by K-Ming Chang
I knew a man like that back on the island. He had a fishpenis and had to live waist-down in water. If he waded onto land, it’d breathe the air and die. All the other fishermen held their breath to blow him. His fishpenis shot eggs down their throats, and they gave birth out of their mouths a month later. You were conceived in a mouth, too. Your mother spoke you in her sleep, during some dream about drowning. Don’t believe when she says you’ve got a father.
The other pirates all said his ship was powered solely by flatulence, that he stood at the prow and farted a wind that blew him anywhere in the world. They say his ship was armed with sharks swimming always beneath him, and that was why he’d never lost a battle. In two weeks he’d won so much loot, his entire fleet began to sink with the weight of all that shine. Now they stored their bounty in seaside cliffs, branding treasure maps into one another’s backs. Ah Zheng’s feet had never felt land, and the idea of living with his feet locked to the earth—that shit-colored filth—made him physically ill.
The sea, on the other hand, was his glittering garment. He was so blessed, even the storms bounced off his boat. Ah Zheng resembled an ordinary hog*7 on land but was handsome on water, especially reflected off a surface—he wore the hat of a Tanka, but underneath, his hair was like water, stroking his shoulders or coiling on its own. He was born with a blowhole on the top of his head that he liked to stick a miniature flag inside, a flag that was just a piece of toilet paper. His eyes were the bitter color of grapes. Always remember to spit out the grape skins or you’ll get eyes like that too, all seed. You’ll see everything dark as light, everything loved as lost.
All this to say: Old Guang, my beefhearted fishdicked hogspawned grandfather, fell in love with Ah Zheng. At the beginning of his piracy career, Old Guang was seasick, bent at the waist and waddling to the rails. Ah Zheng would clean my grandfather’s face with his own silk sleeve. He told my grandfather that acupuncture would cure his seasickness, and invited him back to the captain’s cabin. Ah Zheng’s acupuncture needles were made of fishbone, invisible to the light. Though Old Guang was afraid of needles, he said nothing.
Ah Zheng was undressing him, and suddenly my grandfather’s mouth felt like a sea urchin, spike and salt. When Old Guang was naked, Ah Zheng directed him to lie facedown on the pallet. He sterilized each needle in seawater and strong vinegar, then hovered his hand over my grandfather’s left shoulder-bone. Old Guang yelped, and Ah Zheng laughed: I haven’t even put it in yet.*8 When Ah Zheng slipped the needle directly into the shoulder-bone, Old Guang moaned. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation stayed for days.
Old Guang and Ah Zheng fucked with urgency. Ah Zheng’s beard tasted of sea spray, stinging his whole skin. My grandfather really believed that Ah Zheng was a reincarnation of a god—how else could he be so young and so confidently commanding a fleet larger than the emperor’s? How else did he grow such stately long legs, such a deeply cleft ass, a crack all shadows lusted to live inside? Sometimes, their lovemaking was closer to prayer: My grandfather held Ah Zheng’s semen*9 in his mouth for as long as possible, torturing it of taste.
Old Guang was the crew’s best navigator. He claimed to have ejaculated all the stars into the sky. Even his crewmates—mostly other kidnapped fishermen—had to admit Old Guang was their best addition. Occasionally, when they did get lost, Old Guang wanted to stay that way: Ah Zheng fucked better when he was lost and needed another body to shore on. The last time they were lost, they loitered beside an island inhabited solely by crabs. Crabs with shells like raw emeralds. Crabs with rainbowed claws. Albino crabs. Crabs so dark they turned the sea to ink. Mirror-shelled crabs. Crabs with a thousand legs that could burrow in stone. The entire island was a beach with holes every two feet. Each hole had its own crab species. With their food running out—they hadn’t stolen a ship in weeks—all the pirates tried catching crabs with nets made of their own hair. The crabs were fast, but the pirates managed half a dozen: two hot-pink ones the size of palms, and four thumb-sized crabs the color of tongues. That night, they roasted the crabs on their boats, cracked open their shells with stones.
