Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  There are many Buddhist kids in my school, which is a Catholic school. If their schools were any good, why would they go to a Catholic school?

  What’s a buddha?

  I go to Lasan Taberd, an all-boys school run by Jesuits near Notre Dame Cathedral and JFK Plaza. In the plaza there is a large plaster statue of the Virgin Mary holding a globe with a little cross sticking out of it.

  Last week I accidentally dropped all my colored pencils on the floor and Frère Tuan, our teacher, whacked me on the head with a ruler.

  I like Frère Tuan. He called me Dinh Bo Linh once in front of the whole class. (My name is Dinh Hoang Linh.)

  Dinh Bo Linh ruled from A.D. 968 to 979. He was a village bully before he became a warlord, before he became the emperor. He was known as Dinh the Celestial King.

  To the north was China—Sung Dynasty. To the south was Cham pas—savages.

  In front of the palace was a vat of boiling oil. Criminals were thrown into this vat.

  This is how he died: Do Thich, a mandarin, dreamed that a star fell into his mouth. He thought this meant that he would become the next emperor.

  One night, as Dinh Bo Linh and his son, Dinh Lien, were passed out, drunk, in a courtyard, Do Thich slashed their throats.

  As soldiers searched for him, Do Thich hid in the eaves of the house for three days until he became very thirsty and had to climb down for a drink of water.

  A concubine saw him do this and went and told General Nguyen Bac, who had Do Thich executed. His corpse was then chopped into tiny pieces and fed to everyone in the capital.

  The capital was Hoa Lu.

  Everyone loved Dinh Bo Linh. There is a poem about Do Thich:A frog at the edge of a pond,

  Hankering for a star.

  I told my best friend, Truong, this story, and he said, “Did they eat his hair too?”

  “Probably not.”

  “How about his bones?”

  “Just the smaller bones.”

  “How do you eat bones?”

  “You chop them up real fine and cook them for twenty-four hours.”

  Truong giggled. “How about his little birdie?”

  “That they certainly ate.”

  “You liar!”

  Truong said, “A penis is so ugly to look at, so disgusting, so unnatural. Why do we have penises?”

  I said, “They may be ugly, but women love to look at them.”

  “No, they don’t!”

  “They love to touch them too.”

  “Who told you?!”

  “They like to put it in their mouth!”

  “You’re sick!”

  “I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Women are disgusted by the penis.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  Truong sits behind me in class. One time he said, “You just farted, didn’t you?!”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How come I smelled it?!”

  “I don’t care what you smelled. I didn’t feel it.”

  One of the kids in my class has neither the middle nor ring finger on his left hand. No one really knows what happened. Someone said he picked up his father’s hand grenade and it blew his fingers off. Someone else said he lost his fingers in a motorcycle accident. Maybe he was just born that way. When we see him from afar—say, from across the schoolyard—we raise our fist, with index finger and pinkie upturned, to salute him.

  There is another weird kid in my class. The skin on his face has the texture of bark and he cannot close his mouth properly. We call this kid “Planet of the Apes.”

  The Americans have made a special bomb called “Palm.” It’s like a big vat of boiling oil that they pour from the sky.

  At school, during recess, we divide ourselves into gangs and try to kill each other. I have perfected a move: I feign a right jab, spin 360 degrees, and hit my opponent’s face—surprise!—with the back of my left fist as it swings around—whack! So far I’ve connected with three of my enemies. I hit this one kid, Hung, so hard he fell backward and bounced his head on the ground—booink! Ha, ha! Blood was squirting out of his nose. He was taken by cyclo to the hospital, where he was pronounced Dead On Arrival.

  Soon people will catch on to this move, which means that I will have to come up with another move.

  It’s important to overcome one’s ignorance: Our cook, who’s illiterate, once told me that a person gains exactly one drop of blood per day from eating. “Otherwise,” she said, “where would all that blood go?”

