Monkey Hunting (15 page)

What was he meant to do? He wanted to know, whatever it was.

Domingo felt in his pocket for his great-grandfather’s spectacles. He polished the lenses with his shirttail and put them on. Papi had told him that Chen Pan’s eyesight had been excellent until six months before he’d died. Domingo looked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. The middle of his face looked perfectly clear, but he was blurry around the edges.

He closed his eyes, still wearing the glasses, and saw his father on the day they’d left Cuba. Papi had been wearing his white linen suit and Panama hat, a red carnation in his lapel. He’d held tight to Domingo’s hand during the short flight over the Straits of Florida. When they’d arrived at the Miami airport, Papi’s hat had been confiscated for harboring tropical fleas, and so he’d immediately bought another one, his first purchase on
yanqui
soil.

For a moment, remembering this, Domingo felt exalted, at peace, as if he could rest an eternity. He cried out with gratitude.

“Papi!” he shouted.
“¡Aquí estoy!”

But when he opened his eyes, his father rose out of sight, high and slow, like a home-seeking ghost. Domingo imagined a flock of geese accompanying him, graceful and sonorous, their stout wings stirring the breeze. How his heart flowered with tenderness! And in the pale air behind him, Papi’s Panama hat floated like a peaceful omen.

At daybreak Tham Thanh Lan appeared. Her hair was in disarray, and the hem of her ao dai was muddied and torn. She held up a rickety bamboo cage filled with crickets she’d collected along the Saigon River. She was nearly eight months’ pregnant.

“Breakfast?” Domingo joked, half relieved.

Tham Thanh Lan didn’t answer. Instead she imitated the crickets’ song by pressing her tongue to the back of her front teeth. She insisted that Domingo accompany her to the Giác Lâm Pagoda. The temple was the oldest in Saigon, three miles by foot into the Tan Binh district. The weather was sweltering. Domingo thought of the army morgue he’d visited in Danang this time last year, the stink of embalming fluids, the dead naked men stitched up like crude science projects. It had taken him two days to eat anything after that.

At the entrance to the pagoda, a statue of Quan Am, the Goddess of Mercy, stood on a lotus blossom. Tham Thanh Lan slipped off her sandals and gestured for Domingo to remove his shoes. She led him past hundreds of funeral tablets and an army of gilded figures he didn’t recognize.

Candles burned everywhere, each one a little vote for change. A pot of white lilies wilted sleepily in a corner. Domingo recalled all the petitions buried by the roots of the ceiba tree in Parque Martí, a myriad of wishes and talismans. His mother always prayed under the sacred tree before going to work.
Araba iya
o,
she’d greet the mother ceiba, and ask it for blessings in bringing forth life. On her way home, she’d give the ceiba thanks for another job well done.

Domingo tried to think back to what he’d wanted once, some essential need. When he was nine, he’d run along the beach near Santiago. The Revolution had been only a month old. His father had warned him of the dangerous undertow, of the rip tides that had claimed unmindful lives. But all he’d seen was the waves breaking steadily, predictable as pleats. He’d kicked up sand as he ran, harder and faster, before diving into the sea.

Domingo shielded his eyes from the glare of the candles. The wax gave off a scorched smell. Yesterday he’d emptied his entire savings account at the base. One thousand and twelve dollars. He wanted to give it all to Tham Thanh Lan, to count it out for her in a pile on her kitchen table, to promise to send more every month. He needed to go away, to leave her like another country.

Tham Thanh Lan took his hand and led him to the figure of the Thich Ca Buddha as a child, dressed in yellow. “This is
mi hijo,
” she told the young god, clutching her enormous stomach. Then she lowered herself to her knees. She wanted Domingo to swear his loyalty to her, with this god as her witness. He began to pray—not to the Buddha but to Ochún, on account of the god’s yellow robes:

Madre mía, dueña de todos los ríos del mundo
donde todo hijo de santo va bañarse para
recibir la bendición del agua dulce . . .

Tham Thanh Lan bought a finger’s width of scented kerosene for one of the forty-nine lamps on the altar that was strewn with miniature Bodhisattvas. The kerosene, she told Domingo, would burn with her wish for their happiness. She wrote their names on a scrap of paper and attached it to a branch of the altar. Domingo’s shirt was soaked with sweat, but his skin felt cold, like a just-caught fish. He heard the senseless rush of his own blood.