The next day, the whole crew was too sick to sail. A few of the men even died, and they threw the corpses onto the beach. Crabs scuttled out of their burrows and carpeted the bodies. In an hour, only the bones were left. It was karma, Old Guang said. We ate them, so they demanded to eat of us. The debt is paid. After that, everyone got better, and they sailed far from the cursed island of crabs. The only person who hadn’t gotten sick was Ah Zheng, impervious as ever, blessed by some god that didn’t reach the Chinese.*10
Nine months later, after the fleet had successfully kidnapped a Dutch ship full of muskets (and after half the crew had blown off their toes learning how to use them), Old Guang felt an ache in his crotch. Even Ah Zheng’s acupuncture didn’t help. The only relief was jacking off, which all the pirates did nightly, shoulder-to-shoulder on their bed pallets. Ah Zheng was happy to help with this task. One night, after a dinner of stolen Portuguese egg tarts and rice wine, Ah Zheng and Old Guang fell asleep in each other’s arms. Near midnight, the ache woke Old Guang like a hammer to his crotch. He was suddenly too large*11 for his own skin. He ran up to the deck and vomited into the moon-bleached sea. Ah Zheng woke and ran up behind him. Is it the pain again?
Ah Zheng didn’t know much about pain: He had never lost a tooth or bled or been sore from saddling waves. Some said he was clear-blooded like a fish, and that was why no one could ever tell if he was wounded. But Ah Zheng knew pleasure. So he stood behind Old Guang, close enough to bite his shoulder, and held Old Guang’s penis in one hand, moving in a rhythm that mimicked the ship. Old Guang ejaculated into the sea. The relief came like a blade. Ah Zheng tucked Old Guang back into bed, and they slept in the shape of spears until morning.
In the morning, the whole top deck of the ship was coated in crabs. Crabs of every color and size sequined the ship, filling it a foot deep. The first man to step out on the deck had gotten his big toe pinched off, and his shouts woke the whole ship. When Old Guang climbed up from the captain’s cabin, the crabs parted for him. He stepped onto the deck and crabs scrambled away, clearing a path. Old Guang repelled the crabs like magnets, all except one: the biggest of them all, the only crab that was an ordinary orange.
It was the size of an infant, so fat its legs trembled. Old Guang reached out to touch it, and it immediately collapsed and retracted its legs, dead. All the other crabs had collapsed too. The other pirates were frightened: Did they follow us here? Where were they all hiding? They kicked each crab back into the sea—thousands of them—too terrified to think of eating the meat. Meanwhile, Old Guang kept the body of the big orange crab, which was already starting to smell of decay. Ah Zheng humored him, but reminded Old Guang that eating the crab could make him sick. Old Guang nodded, but secretly he disagreed. He recognized the crab. In dying, the crab had spoken its name.*12
Back on land, his wife and children had gotten an omen of their own: The evening before my grandfather returned home after years of piracy, it rained. The rain was rancid and full of guts, liquefied fish. The next morning, while everything was still damp and smeared, Old Guang arrived at our door, stained to the knees with mud. He didn’t speak for weeks, and he had brought nothing with him: no boat, no brother, no cutlass or evidence of his piracy. Nothing but a silk pouch, dark with blood, and inside it, a spoiled crab. The meatiest crab his wife had ever seen. The only thing he said to her, before resuming another week of silence, was Cook it for me on a full moon night. She obeyed. She could do nothing else: Old Guang would not eat or speak or come to bed.
The night his wife cooked the crab, my grandfather finally spoke. He had spent all his days home reweaving his fishnet, cleaving trees for a new boat. Whatever had happened, he was ready to reenter the sea’s country. The family watched him shape a fish-hook out of a dog’s jawbone, rubbing his thumb again and again in the same place
until it began to curve upward. At dinner, his wife arranged the crab in the center of the table. His children ate unsalted rice gruel and a pinch of egg yolk. The crab was for him alone,*13 wearing a wedding veil of salt, its body cradled in the steamer, glistening with sea-sweat. Old Guang began to pray, and his wife startled at his voice, which now had a sea’s accent. Up and down and up, rocking her ears to ecstasy.
