Monkey Hunting (7 page)

Chen Pan threw a banquet in the boy’s honor, inviting all the esteemed men from Chinatown. They arrived in a slow procession, like self-important elephants. Benny Lan and Lisardo Hu, who owned the biggest restaurant on Calle Zanja. Marcos Jui, the most successful greengrocer. And, of course, the barber Arturo Fu Fon. Chen Pan welcomed his many brothers from the merchants’ association: Juan Yip Men, Lázaro Seng, Feliciano Wu, Andrés Tang, Jacinto Kwok. Even the Count de Santovenia stopped by with a gift.

In the glow of the colored lanterns, every kind of special dish was served. Fried baby pigeons. Chopped lobster. Jellyfish with cucumber. Shark’s fin soup. Red bean pudding. Lichees all the way from China. Chen Pan gave his guests boiled gold water to drink so that they would continue to prosper, offered them blessings to last a thousand years. Arturo Fu Fon proposed a toast: “May death be long in coming but abrupt when it finally arrives!”

The men ate and drank, belched and laughed until their eyes watered—at their hardships, at their good fortune, at the many grandsons they hoped would surround them in old age. No man there, though, had the heart or the bitter nerve to remind Chen Pan that Víctor Manuel was not really his son. That, in fact, he had no children at all.

After dinner, the men settled in to tell their stories. Lázaro Seng spoke of an uncle who had cured his mother’s dysentery by making soup using flesh cut from his own thigh. Jacinto Kwok recalled how in his village a neighbor had been flayed alive for slapping his mother, another exiled at the mere request of his father. Only in China, the men agreed, was life lived properly.

Listening to his friends, Chen Pan questioned whether he was genuinely Chinese anymore. It was true that he’d left his sorry patch of wheat half a world away, but in ten years he’d built a new life entirely from muscle and cunning. This much Chen Pan knew: a man’s fate could change overnight; only the mountains stayed the same forever.

The following autumn, a deadly plague infested Havana. Half the street vendors in Chinatown died within a week. People blamed the river that coursed through the city, corpses and filth floating in it. The wealthy fled to their country homes, avoided all contact with the poor. But the sickness did not discriminate between rich and poor.

One morning, a rash like a fine brocade erupted on Víctor Manuel’s back, and his belly swelled melon-hard. Chen Pan ran to find the doctor from S——. By the time they returned, the boy was shaking and his short pants were soaked with blood. The doctor boiled a pot of odoriferous roots and held Víctor Manuel over the steam. He prescribed fresh lemon juice and cane syrup for him to drink.

“I’ll protect you like a ghost,” Chen Pan swore to the boy in Chinese. He strung up a tightly woven fisherman’s net over Víctor Manuel’s bed so that as he slept, his spirit couldn’t leave his body. But despite Chen Pan’s vigilance, the boy’s spirit seemed to be escaping in wisps.

At midnight, Chen Pan put his ear to Víctor Manuel’s mouth. Not a whisper of breath. He clutched him to his chest, forced his own air into the boy’s lungs. How could this be? Chen Pan prayed to the Buddha, beseeched him for one more hour with his son. When nature is not respected, Chen Pan cried, the heart grows empty, night outlasts daylight.

There’s no swordstroke clarity when grief tears
the heart,

and tears darkening my eyes aren’t rinsing red
dust away,

but I’m still nurturing emptiness—emptiness of
heaven’s

black black, this childless life stretching away
before me.

The next day the Protestant missionaries came around, wielding their Bibles and explanations. Chen Pan shouted for them to leave.

“Their god must be lonely in heaven,” Lucrecia said after the missionaries fled. “Who could love such a master?” She stayed by Chen Pan’s side for many days, neither crying nor praying, simply still.

At the barbershop, Chen Pan’s friends didn’t know how to console him. Their talk turned instead to the war that had broken out against Spain. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a respected landowner, had freed his slaves so they could join the struggle. Others were following suit. Chen Pan recalled the forced conscriptions in China, the young men sent far to the north, to lands of interminable winters and roaring bears.

His friends applauded the feats of Captain Liborio Wong, the Chinese botanical doctor who’d helped recapture Bayamo during the early weeks of the war. Of the bravery of Commander Sebastián Sian, who they’d heard had killed three Spaniards—
pa! pa!
pa!—
with the back of his sword. They imagined themselves riding into battle on stallions bridled in gold. Of fashioning drinking cups from enemy skulls, as their ancestors had done against Yüeh-chih, the defeated king of Han times. Of perfecting their shooting until the very birds would be afraid to fly.

