Monkey Hunting

by Cristina Garcia

  “Will I ever get to meet him?” I asked my mother.

  But she wouldn’t answer me, losing herself instead to the sweet blue smoke.

  From an early age I dreamed of running away, of joining my father in Cuba. Mother said that I looked like him, especially when I was unhappy. My lips would purse together, pinching my face in a most disagreeable manner. She showed me the picture of their wedding day. The two of them are posed formally on a lacquered bench with pots of chrysanthemums on either side. Father is tall and thin, and his skin is a faded brown.

  The villagers gossiped about his mother, who had been a slave in Cuba before ensnaring a full-blooded Chinese. They said that all the slaves there worked the sugarcane fields harder than any beast, that they boiled human flesh on feast days, then gathered around their simmering kettles and banged on a hundred drums.

  There were other tales about Cuba. How fish that rained from the sky during thunderstorms had to be shoveled off the roads before they rotted. How seeds dropped in the ground one day would shoot up green the next. How gold was so plentiful that the Cubans used it for buttons and broom handles. And when a woman fancied a man, she signaled to him with her fan. In Havana, the women chose whom they would marry and when.

  Everything I heard about Cuba made my head revolve with dreams. How badly I wanted to go!

  By the time I was nine, the teacher in our village informed my mother that he had taught me all he knew. He implored her to send me to a boys’ academy several days away by cart and train. It was a school in the old tradition, once renowned for preparing scholars for the Imperial examinations.

  Mother wrote to my father, requesting a decision. That summer he pledged money for ten more years of schooling. I am quite certain that he would not have promised this if he had known I was a girl. The fact remains that I owe everything I am to his generosity.

  I was the best student at my boarding school. I excelled in mathematics and Confucian philosophy and studied English and French. It was not easy to disguise my sex. I kept my hair cropped short and affected a gruff manner, but my hands and neck were too delicate for a boy. My size helped. I was a head taller than most of the other students and I was not afraid to fight.

  In the spring of my fifteenth year, our literature teacher, Professor Hou, took twelve of us to Canton to see the opera and visit historical sites. One morning, word spread that a fellow student had discovered a brothel that catered to virgins. Well, every last scholar dropped his books and followed him out of the lodgment!

  The brothel was in a plain wooden house, not far from the marketplace. Long scrolls of painted silk decorated the walls, including one of an idyllic mountain gorge. A faint breeze made the silk flutter in place.

  One by one, my classmates were escorted into the same squalid room. It was big enough for a bedroll and a tray of steaming tea. No one remained inside longer than a few minutes. Each boy pretended to be more pleased than confused when he came out.

  When it was my turn, I was astonished to see the bare, slender back of a girl no older than me. Her hair was coiled and messily fastened with jade pins. She turned toward me. Her eyes were smeared black, her lips smudged the color of sunset. Even in the distorting shadows of the room, I found her beautiful. Lovely as a blossom born of clouds.

  She opened her mouth and gestured with her tongue. I approached her slowly. She took my hand and rubbed it against her breasts. I felt a jolt go through me. Then she touched me between my thighs.

  “Who are you?” she asked me sharply, pulling her hand away.

  “A girl,” I told her. “Please tell no one.”

  We were silent a long time.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Everyone thinks I’m a boy. It’s the only way I can study.”

  To my surprise, the girl patted the bedroll beside her.

  “Stay a while,” she said. “This way the others will think you’re a man.” She began to giggle.

  I stared at her mouth, her small, uneven teeth. She stared back at me and grew quiet again. Her breathing was slow and steady. Mine was rapid, erratic.

  “Do you like being a boy?” she asked.

  “It’s all I know,” I answered.

  She took my hand again, holding it tightly as we waited together in silence. The air smelled faintly sweet.

  Finally, there was a knock at the door. I stood up, bowed deeply, and left.

  That autumn, my mother sent me a letter. “Come home,” it said. “There is no more money to study.” There was a war in the West, and my father’s remittances had ceased. It was time, she said, that I married.

