Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  Nai-nai lets us try on the silk shawls embroidered with dragons, phoenixes, and butterflies. “You girls so big,” she mourns, measuring with her hands the breadth of my shoulders as I stand before the dresser mirror. “Your mother big too.” Even Marty can’t fit her feet into the black satin slippers, so tiny they’re almost round, stacked neatly in a bottom drawer. My grandmother keeps her jewelry tucked into the toes of the slippers. Mostly earrings, heavy gems in elaborate gold and silver settings, although I’ve never seen her wear anything but plain gold hoops.

  She shows us photographs of our parents’ wedding. “Handsome couple,” she says. My mother doesn’t look too different, except for more makeup and wavy hair, but my father is unrecognizable. The man in the picture has dark, thick hair and a smooth confident face, as if nothing bad had ever happened to him.

  At the wedding my grandmother is wearing a tight high-necked silk gown from her singing days, a gardenia pinned at the breast.

  “Why didn’t you have an orchid?” I ask and she shakes her head.

  “Some flowers for youth only,” she says.

  From the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room Nai-nai takes out an old book called A Dream of Red Mansions. We can’t read it, it’s in Chinese, but my grandmother shows us the color plates beneath their crumbling tissue. Princes and princesses wear elaborate headdresses like little Christmas trees, and flowing robes of turquoise and crimson sweep over their feet so that it looks as if they are floating from courtyard to courtyard.

  Marty points out that the princesses have their hair loose.

  “They’re royalty,” Nai-nai explains. “They have servants to comb.”

  My hair is as long as the princesses’ but I am not allowed to wear it loose except at night. Nai-nai washes it for me in the kitchen sink. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she says the first time because I’m shivering so much. I force myself to stand very still, although I get a crick in my neck and the water from the spray nozzle tickles. “In China, now, it’s not the style for girls have long hair like this,” my grandmother tells me. “Everyone the same, short, like your sister.”

  Once, after my hair has dried enough to brush out, Nai-nai puts it up into a bun like hers. I watch her in the dresser mirror, trying to memorize the motions, but my grandmother is too fast. When she’s done she gives me the hand mirror so that I can examine the back of my head. I see that she has anchored the bun with a single pale green hairpin, like an arrow through a valentine.

  “It’s jade,” my grandmother says, patting my shoulder. “You keep.”

  People ask about Connecticut: how’s school there, do you like your teachers, who are your friends, and I lie, like I did about the seals in Monterey. I tell them I skipped two grades. I tell them there’s a girl in my class who got pregnant and kicked out of school. If my sister happens to overhear she just looks at me with a frown.

  I feel like I’ve been here forever in my grandmother’s house, among these wide streets, with flowers crawling over the weather-beaten picket fences that separate the yards, the salt smell in the air, especially strong in the mornings when we go grocery shopping. It’s Marty who counts off the days on the opera lady calendar hanging on the refrigerator in Nai-nai’s kitchen, who starts saving shells in a plastic bread bag to take back to Connecticut.

  “Don’t you remember when David Katz fell off his bike and broke his arm?” she prods me. “Or when Mrs. Augustine gave me detention?”

  “No,” I say.

  The Nancy Drew girl and I start a magazine about our street—she does the writing and I draw the illustrations out on the picnic table in Nai-nai’s backyard. “So talented,” my grandmother says. We show it to the two teenage girls, who say, “Fantabulous” and giggle at the picture I’ve drawn of them, in miniskirts and gold chain belts. My sister scowls and bounces the kickball so hard against the foundation of Nai-nai’s house that it leaves a black scar.

  I draw other things too that I don’t show anyone, not even Marty. If they were to find them and ask, I would tell them that this is Monkey King, this is his tail, this is the stake through his heart and the blood pouring out. But no one finds them. I do my drawings secretly, in the morning before Nai-nai comes in and my sister is still asleep, and afterward I rip them up into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet.

  The Monkey King is crafty, my mother said. Because he is a god, he knows everything, but he never tells it unless he has to.

