Sarah Canary

by Karen Joy Fowler

  ‘Chin,’ said B.J. He sounded surprised. ‘You’re getting so little, Chin.’ He stopped breathing. In the silence Chin could hear horses’ hooves on the pavement. The police had decided to come at last.

  Two policemen lifted B.J. by the shoulders and the feet. Chin stood and followed as they carried him out of the crowd. Chin kept his head down; his eyes streamed with tears. He searched through the forest of pant legs for one black skirt. Was Harold right that Sarah Canary was a killer? Had Sarah Canary killed B.J.? Or had she saved Chin? Or had she never been there at all?

  There was no sign of her. There was no one else to rescue. The police told Chin that the hotel room was empty. Apparently, while B.J. died, Adelaide and Lydia Palmer had escaped.

  Chin stood at the police station and tried to answer their questions. ‘What is your name?’ they asked Chin. ‘What was his name?’ Hard questions. Chin found it hard to listen. So many ghosts he had to take care of now. The ones he could name and the ones he could not. But Chin knew what B.J.’s ghost would like.

  Chin stood by B.J.’s body and told his ghost a story. ‘One day an old woman had a dream,’ Chin said. ‘She dreamt that she took a pear and cut it in half. She and her husband shared it. She told her dream to Chou Kung. He was the most powerful fortune-teller in all China. “What does it mean?” she asked him. “It means that your son will die,” Chou Kung said.

  ‘The woman ran home, weeping. Her weeping was so loud, it was heard by T’ung Hsien Nu, the Holy Maiden who walks with immortals. “Chou Kung can foretell the future,” she said to herself. “But I can change it.” She took a rooster, called it by the old woman’s son’s name, and killed it quickly.

  ‘The old woman’s son was on his way home when he was caught in a rainstorm. He saw an old brick kiln and decided to shelter there until the storm passed. But when the wind was at its very strongest, he heard his mother’s voice in it. “Come to me, my son,” his mother called. He ran out of the kiln to find her, and just as he left it, the kiln collapsed. He would have died if he had been inside. He returned home and told this story to his mother.

  ‘She went back to Chou Kung. “My son is alive,” she said. “You made a mistake.” But Chou Kung knew that the Holy Maiden had meddled with fate again. He shook his head. He said nothing.’

  Chin told this story to B.J. in Cantonese while the San Francisco police watched. He began to cry again. ‘Poor little rooster,’ he said to B.J.

  He sat on the steps of the police station, bent over, and cried until he heard footsteps. Over the obstruction of his tears, from the space between his knees, he saw the black skirt. ‘Did you kill him?’ Chin asked, but when he raised his eyes, the face was Harold’s.

  ‘No,’ said Harold. ‘I didn’t. I’m not the man I was.’ Harold was standing in front of the San Francisco police department and he was wearing Sarah Canary’s old dress. The dress was slit up the center and Harold wore it over his other clothes, fastened at the neck like a cape. ‘I’m not the same man who left you in a cave in Woodward’s Gardens,’ Harold told him.

  Chin got to his feet immediately and started for Tangrenbu. Harold followed along. Chin walked faster. So did Harold. They covered several blocks without a word.

  ‘Go away,’ said Chin. He had never been so tired.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Harold. ‘Another one dead. I am sorry. Who was it?’

  Chin walked on. Harold was so very eye-catching. Did this mean Chin was invisible beside him? Or would he be part of the attention Harold was certain to attract? Would people say, ‘Look! A man in a dress’? Or would they say, ‘Look! A man in a dress following a Chinaman’? And wouldn’t it make B.J.’s death absolutely useless if Chin allowed himself to get killed outside the gates of Tangrenbu by Harold or any other white demon on the very same night?

  ‘Was it B.J.? I never had anything against B.J.’ Harold’s shoes snapped on the empty streets behind Chin. ‘I know what it’s like to lose someone.’

  ‘Did you find Sarah Canary?’ Chin asked.

  ‘No,’ said Harold. ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’ Chin had a sudden suspicion. He voiced it without stopping, without looking back. ‘B.J. saw you outside the Occidental Hotel tonight.’

  ‘Did he? I wasn’t there,’ said Harold. ‘I’ve been up in Chico. There were sightings, but I was too late. I wonder who B.J. saw.’

  ‘Not Sarah Canary,’ Chin said hastily. ‘We never saw Sarah Canary again.’ It might even be true. It was not given to him to know. A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth, clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of what is and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see.

  Harold caught up with Chin, stepping in front of him. He appeared a bit embarrassed. ‘If B.J. had been wearing this dress, he’d still be alive today,’ Harold said. ‘I shouldn’t have taken it. I don’t need it. Since I’m immortal already. It was selfish of me.’

  Chin began to walk again.

