Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  After a quick silent nod to Uncle Xau from Nao—who then threw a fleeting good-bye look in our direction—we were off, cramped in the back of our relative’s small boat while Xau rowed across the blue and twinkling gold of the Mekong, toward home.

  It was the peak of the hot season, and our little boat passed from light to darkness and back in quick repetition, keeping close to the shore, under the cooling shadows of the trees.

  Nobody spoke. Chang and I stood contemplating the closeness achieved by certain psychic bonds. Once Xau turned around toward us to touch the lustrous black silk of our jackets. He nodded and grunted, and he turned back to rowing. The river had risen to its high mark and Chang and I lost our footing twice.

  Father was dead. What of Mother?

  We took the long route, away from the capital and down one of the Mekong’s tributaries, to avoid crowds, and we kept looking over our shoulders until the spires and steeples and the tops of the statues inside the palace wall grew tiny; and soon we saw the entire city of Bangkok far behind us, too, with its tiny footbridges and hillsides adorned with statues and its empty boats tied ashore together and bobbing in unison with the tide—from this distance all of a piece, like some somnolent giant.

  As we approached our familiar corner of the Mekong, I felt a thousand and one emotions swimming through my brain. I was hopeful and stung all at once. Anticipation fluttered in my chest, alongside loss.

  When I saw the river in the distance, it seemed different. What looked like the curved backs of logs protruded from the water, one or two every few feet at first. The air was becoming heavy and musky in the hot sun, growing more so as we traveled nearer our old home. Soon the water breathed off a strong smell like old fish; it wafted up from the embankment across the river, over the trees. The stench clung to the dewy leaves and, slowly, to our clothes and our skin. Before long my nostrils were burning. The logs in the river were in truth the submerged bodies of the recently dead.

  Xau paddled with one hand while using his other one to cover his nose and mouth. The putrid smell of the drowned grew more profound with every inhaled breath, more intense, and more nauseating in the summer air.

  We continued on. The river was now choked with corpses, half submerged, dead bodies black with mud and earth, their frocks stirring a little in the gentle breeze as our junk kept running against them. The bright sun shone on the river, the warm sunshine played about the decomposing flesh. This was our homecoming.

  It was late 1823 and cholera had gutted Mekong. The epidemic came upon the village like a hard clear light through the dark and when it had passed, those left living were unable to bury the many dead. A multitude was cast into the river. The current did nothing to move the putrid accumulation.

  Soon we saw Mother, on the edge of the river, our stretch of river. Her skin was stippled like old newspaper. And a short bony man, a stranger to Chang and me, had his arm around her dainty shoulder. When Mother saw our junk coming, floating with the tide and around the corpses, she pushed the man aside and ran to the lip of the shore. She began to scream. “My babies!” she cried, and extended her arms toward our arriving junk in an ecstatic flurry, spreading her fingers wide. “My babies, my babies,” she cried, over and again until we reached her. “Eng, and my Bean Sprout.”

  As soon as we were near enough, Mother lifted us with a grunt. We were much bigger than when she’d last held us, and she had aged a great deal; not only was her face as wrinkled as an old woman’s, but her hair had grayed in patches. She stumbled under our twofold weight. But she smelled sweet, the way Father used to, like someone who works hard.

  Mother left Cousin Xau on the shore—and that strange bony man who had caressed her shoulder, too—and she carried us inside our houseboat. How small our home looked now. The marbao wood planks slouching over the flat-bottomed centerboard, the narrow cabin semidark even in the middle of a sunny day, the sawed tree-butt table that was our least wobbly furnishing—it all looked so meager. We had lived here?

  Father had been among the first to die in this epidemic; Aunt Ping was the scourge’s last casualty. We’d missed Father’s burial ceremony. Ping’s funeral was to be later this day.

  Chang and I wiped tears from Mother’s cheeks, and she started laughing on top of her little sobs. “You are able to stand side to side now, the way real brothers do.” In her smile lived the kindness that motherhood itself illustrates. “I always knew I would be reunited with my double-joy,” she said, though her face told us she had not known.

