Shifu, You'll Do Anything For A Laugh Part 9

She stood up and muttered, "That's right, I squashed at least as many as you did." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said, "Froggies, froggies, how come you're so small?" Then she burst into tears.

"Enough of that, little miss," he said almost jokingly to mask his disgust. "Two-thirds of the people in this world are struggling against deep waters and raging fires, you know!"

She stared at him through her tears.

"They're so small," she said, "but their bodies are perfectly formed!"

"Perfect or not, they're only frogs!" He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her forward. But she threw her umbrella to the ground and, with her free hand, tried to peel his hand away "We can't spend the night here all because of a few frogs!" he said angrily as he shook off her hand. But he could see in her eyes that it was futile to try to get her walking again, if she was going to have to squash more frogs in the process. So he picked up her umbrella, took off his s.h.i.+rt, and used it like a broom to shoo the disgusting things off the path ahead. Scattering madly, the little frogs eventually opened up a narrow lane for them. "Hurry up," he said with a tug, "let's go."

Ultimately, they wound up in front of an area covered with rubble. By then the rain had all but stopped and the sky was clearing. After folding their umbrellas, they climbed to the top of a huge boulder that had, sometime in the past, been carefully chiseled by stonemasons. He wrung out his rain-soaked s.h.i.+rt, then shook it out and put it back on. He sneezed, putting as much effort into it as possible to win her sympathy; it didn't work. Shaking his head in mockery of himself, he stood atop the rock and, like all mountain climbers who have reached a summit, thrust out his chest and gulped in the clean air. His mood turned bright and sunny, like the sky, now that the rain had stopped. The air is so clean and fresh here, he was about to remark to her. But he didn't. It was as if they were the only people anywhere in that vast garden, and to him that seemed almost miraculous. Now that he was in a good mood, he took another look at the rubble-strewn ground around him. The huge chiseled rocks were so famous, so evocative, had been framed in so many lenses and shown up in so many poems, yet now they were as common as rocks anywhere. They stood silently, yet somehow seemed to be unburdening themselves of thousands upon thousands of words. They were, in the end, silent stone giants. There in front of the ruins, a pond over which a fountain had sprayed water two centuries earlier was virtually covered by waterweeds, sweet flag, and reeds. Wild gra.s.ses he couldn't name flourished in the cracks between rocks.

After helping one another down from the boulder, they went over and climbed another one that was even higher and bigger. Cool winds swept past, slowly drying the clothing that clung to their bodies. The hem of her black skirt began to flutter in the breeze. When he rubbed his hand over the rock, which had been washed clean by the rain, a clean, fresh aroma rose up to greet him. As if a deep, dark secret had been revealed to him, he said: "Smell this. It's the smell of a rock."

She was gazing fixedly at a stone column that had once supported some large edifice; she looked as if she hadn't heard him. Her gaze seemed capable of boring into the column to discover what was deep inside. At that moment he noticed the strands of gray hair by her temples. A long sigh rose up from the depths of his heart. He reached over and picked up a strand of hair that had fallen to her shoulder and said with heartfelt emotion: "The time just flies by, and here we are, getting old."

She responded by revealing what was on her mind: "The words carved on these rocks will never change, will they?"

"Rocks change," he said. "The cliche that seas dry up and rocks rot away, but the heart never changes is nothing but a beautiful fantasy."

"But in Shen Garden nothing ever changes." She was still staring at the rocks, as if conversing with them, while he was reduced to being an inconsequential audience of one. But he was determined to respond to her comment. In a loud voice, he said: "Not a single thing in this world is eternal. Take this famous garden, for instance. Two hundred years ago, when the Qing emperor built it, no one could have imagined that in the short s.p.a.ce of two centuries it would be reduced to ruins. Back then, the marble stones in the vast halls on which the emperor and his ladies took their pleasure might now be the rocks on which commoners have built a pigsty."