  Mother had betrothed me to a young man who lived two days’ journey north of our village. To explain my absence, she had told his family that I was away helping a sick relative in the city. They would pay a fine dowry, my mother wrote, enough to take care of her in her dotage. But I knew where my dowry money would go: in a cloud of opium smoke.

  I stared at the black ink against the coarse parchment. Again I thought of escaping to Cuba, but I had no money and my father knew only that I was an intelligent boy. The letter was in the handwriting of the local scribe. Through him, the village knew everyone’s affairs. The scribe lived in a hut by a stream high on a mountain ledge. Everyone said that water demons resided there.

  Outside my dormitory window was an ancient oak, the leaves stained red with the advancing season. The winter before, a sixth-year boy had hanged himself from the tree after failing his final examinations. I remembered how peaceful he had looked swaying in the wind. I imagined climbing onto the same branch, rope in hand, summoning dead spirits to strengthen me. Then the sudden pressure around my neck, a last gasp of breath, the blackening release.

  I was sixteen when I went home and married Lu Shêng-pao. His family had a big house with pine trees that sang on windy days. It was not easy to become a woman. I was not trained to pour tea or be graceful in the usual deferences. I could not cook, and my sewing was crooked. My hair was wavy and hard to control.

  Worst of all were my unbound feet. For this, my mother-in-law ridiculed me: “We wouldn’t have paid so much for you if we’d seen those clumsy hooves!”

  This I must say directly. There is no harder work than being a woman. I know this because I pretended to be a boy for so long. This is what men do: pretend to be men, hide their weaknesses at all costs. A man would sooner kill or die himself than suffer embarrassment. For women there are no such blusterings, only work.

  How sad it is to be a woman! Nothing on earth is held so cheap. Boys stand leaning at the door Like Gods fallen out of Heaven.

  Lu Shêng-pao was the third of four sons. He worked in his father’s textiles shop, but he had no passion for this. Behind the rice paper screen of our room, he liked to read and draw. I was lucky. Lu Shêng-pao demanded very little of me. Our first night together, he planted his seed in me once and never tried again.

  My mother-in-law kept a meticulous calendar and soon announced at dinner that my monthly blood had stopped. I looked out the window. The garden was bright with peonies, their stems bending with heavy blossoms. I thought of how flowers in full bloom were most ready to die. The sun was setting. The horizon, it seemed to me, neatly divided the living from the dead.

  News of the pregnancy improved my worth in the eyes of my husband’s family. A daughter-in-law so fertile brings good fortune, signifies that the gods have approved the match. Before me, the family’s luck had not been good. First Brother’s wife had died of the coughing sickness. And Second Brother’s wife received endless scorn after seven childless winters.

  During the first months of my pregnancy, I was so ill and despairing that I ate only a bit of dry rice. Each day seemed heavy and gray, as if the sky had lowered its eaves.

  One afternoon Lu Shêng-pao brought home a packet of herbs that he said would settle my stomach. He boiled the tea himself, something he had never done, and offered it to me in a fine porcelain cup. Then he tucked a blanket around my knees. The tea was hot and
fragrant, like a field of wildflowers. It seemed to flow to every corner of my body, warming it, until I grew drowsy and fell into a deep sleep.

  That night I woke up with a searing pain down my middle. I groaned and curled forward, felt a stickiness along my thighs. Where was my husband? With trembling hands, I lit the lamp and saw that our bed was wet with blood. I screamed, alerting the whole house.

  My mother-in-law stormed in and eased me to the floor mat. “Don’t move!” she instructed and disappeared into the darkness. I do not know how long it took her to return with the sleepy herbalist.

  Liang Tai-lung wedged a damp poultice between my legs and tied it to my waist with a sash. Then he sprinkled a bitter powder on the back of my tongue. When he lifted the remains of my husband’s tea to his nose, he called my mother-in-law aside. She marched over and slapped my face hard.

  “How dare you try to kill my grandson!” she screeched. She refused to hear my explanation.

  I lay on the floor mat for a month, unable to move. My mother-in-law sent in the maid to change my poultice and empty my chamber pot, which she carefully inspected. She brought my meals herself, making sure I swallowed everything—hearty broths made from chicken livers and bamboo shoots. She was determined that I should live long enough to deliver her first grandchild.