  She’s very stupid, this woman, although an excellent cook. She knows how to make an excellent omelet with ground pork, bean threads, and scallions. She smells like coconut milk. Every now and then I stand near her as she squats on the kitchen floor snapping water-cress and peer into her blouse.

  I walked into the dining room and saw Sister Lan—that’s the cook’s name—sitting by herself. She wiped her face with a hand towel and smiled at me. Her eyes were all red. I said, “You’re crying!”

  “No! No! I’m not crying.”

  “Your eyes are all red!”

  “I was chopping onions!”

  I ran out of the dining room, screaming, “Sister Lan is crying! Sister Lan is crying!”

  I told my grandmother about it and she said, “She’s thinking about her boyfriend.”

  Once the foreskin of my penis got caught in the zipper of my pants as I was dressing to go to church. I screamed, “Grandmother! Grandmother!” and my grandmother ran over and pulled the zipper down. That was twice as painful as having my dick caught in the first place.

  My grandmother is a good Catholic. She paces back and forth in the living room, fingering her rosary while mumbling her prayer—hundreds of Our Fathers and thousands of Ave Marias—as fast as she can.

  I only pray when I’ve lost something. Once I lost a comic book—my Tintin comic book—and God helped me to find it. I mean: He didn’t say, “There, there’s your comic book,” but as soon as I finished praying, I knew that my comic book was under a pile of newspapers in the living room.

  My grandmother goes to church twice a day, once at five in the morning and once at three in the afternoon. Sometimes she makes me come along with her.

  The worst part about going to church is having to hear the priest talk. You cannot follow him for more than a few seconds. It’s very hot in there. You look around and all the people are fanning themselves, some with their eyes closed.

  Father Duong can go on and on and on: “Charity is the key, a camel cannot walk through it. . . . Thirty milch camels with their colts, forty kine and ten bulls, forty she-asses and ten foals. . . . The Lord will give thee a trembling heart, the sole of your foot will not know rest. . . . And so many cows besides?”

  A whale spat Jonah out into the desert. It was noon. The sun was blazing.

  Jesus felt sorry for Jonah and gave him a gourd for shade.

  Jonah slept under this shade.

  When Jonah woke up, he was no longer in the shade because the sun had moved.

  When Jonah became angry, Jesus said, “And so many cows besides?”

  At the end of each sermon, Father Duong always says, “O Merciful Father, please bring peace to this wretched land.” That’s when you know it’s almost time to go home.

  As Father Duong walks toward the door, he shakes a metal canister at everyone. That’s “holy water.”

  My patron saint, Saint Martin de Porres, was a black man.

  Many beggars stand by the door outside the church. Once I saw my grandmother put a 200-dong bill into a blind man’s upturned fedora, then fumble inside it for change totaling 150 dong.

  I often think about getting married when I’m in church. About how I’ll have to walk down the aisle in front of everyone. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that. I mean, what if you trip and fall as you’re walking down the aisle?

  To kiss a girl would be like eating ice cream. Her lips will be cold. Her teeth will be cold.

  To kiss a girl would be like eating
ice cream with strawberries, with the pips from the strawberries getting stuck between your teeth.

  My father said, “Women are like monkeys. If you’re nice to them, they’ll climb all over you.”

  There’s a saying: A French house, an American car, a Japanese wife, Chinese food.

  My grandmother has told me this one story over and over (usually when we’re having fish for dinner): During the famine of 1940, when the Japanese invaded, the villagers in Bui Chu, her home village, would place a carved wooden fish on the dinner table at mealtime “so they could just stare at it.”

  My grandmother is deaf in one ear because, as a little girl, she punctured an eardrum with a twig when an ant crawled inside her ear canal.

  My grandmother said to me, “Are you going to be a priest when you grow up?”

  My grandmother was trying to teach me how to tie my shoes. It’s the hardest thing in the world, tying your shoes. I could never figure it out. My father screamed, his face red, “You’re an idiot! An idiot!”