But not a single one joined the fighting.

“The great thing isn’t fame or fortune but stamina,” Arturo Fu Fon said. “In Cuba, it’s enough just to survive.”

For ten days Chen Pan hardly ate or slept. He thought of leaving the island altogether. Of what use was he if he couldn’t save a helpless child? Chen Pan had heard of other
chinos
sailing ships around Indonesia, working the mines in South Africa, building the railroads that crisscrossed North America. Hard work that would leave no time for mourning.

At least in Cuba, it was warm everywhere, and he knew it was impossible to starve. Chen Pan reached down and felt the muscles in his legs. He’d gotten much too soft in Havana, fussing endlessly with delicate things in his shop. Could he regain his forest strength? The necessary sinew for battle?

On the eleventh day, Chen Pan put Lucrecia in charge of the Lucky Find. He strode over to Calle Muralla, purchased fifty machetes, and hired a two-horse cart and driver. Then, against Lucrecia’s objections, Chen Pan headed east, toward the war, to deliver the machetes to Commander Sian.

Middle Kingdom

Chen Fang

SHANGHAI (1924)

In the mountain village where I grew up, my mother smoked opium. She’d grown accustomed to the money my father, Lorenzo Chen, used to send her from Cuba. My two older sisters married early and left for their husbands’ homes. They are traditional women, obedient to their men and eldest sons. They have bound feet and never traveled far.

I am not like my sisters. When I was born, the midwife, soaked to her elbows in birthing blood, called out: “Another mouth for rice!” My mother was so distraught that she dropped me on my head. My brow swelled and I took a fever, but still I lived. The same evening, my grandmother died. Mother thought me an evil presence and refused to nurse me. Instead I was given oxen milk to drink. For this reason I grew so obstinate.

My oldest sister was just three when our father left China for good. First Sister said she remembered how his hair smelled of oranges. Father had returned from his travels for the Full Month celebration after my birth, and a pyramid of oranges stood tall in my honor. Mother had dressed me in red-and-gold silk and hosted a feast that lasted three days. She’d told Father that I was a boy.

Every villager went along with the deceit. A third daughter in as many years certainly meant bad luck. But no one wanted my father retracting his promise to build a new well for the village. I, of course, remember nothing of him. Father returned to Cuba when I was four months old. By then he had taken a second wife, a soup seller he’d met in the streets of Canton. Together they left China on a merchant ship.

I had a great deal of freedom as a child. Mother dressed me as a boy, treated me as a boy, and soon everyone seemed to forget that I was a girl. She did not bind my feet, and I was allowed to play with the rough boys who caught wild bees in the fields. I did not help in the kitchen. I did not learn how to sew. And only I, of my sisters, went to school. My father sent extra money for this purpose, to educate his oldest son.

“I don’t want him plowing the fields like a peasant,” he wrote. And so it was.

At school, I was praised for my calligraphy. I understood intuitively the sway and press of the brush, the precise images they conjured up. One of the first characters I learned was “home.” It looked to me like a pig with a roof over its head. It is meant to spell contentment.

My father was very methodical about sending Mother money. During the leanest years, we had rice and steamed buns and a little meat to eat. His letters arrived twice a year. The envelopes were trimmed with fancy stamps of rubied hummingbirds and skeletal palms and thickly bearded men. My sisters and I showed off the stamps to the other children in the village.

Once he sent us a photograph of our grandfather, Chen Pan. I had heard many stories about him. That he had been kidnapped in China and enslaved on a large farm in Cuba. That he had escaped the farm after killing three white men. That he had survived for years as a fugitive in the woods, eating nothing but hairless creatures that swung through the trees. That he became rich after saving a Spanish lady’s honor, although he never succeeded in marrying her. That he was, miraculously, still alive.

“Will I ever get to meet him?” I asked my mother.

But she wouldn’t answer me, losing herself instead to the sweet blue smoke.

From an early age I dreamed of running away, of joining my father in Cuba. Mother said that I looked like him, especially when I was unhappy. My lips would purse together, pinching my face in a most disagreeable manner. She showed me the picture of their wedding day. The two of them are posed formally on a lacquered bench with pots of chrysanthemums on either side. Father is tall and thin, and his skin is a faded brown.