  Almost every day, postcards arrive: a Chinese cabbage made of jade sitting on an ivory stand in a glass case, a stone lioness with curly hair and a cub under one paw, red and black buildings with winglike roofs stacked on top of one another. On the back are messages from our mother in her angular printing: “Today we go to museum” or “Last night we have dinner with my cousins, there were nine courses and cherry soup for dessert.”

  “Relatives,” Nai-nai sighs. “So many Chinese relatives.”

  Late one evening the phone rings and in the kitchen I can hear Nai-nai speaking loudly in Shanghainese, her telephone voice. She shouts for us to come. “Your ma-ma and ba-ba, hurry, hurry.”

  It’s the next morning there, Ma tells me. Her voice sounds so close by, I suspect a trick, until my mother says it is 105 degrees outside and they have to sleep underneath mosquito netting. Then I can imagine so much blistering sun, a humid hotel room with a fan on the ceiling, the pedicabs Nai-nai has described clattering by the window.

  Marty gets on and tells about the beach, about the school of dead flounder we found washed up the last time we went. She talks fast, kicking the rungs of the chair, biting her knuckles the way she does when she’s excited.

  She hands the phone back to me.

  “Hello, Sally, it’s your daddy.”

  “Hi, Daddy.” My voice sounds creaky. I try to swallow, and I can’t.

  “You reading a lot of books?”

  “Yes,” I say. I don’t tell him it’s mostly Nancy Drew.

  “When we get back, you tell me about them, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  My mother again. “Sally, remember you’re the elder. Be sure you help your Nai-nai. I count on you.”

  “Okay, Ma.”

  Our grandmother makes us sit in the living room after dinner instead of going out to play. I look at National Geographic, but even leopards can’t hold my interest. I imagine announcing to my parents: “I’m not going back. I’m going to stay here with Nai-nai. I can go to school in San Diego.”

  The doorbell rings and there is Ma in a pastel-striped dress, pale, but not so pale as Nai-nai. Her hair is longer and straighter than I remember.

  My sister is tearing over for a hug.

  “You girls good? You’re not too much of a bother to your Nai-nai?”

  “Say hello to your ma-ma,” Nai-nai whispers to me. I can’t move, although I feel my eyes filling with baby tears. I watch my sister, who is now pulling at my mother’s skirt and clamoring, “What did you bring back for us?” Now here is Daddy in his summer clothes—white short-sleeved shirt, khaki trousers—ducking his head in the doorway of the tiny house. It feels like when I had pneumonia: opening my eyes midmorning and the room was much too bright.

  I can’t look at him. But he is not paying attention to me. “Not good manners,” he scolds Marty, who has climbed on top of an ottoman and is pulling up the leg of her shorts to show Ma a scab.

  My mother makes a big fuss over Nai-nai, making her sit down, bringing her a new cup of tea, although the one she has is still hot. Our grandmother gets her present first, a small package all wrapped up in white tissue paper. It contains what looks like several enormous pieces of gingerroot.

  “Life-giving force,” Daddy says grandly.

  Nai-nai nods in a dignified way.

  “You make tea with this, you feel strong,” my mother explains to us.

  My sister and I each receive a fine gold chain with a pendant made of a stone covered in gold filigree to resemble an animal: Marty’s is an amber butt
erfly, mine a jade turtle. In addition, Marty is given a long slender box with Chinese characters on it which turns out to contain a wooden flute. She immediately starts puffing, but only a tortured rasp emerges. Ma demonstrates how to hold it, spreading my sister’s small fingers over the holes, showing her how to make her lips into a kiss and direct a tight stream of air across the mouthpiece. She still can’t get the hang of it.

  The flute should have gone to me. I know I could play it.

  My other present is a carved wooden horse just about the size of my hand, dark and smooth and long-legged with bulging eyes and bared teeth. Holding it up to the light, I see how the artist has let the grain of the wood suggest the curved muscles of the horse’s shoulders and flanks.

  “Your daddy pick this out,” my mother says. “Extra special, for your birthday.”

  “Antique,” my father adds, the first word he’s spoken directly to me.

  I don’t dare look up, even though what I want to do is give it back, tell them that I hate it. But that would make me seem spoiled, and Nai-nai is sitting across the room beaming.