  I would think about shooting my father, only to have to force myself to think, I do not want to shoot my father. Then I would think, once more, about shooting my father, only to have to force myself to think, again, I do not want to shoot my father.

  FORMERLY KNOWN AS BIONIC BOY

  Eric Gamalinda

  He came out of nowhere, and vanished just as quickly. It was the time of comets, prophets, and paranoia. His timing couldn’t have been better. Uri Geller was bending spoons in Russia, NASA was sending Beethoven symphonies to outer space. In Manila, where everything was bad news—the GNP plummeting like the wrecks of a space station, people letting hunger into their households like an unavoidable guest—he burst into the scene like a twist in a story. FEATS OF TELEKINESIS STUN CITY, the tabloids crammed on page one. In one of many TV interviews that followed, he dismissed all the hoopla and remarked: “Bending spoons is for kids.” He was only thirteen years old. Bucktoothed, chubby (wearing a size-XL shirt), hair cropped close to the scalp (“I don’t have the patience to deal with grooming”), his brown eyes a blur under the glaucomatous lens of Clark Kent spectacles, he was indifferent to attention, bored with journalists, and impatient with social pretensions: he walked out of an intimate dinner once, because he felt the conversation made the service too slow. They called him Bionic Boy, a term that amused him, because it made him sound extra-human, electronic, unreal. Wives of generals and mistresses of this coconut czar or that banana baron hosted brunches for him in palatial mansions in Forbes Park. He entertained them with what he considered parlor games—typing messages long distance on a sheet of paper locked in a file cabinet. Whenever he did that, they heard metallic sounds clicking out of his cranium. He couldn’t tell them what did it.ERIC GAMALINDA was born in Manila, the Philippines, on October 14, 1956. His recent publications include a novel, My Sad Republic, and Zero Gravity, a collection of poems.

  One inquisitive matron suggested that they do a brain scan. He replied, “I suggest you invite a lab monkey to your next brunch.” He wasn’t as indelicate with the rest. He interpreted their dreams, and told them some of his own. Not grand, apocalyptic visions in Cinemascope, but simple things with profound settings: a bush whose bone-white blossoms all faced downward, a bright red room. They even asked him to perform some faith healing, but on this matter he was adamant: he thought faith healers were carnival performers, and that disease and its remedy should be left to science. He was, in other words, no threat to the hundreds of psychics who proliferated around the archipelago. Inevitably his talent reached the Palace, which was always on the lookout for divine affirmation. Imelda Marcos invited him for an audience, and he performed the usual parlor tricks. But he gave her one special performance: he made her see the extent of his powers. The palace collection of Douglas MacArthur’s books flew from their shelves, their pages fluttering open in midair. Teacups rattled and teaspoons tinkled in perfect harmony. The shutters of the Mala cañang Guest House whipped open, and capiz chandeliers swayed like galleons in an open sea. Imelda was so dazzled that she arranged for him to meet the president. But he knew the president would not be impressed with pyrotechnics. He offered instead to interpret Marcos’s dreams. His interpretations were accurate and pertinent. He told the president where to keep his money, the condition of his bladder for the following week, the precise number of military casualties in the next Communist ambush. He predicted the aphelion of the regime within the next three years, marked by lavish parties, state visitors (including the pope), and foreign aid. And when Marcos told him he had dreamt of a young eagle diving into the South China Sea, he advised the president to yank the president’s son off a plane that was flying in two hours. That plane, sans the presidential son, crashed soon after takeoff. No one survived. Immediately after that, Marcos gave him something even he had completely unexpected: the documents for his adoption into the presidential family. From then on he would have a room next to the palace gardens and would go by the name of Marcos. He accepted his fate gratefully, and also sadly, because he knew all this was temporary. Not just his life, but the life of the Marcoses as well. The sooner he told them, the better. He was convinced that they could all prepare for the end as one family. And so, one evening, when he thought the time was right, he told the family that, incredible as it may seem, the House of Marcos would fall one day. The family would not hear of it. They closed his room down and sent him away, and Imelda gave him money to keep quiet and to travel as far away as he could. She also gave him a threat: speak, and you die. Nothing was heard of him since then. Upon orders from the Palace, the press stopped mentioning his name. His presence vanished like the ancient layers of a palimpsest. Some say too much luxury killed his powers, and he became a sad, faceless citizen. Others say he found a job in Houston, where he helped NASA coordinate the trajectories of rockets in space. Still others insist there were several Bionic Boys, all claiming to be the authentic one. But the most plausible rumor of all was this: that he never existed at all, that the Palace invented him just as it had invented a lot of stories during its unhappy reign.

