Monkey King
Patricia Chao
Monkey King tells the story of twenty-eight-year-old Sally Wang, a young Chinese-American woman whose mental breakdown and sojourn in a hospital set her firmly on the path of memory. Her recovery takes place against a rich tapestry of culture and personality that unfolds before our eyes under the Monkey King's ghostly shadow. For Sally has been living with a terrible family secret, one that has shattered her life. How she pulls together her Chinese and American identities into a cohesive self and rejoins the land of the living is recounted with a wry and refreshing honesty.
Patricia Chao
Monkey King
For my mother and father and for all my teachers
About my malady I can do nothing. I suffer a little just now-the thing is that after that long seclusion the days seem to me like weeks.
Vincent Van Gogh, Letter To Theo
It is so difficult for me to be in this world.
Philip Guston, Note to His Wife, Musa
Acknowledgments
For making this book possible I am grateful to the Blue Mountain Center; The Millay Colony for the Arts; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; my mother and father; my agent, Heather Schroder; E. L. Doctorow; Marty Lipp; Bill Mead; Miriam Beerman; Allan Hoffman; Ai jen Poo; Kera Bolonik; and everyone else who provided inspiration, suggestions, and encouragement.
For their faith and literary expertise I am especially indebted to Mona Simpson; my editor, Terry Karten; and my most constant readers-Karin Cook, Stephanie Grant, and the late Kenneth King.
Prologue
My father stands on a hill in a high wind, a strapped black bag at his feet. No, it’s a dock, a stupendously busy dock, in the port of Shanghai, the most crowded city in the world. Anyone can see that he doesn’t belong here, that he’s a peasant from the outbacks of the north, from the style of his cheap blue serge suit, made by a local tailor, and his ill-fitting black shoes with their bulbous toes. Still, even among these city slickers he cuts a remarkably handsome figure. He is tall for a Chinese, nearly six feet, with the proportions of a tall person, lean-necked, arms and legs long for his torso. His full hair is slicked back in a side part, his eyes have the doey shape of a matinee idol’s, with thick lashes. If you were to look into them you would see that he is terrified. This is the first time in his life he has seen a steamer. He has never ridden in a car, and the night express that took him from Wuhan to Shanghai is the only train he’s ever been on. The shape of his lips is generously drawn, as if he were a sensual man, although he is not. He has the hands of an intellectual, pale-backed, narrow-palmed, with long, tapering fingers. His wrists are knobby, his Adam’s apple unusually prominent, he is thin by any standards.
When the gangplank clangs down, my father hangs back from the crowd. Not out of politeness, or even tentativeness, but because he is sailing steerage and must wait for the first-and second-class passengers to board before him. He waits without aggression, the bag at his feet like a sleeping dog. He waits without heart.
The hill again. A cemetery by the sea. To the east the grass fades into cliffs and then there’s the drop to the Pacific. After the funeral, my father was cremated and the ashes were flown to San Francisco, then transported down the coast to be buried. Behind my father sleeps his mother-in-law, my Nai-nai, buried in her best silk chipao—a violet one—and tiny black satin slippers.
The ghost’s eyes are larger than the man’s were in life. He has shed the blue serge suit jacket and now stands only in trousers and a loose white shirt. The black bag has decayed into shreds. His feet are bare. His hair is turning white.
White in China means death. Corpses are wrapped in white blankets, mourners wear white, white flowers are carried in funeral processions. White is bloodlessness, despair, the color of the sky on the March morning I tried to kill myself.
Part One
1
Christ, it looks just like that prissy boarding school you went to. I could hear my sister’s voice in my head as we started up the winding drive. A cluster of white Colonial houses, with several tasteful modern buildings thrown in. Near the gate to the left were half a dozen tennis courts and to our right was an amoeba-shaped lake surrounded by weeping willows. All the buildings were connected by neat flagstone paths. On one of these paths a group was walking with cheerful expressions, faces upturned to the weak sun. A teenage girl stopped, yawned, and slipped her sweatshirt over her head to tie it around her waist, casual, like any kid, anywhere, on an early spring day. It really could have passed for a campus, except for the wire fencing out front and the fact that it was much too quiet.