Even he sensed how dry and inane his comment was, little more than nonsense. He knew she hadn't heard a word, so he didn't go on. Taking a damp pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, he picked out one that was relatively dry and lit it with his lighter.

A pair of magpies flew past above them and landed on the top of a distant tree, where they chirped noisily. He felt like saying, See how free birds are! But he'd gotten into the habit of swallowing his comments before they broke loose. Just then, a joyous squeal erupted from her mouth and sparks lit up the darkness in her eyes. He cast a surprised look at her, then looked where she was pointing. There in the gray-blue sky was a gorgeous rainbow. She was hopping around like a little girl and shouting at the top of her lungs: "Look, look!"

Her joy was infectious. The multicolored bridge arching across the sky drove all thoughts of the dark realities of life out of his head, and he was instantly immersed in childlike delights. Without being aware of it, they had drawn close together, as they gazed intimately into each other's eyes. No evasions or sidesteps, no hesitation or wavering; first their hands joined naturally, and then they fell just as naturally into each other's arms. They kissed.

The gorgeous rainbow had disappeared by the time he was sampling the light taste of mud on her lips. The vast ruins spread out around them, a dark purple light glinting off the rocks strewn about and lending a majestic air to the scene. Insects hiding in the waterweeds chirped and clicked, and the crisp honks of geese drifted over from somewhere far off. He glanced casually at her wrist.w.a.tch. It was seven o'clock.

"d.a.m.n!" he blurted out anxiously. "Doesn't your train leave at eight?"

Abandoned Child.

I HAD BARELY PICKED HER UP OUT OF THE SUNFLOWER FIELD WHEN I felt that my heart was clogged with gummy black blood and was sinking heavily in my chest, like a cold stone. A grayness filled my head, like a street swept by a cold wind. It was, in the end, her vibrant, croaking wails that roused me out of my bewildered state. I didn't know whether to thank or hate her, and was even less sure whether I was doing a good or a bad thing. I gazed into her long, wrinkled, melon-yellow face with a sense of alarm, seeing two light-green tears in her eyes and the toothless cavern of her mouth - the cries emerging from it were wet and raw, forcing all the blood in my body into my limbs and my head. I could barely hold the red satin-wrapped infant.

I staggered mournfully out of the sunflower field with her in my arms, rustling the leaves shaped like round fans; the white downy hairs on their coa.r.s.e stems rubbed against my arms and cheeks. I was sweating by the time I emerged from the field; spots on my body that had been scratched by the leaves and stems stood out like red welts from a whip and burned like the stings of insects. But my heart hurt even worse. In the bright sunlight, the satin wrapping of the infant burned my eyes with its fiery redness; it also burned my heart, which felt as if it were enclosed in a layer of ice.

It was high noon; the field spread out around me, the roadway was a murky gray, and the roadside weeds looked like entwined snakes or worms. A cool wind blew from the west, while the sun's rays blazed, and I couldn't decide whether to complain about the cold or about the heat. It was, in other words, a typical autumn midday. Which meant that the farmers were staying put in their villages.

A little bit of everything grew on one side of the road or the other: soybeans, corn, sorghum, sunflowers, sweet potatoes, cotton, and sesame. The sunflowers were in full bloom, a vast cloud of yellow floating amid the verdant crops. A scant few reddish brown hornets flitted through the subtle fragrance. Crickets set up a mournful cry from beneath the leaves, while locusts flew into the air, only to be snapped up by swallows, some of which perched on low-slung telephone wires stretching over the field. The way their necks were hunched down, I could tell they were eyeballing the smooth gray river that flowed placidly through the field below. I detected a heavy, sticky, life-giving odor like that of raw honey. The vitality of life rose all around me magnificently, and this splendid liveliness manifested itself in a steamy mist rising from the rampant weeds and robust crops. A solitary white cloud hung motionless in the astonis.h.i.+ngly blue sky, like a virginal young maiden.