  Look at one another short of breath, walking proudly in our winter coats.

  Efren X looks out the window and remembers the song, but he can’t recall how the next lines go. Things like this drive him crazy. Two stories below, people are braving the cold, rushing from nowhere to nowhere. Lispenard is one long muddy puddle under their boots. Trucks rumble on Canal Street, and his apartment shudders like a barrio in the rim of fire. Marjetica, the super of the building, is paddling about the room and saying, “Is too cold here. I send someone to check the heat.” She is a stooped gray apparition, moving slowly, as though she has a hard time maneuvering her way in the physical world.

  “It has to be cold, Marjetica,” Efren says. “The goddamn computers need the cold. Like mayonnaise. Like ice cream.”

  “Computer will live, but you will die,” Marjetica says. “One day I come here and find you frozen like ice cream, how you like that.”

  “Be sure to save before turning the computers off.”

  “You go out sometimes. Is spring.”

  “Still feels like winter to me. Never can tell when one season ends and another begins. Never learned to.”

  “Go meet people. Eat something. You never eat. Just cookies. Look at you, skin and skeleton. You talk to machine all the time.”

  “You know me inside out, Marjetica.”

  “Go out and meet people.”

  “It’s too cold and the cold makes me socially inept.”

  “Don’t understand your English.”

  “It’s freezing out there.”

  “Not different here.”

  “Besides, I can’t go anywhere. My doctor said so.”

  “Said what?”

  “This new strain. This disease. It’s some kind of pulmonary thing. My lungs, Marjetica. There’s no fucking cure for it.”

  “Oh my,” Marjetica says, edging towards the door.

  “It gets worse and
worse, but my doctor says most people actually do survive, but they need to stay indoors. It’s very contagious.”

  “You see what I mean. I call my sister in Slovenia. She know all about lung sickness.”

  “No, Marjetica. Not even Slovenia . . .” He coughs into his fist for effect, the cough misting the bottom half of the lens of his glasses, like two gibbous moons. As soon as she leaves he picks up a microcassette recorder and presses the record button. “Brief but welcome intrusion from the lady who looks after this dump. I don’t recall if I’ve talked about her before. Lives with a hundred cats, all strays. Claims they bring her good luck. Certainly brings to this building an overwhelming odor of urine. No one else in her life. Arthritic, simpleminded, believes anything I tell her.”

  The phone rings. It’s Christina again. He listens as she speaks to the machine, her voice a hundred light-years away. “Wednesday morning at nine. They’re taking her to court. Turn the goddamn TV on. It’s gonna be televised. Pick up the phone, goddamit. Hello hello hello. Call you again soon.”

  “Well,” he says aloud. “The problem is I don’t have a TV anymore. I blew the thing up. Would darling Christina ever believe how I did it, I wonder.” The recorder clicks off. “Shit.” He pulls the cassette out and slips it in its case and tapes a label on it—#742—and places it on a shelf with several other tapes lining a wall of the apartment. “Acoustic padding,” he says to himself. “Wall of sound.” He slips in a new cassette and records: “Experiment number seven hundred forty-three. Will need to look passably presentable for this one. Shit.”