Monkey Hunting Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  FAMILY TREE

  Prologue - AMOY, CHINA (1857)

  To Paradise - AMOY TO HAVANA (1857)

  Vanishing Smoke - CENTRAL CUBA (1857–1860)

  North - NEW YORK CITY (1968)

  The Lucky Find - HAVANA (1867–1868)

  Middle Kingdom

  Monkeys - CENTRAL HIGHLANDS, VIETNAM (1969)

  TRAVELING THROUGH THE FLESH

  A Delicate Luck - HAVANA (1888)

  Plums

  Small World - SAIGON (1970)

  Peonies - HAVANA (1899)

  The Little War - SANTIAGO TO HAVANA (1912)

  Incense - SAIGON 1970

  LAST RITES

  The Egg and the Ox

  Immortality - HAVANA (1917)

  MONKEY HUNTING - A Reader’s Guide

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY CRISTINA GARCÍA

  Copyright Page

  For José Garriga

  I, Old Monkey, can with this pair of fiery eyes and diamond pupils, discern good and evil.

  —WU CH’ÊNG-ÊN The Journey to the West

  “RADIANT . . . MESMERIZING . . . A LOVING EXPLORATION OF HERITAGE . . .

  García’s grasp of atmosphere is nonpareil and the physicality of her scene setting is intoxicating . . . García writes so well, she puts the reader in the room with her characters. . . . Monkey Hunting is a novel of great scope.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “An epic tearjerker . . . The story spans two continents, four generations, several wars, and the rise of two terrible dictators [yet] the focus always remains on the characters, a family of downtrodden dreamers. . . . García’s luminous prose makes palpable the pang of homesickness, the gut-punch of heartbreak. By the end, we are both exhausted from her characters’ incredible journeys and buoyed by their strengths.”

  —Time Out New York

  “García employs an exuberant prose style in which even the smallest of her torrent of details come heavily jeweled. . . . Escape, family ties, luck, the pull of the homeland—these García trademarks serve here as background and texture to another, more singular matter of the fully lived life.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Such is the force of García’s sensual, warm, witty prose [that] I was happy to follow wherever she led. . . . I soon found myself deeply attached to both major and minor characters.”

  — The Atlantic

  “GORGEOUSLY DETAILED AND ENTRANCINGLY TOLD, EROTIC, MYSTICAL, AND WISE,

  García’s bittersweet saga of a family of remarkable individuals spans a century of displacement, war, and sacrifice, and a world of forbearance and love. . . . [García] writes pristinely lyrical and enchanting prose, and creates powerfully alluring characters, delectable qualities she takes to new heights in this many-faceted tale about an extended Chinese Cuban family.”

  —Booklist

  “Up to now, [García’s] most formidable and affecting characters . . . have been women, extravagant creatures of ripe, even frenzied passions who bloom from the page as colorful as hibiscus blossoms and as huge as Amazons.”

  —Miami Herald

  “[García] paints a vivid picture of her native Havana, both before and after Castro came to power. . . . Although few Chinese remain in Cuba, their legacy remains in Havana’s Chinatown. García’s eloquent novel is a fitting tribute to their lives.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Elegantly written . . . In this multigenerational saga, which embraces many cultures and spans more than a century, Cristina García demonstrates how much the human spirit can endure.”

  —Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

  “Graceful . . . Told in unsparing detail . . . Though García ranges further afield here than in previous works, her prose is as tight and polished as ever. . . . [Her] novel is a richly patterned mini-epic, a moving chorus of distinct voices.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A VIVID FAMILY SAGA . . . GARCÍA WRITES BEAUTIFULLY.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “An expert sense of timing and pace . . . This slim book lodges so deeply under the skin. In describing the sensual world, García depicts her characters’ experiences so luminously that it’s easy to feel the pang of their homesickness, the oomph of their heartbreak.”

