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

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.