Monkey Hunting (3 page)

When Chen Pan was thirteen, bandits had murdered his father for protesting the rape of the watercarrier’s daughter. She was only ten, pretty and dull, and willingly had shown the bandits inside her neighbor’s granary. Father’s legend swelled and the villagers recounted his heroism, but Mother disputed their accolades. “What father leaves his children nothing but his good reputation to eat?” She scolded her sons to learn this lesson: “Avert your eyes to the sorrows of others and keep your own plates full!”

After three months at sea, Chen Pan’s arms and legs grew soft and white as the flesh of the rich women he’d glimpsed in Amoy. Often he fantasized about these women, inhaled the scent of their lacquered hair, slowly dared to love them. He recalled the tales of the women of the old Imperial Court, who were protected by the Emperor’s purple-robed eunuchs. Alluring women swathed in furs and jade, their gauze-silk sleeves blooming like orchids. Delicate women who drank only camel-pad broth and nibbled on rare winter fruit to maintain their complexions. Women best admired from afar, like the mountain mist.

Sometimes the men spoke wistfully of the roadside flowers who awaited them in Cuba, easy amber-colored whores who opened their legs for their own pleasure, expecting nothing in return. For all that it had cost him, Chen Pan couldn’t remember his one night with the dancing girl in Amoy. There were only the memories of his mournful wife.

The ship passed through the Straits of Sunda without incident, then followed the verdant curve of Africa before veering west across the Atlantic. In St. Helena they stopped for fresh water, continuing on to Ascension, Cayenne, the Barbadian coast, and Trinidad. Chen Pan heard the crew announcing each port of call, but the longer he remained on board, the farther away Cuba seemed. Could his eight years of servitude have elapsed already?

When the ship finally reached Regla, across the bay from Havana, Chen Pan climbed to the top deck to get a better view. It was a hot, sunny morning, and the city looked like a fancy seashell in the distance, smooth pink and white. A brisk wind stirred the fronds of the palms. The water shone so blue it hurt his eyes to stare at it. When Chen Pan tried to stand on the dock, his legs slid out from under him. Others fell, too. Together, he and his shipmates looked like a spilled barrel of crabs.

The men were ordered to peel off their filthy rags and were given fresh clothes to present themselves to the Cubans. But there was no mistaking their wretchedness: bones jutted from their cheeks; sores cankered their flesh. Not even a strict regimen of fox-glove could have improved their appearance. The recruits were rounded up in groups of sixty—wood haulers and barbers, shoemakers, fishermen, farmers— then parceled out in smaller groups to the waiting landowners.

A dozen Cubans on horseback, armed with whips, led the men like a herd of cattle to the
barracón
to be sold. Inside, Chen Pan was forced to strip and be examined for strength, like horses or oxen that were for sale in the country districts of China. Chen Pan burned red with shame, but he didn’t complain. Here he could no longer rely on the known ways. Who was he now without his country?

One hundred fifty pesos was the going rate for a healthy
chino.
A Spanish landowner paid two hundred for him, probably on account of his height. His father had taught him that if you knew the name of a demon, it had no power to harm you. Quickly, Chen Pan asked one of the riders for the name of his buyer.
Don Urbano Bruzón de Peñalves.
How would he ever remember that?

Several landowners tried to cut off the queues of their hires. Those who protested were beaten. Chen Pan was relieved that his employer didn’t insist upon this. Now there was no question of his purpose in Cuba. He was there to cut sugarcane. All of them were.
Chinos. Asiáticos. Culís.
Later, there would be other jobs working on the railroads or in the copper mines of El Cobre, five hundred miles away. But for now what the Cubans wanted most were strong backs for their fields.

Vanishing Smoke

CENTRAL CUBA (1857–1860)

Chen Pan arrived at La Amada plantation in time for the sugar harvest. He was thrown together with slaves from Africa, given a flat, straight blade to cut the sugarcane. The stalks were hard, like wood, but fibrous and tougher to chop. Clumps of dust shook loose in his face. Blisters sprouted like toadstools on his palms. Nets of iridescent flies settled on his skin as he worked, as he inhaled again and again the yellow-green fumes of the cane.

