Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh (19 page)

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 wristwatch. It was seven o'clock.

“Damn!” 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 coarse 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 astonishingly 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 hell, but others will assume 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 passenger 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 pass 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 eyeballs, 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 warship 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 38
^th
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 fuckin’ 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 fuckin’ pounds of cotton!” “Nobody'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 entitled “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 coarse 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 passion. The expansion of sunflowers, from clusters 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 lusterless. Countless flowers the size of rice bowls dipped gently atop the stems, like a multitude 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 pagoda-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.