Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  Chang and I stayed like that for a while, not saying a word, seated beside this woman whose face was coated with perspiration. She was not crying, but I may have heard a sniffle as she dried her nose with the back of her hand.

  A faint wind tickled, the light of day burned deep and clear, and everything was perfect—the tips of rock emerging from the narrow green wellspring; the soft grass; Chang on my left; Sarah on my right, fingering the turf beside her.

  “The setting is idyllic,” I said.

  “I always thought so,” she said, looking off into the air and biting her lip. “I always thought so.”

  We sat for a stretch, our eyes on the modest source of the river. Chang reached for something to say and came up with: “I loving your sister.”

  Sarah laughed quietly, a single stream of air let out of her nose. She did not look at us.

  “Why do they tease you?” I asked, gently as I could.

  She closed her eyes, which were dry and flinty, and she dropped her face between her hands. She inhaled as deeply as if she were about to plunge into water. And when she began to talk, her voice, already a near-whisper, was muffled further by her hands blocking her mouth.

  Some time ago, she said, when she had been young and girls and boys her age hadn’t yet begun to care about who had money and who did not, she had been popular, remarkably so, thanks to a yellow bonnet she wore around town—she had been called “Yellow Bonnet”—and she was made junior chairwoman of the church social committee. Her parents had owned a slave to make the beds of the inn and to help with the few rows of now-laid-by cotton in their backyard. Because she was too young to know better, Sarah became friendly with the Negro, whose name was Thomas. He was a tall young slave, and his knee had been ruined by a bullet when the “Underground Negroes’ Railroad” was derailed near the northern Virginia border; his limp made him affordable to Mr. Yates. He had eyes unlit, she said. She had not known better than to trust a slave. Not back then. She had acted neighborly, she said.

  “And he—took advantage of my neighborliness.” It was the first time I heard her sound throaty and needing something from me. “Do you understand, Mr. Eng?”

  I told her I did.

  Of course it had been against her will, she said, and only once, by a slave, that horrible slave, and she talked of how her brother Jefferson had stumbled upon them in the woods. And of the subsequent trial, and of the hanging, which had been such an event for Wilkesboro that the school had been closed for the day. Children had been encouraged to watch it.

  And then she stopped talking.

  I did not know what to say to this woman, but I wanted to say something, and then I heard a person approaching us. It was Adelaide, walking out of the wood and climbing toward us. “I knew I’d find you here—Sarah’s best secret spot by Moody Rock.”

  Adelaide stood regarding her sister; she put her hand on her hips, pursed her mouth, and looked at Sarah for a while, and understood.

  “It was a horrible scandal,” Adelaide said, addressing Chang and me. “Just tore Sarah apart,” she whispered, and ran a hand through her hair. “A slave,” she said, and made the face one does when eating a lemon. “Nearly tore me apart, too. Remember, I’m only a year younger than my beauty of a sister.” She began to smile. “But he got took care of,” Adelaide said. “They obviously got that buck,” she said.

  Sarah raised her head, and her eyes looked to her sister feverishly. “Gone is what’s done,” she said. “I see that.” She breathed deeply, over and again, until she ceased trembling. Her hands were clenched against her forehead. “I see it gone.” The day was silent enough to hear the river bubbling softly to life, and the wind, too, spoke its soft noise.

  Adelaide sat herself down by my brother’s side. We were a pair of couples bound together by circumstance.

  Adelaide said to her: “Ain’t that a nice thing Eng did back there for you, Sarah?”

  Once she got control of her shaky chin, Sarah turned to me and said, “That was—that was a nice thing you did for me, back there.” It took her a long time to face me, but she did. From the trees behind us, a bluebird chirped.

  Sarah and I stared at each other. Then she looked away.

