China Men: National Book Award Winner

On

Discovery

Once upon a time, a man, named Tang Ao, looking for the Gold Mountain, crossed an ocean, and came upon the Land of Women. The women immediately captured him, not on guard against ladies. When they asked Tang Ao to come along, he followed; if he had had male companions, he would’ve winked over his shoulder.

We have to prepare you to meet the queen, the women said. They locked him in a canopied apartment equipped with pots of makeup, mirrors, and a woman’s clothes. Let us help you off with your armor and boots, said the women. They slipped his coat off his shoulders, pulled it down his arms, and shackled his wrists behind him. The women who kneeled to take off his shoes chained his ankles together.

A door opened, and he expected to meet his match, but it was only two old women with sewing boxes in their hands. The less you struggle, the less it’ll hurt, one said, squinting a bright eye as she threaded her needle. Two captors sat on him while another held his head. He felt an old woman’s dry fingers trace his ear; the long nail on her little finger scraped his neck. What are you doing? he asked. Sewing your lips together, she joked, blackening needles in a candle flame. The ones who sat on him bounced with laughter. But the old women did not sew his lips together. They pulled his earlobes taut and jabbed a needle through each of them. They had to poke and probe before puncturing the layers of skin correctly, the hole in the front of the lobe in line with the one in back, the layers of skin sliding about so. They worked the needle through—a last jerk for the needle’s wide eye (needle’s nose in Chinese). They strung his raw flesh with silk threads; he could feel the fibers.

The women who sat on him turned to direct their attention to his feet. They bent his toes so far backward that his arched foot cracked. The old ladies squeezed each foot and broke many tiny bones along the sides. They gathered his toes, toes over and under one another like a knot of ginger root. Tang Ao wept with pain. As they wound the bandages tight and tighter around his feet, the women sang footbinding songs to distract him: Use aloe for binding feet and not for scholars.

During the months of a season, they fed him on women’s food: the tea was thick with white chrysanthemums and stirred the cool female winds inside his body; chicken wings made his hair shine; vinegar soup improved his womb. They drew the loops of thread through the scabs that grew daily over the holes in his earlobes. One day they inserted gold hoops. Every night they unbound his feet, but his veins had shrunk, and the blood pumping through them hurt so much, he begged to have his feet re-wrapped tight. They forced him to wash his used bandages, which were embroidered with flowers and smelled of rot and cheese. He hung the bandages up to dry, streamers that drooped and draped wall to wall. He felt embarrassed; the wrappings were like underwear, and they were his.

One day his attendants changed his gold hoops to jade studs and strapped his feet to shoes that curved like bridges. They plucked out each hair on his face, powdered him white, painted his eyebrows like a moth’s wings, painted his cheeks and lips red. He served a meal at the queen’s court. His hips swayed and his shoulders swiveled because of his shaped feet. She’s pretty, don’t you agree? the diners said, smacking their lips at his dainty feet as he bent to put dishes before them.

In the Women’s Land there are no taxes and no wars. Some scholars say that that country was discovered during the reign of Empress Wu (A.D. 694–705), and some say earlier than that, A.D. 441, and it was in North America.

On

Fathers

Waiting at the gate for our father to come home from work, my brothers and sisters and I saw a man come hastening around the corner. Father! BaBa! BaBa! We flew off the gate; we jumped off the fence. BaBa! We surrounded him, took his hands, pressed our noses against his coat to sniff his tobacco smell, reached into his pockets for the Rainbo notepads and the gold coins that were really chocolates. The littlest ones hugged his legs for a ride on his shoes. And he laughed a startled laugh. But I’m not your father. You’ve made a mistake. He took our hands out of his pockets. But I’m not your father. Looking closely, we saw that he probably was not. We went back inside the yard, and this man continued his walk down our street, from the back certainly looking like our father, one hand in his pocket. Tall and thin, he was wearing our father’s two-hundred-dollar suit that fit him just right. He was walking fast in his good leather shoes with the wingtips.

Our mother came out of the house, and we hung on to her while she explained, No, that wasn’t your father. He did look like BaBa, though, didn’t he? From the back, almost exactly. We stood on the sidewalk together and watched the man walk away. A moment later, from the other direction, our own father came striding toward us, the one finger touching his hat to salute us. We ran again to meet him.

