Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  Now I found myself saying: “It is quite hot today. If you ladies prefer to leave, that is fine with me.”

  Chang leaned toward his wife, pulling me with him, as he attempted to kiss her. But she bounced up and said in a loud voice: “Look! What is that?” She pointed to a butterfly hovering over a dandelion. Chang and I almost fell over as Adelaide eluded Chang’s grasp.

  “It only a butterfly,” Chang said, gloomily. He righted our position.

  We packed away the uneaten lunch and started back toward home. The air was hot, undeniably, and the sky offered no hope of cooling rain. My wife and my sister-in-law walked ahead of us, talking between themselves, and I looked at my wife’s figure descending the hill through the trees. Was wishing for love as hopeless as looking for rain to fall out of this cloudless sky?

  Adelaide looked over her shoulder at my brother, who still wore the expression of a dog given too little to eat. She stopped walking, and stood under a tree waiting for us to catch up to her. She poked Chang’s chest and said, half mockingly: “It’s obvious I’m just having fun with you. He is good, ain’t he?” She kissed him on the cheek, which she could scarcely do without leaning on me a little.

  Adelaide had been my greatest concern when first I considered matrimony, an obstacle I had believed insurmountable. I had thought, What will be worse than a sister-in-law always present? It’s never going to work. Had two couples ever survived such a close, unhappy predicament? A shadow wife not of my own choosing, always in my hair—how could that not change our life forever, in impossible ways, until sooner or later I would end up hating her and she would hate me.

  But that was not how it was turning out at all.

  Before long Adelaide was pressuring Chang to go on tour. In addition, she wanted to come along. She had “never been anywhere.” Sarah, though not as eager about it as her sister, said that she too wanted to see the world, or at least as much of it as you could in the Southern United States.

  Our farming was going profitably enough at this point, and our savings had not really been dented, but Chang, because he was getting to be the kind of man who feared crossing his wife, said he’d be happy if the women would accompany us. Though I hated the accursed peering eye of the crowd, I complied and arranged a modest expedition, a jaunt through the American South. People stared anyway, I thought; they may as well be forced to pay for the privilege.

  Our fame had not diminished much, and we were able to set up exhibitions with no advance promotion. The inaugural show of this tour was in Wohl, North Carolina, a tiny community in the shade of the Leatherwood Mountains some thirty miles from Wilkesboro. It was to be the first time the girls would see our act. The thought of it made my brother and me nervous, Chang especially.

  The Wohl Theater was new and small, like the community itself. Prior to the late 1840s, few roads had come to the shaky homes that were in the midst of becoming the township of Wohl. Chester Wohl had built the Wohl Theater—and the town—after he had found a glistening thread of gold in the stream that coiled around Oxford Hill before disappearing into it like a snake slithering into a tunnel.

  It was night when we first made our way to the theater. Mist and shadow encompassed Oxford Hill, and even the faint light failed to show that any building was there until we were right upon it.

  Inside, the theater was dusky, despite the best efforts of a set of three weak torch flares abutting the stage. Also, our damsels of the front row, Sarah and Adelaide, were the only spectators. Perhaps our fame had diminished due to our lack of touring.

  And yet, the show Chang and I put on then! Acrobatic feats, and feats of strength, rehearsed and improvised—the spontaneous moves hazardous to perform, vaulting, painful twisting, the more splendid for their severity; the rehearsed actions executed with an unprecedented authority and freedom from error. Chang and I swung from the bars of our cage; we gyrated on the cold floor.

  At the end of the vigorous part of the performance, Chang and I clamped together like a vise. His sweat ran toward my body, and his heart rattled my ribs. And then the vise disengaged, its halves going shoulder to shoulder. On the far side of the bars, our wives were applauding—not too loudly or vigorously. There was a play of light from the torch flares on their cheeks.

  Mr. Wohl stepped in front of our cage and cupped his hands over his mouth. “Step right up close and examine the ligament!” he yelled into the empty theater. “Do you want to see if it’s real?”

