Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

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.
    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