The heat began before dawn and persisted long after sundown. Chen Pan strained his back from all the bending. He tripped on lizards the width of his fist. A slip of his machete opened a wound in his shin that took many weeks to heal. The growing lines of oxcarts sagged under the weight of all the cane. Still, the work didn’t stop.

The African slaves steadily slashed their rows of sugarcane.
Whoosh-whoosh-whack.
Three quick blows was all it took for them to strip the cane and leave an inch of stalk in the ground. Chen Pan had never seen men like this. Twice as wide as him, with thighs thick as oaks. Teeth that could grind his bones. Others as tall as two Chinese, with notched spines he could climb like a pine.

The Africans’ skin seemed to darken the fields— reddish black skin or blue-black skin or skin brown as bark that gave off a smell of the woods. Most of the slaves had a spiderweb of scars on their backs, or strips of pink flesh still raw from the overseer’s whip. Chen Pan watched a slave catch honeybees with his tongue, swallowing them like a bear. He claimed they didn’t even sting.

The men came from places Chen Pan hadn’t heard of: Mandinga, Arará, Carabalí. In China, no one would believe such men could exist.

From his first hour in the fields, it was clear to Chen Pan that he was in Cuba not as a hired worker but as a slave, no different from the Africans. That he’d been tricked into signing his life away. At night, his muscles burned with the day’s work, but he slept only fitfully. The same questions tormented him. How would he ever return to his village? Build the river house on stilts? Restore his father’s good name?

The slave quarters were a fetid honeycomb of rotting wood—dirt and stink, rats and lice aplenty, nothing freshly green. The air quivered with mosquitoes. Meager fires in the courtyard cooked sweet potatoes, plantains, and malanga for dinner, giving off sparks and a starch-violet smoke. Rooms were filth holes with hard planks or hammocks for beds. A miserable guard in a grillwork lookout had the only key. The
mayoral
lived nearby with his fortress of firearms.

A few old hags did the washing and cooking, tended a dusty row or two of tubers. Chen Pan’s shipmates began growing their own vegetables from the seeds they’d brought from home: bitter melon, squash, white cabbage, eggplant, bok choy. One night, a chef from Canton made a bird’s nest soup so delicious it made several men cry for their mothers.

After dark, no lights were permitted in the
barracón,
so the slaves kept fireflies in tiny twig cages. Sometimes a homesick slave sang a song from his village, monotonous and sad, his words absorbed by the steady night-grinding of crickets. The restless ones spent hours pulling ticks from their skin. Men and women alike smoked cigars of wild tobacco to ward off evil. Because evil, they said, hung everywhere.

Talk was as rife as the vermin in the
barracón.
Chen Pan couldn’t follow most of the stories, but what he understood, or thought he understood, unsettled him. Giant chameleons whose bite caused madness? Island snakes faster than full-trotting pigs? Scarlet vipers that turned themselves to hoops, tails in their mouths, and chased their victims to collapsing? The slaves spoke reverentially of a Yoruban girl who had bought her freedom by carving tortoiseshell combs. Everyone dreamed of this, to secure enough money to set himself free.

Sometimes an African hanged himself from the mahogany tree wearing his Sunday rags. The
bozales,
the newly arrived Africans, were especially prone to suicide. They threw themselves into the well or the boiling sugar cauldrons, swallowed mouthfuls of dirt, or suffocated themselves with their own tongues. On the plantation, there were many ways to die. The stuttering woodcutter from D—— hanged himself on the Africans’ tree after a beating left him bent in two. Word spread on the plantation that even mild reprimands to
los chinos
could be disastrous to the master’s investment.

At first, Chen Pan had trouble understanding anyone. Spanish sounded like so much noise to him. Firecrackers set off on New Year’s Day. There was no bend in the sounds, no ups or downs, just
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
Like that.
Tra-ba-jo, tra-ba-jo.
He soon learned that he didn’t need to know much more than that. Sometimes the Africans mixed in their own tribal languages. Abakuá. Lucumí.