  —The Boston Sunday Globe

  “García has a rare gift for concentrating beauty by leaving things out. Here is . . . a novel that manages to trace four generations of a family not by revealing every last detail of personal histories but rather by revealing people’s dreams, their unuttered concerns and observations. . . . Whether she’s writing about the food stalls in Chinatown, the lovingly tended graves in the city’s Chinese cemetery, or even the absurd assortment of curios in the Lucky Find, García savors her descriptions and never rushes through any of them, carefully building for us a Havana of cinematic vividness, detail by shimmering detail.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “In Monkey Hunting, author Cristina García does again what she is so adept at: guiding the reader through multiple generations of well-fleshed characters moving through time and place. . . . Monkey Hunting [is] a sensuous mosaic of fierce struggles to survive in new worlds. This worthy novel deserves a broad audience.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Fierce and intoxicating . . . vividly imagined . . . Monkey Hunting is a lucky find, indeed.”

  —Miami Herald

  “GARCÍA [IS] A LITERARY DAUGHTER MINDFUL OF HER MAGIC REALIST INHERITANCE BUT MAINTAINING A REBELLIOUS, STREETWISE EDGE ALL HER OWN.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Visceral, poetic, fantastic . . . Sit back. Take it in. Read MonkeyHunting for its high-octane poetry, its cocktail of color and incident, its rat-a-tat-tat of vigorous verbs, and Isabel Allende–style eroticism. . . . Glorious images born of a writer who has a gift for splicing together unexpected scenes, cultures, and similes.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “At once dreamlike and historically accurate, lushly written and bristling with harsh human truths.”

  —L.A. Weekly

  “The writing in Monkey Hunting is crystalline, occasionally surreal, and nothing short of lovely. There is a rhythm to the narrative that echoes the rich, careful pace of the Cuban days it describes.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Sage, evocative, and steeped in ancient truths and the strengths and mysteries of family, Monkey Hunting is also a tribute to new beginnings and to the protean nature of identity.”

  —Elle Magazine

  “Monkey Hunting is . . . a wondrous collection of tales and family legends that bound from Chinese circuses and Cuban plantations to the jungles of Vietnam . . . filled with ordinary characters who, through blind chance or unbridled drive, do extraordinary things.”

  —Los Angeles Magazine

  FAMILY TREE

  ORIGINS

  Prologue

  AMOY, CHINA (1857)

  Temptations were plentiful in Amoy. At the circus, Chen Pan watched as the trapeze artist swung from one end of her sagging tent to another in a crimson streak. He followed her soarings, the arc of her willow eyebrows, her delicate steps along the fragile-seemingtightrope. She wore a spangled bodice and knee-highleather boots. Her legs were straight as bamboo. She was beautiful, this Fire Swan, calm and disdainful, taller than any woman Chen Pan had ever seen.

  Only a week ago he’d left his village by the J—— River to look for work in the city. Winter rains had flooded
his wheat fields, rotting the stalks already choked with darnel. Bandits were roaming the countryside, setting fires and stealing horses. How far away all this seemed to him now.

  Outside the circus tent, the hills of Amoy scalloped down to the rim of the sea. Foreign sailors patrolled the port in their tasseled uniforms. Bedraggled men hauled crates and burlap bundles, loading the British ships. Near the docks, a tavern painted with scenes of spring served warmed wine from jade jars. The owner coaxed Chen Pan to a back room lined with silk cushions. The night before, he’d gotten lucky throwing dice against a barge captain. The winnings were still in his pocket.

  A musician was playing an old-fashioned ch’in, singing the lament of a forgotten mistress. Dancing girls in scarlet skirts beckoned to him like a sea of peonies. Dishes of peas with aniseed appeared at his table with a generous dippingof wine. The owner offered Chen Pan a carved opium pipe. He took one puff, then another. Soon the sweet hot smoke had him searching the clouds for immortals. In the delicate haze of the ensuing hours, his gambling gold slowly vanished in the arms of a lush dancing girl.

