Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  I’d just been moved up to Status Four, which meant I could go anywhere on the grounds by myself. It was only eight-thirty, plenty of time for a walk before lights out. I went upstairs to my room and grabbed a jacket. On the way out the door I remembered Nai-nai’s hairpin. I found it in my bag and slipped it into my inside pocket.

  The lake was absolutely still. It was a mild, clear night. I lay down on one of the benches and looked across the water to where the willows poured down in Gothic arches. They were white, ghostly, in the light from the parking lot. Around me the shapes of the buildings lay cozy and familiar: the A-frame dining room that had so disoriented me the first night, the gym, the barrackslike adolescent unit, all those Colonial houses, including the admitting ward.

  I took the hairpin out and laid it against my cheek. It was much colder than the air, colder than anything alive.

  I was ready to leave.

  In eighth grade, I had finally announced to my mother that I didn’t want to take piano lessons anymore.

  She gave me a lecture on how important it was to have a music background.

  “You don’t have one,” I said. “Nai-nai didn’t make you sing.”

  Ma told me I was selfish.

  “You never get a husband, Sally. You don’t know how to give in. You don’t know how to love like a wife has to love.”

  I guess she’d know.

  There were so many tragedies. At Willowridge, after a while you got numb. The amazing thing was that anyone survived at all.

  The parking lot lights went off.

  The dark is kind; why should I be afraid of it? I made out the Big Dipper, easy, over the trees, and then the North Star. Part of Orion stuck up over the horizon—he was a winter constellation, and on his way out. My favorite star was the cold blue brilliant light of Vega, but I couldn’t find her, it probably wasn’t the right season. And then I saw, upside-down from how I usually did, that bold glittering W, an M now, smack in the middle of the Milky Way. Queen Cassiopeia, brighter than anyone else, and the most abstract.

  I got down off the bench and lay on my back on the wet grass and wept.

  Part Two

  8

  My mother grew up the youngest of five daughters in a wealthy Shanghai family. My grandfather was a scholar who had studied in Paris, and by the time my mother was twelve she could speak English and French as well as Mandarin, and of course the soft, slithery local dialect. Shanghainese is elegant and musical, a feminine tongue—it is to Mandarin as Portuguese is to Spanish.

  Before Communism, my mother watched her three oldest sisters get married off one by one to boys of good birth, carefully chosen by my grandparents. The year my mother turned fifteen the revolution began, and like so many of the aristocracy, the family packed up and went abroad. The Mas moved to San Diego to live with my grandmother’s cousin Su-yi. My grandfather had died in a tuberculosis epidemic, so it was only my grandmother and her two youngest daughters, Ming-yu and Bau-yu—Clear Jade and Precious Jade. They were forced to leave most of the household goods in storage. I think Nai-nai must have known that she would never see them again, for she brought all her favorite mementos with her. “So much junk,” my mother would say, rolling her eyes, when she told the story to Marty and me.

  I can picture Nai-nai, tiny even in high heels and the 1940s-style navy cinched-waist suit her Shanghai tailor had copied from French Vogue, hair swept into a bun with ivory pins making an X at her nape, gold hoops in her ears. In her youth, she’d been a well-known lieder singer, traveling to Paris and Vienna on tour, so this new port didn’t faze her. I can see her standing on the dock in San Francisco watching anxiously as they unloaded the luggage-heavy brown trunks with the family character, Ma, painted in white. Although my grandmother’s English was heavily accented, she was a mezzo-soprano after all, and she shrieked at the men as they trundled the trunks down the gangplank. “Attention! You pay attention!” The Chinese Princess, the crew had dubbed her, which mortified my mother. She and her sister stood huddled together, arms linked, as the dockworkers stared at them and joked, using words my mother didn’t recognize but knew were dirty.

  Their first year in America, Ming-yu, my Aunty Mabel, was sent east to college. My mother had to adjust to American high school by herself. Her spoken English was not up to her reading ability, and since spoken Chinese has no genders, she, he, and it were interchangeable to her. One day, from a stall in the girls’ bathroom, she heard a classmate mocking: “Mis-tah Bee-vah, she def-in-i-lih my fa-vor-ih tea-cha.”