  I asked her where Lu Shêng-pao was, but she wouldn’t answer me. Later, I learned that he’d been sent to the South on business for his father.

  When my belly grew so large I felt as though I had swallowed the moon, Second Sister came to visit me. She had traveled far, suffering on her lotus feet. My mother-in-law was suspicious of her visit, but she permitted us to sit together on the porch. She herself sat nearby, embroidering a silk pillowcase for the baby.

  It was a blustery day, and the pines sang like the opera heroine I had heard in Canton. The birds scattered in all directions. The wind kept unsettling my mother-in-law’s sewing. When she entered the house to fetch more thread, my sister slipped me a letter from my old professor. Then she kissed me on the cheek and departed. I never saw her again.

  I waited until everyone was asleep to retrieve the letter from my sash. Professor Hou had recommended me for a teaching post at a foreigners’ school in Shanghai. I was to report there at the start of the New Year, four months hence. I could not still my breathing. I must leave here, I thought. But how?

  For the next week, every hour seemed a day and each day a year. I grew clumsier than usual in the kitchen, dropped a platter of steamed asparagus on my feet. My mother-in-law grew concerned. She took me to a fortune-teller, blind and decrepit, who specialized in predicting the sex of the unborn with a cracked tortoiseshell.

  “To you a son will be born,” she foretold. “He will rule over many people with the sun on his shoulder. But you must leave him after one month. This is the will of your ancestors.”

  Soon after Lu Chih-mo was born, my mother-in-law paid me handsomely to abandon their home. I left without apologies and took a train to Shanghai. My breasts were painfully hard, leaking with unsupped milk. How often I have suffered this decision! I tried to banish thoughts of my son, of his baby fist around my finger, of his involuntary smiles when he slept. His face was so pale, a mysterious little moon. I thought I would be pleased to leave him, to seek my freedom. Instead I swallowed my bitter heart again and again.

  I almost returned to Lu Chih-mo on several occasions. I bought tickets on trains I never boarded, imagined flying over this scarred, warring land to find him playing with a length of knotted string beneath the pines. I thought of stealing him, of bringing him back with me to Shanghai. But I realized that it would be easier for me to see heaven than to see my boy again.

  In Shanghai, I was fortunate. I did not hide my gender and still the foreigners hired me, thanks to Professor Hou’s kind words.

  I teach Chinese classics and modern literatures. My students are the children of diplomats and industrialists: French children, English children, children of wealthy Chinese families, too. I pretend to be a widow. I pretend to be childless. And so people do not concern themselves with my life.

  Monkeys

  CENTRAL HIGHLANDS, VIETNAM (1969)

  Rabo mono amarra mono.

  Domingo Chen was on night watch. He volunteered for it often, preferring darkness to the day’s uneasy camaraderies. He sat behind his mound of packed red clay, his M-16 oiled and loose in his hands, his flak jacket scrawled with BINGO. A sickle moon played hide-and-seek through the jungle canopy. There were no stars. No way to read heaven with any accuracy. He might have loved this sky in another time, from another perspective.

  Domingo listened to the rumble of nightmares from the foxholes, men crying out in their sleep, fear pulling wires in their throats. Lately, there’d been drowsy talk about how the snub-nosed monkeys started howling when the weather shifted, how the peasants hunted the monkeys and sold their skulls as war souvenirs. In Cuba, Domingo recalled, the paleros had coveted the skulls of Chinese suicides for their curses and spells.

  The day had been hell. During the hot, lacquering afternoon, Danny Spadoto had been blown apart by a booby trap, as though no more than a vague idea had been holding him together. Spadoto had been a superb whistler, a genius with puckered lips. After several beers he would take requests, could do Sinatra’s “September Song” note by perfect note. He’d been a big guy with beefy, fluorescent cheeks; a happy guy, even in war. Domingo wondered whether Spadoto had been happy because he’d known a lot more than everyone else, or a lot less.