The villagers gossiped about his mother, who had been a slave in Cuba before ensnaring a full-blooded Chinese. They said that all the slaves there worked the sugarcane fields harder than any beast, that they boiled human flesh on feast days, then gathered around their simmering kettles and banged on a hundred drums.

There were other tales about Cuba. How fish that rained from the sky during thunderstorms had to be shoveled off the roads before they rotted. How seeds dropped in the ground one day would shoot up green the next. How gold was so plentiful that the Cubans used it for buttons and broom handles. And when a woman fancied a man, she signaled to him with her fan. In Havana, the women chose whom they would marry and when.

Everything I heard about Cuba made my head revolve with dreams. How badly I wanted to go!

By the time I was nine, the teacher in our village informed my mother that he had taught me all he knew. He implored her to send me to a boys’ academy several days away by cart and train. It was a school in the old tradition, once renowned for preparing scholars for the Imperial examinations.

Mother wrote to my father, requesting a decision. That summer he pledged money for ten more years of schooling. I am quite certain that he would not have promised this if he had known I was a girl. The fact remains that I owe everything I am to his generosity.

I was the best student at my boarding school. I excelled in mathematics and Confucian philosophy and studied English and French. It was not easy to disguise my sex. I kept my hair cropped short and affected a gruff manner, but my hands and neck were too delicate for a boy. My size helped. I was a head taller than most of the other students and I was not afraid to fight.

In the spring of my fifteenth year, our literature teacher, Professor Hou, took twelve of us to Canton to see the opera and visit historical sites. One morning, word spread that a fellow student had discovered a brothel that catered to virgins. Well, every last scholar dropped his books and followed him out of the lodgment!

The brothel was in a plain wooden house, not far from the marketplace. Long scrolls of painted silk decorated the walls, including one of an idyllic mountain gorge. A faint breeze made the silk flutter in place.

One by one, my classmates were escorted into the same squalid room. It was big enough for a bedroll and a tray of steaming tea. No one remained inside longer than a few minutes. Each boy pretended to be more pleased than confused when he came out.

When it was my turn, I was astonished to see the bare, slender back of a girl no older than me. Her hair was coiled and messily fastened with jade pins. She turned toward me. Her eyes were smeared black, her lips smudged the color of sunset. Even in the distorting shadows of the room, I found her beautiful.
Lovely
as a blossom born of clouds.

She opened her mouth and gestured with her tongue. I approached her slowly. She took my hand and rubbed it against her breasts. I felt a jolt go through me. Then she touched me between my thighs.

“Who are you?” she asked me sharply, pulling her hand away.

“A girl,” I told her. “Please tell no one.”

We were silent a long time.

“Why are you here?”

“Everyone thinks I’m a boy. It’s the only way I can study.”

To my surprise, the girl patted the bedroll beside her.

“Stay a while,” she said. “This way the others will think you’re a man.” She began to giggle.

I stared at her mouth, her small, uneven teeth. She stared back at me and grew quiet again. Her breathing was slow and steady. Mine was rapid, erratic.

“Do you like being a boy?” she asked.

“It’s all I know,” I answered.

She took my hand again, holding it tightly as we waited together in silence. The air smelled faintly sweet.

Finally, there was a knock at the door. I stood up, bowed deeply, and left.

That autumn, my mother sent me a letter. “Come home,” it said. “There is no more money to study.” There was a war in the West, and my father’s remittances had ceased. It was time, she said, that I married.

Mother had betrothed me to a young man who lived two days’ journey north of our village. To explain my absence, she had told his family that I was away helping a sick relative in the city. They would pay a fine dowry, my mother wrote, enough to take care of her in her dotage. But I knew where my dowry money would go: in a cloud of opium smoke.

I stared at the black ink against the coarse parchment. Again I thought of escaping to Cuba, but I had no money and my father knew only that I was an intelligent boy. The letter was in the handwriting of the local scribe. Through him, the village knew everyone’s affairs. The scribe lived in a hut by a stream high on a mountain ledge. Everyone said that water demons resided there.

Outside my dormitory window was an ancient oak, the leaves stained red with the advancing season. The winter before, a sixth-year boy had hanged himself from the tree after failing his final examinations. I remembered how peaceful he had looked swaying in the wind. I imagined climbing onto the same branch, rope in hand, summoning dead spirits to strengthen me. Then the sudden pressure around my neck, a last gasp of breath, the blackening release.