The

Father

From

China

Father, I have seen you lighthearted:

Let’s play airplane, you said. I’ll make you a toy airplane. You caught between your thumb and finger a dragonfly. You held it by the abdomen. Its fast wings blurred, but when its motor paused, I saw that the wings were networks of cellophane. Its head bulged with eyes, below which the rest of its face was crowded. You hold it, you said. Around its belly you slipped a lasso of thread, which you tightened, crinkled its shell, pinched a waist, and the tail bent downward slightly. Then you tied the other end of the string around my finger, and said, Let go. The tying hadn’t hurt it one bit; the dragonfly whirled up and flew in circles at the extent of the string, which I pulled toward me and cast away, controlling my pet airplane. It flew lower, and I turned with it not to get entangled. Suddenly the dragonfly dropped and dangled, but all we had to do was shake it, and it flew again. After a while, though I poked and prodded, it did not go any more. You watched for five more dragonflies to alight until each sister and brother had had a turn.

Upon hearing about the sage of the Ming period who shook himself and turned into a red dragonfly, I remembered our airplane, which was not red. The sunlight had iridized the black into blues and greens.

On summer nights, when we picked new routes home from the laundry through the Stockton streets, crickets covered the sidewalks and the lighted windows. Bats flew between the buildings, and some got hit by cars; we examined them, spread their wings, looked at their teeth and furry countenances. The bats wafted like burned paper in the searchlights, which lit up tightrope walkers who had strung wires from the tallest rooftops and walked with no nets to and from the courthouse dome. On garbage nights, we children ran ahead and rummaged the department store bins for treasures; in trade, you left our garbage, a bag here and a bag on the next block. But usually we didn’t walk the long way on Main Street; we went through Chinatown, Tang People’s Street, gray and quiet except for the clicking of gamblers who had left a window open. Then we passed the Japanese’s closed-up house, nobody home for years, and the Filipino Lodge, where we sat on the benches that were held up by tree bark growing over their edges; the Filipinos had gone in for the night. On our own front porch, you snapped on the light, and the moths came swarming. It’s a Hit-lah, you said, swatting one with your newspaper. Hit-lah, we shouted, and attacked the moths, killed them against the walls and railings, Hit-lah! and a hit on the first syllable. They were plain no-color butterflies. We killed Hitler moths every summer of The War. It was interesting to grow older and find out that only we called them that, and outside the family, things have other names.

But usually you did not play. You were angry. You scared us. Every day we listened to you swear, Dog vomit. Your mother’s cunt. Your mother’s smelly cunt. You slammed the iron on the shirt while muttering, Stink pig. Mother’s cunt. Obscenities. I made a wish that you only meant gypsies and not women in general.

You were tricked twice by gypsies. One unwrapped her laundry right there on the counter. She shook out her purple and rose cloths, held them up, and said, You’ve torn my best dress. Oh, look. And the blouse, too. Nothing left but rags. And the skirts. Torn to pieces. Mangled. You’ll have to pay for them, you know. Replace them. Oh, my new expensive tablecloth. You’re going to have to give me money for new clothes. A wardrobe. Come on. Pay up now. Pay. Pay. She wiggled her fingers through the holes. She had brought dustrags, of course.

No, you said. Your clothes be old, you said.

The gypsy strewed her clean, pressed rags and rushed out, but she returned with a sister gypsy—and a cop. The two gypsies talked hard, their earrings leaping with the movements of their jaws. The fan and air-conditioner circulated the smell of their winged hairdos. The policeman, whose navy blue bulk expanded to fill the room, metal and wood clunking, kept saying, Small claims court. Deportation. So you paid, rang up the No Sale on the cash register and paid. Twice.

I knew she was up to something, MaMa shouted. Remember when I sorted her bag, I said, ‘How do the gypsies afford to have rags laundered?’ I could tell that that Romany demoness was up to no good. She and that other one who acted as witness concocted a big story in English for the police. And you couldn’t speak English well enough to counteract it. Fell for it twice. You fell for it twice.

Kill your Romany mother’s cunt, you said between your clenched teeth. Kill your Romany demoness mother’s cunt dead. There is a Cantonese word that sounds almost like grandmother, po, and means a female monster that looms and sags. In the storeroom were a black bag and a white bag, which we never opened. They were big enough for us children to climb like hills and we called them Black Bag Po and White Bag Po. You called the gypsies those names too. Old bags, you muttered. Gypsy bag. Smelly pig bag. Sow. Stink pig. Bag cunt.

When the gypsy baggage and the police pig left, we were careful not to be bad or noisy so that you would not turn on us. We knew that it was to feed us you had to endure demons and physical labor.

You screamed wordless male screams that jolted the house upright and staring in the middle of the night. It’s BaBa, we children told one another. Oh, it’s only BaBa again. MaMa would move from bed to bed. That was just BaBa having a dream. Bad dreams mean good luck. She would leave us puzzling, then what do good dreams mean?

