Monkey King

by Patricia Chao

  Across the yard, I can hear Marty wailing, and then the back door slams.

  “Sally, what happen?”

  Instead of answering my mother, I turn over onto my stomach and bury my face in the leaves. They are cold and itchy.

  “Sally, STAND UP. It’s dirty there. Answer me. Did you push your sister?”

  I have no words for her. I wait, counting One Mississippi Two Mississippi, until suddenly my head is jerked backward as my mother pulls me up by the braids. “You’re acting crazy,” she hisses.

  Sitting up, I watch her march across the yard to where Marty is. My sister is crying even louder than before. Ma stoops over her, asking questions. Then she picks my sister up, grabbing her under the arms and hoisting her over her shoulder like she does a bag of rice. “Sally, open the back door!”

  I can’t move. Somehow my mother manages to get the door open herself.

  I lie back into my leaf bed. The sky is now almost completely black, but the tops of the trees are blacker, like fingers reaching up. Although the fire is so low I can no longer see it, I can still smell the smoke. It feels peaceful to lie here like this. It feels safe. There are things going on in the house: Ma’s loud voice, Daddy grumbling from his chair in the living room, my sister whining. They have nothing to do with me. I feel sleepy.

  I hear the roar of the bakery truck pulling into the driveway next door, into the garage, the truck door slam. Mr. Katz is home from work. “Oh, look at the Wangs’ yard, so nice and neat,” I hear Mrs. Katz say as she opens the back door for her husband. Neither of them see me in the pile of leaves.

  I think of different animals I can be: a chipmunk, a squirrel, even a bear.

  But all I feel like is myself, a big fat human being.

  In our house the kitchen light goes on. Ma’s face is at the window, peering out. Then it disappears. The back door opens. I wait, listening to the padding footsteps across the swept grass.

  “I think your sister has sprained ankle,” she says. “I called Dr. Di Leo and he’s coming over.”

  Nothing about it being my fault, although I can’t imagine Marty not telling on me.

  “Sally, get up. Come in and eat your supper.” I sit up and rub at my face, which is wet. My mother doesn’t seem to notice. She simply stands and waits for me to get to my feet and follow her back to the house.

  My sister is careless, a tomboy, her bed has lumps after she makes it. I always take care to smooth mine out, tugging the corners so that the white chenille spread lies perfectly flat, the fringe hanging down evenly all around. My mother doesn’t notice. In fact, although Saturday is the day for changing the sheets, sometimes when I come back from school I see that she has changed my bed on a weekday. I know because Piggy is sitting smack in the middle of my pillow like a throne. I like to leave him lying down with his head propped up.

  After school I lie on my perfect bed and listen to David and Darcy calling from outside: “Oh, Sal-lee! Oh, Mar-tee!” I heard Mrs. Katz say I must be going through growing pains, that is why I am always so tired.

  My sister pushes open the door. Her ankle is completely healed now, although sometimes she stands on one foot, like a stork, to remind me. “You want to play kickball?”

  “No.”

  “David said you could be first up.”

  “I don’t want to play.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t feel well.”

  I look past her to the baby rocking chairs, to the window framed by curtains just a shade whiter than our bedspreads. The curtain borders are edged with the same lace as Raggedy Ann’s apron.

  “You are bor-ing,” Marty says to me, and slams the door on her way out. I hear that irregular clomp that means she is taking the stairs two, sometimes three at a time.

  Mrs. Lister, my third grade teacher, writes my mother a note:

  Although Sarah has always been a reserved child, for the past month or so she has been unusually withdrawn, and I’m a little concerned. When I called on her today, she put her head down on the desk and refused to answer. When I asked her if there was anything wrong at home, she said no. I suggest you make an appointment with your family doctor.

  The doctor says that I am healthy as a horse. I sit outside in the waiting room, while he talks to Ma, wishing I really had a disease. I just know she’s going to say something about waste, wasted money. But when the door to the office opens her face is normal.

  “Come on, Sally. We go home now.”