The toll of a bronze bell rolled through the smoky temple, ascending slowly, carrying Tham Thanh Lan’s prayer to heaven.

It was dusk when they returned from the temple. Tham Thanh Lan went to bed still dressed in her
ao
dai.
Outside, the rain came down hard and slanted by the wind. Lightning lit up a distant patch of purplish sky. Warblers quarreled loudly in a nearby banyan tree.

Domingo watched himself watching Tham Thanh Lan from a distance, like a ghost on the other side of a riverbank. Noiselessly she breathed in the darkness, slept the radiance of a doubled life, oblivious to the clumsy circling of moths, to the rain, to their ruin. Her tiny feet began paddling the air.
And so you go,
never to come back.
Did he imagine her saying that?

He stood by Tham Thanh Lan’s window and imagined it multiplying, stretching into the sky, a conga line of shuddering glass. Maybe there should be a kind of reality salsa, with songs for death, for silence, for forgetting. Domingo envisioned thousands of couples dancing tightly and quietly, reliving unspeakable sorrows. Wasn’t failure, if spectacular enough, an achievement in its own right?

Before the sun rose, Domingo planted the cash in Tham Thanh Lan’s apartment. He stuffed her mattress and kitchen pots, lined her silk slippers, folded the biggest bills in her Hong Kong jewelry box. She would find it all in ten minutes, if she looked. He wanted to leave her something more, a burning, a stamping, some proof of his faith. Then he remembered their son.

On the street, the first soup vendors were arranging their charcoal fires. The air was damp and clear. Laborers in blue uniforms raced by on their ancient bicycles. A thicket of peddlers made their way to the Cholon market carrying baskets of guavas, mangosteens, chickens, and snakes. Domingo bought a bowl of hot scallion noodles in broth. The soup tasted good, scalding and spiced with chile peppers. He paid the soup lady with his last Vietnamese coins and left.

LAST RITES

The Spirit wants only that there be flying.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE

The Egg and the Ox

Chen Fang

SHANGHAI 1970

The guards are beating the prisoner again. The same woman who tried to commit suicide last summer by sharpening her toothbrush against the cement floor and plunging it into her wrist. The poor thing wails half the day, fraying everyone’s nerves. Other times she laughs so hard the guards beat her senseless.

I’ve been here for three years. The cold wind freezes the bars of my cell. Dust swirls through the cracks in the walls. My every breath is a cloud. In the mornings I wake up with a pressure in my chest, as though a horse were pressing its hoof to my breastbone. Soon winter will return with its merciless jewels. The world is not what it was once. The stars are off course, loose and aimless in the sky. Here it is always dusk.

I do not think anybody expected me to last this long. Too genteel, they sneered. Too corrupted by Western ways. I am seventy-two years old. My hands are stiff, reddened with arthritis from months of wearing handcuffs. My gums are black and bleed continuously. To eat, I must first press the blood from them.

Twice I’ve been hospitalized—once for pneumonia, another time for rectal hemorrhaging. I fear I may have a tumor. To relieve myself is an anguish. Still, I must eat. There is only rice gruel, sometimes an extra mug of hot water when the kind female guard is on duty. Yesterday, the fat guard dislodged my shoulder when she twisted my arm high behind my back.

My interrogations come in flurries. Two or three times daily for a week, then nothing for months. My tormentors parade death before me, thinking this could frighten me. They do not realize how much more tempting it is to die than to stay alive. Perhaps there is someone on the other side already calling for me:
Come along now, Chen Fang. We are waiting for
you. Everything is better here.
Perhaps eternity is just one of many possibilities.

Of course, my impassivity ignites the interrogators’ fury. They scream close to my face, spraying me with spittle. “Confess! Confess!” How tiresome it is.

My eyesight is failing. The guards broke my reading glasses my first day here and they are still missing a lens. This morning an autumn leaf blew into my cell from the prison yard. Its crimson and yellow colors dazzled me. I held it close to my face and carefully turned it over, tracing its delicate veins. Its presence comforted me, as if it were hoarding a precious light.

The sound of rain washes away my most desperate moments. But anything more than a drizzle is a problem. In June my cell flooded, grew fluorescent with mold and mosquitoes. Dampness blackened the floor and a fungus grew overnight in my slippers.