This was my second hospital in five days. The first was Yale New Haven, where I’d been admitted from the emergency room and they’d doped me up with something they usually use for psychotics. It made me not care so much when my shrink Valeric told me where I was going when I got out of there. She’d drive me up herself, she said.
I said, What if I don’t want to go.
She shook her head. “I don’t have a choice, sweetie. You broke our pact. You promised you’d let me know if things got this bad.”
I didn’t answer. Instead I said: “Maybe I should have stuck my head in the oven.”
“If you’d done that you would have blown up every house on your entire block. This isn’t England in the sixties. You’re not Sylvia Plath.”
The whole way up I’d been in a trance. We stopped at a Howard Johnson’s for breakfast, but I didn’t eat anything, just sipped black tea and chain-smoked until Valeric said, Come on, we’re going to be late. The only thing I remember about the drive was watching the trees along the highway-maples with their massive trunks and dark snaky lower limbs, fatalistic lean oaks, spears of birches angling whitely and every which way against the lightening sky.
Admissions turned out to be in one of the Colonial houses. Again, the feeling was boarding school—the headmaster’s study, where you reported to if you’d been caught drinking or with a boy in your room, or if they were going to tell you that someone in your family had died. Valeric and I sat in Queen Anne chairs upholstered in red velvet while a snotty-looking woman in half glasses took notes at a desk facing us. Her chair was a regular office swivel one, which she trundled ruthlessly over the faded pink and blue Oriental rug to retrieve forms from the file cabinet.
The information they wanted was simple enough:
Age: 27
Allergies: ragweed
History of psychiatric illness: none
Admission: voluntary
Status: suicide risk
Several official-looking documents, like leases, were handed to me on a clipboard. How civilized this was, nothing like I’d imagined. I signed, using the ballpoint attached on a string, not bothering to try to make out any of the small print. I can’t tell you how my handwriting had deteriorated by then, I was lucky to be able to make any kind of mark at all. Valeric signed each form after me, her writing loopy and leaning, the kind my best friend, Fran, says indicates a generous nature.
“Okay, honey, I have to be getting back on the road now. I have a ten o’clock client.” When she leaned to hug me, I felt the strength in her lean arms and shoulders. “They’ll take good care of you here, Sally,” she whispered. “And don’t worry—remember, I’ll be coming up to see you once a week.”
When Valeric had left, Swivel Chair Lady peered over her half glasses, meeting my eyes directly for the first time. “Would you please hand me your suitcase?”
I thought: Customs, and heaved up the sagging bag that had surprised me with its weight, even empty. It was my father’s; I’d found it on the floor of my mother’s closet. While I was packing, Ma had come into my room. She sat down on the bed next to me looking plump and helpless in what my sister and I ca
ll her Chinese Communist outfit—navy turtle-neck and matching elastic-waistband pants.
“That bag’s falling apart, but I don’t like throw away. Are you sure you want? I have better.”
“No, this is fine.”
In fact, it was appropriate, because I too was traveling to a strange land from which I might never return.
After a while Ma cleared her throat and said: “You don’t worry about expenses. However long it takes, okay.”
Her eyes were glassy. It made me uncomfortable and I looked away, pretending I hadn’t seen.
The straps and buttons gave Swivel Chair Lady a little trouble but I didn’t offer to help. She stuck her claw right in, rummaging, feeling everywhere-between my folded clothes, into all the corners, her nails scraping leather.
In Mandarin, my Uncle Richard once told me, there is a special category of nouns for long, skinny things like pencils, chopsticks, hair. All numbers modifying these nouns must end in zhi.