  I know for sure she’s not mad when we get to the car, because she lets me sit up in front with her. When we’re out on Whitney Avenue she begins to hum to herself—some old Chinese tune. In church Marty and I used to be embarrassed because she sang way louder than anyone else, with shakes in her voice. Then one day at coffee hour the organist came up and asked whether she wanted to join the choir. “Your mother has perfect pitch,” he told Marty and me. She didn’t join, but I noticed she sang more in the kitchen. Hymns, old-time songs like “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat.”

  “You know what this is, Sally?” she asks me now.

  “No,” I say, although it sounds familiar. Sad, like all Chinese songs.

  “It’s a folk melody called the flower drum. They made it up in China a long time ago. The empress decided that she wanted all the flowers in the summer garden to bloom, even though it was winter. So she called out all the musicians and told them to play play play until the flowers come out.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It worked. In the middle of winter, the peonies and jasmine and plum blossom, they all burst into bloom. Your Nai-nai used to sing this to me when I was a little girl.”

  We are going past Lake Whitney now, a couple of blocks before we make the turn onto Coram Drive. It’s winter, like in Ma’s story, but everything is flat gray or white—the lake water, the lone seagull huddled on the wire fencing. The gull makes me think of the ocean.

  “I wish we could visit Nai-nai,” I say.

  “Sealy,” my mother says. That was my nickname, from a long time ago, when Daddy still liked me. “You know what I think? I think we need a treat.” Instead of making the turn onto our street, we keep going straight and then turn right and head all the way up to Ridge Road.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, but my mother just smiles.

  It turns out to be Knudsen’s Dairy, where we go in the summer, on Sundays, when Daddy is in a good mood. Next to the ice cream shop is a giant milking barn, and our family usually sits on the terrace where we can watch the cows being led up the ramp. Once Mr. Knudsen, bald and pink-faced like Mr. Clean, gave us a tour of the barn. It smelled awful, like throw-up. Today Ma and I sit inside at one of the sticky yellow tables.

  “You used to have so many friends,” she says, poking at the bulb of orange sherbet in its metal flower. She always gets a different flavor, though it has to be sherbet. Sometimes I think my parents like Knudsen’s more than Marty and I do. I have a double scoop of chocolate almond fudge on a sugar cone.

  I eat and say nothing. Ma reaches over and flips one of my braids over my shoulder so I won’t get ice cream on it.

  “Remember, you always play with Darcy?”

  “Darcy’s boring.”

  “How about school? Don’t you have friends at school?”

  “Some.”

  “Why don’t you bring them home?”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Next Saturday I take you to see Mei Shie.”

  “Who?”

  “Mei Shie is special lady, can help you.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Better than a doctor. She lives in Chinatown. We go there, just you and me. No Daddy or Marty. You can wear your play clothes.”

  We take the train in and then a taxi. The place where Mei Shie lives is over a noodle shop. The downstairs foyer has pale green walls like the nurse’s room at school and the floor is dirty white tiles. As we climb the stairs skeleton cats brush against our legs.


  My Nai-nai is the only other old person I know, and the woman who opens the door doesn’t look anything like her, although she has a bun and wears the same shoes, shuffly black slippers. Big red spots bloom on her cheeks. She puts her sagging face right down in front of mine and says something in Chinese that I recognize to mean “Come in, come in,” although her voice is loud and crabby.

  The main room of the apartment is full of low, black carved furniture, and over at one end there is a beaded curtain, like they have at the Sung Trading Company. It’s dim, there don’t seem to be any windows, the only light comes from small pink glass flower lamps along one wall. The smell in the air is sweet and rotten. Ma and I sit down on a scratchy black couch and wait for the lady to bring us Chinese tea in tall glasses that have plastic webbing around the bottoms. Ma picks up her glass and takes a sip. It always embarrasses me, the way my parents slurp when they drink tea, but then the lady does the same, making an even louder noise.

  Ma and the lady are talking in Chinese, and I hear my mother tell her my Chinese name.

