Monkey Hunting - Hardcover

Garcia, Cristina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375410562 ISBN 13: 9780375410567

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

The new novel—her first in six years—from the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters follows one family from China to Cuba to America in an emotionally resonant tale of immigration, assimilation, and the powerful integrity of self.

In 1857, when Chen Pan signs a contract that will take him from China “beyond the edge of the world to Cuba,” he has no idea that he will be enslaved on a sugarcane plantation . . . or that he will eventually, miraculously, escape his bonds and embark on a prosperous life in Havana’s Chinatown . . . or that he will buy a mulatto woman out of slavery and take her into his home and heart . . . or that he will end his long days in Havana, surrounded by children and grandchildren, as Cuban as he is Chinese.

In a vivid tapestry of incident and feeling, Chen Pan’s life story is interwoven with those of two of his descendants: his granddaughter, Chen Fang, born in China and raised as a boy so she could be educated, her life coming to its end in one of Mao’s hellish prisons, and Domingo, Chen Pan’s great-great-grandson, who, with his father, becomes an American citizen after Castro’s revolution, only to lose his parent to the false promises of the American dream, and himself, finally, to the madness of wartime Vietnam.

Deeply stirring, wonderfully evocative of time and place, rendered in the lyrical prose that is Cristina García’s hallmark, Monkey Hunting brilliantly illuminates a generations-long struggle toward a sense of true belonging.

About this title

About the Author:

Cristina García was born in Havana and grew up in New York City. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was nominated for a National Book Award and has been widely translated. Ms. García has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. She lives in Santa Monica with her daughter, Pilar.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

To Paradise
Amoy to Aavana
(1857)

There were other men like Chen Pan on the ship, not too young, but not too old either. From the farms, mostly, as far as he could tell. No weaklings. Cuba, the man in the Western suit had told him, needed sturdy workers. Chen Pan was taller than most of the recruits, and his arms were taut with muscles. His hair was tied back in a thick queue, but at twenty years old he barely needed to shave.

A few families came to see their men off. The women gave their husbands sticky rice balls and packets of seeds for their journey. There was no weeping. Even the smallest children were dry-eyed. Most of the men, like Chen Pan, went aboard alone and empty-handed.

That evening at sea, the coast of China gradually faded behind them. A haloed moon rose on a swell of wind, but this hopeful omen didn’t alter the facts of the ship. It was outfitted like a prison, with irons and grates. The recruits were kept belowdecks, like animals in a pen. The shortest among them couldn’t stand upright. Soon Chen Pan’s neck ached from stooping.

Neither the British captain nor his crew spoke much Chinese. The captain issued his orders with a flat expression and a wave of his girlish hands. His crew was far more unruly. They threatened the re- cruits with muskets and cutlasses and rattan rods, shackled those whom the rods didn’t tame. Chen Pan was struck with a hoisting rope for requesting an extra blanket.

Those men who’d brought food or tobacco on board began to barter and sell. These boiled chicken feet for your hemp sandals or your uncle’s flute. A handful of pumpkin seeds for your stash of turnips or hard-boiled eggs. A day’s opium for the woolen gloves. Gambling sprouted like snake-grass in every bunk. The incessant clicking of dice finely divided the hours. A man from W—— gathered most of the winnings and crowed, “If you were too dumb the life before, you won’t be enlightened today!”

After his misfortunes in Amoy, Chen Pan refused to gamble. He guarded his Mexican coins, tucking them between the meager cheeks of his buttocks for safekeeping.

The men got beef jerky and rice gruel to eat. Chen Pan ate, although the taste of the food sickened him. It was oversalted, and the lack of adequate water made him desperately thirsty. Hour after hour, he thought more of his shoe-leather throat than of the life awaiting him in Cuba. Those who demanded more water were answered with blows. Chen Pan watched men drink their own urine, lick moisture from the walls of the ship. A few swallowed seawater until their stomachs swelled and they choked in their own filth.

A squat melon-grower from T—— announced that he would throw himself into the ocean to end his torment. Chen Pan crept on deck with two others to watch him jump. The melon-grower didn’t shout or linger but simply stepped into the breeze. A moment later, the furling waves received him with indifference. The melon-grower had been an orphan and a bachelor. No destiny would be altered but his.

The ship continued to plow south into the hard-gusting wind. Chen Pan covered his ears so they wouldn’t blow away altogether. He asked himself four questions: What was the last sound the melon-grower heard? The last color he saw before he died? How long would it take for the fish to devour him? Would this death complete his fate? “Show me the person who doesn’t die,” shrugged a short-legged man next to Chen Pan.

This was something Chen Pan’s father used to say, that death alone remained impartial. All the towering men, all the great beauties with kingfisher plumes in their hair—not a single one expected to grow old. But they, too, would return to dust. If it was true that man had two souls, one of the body and the other ethereal, then they would merge with the earth and the air after death.

Chen Pan knew that he didn’t want to fade away slowly, like a dying candle—one day no different from the next; the dirt etched in his hands along with his fortunes. No, he would rather live in a blaze of courage and flame like Li Kuang, the ferocious warrior who’d battled the Huns, or the heroes in the stories his father had recounted to him.

