Another synchronized kick and the boy fell on his back, and got tangled in the fishing lines.
“I’m sorry,” the boy lied. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” His tear ducts were clearly still in working order.
As Chang and I advanced, Father came running toward us. He was frantic and waved his arms. “Stop—stop what you are doing!”
His face was white as a Caucasian’s.
Chang and I walked away. We did not look at Father, who had begun to help free the boy from the fishing lines. We did not ask his permission to leave, or look at his face to see if he was shamed by us. Or if he sympathized with the boy. This fight brought no satisfaction, no gush of relief. I did not cry, but I felt the tears collecting behind my eyes. I felt a great affection for Chang. That is not to say I did not still crave separation. From this point on, that is what I wanted more than anything in life, to be separate like the other boys.
Chang and I limped back into the seclusion from which we had come.
I used to say I learned little from my childhood, save fishing and fighting. Looking back, I realize those wonderful days taught me the art of not weeping, regardless the strength of the urge.
Also when we were eight, Aunt Ping the traveling barber came to tell us King Rama wanted the double-boy dead.
Our family was spending a balmy early evening out by the riverbank. Residue of an afternoon downpour wept off the tree leaves, cicadas chirped in their miniature crescendos, the semidarkness brought about tree-shaped shadows, and a faded moon dangled in the dark blue overhead.
Mother, Chang, and I were washing clothes in the Mekong as a floating theater skimmed by with its actors singing and dashing across a little stage. The birds in the trees provided background harmony, the trees themselves marked a soft tempo as some wind rustled through, while a leaf or two danced off the branches and alighted in rhythm. We all stopped working and swayed to the music, except Father. He was hoping to sell bronze trinkets from his stand. This was his strategy to take in money when he wasn’t fishing.
All that morning there had been a fire in one of the Mekong villages a mile from the shore, and the faint smell of far-off smoke still spiced the warm air.
Chang and I stood by the edge of the river, sinking our small bare feet into the soft mud, arguing and laughing and picking at each other’s ears, and listening to the fish jump from the river with swishing tails (this always prompted Father to look up from his trinkets and grumble).
Soon a large woman in a short loose green jacket and green pants rowed up to us in a narrow dinghy.
“Is Aunt Ping coming to cut our hair again?” Chang asked.
I repressed a shudder of annoyance; I always noticed things before he did. If ever trouble made Chang react, I had already responded moments earlier, the way a flash of lightning precedes the dull boom that rushes to catch up with its kin.
“Patience,” I said, tapping Chang’s head bones with my finger. I had to admit a fondness for his smile, knurly as it was and incorporating the whole of his face.
Now past the mossy tree that arched over the river of our floating home, our aunt paddled to a stop by the trough of mud that began a footpath toward the inland village a mile behind our house. Ping was out of breath. Our aunt was a wide woman with warm, tawny skin not handsome enough to leave much impression.
“Nok, Nok,” she huffed, “I need to talk to you.” She was restless, holding a hand to her face and squeezing her bottom lip, as if that were the only way to keep from blurting out her secret.
Father stepped out from the trinket stand and positioned himself between Mother and her sister. “What is it, Ping?”
“Ti-eye, you are the only Chinese I have ever met who never sees what’s in front of him,” sighed Ping. She motioned at Chang and me and rolled her eyes.
After the adults sent us off to play by ourselves, we scrambled nose-to-nose along the water’s edge, stepping on the raspberry-red snail-egg pods at our feet, side-winding past the tree line and all the way up to the summit of grassy Kang Gee Hill. Even from this high point, little broke the monotonous sweep of the horizon; but in the distance we could make out the two-color current where the clear blue waters of the Mun ran alongside the muddy Mekong. We did not yet see the little girl who was coming toward us.
“Well, here we are,” my brother said, and wrapped his arms around me as I brought mine around him. We were stepping on worms with our bare feet.
I had to agree; we were here. His forehead fit against the top of my nose. And then Chang tucked his head in the nook where my neck joined my shoulder.
