A bright half-moon shone through the window. The wind raved, tearing the leaves off the palms, altering the sky. Chen Pan recalled how years ago, a fierce windstorm had coated his family’s wheat fields with dust. The same day, his father had claimed that he’d procured a magical herb that would enable him to remember everything he’d ever read. Before he could test its efficacy, the bandits had come. By nightfall they’d severed Father’s head with a sword, parading it on a pole for the entire village to see.
When you remembered a wind, Chen Pan thought bitterly, it blew forever.
Had Chen Pan gone mad? Soon that was the word in Chinatown. Over the next few weeks his fellow merchants visited him, trying to dissuade him from his imprudence. Chen Pan listened to them, treated them to warmed wine at the Bottomless Cup in return for their admonitions. But he didn’t change his mind.
“Too much heat is simmering in your head!” the grocer Pedro Pla Tan warned him. He advised Chen Pan to get a proper wife from China or, better yet, to visit the new whorehouse on Calle Teniente Rey. Why invite trouble by buying this slave? There was a French girl just arrived at Madame Yvette’s, a fourteen-year-old natural blonde who wore red lace panties slit in two. “Her waist is like a roll of new silk,” Pedro Pla Tan sighed.
The fish seller, Benito Sook, quoted Confucius, who said that it wasn’t until a man reached sixty that his ears obeyed him. It was clear, Sook insisted, that Chen Pan’s ears were nowhere near obedience.
Sook and the other merchants agreed that Chen Pan’s sentimentality surely would cause a deformity. After all, look at how Evelio Bai’s head had so swollen from his love of flattery that he could barely hold it upright. Or how that Ramón Gu’s arms had stretched to preternatural lengths from his greediness. And what of the sad example of Felipe Yam, who continued to grow lumps on his breasts from sheer indolence?
Yes, the men agreed, Chen Pan would suffer this decision. At the very least he would be plagued with backaches and blurred vision, a sore neck, a dizzy head, a parched tongue.
On her first morning at the Lucky Find, Lucrecia knocked over a marble bust of a Spanish general, prompting the patriotic Véa to quit on the spot. Lucrecia swept up the broken pieces, then continued dusting from one tenebrous end of the store to the other. But each time she turned around, Lucrecia knocked another heirloom to the ground. Only a bronze Moroccan elephant, defenselessly sprawled on its back, escaped with just a minor dent.
How could she be so good with a knife, Chen Pan wondered, and ox-clumsy in his shop?
“The air is nervous in here,” Lucrecia said, unsettling the stale air of centuries with her feather duster. She insisted that the objects in Chen Pan’s store confessed their miseries to her. The Virgin of Regla statue loathed the drunkard sculptor who’d carved her face into a grimace. And the mantilla draped over that gilded mirror had once belonged to a flamenco dancer who’d lost her left leg to gangrene.
“Foolish girl!” Chen Pan interrupted her. “Talking to knickknacks!” For days she’d said nothing at all, and now this?
When Lucrecia went upstairs to prepare his lunch, Chen Pan brought his ear to the Virgin’s lips. For him, though, there was nothing but a stagnant silence.
A week later, with his inventory in near shambles and the baby’s squalling fraying his nerves (Chen Pan, too, had begun breaking his share of antiquities), he asked Lucrecia, “What else can you do?”
“I make candles,” she said. It was a skill she’d learned with the Sisters of Affliction.
Chen Pan bought everything she needed to get started. There was slow-burning string, beeswax, assorted dyes, a copper cauldron, flexible scrapers, and a wooden drying rack. Then he set up a workshop for her in the back of the Lucky Find.
Before long, Lucrecia was peddling her candles all over Havana. For Easter, she made pastel tapers dipped in vanilla and rose oil. By June, she was selling votives scented with crushed orange blossoms and calling them velas de amor. Word spread among the city’s savviest women of the candles’ stimulating effects in the boudoir. Every Thursday when Lucrecia offered a fresh batch of her love candles for sale, women came from everywhere to secure their week’s supply.
In July, Lucrecia announced to Chen Pan that she’d gone to the magistrate to have herself evaluated. Chen Pan knew what that meant. Una coartación. Lucrecia wanted to buy her and Víctor Manuel’s freedom.
“You’re free to go today,” he told her. “I won’t hold you here against your will.” Lucrecia didn’t answer him, but she also didn’t leave.
Instead Lucrecia planted a garden behind the Lucky Find. Yuca. Taro root. Black-eyed peas. Three types of beans. No ornamental flowers whatsoever. She said she would grow only what they could eat.
