Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

while I was out on the road trying to unload the baby, I ran into an old friend from elementary school. He couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, but he looked fifty. When the conversation turned to families, he said sadly, “I'm still a bachelor, and I guess that's how I'll stay.”
    “I thought you were well off financially.”
    “I'm doing all right, but there just aren't enough women to go around. If I had sisters, I could work a swap for a wife. Unfortunately, I don't.”
    “I thought township regulations outlawed that kind of marriage arrangement.”
    He gave me a puzzled look. “Just what do those township regulations mean?”
    I nodded. When I told him about the baby I'd found and all the trouble that had caused me, he listened in stony silence, without a trace of sympathy in his eyes. He just puffed on the cigarette I'd given him. The tip of the cigarette sizzled, but not a wisp of smoke emerged from his mouth or nose. As far as I could tell, it all disappeared deep down in his stomach.
    Five days later he came to see me. With obvious embarrassment, he said, “Why not… why not give me the baby? I'll raise her till she's eighteen. …”
    I looked agonizingly into his face, which showed even greater agony, waiting for him to continue.
    “When she's eighteen … I'll only be fifty … and who says I can't…”
    “Old friend,” I interrupted, “don't say any more, please.”
    I bought two more sacks of powdered milk with my own money, to which my wife responded by smashing one of our chipped bowls. Through tears of genuine sorrow, she said, “I've had it! I can't take it anymore! You obviously don't care what happens to us anyway… . I've scrimped on food till I don't need to go to the toilet anymore, just to save money. And for what? So you can buy milk for somebody else's kid?”
    “You're my wife,” I said, “so please don't take your unhappiness out on me. You see me go out every day to find a home for her, don't you?”
    “You should never have brought her home in the first place.”
    “Yes, I know that. But I did, and we can't let her starve.”
    “What does that make you, a man with a good heart?”
    “Good people don't get what they deserve, do they? After all these years we've been together, I wish you wouldn't nag me. If you've got a solution, tell me, what is it? We can work together to place this child somewhere, what do you say?”
    “Yes,” she said, flashing her most fetching pout. “Once we get rid of this child, we can have another one of our own.”
    “Have another one?”
    “Yes, a son!”
    “Another one!”
    “Twins would be best.”
    “Yes. Yes.”
    “Go to the hospital and talk to our aunt. Maybe she can come up with something. Widows and widowers from the city are always asking her to help them find children.”
    The final battle. If my aunt, who worked in the hospital's obstetrics ward, couldn't help me find a home, the chances were 80 or 90 percent that I was fated to be the baby's adoptive father. If that's how this all wound up, it would be an unending calamity both for her and for me. I lay in bed that night, oblivious to the onslaught of bedbugs, listening to my wife grind her teeth, smack her lips, and breathe heavily as she dreamt; my heart felt as if it had turned to ice. Finally, I crawled quietly out of bed and went outside, where I looked up at the desolate stars in the sky and felt I had, at last, found a bit of understanding. The damp night air wet my back, and my nose ached from sadness. All of a sudden I knew the importance of treasuring my own life; for too long I'd lived for other people, and vowed to reserve some of the love in my soul for myself. Back inside, I heard the gentle, even breathing of the baby in her winnowing basket. Picking up a flashlight, I shone it down on her. She'd wet herself again, and the liquid had seeped through the slats of the basket onto the floor. I changed her diaper. With Heaven's help, this would be the last time I had to do that!
    My aunt, who had just finished delivering a baby, was sprawled in a chair in her white uniform, which was covered with sweat and drops of blood, trying to catch her breath. She'd gotten a lot older in the year since I'd last seen her. She bent forward in greeting when she saw me walk in. Her nurse was in the delivery room cleaning up; a newborn infant in its cradle was bawling.
    I sat down in the same nurse's chair I'd sat in the year before, directly across from