  On the way to Ping’s funeral, I could only recall my aunt as a patch of piquant warmth and not as a clear, precise image. Once she’d brought us the hugest rice balls I had ever seen. The woman had liked music and would hum in a sweet-pitched voice when she’d cut our hair. I could picture the rice, hear the tune. And Aunt Ping had been the one to warn Mother that King Rama was going to take us.

  “We still have Mother,” Chang whispered

  Chang and I followed Uncle Xau, Mother, and Sen—that bony man (he was her childhood friend, and his hair occurred in wisps above his skinny face)—into the courtyard of a temple in the woods. This shrine was low to the ground, a modest imitation of those in Rama’s palace grounds—bamboo where the royal temples had been marble, and thatch where they had been gold.

  Ping was coffined in a wood box perched on a high bier that was draped in thin red cloth. Above her, a white canopy hung down—white being the color of Siamese mourning—and the canopy was festooned with fragrant flowers. Mother was crying uncontrollably.

  Chang started to weep. I shook with his tearful spasms as we waddled our way through the crowd. In the back of the temple, flutists and drummers began to play, and someone sounded a gong. People whom I did not know walked over to comfort Mother with a word or a phrase before moving on. “Sorry,” they said, “sorry for your loss.”

  A bent old priest in yellow robes limped over to Mother, shook his head as if it gratified him to join her in reviling the fates, then he took Mother in hand and led us slowly to a little grassy courtyard behind the temple. As he tried to comfort her in his weak voice, the shriveled priest slid his eyes our way again and again, trying to steal glimpses of Chang and me.

  The high-pitched music was loud now, and it sounded like wailing. Meanwhile, the modest crowd of mourners had followed us into the little courtyard. A light rain started to fall, but offered no relief from the heat.

  The priest walked, bent-backed, to a low wooden platform. He climbed onto it, grunting and shuddering as if it were much higher than it was, and he turned to the crowd. At his old feet sat four young women holding lit wicks. These women were hunched over, too, but not from age; they were trying to protect their tiny flames from the rain as if their lives depended on candlelight. Mother, Chang, and I stood before this platform, with a small assemblage at our backs. They gaped at our band.

  I stood there, frightened, believing that everything was somehow, if not my fault, then the fault of my predicament, the peculiarity of my connecting band.

  The priest started to pray softly in a guttural voice. “Life is done. Life has begun,” he said, grumbling the words, and he kept repeating this, chanting it, as four young clerics carried Aunt Ping’s coffin through the crowd slowly on their way to us and the platform. The coffin was empty. Aunt Ping herself, her corpse, was nowhere to be seen.

  A young priest stepped forward and presented Mother with the thin red cloth that had been draped over the coffin’s bier.

  “Your beloved sister’s body is being washed and purified.” He held the red fabric like it would shatter if he dropped it. Mother’s lip trembled and broke my heart. “Thank you,” Mother said, finally taking the cloth. The smile she managed was as rueful as misery itself, and I don’t think she noticed it was raining. She rested her hand atop Chang’s head, twisting his hair with her long fingers. I felt my brother sobbing. And I joined him.

  Aunt Ping’s corpse was making its way back to the empty bier, our aunt now balanced atop the sh
oulders of the four who had carried her coffin. She was glistening wet, and draped in white sheets as pale as her lifeless skin. Mother gasped when she saw her sister’s body. I pretended to think kind, solemn thoughts but couldn’t concentrate. The women sitting at the edge of the casket with their lighted wicks distracted me. They tried not to look at us as I was trying not to look at them.

  Then the thought came to me that Aunt Ping was smiling as she lay there. But she was not; when I concentrated my eyes on her, Ping’s expression looked solemn and drawn—the skin so tight the bones nearly poked through—and her naked body could be seen through the sheet in gray patches where her wet flesh stuck to the cloth. “Hello, Aunt,” my brother said. Ping’s eye sockets were hollowed. Her gray hands were crossed on her stomach, and her drab face looked angry, and huge, with black deep nostrils. The skin of her face was covered in white downy fuzz. Even in the rain, the smell was asphyxiating.

