MARILYN CHIN’S books of poems include Rhapsody in Plain Yellow; The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty; and Dwarf Bamboo. She is completing a book of tales, in which “Moon” will be featured. Her work is anthologized widely, most recently in the Norton Introduction to Literature, and she was featured in Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, a Stegner fellowship, and a Lannan award, she currently codirects the M.F.A. program at San Diego State University. She was born in Hong Kong in 1955.
On Christmas Eve, Granny went to Safeway and bought a big white cake with Santa’s face on it and made us go with her to the Neighborwoman’s house. She placed the cake into the Neighborwoman’s hands and said, “Peapod, translate this: Malignant Nun, we do not beg for your God.” I didn’t know how to translate “Malignant.” And said politely, “Dear Missus, No beg, No God.”
My sister and I both wept silently, embarrassed that my grandmother made us into a spectacle and ashamed that we had to lie to get out of it. Meanwhile, Granny was satisfied that we learned our lesson and decided to take her two favorite peapods to Chinatown for sweet bean dessert. We were the only riders on the bus that night; everybody else was probably home with their families preparing for a big meal. “Merry Christmas, ho ho ho, I am Santa’s helper!” said the Bus Driver. He was wearing a green elf’s hat, but we knew that he was really Mr. Riggers, the black bus driver. He gave us each two little candy canes. Granny scowled, “Tsk, tsk, ancient warrior in a fool’s cap!” Then, we sat way in the back of the bus and Granny began singing our favorite song: “We will go home and eat cakies, little lotus-filled cakies,” Granny sang. “We will eat sweet buns, sweet custard sweet buns!” she sang. “We will eat turnip squares, salty white turnip squares,” she sang. “We will eat grass jelly, tangy green grass jelly. We will eat dumplings, soft, steamy dumplings.” She was so jolly that we forgot our embarrassing episode and we sang with her, clapping hands. We sang and sang.
Granny would die a few years later, leaving us $3,000 under her mattress and a brand-new cleaver, still wrapped in Chinese newspaper from Hong Kong. We grew up into beautiful, clear-skinned young women. We worked hard in our studies, became successful and drove little white Mercedes. We learned nothing from our poverty, but to avoid poverty at all cost.
We had three failed marriages between us. Four nice children, whom we proudly raised with upper-middle-class values. We spent days and days at the mall buying shoes. We became born-again Christians. We feared love and loved no one, not even ourselves. We ended up with two dull but very kind husbands. We spoke of our grandmother with reverence but understood nothing, nothing, nada, nothing that she taught us.
Fa la la la la, little cakies, little cakies, little cakies . . . we drive around in our little white Mercedes all over southern California eating little cakies. Yes, let’s put on the Ritz, sisters: little petits fours in pastels and rainbows . . . booze-soaked baba rhums, oooh yes, nuttynutty Florentines on little white doilies. . . . Oh sisters! Let’s ghetto it! Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, pink and white Snowballs; let’s suck the creamy hearts out of the Twinkies. Come hither, come yon, young Chinese girls. Come, let’s drive around in our little white Mercedes eating cakies, little cakies. Come, let the crumbs fall down our chins and dance on our laps. Come, light light airy madeleines, come, creamy creamy trifles. Come, little cakies, little cakies. Come, the sweet, sweet hereafter.
TWO PARABLES: MOON
Marilyn Chin
Moon was a little fat Chinese girl. She had a big, yellow face befitting her name. She was sad and lonely as were all little fat Chinese girls in 1991, and she had a strange, insatiable desire for a pair of trashy blond twins named Smith (no accounting for taste, of course). Every night she would wander on the beach in search of them, hoping to espy them taking a joyride around Pacific Beach in their rebuilt sky-blue convertible Impala: their long blond hair swept backward like horses’ manes, their faces obscenely sunburnt, resembling ripe halves of peaches.
One chilly September evening the boys stopped to make a campfire on the beach; and Moon, feeling quite full and confident that day, descended upon them, waddling so fat, so round and shiny with seaspray. She offered them chocolate Macadamia nut clusters and began to sing, strumming a tiny lute-like instrument her grandmother sent her from China. She began singing in an ancient falsetto a baleful song about exiled geese winging across the horizon, about the waxing and waning of stormy seas, about children lost into the unknown depths of the new kingdom.
The boys were born and raised in “the valley” and were very unsophisticated. They were also functional illiterates and were held back twice in the fifth grade—and there was no way that they could have understood the complexities of her song. They huddled in that sporting male way and whispered surreptitiously, speaking in very short sentences between grunts or long, run-on sentences with ambiguous antecedents, so that Moon was not quite sure whether she was the subject of their discussion. Finally, the boys offered to give fat Moon a ride in their stainless steel canoe they got for Christmas (we know, of course, that they were up to trouble; you don’t think that their hospitality was sincere, do you?).
Moon graciously accepted their invitation. Actually, she was elated given the bad state of her social life; she hadn’t had a date for centuries. So the two boys paddled, one fore, one aft, with fat Moon in the middle. Moon was so happy that she started strumming her lute and singing the song of Hiawatha (don’t ask me why, this was what she felt like singing). Suddenly, the boys started rocking the boat forcefully—forward and backward making wild horsey sounds until the boat flipped over, fat Moon, lute and all.