  ‘The dress sheds bullets,’ Harold told him. ‘And fire. You can’t be drowned in it. It makes you immortal. Overkill in my case. To coin a phrase.’

  ‘Go away.’ Chin stopped at the gates of Tangrenbu.

  ‘I don’t blame you for not liking me,’ Harold said. ‘Immortality was a burden. I wore it gracelessly. I’m learning to handle it better. Take the dress.’

  Chin stared at him. ‘No.’

  ‘Please. You earned it. Wear it and no one will ever hurt you again.’

  ‘No,’ said Chin. He did not believe Harold. He did not disbelieve. It did seem possible, finally, that this dress was Sarah Canary’s gift to him, her reward for all his patience and peril. He could just picture himself, a Chinese man dressed as a white woman. He could just picture no one hurting him. ‘I’m not brave enough for immortality.’ Hadn’t he once said this very thing to B.J.?

  ‘I know I’ve made mistakes,’ said Harold. ‘Things I wish I could undo. I must have been crazy. She made me so crazy. You remember?’ There was a wistfulness in his voice.

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘I don’t mind telling you, I see things quite differently now. I see things quite differently since I’ve been wearing this dress.’

  Harold stood behind Chin and did not follow him through the gates of Tangrenbu. Chin turned around once. Harold was still standing there, staring after him. Chin had a moment of inspiration. ‘Half woman, half man,’ he said. And Harold answered:

  ‘“All look and likeness caught from earth

  All accident of kin and birth,

  Had passed away.”

  ‘That’s poetry, Mr Chin. That’s Coleridge.’ Harold unhooked the dress from his neck and slid it from his shoulders. He held it out to Chin.

  ‘“She, she herself, and only she,

  Shone through her body visibly.”’

  The street lamp behind Harold flickered so that the shadows, the dark shapes stretching over the street, vanished for a moment and then reappeared as if Chin had blinked. ‘I have to go now,’ said Chin. ‘I have to go home.’

  x

  The Taiping Rebellion ended with the death of the Heavenly King in 1864. The Heavenly King’s other name was Hung Hsiu-ch’üan. He was a failed candidate for the civil service examinations and a Hakka convert to Christianity.

  The foreign, Christian elements of the rebellion may have cost Hung Hsiu-ch’üan the local support he needed. Ironically, it may also have cost him the support of the foreign communities in China. The missionaries certainly found him difficult. He had read the Bible, which was to his credit, but then he had visions and this could not be encouraged. He claimed to be a prophet, to have direct inspiration from God. He purchas
ed a fire engine and baptized his troops with it. The imperialist powers joined forces with the imperial powers to crush the movement. The victorious commander of the Imperial Army reported that, at the end, Hung betrayed his religion and killed himself. Much later, new evidence surfaced that proved he died instead, conveniently, just before the collapse of his rebellion, of natural causes, at the hand of his God.

  In all important respects, the dynasty was defeated as well. The foreign powers imposed conditions that made China helpless. In 1873, the Ministers of the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands stopped performing the ta-li or kowtow at the foot of the Dragon Throne. The Manchus became a puppet regime, unable to inconvenience the imperialists, but permitted to continue to wreak havoc on their own people.

  The unpopular regency of the Dowager Empress, Tz’u-hsi, ended in 1873. It was hoped that the young Emperor, although currently debauched by the palace eunuchs, would in time develop into a forward-thinking leader. Time was not given him. The reign of the new Emperor lasted only two years and ended with his death from smallpox. His Empress, much disliked by her mother-in-law, died soon after, murdered by persons unknown.

  Tz’u-hsi chose as new Emperor an infant named Kuanghsü. With this choice, Tz’u-hsi prolonged her regency by another twenty years. It was a brazen violation of the laws of succession. One official felt compelled to commit suicide over it.

  19

  Chin’s Theories on Fate and Chance

  It will not harm her magic pace

  That we so far behind—

  Her Distances propitiate

  As Forests touch the Wind

  Emily Dickinson, 1872

  In 1875, Chin was given a quotation from the story of Chou Kung, from the very story he had last told B.J., as part of the civil service examinations. Chin had fresh paper before him and a beautiful brush that was a gift from his mother. He was thinking of Adelaide. She had ceased to be a regret to him and became instead a sort of perfume that hung about his years in Golden Mountain, sweetening every other memory. He thought of her often, daily, almost ritually. He remembered that she talked too much, that she always knew everything, that she had often been tactless and disapproving. He woke up every morning and remembered that, whatever else the day brought, it would not bring Adelaide.

  He would marry a woman his mother chose. Because of Adelaide, he would treasure his wife and he would treasure his big-footed daughters as they came. He hoped that his memory was also sweet to her, but this was unlikely, leaving as he had, without a word. He wondered if Adelaide was the sort of person who could let her whole life be poisoned by regret. He was afraid that she was.