Chen Pan liked the Africans. They showed him how to swing the machete, shared the yams they roasted in ashes. Cabeza de Piña, who could knock men senseless with a butt of his head, took an interest in Chen Pan and protected him like a brother. He called Chen Pan “Flecha,” or arrow, on account of his long, straight spine. Cabeza said that Chen Pan, like him, was a son of the God of Fire.

In turn, Chen Pan taught his friend Chinese exercises to begin his day, to gather energy from the heavens to strengthen his body.

The other Chinese ridiculed Chen Pan. They said they wanted nothing to do with the Africans. They said the black men were liars, that they stank like monkeys and stole their food. But Chen Pan paid them no mind.

Everyone, Chinese and African alike, agreed on one thing: their hatred for the overseer, a burly pig of a criollo they called El Bigote for the mustache he wore like a door handle. Who did he imagine himself on that tired mare, his whip and pistol at the ready, his top boots muddy in the midday sun? Each time the master rode by to inspect the fields, El Bigote unctuously stammered: “Sí, Señor. No, Señor. A sus órdenes, Señor.”

One day, El Bigote viciously whipped Chen Pan for telling one of his great-aunt’s jokes (about a goatherd’s first woman) that had made the men laugh so hard they dropped their machetes. “Baaaa-baaaa!” Chen Pan was still bleating when the lashes stripped the shirt off his back, leaving a lattice of blood. For many nights afterward, Chen Pan nursed his wounds with the Africans’ healing leaves and planned his reprisal.

The flogging was not Chen Pan’s last. For him and the other men, the whip cracked for any small wrong— if they slowed down or spoke their own language or dared to protest. Twenty lashes for outright defiance. Thirty more if the offender persisted. After that, it was the shackles for two months or working fettered in the fields.

For Chen Pan, the silence was worse than the sting of the whip. He felt his unspoken words festering inside him, ordinary words like “sun” and “face” and “tree.” Or snatches of poems he longed to shout out loud, like the one about Lady Xi. Hundreds of years ago—Chen Pan heard his father’s voice reciting it— the King of Chu defeated the Ruler of Xi and took his wife in the spoils of war.

No present royal favour could efface
The memory of the love that once she knew
Seeing a flower filled her eyes with tears
She did not speak a word to the King of Chu

Now and then a breeze blew through the sugarcane fields, carrying a scent of jasmine or heliotrope. This heartened Chen Pan. No matter that he was stuck on this devil island surrounded by mangroves and fleshhungry sharks, that his arm often dropped in mid-swing from pure exhaustion. He imagined the breezes as fresh breaths from the sea, coaxing boats along the horizon, their sails puffed up and purposeful.

Sometimes he distracted himself by spying on the few female slaves in the fields. On lucky Sundays, Chen Pan watched the younger ones bathing in the stream or lying with their lovers in the thickets. He noticed with longing that in the heat of love they didn’t close their eyes or turn their heads.

The fights over the women grew so bloody and bitter that someone usually ended up dead.
As long as
bones are rare, a pack of dogs can’t share.
Three slaves came to blows over a plump girl who worked in the kitchen. The two smaller men managed to strangle the bigger one, then bashed in his head. At the funeral the slaves chanted and clapped over the lifeless body, clamoring for the dead man’s safe passage to Africa. Then they sealed his eyes shut with semen before burying him in the woods.

On weekends, fiestas animated the
barracón.
The criollo trader came around with his white bread and fritters. He also sold calicoes and muslins, peanut candies, muscle ointments, and gingham handkerchiefs. An occasional cockfight heightened the excitement. Chen Pan used to play the cocks in China, sneaking off to W—— after his mother and wife were asleep. He liked to judge a rooster by its battle-trim, by the ferocity in its eyes. Once, he’d bought a new hoe with his winnings.

There were other entertainments. Slave games over whose prick was biggest. Many such contests. In one, the men thrust their
pingas
through a hole in a deep wooden box with ashes at the bottom. The man who pulled his
pinga
out with the most ash was pronounced the winner. Cabeza de Piña frequently won this game.

When Cabeza was ordered to sleep in the stocks for fighting with the
mayoral,
several Africans surrounded Chen Pan. They accused him of getting Cabeza in trouble. But Chen Pan fought back. No other Chinese bothered to speak to the slaves, he complained, so why were they attacking him? When the Africans forced Chen Pan to put his
pinga
in the ashes box, he wanted to vanish from the shame. He pulled it out, shriveled, with no ash at all.