Most days I try to exercise my arms and legs, clean my bed linen as best I can. I reconstruct poems in my head, patiently collecting each syllable. It pleases me to reclaim a few lines. Here is a fragment I recovered from a poem of Meng Chiao’s:

A sliver of moonlight cast across the bed,
walls letting wind cut through the clothes,
the furthest dreams never take me far,
and my frail heart returns home easily.

I like to remember the mountains on summer days—the sun hanging like a stone, the black-necked crickets filling the air with their small worries. Endless days, idle and blessed. The stream surged down the mountainside with its cooling purpose, polishing rocks, and the baroque little owl waited in the eaves of the scribe’s hut for its mice. Often the wind blew so hard it felt solid against my skin, like a block of wood.

Last month the kind female guard asked me to write a poem for the occasion of her son’s birth. “This way I’ll remember you when you’re gone,” she whispered. She is a homely woman with a downward droop to her nose. I know she does not mean to be cruel. The other guards kick and push me until I fall to the floor. They take away my food before I finish (I cannot hurry my meals due to my gums). But this guard gives me ample time. I am not a poet, but I wrote something for her son.

As a woman alone, a teacher of literature, I lived simply, learning to endure absence like a continual thirst. I longed for my father in Cuba, for my kind older sisters, for the touch of my beloved Dauphine. In China women do not stand alone. They obey fathers, husbands, their eldest sons. I lived outside the dictates of men, and so my life proved as unsteady as an egg on an ox.

When the Communists took over, they threw out the foreign teachers in our school: Dieter Klocker, our choral director; Serendipity Beale, the British historian who taught me to play cribbage; the biologist Lina Ginsberg, who’d come to Shanghai to escape the Nazis and married a Chinese scholar. The new leaders claimed they did not want such teachers burdening the students with alien ideas.

At first I was permitted to stay on at the school (renamed the Glorious Motherland Middle School). I did my best to implement the policies imposed upon us by Party officials and to fulfill my academic duties. Once a week an army officer would come to lecture my students. “You must plant gardens with bayonets!” he shouted again and again. What could I possibly teach them after that?

I recounted for them the story of Li Kuang, the scourge of the Huns. One night Li Kuang got drunk and mistook a stone for a tiger. Determined to kill it, he reached for his bow and quiver and shot the “tiger” with his arrow. The next morning Li Kuang found that his arrow had penetrated the stone, feathers and all.

“Given pure will,” I told my students, “stone swallows feathers.”

But I am not certain they understood this tale. The new generation, I fear, is largely without history or culture, boys and girls weaned only on slogans. Guns have taken the place of intellect. In the old days, it was not unusual for millers to blind the mules they used to turn their grindstones. Is this what we have become? A country of blind mules? Where are the ideas that took a lifetime to comprehend?

I miss our old language, its capacity for subtlety and consolation. And yet I am the lonely one here. These days, everything old is to be destroyed: old customs, old habits, old culture, old thinking. Teachers used to be venerated. What am I now? A dirty scrap, barely human. Too old to bother killing.

When the latest terror began, my own students beat me with sticks. They forced me to kneel for hours at a struggle meeting in the school auditorium. The president of the student body, Niu Sheng-chi, accused me of favoring the children of Chinese capitalists, of insisting upon bourgeois decorum in the classroom, of criticizing the Red Guards through clever allegory.

Others, sadly, followed suit. My fellow literature teachers reported that I introduced students to contaminating foreign authors (Kipling, Dickens, Flaubert). The mathematics instructor accused me of brainwashing young minds to think for themselves (the irony of this made me laugh aloud). Even the janitor and the groundskeeper were recruited.

Many of my neighbors were obliged to participate, to indict me for imaginary sins. I saw Pang Bao, the violinist who lived in the apartment next door, bow his head in shame during the proceedings. Dozens, however, joined in the shouting and slogans: “Dirty running dog!” “Capitalist roader!” “Spy!” What choice did they have? The kerosene seller, I noted, shouted with particular relish. I asked myself: Is contempt not the underside of envy?

I lifted my eyes and imagined a forest before me instead of this shortsighted, cowardly crowd. I remembered the storms in the mountains, how the lightning cracked and struck the tallest pines, how the wildflowers released their last sweetnesses to the wind. After the tumult, all grew quiet again. As I knelt there, humiliated, I tried to trust the larger world beyond this inconsequential gallery.

