Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

strawberries.
    “Ding Shifu,” she called to him warmly. “Where have you been keeping yourself?”
    He stopped in his tracks. And when he did, he spotted three more former workers from the factory. They all smiled at him. Then they asked him to sample their wares.
    “Have some strawberries, Ding Shifu!”
    “How about a tomato, Ding Shifu?”
    “Try one of my carrots, Ding Shifu!”
    He was about to ask them how business was, until he got a good look at their faces. There was no need to ask. Life was tough, all right, but as long as you were willing to work hard and put your pride aside, you could always get by. But there was no way a man his age could compete with younger folks in opening a vegetable stall, let alone pedaling a pedicab like his apprentice. He also couldn't sell piglets out on the street; you couldn't call it hard work, but you needed the gift of gab, someone who could talk a dead man into coming back to life. At the factory, old Ding had a reputation for almost never having anything to say. This was all very disappointing, but he hadn't reached the point of despair. He'd take a look around and find something he could do. In fact, that's what he was doing now. He refused to believe that in a city this big, there wasn't a single thing he could do to make a living. And just as despair was beginning to creep in, the old man upstairs pointed out the way to riches.
    Dusk was falling when he found himself in front of the hill behind the factory, where the blood-red rays of the setting sun danced on the brilliant surface of the man-made pond behind the hill. Carefree couples strolled along the path ringing the lake. After decades of working at the factory, this was the first time he'd ever made his way out to the hill, let alone strolled around the lake. For all those years, the factory had been his second home; the dozens of awards he'd earned represented buckets of sweat. He turned back to look once more at the factory: a workshop that had once buzzed with activity now stood quiet and deserted. The clang of steel on steel had become yesterday's dream; the chimney that had spewed black smoke for decades was now a sleeping volcano; the factory grounds were littered with tin can rejects and rusty cutting machinery; the yard behind the cafeteria was strewn with empty liquor bottles.
    The factory was dead; a factory with no workers was nothing less than a graveyard. His eyes burned, his heart was filled with a mixture of sadness and anger. As the evening deepened, an eerie gloom rose above the hilltop thickets, heralded by the shriek of a bird that startled him. He massaged his sore leg and stood up. He walked back down the hill.
    A cemetery occupied the area near the lake at the foot of the hill. It was the final resting place of over a hundred heroes from the life-and-death struggles of the city thirty years before. Lush green trees ringed the cemetery: there were pines, cypresses, and dozens of towering poplars. He walked over to the cemetery on a leg so sore he had to sit down on a stone marker. Crows saturated the night with caws from a nest in one of the poplars and magpies circled above as he massaged his leg. While he was rubbing it, his gaze drifted to the abandoned hulk of a bus on the ground beneath the poplar. No tires, no glass in the windows, and hardly any paint anywhere. Who, he wondered, left that thing here? And why? Occupational habit had him thinking how he could convert the thing into a living space. And at that moment he spotted a young couple skulking out of the cemetery, like a pair of specters, then slipping into the rusty bus. For some strange reason, he began breathing hard. One old Ding wanted only to get out of there as quickly as possible; a second old Ding couldn't tear himself away. While the two old Dings were engaged in a fierce battle of wills, a soft, lovely moan emerged from the bus hulk. That was followed by an irrepressible female scream, not all that different from the screech of a cat in heat, but distinct nonetheless. Old Ding couldn't see his own face, of course, but his ears were burning and even the puffs of air from his nose seemed overheated. There was a rustling noise in the bus just before the man popped out through the door. The woman followed a few moments later. He held his breath like a thief hiding in the bushes, not getting slowly to his feet until he heard a somewhat triumphant cough coming from the line of trees beyond the cemetery.
    The old Ding