By harvest’s end, Chen Pan was hacking his way through the fields with the same proficiency he’d first admired in the Africans. As the last of the cane matured, its skin grew brittle, its stems clotted with treacly juice. Chen Pan learned to move to the rhythm of the swaying stalks, to the heat and buzz of the insects. He cut cane until time lost all meaning, until his throat cracked drought-dry, until his dreams blew nothing but dust.

If he completed his contract in Cuba, what would he have to show for it? No money and an old-man body. His fate burnt in the fields. A dead-dog luck.

In the last grueling weeks of the
zafra,
the sugar mill bell tolled twenty times in a single workday. Chen Pan’s life was metered by the
snap-crack
punctuations of the whip, by his sun-cured skin torn off in strips. A few of the
chinos
got less arduous jobs. They loaded the cane onto the crushing machines or tended the boiling sap. Chen Pan was picked for these jobs, too. But after the suffocation of ship and
barracón,
he couldn’t bear to stay indoors for long. The sun was brutal, it was true, but sometimes cranes flew overhead, rinsing him with their shadows and wandering luck.

A cloud-crane setting out, you’d rather
go back home, white clouds and beyond,
sip streamwater, sleep in empty valleys . . .

Chen Pan missed his great-aunt most of all. Before going to Amoy, he’d taken leave of her under the eaves of her thatch-roofed house. How he’d loved the neat rows of her chrysanthemums. They’d spent hours collecting mulberry leaves, and her blackened teeth had flashed whenever she’d told him a ribald joke. As a child, Chen Pan had believed that his penis (and every other boy’s, for that matter) was little more than a source of mirth for women.

“Remember, we own nothing in death,” his great-aunt had said, embracing him. “Go safely and return home.”

Chen Pan’s father often had auditioned his poems for this beloved aunt. She was old and unschooled, but she listened to her nephew attentively. Whenever Father read her an expression she didn’t understand, he would scratch out the line. He’d decided to write only what any good peasant could appreciate.

Chen Pan composed letters to his family in his head.
Dear Auntie. Dear Wife. Dear Brother. I am not dead.
But he didn’t finish these letters. Better to let everyone think that brigands had robbed and killed him, that vultures had come and plucked out his eyes. He knew that his wife would burn incense in his name, urging his ghost home. Chen Pan liked to imagine her surprise at his return. But with each swing of his machete, that prospect grew more and more remote.

Sometimes a storm broke the monotony of the days, but soon the downpours became predictable: the clouds built their same gray cliffs every afternoon, the rains lasted no more than an hour. And at dusk, the fields grew tremulous with fireflies. Only a calamity made one day different from the rest. Like the time Yeh Nien got struck by lightning as he raised his machete in a storm, or the morning slow-witted Eulice lost three toes to a toppled ox.

Late one afternoon, a magnificent thundershower obscured the fields. The slaves couldn’t see to the ends of their machetes, but they were forced to keep cutting cane just the same. In the blurring confusion, Chen Pan caught sight of El Bigote shouting orders at a field boss. He picked up a sharp stone, aimed carefully, then hurled it at the overseer’s temple—the very spot, Chen Pan knew, that if hit correctly would instantly kill a man.

Every slave was whipped in retribution for El Bigote’s murder, but nobody confessed to the crime or to having witnessed it. No one said a word to Chen Pan either, but the slaves offered him small tributes. He got his pick of the machetes at dawn and was permitted to drink first from the noontime water trough.
Akuá mbori boroki ñangué‚
the Africans murmured. The goat is castrated only once.

Years before, a traveling acrobat had come to Chen Pan’s village with an enormous macaque monkey on a leash. It was summer and the macaque broke loose and climbed his family’s kumquat tree, gorging, uninvited, on the fruit. No amount of coaxing could get the monkey down. Then it tried to mount all the local dogs, including the little helpless ones like his greataunt’s Pekingese. Chen Pan had killed that monkey, too, with a single throw of a stone.