believe them. Her talents were wasted, I was thinking. She should have been busying herself editing a
New Tales of Strange Events
.

Relating all those ghost stories invigorated my aunt. The newborn baby in the delivery room was still wailing when the nurse flung open the door, fuming mad, and said, “What kind of mother is that? She has her baby, dusts herself off, and runs away.”

I cast a questioning glance at my aunt.

“She's the wife of a man from Black Water Village who's already had three children, all girls. She was hoping for a boy, but no such luck. And when her husband heard she'd had another girl, he simply drove off in his horse cart. Not the sort of father you see every day. Well, when she saw him run off like that, she jumped down off the delivery table, pulled up her pants, and ran out crying, leaving her new baby behind.”

I followed my aunt into the delivery room to look at the newly abandoned baby. She was scrawny as a sickly kitten, nowhere as plump and healthy looking as the baby I'd found, and not nearly as cute; nor, for that matter, were her cries as robust. For some reason, that was a comforting thought.

My aunt poked her belly gently. “Slothful little thing,” she said. “Why couldn't you grow one more little piece of meat? With it you'd have been the apple of their eye; without it you're nothing but an offensive little turd.”

“What do we do with her?” the nurse asked. “We can't just leave her here, can we?”

My aunt turned to me. “Why don't you take her home with you? I've seen her parents, and there's nothing wrong with them. Tall, sturdy peasants, both of them. So this one ought to turn out just fine, maybe even a real beauty.”

I was on my way out of the room before she'd even finished.

I sat in the sunflower field transfixed, my rear end and legs turning numb from the damp ground. I had no desire to stand up. The petals of the dish-shaped sunflowers had curled up and turned black, like eyelashes. Countless black, seedy eyes were staring at me. Dark cottony clouds blocked out the sun. The floral heads hung down in a state of disorder, as if in sad stupefaction. Black ants were busy rebuilding their tiny fortresses on the flat, muddy ground, making them taller and sturdier than the last time I'd seen them, oblivious to the reality that they would be leveled yet again the next time it rained, in utter disregard of the architectural history of their splendid ant kingdom. Lacking even a breath of wind, the sunflower field was oppressive as a kitchen steamer, in which a meaty, delectable duck — me — was being prepared.

Sitting there, I was reminded of something beautiful that had occurred in a big city somewhere: A beautiful, genteel young woman was in the habit of killing and eating young men. She braised their thighs, steamed their hips, and cooked their shredded hearts and livers in vinegar and garlic. Having devoured quite a few young men, the young woman was the picture of good health. Then I recalled something that had happened in China's distant past, right here in my own hometown: A chef by the name of Yi Ya cooked his own son and presented it to Duke Huan of Qi. They say that Yi Ya's son was incomparably delicious, far tastier than the tenderest lamb.

Those thoughts fortified my belief that human nature was more fragile than the thinnest paper. Just then, gusts of wind made the coarse sunflower leaves rustle coarsely as they brushed my head and face and, at the same time, rubbed against my pitted heart like sandpaper. I don't think I'd ever felt quite so comfortable. When the gusty wind died down, insects all around me burst forth with wonderful sounds. A small locust was riding on the back of a larger one next to a sunflower stalk; they were mating. In at least one significant way, they and humans are alike; that is to say, they are no more lowly than we, and we are no more noble than they. Nonetheless, hope was plentiful there in the sunflower field. Those drooping flowers were like countless children's faces, gazing at me affectionately, consoling me, and instilling me with the strength to come to grips with the world around me, no matter how painful that knowledge and understanding might be.

Unexpectedly, I was reminded of the conclusion to “Dolls of Michinoku.” Once the author of the story understood the custom of drowning babies and had returned to Tokyo, he happened to see a row of marionettes, their eyes closed, hanging in a department store, coated with dust. The sight reminded him of all those babies who were cast into raging waters before they could open their eyes or cry for the first time. But I could find no such symbol on which to pin my sorrow and bring this chapter to an end. The sunflowers? The locusts? The ants? Crickets? Worms? Absurd, all of them. None of them represented the true face of life. In the tunnel I had dug for myself, I kept bumping into the white bones of abandoned children, and I told myself that these human beings who filled the air with sounds that might have been crying and might have been laughter could not be viewed as unvirtuous or dishonest or unlovely. Do the abandoned infants of Michinokou now belong to history? Condoms, IUDs, birth control pills, male and female sterilization, and abortions have combined to eliminate the cruel practice of drowning the infants of Michinokou.

And yet, here, in this place, where the land is blanketed with yellow flowers, the issue is much more complex than that. Doctors and the Township Government can work in concert to force sterilization upon men and women of child-bearing age, but where might we find a wonder drug capable of uprooting and eliminating the petrified notions that cleave to the brains of people in my hometown?