  Adelaide hollered back: “We don’t need no more proof!” Then she threw her head back in laughter. Her eyes were tearing and quite pretty. The shadows of moonlit branches outside threw jagged patterns on her face and body, dark lines in the near-dark. Sarah did not really laugh and looked tired at Adelaide’s side.

  We took in no money from that hastily arranged show, and not much from the few performances that followed. When you rush into a tour with little promotion, it’s bound to start off sourly. Not much improved when we got to Windy Gap, North Carolina. At that town’s lone hostelry, eschewing the normal routine, Adelaide and Sarah stayed in one room, Chang and I in another—at Adelaide’s suggestion.

  It was late. As we dressed for sleep, I noticed Chang had turned white. In that little room, its low ceiling just higher than our heads, we were standing face-to-face leaning against the dresser for balance as we were taking our pants off, when he looked at me as if he’d just noticed he was missing a limb.

  “What if Adelaide stop loving me?” he said. “I think she stop loving me.”

  “Chang.” I took a deep breath. “Has she not spoken of wanting to have a child more than anything?”

  I put my arm round his shoulder so we could walk side by side to the bed. “Brother,” I said, “you and I were never meant for love, and so we don’t want to fail it. But do not fret over nothing.” I gave his arm a light squeeze. One minute he was overjoyed about the glory of trying to be a husband, the next it was all anguish.

  “Eng, you never worry?” He was blinking at me, nearly in a panic.

  “I am a creature of habit, you know that, brother,” I said. “I’ve come across some—crimps in my own marriage, but I go on, I work to get everything calm and smooth,” I said as we climbed under the sheets. Chang cocked his head toward mine like a rooster.

  Why is he talking to me this way? I said to myself. Of course I have concerns, attached at the chest and attempting what we are.

  Why can’t he do as I do? I said to myself. Is it not easier to live without sharing one’s fears?

  What I was coming to know about my marriage was that it afforded me a glimpse of the normality I had never understood before—but just a glimpse. I knew I had been right to caution Chang when first he began falling for Adelaide. The insignificant flat hanging appendage of flesh that linked us was stronger than the tally of its soft tissue, because it could ward off love, and all thoughts of happiness. I was lonely, maybe as much in marriage as ever.

  Soon we found ourselves in Waveland, Louisiana, a port town just outside New Orleans. We stood one late afternoon on the banks of the foul-smelling Mississippi, waiting at the end of a very long line of people preparing to board, one by one, onto the Ivory Eagle, a white steamboat bobbing on the river. It looked like a wedding cake that belched smoke. I thought of the floating musical theaters of home.

  Once aboard, the queue of riverboat travelers was divided into two classes—the Main Deckers, who cramped against the engines, barrels, baggage, random scatterings, live chickens, and derelicts; and the Upper Levelers, those lucky few who had paid to climb the baroque spiral stairway that led to a row of individual rooms, all of which featured a Southern porch and a mulatto maid to attend to any lady passengers. Our two couples were supposed to have been Upper Levelers, but because my brother had written the wrong sum on the check we had sent—I could not look after everything he did, despite our nearness—we four now had to stand on the main deck.

  Gingerbread fretwork dangled everywhere, and the windows were of colored glas
s. Some of the boat’s steam had condensed into beads of moisture that winked on the brasswork like tiny diamonds in the sunlight—but beneath these elegant cosmetics the steamboat was squalor set afloat. The loud hissing never softened, the funnel coughed out foul black clouds of smoke one after the other, and the deck shuddered with the hiccups of an inferior engine. All of these inconveniences paled before the detestable inhabitants of this world between paddle wheels. The fat, cigar-smoking gambler, in the market for a tourist to fleece; the stoop-backed farmer, clutching his modest harvest and looking nervously about; the crewman, sneering as he passed; the lady of the evening in her narrow bonnet, at work in the uglying light of day; the sightseer eyeing this harlot before turning back to his wife and children with displeasure; above all, the whole of this mass of shabby-clothed unfortunates, casting furtive glances around, reeking of threadbare unclean clothes and the perspiration of close contact, chatting or sleeping or making way for any and all flotsam being pushed aboard—these were what gave the main deck its particular character. Chang and I had not traveled in such conditions since we’d made our own modest fortune.