  At lunch they’d switched C rations (his pork slices for Domingo’s lamb loaf), and Spadoto had offered Domingo the address of the guaranteed best lay in Saigon. Hair smells like goddam coconuts, he’d promised, letting out an awed whistle. Domingo had stared at the scribbled information: Tham Thanh Lan, 14 Nguyen Doc Street. Two hours later, he was shaking Spadoto’s torso loose from a breadfruit tree. Domingo had understood then that he would spend the rest of his life trying to walk normally again, trying to lose his slow-motion, anti–land mine strut.

  In the afternoon, cutting through a vine-choked path, the rain coming down rice-sticky, the platoon had stumbled onto a field of white flowers. Domingo had sniffed the air. It smelled sea-brackish, although they were nowhere near the ocean. The Vietnamese scout, a square-faced man everyone called Flounder, said that the flowers bloomed once every thirty years. To see them, and in such profusion, meant excellent luck. To everyone’s surprise Flounder began eating the flowers, which were salty and curiously thirst-quenching. Salt of the jungle. Sal de la selva, Domingo translated to himself, and put one in his mouth. Then a quiet euphoria settled over him until dusk.

  Domingo absently rubbed the magazine of his M-16 as he stared into the haze of the jungle. The slow stain of night seeped into his skin. He thought of how his hands hadn’t been his in nearly a year, how they hadn’t touched a conga or loved a woman in all that time. How mostly they’d just scratched insects from his skin.

  Soon it would be the first anniversary of Papi’s death. Domingo had visited his grave in the Bronx before leaving for Vietnam. He’d sprinkled the plot with fresh water, burned incense and a handful of new dollar bills, left a crate of fresh papayas he’d bought at a Puerto Rican bodega. He’d given away everything of theirs except for a pair of spectacles that had belonged to his great-grandfather, Chen Pan. Domingo promised himself that he would return in a year to complete the traditional rituals. But only fear, he knew, made promises.

  Domingo tried to conjure up images of his father. Papi on the banks of the Río Guaso, guiding Domingo’s fishing pole. “Hold the pole steady, mi hijo. Wait until the fish rises to the bait.” His father’s fingers folding the edge of a dumpling or deveining a mound of shrimp. Those same fingers massaging Domingo’s scalp “to make your brain work better.” Papi’s blue (always blue) guayaberas swinging loosely on his skinny frame. The high sheen of the American shoes he’d bought at the naval base. The babyish way he’d suckled his cigarettes.

  Th
en came the images Domingo found unbearable to consider. Papi trembling at the edge of the subway platform, wearing his white linen suit. The approach of the man in the red shirt (that’s what the police report said—all details but no explanations) to ask him the time. The bearing-down metal of the south-bound train. South, Domingo thought, the train was going south.

  Death had tempted his father like a sudden religion, come wearing a shirt of fire. Domingo pictured the expression on Papi’s face as he flew onto the subway tracks, flew high and unwaveringly and believing—what? Everything Domingo had done since had been filtered through that look.

  Papi had taught him that the worst sin for a Chinese son was to neglect his dead ancestors. Domingo remembered the story of his great-grandfather, who’d hidden in the woods after escaping the sugar plantation. When his mother had died in China, her ghost had crossed the Pacific, soared over the Rockies and the Great Plains and down the humid thumb of Florida to Cuba, looking for her son. She’d become a jungle owl and followed Chen Pan for nearly a year, fussing and hooting and disrupting his sleep. She’d even made him stop casting a shadow.

  Could this, Domingo wondered, happen to him? He lit a joint and watched the shadow of his hand cupping the flame. If there was no shadow, he reasoned, there’d be no body and he’d be dead.

  Domingo leaned against a sandbag and examined the barrel of his rifle. He hadn’t used it much, giving away ammunition to his more trigger-happy buddies. Besides, his ears bled whenever he shot it off. His biggest fear was that in the heat of a firefight, his fellow soldiers would mistake him for a Viet Cong and shoot him dead. Enough of them were suspicious of him to begin with. With his heavy accent and brown skin, how could he be American?