He told the story one tooth at a time: Ah Zheng was defeated. The fleet was folded up at the bottom of the sea. They’d met an old warship full of coolies. Ordinarily, they never attacked British ships, which were even better armed than the Portuguese. Even outnumbered, the British had their tricks. So Ah Zheng’s men stayed away. But this time, Ah Zheng’s fleet had gotten close enough to see the coolies,*14 the ropes around their necks and feet. Ah Zheng had heard of the many men tricked into contracts or ripped from their sleep, thrown into the bellies of ships and collared. The men who harvested sugar in Cuba or scraped seabird shit from caves in Peru. Cantonese men—the very men that had banned his people from Hong Kong—were now the ones being dragged through the sea on leashes. Ah Zheng believed this was karma. But he also believed in divine intervention,*15 so he steered his ship straight into the British cargo hold. A hole bloomed open, and the water threaded in, sinking that first ship. The British veered away and fired their guns at Ah Zheng’s pirates, felling rows and rows of them. Oh shit, Ah Zheng said. Fuck this.*16
Remember, the coolies were quarantined together in the cargo holds. And most of them could not swim. Remember, too, that Ah Zheng never meant to save the coolies. He meant to drown them, which of course was the only way to save them. Better dead than kuli. Ah Zheng whistled, summoning whales and sharks to head-butt the British fleet. Two of the six coolie ships were sinking quick, and a fourth was injured. Old Guang and Ah Zheng, of course, resolved to die together. All the other pirates chose suicide-by-sea, flinging themselves over the side. Better dead than captured. In the end, there wasn’t a lot to see: gusts of gunpowder, cannonballs burrowing into Ah Zheng’s fleet, shards of ships embedded in the sea like shrapnel.
Ah Zheng kissed Old Guang a last time, the water already past their hips. It was true: Ah Zheng’s blood was fish blood, completely clear. Or maybe the wetness was his tears. Either way, the salt of that last kiss scoured my grandfather’s tongue, cleared his ears. He knew then. He remembered the crab’s name, the crab he still kept below deck. He whistled with three fingers in his mouth, prayed the crab’s name in his mind. And it came: It flew out of the water a hundred feet away, its legs webbed into wings. It quadrupled in size, the diameter of an umbrella, and now it was skimming the sky toward Ah Zheng and my grandfather.
They each gripped a wing, and now the crab was lifting them both, tugging them free of the boat’s carcass. Old Guang blacked out—from fear or relief, he wasn’t sure—and did not remember holding on. And yet, when he woke, he was home. He was lying belly-down on the pier he’d sailed from years ago, before he was a pirate, before he’d sunk and been saved by a crab. Ah Zheng was awake,*17 standing on the pier, his back to the rain-thawed sky. Now my grandfather knew for sure. Ah Zheng was crying bullet-sized tears. He was rocking the crab in his arms. It was dead again and shrunken back to its original size. No sign of webbed wings. Its legs were leggy again.*18
This was the first time Ah Zheng had ever stood on land. It had taken him two hours to get on his feet: The vertigo had overcome him, and his legs could only straighten at a slant. He wasn’t used to a floor without feedback, a ground without any groove. But he didn’t want to fall too loudly and wake up my grandfather, who had been sleeping as if dreaming, kicking the air and twitching his nose. Now that they were both awake and on their feet, Ah Zheng and Old Guang could only stare at the crab, wait for it to confirm itself some kind of god, some kind of patron deity they would now have to spend the rest of their lives repaying. But it remained a rotting crab.
Remember: Ah Zheng was born divorced from all lands, all nations.*19 He hated the dumbness of trees, the way they never ducked the axe. He hated the shit-smell of soil. Roots disturbed him, those gnarled limbs that thieved water for a living. Ah Zheng was also a hunted man, wanted by the empire for piracy, smuggling, murder, the kidnapping of fishermen. Old Guang was just another of his crimes. Meanwhile, the crab exhaled steam. It was demanding to be brought inland and cooked. Sometimes it hissed with a girl’s voice. So they parted—Ah Zheng to the sea, Old Guang to his mountain.
And, of course, by now you know how my mother was born*20: Our grandfather ate the crab, steamed with green onions and glittered in oil, and spat a pink mouthful across the table. That wet fist of meat began to mewl and writhe, as if something was tented inside, beating a way out. A fetus: fully formed and orange as the crab’s shell. The crab was no god or ghost or demon. It was his daughter, born from a half-cooked man and a pirate, with a name no one could pronounce. The child spoke it herself, a sound halfway between swallow and song.