  I don’t thank Daddy though. And in the commotion of Marty trying to learn to play the flute, no one seems to notice.

  Later, in bed, when everyone else is asleep, after I have tucked Piggy in beside me, I reach under my pillow and take out the hairpin Nai-nai gave me. Even as a child, I know it’s a much finer jade than my turtle. The weight of it sits cold in the palm of my hand, and lying there in the dark, I think that it’s as cold as the ocean in Monterey where I swam with the seals. I can see their gray-blue bodies gleaming in the water above, through the fractured sunlight on the waves. Once in a while they brush up against me, sleek dark flesh, a caress as gentle and unthinking as a breath. I am not afraid. Under here, I can hold my breath forever, and the cold does not bother me.

  11

  It’s fall. I’ve just started third grade. After school it’s still light enough to play outside until dinner. When Daddy asks us if we’ve done our homework we lie and say we don’t have any yet.

  There’s always someone to play with. Coram Drive is in a Catholic parish, St. Cecilia’s, and almost every house on the block has children. The Cuddys, two houses down from us, already have five, one right after the other, and their mother is always pregnant. In the summer the older ones sleep on the screened porch. All the names on the mailboxes are Irish and Italian till you get to the dead end, and there are the Wangs and the Katzes. Mr. Katz owns a bakery in Cheshire, a couple of towns over, and every dawn we hear his truck chugging out of the driveway. My father says that Jews are almost as smart as Chinese.

  The Katz kids are our best friends in the neighborhood, although for a while my parents wouldn’t let us play with them because of what happened last year.

  David Katz is two years older than me, the bully of the block. He’s big for his age, chunky, walks with a swagger. One Fourth of July he blew off the tip of his thumb with an M-80 and had to be rushed to the emergency room in his father’s truck. The thumb grew back like a golf club, which just made him scarier, and the way he wears his hair, in a marine-style crewcut, doesn’t help. My mother is the only parent on Coram Drive who is not afraid of him.

  “David, how you ever going to find a wife, you have such bad manners? I know you have a heart of gold, but nobody else knows. Have another plum candy, it’s good for blood circulating.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Wang,” David mumbles to my mother. I think in a weird way he likes her.

  Darcy Katz is my age, lank-haired and freckled and as skinny as a rail. She does everything Marty and I tell her to, including peeing into a hole we dig under the swing set in our backyard. But no matter what she does, the skirts of her smocked flowered dresses stay perfect starched bells over her knobby knees. Although Darcy and I are in the same grade, I am in the A class and she is in C. Despite what my father says, Darcy is not very smart. She likes me because I draw pictures for her—horses, kittens, pretty white-girl faces with long lashes and pouty lips—and doesn’t even mind when I make a caricature of her father with a big white chef’s hat on. She has a giggle that starts shyly and then turns into an uncontrollable stream, like her peeing.

  Our backyard has the swings, but the Katzes have a stagnant little pond that Darcy claims holds goldfish, although we’ve never seen any. Sometimes when the four of us are hanging out back there, the bad boys come up to the wire fence that separates the Katzes’ yard from the back lots, where they live. They holler at us, make machine-gun noises.

  David screams: “Your mother eats shit!”

  What I’m thinking is that it’s no sweat to be Jewish. Although they attend Hebrew school, unable to wheedle their parents out of it like Marty and I did with Chinese school, David and Darcy with their fair skin and freckles blend in with the other kids. Plus their parents speak perfect English.

  We climb over the fence and swipe things from the bad boys’ backyards: a garden hose, crabapples, a new baseball glove left lying in the grass. Once we fill an old rice sack with rocks and throw them against someone’s double basement doors until a window flies open.

  The bad boys get back at us by ripping a hole in the Katzes’ fence and pouring detergent into the goldfish pond. They run through our backyard, deliberately trampling the violet bed and Ma’s tomato plants. Daddy leans out the back door screeching: “I call your parents! I know who you are!”

  “You old chink!” they yell, and run away, laughing their heads off. They know he’s chicken, that he’ll never carry out his threat.

  On the refrigerator my father tapes up a page from a magazine that shows a sad-looking black boy leaning up against a brick wall. Underneath it says: “He hasn’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”

  Daddy tells Marty and me: “That’s what Americans think of us. “

  “We’re American,” I say.

