Monkey Hunting Read online

  Chen Pan’s mother blamed his wife for ruining the family with her persistent barrenness. Weak and sallow-skinned, Mother ruled the farm from her bed, knees tucked to her chest, lotus feet curled and useless from the painful binding long ago. In her closet were three minuscule pairs of jeweled slippers, all that remained of a dowry once rich with silks and brocades.

  She also chastised Chen Pan’s younger brother for spending his days writing with his one brush and inkpot. “Even from the grave, your father has cursed you with his useless ways!” In winter, their house grew so cold that his small supply of ink froze.

  On board, the recruits began to suffer every manner of illness. Cholera. Typhus. Dysentery. Bad luck, Chen Pan decided, had settled into every crevice of the ship. Nine men died the first month, not counting those killed in fights or beaten to death by the crew. Many more might have perished but for Chien Shih-kuang, sorcerer of herbs and roots. With his felt bag of magic, the wry herbalist from Z—— brewed teas to mend every imbalance, quieting fiery livers, warming cold organs, restoring the temperamental ch’i.

  The captain had promised Chien Shih-kuang payment of passage back to Amoy in return for his services on board. The herbalist had agreed because he’d heard that in Cuba men knew the secret to halting the winter retreat of the sun. He, too, wished to learn this secret.

  One night Chen Pan dreamed that bandits had set fire to his great-aunt’s farm and that he alone was battling the flames. He woke up delirious, his skin hot and itchy. Chien Shih-kuang plastered a five-pointed leaf on Chen Pan’s forehead with a few drops of a caustic liquid. When his fever broke, Chen Pan tried to pay the doctor with one of his precious Mexican coins, but Chien Shih-kuang refused it. (Years later, Chen Pan would learn that the herbalist had married a Spanish heiress in Avila and generously cured the poor.)

  But not even Chien Shih-kuang could save the suicides. Chen Pan counted six altogether. After the melon-grower, another man jumped into the sea. One more poisoned himself with stolen opium. A boy, no older than fifteen, passed his days and nights in tears. He confided to Chen Pan that he was in great grief over having been decoyed on board. “I’m the only child of my parents!” he cried before thrusting a sharpened chopstick into his ear. In this way he stopped his regretting.

  A native of K—— hanged himself with strips of torn clothing deep in the ship’s hull. (The guards had beaten him savagely for siphoning rainwater from their private barrels.) Chen Pan thought his swaying sounded like the slow tearing of silk. With the winds stiff and the sea wide all around, he asked himself why someone would choose to die so confined and without air. Chen Pan wasn’t certain what made a man ultimately want to live. He only knew that he would survive unless somebody managed to kill him.

  The night the Wong brothers died, a squall engulfed the sea. The ship creaked and groaned like a sick man. The storm ripped off a mast and tossed two officers overboard. The men feared that the brothers’ ghosts had cursed the ship, that they were causing the thunder and lightning, the wind from eight directions, the waves as high as the Buddha’s temples. But by morning the sea was calm.

  At noon, a pair of whales was spotted off the Cape of Good Hope. Chen Pan clambered to the deck to see the breaching beasts. “Maybe we should kill them and get some fresh meat,” the lazy-eyed Wu Yao suggested. Chen Pan looked at him incredulously. It was obvious that this city boy had never caught so much as a pond carp.

  The rumors spread with every day at sea. A bankrupt tailor pieced most of the gossip together, all the while quoting ancient sayings. Caged birds miss their home forest. Pooled fish long for the deep. Chen Pan listened closely to the tailor, but he didn’t circulate the man’s tidings: that their ship was headed for the Philippines; that every last man on board would be killed there, heart scooped from his chest; that they’d be sold to cannibals who savored yellow flesh.

  There was talk of mutiny. Should they behead the captain and crew? Set fire to the vessel? Reverse their course to China? Chen Pan knew there were men on board fit for murder, experienced warriors who’d fought the British barbarians. Arrow-scarred, they’d been dragged from their prison cells to the ship. But the ones who talked loudest were most filled with hot air.

  Chen Pan grew increasingly regretful. Had he deceived himself with his own grand dreams? How could he go home poorer than when he’d left? (Already, he imagined his mother’s rebukes.) He tried to concentrate on his return to China a few years hence. A procession of men would follow him, triumphant in his sedan chair, carrying a hundred chests of princely gifts on their shoulders. Enough silk for three generations. New harnesses for the village horses. Countless jars of turtle eggs pickled in foreign wines. The villagers would gather around him, paying him the respect in life that his father had achieved only in death.