  She had trouble getting herself to gaze into my eyes, but she continued to try. For the first time in my life I saw that a woman other than my mother was striving to love me. Sarah sat there almost looking into my eyes, under the North Carolina sun, her sister smiling beautifully behind her, and I grinned an awkward grin. A thick, warmish joy entered my heart. Sarah had a face of beautifully long length. Her blond hair was marvelously different from my dark own.

  “Sarah,” I said, my nervous lips surprisingly forming the words I wanted them to, “would you—”

  “Yes.” She was nodding, and touching her face lightly. Her hands did not look young in the light. They were fidgety, veined, and very thin, and now they were betrothed to me. They were mine now. I pulled Chang to our feet. We quickly made for the hills.

  “Why do we go?” Chang asked as I climbed us over the rocks and ran us down into the wood. “Why are you leave Sarah up there, just when she say yes?” I was out of breath from running, and the twigs thrashing past scratched my cheek.

  I could not answer. I was taking my brother with me into the deep of the woods to hide my tears of gratitude.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Sadness of Siam

  1819–1825

  Siam

  The captivity Chang and I knew as teenagers at King Rama’s palace brimmed with the habiliments of nobility. Temperate and pretty was our morning bath in the collapsible tub that Nao would bring by. Tar-black English soap was a friend we had not known during our life on the Mekong. Another friend was His Highness himself. At this point I was reasonably convinced he would not kill us.

  One night, late, the King entered our cabin, waking us. He was, surprisingly, without his usual escort of handlers. He wore a long flowing red robe, with a tiger on the back and the sign of the sun on the breast.

  “Wake up, double-elephant,” He boomed from the doorway. “Did you know that the citizenry have begun calling you by that name in their new legends—double-elephant? No? Well, We know. We know everything.”

  I was too young to understand it then, but the King was drunk. “Get up,” he burped. “We want to show you something.” He directed us out into the night with hands as big as Buddha’s.

  It was very late. The crickets seemed unusually loud, and the twinkling stars bright and lovely. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we walked with the King, alone, the only ones about on the royal grounds. He walked uneasily, wavering a bit, with the two of us a step behind, yawning.

  He took us to a marble floor in the middle of an empty plot of grass, atop a green hill and encircled by rubble. In the center of this displaced marble floor, a naked man and thirteen naked children were confined in a huge iron cage loaded with thick chains. They were all gagged. The man was awake, and looked at us with the eyes of someone frightened to his core; the children slept.

  “We want to tell you a story,” Rama said to us, patting our heads. “Sometimes a man will think he is a shadow. And this man believes a shadow can flee the sun until the shadow is tiny in the remotest distance. But the royal sun sees things, no matter how small. Our eye is like a magnifier.”

  The King avoided looking at the prisoner. Swallowing, He told us that this man would be hanged by a hook from his chin in the morning; afterwards the prisoner would be made to sit on seven sharp pikes, each a foot long, then dropped in boiling oil, and finally pounded into pumice in an immense mortar before the eyes of his family. Rama wanted everyone to see the traitor now, He said, that is why all the walls blocking this view had been broken down. Tears filled the King’s eyes as He told the story. Chang looked into my face with a fear I hadn’t seen since we’d first been abducted.

  There is a reason the King wants us to see this, I said to myself. We could still suffer this fate.

  I took my brother’s hand
and held it, the way I would later take my wife’s.

  Rama brought us back to our cabin and gave us a hand-sized jade dragon figurine as a gift. “For you,” He said. Even in the semidarkness, a white band of moonlight illuminated the tiny green figure, with its black stones for eyes, and its spiked tail, and its smile that seemed as though it might shift any second into a snarl. Chang and I thanked King Rama, climbed into bed, holding His present, and fell asleep. We held on to that gift for more than twenty years.

  I thought He was going to keep us on his grounds forever and exhibit us whenever a foreign leader came to visit. I was wrong, but I could not have known why.