After taking a breath and thinking of home to avoid seeing the muddy grass and the salt pits hundreds of feet below, I started to roll down the hill with my brother, leaving a double-trail in the mud. Ever since first we had fallen into the river, we loved to roll.
Chang and I bounced along and I could feel his breath in my hair with each laugh. “Yes, yes,” he shrieked when we picked up speed. Our spongy, exposed band skimmed against the grassy loam at the underside of each rotation, my brother’s little mouth emitted a staccato murmur that sharpened with every bump, and I sensed he wanted to stop.
“No,” I managed in a shaky voice. “We’ll wait until we reach bottom.”
Inevitably, our speed and the hill leveled off. We lay there at its base, disoriented and tired, our dress curled up above our scratched bare backsides. The heat had become oppressive, the sky was already swapping its dark blue for black, and rain began once more to fall.
We spent a minute catching our breath. The back of my head was burrowed into the earth, while Chang rested his face on my breastbone.
Looking up, I noticed her.
More than halfway down the hill, a young girl with small bones and little muscles and smooth skin stared at my brother and me from under a mass of delicate wet black hair. About our age, she stood some twenty feet away, bent forward and squinting. This was the first little girl we had ever seen, and she was an angelic sight.
The petite creature waited in place, then she turned, ran, and soon she disappeared over the hill, screaming as she went. Her cries seemed to grow louder as she raced farther away.
Chang moved to get up and give chase, and so I followed. We ran after her. Actually, Chang ran while I backpedaled to keep pace. We were surprisingly fast in that posture, and I could tell by the increasing volume of the girl’s shrieks, and by Chang’s widening smile, that we were closing in on her. The hue and cry of her crash to the ground was heralded by the sound of her stumbling feet, and so I was ready when my brother slowed us to a stop.
My brother smiled down at the girl. “Hello,” he said, and bent us toward her. Her face was bloodless, her mouth an uncertain sneer, heartbreaking and thrown open as if in mid-scream. She wept as this double-child, still standing face-to-face, tilted in her direction.
The girl kicked at us wildly, and she scrambled to stand. Then she ran off, and regained her ability to scream at the top of her lungs.
Chang motioned after her a second time, but I put my hand on his shoulder. Again, I did love him at this point—not as a part of myself, as others have said and written, but perhaps as much as I loved myself. The dank smell of the riverbank rippled over us with the warm rain, and yards away, down the far side of the hill, a pair of partially eaten duck carcasses by the chalky lip of the salt pits called to mind human remains.
It was shadowy, nighttime, when we returned alone to the table of trinkets in front of our floating home. Against the green shoreline, far upstream, there were little white boats around which tiny flecks of torchlight lingered like fireflies.
Mother was crying and her hand was over her mouth. Father hugged her. Our aunt was running a hand through Mother’s hair. Ping had announced the news: the King wanted to kill the double-child, the bad omen.
The young sovereign, new to the throne, was said to be delicate. Although we didn’t know it yet, His Highness had a reputation as a poet. He had translated the Siamese version
of Ramayana, and subsequently He wrote the ten-thousand-line-long Harvests of Siam, two stanzas of which remain with me: “For our proud and mighty nation/It is high time for jubilation/Meeting our jaded eyes in an altogether special way/This land’s double-pride Chang-Eng was walking about today.”
Mother had always been remarkable, not only for the absolute harmony of her features but also for her measureless tenacity. She had ostensibly to obey Father’s every whim, of course, but she never failed to seem magnificently fierce while doing so. Now her wailing broke our hearts.
Mother wouldn’t stand for any decree, she said, picking us up with a grunt. Rain still fell, and as the weather pelted her cheeks, the dust of the day began to run down the side of her face in muddy rivulets.
She told Father we’d all escape to China.
In a soothing whisper, he reminded her it would take at least two days to make the house truly seaworthy and to build a suitable oar.
“But it can be done.” She employed the tone she thought necessary to use with Father sometimes.
