by Jennifer Juo
Later that afternoon, Sylvia went home for a few hours, leaving Lila in the clinic with Ayo. Energy and Patience helped her build a little shrine for Lila out of bamboo and banana leaves. Since Lila was born in the year of the boar according to Chinese astrology, Sylvia decided her bush-soul resided in the wild boar found foraging in the local forest. Wild boars sometimes came from the forest that bordered their garden. She placed an offering of fruit, as Ayo suggested, at the edge of this forest where the wild boar had last been seen.
A few days later, the antivenom eventually succeeded in neutralizing the poison in Lila’s blood, much to the spirits’ chagrin. Ayo smiled when he signed the medical release forms. Her daughter had been in his clinic for four days. Sylvia impulsively hugged him to thank him, holding him near for a little too long. The nurses probably wondered or maybe they had seen everything that had happened the last four days. Four days, a small slice of her life really, but to her, it felt like a seismic shift. The ground had moved and she would need to find her bearings again.
When she got home, she religiously changed the offering at her daughter’s shrine to her bush-soul. She believed in what Ayo said about the bush-souls because they were his words and his beliefs. She realized it was a psychological need for her, a ritual she performed every morning because she needed it as much as she believed it, just as he had said. Every day, when she placed fruit at the shrine at the edge of her garden, she thought of Ayo and the wild boar, watching over her daughter. She imagined the wild boar and her daughter would become intimately bound, invisible blood exchanged. The animal would protect Lila, and she, in turn, could not kill any of its species. The wild boar with its comical face, gray coat, and stunted tusks, capable of spearing snakes in the neck, would become Lila’s protection against the snake spirits.
After the snake attack, Sylvia also got Energy to tie up all the open air-conditioner pipes with cloth to keep the snakes out. But Patience and others still whispered that there was a snake spirit assaulting their house, and it would come back.
WINSTON
Chapter 8
His wife was in the garden when Winston returned. Energy crouched on the ground harvesting Chinese cabbage and dark greens from the vegetable patch under the kitchen window. Sylvia stood next to the leafy mango trees at the edge of the garden, her long, dark hair lit up by the late afternoon sun. She was beautiful, but Winston saw her beauty as a liability. Her looks intimidated him, repelled him in some shy, awkward way and left him fumbling with his words in her presence.
“Patience told me about the…” Winston began. “I should’ve been there.”
“We managed,” she said, but she felt very far away to him. He sensed the first stones being laid out between them. He suddenly felt a small sadness growing inside of him, but he kept it contained, isolated before it had a chance to thrive.
“No, I should’ve been here,” he said stiffly, staring off into space. He didn’t have the words in English or even in his native Chinese to repair the damage that had been somehow done by his absence. He wasn’t the kind of man who understood how to pry open a women’s emotions, so he just stood there, his arms hanging limply by his sides.
She turned and walked quickly to the kitchen, clutching the basket of dark Chinese greens. Something about the way she abruptly turned her back on him made him reluctant to follow. He didn’t know what had happened while the baby was in the clinic, but he sensed something in her had changed.
***
The next week, he left for the bush again. He told himself he preferred to be away. It was easier that way. He didn’t have to deal with the messy emotions of marriage. Winston also had to be on the road more than ever now, peddling the miracle seeds. The ADA headquarters in New York and its international donors had set a timetable. If the seeds had not been adopted by a decent percentage of farmers in two years, the project’s funding would be up for review. He didn’t want to go back to Taiwan and face his father as a failure, not with everything that had happened between them. He had to redouble his efforts to evangelize the seeds. A part of him wanted his praises sung loudly and widely so that his estranged, disapproving father could hear.
He thought of his childhood, bitterly cold Northern winters in Shandong, when his maid would put coals under his kang brick bed to keep him warm at night. He wanted to curl up in his mother’s bed like he usually did on cold nights. But that night, his father was home, visiting from Beijing where he was studying at Beijing University. Even though he was only six years old, he felt that he and his father were somehow rivals for his mother’s love. His mother adored him and his father knew this, detested it even. “Don’t coddle him,” his father would say sternly. As a boy, Winston was glad that his Baba was never around, spending most of the months in Beijing, studying classical Chinese poetry.