  Because the days were long and the men so constricted, they entertained each other with stories about the tallest men who ever lived. Chung Lu-yüan, who was fond of lantern riddles, reported of a man who, sitting down, was as big as a mountain and could dam the course of a river with his ass. Hsieh Shuang-chi, a stevedore who was tricked on board by his greedy brother-in-law, told of a giant who drank a thousand gallons of celestial dew for his breakfast.

  Chen Pan retold the jokes he’d learned from his beloved great-aunt. His favorite was the one about the evil warlord who’d had the length of his penis extended with a baby elephant’s trunk. Everything went well for the warlord, Chen Pan said, until the day he passed a peanut vendor in the street.

  There was also a dwarf on board who could imitate perfectly the sounds of a cassia-wood harp. His name was Yang Shi-fêng, and he sang of his land, where the tallest men grew to no more than three feet. In former times, he said, his countrymen had been sent as jesters and slaves to the Imperial Court. Then Yang Cheng came to govern the land of the dwarves and convinced the Emperor to annul his cruel trade. To this day every male born in T—— has Yang in his name.

  Others recounted the tale of the impudent Monkey King. Entrusted with the job of guarding the Immortals’ heavenly peaches, the Monkey King heartily partook of them instead. One transgression followed another, but none of the Jade Emperor’s emissaries could catch the fearless simian. Finally, the Buddha himself cast a powerful spell that sealed the monkey under a mountain for five hundred years.

  On a nearby bunk, a pig breeder from N—— reminded Chen Pan of his father. His hair fluttered with unruly tufts, no matter that the air was perfectly still. The pig breeder shared the last of his wife’s pickled cabbage with Chen Pan. The taste made them both homesick. Chen Pan recalled the long summer afternoons his father had read poems to him, their plows left untouched in the shed. Before long the cicadas would sing, signaling the onset of autumn.

  These lovely seasons and fragrant years falling Lonely away—we share such emptiness here

  When Chen Pan was thirteen, bandits had murdered his father for protesting the rape of the watercarrier’s daughter. She was only ten, pretty and dull, and willingly had shown the bandits inside her neighbor’s granary. Father’s legend swelled and the villagers recounted his heroism, but Mother disputed their accolades. “What father leaves his children nothing but his good reputation to eat?” She scolded her sons to learn this lesson: “Avert your eyes to the sorrows of others and keep your own plates full!”

  After three months at sea, Chen Pan’s arms and legs grew soft and white as the flesh of the rich women he’d glimpsed in Amoy. Often he fantasized about these women, inhaled the scent of their lacquered hair, slowly dared to love them. He recalled the tales of the women of the old Imperial Court, who were protected by the Emperor’s purple-robed eunuchs. Alluring women swathed in furs and jade, their gauze-silk sleeves blooming like orchids. Delicate women who drank only camel-pad broth and nibbled on rare winter fruit to maintain their complexions. Women best admired from afar, like the mountain mist.

  Sometimes the men spoke wistfully of the roadside flowers who awaited them in Cuba, easy amber-colored whores who o
pened their legs for their own pleasure, expecting nothing in return. For all that it had cost him, Chen Pan couldn’t remember his one night with the dancing girl in Amoy. There were only the memories of his mournful wife.

  The ship passed through the Straits of Sunda without incident, then followed the verdant curve of Africa before veering west across the Atlantic. In St. Helena they stopped for fresh water, continuing on to Ascension, Cayenne, the Barbadian coast, and Trinidad. Chen Pan heard the crew announcing each port of call, but the longer he remained on board, the farther away Cuba seemed. Could his eight years of servitude have elapsed already?

  When the ship finally reached Regla, across the bay from Havana, Chen Pan climbed to the top deck to get a better view. It was a hot, sunny morning, and the city looked like a fancy seashell in the distance, smooth pink and white. A brisk wind stirred the fronds of the palms. The water shone so blue it hurt his eyes to stare at it. When Chen Pan tried to stand on the dock, his legs slid out from under him. Others fell, too. Together, he and his shipmates looked like a spilled barrel of crabs.