“Yes.” His voice carried little self-assurance, and scant certainty. “It is possible.”
I felt that Chang, as did I, sensed that the plan was merely some complicated adult joke. But I imagined how lovely it might be to float with Mother across the sea, watching her row through the night, barefoot, her hair thick and salty with the seawater and tied in a braid as black as her eyes.
“We might not have two days to waste on fixing the houseboat,” Mother said, as if coming out of a dream. At the same time, a wall of fog had sprung from the river to ramble our way.
Ping said she knew of someone who had a navigable boat for sale, in a Mekong village not far from where we lived. Her own skiff was too small for the four of us, she said. My brother and I started to cry.
“We will see if we can purchase that boat, then,” Mother said, putting us down. “Now.”
The shaky wall of fog slowed its approach, grew, hesitated by the trees that hunched over the river, shrank, and retreated downstream.
Father asked: “Leave the Mekong, just like that?” Mother did not answer.
Our escape plans progressed quickly, until adversity, as it tends to do, hit.
Mother, Father, and Ping were in our houseboat gathering belongings. Left alone outside, Chang and I stepped sideways toward a low pontoon bridge. Playing through our tears under the dark sky, we tried to hurdle it together, but my brother was a moment behind in our jump. We came down violently, with our connecting band left straddling one of the posts. We hung there, face-to-face. The pain was terrible. Neither of us could move. Chang’s face was red and he could not breathe.
I don’t know how old one has to be to understand death. Maybe the young can fathom it, maybe no one ever really can. But on that pontoon bridge, thinking—maybe hoping—that my connecting band had snapped like a bamboo fishing rod, I may have grasped the idea.
At this time, our connector was about two inches long, and Chang loved it. He called it Tzon, or ripe banana, and wailed if ever I mentioned severing it. It was more taut then, and would crackle like an old knee when we inched closer or father apart (no one had any idea the thing would grow with us, and one day allow lateral positioning). I often fidgeted with a stretch of brown leathery skin—a hairy birthmark—midway across it, and also a little brown dot, a charming dinky island that lived, insolently, just free from the shoreline of the larger birthmark. The dot tingled pleasantly when touched.
But now we stretched across that post. Chang was turning blue.
Finally, somehow, I got together the strength to heave myself over toward his side. We fell with a thump to the mud, I on my back with Chang across my chest. I shook with his spasms. And the pain continued as if hot lancet blades were raining down continuously on our ligament. Chang’s eyes were closed, and it looked as if my brother were lying dead beside me. His arm was snagged around mine, and my legs prickled under the weight of his. I tried to pull free of him, and, limp and unconscious, Chang danced with me. I coughed blood.
Rain was coming down hard. My chest was scratched up and the ligament was a purple welt. Blood escaped from Chang’s mouth onto my shoulder. I was too tired to scream for help, so I closed my eyes.
I waked as Father carried us to our houseboat. The rain had let up; I’m not sure how long we’d lain there. “These two obviously can’t go anywhere,” Father said, looking almost sanguine as he brought us across the threshold. Chang was still unconscious, I, half awake.
Gently, Father placed us on the rug, on our sides. Then he took Chang’s shoulder in his hands and cautiously shook us. The candle on the tree-butt table emitted black smoke, and gnarled shadows roamed the cabin. Mosquitoes buzzed by.
Mother pushed him aside as she came to sit by us. “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Despite the heat, she wasn’t sweating. “We have to fetch the doctor.”
They argued. No one knew what to do. Should Father try to buy a boat and then take a day’s journey to see a doctor in Bangkok? Or should Father alone paddle toward the capital city in Ping’s boat, in hopes of persuading the doctor to come here, to tend to us before the King’s men arrived? Maybe the doctor could separate us, and the King’s men would find no double-baby to kill. If only Chang would open his eyes.