  “You are American citizen. In your heart you are a Chinese.”

  I’m not listening. I’ve learned not to listen to my father. What I secretly know is that I am the most American kid I have ever met. In second grade when Mrs. Augustine has the whole class write down the Pledge of Allegiance from memory I’m the only one who gets every word correct. I pretend I am Natalie Wood in West Side Story. She is really American, my mother says, only playing the part of a foreigner.

  But this doesn’t solve the problem of eyes. The bad boys, sometimes kids we don’t know at school, jump out at us, pulling the corners of their own eyes back toward their temples. “Ching chong Chinaman.”

  Everyone loves Chinese hair. Mrs. Augustine tells my mother that she looks out over the second grade and sees the sun shining off my sister’s pixie. “Just like an angel, that one.”

  Eyes are a different story. Of course the best type to have are round and as large as possible. Even Ma thinks so. By her bed she keeps stacks of Chinese magazines with movie stars, and they all have great big almond eyes, outlined in black, with fluttery lashes. Some Chinese people, like our Nai-nai, have naturally Western-looking eyes, with double eyelids, but most have a single lid, which makes the eye look flat and slanty. Daddy has a single lid, though his eyes are big. Even Ma, who was a beauty in Shanghai, has single lids. She tells us that in Japan they have an operation where they take skin off your thigh to give you double eyelids.

  “You have single,” she announces to me. Marty she studies with more attention. “Too early to tell,” she concludes. “You could be double when you grow up.”

  Ma cuts our eyelashes to make them grow fuller. The stubble hurts every time we blink, and Marty gets an infection. Finally the school nurse writes a note to our mother telling her that it’s dangerous, so she stops.

  “Foolish,” Daddy says to Ma. “Why you want them to look cheap?” He points at me. “She has natural beauty, like all unmarried Chinese girl.”

  The way he says it makes me feel ugly.

  At breakfast when Ma makes my braids she complains about the knots. “What’s the matter with you, Sal-lee? Such a big mess! Y
ou look at that Darcy, always so neat.” I don’t say anything.

  Daddy is reading a newspaper, an American one, the New Haven Register.

  “You don’t eat,” Ma says to me. Usually it’s my sister who’s the finicky one; I have a big appetite, a Chinese appetite.

  When we come home from school Ma is out in the backyard raking. “Help your mother,” Daddy says, so my sister and I change into our play clothes and go join her. The metal prongs of the rake scrape the grass, turning up curled bewildered worms. My sister says they make her want to throw up.

  By the stone fireplace we make two huge mounds of leaves: spiky brittle brown oak, red maple with delicate points, yellow almond-shaped dogwood. I’m almost sorry we have to burn them. Our mother feeds armfuls to the fire while my sister and I watch.

  Ma goes in to start dinner. It’s almost dusk, and Marty and I light the ends of twigs and twirl them to make orange figure eights. My sister’s hair flies up behind the collar of her gold corduroy jacket as she screams: “Look at mine, look at mine!” Waving our sticks, we jump onto the picnic table bench and then onto the table itself, leaping down so it gives us shocks in our ankles, then hurtle over the springy grass to the swing set. It’s then that I spot it, the biggest worm I’ve ever seen, curled up under one of the swings. I stoop down and nudge it onto my twig with my finger. It doesn’t really want to move, but I angle the stick to force it.

  “What’s that?” Marty demands, nosy as usual.

  I hold up the stick and my sister shrieks and takes off, streaking along the fence that separates the Katzes’ backyard from ours. I chase her, twig held up like the Statue of Liberty’s torch. “Baby! Baby! It’s just a worm!” She’s close enough so I can hear her panting, or sobbing, I can’t tell which.

  “Get that away from me!”

  On the patch of ground that is our vegetable garden in the summer, my sister trips on a weed and falls sprawling. I pretend not to see and keep running, past her, back toward the piles of leaves. By the dying fire, I see that the worm is gone, and I toss the twig away. I fling myself onto one of the piles spread-eagled and lie there, breathing hard, inhaling the sweet dusky smell.