She was crying still, as if she'd been cruelly mistreated. At the time, I didn't know she'd been abandoned. I doubt that my pity, which was worth so little, could prove to be of much benefit to her, but it brought me nothing but agony. I can't help but believe that the saying "good deeds are seldom repaid in kind" is a law of the universe. You may think yourself virtuous for rescuing someone from the jaws of h.e.l.l, but others will a.s.sume that your actions are self-serving, even destructive! From now on, you won't catch me performing any good deeds. That doesn't mean, of course, that I'll turn to evil. I suffered greatly because of that infant girl, and could feel it coming even as I carried her out of the sunflower field.

I was the only pa.s.senger in the rickety bus that had delivered me to the Three Willows stop no more than half an hour before I spotted the baby girl in the sunflower field. During the bus ride I found myself becoming increasingly conscious of the superiority of our social system. The ticket-taker, a girl with a face like a sparrow's egg, was saying the very same thing. The way she yawned all during the trip was a good sign that she hadn't slept the night before - maybe she and her boyfriend had found a more enjoyable way to pa.s.s the night. And with each yawn, she turned that lovely face of hers my way and glared at me with such resentment you'd have thought I'd just spat on her or had put powdered lime into her jar of face cream. All of a sudden I had the feeling that dark freckle-like spots covered her eyeb.a.l.l.s, and that each time she glared at me, those spots peppered my face like buckshot. I was seized with fear, as if I'd offended her somehow, which was why I greeted each of her looks with the most sincere smile I could manage.

Eventually, she forgave me, for I heard her say, "This is your personal vehicle." Seventeen of the twenty windows in my vehicle, which was some thirty feet long from front to back, were broken, and the black leather seats looked like flat cakes soaked in water, curled up at the edges. My personal vehicle, with all its rusty metal parts, shuddered as it flew down the narrow dirt road, the green fields on both sides quickly disappearing behind us. My personal vehicle was like a wars.h.i.+p plowing its way through wind and wave. Without turning to look, my driver asked, "Where are you stationed?" I told him, happily surprised at being favored with his interest. "Is it the fort?" "Yes, yes it is!" Now, I wasn't stationed at the fort, but I knew the benefits of lying - I had been contaminated by a pathological liar. That perked up my driver, and I could see the friendly look on his face even though he hadn't turned around. I must have rekindled a host of memories in him, memories of army life. I echoed his curses, adding my own for the fort's deputy chief of staff, a gangsterlike man with a face like a monkey. He told me he'd once driven for the deputy chief of staff as he sat in back with the wife of the commander of the 38th Regiment. When he looked in the mirror and saw the deputy chief of staff feel the woman up, he'd grimaced and turned the jeep right into a tree ... ha ha, he laughed. So did I. "I understand," I said, "I understand perfectly. The chief of staff's only human." "When I got back to the fort he told me to fill out a report, so I said, 'I lost my bearings when I saw the deputy chief of staff feel the woman up, and crashed the jeep. It was all my fault.' After I sent it in, our political instructor said Tuck you!' and whacked me in the back of the head. 'What kind of report is that? Go back and redo it!" "Did you?" "No f.u.c.kin' way! He wrote it for me, and I copied it." "Your political instructor sounds like a good guy," I said. "Good guy? I had to give him ten f.u.c.kin' pounds of cotton!" "n.o.body's perfect," I said. "That was during the Cultural Revolution, so it was all the fault of the Gang of Four." "How are things in the army these days?" he asked. "Not bad, not bad at all."

When we arrived in Three Willows, our bus girl opened the door and was about to kick me off the bus. But she didn't scare me, since the driver and I had become comrades in arms. I tossed a pack of Ninety-Nines on the dashboard. That pack of smokes must have made a big hit, since he was still honking his horn in thanks far down the road.

I started walking. I was carrying a sack of candy in my backpack and a small case of liquor in my hand. I'd have to walk the two and a half miles down a country road that never saw a bus, under a blazing sun, before I'd be home with my parents and my wife and daughter. I saw the sunflower field off in the distance. The minute I spotted the note pinned to one of the willow trees, I ran toward it. All because of that note.