The boys laughed and taunted Moon to reappear from the rough water. When she didn’t surface after a few minutes, it suddenly occurred to them that she was drowning; they watched in bemusement while the last of her yellow forehead bled into the waves. Finally, they dove in and dragged her heavy body back into the boat, which was quite a feat for she was twice as heavy wet than dry—and she was now tangled in sea flora.
When they finally docked, Moon discovered that the boys saved her only to humiliate her. It appeared that they wanted a reward for saving her life . . . a blood-debt, if you will. In this material world—goods are bartered for goods—and actions however heroic or well-intentioned in appearance are never clearly separated from services rendered. And in the American ledger, all services must be paid for in the end; and all contracts must be signed at closing bearing each participant’s legal signature. Thus, the boys ripped off Moon’s dress and took turns pissing all over her round face and belly saying, “So, it’s true, it’s true that your cunts are really slanted. Slant-eyed cunt! Did you really think that we had any interest in you?”
After the boys finished their vile act, they left Moon on the wharf without a stitch on, glowing with yellow piss. And she cried, wailed all the way home on her bicycle. Imagine a little fat Chinese girl, naked, pedaling, wailing.
When Moon got home her mother called her a slut. Her father went on and on about the Sino-Japanese war and about the starving girl-children in Kuangtung—and look, what are you doing with your youth and new prosperity, wailing, carrying on, just because some trashy white boys rejected you. Have you no shame? Your cousin the sun matriculated Harvard, your brothers the stars all became engineers. . . . Where are the I. M. Peis and Yo Yo Mas of your generation?—They sent her to bed without supper that night as a reminder that self-sacrifice is the most profound virtue of the Chinese people.
Up in her room Moon brooded and swore on a stack of Bibles that she would seek revenge for this terrible incident—and that if she were to die today she would come back to earth as an angry ghost to haunt those motherfuckers. With this in mind, Moon swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills only to cough them back up ten minutes later. Obviously, they didn’t kill her. However, those ten minutes of retching must have prevented oxygen from entering her brain and left her deranged for at least a month after this episode (hey, I’m no doctor
, just a story-teller, take my diagnosis with caution, please). Overnight, she became a homicidal maniac. A foul plague would shroud all of southern California, which, curiously, infected only blond men (both natural and peroxided types, those slightly hennaed would be spared).
For thirty days and thirty nights Moon scoured the seaside, howling, windswept—in search of blond victims. They would drown on their surfboards, or collapse while polishing their cars. . . . They would suffocate in their sleep next to their wives and lovers. Some died leaving a long trail of excrement, because whatever pursued them was so terrible that it literally scared the shit out of them. And not since Herod had we seen such a devastating assault on male children.
On the thirty-first night, the horror subsided. Moon finally found the Smith boys cruising in their sky-blue convertible Impala. They were driving south on the scenic coast route between San Clemente and Del Mar when she plunged down on them, her light was so powerful and bright that the boys were momentarily blinded and swerved into a canyon. Their car turned over twelve times. They were decapitated—the coroner said, so cleanly as if a surgeon had done the job with a laser.
Moon grew up, lost weight and became a famous singer, which proves that there is no justice in the universe, or that indeed, there is justice. Your interpretation of this denouement mostly depends on your race, creed, hair color, social and economic class and political proclivities—and whether or not you are a feminist revisionist and have a habit of cheering for the underdog. What is the moral of the story? Well, it’s a tale of revenge, obviously, written from a Chinese American girl’s perspective. My intentions are to veer you away from teasing and humiliating little chubby Chinese girls like myself. And that one wanton act of humiliation you perpetuated on the fore or aft of that boat of my arrival—may be one humiliating act too many. For although we are friendly neighbors, you don’t really know me. You don’t know the depth of my humiliation. And you don’t know what I can do. You don’t know what is beneath my doing.
RED WALL
Sara Chin
In Beijing, people are getting rich and riding around in chauffeured air-conditioning. Not so long ago, things appeared to be otherwise. I set down what I saw then. But was my experience an encounter with history, or with nostalgia? Is this just the sort of thing an American would mix up?
The long wall never quits. It goes on, one street to the next, Zhongnanhai to Tiananmen. Lovers come, sit in its shade and, like the wall, they too go on and on, rapt in themselves, bicycles left by a tree, the traffic beyond flaring white.
Through the afternoon, people gather to buy an ice, cross the street. Buses come, veer away, yet nothing disturbs the long wall and its red shade. A march of leafy trees shelters it from the street.
I sit and watch a young soldier feed a popsicle to his girl. It’s a treat to hide in the shade and eat an ice. The girl and her popsicle melt. The day’s heat can only make them expire faster. The ice drips, the girl giggles over the smear on her lip. Her soldier takes out his handkerchief and applies it to her giggle.
