Read Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh for Free Online

They squealed their displeasure.
    “Stop squealing, little ones. Luck is with us today. You're about to become the happiest little pigs in the world. Joyful days are here for you two. Instead of squealing like that, you should be laughing.”
    The peddler followed the woman into a lane, a pig under each arm. The little girl, who was perched on the woman's shoulders, turned around and laughed loudly at the sight of the pigs.
    Old Ding watched the procession of pigs and people as long as he could with a growing sense of melancholy. Then he started walking again, all the way up to the middle of the overpass, where he stopped and thought dreamily about the captivating elegance of the young woman. The bridge too was crowded with little stalls, each one manned by a peddler who had the look of a laid-off worker. The overpass swayed slightly; gusts of hot wind hit him in the face. Cars whizzed back and forth on the sparkling asphalt below. He spotted his apprentice, Lü Xiaohu, wearing a yellow vest, speeding down the sidewalk across the way on his three-wheeled pedicab. A white canopy over the back shielded a stately young couple. They were traveling so fast he couldn't see the spokes in the wheels, which were just a silvery blur. The two heads behind the man up front touched from time to time. Sweat poured down Lü Xiaohu's face. He was no one to mess with, old Ding was thinking, but was a terrific fitter, and any fitter worthy of the name was good at just about anything he put his hand to.
    After walking down off the overpass, he entered a farmer's market, filled with hope. The canopy over the market was made of green nylon, which gave the faces of all the vegetable sellers a green tint. The smell of vegetables, meat, fish, and fried snacks merged and engulfed him; so did the shouts of hawking peddlers. In front of one of the stalls he spotted Wang Dalan, the one-handed woman who had worked with him at the factory. She was watching over a pile of sticky 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