  As two of the King’s prized treasures, we started to receive schooling. Nao would come to our quarters to give us history and language lessons. This went on for some four years. In all of that time, King Rama himself instructed us in the manservant’s stead on three occasions. On one of these days little Princess Xenga accompanied her father and listened along. Chang and I must have been about thirteen.

  Beside us in our hut, the royal father and daughter sat on portable thrones held aloft by pairs of large attendants who gripped handles at the legs of the chairs. Held two feet off of the ground, Xenga, like her father, was gowned in red silk, and across the room I could smell the ginger that perfumed her hair. Below her feet lay fresh rose petals.

  Somewhere between the rules of Thai grammar and the history of the battle of Ramkhamhaeng, the King instructed: “People remain young through faith in Siam.” The words came out of the King’s throat packed with emotion.

  I tried to sneak glimpses of the Princess. Nervous and little in the plush red seat of her small throne, she had a resplendent loose train of hair. Like me, she did not know what to do or say in the presence of her father.

  So many handsome children are exquisite because of their youth; their shape and demeanor are so different from those of adults that the youngsters seem almost part of another phylum. And with others it is different. This princess, at twelve already like the most elegant of women, had begun provokingly to carry her charm in her smooth face and graceful body; she sat there, her head cocked, with hands on undeveloped thighs, the bloom of youth approximating, through some extraordinary intuition, the full-blown flower of injurious adult charisma.

  “He who seeks the best in life grows old and is crushed by the world,” said the King. I sat in mute appreciation, knowing that even to steal another look at the Princess meant leaning forward, which would have stirred my brother too obviously in the direction of the royal child.

  I did so regardless. Xenga was nodding her head at her father’s words.

  “Your Excellency?” My brother’s voice had the same casual note it carried when interrupting me. A shocked silence fell over the room.

  “—and he who is always prepared for the worst becomes old yet sooner, with his worry,” said the King, as if he had not heard.

  Chang said, “Your Highness?”

  Even though we were now allowed to look at him, we were not to address the King unless He asked us to do so. From his elevated throne, Rama glanced at the ceiling and sighed through His nostrils. His attendants shuffled their feet. The Princess deigned to eye me for the first time, with a fidgety glance.

  One of the King’s handlers leaned forward and whispered too loudly in His ear: “The double-boy has a question, Your Excellency.”

  “Yes, Siam knows that,” the King said. “Siam knows that.” His Highness wiggled in annoyance, and His throne swayed. The handlers worked to keep from upsetting the King’s position.

  “What?” Rama asked my brother. “What is it, that you break off the lessons of a Crowned Majesty?”

  Looking at the floor, I groaned inwardly.

  “Your Majesty.” Chang had brushed aside safety. “Would it be possible to see our mother again?” That surprised me. He hadn’t mentioned Mother in quite some time; then again, neither had I—not to him.

  Rama’s crown, a white oval with silver feathers sprouting from its summit, now lay a little tilted on His head.

  “You wish to leave the royal grounds?”

  The Princess snapped, “You are a guest of Siam.” Her lisp was pronounced. Drops of sweat had formed on her little brow, and the black hairs that coiled out of the horseshoes of her eyebrows began to twitch. I wanted no more than to hold hands with her, because a handshake bears at least some aspects of intimacy, and I believed I would never travel any closer than that to a romantic kiss.

  Rama lifted His hand calmly, held His forefinger pointing upward in a quieting motion, and looked at His daughter. “Sniveling Female Dog,” He said in soft tones, “who gave you leave to speak?” The Princess lowered her head.

  The King ordered his attendants to carry Him to the doorway. There, His Highness opened it onto His palace and grounds.

  “Behold Siam,” He whispered, and gestured outside to the kingdom of Him with a sweep of His arm that rocked the chair a little; the royal lifters scrambled to keep the King stabilized. At the lip of the river, boy soldiers stood guard here and there atop the palace wall, shooting arrows into the air for sport, distant missiles that looked ineffectual as pine needles in a breeze. Over the river a golden ray of sun was falling through a hole in the gray clouds.

