Monkey Hunting Read Free Page A

stiff and the sea wide all around, he asked himself why someone would choose to die so confined and without air. Chen Pan wasn’t certain what made a man ultimately want to live. He only knew that he would survive unless somebody managed to kill him.
    The night the Wong brothers died, a squall engulfed the sea. The ship creaked and groaned like a sick man. The storm ripped off a mast and tossed two officers overboard. The men feared that the brothers’ ghosts had cursed the ship, that they were causing the thunder and lightning, the wind from eight directions, the waves as high as the Buddha’s temples. But by morning the sea was calm.
    At noon, a pair of whales was spotted off the Cape of Good Hope. Chen Pan clambered to the deck to see the breaching beasts. “Maybe we should kill them and get some fresh meat,” the lazy-eyed Wu Yao suggested. Chen Pan looked at him incredulously. It was obvious that this city boy had never caught so much as a pond carp.
    The rumors spread with every day at sea. A bankrupt tailor pieced most of the gossip together, all the while quoting ancient sayings.
Caged birds miss their home forest. Pooled
fish long for the deep.
Chen Pan listened closely to the tailor, but he didn’t circulate the man’s tidings: that their ship was headed for the Philippines; that every last man on board would be killed there, heart scooped from his chest; that they’d be sold to cannibals who savored yellow flesh.
    There was talk of mutiny. Should they behead the captain and crew? Set fire to the vessel? Reverse their course to China? Chen Pan knew there were men on board fit for murder, experienced warriors who’d fought the British barbarians. Arrow-scarred, they’d been dragged from their prison cells to the ship. But the ones who talked loudest were most filled with hot air.
    Chen Pan grew increasingly regretful. Had he deceived himself with his own grand dreams? How could he go home poorer than when he’d left? (Already, he imagined his mother’s rebukes.) He tried to concentrate on his return to China a few years hence. A procession of men would follow him, triumphant in his sedan chair, carrying a hundred chests of princely gifts on their shoulders. Enough silk for three generations. New harnesses for the village horses. Countless jars of turtle eggs pickled in foreign wines. The villagers would gather around him, paying him the respect in life that his father had achieved only in death.
    Because the days were long and the men so constricted, they entertained each other with stories about the tallest men who ever lived. Chung Lu-yüan, who was fond of lantern riddles, reported of a man who, sitting down, was as big as a mountain and could dam the course of a river with his ass. Hsieh Shuang-chi, a stevedore who was tricked on board by his greedy brother-in-law, told of a giant who drank a thousand gallons of celestial dew for his breakfast.
    Chen Pan retold the jokes he’d learned from his beloved great-aunt. His favorite was the one about the evil warlord who’d had the length of his penis extended with a baby elephant’s trunk. Everything went well for the warlord, Chen Pan said, until the day he passed a peanut vendor in the street.
    There was also a dwarf on board who could imitate perfectly the sounds of a cassia-wood harp. His name was Yang Shi-fêng, and he sang of his land, where the tallest men grew to no more than three feet. In former times, he said, his countrymen had been sent as jesters and slaves to the Imperial Court. Then Yang Cheng came to govern the land of the dwarves and convinced the Emperor to annul his cruel trade. To this day every male born in T—— has Yang in his name.
    Others recounted the tale of the impudent Monkey King. Entrusted with the job of guarding the Immortals’ heavenly peaches, the Monkey King heartily partook of them instead. One transgression followed another, but none of the Jade Emperor’s emissaries could catch the fearless simian. Finally, the