Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh (20 page)

“I found it,” I announced. “In the sunflower field …”

My wife reacted angrily: “I can still have babies!”

“Do you expect me to turn my back on a child in danger?” I asked her in a pleading tone.

“You did the right thing,” Mother said. “You couldn't walk away.”

Father didn't say a word the whole time.

As I laid the baby down on the bed, fitful wails erupted.

I said it was hungry. My wife glared at me.

“Unwrap it and let's see what the baby looks like,” Mother volunteered.

Father laughed coldly and squatted down on the floor, taking out his tobacco pouch; soon he was puffing away at his pipe.

My wife moved quickly up to the bed and untied the cloth band holding the satin wrap together. One brief glance and she backed away despondently.

“Let me see Baby Brother!” my daughter cried out as she pushed up and put her hands on the edge of the bed, trying to climb up. “Let me see him!”

My wife bent over and pinched her hard on the backside. With a loud shriek, our daughter ran out into the compound and cried at the top of her lungs.

It was a little girl. Kicking her blood-spattered, wrinkled legs, she wailed piteously. Her arms and legs were in good shape, her features looked just right, and her cries were nice and loud. No mistake about it, she was a fine little baby. A pile of black excrement lay under her backside; I knew this was what they call “fetal feces.” Which meant that the squirming little object lying softly in the red satin was a newborn infant.

“It's a girl!” Mother said.

“If it wasn't, who would be willing to throw it away?” Father said darkly as he banged the bowl of his pipe on the floor.

My daughter sounded as if she were singing a song out in the yard, but she was still crying.

“You can just take it back where you found it,” my wife said.

“That would be the same as leaving it to die,” I protested. “This is a human life we're talking about, so don't try turning me into a criminal.”

“Let's take care of her for the time being,” Mother said, “while we ask around to see if anyone is missing a child. You need to go all the way in things like this. It's like seeing a parting guest to his door. This good deed will ensure that your next pregnancy will produce a son.”

Mother, no, everyone in the family, was hoping against hope that my wife and I would produce a son so I could fulfill my responsibilities as a son and a husband. It had become such a powerful demand, accompanying my wife and me without letup over the years, that you could cut the tension with a knife. It was a noxious desire that had begun to poison the mood of everyone in the family; the looks in their eyes tore at my soul like steelyard hooks. Time and again I was on the verge of laying down my arms and surrendering, but I always stopped myself. It had reached the point where anytime I was out walking, I was gripped by a deep-seated terror. People kept giving me funny looks, as if I were a mental case or a strange creature from some alien planet who had landed in their midst. I cast a sad glance at my mother, whose devotion to my well-being knew no bounds. By then I didn't even have the strength to sigh.

I picked up a scrap of toilet paper to clean the baby's bottom. Hordes of flies, attracted by the smell, swarmed over from the toilet, the pigsty, and the cattle pen, forming a nasty black tide as they buzzed around the room. Masses of bedbugs leaped up out of the darkness beneath the bed, as if shot from a gun. The fetal feces was hard and sticky, like softened pitch or a warmed medicinal plaster; it smelled awful. A mild sense of disgust rose in me as I cleaned it up.

My wife, who had by then gone into the outer room, came back and said, “The way you ignore your own kid, it's as if you're not her real father. But you'll even wipe the butt of somebody else's kid, like she was your own flesh and blood. Who knows, maybe she is. Maybe she belongs to you and some woman out there. Maybe you went out and had yourself a nice little daughter …”

Her grumbling merged with the infernal buzzing of the flies, nearly liquefying my brain. “Knock it off!” I shouted hysterically.

That shut her up. I stared at her face, which, out of rage and fear, had undergone a dramatic change. I could also hear my daughter, who was playing with a neighbor girl somewhere in the lane. Girls, girls, unwelcome girls everywhere.

Despite all my care, some of the fetal feces soiled my hand. There was something wonderful, I felt, about cleaning up an abandoned baby's first bowel movement. Feeling honored, I went back to cleaning her up, scooping out the dark excrement with my finger. Out of the corner of my eye, I looked at my wife, whose mouth hung slack, and at that moment, a sense of deep-rooted loathing for all of humanity exploded inside me. Naturally, self-loathing topped the list.