His mother let Winston do as he pleased in their huge courtyard mansion with multiple gardens and a small pond. He liked climbing his favorite gingko tree. He loved this tree with its fan-shaped yellow leaves because his favorite Uncle Han-ru claimed that the tree was over a thousand years old. Gingko trees were resilient and naturally disease-resistant, and because of this, some lived for two thousand years. Uncle Han-ru told him about the gingko trees in Hiroshima that were still standing. They had been only slightly charred by the American nuclear bomb and later had regained healthy leaves. Winston admired this characteristic, the resiliency, the ability to survive war and the worst calamities, and still rejuvenate. Secretly, when everything in his life fell apart later on, he tried to mimic the characteristics of his favorite tree.
His Uncle Han-ru had also been in Beijing with his father, studying at the university, but Winston wished Uncle Han-ru was his father instead. Uncle Han-ru was full of fun, laughter, always tickling him and telling stories. In contrast, his father rarely interacted with him, acting as if Winston had a contagious disease.
But after his mother’s death and their escape to Taiwan, he and his father had been left alone in a tiny Japanese paper house bordering the rice paddies. Politics and war had forced them to face each other, all the space that kept them at a distance collapsed, leaving them trapped in a thirteen hundred square foot house with paper walls.
The worst part of it, Winston knew, was that he and only he witnessed the effect of this dramatic social change on his father. Born and bred an aristocrat, his father had never worked a day in his life. He was an intellectual, trained in the classical sense as a Chinese poet-scholar. Outside of his aristocratic world, he was useless, and Winston saw this. That was what broke their relationship, Winston knew. Instead of getting a job, his father continued hanging out at teahouses in Taiwan, reciting poetry with other aristocrat exiles from China as they slid further into poverty.
***
Winston returned to Simeon’s village. If he could just get Simeon to adopt the seeds, all the others would follow once they saw the bounty of his harvest. He peered into Simeon’s hut. Bare of furniture, he only saw some woven mats, cooking pots, and the bag of Cole Agribusiness seeds—still unopened. Simeon welcomed them warmly, inviting them to stay for dinner. But it made Winston question Simeon’s friendliness and enthusiasm. He wondered whether he had misunderstood Simeon’s intentions. The man may have just wanted to be friends out of curiosity rather than because of any real interest in the seeds. Winston felt a kind of desperation. He knew time was running out, and Simeon was his only “lead” so far. They had been coming here for over six months now, and neither Simeon nor anyone else had adopted the seeds.
Winston noticed Simeon and his family sitting on plain wooden stools under the tree while the rest of the village crouched on cane mats. Next to them, over a fire, a blackened clay pot simmered with a pepper chicken stew. Simeon’s wife served the stew and gari on enamel plates. Richard refrained from eating and advised Winston, “As a rule, never eat the food the locals serve. It will upset your stomach. Trust me.” But the stew smelled appetizing to Winston, sick of eating Spam and tuna fish out of tin
s on these trips. He accepted the food, rolling the starchy gari into a ball and dipping it into the red sauce of the stew, relishing the spicy and flavorful taste.
“You like it?” Simeon watched as Winston gnawed on a chicken head from the stew.
“Yes, very good, much better than English food. In China, we eat chicken heads too, and feet. Considered delicacies.”
“Is dat right?” Simeon said. “One day, I want to visit your country.”
After dinner, Winston washed his hands, stained orange from the palm oil sauce, in a small bowl of water. As the sun began to set, the women washed the plates in large basins of water on the ground while the children played with the chickens and goats in the twilight, and the men talked.
“Sorry I no find time dis week to clear de bush to plant your seeds,” Simeon said. The chief was sitting on the front porch of his house next door, pretending not to pay attention but listening all the same.