Swivel Chair Lady confiscated all my zhi objects: cigarettes, shoelaces, belts, hair elastics, the drawstring to my parka.
Also, contact lens solution, nail clippers, aspirin. She asked for the pearl studs in my ears and the gold watch Ma gave me when I got married. Then she picked up her telephone receiver and dialed four numbers. “The new admit is ready.” She said to me: “An MH will escort you to the ward.”
“MH?”
“Mental health worker. You are aware, aren’t you”—she paused and gave me what I interpreted as a triumphant look—“that you’re going to be watched twenty-four hours a day?”
The dayroom in Admissions resembled a primary school classroom, furnished in orange, yellow, and white plastic, with a linoleum floor and plaid curtains at the windows, which lined one wall. There were no bars, but the panes were reinforced with chicken wire and looked like the kind you couldn’t open. At the far end of the room was a glassed-in booth, where a nurse in a pantsuit was sitting in a folding chair. Right outside the booth a man in a pale yellow button-down shirt was slumped in an orange chair, an ashtray smoking on the table beside him.
The MH, a woman about my age, led me over to one of the doorways opposite the bank of windows. Through the brown darkness, I could see that one of the beds was already occupied. Someone whose face was to the wall, long stringy hair—I couldn’t tell what color—one hand dangling over the edge. The hand was so small and pale that it itself looked ill.
“Lillith,” said the MH.
No answer.
“She just got in this morning too.”
I set my bag down near the foot of the unoccupied bed, not knowing what to do next. I didn’t feel like staying in this stuffy room with that creepy sleeper.
The MH was standing in the doorway, watching me. She had a certain kind of Zen quality I’ve always admired, with her wire-framed glasses and bun and the Earth shoes that pulled down her heels as she walked, although on her the effect was oddly graceful.
I asked to use the bathroom. It turned out I couldn’t even do that by myself—the MH posted herself right outside, the door slightly ajar. Sitting there, waiting, I looked around, wondering what possibly could be dangerous. It didn’t occur to me that I could shatter the mirror glass, or even the frosted shower door, with my fist, and use the pieces to slash my wrists, or swallow them.
Christ, I was never going to be able to pee. I told myself this was just a job for her, she wasn’t listening or anything. The disinfectant smell made me shiver, and I had to concentrate hard on the speckled white ceiling tiles until they blurred, before I could let go.
When I came out the MH said: “You’re free to watch TV, you know. Or read, if you want.”
Reading was another ability I’d lost—it was the reason I’d quit my job as an art director in New York City. I’d managed to hide it for a while, marking time at my drafting board, leafing through font books. The letters themselves still interested me, as abstract entities. I could still discuss what typeface would be appropriate for what kind of ad, and I could discern the shapes and textures of things, when a paragraph seemed too long or too dense, for instance, but if I read a sentence I couldn’t remember a word of it ten seconds later. Then it got so I couldn’t understand text at all unless I read it slowly out loud, and even that didn’t always work. The letters started getting smaller and smaller, although the pica rule said otherwise.
A similar thing happened when I went back to Connecticut and tried to drive. I faked it for a while, but you can’t fake a sense of timing. Ma put her foot down after the front fender of the Honda got swiped as I was trying to make a left-hand turn into oncoming traffic.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why are you sorry?” the MH asked.
“I’m sorry I can’t carry on a conversation.”
“This isn’t a cocktail party. You don’t have to be entertaining.”
Where did you go to college? I wanted to ask her. Do you have a boyfriend? What makes you so normal?
The phone shrilled and the nurse poked her head out and announced there was another admit. I snuck a glance at the man in the yellow shirt. He hadn’t said a word or even raised his head since we’d come in. While the MH was gone I picked up a Ladies’ Home Journal from one of the tables and flipped through it aimlessly. I was dying for a cigarette but didn’t have the nerve to ask. The man seemed like he maybe couldn’t speak at all. I settled for secondhand smoke.