  I had an uneasy feeling walking the decks with our wives, moving shoulder-to-shoulder with my brother, our band peeking through the vests of our suits. Hissing through their dirty pinkwhite mouths, the Main Deckers, ladies and gentlemen both, surrounded us, poking with sweaty fingers and pulling to see with frenzied wide eyes if the band was real. Treading lightly beside Chang and me trying to find someplace to sit, Sarah and Adelaide were stiff as statues and gazed straight ahead, putting forth great effort not to look upset. Chang and I used Gung-Fu to thwart the rude hands as best we could, pushing back the crowd with our precise circular strokes. Our wives were whispering between themselves throatily, “Please get us away from here,” saying “please” over and again.

  Finally the four of us found space on a secluded bench near the helm. The boat chugged across the water, which the prow cut through in a double-lather that dragged from the stem of the boat like a pair of foamy comet’s tails. Everyone around us continued to stare, and pointed, calling out to Chang and me. Adelaide seethed under a wide-brimmed hat whose pink tassels wafted behind her with every breeze, while Sarah stood motionless beside the helm, hatless, without the lip rouge her sister always wore. Our wives were not used to this sort of reception. Adelaide would not look at her husband, and so she sat next to me. She laid her parasol across my knees. Sarah stood beside the helm, her shoulders sagging under the attention, worry lines springing up around her eyes from fighting back tears.

  “Well, Eng,” Adelaide said, making a show of addressing me instead of her husband. “I guess it’s obvious to us all your brother here is a moron.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “I heard you before, Chang,” she said, hot-tempered now. She imitated my brother’s accent: “ ‘Solly’”

  “They’re all staring at us—it’s just terrible,” said Sarah, slouching her shoulders and looking over the railing at little shanties bobbing to the rhythm of our passing boat’s wake.

  “Well, Eng,” Adelaide said again, “it looks like we’re both bound to the same moron.” Her laugh could not have sounded less affectionate. I smiled at her.

  She looked away from me quickly.

  Sarah, meanwhile, had begun to cry. Her face was growing mottled, and she leaned over the rail of the ship and opened her lips into the breeze like she was trying to guzzle a drink of air. She wore her clothes as if they’d been flung on with a hayfork. “My stomach,” she said, the loose skin under her jaw shaking. “What a squirrelly life you’all lead. Oh, my stomach.”

  I had to turn from the sight of my wife. And so, had my sister-in-law been the ugliest woman in the world, at that instant she would have appealed to me. She was not the ugliest woman in the world. She put her tongue briefly to her lips to moisten them.

  As Adelaide was looking down at the colors of the sun on the water, I realized I had never noticed the perfection of her nose. I understood now that Sarah’s nose was too long, a grotesque of Adelaide’s. She looked away from me quickly, and I felt as if kicked in my suddenly disgraceful heart.

  “Please, Adelaide,” Chang said. “What the matter?”

  Adelaide picked at her fingers distractedly. Does she suspect my feelings? I wondered.

  “What the matter?” Chang said, morose.

  This was the first time I had admitted my desire to myself.

  “Can’t a girl think about something,” Adelaide said, “without a Chinaman asking, ‘what, what, what?’ ” She cocked her head to the side. “What do you think is the matter? It’s obvious this is not what I had in mind when I wanted to see the world.”

  “I make mistake.” Chang exhaled from his nose, and I could feel his discouraged air on my neck.

  “Chang, forget it,” Adelaide said. “Forget it.” She rose from the bench and began walking in the direction of a card game being played farther along the main deck. “Forget it.” The phrase, which she now started to sing in an invented melody, formed a trail behind her. “Forget it. Forget it. Forget . . .”

  Chang called after her: “Adelaide, sorry, I sorry—”

  She spun around to us. “Shh! Chang, it’s nothing.”

  He smiled nervously and swallowed his breath. “It nothing, Adelaide?”

  “No. Yes.” She began to laugh. “I was mad, but I ain’t now.”