I was charged with being a Kuomintang spy, of working for French intelligence, of engaging in decadent behavior with the enemy (I wondered what they knew about Dauphine). I was denounced as a friend to foreigners, forced to wear a dunce cap scrawled with “cow’s demon and snake spirit,” made to repeat quotations from Mao’s
Little Red Book.
Li Po wrote of such men
who have made slaughter their own version
of plowing.

“I have done nothing wrong,” I repeated, hunched in my dirtied clothes. For me, those five words were my brick wall.

As the accusations against me grew wilder, my best student, Lao Mei-ping, defended me. She was a slight girl with confident hands, inclined toward the sciences. For her courage I heard she was sent to a labor camp in Manchuria. No one knows what has become of her.

I was reassigned to menial work in a factory. I filled cans with the red paint used for denunciation posters. After my home was destroyed, my books burned, my photographs confiscated (these would later be used as “proof ” of my foreign connections), another family was transferred to live with me in my two-room flat.

Seize power. Every ignorant, frustrated person in China has taken this phrase to heart.
When the earth
shakes, snakes slither from every crack in the dirt.

I finally know of my son. I read about him in the Party newspaper they distribute to the prisoners. Lu Chih-mo has made his reputation running an important southern province. A reputation, no doubt, built on corpses. Of what use, I think now, was it for me to educate so many children when my own son has turned out a barbarian?

I read every article about Lu Chih-mo, trying to discern how he still might be a part of me. I study photographs of him, find the set of his mouth disturbing. When he was a baby, his lips used to quiver as he nursed himself to sleep. And when he cried, his cheeks flushed a scalded-looking red.

It is said that Lu Chih-mo is a confidant of Mao’s wife. Years ago, everyone in Shanghai knew her as a minor actress of easy virtue. I met her once at a French embassy party, provocatively dressed, on the arm of an ambitious petty official. Now she alters people’s lives like theater scenery, eliminating whomever she wishes.

I know that if Mao were to lead my son to a cliff by the sea and command him to jump, he would stupidly plunge to his death. As it is, many thousands have killed themselves. They jumped off buildings or hanged themselves when the Red Guards came. Instead of one hundred flowers blooming, we have ten thousand bloody corpses, ten thousand pairs of vacant eyes.

Lu Chih-mo’s personal campaign is to destroy the country’s ornamental flowers, which he berates as a bourgeois preoccupation. I am told that nothing is left of Shanghai’s fine gardens but dirt and mud.

I have thought of using my son’s name to help me get out of prison. But what would become of him if it were known that his mother was a traitor? Would he have to shoot me to prove his allegiance to the Revolution?

Here in my cell, I live in my body more familiarly than before. Once my body existed outside me, like a musty dress in the closet. Now each new discomfort brings it recognition and sympathy.

I like to pretend that Dauphine is still dancing with me to one of her Cuban boleros. I smell the gardenia she’s pinned behind my ear, her breath against my neck. I sing the lyrics as she laughs at my clumsy pronunciation:

Fuí la ilusión de tu vida
Un día lejano ya
Hoy represento el pasado
No me puedo conformar

My father must be dead by now. In the last photograph he sent us, he is wearing a cream-colored shirt and a parrot is perched on his shoulder. Father wrote that the bird’s name was Jade Peach and that it could whistle twenty-six Cuban tunes. For this, too, I am in prison. Because my father was a foreigner.

I understand that everything in Cuba has changed since his time, that his country is experimenting with a similar madness. For what else can one call the subjugation of millions to the will of a troubled few?

Listen to me. I am old and very weak, but I want to live in the world again.

This is my plan. If I survive, I will search for my family in Cuba. There is a street called Zanja in the eastern part of Havana where the Chinese live. Surely someone will have heard of my father, Lorenzo Chen, the fine herbalist? And I must teach myself Spanish! Who knows if my Cuban family can speak Chinese?

When I arrive, I will find a balcony overlooking the sea and watch the bats pour through the city at dusk (my father mentioned this in one of his letters). I will smoke a Cuban cigar (these are famous even in China), maybe two cigars. The rains will begin, splattering the city, replenishing the sea. Only then will I go inside and write to my son in Shanghai.