  “Ah,” the lady says, making a clicking sound with her teeth. She leans over to peer at me, and now I can see the wrinkles on her cheeks like spiderwebs beneath the makeup. Then she reaches across the coffee table and puts both her thumbs hard right on my eyelids and stretches them up. It feels like getting sand in my eyes at the beach. Finally she lets go and says something to my mother. Then she scuffles into the other room, through the clicking curtain.

  “Mei Shie says your energy is too yin,” Ma tells me. She lowers her voice and adds: “Mei Shie not completely Chinese, you know. Her mother is Greek.”

  The lady comes tottering back, carrying something carefully in both hands. When she gets close I see that it’s a tall glass jar with a screw-on lid, filled with some kind of murky liquid. My mother tries to help her with it, but Mei Shie nudges her away. She sets the jar down on the table in front of me and says something to my mother.

  Ma translates: “Sally, you put your hands on the lid.”

  I do as she says, and it’s just an ordinary lid, like on a peanut butter jar, only bigger.

  “Close your eyes,” Ma whispers.

  With my eyes shut, the smell in the room is worse, and my throat swells so I think I might choke. The metal of the jar lid is cool beneath my palms.

  It’s the smell. I open my eyes to dark and there’s a change in the air, a new body in the room. The bed sagging gently as someone sits down.

  In the faint light from the window I can see his outline: the long curving torso, the bulbous head set onto a thin neck, just like pictures in the book. There’s no tail, but I imagine it curled underneath like a worm.

  “Be quiet,” says Monkey King.

  Look, Marty, I want to say, but of course Monkey King is right, I am not allowed to talk. It would break the spell.

  So I lie still, as still as if I were dead. The hand, pushing up my nightgown. I can feel the ridges on his fingertips against my skin. Then my underpants are dragged down to my ankles, a flood of cold, and I think I might wet myself, but I don’t.

  Nails as rough as crab claws between my thighs. That stick he has, that he can make bigger or smaller when he feels like it. Or is it his tail? I can’t tell. Ma said it hurt like this when I was born. Like she wanted to die. Like it would never stop. It cracks my bones apart. The curtains are flapping. Go to the ceiling. But sometimes I don’t fly up there fast enough, or else drop down too soon.

  With one hand he holds my wrists together over my head, with the other he covers my mouth. He is the Monkey King, he is immortal, he cannot be stopped. Tears wet my hair, but I do not make a sound. He doesn’t need to cover my mouth, he doesn’t need to whisper that he will kill me if I say anything to Ma. He lets go of my wrists and I feel his fingers in the hair at the back of my neck. This is the sign that it is ending. The first time I thought he was throwing up, but nothing came out. When he is quiet I let my eyes fall closed.

  Now the smell is like the Katzes’ goldfish pond in the summer. I am being put back together, my underpants pulled up with the elastic making a little smack against my stomach, the skirt of the nightgown arranged over my legs again carefully, in a way I would never do myself. Like Darcy dressing her dolls.

  I hate dolls, I never owned one my entire life.

  Piggy is back in my arms.

  I open my eyes to dark.

  He is gone. I can see the fuzzy gray lump in the next bed. I can hear the staccato puffs of her breathing.

  “Mar?”

  She doesn’t answer, although I know she’s not asleep.

  “Aiih!” The lady’s voice is right in my ear and I want to wince away but I can’t, I’m being held tight around the shoulders by Ma.

  “Look, Sally,” she says.

  I’m scared to. But when I open my eyes, all I see is the old lady in a chair across from me, holding the jar in her lap.

  “This is Greek test-oil and water, the water has floated to the top,” Ma says in her storytelling voice. “Mei Shie says that someone has put a curse on you.”

  Then they are jabbering away in Chinese again, and Mei Shie gives my mother several little plastic bags. On the train ride home Ma closes her eyes and starts to snore. I take one of the plastic bags out of her carryall and examine the rust-colored powder. I know what it is even before I ask, later, at home—it’s dried blood. I don’t know how I know this. Ma will boil it in water for me to sip from a mug. It will turn my breath and sweat bitter so that the kids at school will say pee-yeww! and no one will want to stand next to me in line.

  The first night I take the potion I can still taste it in my mouth after I brush my teeth. In bed I fall asleep instantly, before my sister even, because the last thing I remember is her voice in the dark.