  She walked away again. He called to her once more—“Addie!”—but she did not respond. And my brother looked at me, his face flushed with helplessness, with sadness.

  As for me, I was wounded by the image of Adelaide frolicking away from Chang, and also the warbled but lovely melody she had invented just seconds before. Forget it. Forget it. Forget . . . It did not bring me happiness.

  Even now I felt Chang’s stare.

  Never allow yourself to surrender to this longing, not at all, I thought.

  Adelaide will be a close friend, the closer the better, for that way I can enjoy her company. All else is lunacy.

  I could hear Adelaide’s refrain playing in my head, speaking to me, too: Forget it. Forget it. Forget . . .

  At that moment Sarah, blinking and pale and not yet fully free from the hold of nausea, came over to sit down next to me and touch my forearm. “I don’t know how you’all can stomach it all the time—staring and pointing.” She was shuddering but managed to regain her babyish tone. I was startled by my wife’s hand. I had forgotten about her.

  After a few minutes, Adelaide returned, accompanied by a smiling red-shirted young crewman. The wind had curled one of the pink tassels of Adelaide’s wide-brimmed hat down toward her neck. The sight of that lucky thread cambering from the hat faintly to touch her bare skin gave me a physical pain. Jealous of a tassel?

  In any case, the smiling crewman at my sister-in-law’s side shook his head at Chang and me. “This is Mr. Butler,” Adelaide said. “I convinced him to let us stay in two of the vacant rooms of the upper deck.”

  Mr. Butler picked up our bags and shepherded us toward the stairway that would lead us to more agreeable facilities. After a few steps Butler had vanished into the steam and smoke and the thick of the rabble. Chang and I were a step behind our wives, fighting off invasive hands, and though the girls seemed to think we were out of earshot, we were not. They were talking, in hushed tones, about how Adelaide had convinced Mr. Butler to bring us to the upper deck. “What did you say to him?” Sarah was asking her sister. “I’ll never know what to say to a man like you do.”

  “Don’t be squirelly with me, Sarah Bunker.” Adelaide was incredulous. “You obviously know exactly well how to talk to a man. Maybe if you hadn’t known to sweet-talk so well, you wouldn’t have gotten us ruined in the first place—”

  Sarah turned her head away as if she’d been smacked. “Adelaide Yates,” she hissed. “That was different.” Then she shot Adelaide a look containing more cold steel than I thought Sarah capable of. The wind tore at what she said next, b
ut I was almost sure this is what I heard: “Well, I married them, didn’t I?” Chang looked not to have heard, or pretended not to have.

  Walking up the stairs, I was overcome by shock, then rage. What did that mean, Maybe if you hadn’t known ... ? Had my wife lied to me about the slave? I was in such a state that I barely registered the black smoke that beset us from the belching funnel as we climbed the stairs. Had she lied to me? How dare she! The groundwork of our marriage was shown now to have been flawed from the outset. What about all of the effort I put into love and matrimony? But there was an underbelly to my anger that was almost agreeable. Sarah had lied, and I did not want to forgive her.

  I was not able to savor my anger for long. As soon as we were shown to our rooms, a yelling came from below. I thought at first that a fight had broken out around the “grub stock”—the enormous metal container that our ship’s stewards would fill with broken jellied meats, game, ragouts, and fish, in order that the main deckers could scramble for their dinner all at once—but no, the food had not been brought out yet, though by now it was dark and quite late enough for it. Looking over the rail, I saw what the commotion was about soon enough.

  The Mirrorglass, another steamboat—this one about three hundred feet long, adorned with American flags and a cursive insignia painted on its colossal paddle box—roared toward us, flanking to the right of our Ivory Eagle, trailing us by no more than twenty yards. My fellow passengers were screaming taunts at the other steamboat. And they were demanding a race.

  The stretch of Mississippi on which we were traveling was quite hazardous, and though steamboat races were common, that did not mean they were safe. The great river was always changing her form. New and surprising junctions appeared and disappeared with the rain, swells and ties emerged or vanished, slices of land became linked suddenly after having been divided for years. An inch of difference in the river’s level from one day to the next could bring disaster.