  The following afternoon, a slope-shouldered man with drooping whiskers invited Chen Pan for tea. What more did he have to lose? The tea was hot and heavily sugared. There were sweetmeats and bean paste cakes. The man wore a Western-style suit and a ring on his little finger, flecked with diamond chips. His age was impossible to guess. Chen Pan wanted to believe everything he said. How the drinking water in Cuba was so rich with mineralsthat a man had twice his ordinary strength (and could stay erect for days). That the Cuban women were eager and plentiful, much lovelier than the Emperor’s concubines.That even the river fish jumped, unbidden, into fryingpans. Suddenly the world seemed larger and more unfathomable than Chen Pan had imagined.

  “Spit the country dirt from your mouth!” the man in the Western suit pressed him. “You need to act while you’re young! What? Are you waiting for peaches to fall from heaven?” He counted out eight Mexican coins as a deposit, pledged four pesos more a month for eight years. “And remember,” he said, with a quick roll of his shoulders, “one foreign year elapses twice as fast as a Chinese one!”

  But what if the opposite were true, Chen Pan worried. His father had told him once that a Chinese mile was only one-third as long as an English one. If this held true for time as well, he would be gone for twenty-four years.

  Chen Pan tried to picture Cuba, an island—the man in the Western suit explained—that was many times the size of Amoy. If all went well, Chen Pan speculated, he could return home a wealthy man, perhaps a stronger man if the story about the drinking water wasn’t a lie. Then he’d build a splendid house by the river, huge and on stilts, betterthan any in his village’s memory. He’d buy two or three more wives, comely and fecund as hens, found his own dynasty. At the end of his life there would be four generationsof Chens living under one roof.

  There would be tales to tell, too, enough to fill many evenings with his adventures. If only his poor father could be alive to hear them!

  It was winter and fiercely cold. The sun had declined its duty by midafternoon. In Cuba, Chen Pan was assured, the air was as tepid as a summer bath all year long. No more snow or bitter winds. Chen Pan didn’t suffer his decision. This time, he believed, the odds were in his favor. He signed the contract, unrolled with a flourish on the littletabletop. Then Chen Pan took his first coin, still warm from the hands of the man in the Western suit. He would go beyond the edge of the world to Cuba.

  To Paradise

  AMOY TO HAVANA (1857)

  There were other men like Chen Pan on the ship, not too young, but not too old either. From the farms, mostly, as far as he could tell. No weaklings. Cuba, the man in the Western suit had told him, needed sturdy workers. Chen Pan was taller than most of the recruits, and his arms were taut with muscles. His hair was tied back in a thick queue, but at twenty years old he barely needed to shave.

  A few families came to see their men off. The women gave their husbands sticky rice balls and packets of seeds for their journey. There was no weeping. Even the smallest children were dry-eyed. Most of the men, like Chen Pan, went aboard alone and empty-handed.

  That evening at sea, the coast of China gradually faded behind them. A haloed moon rose on a swell of wind, but this hopeful omen didn’t alter the facts of the ship. It was outfitted like a prison, with irons and grates. The recruits were kept belowdecks, like animals in a pen. The shortest among them couldn’t stand upright. Soon Chen Pan’s neck ached from stooping.

  Neither the British captain nor his crew spoke much Chinese. The captain issued his orders with a flat expression and a wave of his girlish hands. His crew was far more unruly. They threatened the recruits with muskets and cutlasses and rattan rods, shackled those whom the rods didn’t tame. Chen Pan was struck with a hoisting rope for requesting an extra blanket.

  Those men who’d brought food or tobacco on board began to barter and sell. These boiled chicken feet for your hemp sandals or your uncle’s flute. A handful of pumpkin seeds for your stash of turnips or hard-boiled eggs. A day’s opium for the woolen gloves. Gambling sprouted like snake-grass in every bunk. The incessant clicking of dice finely divided the hours. A man from W—— gathered most of the winnings and crowed, “If you were too dumb the life before, you won’t be enlightened today!”

  After his misfortunes in Amoy, Chen Pan refused to gamble. He guarded his Mexican coins, tucking them between the meager cheeks of his buttocks for safekeeping.