Worse than the swearing and the nightly screams were your silences when you punished us by not talking. You rendered us invisible, gone. MaMa told us to say Good Morning to you whether or not you answered. You kept up a silence for weeks and months. We invented the terrible things you were thinking: That your mother had done you some unspeakable wrong, and so you left China forever. That you hate daughters. That you hate China.

You complained about holiday dumplings: Women roll dough to knead out the dirt from between their fingers. Women’s fingernail dirt. Yet you did eat them. MaMa said, though, that you only lately began eating pastries. Eating pastries is eating dirt from women’s fingernails and from between their fingers. As if women had webs. Finger jams.

MaMa pays you back, with her tomato and potato wages, the money she sends to China. They’re my relatives, she says, not his.

You say with the few words and the silences: No stories. No past. No China.

You only look and talk Chinese. There are no photographs of you in Chinese clothes nor against Chinese landscapes. Did you cut your pigtail to show your support for the Republic? Or have you always been American? Do you mean to give us a chance at being real Americans by forgetting the Chinese past?

You are a man who enjoys plants and the weather. It’s raining, you said in English and in Chinese when the California drought broke. It’s raining. You make us inordinately happy saying a simple thing like that. It rains.

What I want from you is for you to tell me that those curses are only common Chinese sayings. That you did not mean to make me sicken at being female. Those were only sayings, I want you to say to me. I didn’t mean you or your mother. I didn’t mean your sisters or grandmothers or women in general.

I want to be able to rely on you, who inked each piece of our own laundry with the word Center, to find out how we landed in a country where we are eccentric people.

On New Year’s eve, you phone the Time Lady and listen to her tell the minutes and seconds, then adjust all the clocks in the house so their hands reach midnight together. You must like listening to the Time Lady because she is a recording you don’t have to talk to. Also she distinctly names the present moment, never slipping into the past or sliding into the future. You fix yourself in the present, but I want to hear the stories about the rest of your life, the Chinese stories. I want to know what makes you scream and curse, and what you’re thinking when you say nothing, and why when you do talk, you talk differently from Mother.

I take after MaMa. We have peasant minds. We see a stranger’s tic and ascribe motives. I’ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I’m mistaken. You’ll just have to speak up with the real stories if I’ve got you wrong.

My father was born in a year of the Rabbit, 1891 or 1903 or 1915. The first year of the Republic was 1911. In one of his incarnations, one of the Buddhas was a rabbit; he jumped alive into a fire to feed the hungry.

BaBa was the youngest and the smartest of four brothers. They put their ears to the door of the room where he was being born. At midday the midwife came out carrying a basin of blood; and they did not understand how a baby could be constructed with so much blood left over.

The oldest brother, Dai Bak, Big Uncle, said, Get some boxes and chairs and come with me. The brothers balanced the teaks and pines in a stack under their parents’ window and climbed it like acrobats. By the time they reached the curved sill, the baby had been born. They saw its foot sticking out of a bundle tied to the hook of the rice scale. The baby’s bottom plumped out the white cloth. Their mother and father were laughing, and laughed harder when they saw the boys at the window. BiBi has arrived, their father announced, and simultaneously they heard a baby’s cry come from the dumpling, the dim sum, the little heart. The brothers clutched one another, they cheered, jumped up and down.  ‘Jump like a squirrel,’  they sang.  ‘Bob like a blue jay, tails in the air, tails in the air.’ A baby is born. A baby is born. They scrambled down and ran inside to have a look at him. They hung over the headboard, knelt by the bedside, put their heads next to the baby’s on their mother’s pillow. All day the brothers smiled when they saw one another and the baby.

Grandmother, Ah Po, said, Your little brother is different from any of you. Your generation has no boy like this one. Come. Look. She unwrapped the baby to show how skinny he was. She uncurled his fists, and his brothers touched the wrinkles inside, looked at their own wrinkles. Look at the length of his hands and fingers, said Ah Po. This kind of hand was made for holding pens. This is the boy we’ll prepare for the Imperial Examinations. The other boys were built like horses and oxen, made for farmwork. Ah Po let them each sit on the bed and hold the baby in his lap. They felt big and important. Dai Bak, the oldest, remembered also holding the other two; curious how each brother had felt different in his arms, this one so light. Now when you go out to play, you have a baby to strap on your back, he said to the brother who, up to then, had been the youngest. Grandfather stood at the foot of the bed and was dumfounded that he had four sons, all in his old age.