Someone had scribbled the words: "In the sunflowers, hurry, save a life!!!"

Suddenly, the sunflower field seemed a long way off, like a cloud floating just above the ground, yellow and soft, its rich fragrance reaching out powerfully to me. I tossed down what I was carrying so I could run faster. And as I ran anxiously, images of something from the past - something I couldn't forget - surged up in my mind. Two summers before, I was walking home, following a white dog, when I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in years, a girl called Aigu. That chance meeting led to a whole string of events, which formed the basis of a short story I later wrote ent.i.tled "White Dog and Swings." I still think it's one of my best. Every time I come home, I discover something new, which negates something in the past.

The complex and colorful life of a farming village is like a great work of literature, one that's hard to finish and even harder to understand. That thought always reminds me of the shallow, insipid business of writing. What strange new discovery was waiting for me this time? If the note I'd read was any indication, it was bound to be "exciting" and "tragic," to use terminology favored by elite writers. Yuri and Lara carried out their trysts amid sunflowers, a warm and romantic Eden just made for losing your senses. I was nearly breathless when I reached the edge of the field. The coa.r.s.e sunflower leaves were rustling in the warm breezes; dragonflies, crickets, and katydids were making their happy yet bleak noises; and then the baby girl who would bring me unimaginable troubles began to wail. Her cries were the lead instrument in the sunflower symphony - fast and anxious, urgent as a flame singeing the eyebrows.

I'd never seen an entire field of sunflowers before. I was used to seeing clumps or thickets of them by a bamboo fence or at the base of a wall; there they stood tall but lonely, almost as if they were humiliated. But a field of sunflowers stood side by side, gently and intimately supporting each other, resembling a sea of undulating pa.s.sion. The expansion of sunflowers, from cl.u.s.ters here and there to an entire field, was a heartwarming reflection of the effects of economic reforms in agricultural villages.

It would be several days before I fully realized that this baby girl, abandoned in a lovely field of sunflowers, was a strange creature, the focus of so many contradictions that it would have been unthinkable to abandon her and just as unthinkable to keep her. Mankind has evolved to the point where all that separates it from the animal world is a line as thin as a sheet of paper. Human nature is in fact as thin and fragile as a sheet of paper, which crumples at the slightest touch.

The thick sunflower stems were gray green; their bottom leaves had already fallen, leaving tiny scars where they had broken off, while those higher up blocked out the light. The leaves were dark green, nearly black, and l.u.s.terless. Countless flowers the size of rice bowls dipped gently atop the stems, like a mult.i.tude of bowing heads. I followed the sounds into the field, sending clouds of golden pollen fluttering down onto my hair and arms, even into my eyes; fluttering down to the rain-leveled ground; fluttering down onto the infant's red satin wrapping; and fluttering down on three paG.o.da-like anthills near where she lay. Hordes of black ants caught up in a flurry of activity were intent on building their stronghold. Bone-corroding despair hit me all of a sudden. Besides helping humans forecast the weather, the ants' frenetic industry was absolutely worthless, for their hills could barely withstand thirty seconds of pelting rain. Given man's place in the universe, how superior to those ants are we? Terror exists everywhere you look: we are surrounded by traps, by deceit and by lies and self-serving corruption; even fields of sunflowers are places to hide red infants. I thought about leaving her where she lay, turning around, and continuing on my way home, but I couldn't do it. It was as if she were welded to my arms. Time and again I decided to leave her there, but my arms had a mind of their own.

I walked back to Three Willows to study the note again. The scribbled words stared back at me savagely. The surrounding field was vast as ever; autumn cicadas on their last legs chirped desolately in the willow trees, and the winding dirt road leading to the county capital emitted a blinding yellow glare. A scruffy cat, banished from its home, slipped out from a cornfield, looked at me, and meowed once before creeping listlessly into a patch of sesame.