  The men were ordered to peel off their filthy rags and were given fresh clothes to present themselves to the Cubans. But there was no mistaking their wretchedness: bones jutted from their cheeks; sores cankered their flesh. Not even a strict regimen of fox-glove could have improved their appearance. The recruits were rounded up in groups of sixty—wood haulers and barbers, shoemakers, fishermen, farmers— then parceled out in smaller groups to the waiting landowners.

  A dozen Cubans on horseback, armed with whips, led the men like a herd of cattle to the barracón to be sold. Inside, Chen Pan was forced to strip and be examined for strength, like horses or oxen that were for sale in the country districts of China. Chen Pan burned red with shame, but he didn’t complain. Here he could no longer rely on the known ways. Who was he now without his country?

  One hundred fifty pesos was the going rate for a healthy chino. A Spanish landowner paid two hundred for him, probably on account of his height. His father had taught him that if you knew the name of a demon, it had no power to harm you. Quickly, Chen Pan asked one of the riders for the name of his buyer. Don Urbano Bruzón de Peñalves. How would he ever remember that?

  Several landowners tried to cut off the queues of their hires. Those who protested were beaten. Chen Pan was relieved that his employer didn’t insist upon this. Now there was no question of his purpose in Cuba. He was there to cut sugarcane. All of them were. Chinos. Asiáticos. Culís. Later, there would be other jobs working on the railroads or in the copper mines of El Cobre, five hundred miles away. But for now what the Cubans wanted most were strong backs for their fields.

  Vanishing Smoke

  CENTRAL CUBA (1857–1860)

  Chen Pan arrived at La Amada plantation in time for the sugar harvest. He was thrown together with slaves from Africa, given a flat, straight blade to cut the sugarcane. The stalks were hard, like wood, but fibrous and tougher to chop. Clumps of dust shook loose in his face. Blisters sprouted like toadstools on his palms. Nets of iridescent flies settled on his skin as he worked, as he inhaled again and again the yellow-green fumes of the cane.

  The heat began before dawn and persisted long after sundown. Chen Pan strained his back from all the bending. He tripped on lizards the width of his fist. A slip of his machete opened a wound in his shin that took many weeks to heal. The growing lines of oxcarts sagged under the weight of all the cane. Still, the work didn’t stop.

  The African slaves steadily slashed their rows of sugarcane. Whoosh-whoosh-whack. Three quick blows was all it took for them to strip the cane and leave an inch of stalk in the ground. Chen Pan had never seen men like this. Twice as wide as him, with thighs thick as oaks. Teeth that could grind his bones. Others as tall as two Chinese, with notched spines he could climb like a pine.

  The Africans’ skin seemed to darken the fields— reddish black skin or blue-black skin or skin brown as bark that gave off a smell of the woods. Most of the slaves had a spiderweb of scars on their backs, or strips of pink flesh still raw from the overseer’s whip. Chen Pan watched a slave catch honeybees with his tongue, swallowing them like a bear. He claimed they didn’t even sting.

  The men came from places Chen Pan hadn’t heard of: Mandinga, Arará, Carabalí. In China, no one would believe such men could exist.

  From his first hour in the fields, it was clear to Chen Pan that he was in Cuba not as a hired worker but as a slave, no different from the Africans. That he’d been tricked into signing his life away. At night, his muscles burned with the day’s work, but he slept only fitfully. The same questions tormented him. How would he ever return to his village? Build the river house on stilts? Restore his father’s good name?

  The slave quarters were a fetid honeycomb of rotting wood—dirt and stink, rats and lice aplenty, nothing freshly green. The air quivered with mosquitoes. Meager fires in the courtyard cooked sweet potatoes, plantains, and malanga for dinner, giving off sparks and a starch-violet smoke. Rooms were filth holes with hard planks or hammocks for beds. A miserable guard in a grillwork lookout had the only key. The mayoral lived nearby with his fortress of firearms.

  A few old hags did the washing and cooking, tended a dusty row or two of tubers. Chen Pan’s shipmates began growing their own vegetables from the seeds they’d brought from home: bitter melon, squash, white cabbage, eggplant, bok choy. One night, a chef from Canton made a bird’s nest soup so delicious it made several men cry for their mothers.