  He tried to tell himself that he had left her out of kindness rather than cowardice. He wasn’t sure this was true. Certainly, he had wanted to see her again. He had wanted to tell her how brave she was. ‘Are you all right?’ he had wanted to ask her. He had wanted to tell her lies beginning with the word someday. He couldn’t let himself do this. In the end, he had decided to let Adelaide stay forever in the happy world where B.J. was still alive, although this meant, of course, that Chin could never see her again.

  Chin began to write down the side of the page. ‘This reminds me of another story I heard once,’ he wrote. ‘In this story, instead of a kiln, there is a cage, and instead of a son, there is a woman, and instead of a storm, there is a tiger.’

  Chin had felt so completely Chinese in Golden Mountain. But back in China, every word he spoke seemed odd and Western. Half Chinese. ‘You are too flexible,’ his uncle had always told him. ‘Make a place to fit yourself.’ Perhaps he would pass the examinations and become important. Perhaps the time in China was just right for him. A new approach to the Western imperialists was being cautiously suggested. In this approach, Chinese learning and culture remained as the theoretical base, or ti, but Western learning was recognized for its many practical applications, or yung. Chin had a vision of steamships on the Yangtze. Chin wrote:

  There are many stories of the conflict between Chou Kung and the Maiden, which is the conflict between fate and chance.

  We imagine ourselves as creatures of destiny. We listen to stories and forget that the listening also tells the story. The story we hear is ourselves. We are the only ones who can hear it.

  Without our listening, all the stories are the same story. They all tell us that nothing is meant to be.

  That nothing is meant.

  That nothing is.

  They tell us nothing. We dream our little dreams, dream that we are dreamers—

  Chin dipped his brush in the ink again.

  —while all about us the great dream goes on. Sometimes one of the great dreamers passes among us. She is like a sleepwalker, passing through without purpose, without malice or mercy. Beautiful and terrible things happen around her. We discern symmetries, repetitions, and think we are seeing the pattern of our lives. But the pattern is in the seeing, not in the dream.

  We dare not waken the dreamer. We, ourselves, are only her dreams.

  He had blotted the paper with a long, mounded worm of ink. Neatness counted. Chin would have to start over. He folded the ruined paper once down the middle, running the fold between his thumb and forefinger. He opened it up to look at it. The wet ink had spread under the pressure of his fingertips into a curved shape on both sides of the fold. With no intent of any kind, except to discard the paper, Chin had drawn the Caucasian ideogram for the heart, which, when broken like this, into two parts, is also the butterfly.

  xi

  Nineteen eighty-seven was the Year of the Rabbit. Religious leader Jim Bakker lost his pulpit in a sexual scandal involving a twenty-one-year-old church secretary; the police in Utah exchanged gunfire with polygamists; animal-rights activists burned a partially constructed laboratory in Davis, California, while in Berkeley, university officials were accused of enforcing an unspoken quota system that limited the number of Asian Americans accepted as students. Ronald Reagan, the American president, made a speech about the American Indians.

  The Australian People magazine took considerable heat over a projected charity program whose schedule included a dwarf-throwing and bowling contest. During this event, dwarves were to be strapped onto skateboards and rolled at the pins. The editor of the magazine defended the program by saying that only stunt-dwarves were to be used. These men are professional projectiles, the editor said. These men like being thrown.

  In 1988, a genetically engineered mouse with an enhanced susceptibility to cancer became the first animal to be patented. The Pullyap tribe was given $162 million in land, cash, and jobs in exchange for their claim to some of the most valuable land in Tacoma. Religious leader Jimmy Swaggart was involved in a scandal of sex and prostitution.

  In 1989, herpetologists at Seattle’s Woodland Park had a hatch of hundreds of Solomon Island leaf frogs. These frogs had never before been successfully bred in captivity. Suddenly the herpetologists were drowning in them.

  In 1989, the Chinese government killed an estimated four hundred to eight hundred civilians as a response to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

  According to eyewitness accounts, President Reagan’s speech went something like this: ‘They from the beginning announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life . . . And we set up these reservations so they could, and have the Bureau of Indian Affairs take care of them . . .

  ‘Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, “No, come join us. Be American citizens along with the rest of us,” and many do.’

  The President went on to say that some Indians had become very wealthy from oil on their reservations, ‘and so I don’t know what their complaint might be.’

  In 1990, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported new evidence, in the form of hairs, of the existence of a Chinese wild man, a creature weighing five hundred to six hundred pounds, standing six to seven feet tall, and h
aving humanlike features.

  The following headline appeared in the Weekly World News: ‘Wounded Civil War Soldier Found in Georgia. “This man is not from our century,” experts tell police.’

  And in the Worldwide Gazette: ‘Flea Circus Horror! Trainer Attacked by Ravenous Fleas!’

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