“He go be scared of de bush-souls,” the chief suddenly yelled from his porch. “De forest dere is sacred, you hear? Our bush-souls go live dere.”
“Sacred? I didn’t realize,” Winston said.
“Our village has been guarding de forest for many generations. No one can cut a tree dere. We use de forest for offerings to de spirits,” Simeon explained.
“But is there a way around it?” Winston knew from his own experience with Chinese superstitions, there was always a way around it, a visit to a shaman or something. He also wondered if this was just an excuse put up for the foreigner. He knew the locals practiced slash and burn agriculture, cutting and burning new forest for farming while letting the jungle takeover the old farm land.
“Maybe, but why should we do what you tell us, eh?” the chief said.
“I want to tell you a story,” Winston said. “My people, the Chinese, are poor. We used to be the richest, most powerful in the world when the English were still running around in animal skins.”
Simeon and the villagers laughed at this comment.
“But you know why we fell behind?” Winston continued. “Because we fell behind in technology. We invented gunpowder, only we didn’t know it. We used it in firecrackers. The English took it and made it into guns and shot us with it.”
“Dat is crazy crazy,” Simeon said. “Dey steal your tricks, eh.”
“You shouldn’t fall behind either. You can’t let the white man rule. You need to take his tricks and make yourselves strong too.”
Winston didn’t know if his argument would have any effect on the chief or Simeon. But he was appealing to that side of Simeon that was in himself too. It wasn’t simply a desire to be like them, it was a competitive motivation to one up them, to be better than the white man. Just then, a black snake, the most widely feared and dangerous black mamba, slithered from a tree. The venom from a black mamba was usually fatal, resulting in immediate cardiac arrest. Simeon moved quickly, slicing its head off with his machete.
***
That night, Winston and Richard drove to a hotel in the nearby shantytown several miles away from Simeon’s village. The hotel had peeling pink paint, dark green shutters, and West African highlife music blaring from the bar downstairs. It was dirty, noisy, and full of heavily made up girls standing around in hallways garishly lit by red and blue light bulbs. Winston, Richard, and their local guide sat down at the bar-restaurant for dinner. The menu was “whatever caught in the bush today.” Tonight it was snake meat.
After dinner, Winston walked down the hallway of his hotel-brothel, and the girls followed him to his room, yelling “O’Ebo, I give you pleasure! Please take me!” He threw some naira bills toward the girls and then pushed them out with his door. His room was poorly furnished—a cast-iron bed, a thin, bug-infested mattress, stained walls, gray cement floor, and a lone exposed light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Winston noticed a small window up high, covered with a screen full of holes. There was no glass. He took out a dark green mosquito coil and lit it on the floor. The sharp, incense-like smell of the burning coils suddenly brought back a feeling of his childhood.
He recalled his mother the way all men remember their mothers—sweet-smelling, soft-spoken, warm. His mother was holding him in her arms. They were in his room, one of the many rooms on their estate. It was dark and windy outside. He could hear the tree limbs hitting the wall of his room. But when he tried to bring up his mother in his mind, he couldn’t remember her face exactly, only the idea of it.
He staggered to the bed and sat down. He could hear the sound of sex and scurrying cockroaches. Suddenly, here in this dingy brothel room, he felt the isolation of his own life. Since the loss of his mother, he hadn’t been close to anyone. He had long suppressed the terrible events of her death and his guilt in the dark recesses of his memory.
He recalled his mother’s body lying inert and cold in the corner of the broken building. He and his mother had been on the run. They were supposed to have met his father at the port in Shandong and to have sailed to safety in Taiwan. But they hadn’t fled fast enough. With Japanese troops everywhere and Communists not far behind, they hid in an abandoned farmhouse, its roof caved in by a bomb.
He thought of the abandoned farmhouse with the broken tiled roof, a gaping hole in the ceiling, so that he could see the stars at night. They only had a few steamed buns and some cold tea. His mother rationed their food each day, but now he realized she had only given it to him. His mother didn’t drink or eat anything for several days. He woke one morning and found her body so still, lifeless like an inanimate object. As an eleven-year old child, he assumed she had died of hunger, although in reality it was dehydration that had killed her. He had been so hungry and thirsty that he had devoured whatever they had, not even thinking of sharing.