Soon, an elderly couple approaches, two old Beijing men walking arm in arm. One swings a bag, the other leads with his belly. They pass the young lovers and come at me, hefty old men with shorts hauled up to their armpits, hair buzzed to their skulls. They cross in front of whereSARA CHIN was born in 1949 in Kiangsi, China, and raised in the United States. She lives in San Francisco, where she works on TV documentaries. She has written a book of short stories, Below the Line, and is now working on a novel.
I sit, big busy voices bowling along. They don’t see they’re going to trip over me until I pull back my feet. Even then they go on without a glance until a bump in the sidewalk, a crack in a thought, stops them suddenly. They turn to stare.
The lovers separate then. The girl, so flirty a moment ago, turns into a pudding face, the boy shrinks to a mere noodle. His uniform rumples, his handkerchief goes back to its pocket.
Boy and girl think the old men are looking at them, but I know they’re not. The old men are staring at me. In the days before the city is entirely given over to the new, they have this look for the stranger in their midst. It’s a stare that commits the whole body to its task, head up, chin out. The eyes do the calculating. They can tell whether the person stared at—like the donkey one might buy—has a set of teeth on her and enough meat to last a winter or two. This stare I recognize. I’ve prepared for it by wearing sunglasses. Large, expensive globes tinted to shield out UV and other rays. I’ve been to Beijing before. I know what to do: I smile. The old men stare. I smile again. Show a bit of teeth. They’ll go now, I think, they’ve seen enough. But no. The old men suddenly rush me. Run me down like a barnyard chicken.
“Xiao Hung, Xiao Hung!” they shout, “What are you doing here!”
I jump. And behind me someone cries. Only then do I understand: it’s the girl with the young soldier. The old men really have been staring at her, not me. She runs now, Xiao Hung, her flimsy dress streaking along the red wall, her soldier following. So much has changed since I was here before.
Before, I came to work. Before, I came to meet history, to shake its hand, look it in the eye. Hang a microphone over it, record it. Before, I didn’t have time to come to the red wall and rest in its shade, stare at people as much as they stared at me.
A lifetime ago it seems, Jill called one day and startled me. She said, “Would you like to do something different?”
I didn’t know what she meant, but soon enough she was talking me into my first trip to China. I wanted to go, there was no doubt about that. I had relatives everywhere and I wanted to see the great sights, but even so, Jill had to convince me; she wasn’t offering an easy trip. She said, “The money’s not quite in place yet, all of it, but it will be, you know. This is just too fantastic to pass up. They’re all dying off! We’ve got to interview them now or we won’t get them at all, at their age. Can you do it?”
She wanted me to work six weeks for nothing, filming on a bare-bones budget, pay deferred. The days would be long, with no overtime, but naps were guaranteed.
“Absolutely. They’re all incapacitated after lunch, I don’t know whether it’s the lunch or the heat, though having eaten some of the lunches—”
Jill planned to travel all over: Shanghai, Beijing, a village here and there. “You’ll get to see a lot, though it might be awful, too, some of it.” She took pains to warn me as well as win me over. Jill was an old friend. She had given me my start, hiring me for a documentary series she had produced several years earlier.
“What do you mean?” I said. I had grown up in New Jersey, Jill in London; Jill had a different idea of awful than I did. Among other things, she liked marmite and fish and chips.
“You’ll see,” she said.
Before I left, Jill briefed me on what she wanted from China, “A simple story.”
“Good,” I was relieved. “It’s not going to be another thriller then.”
I remembered an exposé Jill had done on British intelligence. Something about fair trade, or was it “the” fair trade? Sex for secrets, where the sex had become worth a lot more than the secrets. Jill had left London for New York after the fallout from that show. That was also when she changed her name from Gillian to Jill. “More to the point, don’t you think,” she said.
“No, no,” she assured me now, “I’m not going to go to China and make people drop their drawers—if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You promise.”
“Please. This one’s not about smutty people. This one’s history.”
“From those who lived it.”
“Exactly. That’s the point. We’re going to be educational.”
Jill said this last without embarrassment. She was the only person I knew who could, and did, go on TV to say, “The purpose of film is to raise the general level.” She said this on public TV, but even so . . .
Jill was tall, close to six feet, and liked to cultivate the attention she always got for her height
and her looks. When she talked, people had a way of stepping back, inadvertently, to get a good view of her.
She sent me her script: “China Reborn.” She was going to cover forty years of revolution up to the moment of what the communists called liberation, but what Jill decided to call birth. The birth, in 1949, of the new China, long and fraught, but made momentous the instant Chairman Mao stood atop the red wall and waved those famous hands.
“I’ve got loads of footage already,” Jill said. “Newsreels, Shanghai melodramas—you name it, it’s incredible.”
Along with her script, Jill included a list of things she wanted me to know about China. Her list went like this:General Li: Can we drug him? Antihistamine, of course. Otherwise, he’ll come across as a crybaby. Age: 78.
Liu Bai and Liu Bing: Brothers. Fought the Japanese. Bai is a good talker, Bing is not. But Bai can’t walk (knees shot to hell). Bing can. So—who to interview? I need a tour of their village. Someone who can walk and talk at the same time. Is this too much to ask? Age: Pickled.
Chen Xiao Lan: “Little Songbird of the Party.” Will she sing for us? Age: Not apropos.
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