  Princess Xenga turned with a lover’s thirst to the sweltering scene of green meadow, sunbeam, and the seven royal temple spires on the horizon. She grinned on her existence of soft and eternal tranquillity.

  “Chang and Eng,” the King barked. We turned toward Rama, who was licking His teeth like a serpent. Afternoon sunlight appeared about the doorframe, curling around the King on his throne, and He glowed with this light, this royal halo in which wars were raged, villages razed, temples constructed, sacrifices offered, and luckless conjoined subjects were taken from their homes.

  “My young visitors,” He said, “after loss the coarser soul is better off than the noble one; the dangers for the latter must be greater. King Chulalongkorn, Our forefather, said: When a dragon loses a finger, it returns; not so with a man. Do you understand?”

  Far in the distance, I made out a patch of black clouds distinct among the gray ones covering most of the sky. Perhaps this marked the stretch of river where we had lived our old life.

  “Put Us down,” the King told his handlers. The two burly men looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

  “Your Lord requests to be put down!” Rama’s eyes were bright with magnificence and spleen. “Should We have your ears stretched to hear commands more easily?” The men brought the throne to the floor, gingerly.

  Rama smoothed his sleeves. “Take Xenga and leave Us with the double-one. Now!”

  The King’s handlers directed the Princess and her subordinates outside. Wind rattled the doorframe, far-off trees danced, and the air promised imminent rain.

  We were alone with the King. “We understand things about you.” There was nothing in His face now but sympathy and apprehension. “Maybe you understand Us a bit, too. Maybe as much as any person can.”

  My brother asked, “Your Majesty, would it be possible to see our—”

  I kicked Chang, and he quieted.

  The King’s eyes looked off as he spoke. “What I am, for the world I am not. In the Royal Hall of Judgment, a thousand faces before me, waiting for a decree, often I ask myself, Am I King, or another? Am I estranged from myself?” He blinked and gazed at my brother and me for a while.

  The King cleared His throat. “It is coincidental that you mention taking leave of the palace now,” Rama said, regaining his regal tone of voice. “Do you know what coincidental means?”

  We nodded.

  “There has occurred a reason for you to return to your family.” Rama ran His palm along His throat from chin to collarbone. “News reached Us yesterday that your father has died. Perhaps We will let you see his funeral.” And with that, he released us forever.

  The next day, in the early morning, we were awakened by Nao taking us from our bunkhouse.
He draped a black blanket over our heads and carried us to a pull-cart and had us lie down on it, the cloak hot over our sweaty bodies, the pull-cart splintery below. The cart seemed close to falling apart over each pebble. Chang asked, “Do you think it is true?”

  Our cart stopped. When Nao lifted the blanket, we were beyond the palace gates, at a pretty green spot beside a big tree on the bank of the river. Birds stepped like tightrope walkers across the tree branches.

  My brother and I stepped down onto the soft grass and Nao stood behind us, silently. Chang and I pressed against one another. River mosquitoes bit us. The birds took off and flickered into the damp afternoon. With the orange-yellow light of dawn flaming on the water, the Mekong was intensely sad. We stood looking at the river for hours.

  At last I heard the sound of footsteps. Two of the King’s attendants emerged, leading a third man toward us. This man’s gray frock was the first peasant garment I’d seen in a dog’s age. He was Uncle Xau, a relative of Aunt Ping’s but a stranger to us.

  Xau was craning his neck and looking all around. That, and the quick action of his thin legs, and the way his arms dangled loosely, thrashing about, flopping, made him look like a marionette. Before long Xau saw Chang and me for the first time in his life. He stopped as if the sight had hit him physically.

  His mouth started to open and his hand came to cover it. The sadness and surprise in his eyes gave him a facial cast I’ll never forget: heart-stricken and petulant. I looked over our shoulders to see what pitiable sight he was gawking at, but there was nothing behind us except sunshine and grass.