  It works. Monkey King never comes to my bed again.

  12

  Downstairs my parents are fighting in Chinese but the different way they talk makes it sound as if they’re speaking different languages. Ma is fast, slippery, slurry. Daddy is choppy and whiny like a baby. Marty and I listen from our bedroom. She is six and I am seven. My sister claims she understands.

  “No way,” I say.

  “He’s saying he never had a father, so he doesn’t know how to behave.”

  This is what he says to Ma after he spanks us, which he has been doing a lot lately. We are evil girls. Marty talks back and gets into fights. My trouble is what I don’t do, like going up to my room before helping Ma with the dinner dishes. Plus my sister and I are both stupid in school, Bs instead of As, Marty worse than me because she never does her homework.

  Ma scolds Daddy. “Bad for character,” she says in English. “My father hit me and it didn’t make me study more.”

  No matter how hard our father hits us, though, he can’t make us cry. I can tell by his face just how much he hates that I can get to my feet, pull my skirt down, and walk upstairs like nothing happened. Marty used to cry, but I have taught her not to. Now my sister and I show each other our bruises and agree that he is a weakling.

  I know what they are fighting about now. My hair. Ma wants to cut it, Daddy says no.

  My father’s voice gets higher, louder, filling my head no matter how hard I press my palms against my ears. He is cursing in Chinese, peasant curses. Marty and I call it his murder voice.

  Ma’s voice stays low and cool, like he could shout all night and she wouldn’t care. Still, Daddy will win the argument, like he always does. I will have two long braids until I die.

  Our parents teach Chinese to Yale students but not to us, so although we understand a little we can’t speak it. For a couple of months we have to take lessons on Saturday mornings in the living room behind the Sung Trading Company. Aunty Lilah—she and Uncle Frank own the store—is our teacher. She holds up cards with magazine pictures pasted on them: chair, table, cat. Yizhi, zhuozi, mau.

  After our lesson we go out to the store to wait for Ma. We are supposed to be nice to Mimi Sung, who is our age, but
I can never think of a thing to say to that round, beaming face behind the cash register.

  “Ah, how’s it going?”

  “Just fine, thank you,” she replies in her prissy way. She’s a whiz at making change, can practically figure out what Ma is going to give her before she opens her purse. I watch her plump little hands riffle confidently through the stacks of bills, scoop the coins out of the cash drawer without her having to look down.

  “Such a pleasant girl,” Ma says in the car. “So helpful to her parents.”

  But the Oriental kid we really hate is Xiao Lu, who is the reason we get into trouble and can’t play with the Katzes for an entire year.

  Xiao Lu’s father is a math professor, his mother stays at home and does nothing. “Very old world,” Ma says. When he was little that strange mother let his hair grow long and put him in dresses to fool the gods into thinking he was a girl so they wouldn’t steal him. He’s skinny and yellow-colored because he’s rarely allowed to play outdoors.

  Marty and I call him Pointy Head and Flat Face.

  “He looks like he was run over by a truck.”

  “How can he even see out of those eyes?”

  When he really gets on our nerves we call him Girl.

  “Get the ball, Girl.”

  “Bring us some lemonade, Girl.”

  At the dinner table Aunty Winnie says something to him in Chinese, like “Go do your homework,” and he obeys instantly, ducking his head and clambering down from his chair.

  Our parents can’t tame us. Once a month we drive into New York City to have dinner in Chinatown, where the narrow, winding streets are jammed with short people and funny smells and whose stores I try not to look into when we pass, for fear of seeing pressed duck like hanged men in the window. “Shanghai much worse,” Ma assures us. In the restaurant Daddy speaks in Mandarin, stroking characters on his napkin with his Parker fountain pen when the waiter doesn’t understand. But the language on the street is Cantonese, where people sound like they’re fighting, even when they’re not. In the car on the way home my sister and I imitate it, breaking ourselves up. “LO LEE LO GOO,” I shout, exaggerating the up and down tones. “GUM GO JEE WOK NA NA NA,” Marty gasps back.