  “They are stupid,” she raged to Nai-nai. “I read Pride and Prejudice when I was thirteen, and they cannot spell.”

  My grandmother frowned at her youngest daughter. “Eh, Bau-yu, you may be intelligent, but you don’t comb your hair properly. It’s no wonder you don’t make friends.”

  Nai-nai stayed in the guest bedroom, but my mother had to share a room with the cousin’s daughter, who was attending secretarial school and silly beyond belief. The daughter had dropped her Chinese name for an American one—Grace—and her Shanghainese was so bad that my mother was forced to converse with her in English. “She has twenty kinds of nail polish on the dresser,” my mother wrote, half in scorn, half in envy, to Aunty Mabel. As ridiculous as Grace was, however, it was she who thought to take my mother shopping for plaid dirndls and shirts with Peter Pan collars so that she could blend in better.

  Su-yi, my grandmother’s cousin, was from a different branch of the Shanghai family, one that was not as illustrious as Nai-nai’s. She was nervous having her overseas relatives staying and was always cooking, creating feasts of eight courses or more for weekday dinners. She always took care to include at least two seafood dishes, my grandmother’s favorite.

  “You don’t have to go to all this fuss,” Nai-nai would say every night when they sat down to eat.

  “No trouble, no trouble. You’re used to much better in Shanghai, I’m sure.”

  Su-yi’s husband was as quiet as a tomb. In China he had been a pediatrician. He worked very long hours at his American job, which was managing an Italian bakery, and when he was home he’d park himself in the La-Z-Boy and read Chinese magazines. When TV came the husband would watch whatever was on until he fell asleep in the recliner. After dinner my mother and Grace would sit together on the sofa behind him while Nai-nai and Su-yi argued in the kitchen about who would do the dishes.

  “You girls finish homework?” the husband would ask, without turning around.

  “Yes, Ba-ba,” Grace would answer, for both of them. My mother’s favorite was Jack Benny. The glasses and laconic delivery gave him the demeanor of a Chinese scholar, like her father. Jack Benny made her laugh, even when she didn’t get the jokes.

  By the time my mother joined her sister at Smith, she too had an American name—Bonnie. In her high school graduation photo Ma is wearing a blue-collared sailor’s dress and she brandishes her diploma, all her teeth showing in a broad American grin, hair ribbons flapping behind her. She’d worn a cap and gown like everyone else in her class, but Nai-nai thought they were ugly and made her take them off for the camera.

  Meanwhile, my Aunty Mabel had met a nice Chinese man. He’d been impossible not to notice, since he was the only other Asian in town besides old Mr. Lee, who ran the Chinese laundry. Pau-yu Wang was teaching introductory Chinese to rich white girls who still had missionary fantasies, despite the fact that China was now Communist. Being a well-brought-up Shanghai girl, my aunt hadn’t dared speak to Professor Wang her entire freshman year, and he had shown no signs of wanting to make her acquaintance. She found him uncommonly handsome—many of his students had crushes on him—although his height was disconcerting to her. The two were officially introduced at a party for foreign students, and by the time my aunt was a junior, they had progressed to meeting for tea now and then. But once my mother swept into the campus coffee shop in her powder blue cashmere sweater set, newly permed curls bouncing off her shoulders, my Aunty Mabel didn’t stand a chance.

&
nbsp; In China my parents would have been considered no match at all. Daddy was from the north, a poor farming village in Shandong province, and because he had no relatives in the States, my grandmother couldn’t check up on him. My mother teased my father about his nasal Beijing accent, and he, the intellectual, would merely smile. “Although your mother never admit,” Nai-nai told me once, “Beijing Mandarin is most exclusive, like Parisian French.”

  Nai-nai approved of my father, despite his dearth of credentials. Perhaps she was impressed by his refined air, unusual in a man of his background. Or perhaps, after marrying off three daughters, she had relaxed her standards and decided it was all right for my mother to be adventurous—they were in a new country after all.

