Mo Yan - Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

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 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.