My wife came up to help. I neither welcomed her help nor rejected it. When she reached down and expertly straightened the swaddling cloth, I stepped back, scooped up some water, and washed the excrement off my hand.

“Money!” my wife cried out.

I held up my hands, turned, and saw her holding a loose piece of red paper in her left hand and a wad of crumpled bills in her right. She let go of the red paper, spit once, and began counting. She did it twice, just to make sure. “Twenty-one yuan!” Her face exuded tenderness.

“Go get Shasha's baby bottles,” I said, “and wash them. Then fill one with powdered milk and feed the baby.”

“Are you serious about taking her in?” she asked.

“We'll worry about that later,” I said. “For now we don't want her to starve.”

“There's no powdered milk in the house.”

“Then go buy some at the co-op!” I took out ten yuan and handed it to her.

“We're not using our own money,” she said, waving the dirty bills in her hand. “We'll use her money.”

A cricket bounded out from a corner of the damp wall and landed on the edge of the bed, then crawled over the red wrapping. The insect's coffee-colored body looked especially somber against the deep red of the satin. I saw its antennae twitch nervously. The baby stuffed one of her hands into her mouth and began to suck. The white skin over her knuckles was peeling. She had a full head of black hair and two big, fleshy, nearly transparent ears.

Just when, I don't know, but my father and mother had moved up beside me and were watching the hungry baby chew her fist.

“She's hungry,” Mother said.

“People have to learn how to do everything but eat,” Father said.

I turned to look at the two old folks, and waves of heat rolled up from my heart. As if they were praying to the Holy Ghost, they stood with me admiring the dirty, bloodstained face of a girl who might someday become a great woman.

My wife returned with two sacks of powdered milk and a package of detergent. I mixed a bottle of milk, then shoved the plastic nipple, which my daughter had nearly chewed to pieces, into the baby's mouth. The baby rocked its head back and forth a time or two before wrapping her lips around the nipple and beginning to gurgle.

After finishing the bottle, she opened her eyes. They were black as tadpoles. She struggled to look at me, but her gaze was cold and detached.

“She's looking at me,” I said.

“A newborn baby can't see anything,” Mother said.

“How do you know what she can and can't see?” Father objected angrily. “Did she call you up and tell you?”

Mother backed away. “I'm not going to argue with you. I don't care if she can see or not.”

Just then our daughter ran in from the lane and shouted, “Mother, did you hear that thunder? It's going to rain.”

She was right. From where we were standing inside the house, we could hear peals of thunder rolling in from the northwest, like the sound of a millstone turning. I saw dark, downy clouds through holes poked in the paper covering of the rear window.

Shortly after noon, the skies opened up, and a gray curtain of rain sluiced down from the tile overhangs, the sound merging with the croaking of frogs. A dozen or more huge carp shaped like plow blades had been carried along by the river of rainwater and were now flopping around in the yard. My wife was fast asleep in bed, holding our daughter in her arms; I could hear my parents’ heavy breathing in their bed in the other room. After placing the baby girl in a bamboo winnowing basket, I carried it into the front room and set it down on a tall stool, then sat down beside her and gazed out at the wild torrents of rain falling outside. When I turned back to look at the baby, she was curled up in the basket, sleeping soundly. The rain sheeted down off the eaves onto an upturned bucket, the sound shifting from a crisp pelt to an urgent dull pounding. What little light entered the room from the leaden skies was a dark blue, turning the baby's face the color of orange peel. Worried that she would wake up hungry, I held a bottle of milk in readiness, as if it were a fire extinguisher, just in case. Every time she opened her mouth to cry, I stuffed the nipple in it, stopping the crying before it had a chance to blossom. Not until I noticed milk seeping out of the sides of her mouth did I come to my senses: the baby could die from too much to eat as easily as she could starve. I stopped feeding her and cleaned the milk out of her eyes and ears with a towel, then turned again to look anxiously at the steady rain. It was already obvious that this baby had become a burden, my burden. If not for her, I'd have been in bed by then, sleeping off the fatigue from my long bus ride. Instead, because of her, I was sitting on a hard stool, watching the numbing rainfall outside. If not for me, by then she might already have drowned, either that or frozen to death. She could have been swept along into a trough by the gush of rainwater, to have her eyes pecked at by hungry fish.