This guilt propelled him, drove everything he did. It was the reason for his personal crusade against hunger and famine, the reason he had come to Africa. Deep down, he also knew it was the reason he found himself in a dirty brothel feeling this thing called loneliness. Since Lila’s snake bite, his wife had retreated into the far corner of their tepid marriage. He had put himself in this desolate corner, and he knew there was no one else to blame. He lay down on the creaky bed and closed his eyes. As he heard the moans of pleasure through the thin walls, he half-wished it was him.
***
In the spring of 1974, after over a year of Winston trying to convince him, Simeon finally cleared his land. Winston stood on the burned, charred ground being readied for planting. He could smell the lingering scent of ashes. His feet crunched on the blackened wood and plant debris. The sun was hot that day, and Winston knew he should be feeling hope. This was the first milestone in his project, but the heat and the acrid smell of the smoke made him feel dizzy.
Winston sat down on a large granite boulder in the shade. Parts of the rock had rounded, indented holes, left from grinding corn. He picked up a small rock and examined its slightly greenish hue in the light. His mother would have liked this rock, he thought, remembering their shared hobby of collecting interesting rocks. He put the rock in his pocket, running his fingers over its smooth edges every once in a while. In the distance at the edge of the village, several girls braided each other’s hair into elaborate patterns, each one unique. Other girls helped shell palm nuts. A group of boys threw stones at each other. He could hear alternating cries of laughter and pain. He closed his eyes for a second in the shade.
He told himself he would help Simeon, and together they would show the rest of the village what could be done. He hoped if they saw the miracle of the seeds, the bounty of Simeon’s harvest, they would follow in his footsteps. His mind raced ahead, dreaming of taking Simeon around the region, as a sort of poster-farmer. He just needed one success and then all others would follow.
Early the next morning, Winston and the agricultural extension worker demonstrated how to plant the hybrid maize seeds. It was May, the beginning of the rainy season, the perfect time to plant. The maize growing period mirrored the local seasonal shi
ft between rainy and dry seasons. The maize could be planted at the start of the rainy season in May and then harvested at the onset of the dry season in October.
Simeon’s wife, Abike, and several village women crouched down, using hoes to break up the soil, taking out any roots, stones, or plant debris. Afterward, Winston helped Abike distribute the fertilizer as they planted the maize seeds in rows. The amount of fertilizer had been carefully calculated in Winston’s lab. He had analyzed the soil samples himself, determining the levels of nitrate, potassium, and phosphorus, critical minerals that would be absorbed by the roots. He knew the soil was a deeply weathered, loamy sandy soil with clay subsoil, a kaolinitic soil common throughout the humid tropics of West Africa. It had moderate agricultural potential and had to be enriched if they were to have any success with the hybrid maize.
After they were done planting, Winston and Simeon walked through the forest several miles to a nearby plantation. The large farm was owned by a government official, a green tractor from America ploughed vast tracts of cleared and flattened land. Bags of seeds stamped with the Cole Agribusiness logo were waiting to be planted, stored inside a red barn, an exact replica of an American farm. Jeeps and American consultants, wearing green Cole Agribusiness caps with the maize insignia, swarmed about the farm. The ADA was collaborating on this project as well, hoping that once small rural farmers saw the successes of a “modern” large-scale farm, they too would follow suit.
The red barn felt out of place and bothered Winston, sticking out in his mind like a bad omen. Winston and Simeon stood at the fence of the plantation, watching the tractors driving around, the metal glinting in the slanting sun.
“Dis farm is impressive,” Simeon said.
Winston understood the envy, the longing in Simeon’s voice. When he had first arrived in England, he was impressed by how neat and tidy the streets were. It was unlike Taiwan, where everyone threw trash everywhere, and he had to watch where he stepped.