  After dark, no lights were permitted in the barracón, so the slaves kept fireflies in tiny twig cages. Sometimes a homesick slave sang a song from his village, monotonous and sad, his words absorbed by the steady night-grinding of crickets. The restless ones spent hours pulling ticks from their skin. Men and women alike smoked cigars of wild tobacco to ward off evil. Because evil, they said, hung everywhere.

  Talk was as rife as the vermin in the barracón. Chen Pan couldn’t follow most of the stories, but what he understood, or thought he understood, unsettled him. Giant chameleons whose bite caused madness? Island snakes faster than full-trotting pigs? Scarlet vipers that turned themselves to hoops, tails in their mouths, and chased their victims to collapsing? The slaves spoke reverentially of a Yoruban girl who had bought her freedom by carving tortoiseshell combs. Everyone dreamed of this, to secure enough money to set himself free.

  Sometimes an African hanged himself from the mahogany tree wearing his Sunday rags. The bozales, the newly arrived Africans, were especially prone to suicide. They threw themselves into the well or the boiling sugar cauldrons, swallowed mouthfuls of dirt, or suffocated themselves with their own tongues. On the plantation, there were many ways to die. The stuttering woodcutter from D—— hanged himself on the Africans’ tree after a beating left him bent in two. Word spread on the plantation that even mild reprimands to los chinos could be disastrous to the master’s investment.

  At first, Chen Pan had trouble understanding anyone. Spanish sounded like so much noise to him. Firecrackers set off on New Year’s Day. There was no bend in the sounds, no ups or downs, just rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Like that. Tra-ba-jo, tra-ba-jo. He soon learned that he didn’t need to know much more than that. Sometimes the Africans mixed in their own tribal languages. Abakuá. Lucumí.

  Chen Pan liked the Africans. They showed him how to swing the machete, shared the yams they roasted in ashes. Cabeza de Piña, who could knock men senseless with a butt of his head, took an interest in Chen Pan and protected him like a brother. He called Chen Pan “Flecha,” or arrow, on account of his long, straight spine. Cabeza said that Chen Pan, like him, was a son of the God of Fire.

  In turn, Chen Pan taught his friend Chinese exercises to begin his day, to gather energy from the heavens to strengthen his body.

  The other Chinese ridiculed Chen Pan. They said they wanted nothing to do with the Africans. They said the black men were liars, that they stank like monkeys and stole their food. But Chen Pan paid them no mind.

 
Everyone, Chinese and African alike, agreed on one thing: their hatred for the overseer, a burly pig of a criollo they called El Bigote for the mustache he wore like a door handle. Who did he imagine himself on that tired mare, his whip and pistol at the ready, his top boots muddy in the midday sun? Each time the master rode by to inspect the fields, El Bigote unctuously stammered: “Sí, Señor. No, Señor. A sus órdenes, Señor.”

  One day, El Bigote viciously whipped Chen Pan for telling one of his great-aunt’s jokes (about a goatherd’s first woman) that had made the men laugh so hard they dropped their machetes. “Baaaa-baaaa!” Chen Pan was still bleating when the lashes stripped the shirt off his back, leaving a lattice of blood. For many nights afterward, Chen Pan nursed his wounds with the Africans’ healing leaves and planned his reprisal.

  The flogging was not Chen Pan’s last. For him and the other men, the whip cracked for any small wrong— if they slowed down or spoke their own language or dared to protest. Twenty lashes for outright defiance. Thirty more if the offender persisted. After that, it was the shackles for two months or working fettered in the fields.

  For Chen Pan, the silence was worse than the sting of the whip. He felt his unspoken words festering inside him, ordinary words like “sun” and “face” and “tree.” Or snatches of poems he longed to shout out loud, like the one about Lady Xi. Hundreds of years ago—Chen Pan heard his father’s voice reciting it— the King of Chu defeated the Ruler of Xi and took his wife in the spoils of war.

  No present royal favour could efface The memory of the love that once she knew Seeing a flower filled her eyes with tears She did not speak a word to the King of Chu

  Now and then a breeze blew through the sugarcane fields, carrying a scent of jasmine or heliotrope. This heartened Chen Pan. No matter that he was stuck on this devil island surrounded by mangroves and fleshhungry sharks, that his arm often dropped in mid-swing from pure exhaustion. He imagined the breezes as fresh breaths from the sea, coaxing boats along the horizon, their sails puffed up and purposeful.