I was sixteen when I went home and married Lu Shêng-pao. His family had a big house with pine trees that sang on windy days. It was not easy to become a woman. I was not trained to pour tea or be graceful in the usual deferences. I could not cook, and my sewing was crooked. My hair was wavy and hard to control.

Worst of all were my unbound feet. For this, my mother-in-law ridiculed me: “We wouldn’t have paid so much for you if we’d seen those clumsy hooves!”

This I must say directly. There is no harder work than being a woman. I know this because I pretended to be a boy for so long. This is what men do: pretend to be men, hide their weaknesses at all costs. A man would sooner kill or die himself than suffer embarrassment. For women there are no such blusterings, only work.

How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap.
Boys stand leaning at the door
Like Gods fallen out of Heaven.

Lu Shêng-pao was the third of four sons. He worked in his father’s textiles shop, but he had no passion for this. Behind the rice paper screen of our room, he liked to read and draw. I was lucky. Lu Shêng-pao demanded very little of me. Our first night together, he planted his seed in me once and never tried again.

My mother-in-law kept a meticulous calendar and soon announced at dinner that my monthly blood had stopped. I looked out the window. The garden was bright with peonies, their stems bending with heavy blossoms. I thought of how flowers in full bloom were most ready to die. The sun was setting. The horizon, it seemed to me, neatly divided the living from the dead.

News of the pregnancy improved my worth in the eyes of my husband’s family. A daughter-in-law so fertile brings good fortune, signifies that the gods have approved the match. Before me, the family’s luck had not been good. First Brother’s wife had died of the coughing sickness. And Second Brother’s wife received endless scorn after seven childless winters.

During the first months of my pregnancy, I was so ill and despairing that I ate only a bit of dry rice. Each day seemed heavy and gray, as if the sky had lowered its eaves.

One afternoon Lu Shêng-pao brought home a packet of herbs that he said would settle my stomach. He boiled the tea himself, something he had never done, and offered it to me in a fine porcelain cup. Then he tucked a blanket around my knees. The tea was hot and fragrant, like a field of wildflowers. It seemed to flow to every corner of my body, warming it, until I grew drowsy and fell into a deep sleep.

That night I woke up with a searing pain down my middle. I groaned and curled forward, felt a stickiness along my thighs. Where was my husband? With trembling hands, I lit the lamp and saw that our bed was wet with blood. I screamed, alerting the whole house.

My mother-in-law stormed in and eased me to the floor mat. “Don’t move!” she instructed and disappeared into the darkness. I do not know how long it took her to return with the sleepy herbalist.

Liang Tai-lung wedged a damp poultice between my legs and tied it to my waist with a sash. Then he sprinkled a bitter powder on the back of my tongue. When he lifted the remains of my husband’s tea to his nose, he called my mother-in-law aside. She marched over and slapped my face hard.

“How dare you try to kill my grandson!” she screeched. She refused to hear my explanation.

I lay on the floor mat for a month, unable to move. My mother-in-law sent in the maid to change my poultice and empty my chamber pot, which she carefully inspected. She brought my meals herself, making sure I swallowed everything—hearty broths made from chicken livers and bamboo shoots. She was determined that I should live long enough to deliver her first grandchild.

I asked her where Lu Shêng-pao was, but she wouldn’t answer me. Later, I learned that he’d been sent to the South on business for his father.

When my belly grew so large I felt as though I had swallowed the moon, Second Sister came to visit me. She had traveled far, suffering on her lotus feet. My mother-in-law was suspicious of her visit, but she permitted us to sit together on the porch. She herself sat nearby, embroidering a silk pillowcase for the baby.

It was a blustery day, and the pines sang like the opera heroine I had heard in Canton. The birds scattered in all directions. The wind kept unsettling my mother-in-law’s sewing. When she entered the house to fetch more thread, my sister slipped me a letter from my old professor. Then she kissed me on the cheek and departed. I never saw her again.

I waited until everyone was asleep to retrieve the letter from my sash. Professor Hou had recommended me for a teaching post at a foreigners’ school in Shanghai. I was to report there at the start of the New Year, four months hence. I could not still my breathing. I must leave here, I thought. But how?

For the next week, every hour seemed a day and each day a year. I grew clumsier than usual in the kitchen, dropped a platter of steamed asparagus on my feet. My mother-in-law grew concerned. She took me to a fortune-teller, blind and decrepit, who specialized in predicting the sex of the unborn with a cracked tortoiseshell.