Be careful what you ejaculate into the sea. A crab could crawl onto your ship and grow your child inside it.*21
My grandfather, having successfully sired children with his wife and a pirate, retired back to his fishing boat. My grandmother didn’t mind having one less person to feed, so he spent the rest of his life scouring the sea, holding the fishing pole between his knees as he doodled maps with both his hands. They were nonsensical maps, maps that were all ocean or all land, that had rivers ending in volcanoes or mountains that punctured the sky and let out all its color. They were maps with no directions, no orientation, no decipherable key.
Sometimes the maps were just arterial collections of lines, rivers balled up like thread, roads without beginning or end. They were maps to get lost with, and when passing boats advised him to turn back, head toward safer waters—when dockhands tried to sell him real maps with real trade routes and real countries—he refused. He was trying to be lost, and he was professionally good at it. As long as he was lost, my grandfather believed that Ah Zheng would have to find him, recapture him from home, place him in the bondage of belonging again with someone.
I choose to believe that Ah Zheng found my grandfather again, delirious with thirst and far from any coast; I still dream about it; I still see him in a fishing boat, small as a hat; then he’s suddenly overshadowed by a frigate; Ah Zheng on the deck, waving his shirt like a flag, bare-skinned and salt-striped; the logo of Ah Zheng’s new pirate fleet painted in his own blood; a scab-colored crab with a hundred legs; a hundred-legged crab with wings; Ah Zheng scolding Old Guang for leaving their daughter on land, letting her be corrupted by land-hemmed people; but at least there is time enough for a million more children, a million-gendered child; between them, there is an entire century to father; an entire sea to sire.*22
I’m not going to change the sheets for you, not even if you wet yourself. Why do you think you’re sweating so much? Because you’re sick? It’s the sea in you. That stretch of sheet where you’ve pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart’s a fish. If you open your mouth, it’ll swim out*23 of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive.
* * *
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When I retold my mother the story, a week after I got better, she said all of Ama’s stories were figments of my fever and the only piracy in our family is the bootleg-DVD kind. Our cousins on the island used to send us shrink-wrapped packages full of pirated movies from Hong Kong, and we’d watch them while my mother massaged horse-oil cream into my scalp. She said it’d make me smart. I said, You think a horse is smarter than me? My mother said yes, a horse can be set loose anywhere from home and still know its way back. The skin on the back of my neck was always paved with snake scales, drought-crusted and rough. She alternated between slathering the back of my neck and dewing her feet with oil, which she did under a blanket so I wouldn’t see her toe-nubs. She said most days she forgets they’re supposed to be missing. She said the
nubs ache like gums, that she’d rather have teeth for toes. A mare for a mother. I thought she was trying to warn me about Ama, but all she said was Drinking Ama’s boiled soda will rot your teeth faster than anything. I said nothing, but the memory of sweetness ghosted my mouth.
We watched martial arts movies back-to-back, all of them with similar plots: two brothers, one good and one bad, battle each other for honor on a rooftop. Improvised weapons and a serrated skyline. Guns, sometimes knives. A woman who must choose between the brothers, but in the end she dies (car accident, suicide, or assassination). The two brothers reconcile on the rooftop, but only after one brother’s knife stirs up the other’s stomach. The movies were so low-budget that each actor had to play multiple men, meaning the murdered brothers came back with different clothes and names and haircuts. It became a game to count how many ways a face was repeated, how many bodies one man could die inside.
The piracy was obvious: We could see the glare of a screen embedded in a black frame, the walls of a theater shadowing both sides. At the climax, a woman in the audience stood up and shouted something at the screen. A row of heads bobbed along the bottom, a shadow skyline. We watched the movie being watched. We could hear a woman whispering in one of the front rows, repeating every line of dialogue like an echo. My mother and I shushed her even though we knew she couldn’t hear: She wasn’t here. In the middle of the movie, the camcorder lagged and the audio mismatched with the actors’ mouths, language spoken in a different time zone from the listener. We saw what was happening before we heard it. The knife cleaved a belly, too easy. The scream was stalled. In this shot, the sky was the same shade as my mother’s name.