Monkey Hunting Read Free Page B

Buddha himself cast a powerful spell that sealed the monkey under a mountain for five hundred years.
    On a nearby bunk, a pig breeder from N—— reminded Chen Pan of his father. His hair fluttered with unruly tufts, no matter that the air was perfectly still. The pig breeder shared the last of his wife’s pickled cabbage with Chen Pan. The taste made them both homesick. Chen Pan recalled the long summer afternoons his father had read poems to him, their plows left untouched in the shed. Before long the cicadas would sing, signaling the onset of autumn.
    These lovely seasons and fragrant years falling
Lonely away—we share such emptiness here
    When Chen Pan was thirteen, bandits had murdered his father for protesting the rape of the watercarrier’s daughter. She was only ten, pretty and dull, and willingly had shown the bandits inside her neighbor’s granary. Father’s legend swelled and the villagers recounted his heroism, but Mother disputed their accolades. “What father leaves his children nothing but his good reputation to eat?” She scolded her sons to learn this lesson: “Avert your eyes to the sorrows of others and keep your own plates full!”
    After three months at sea, Chen Pan’s arms and legs grew soft and white as the flesh of the rich women he’d glimpsed in Amoy. Often he fantasized about these women, inhaled the scent of their lacquered hair, slowly dared to love them. He recalled the tales of the women of the old Imperial Court, who were protected by the Emperor’s purple-robed eunuchs. Alluring women swathed in furs and jade, their gauze-silk sleeves blooming like orchids. Delicate women who drank only camel-pad broth and nibbled on rare winter fruit to maintain their complexions. Women best admired from afar, like the mountain mist.
    Sometimes the men spoke wistfully of the roadside flowers who awaited them in Cuba, easy amber-colored whores who opened their legs for their own pleasure, expecting nothing in return. For all that it had cost him, Chen Pan couldn’t remember his one night with the dancing girl in Amoy. There were only the memories of his mournful wife.
    The ship passed through the Straits of Sunda without incident, then followed the verdant curve of Africa before veering west across the Atlantic. In St. Helena they stopped for fresh water, continuing on to Ascension, Cayenne, the Barbadian coast, and Trinidad. Chen Pan heard the crew announcing each port of call, but the longer he remained on board, the farther away Cuba seemed. Could his eight years of servitude have elapsed already?
    When the ship finally reached Regla, across the bay from Havana, Chen Pan climbed to the top deck to get a better view. It was a hot, sunny morning, and the city looked like a fancy seashell in the distance, smooth pink and white. A brisk wind stirred the fronds of the palms. The water shone so blue it hurt his eyes to stare at it. When Chen Pan tried to stand on the dock, his legs slid out from under him. Others fell, too. Together, he and his shipmates looked like a spilled barrel of crabs.
    The men were ordered to peel off their filthy rags and were given fresh clothes to present themselves to the Cubans. But there was no mistaking their wretchedness: bones jutted from their cheeks; sores cankered their flesh. Not even a strict regimen of fox-glove could have improved their appearance. The recruits were rounded up in groups of sixty—wood haulers and barbers, shoemakers, fishermen, farmers— then parceled out in smaller groups to the waiting landowners.
    A dozen Cubans on horseback, armed with whips, led the men like a herd of cattle to the
barracón
to be sold. Inside, Chen Pan was forced to strip and be examined for strength, like horses or oxen that were for sale in the country districts of China. Chen Pan burned red with shame, but he didn’t complain. Here he could no longer rely on the known ways. Who was he now without his country?
    One hundred fifty pesos was the going rate for a