  We backed away. The four sitting women threw their lighted wicks onto Ping.

  Fire jumped to my aunt’s corpse, engulfing her. Using my hand to shield my face from the heat, I stole a glance at her silhouette diminishing in the middle of that blaze. I felt ill. Chang leaned his head on my shoulder, burying his face. Death had stolen into the dancing flames, taunting both young and old, throwing the soot of Ping’s remains into the air, where they brewed in ample circles over the fire.

  Years later, as I read the Bible to prepare for my baptism in North Carolina’s Yadkin River, a passage unsettled me, and brought me back to Ping’s burning corpse: “For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” How to prepare for this, when, even now at the end of my life, I understand nothing?

  We had grown, Chang and I, since we had last seen Mother, and so something had to be done about the living arrangements in the tiny houseboat. This was our old home, but it did not feel that way. Our first night with her, after Ping’s funeral, Mother sat us down on the floor and asked us about our time with the King. She contrived a grin that went to the core of me. But her chin had trouble.

  “There were things about the palace that were pleasing.” Chang was trying to comfort her, but spoke as nervously as one of Rama’s courtiers before the King himself. “Look at the jade dragon His Majesty gave us, Mother,” he said.

  “I missed you,” I said. “Yes,” Chang said, “we missed you, of course.” The sky was raining into the cabin.

  Mother looked into my eyes. A frown passed over her face quick as spilled water. “Please,” she said. “Stop it.” Chang and I did not know what we had done wrong.

  “I know what you are doing.” Her voice was soft and even. “You are pitying me. And yourselves. I am sure of it.”

  “No,” we said.

  She managed another smile. She seemed half our size now—I could not believe that.

  “When your father first got ill,” she said, “he was leaking from his body.” Her eyes got impassioned. “Life is not a jade dragon. He was leaking everywhere. And Ping, too. So do you think that is disgusting?”

  I felt my brother swallow at the same time I did. Everything inside the cabin was getting rained on. Mother breathed loudly out of her nose. I looked to my brother for comfort from Mother—one more awful turnabout.

  It was not always like that. Sometimes she would forget herself and smile, and I would feel again like a six-year-old with a father and a happy mother and a home I did not realize was preposterously meager, I was laughing again and not thinking, talking affably with my brother and listening to his talk. But Mother’s smile would die, or I would hear a fish jumping from the Mekong, and I was back to sleeping on the unpleasant floor, next to inconsolable Mother’s berth, sweating together with Chang on a rough hot straw mat.

  The nights were sweltering and an inky blue. Sometimes Chang, who usually nodded off before I did, would curl even closer to me and lay his arm across my hip. This made the nights even hotter.

  “Good night, brother,” I’d say. He’d snore.

  Mother, her head propped on her hand, would moan and whimper in her sleep.

  The repeat visits at our doorstep by Sen became upsetting to Chang and me. An austere widower, thick-browed with dark bags under his eyes, Sen was, in his own words, a “most successful merchant,” and he carried around with him a bedraggled carpetbag filled with fishing hooks he’d once taken “all the way to Hong Kong to make an honorable living.”

  Sometimes, if Mother left him alone with us, his eyes would flash a moist whimsy and he would, in a hush and with a grin, refer to women as “the lower gender.”

  We would nod.

  Sen tried to look paternal. “May I tell you something, Double-Boy? To such a man as myself, and to the brand of men you will be—if I can be of the help that I think I can—hardship isn’t the exceptional thing it is to lesser people.” Unlike Father, Sen used a loud voice to pass along what it was he thought he knew of the world. “Calamity is no more unusual to my day and night than are torrential rains to Kang Gee Hill, children. Do you think I always had so little hair on my scalp?” He drew us close. “No, no, keep quiet for a moment, Double-Boy. I shall tell you a story. My late father, a man you would have done well to meet, lost his eye when he was a young priest. But he kept the eye in a hollow box, covered with cloth, or he told people he did. The word spread that this eye could see into your soul. And so it was that my father was beloved by all.” As Sen spoke, I focused on his teeth, even and full and white. “And, I may add, prosperous.”