Since I’d been sick, a minute could feel as long as a day, or I’d blink my eyes and suddenly see that three hours had passed. The dayroom had one of those large school clocks where the seconds jerk along. It reminded me that my mother would be starting her own class at Yale about now, standing before the blackboard in her plaid skirt and white blouse. Ma had no compassion for the slow or the lazy or the simply unfocused. She could pick out those students in the back, the ones who hadn’t done their homework, and she’d call on them. When my sister and I were small we’d do the dinner dishes while Ma corrected exams at the kitchen table. “This one gets a C!” she’d announce triumphantly. Or worse: “This one doesn’t belong in my class, he’s too stupid.” She’d draw the F much bigger than any of the other grades.
My mother is nothing if not efficient. When she’d found me passed out on my bed and the mess on the floor beside it, she called 911 and then she called Valeric. I don’t remember a thing about the ambulance ride, although they told me later the siren was screaming the whole way. In the emergency room they made me sit up in a chair and gave me this evil-looking black potion in a glass so I’d throw up again. It was Valeric who jerked me to my feet and hustled me down the pale green corridor to the bathroom, Valeric who knelt on the floor with me, grabbing back my hair and holding on to my nape with the other hand, as if she’d done it a thousand times before for other desperate women. It came up as easily as a trick, just colorless mucus by then, and I thought: It’s all gone, I have failed. When I was done, she wet one of those coarse brown paper towels all public bathrooms have and pressed it against my forehead. We walked back that way to where Ma was sitting ready with a handful of Kleenex.
After her class was over, Ma would drive home for lunch, to the empty house. She’d change into her Communist China outfit and call Lally Escobar, who lived next door. Lally was a little older, divorced, with a son in Australia. Come over for leftovers.
“Bonnie, you’re so lucky to have daughters!” Lally would tell my mother. “Sally is the willowy, sensitive one,” she’d announce, even if one of us was in earshot, and then: “But of course that Marty is the beauty.” We might have been species of iris in her garden.
By noon there were six new admits, including me and my roommate and the man in the yellow shirt. Lunch was brought in on trays. I asked one of the other patients if I could bum a cigarette. She looked surprised but shoved the pack across the table at me. It was a Lucky Strike and it made me dizzy, which I liked.
When my roommate finally staggered into the dayroom, she looked terrible, skinnier even
than me, with hair that could have been dark blond if it weren’t so filthy. Her eyes were a chilly washed-out blue-the kind Nai-nai used to call devil eyes. Laceless white sneakers sagged around skeletal ankles.
She too had been deprived of zhi objects.
When we lined up for meds, I saw that her paper cup was brimming with different colors. She swallowed the pills one at a time, moving the water cup to and from her lips in slow motion, as if sleepwalking. Once she gagged, but it didn’t faze her, she just waited until she knew she was going to keep it down and then continued. A pro.
The brassy theme music of a soap opera blared out from the television set. I could hardly keep my eyes open—what had they given me?—and then I was dreaming that it was dark November and I was a child lying on my bed on Coram Drive, looking out at the dusk beyond the white-curtained windows. It was a dream I’d been having a lot lately.
The sound of clapping jolted me awake. We admits were ushered from the dayroom and down a corridor into a room with lime green wall-to-wall carpeting but no furniture, like a new house. This, we were told, was group therapy. The leader, a bearlike man in beard and ponytail, gestured to us that we should sit down on the floor in a circle.
“We’ll start off by getting to know one another a little bit. Let’s go around the room and hear why each of you are here.”
Nobody was talking. Bear Man knew his stuff. One by one he got us to cough up our stories. He started by pointing at the woman who had given me the Lucky.
She was an alcoholic, she confessed. I envied her that simple label. She’d come home drunk one night, gone in to check on her three-month-old daughter, and accidentally set the crib on fire with her cigarette. Her husband had given her an ultimatum: rehab or divorce.
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