  My parents were married in San Diego, a week after my mother’s college graduation. In the official wedding portrait, my father is standing, his boxy dark jacket a little too loose, hair slicked off his brow in a side part, not smiling exactly, but his eyes are shiny with excitement. My mother is seated in front of him. She is wonderfully pale—rice powder, Nai-nai told Marty and me—dressed in a white tailored suit to which is pinned a corsage of tiny light flowers. Her expression is haughty, even severe, gloved hands folded in her lap, white pumps pressed together. She looks decades older than the girl in the high school photograph.

  My parents got jobs teaching at the Army Languages School in Monterey, where they rented a bungalow half a mile from the Pacific Ocean. One day, smack in the middle of her morning class, while she was standing at the blackboard writing the characters for sun and moon, my mother felt deathly ill. Somehow she made it to the bell and hurried to the ladies’ room, where she was crouched over the toilet for an hour. “Every day like that for six months,” she told me. “I think I rather die than be pregnant.”

  My father was certain that their first child would be a son. It was 1958, the year of the dog, which means strong and reliable. He was so sure that when my mother went into labor he dropped her off at the hospital and then went out to buy four dozen eggs to hard-boil and dye red, as is the Chinese custom for a new baby boy. When they told him it was a girl he walked out of the hospital and got into the sky blue Pontiac my parents had just bought and made the rounds to distribute the eggs anyway. “Maybe next time,” their friends consoled him. Because my parents had not been prepared for a girl, I had no name for the first two months of my life.

  Ma is an inconsistent storyteller. Once she claimed that she and my father first set eyes on each other in San Diego, while she was still in high school, sweet sixteen, never-been-kissed. He was there for a conference and had stopped by the house to visit Aunty Mabel. When I challenged her later, she replied: “You dream this, Sally. Of course I meet your Daddy at Smith. Ask your Nai-nai.”

  But my grandmother claimed she couldn’t remember. Nai-nai wasn’t the type to sit down and relate tales, although now and then she would toss out a gem for Marty and me to ponder: “Did you know your mother buy her wedding outfit off the rack?”

  In contrast, my father’s frequent stories of childhood were ruthlessly unvarying. Each one was designed as a lesson to Marty and me—study hard, respect your elders, clean your rice bowl.

  The house where Daddy was born had dirt floors and the family drank hot water because they couldn’t afford tea leaves. My father was the middle child, sandwiched between two sisters. His parents both died shortly after their third child was born and the orphans were shuffled from relative to relative, a miserable existence. Especially for my father, who was always ailing; there wasn’t a disease you could name that he hadn’t suffered: malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, rheumatic fever.

  In all those strange poor beds he read voraciously, everything from the classics teachers would lend him to the big-city newspapers visitors would bring to the village. And Western science textbooks so beat-up their covers were gone. At sixteen, in the hospital recovering from influenza, he composed a five-page essay on the new role of technology in China. It won him first prize in a provincewide contest and brought him to the attention of an American missionary couple stationed in Beijing. They arranged for him to study in the United States after he had gotten his undergraduate degree.

  What seduced my father above all else was the elegant metaphor of physics, which had a language of its own so that no matter where in the world he went he’d find someone else who could speak it. He’d be respected, even if his English wasn’t perfect. So there he was at Berkeley, fresh off the boat, knowing no one, with only a single change of clothing and ten dollars spending money a week. For the first time in his life Daddy felt at home, not in the shabby off-campus apartment he shared with two other male grad students, a Czech and a Russian, but in the chalk- and dust-smelling physics lab, surrounded by giant blackboards dancing with equations he could not only understand but elaborate on. Out of the lab, his life felt more precarious than ever, but if it were possible for my father to be happy, he was happy then.

  Happiness precedes loss. This is the main lesson I have learned from my father. When the telegram arrived, Daddy knew at once that it meant the end of his dream. His sponsors had been killed in a car accident. Good-hearted as they were, they’d never changed their will and everything went to a son who lived in Minneapolis. The son did not return my father’s phone calls or letters. As a stranded student my father could stay in America, but he had to support himself. The lawyer who was handling his sponsors’ estate wangled an interview for a teaching post, beginning Chinese, no experience needed, at a prestigious women’s college on the East Coast. My father accepted the job as soon as it was offered. He had nowhere else to go.