One of the marooned carp lay on the path in the yard, belly up, its tail flapping against the tiles, a muted glare emerging from it. Finally it flipped back into the puddling water. When it stretched out straight, it looked like a plow knifing through the water. I was tempted to run out in the rain and scoop it up for a treat for Father, something to go with his wine. But I held back, and not just because I wanted to avoid getting soaked.

That afternoon, with rain falling like darts, I suffered the onslaught of mosquitoes as I pondered my hometown's history of abandoned children. Without having to consult any written material, I had a clear historical sense of children who had been given up by parents in my hometown. Relying solely upon the keen bite of memory, I chewed open up a dim tunnel through the sealed history of local abandoned children. Heading down that path, I kept bumping up against their cold, white bones.

I grouped the children into four general categories, knowing full well that there was unavoidable overlap.

The first group of children included those abandoned by families mired in poverty; unable to raise the children, they drowned them in chamber pots or simply left them by the side of the road. Most of these cases occurred before the founding of the People's Republic, when family planning was unheard of. This sort of abandonment appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. I was reminded of two Japanese stories. One, entitled “Snow Babies,” was written by Minakami Tsutomu; I can't recall who wrote the second one, entitled “Dolls of Michinoku,” but maybe it was the famous author of
The Ballad of Narayama
. Both works deal with abandoned children. In “Snow Babies,” the children are left in the snow to die, but those whose will to live is strong enough to carry them through the night in their snowy tombs are retrieved by their families and taken home. As for the babies of Michinoku, before they even cut loose with their first wail, they are dumped headfirst into a vat of hot water. People back then believed that babies had no feelings until they drew their first breath, and that drowning them then was not an inhuman act. If the babies managed to cry, their parents were obliged to raise them. Both means of abandonment were known in my hometown, and their causes were as I stated earlier — my groupings were based upon causes. I was confident that over the years a great many local babies had died in chamber pots, in dirtier and far crueler fashion than their Japanese counterparts. Of course, even if I'd asked all the local elders, none of them would have owned up to such infanticide. Yet I recalled the looks on their faces as they sat by wattle fences or at the base of a broken wall; to me those were the looks of baby killers, and I was sure that some of them had ended the lives of their own sons or daughters in chamber pots or by leaving them by the sides of roads to starve or freeze to death. They were children no one bothered to save. To these people, leaving children by the side of a road or at an intersection was somehow more humane than drowning them in a chamber pot; in fact, this was nothing more than self-consolation by decent fathers and mothers in the grip of poverty. Put out to die, these children had an incredibly slim chance of living, and most probably ended up filling the rumbling stomachs of wild dogs.

The second group of abandoned children includes those born with disabilities or who are retarded. These children aren't even entitled to end up in a chamber pot. In most cases, the parents bury the child alive in some remote spot before the sun comes up. They then top the burial mound with a brick directly over the infant's abdomen, to keep it from being reborn during the next pregnancy. But this is not always carried out. Shortly after Liberation, Li Manzi, who is now a local district chief, was born with a harelip.

Illegitimate children comprise the third group of abandoned babies. “Illegitimate” is a powerful insult for anyone, and in my hometown, anytime a young woman gets particularly angry at someone, this is what she calls them. An illegitimate child, of course, is one born to an unmarried woman. Most of these children are bright and attractive, because men and women who are adept at sneaking around to produce a love child are nobody's fools. These offspring have a somewhat higher survival rate, since childless couples are often willing to raise them as their own; often they'll arrange to take them in beforehand, and once they're born, their biological fathers deliver them to their adoptive parents in the dead of night. Others are left someplace where they're easily spotted. And most of the time, money or valuables are tucked into the swaddling cloth. This group of abandoned children often includes boys, while there are seldom any boys in the previous two categories, except for those who are disabled.