Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

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,