After looking down at the infant's puffy, nearly transparent lips, I picked up my backpack and box and, cradling her in my arms, headed for home.

My family was happily surprised to see me appear out of the blue, but they were positively astonished to see the infant in my arms. Father and Mother showed their astonishment by tottering slightly on their feet; my wife showed hers by letting her arms drop to her side. Only my five-year-old daughter displayed any excitement toward the infant, and that was considerable. "A baby brother!" she shouted. "A baby brother! Papa's brought home a baby brother!"

I knew that my daughter's intense interest in a "baby brother" was born of long coaching by my parents and my wife. Every time I came home, she'd pester me for a baby brother - not just one, in fact, but two of them. And each time that happened, I could sense the somber yet gentle looks in the eyes of my parents and my wife as they gazed at me hopefully, as if I were on trial.

On one occasion, I'd fearfully taken a pink male doll out of my travel bag and handed it to my daughter while she was creating one of her scenes over a baby brother. She'd taken it from me and immediately hit it in the head, producing a resounding thud. Then she'd flung it to the floor and begun to bawl. "I don't want that," she said through her tears. "This one's dead ... I want a baby brother who can talk." After picking the plastic toy up off the floor, I'd looked into its protruding eyes and seen a look of uncommon ridicule. All I could do was sigh. Father and Mother had also sighed. Then I'd looked up and there was my wife, two lines of murky tears coursing down the lacquerlike skin of her dark face.

Except for my daughter, they all looked at me with numb expressions, which I returned to them. I smiled bitterly to ease my discomfort, and they followed suit, not making a sound. They all wore the same molten look on their taut faces, as if etched into clay figurines.

"Papa, let me see my baby brother!" my daughter shouted as she jumped up and down.

"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 sc.r.a.p 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. Ma.s.ses 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 b.u.t.t 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 b.u.mping 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 j.a.panese stories. One, ent.i.tled "Snow Babies," was written by Minakami Tsutomu; I can't recall who wrote the second one, ent.i.tled "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 fas.h.i.+on than their j.a.panese 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded. These children aren't even ent.i.tled 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 n.o.body'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.

The period after Liberation, owing to improvements in living standards and hygiene, saw a significant drop in the occurrences of abandoned children. But the numbers began to rise again in the 1980s, when the situation grew very complicated. First, there were no boys at all. On the surface, it appeared that some parents were forced into acts of inhumanity by rigid family planning restrictions. But upon closer examination, I realized that the traditional preference for boys over girls was the real culprit. I knew I couldn't be overly critical of parents in this new era, and I also knew that if I were a peasant, I might well be one of those fathers who abandoned his child.

No matter how much this concept tarnishes the image of the People's Republic, it is an objective reality, one that will be difficult to eradicate in the short term. Existing in a filthy village with foul air all around, even a diamond-studded sword will rust. So, it seems, I awakened to the Truth.

All night long it rained, but as dawn broke, a ray of sunlight - blood-red, wet and hot - split the dark clouds. I carried the baby over to the bed and asked my wife to watch her. Then I went outside to slosh through the muddy puddles of rainwater and to cross the river on my way to the towns.h.i.+p government office to ask for help. As I entered the lane, I saw that the sorghum stalk fence had been blown down by gusty winds, leaving lush morning glories to soak in the water. Purple and pink blossoms had turned to face the clearing sky, as if offering a sorrowful complaint. Now that the collapsed fence was no longer a barrier, a clutch of half-grown chickens, their feathers still growing, rushed into the yard to peck frantically at large heads of cabbage.

The river's floodwater all but submerged the little stone bridge, sending spray high into the air when it crashed against the stones. I twisted my ankle when I jumped off the bridge, and as I hobbled along the dike, I couldn't help but think that this was not a good sign, that this trip to the towns.h.i.+p office might not solve my problem. But I kept hobbling as best I could toward the row of tiled buildings.