Chen Pan insisted that she plant chrysanthemums like his great-aunt had in China. The flowers bloomed in the fall and promoted longevity, he told her. His great-aunt had drunk wine infusions made from the sweet-smelling petals and had lived well into her eighties.
Lucrecia reluctantly planted a bed of chrysanthemums to honor Chen Pan’s wishes, but the flowers quickly wilted in the summer heat.
Víctor Manuel grew to be a strong boy. He began walking at nine months. One step, two steps, then down in a heap. He never bothered to crawl. His legs were fat with rolls. Sturdy as two dynasties, Chen Pan laughed. It pleased him to squeeze them. Víctor Manuel liked the sound of the drums, of the lute and the Chinese sheng pipes, and so Chen Pan paid musicians to come and play for the boy in the mornings.
“Sa! Sa!” Víctor Manuel imitated the lute player, sounding like the wind blowing through the rain. “Ch’ieh! Ch’ieh!” he shouted when the notes climbed as high as the voices of chattering ghosts. The boy swayed and rocked with the swelling notes and cried when the lute player went home.
On Saturdays, Chen Pan took Víctor Manuel with him to Arturo Fu Fon’s barbershop for a trim and a fresh round of gossip. Víctor Manuel followed the talk, eyeing each man in turn as though assessing the worthiness of his information. Chen Pan was convinced that the boy would be speaking perfect Chinese soon.
“Perfect Chinese with this bunch of woolly heads?” Arturo Fu Fon laughed, folding his hands over his generous stomach. “Poor little cricket. Who’ll talk to him after we’re gone?”
At the barbershop, the men were most fond of discussing naval disasters. They speculated on the fate of the Flora Temple, shipwrecked with eight hundred fifty Chinese aboard. Or the Hong Kong, which ran aground after the recruits set it on fire. Most mysterious was the case of El Fresneda. Shortly after leaving Macao, the frigate disappeared. Months later, the British navy found it drifting off the coast of the Philippines with one hundred fifty skeletons on board.
“People will devour each other when there’s nothing else to eat,” Arturo Fu Fon said, sliding his razor down the cheek of the remarkably hirsute Tomás Lai.
“Wouldn’t there be somebody left after picking all those bones clean?” asked Eduardo Tsen. He came to the barbershop only to argue.
“A man today, tomorrow a cockroach or a hungry ghost,” Salustiano Chung predicted from beneath his gauze hat. Then he turned to Chen Pan with a grin. “And what do you think, Señor Chen?”
Everyone laughed. Their routine was already well worn.
“As the great philosopher Lao-tzu once said,” Chen Pan began, “ ‘Those who speak know nothing. Those who know are silent.’ ”
“Yes, and those who speak of the virtues of silence are themselves cockatoos!” Arturo Fu Fon chimed in.
When they forgot their shipwrecks, the men spoke longingly of home. The lowliest chino in Cuba knew by heart Li Po’s poem:
Before my bed there is bright moonlight So that it seems like frost on the ground: Lifting my head I watch the bright moon, Lowering my head I dream that I’m home.
Most of Chen Pan’s friends had been farmers in China, and no amount of city excitement could replace for them the quiet pleasures of working the soil. Chen Pan, however, wasn’t the least bit nostalgic. He wa
s most grateful to Cuba for this: to be freed, at last, from the harsh cycles of the land. He’d carried both books and a hoe in his youth. He preferred the books.
When he was a boy, the elders in his village had tried to foretell the harvest by interpreting the movement of beans they tossed in the air, or by puff-roasting rice in an iron pan. They listened to the timbre of thunder linking the old year with the new, then made their prognostications. But there was no predicting the inconstant proportions of sun and rain, the continual affliction of floods. And their palm-bark coats did little to protect them from the weather. In bad times, children were sold to pay the rent, and everyone chewed boiled wheat to calm their empty stomachs.
Chen Pan no longer believed in demons that ruined the harvest, that food eaten from one’s own toil tasted best. He would rather buy a single yam and roast it plain for his dinner than resign himself to the unpredictability of the land. He preferred to pay his weekly bribe to the Cuban policeman, too (a rather modest sum on account of the De Santovenias), than surrender his entire farm to the Emperor’s tax collectors.
Víctor Manuel’s birthday coincided with the Chinese New Year. What could be luckier? Plump, brown, healthy boy. Firecrackers popping all around. Pyramids of oranges and pomegranates. A red satin birthday suit sewn for him with silk thread and tassels. A miniature jade baton to ensure a scholarly future.
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 th
ree 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.
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