Father decided it would be best if he alone went to buy the navigable boat; on his return, we all could sail off together. He kissed Chang and me on the forehead and left. He hunched his shoulders to walk out into the rain. He did not look back at us. I wish I could recall what Father looked like at that moment, but as with so much from those days, that memory seems now like a boat off in the distance, a little speck that glints on the horizon before disappearing. I never saw my father again.
Mother paced as our Aunt Ping came to sit with us in our bedstead. Ping was shaky, and perspiring, and she looked at us for a long, long time. “I’m all right,” I told her finally, and I meant it. A stench of something like rotten eggs had been streaming in from outside. “We are fine,” I said.
And without warning Mother ran over to us and cried. Chang had gained consciousness, finally. “My bean sprout,” she said.
He blinked, and stared at Mother with frightened eyes. She kissed his cheek, asked him how he felt. “Our band hurts a little,” he said.
Mother and Ping comforted Chang and me. And after Ping had fallen asleep next to us, Mother sang and cried and massaged our band with warm water and palm leaves for hours. “Oh, you are so very brave, Chang,” she said, stroking his smooth cheek with her tender touch. “And you too, Eng,” she said, still petting my brother. I had exhausted myself saving us from the pontoon bridge, and it was I who had been awake for the bulk of the pain, and I who assured Mother and Ping that we’d survive. Chang awoke and received kisses.
Soon dawn surged and passed, and the morning hours too.
At noontime a woman came running to our door. I didn’t know who she was, but she looked as if she could have been one of Mother’s relatives. “The King’s men are here for the little monster,” the woman said, out of breath. She rested her arm on the doorjamb; she was small, and her lovely cheekbones seemed to come straight from Mother—and also her soft black hair and clear deep eyes. “They’re in Mekong village and looking for this place,” she said.
From there things proceeded quickly.
The knife’s blade was wet; Mother and Ping had submersed it in hot water. Chang was crying; I was not. “Please don’t,” my brother said. I do not think it was only that he thought we’d die from trauma if they tried to separate us. He simply could not imagine the aloneness of a life apart.
Slowly she pierced the ligament with the tip of the blade, drawing out a dab of our blood. Tears streamed down Mother’s face, too. I heard a modest crunching as the cutting edge slid into our skin. More blood. We panted reflexively. Our legs in a spasm of self-preservation clung to each other, a tangle at the knees. And we wept, in pain such as no child should ever know.
The kn
ife was inside Chang and me, though only at a pinprick’s depth. I tried not to scream but the howl caught behind my gnashed teeth was a fluttering tuna fighting to get free from a trap. It escaped.
“Please,” I said. “Do it.”
Mother towered above us, lingering, stabbing my brother and me for a moment that seemed to drain time from the air. I believe she would have carved us apart. The attempt almost certainly would have killed us, but that seemed less terrifying than the King’s men, who would take our lives for sure. Mother never got the chance to finish the cut.
The King’s men stormed into our home, striding in as if invited—two strong soldiers with tremendous arms fit to be thrust out, one at a time, to part a crowd. They wore exaggeratedly flared red silk pantaloons, along with silk vests that barely covered their bare, tublike chests. Both were shaved bald. They stared with green eyes at Chang and me as they swaggered toward us. Mother still held her blade thrust into our band. I could barely keep my eyes open from the shock and pain.
One of the men put his hand on Mother’s shoulder. She simply withdrew her knife and stepped aside.
A King of Siam, and by extension anything associated with Him, receives more reverence from His subjects than does any sovereign I’ve ever met, from the Tsar of Russia to the Queen of England. No one dares ever to pronounce His name or to write it, and no one but His inner clan even knows what it is.
Siamese are told from birth that His body is a womb that purifies His noble human soul before elevating it to godly excellence at the moment of His death. The very fact of kingly status is proof of a thousand previous lifetimes of glory; but all that past glory is insignificant compared to this final mortal position of sovereignty, which itself will be insignificant compared to the holiness awaiting Him upon His final breath. Still, it is treason to ponder the King’s mortality, and consequently no heir is appointed during His lifetime.
Chang and Eng Page 4