Chen Pan’s father had been as restless as these heroes, never reconciling himself to a life on their farm. He’d recited the Songs of Wu as he’d absentmindedly hoed the wheat fields, grew devoted to the poetry of the deserted concubines of the Han court. He’d referred to the sun as the Lantern Dragon, the Crow in Flight, the White Colt. The moon was the Silver Dish or the Golden Ring.

Father had taken the Imperial examinations for twenty years without success. He’d been a good poet but incapable of composing verses on assigned subjects, as was required by the examiners. He’d blamed his absorption of useless knowledge for overburdening his imagination. Before picking up his brush to write, he would rub his inkstick on a whetstone for a meditative hour as Chen Pan watched.

Chen Pan’s mother ridiculed her husband as she hobbled from room to room on her lotus feet. “Ha! Everyone calls him a scholar, but he hasn’t found a position yet. And in winter he wears a thread- bare robe. This is how books fool us!” Chen Pan’s mother was from a family of well-to-do farmers, and far from beautiful. She knew little poetry, but used to repeat the same line to nettle her improvident husband: Poets mostly starve to death embracing empty mountains!

After ten days of cramped, stinking squalor, a fight erupted belowdecks. A city man named Yang Yün, contrary as a donkey, shoved a quiet farmer out of his bunk. “Son of a whore!” the farmer shouted, punching Yang Yün in the chest. The city man pulled a knife from his vest and silvered the air with reckless slashing. The farmer disarmed him in no time, then promptly broke his nose.

Chen Pan watched the fight from behind his tattered book of poems, a last gift from his father. He decided that if Yang Yün or any of the other city cocks so much as jostled his elbow, he would knock them unconscious with a blow.

The captain’s guards chained the troublemakers to iron posts. Others who’d cheered them on were flogged to intimidate the rest. When the stubborn Lin Chin resisted, the guards kicked him in the ribs until he spat blood. The next day he died and his body was dumped in the sea. It was said that Lin Chin didn’t sink at first but floated alongside the ship for hours, his eyes fixed on the sky. Chen Pan wondered if the dead man’s ghost would find its way back to China. Or would it wander forever among the unvirtuous and the depraved?

As the ship continued to sail, Chen Pan imagined his wife pounding the season’s meager yield of grain in their yard, looking warily to the sky for rain. They’d been married for three years but had no children. Unlucky, despite what the matchmaker had predicted. On their wedding night, Chen Pan and his wife had drunk pomegranate wine and she’d grazed his chest with her soft, scant breasts. But month after month her womb spilled its blood.

Chen Pan’s mother blamed his wife for ruining the family with her persistent barrenness. Weak and sallow-skinned, Mother ruled the farm from her bed, knees tucked to her chest, lotus feet curled and useless from the painful binding long ago. In her closet were three minuscule pairs of jeweled slippers, all that remained of a dowry once rich with silks and brocades.

She also chastised Chen Pan’s younger brother for spending his days writing with his one brush and inkpot. “Even from the grave, your father has cursed you with his useless ways!” In winter, their house grew so cold that his small supply of ink froze.

On board, the recruits began to suffer every manner of illness. Cholera. Ty- phus. Dysentery. Bad luck, Chen Pan decided, had settled into every crevice of the ship. Nine men died the first month, not counting those killed in fights or beaten to death by the crew. Many more might have perished but for Chien Shih-kuang, sorcerer of herbs and roots. With his felt bag of magic, the wry herbalist from Z—— brewed teas to mend every imbalance, quieting fiery livers, warming cold organs, restoring the temperamental ch’i.

The captain had promised Chien Shih-kuang payment of passage back to Amoy in return for his services on board. The herbalist had agreed because he’d heard that in Cuba men knew the secret to halting the winter retreat of the sun. He, too, wished to learn this secret.

One night Chen Pan dreamed that bandits had set fire to his great-aunt’s farm and that he alone was battling the flames. He woke up delirious, his skin hot and itchy. Chien Shih-kuang plastered a five-pointed leaf on Chen Pan’s forehead with a few drops of a caustic liquid. When his fever broke, Chen Pan tried to pay the doctor with one of his precious Mexican coins, but Chien Shih-kuang refused it. (Years later, Chen Pan would learn that the herbalist had married a Spanish heiress in Avila and generously cured the poor.)

But not even Chien Shih-kuang could save the poor suicides. Chen Pan counted six altogether. Af- ter the melon-grower, another man jumped into the sea. One more poisoned himself with stolen opium. A boy, no older than fifteen, passed his days and nights in tears. He confided to Chen Pan that he was in great grief over having been decoyed on board. “I’m the only child of my parents!” he cried before thrusting a sharpened chopstick into his ear. In this way he stopped his regretting.

A native of K—— hanged himself with strips of torn clothing deep in the ship’s hull. (The guards had beaten him savagely for siphoning rainwater from their private barrels.) Chen Pan thought his swaying sounded like the slow tearing of silk. With the winds stiff and the sea wide all ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375410562
• ISBN 13: 9780375410567
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272