  If the sponsors hadn’t died. If my father had been more enterprising and hunted around for new benefactors instead of accepting a second-rate fate. Why did he give up? Daddy gave no clues, he never talked about his early life in America. I suspect that it was humiliating in a way that my mother, who was thirteen years younger with her family to shield her, had never experienced. Daddy’s skin stayed as white as if he were still starving, unlike my mother, whose pallor was milk with a tinge of cream, the complexion of a Chinese beauty.

  But my father, even in his ghostliness, still turned the heads of women on the street. Had he been bolder he could have courted one of his students, the ones who sat in the front row mesmerized by his full mouth as he formed each precise syllable. But I know my father did not find those girls beautiful. Too big and eager and uncontained, with their heavy breasts and muscled calves and light frivolous hair. The two Ma sisters with their aristocratic looks must have felt like a dream to him. Especially my mother, whose formidable will was hidden by a kind of vivacious delicacy.

  It is true that I resemble my father, especially as I get older, except for my eyes, which Nai-nai said were my maternal grandfather’s. But what was striking in Daddy feels cumbersome in me: my height, my long solemn face and full mouth, my large hands and feet. The shoe salesman would ask my size and Ma would put in: “You can see, she has enormous ones.” She once told me there might be some Manchurian or even Hakka on my father’s side. Hakkas were misfits who had no home province, big-footed because they were nomads and did so much walking.

  If I am my father’s child, then my sister is my mother’s. Born barely twelve months after me, she was named after Martha Washington, my mother’s favorite character from American history, which my parents were studying at the time to obtain their citizenship. Even as a girl my sister had an arresting face: diamond shaped, almond eyes set wide apart, a thin-lipped, stubborn mouth, Ma’s kitten chin. Typical Shanghai, my mother pointed out. Her nickname for my sister was “Mau-mau,” which means “little cat.” Marty’s official Chinese name is “Joyous Virtue” and indeed she was a sunny child, when she wasn’t having tantrums.

  “But you, you have your father’s blood,” Ma told me. “So pessimistic, those peasants.”

  And so I’d picture that melancholy running in our veins, like some rare blood disease.

  When I was four and my sister
three, Ma, who had been staying home with us, went back to teach summer school and Nai-nai moved in. It was my father who decreed that we should call my grandmother “Nai-nai,” which is the word for a father’s mother, instead of “Ha-bu,” which means mother’s mother. That way, Daddy said, she could stand for both grandmothers. Nai-nai in no way resembled the plump bespectacled grandmothers in our fairy-tale books. I remember exactly how she looked the first time we met—the cream-colored kid gloves, ivory hairpins, miniature feet in black embroidered slippers dangling daintily over the edge of the sofa. “Not bound,” she said when she caught me staring, “but still very nice.”

  I used to imagine that in China, beauty did not have a sexual connotation. If a woman was beautiful, she was beautiful like a flower or a good horse. A man wanted to write poetry about her, not to have her. My grandmother was beautiful in that way, with her pristine clothes, her long hair wound into its pincushion bun every waking hour, not a strand out of place. Her face was a perfect oval, like a cameo, her pursed lips dark red, and she had a mole on her neck that embarrassed her, to the point where she usually wore high-collared blouses. When I was older, I’d watch her hobble down the sidewalk and wonder how such a delicately made woman had survived the birth of five children.

  My grandmother liked to take walks. After lunch it was our habit to meander down to the rocky beach to feed the gulls or explore the woods across the street or my favorite: stroll two blocks over to the primary school Marty and I were still too young to attend. It was deserted for the summer and my grandmother would lift me and my sister up in turn so that we could peer through the windows. The bulletin boards and countertops were bare, the chairs upturned on top of the tables. “Next year,” Nai-nai promised me. The school was surrounded by pines, which threw cool shadows, and the ground below us was cushioned with fallen needles. My grandmother was wrong. By September we’d be in Connecticut and Nai-nai and the school in the pine grove would seem a thousand years away.