  The men got beef jerky and rice gruel to eat. Chen Pan ate, although the taste of the food sickened him. It was oversalted, and the lack of adequate water made him desperately thirsty. Hour after hour, he thought more of his shoe-leather throat than of the life awaiting him in Cuba. Those who demanded more water were answered with blows. Chen Pan watched men drink their own urine, lick moisture from the walls of the ship. A few swallowed seawater until their stomachs swelled and they choked in their own filth.

  A squat melon-grower from T—— announced that he would throw himself into the ocean to end his torment. Chen Pan crept on deck with two others to watch him jump. The melon-grower didn’t shout or linger but simply stepped into the breeze. A moment later, the furling waves received him with indifference. The melon-grower had been an orphan and a bachelor. No destiny would be altered but his.

  The ship continued to plow south into the hard-gusting wind. Chen Pan covered his ears so they wouldn’t blow away altogether. He asked himself four questions: What was the last sound the melon-grower heard? The last color he saw before he died? How long would it take for the fish to devour him? Would this death complete his fate?

  “Show me the person who doesn’t die,” shrugged a short-legged man next to Chen Pan.

  This was something Chen Pan’s father used to say, that death alone remained impartial. All the towering men, all the great beauties with kingfisher plumes in their hair—not a single one expected to grow old. But they, too, would return to dust. If it was true that man had two souls, one of the body and the other ethereal, then they would merge with the earth and the air after death.

  Chen Pan knew that he didn’t want to fade away slowly, like a dying candle—one day no different from the next; the dirt etched in his hands along with his fortunes. No, he would rather live in a blaze of courage and flame like Li Kuang, the ferocious warrior who’d battled the Huns, or the heroes in the stories his father had recounted to him.

  Chen Pan’s father had been as restless as these heroes, never reconciling himself to a life on their farm. He’d recited the Songs of Wu as he’d absentmindedly hoed the wheat fields, grew devoted to the poetry of the deserted concubines of the Han court. He’d referred to the sun as the Lantern Dragon, the Crow in Flight, the White Colt. The moon was the Silver Dish or the Golden Ring.

  Father had taken the Imperial examinations for twenty years without success. He’d been a good poet but incapable of composing verses on assigned subjects, as was required by the examiners. He’d bl
amed his absorption of useless knowledge for overburdening his imagination. Before picking up his brush to write, he would rub his inkstick on a whetstone for a meditative hour as Chen Pan watched.

  Chen Pan’s mother ridiculed her husband as she hobbled from room to room on her lotus feet. “Ha! Everyone calls him a scholar, but he hasn’t found a position yet. And in winter he wears a thread-bare robe. This is how books fool us!” Chen Pan’s mother was from a family of well-to-do farmers, and far from beautiful. She knew little poetry, but used to repeat the same line to nettle her improvident husband: Poets mostly starve to death embracing empty mountains!

  After ten days of cramped, stinking squalor, a fight erupted belowdecks. A city man named Yang Yün, contrary as a donkey, shoved a quiet farmer out of his bunk. “Son of a whore!” the farmer shouted, punching Yang Yün in the chest. The city man pulled a knife from his vest and silvered the air with reckless slashing. The farmer disarmed him in no time, then promptly broke his nose.

  Chen Pan watched the fight from behind his tattered book of poems, a last gift from his father. He decided that if Yang Yün or any of the other city cocks so much as jostled his elbow, he would knock them unconscious with a blow.

  The captain’s guards chained the troublemakers to iron posts. Others who’d cheered them on were flogged to intimidate the rest. When the stubborn Lin Chin resisted, the guards kicked him in the ribs until he spat blood. The next day he died and his body was dumped in the sea. It was said that Lin Chin didn’t sink at first but floated alongside the ship for hours, his eyes fixed on the sky. Chen Pan wondered if the dead man’s ghost would find its way back to China. Or would it wander forever among the unvirtuous and the depraved?

  As the ship continued to sail, Chen Pan imagined his wife pounding the season’s meager yield of grain in their yard, looking warily to the sky for rain. They’d been married for three years but had no children. Unlucky, despite what the matchmaker had predicted. On their wedding night, Chen Pan and his wife had drunk pomegranate wine and she’d grazed his chest with her soft, scant breasts. But month after month her womb spilled its blood.