  “Your father sounds interesting,” I said.

  “You may see yourself as a double-boy suffering strenuous times.” He did not look at us as he talked. “I see you starting the climb up the mountain marked ‘opportunity.’ Hardship is what makes a man, it is exciting.”

  The lack of Father seemed less than an opportunity. Mother spent her time crying, or sitting with Sen, or both. We lived in deep poverty.

  Father’s and Ping’s funerals had cost Mother everything; our tuna nets had been sold, our trinket table discarded, our spirits broken. Chang and I sat for days on the dinghy tied to our houseboat, trolling the river with our hands. But few fish wanted to swim around the corpses of the fallen of our village, and the few that we did catch were valuable to us as food, and for that reason we had nothing to sell.

  Yes, Sen—it is always an adventure to lose one’s father in the first blush of high fishing season; and when one’s meager family savings lose all their flesh in the course of a few weeks, then that too becomes instructive, an “exciting” misery. Mother’s moans and cries would often drive Chang and me from the houseboat. She was right there with us after all this time, and I found myself yearning for her anyway, and new pains gathered around my heart.

  Rain fell and irrigated the earth, fell and irrigated, and fell and at last flooded. Wet days passed and then weeks. Chang told trees and rocks and the dripping mud our troubles, hoping to enlist helpful spirits. None emerged.

  Sen slipped Mother tiny gratuities here and there.

  I began to dream of Princess Xenga, and of her fragile hands. A year passed like that; we were fourteen. If we had been two separate boys, we might have gotten work, the better to help Mother—this is what I thought.

  And then something happened.

  As they had done ages before, strangers began to visit our houseboat.

  It started with a lone sightseer. A woman arrived one bleak day from Bangkok, elderly and lean and serious, her forearms thrust into the pockets of her frock, halfway up to her elbows. She stood before the houseboat and stared silently.

  “Why did you come all this way?” Sen asked her, scratching the top of his bony head. He had been sleeping, and the few hairs he had stood tall. “Just to see these boys?”

  “They have met the King.” The woman closed her eyes as if trying to imagine what such an honor would be like. “And I wanted to encounter them. The double-elephant. The doublehappiness of Siam.”

  This woman poked her old head in the doorway, caught a glimpse of u
s, smiled, nodded, and left without another word.

  Soon people began turning out in hordes. They came just to glimpse. One visitor, a man who had lash marks across his neck and face, handed us a bushel of duck eggs, and then a large black duck that bobbed its head and squawked. A moment by our door, and the man turned on his heel, walked down the shoreline, then twirled again and waved.

  That was when Chang and I began our business of raising ducks and selling their eggs.

  We sold the eggs to local merchants for cash, and then borrowed Uncle Xau’s boat to go upstream and buy another few ducks. Merchants were close-lipped and wide-eyed as we peddled our cargo to them.

  With the money from the eggs, we increased our flock, and then we negotiated the whole business again. After a short time, Mother said, “What is this? Have we become duck vendors now?”

  “Yes, we have,” we said.

  I hated her new pallor, her weaker voice, and her new expression because I saw them somehow as groundwork for the lack of maternal interest. Her brown front tooth had at last fallen out; she concealed its absence behind an everlasting grimace.

  At any rate, on the shore beside our houseboat, Chang and I had built a fenced bamboo-enclosed circle in an afternoon (we had grown quite strong for our age). Inside it, we dug a basin and filled it with water. We kept our ducks on this little pond as pure as any in nature.

  Chang and I looked out for one another then, and each had answers for all of the other’s questions.

  What if we do not succeed at this? he asked.

  We will make an appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate. As Father said.

  What if Mother or Sen stops us from fishing? I asked.

  A Mekong Fisherman stays abreast of change.

  “We should only ever work together,” Chang said. “Nobody else knows things the way we do.” He winked. “Don’t ask me to say what that is that we know, but we know it.”

  We rolled on the riverbank and hugged each other because we could not stop laughing. Who could say when last we had laughed like that? Or the next time that we would?