At the baby’s one-month birthday party, Ah Po gave him the Four Valuable Things: ink, inkslab, paper, and brush. The other children had only gotten money. She put the brush in his right fist. Villagers and relatives praised the way he waved it about. Eating bowls of chicken-feet-and-sweet-vinegar soup and pigs’-feet-and-sweet-vinegar soup, they said good words for the future. Ah Po shaved her baby’s head except for the crown, though it was only baby fuzz he had growing on his head. The house was ashine with lights and lucky with oranges.

Third Uncle, Sahm Bak, waited until the baby was tucked away in his parents’ bedroom for a nap. Then he ducked into that room and pressed himself against the wall so as not to be spotted from the guest hall, the doors never shut in this house. He dropped to his knees, crawled quickly behind and under furniture, and reached the bed. He grabbed two handfuls of the quilt and hoisted himself up, his chubby legs kicking. He saw the baby asleep, curled in a nest of blankets in the middle of the bed. Sahm Bak delighted in drawing the curtains and hiding inside the layers of canopy and mosquito netting; this high bed was his flying boat to the moon, a secret room, a stage for plays, night in the middle of the day. He stood up, captain of his flying boat, and walked over to his baby brother. His feet sank into the quilts. He was wearing a pair of leather shoes his father had brought back from the Gold Mountain. The shoes were too big for him, but he had stuffed the toes. He pushed and pulled the baby free of the blankets, then he jumped on its stomach. The baby was not as soft as the quilts. The unexpected bones and the oversize shoes made Sahm Bak fall. The baby began to cry. Sahm Bak got to his feet quickly. He had to hurry before the noise brought the adults running. He jumped up and down, up and down on the baby’s stomach, so bouncy. The baby let out a squeal each time the shoes depressed his stomach. When the adults arrived, the baby was not squalling any more, but was blue. Since being hit and scolded on a birthday would be bad luck, Sahm Bak had to wait until the next day for his punishment; Dai Bak, who should have been more alert watching his brothers, would have to be punished too. The adults sent the guests hastily home with red eggs and ginger to fill their hands.

For years afterwards, Ah Po would say, You were so bad, you stomped on him for hours.

I don’t remember doing that, her third son said. Do you remember my doing that? he asked you, BaBa.

No, you said. I don’t remember either.

Sometimes Sahm Bak pretended he was a baby, quietly nudging himself onto his mother’s lap, but when she noticed him, she put him on the floor and picked up BaBa, her BiBi, her lap baby. She loved him so much, she licked the snot from his nose.

Grandfather, Ah Goong, plowed fields hour after hour alone, inching along between earth and sky. To amuse himself, he sang girls’ songs in an old man’s falsetto. He wished for a happy daughter he could anticipate seeing in the evenings after work; she would sing for him and listen to him sing. He tied his ox near some water and took a walk about the village to find out what the neighbors were doing. One family he often visited had had a baby due at the same time as our family. After seeing what he himself had gotten, he went to find out what they’d gotten. His mouth and throat, his skin puckered all over with envy. He discovered why to be envious is to guzzle vinegar. Theirs was the loveliest dainty of a baby girl. She lay ignored in a yam basket. He gazed at her and sang to her until he had to leave, should he fall farther behind in his plowing. The next time he visited, he brought her a red ribbon, which he fashioned into a bow and arranged by her ear. He laughed at the air it gave her. She wore rags, which sent waves of delicious pity coursing through him. Poor girl, he said. Poor, poor girl.

The day his third son stomped on the baby, Ah Goong sneaked away from the commotion. He scooped up party food on the way out. He went to the girl’s house. He tucked red packets of money in her faded shirt, no special red dress for her today, no new red jacket, no tiger shoes nor hat with eight boy dolls for tassels. Her family offered him shredded carrots, scant celebration. How sorry he felt for her, how he loved her. She cried, squeezing bitty tears out of her shut lids. His heart and his liver filled with baby tears. Love filled his heart and his liver. He piled grapefruits and oranges in a pyramid for her. He tarried so long that he had to use the outhouse, but he carefully weighed his shit on the outhouse scales so that these neighbors could return a like amount to his fields.

He cut a reed from the New Year narcissus and blew tunes between his thumbs. Though the snowpeas would be fewer at harvest, he brought the girl their blossoms, pinks with purple centers, light blues with dark blue centers, the vine flowering variously as if with colors of different species. She chewed on the flowers and pulled the tendrils apart in her chubby hands. Extravagance. In the summer he fanned her with a sandalwood fan; he rubbed its ribs with sandpaper, and with one pass, the air thickened with memories of Hawai’i, which is the Sandalwood Mountains. In the autumn the two of them would rattle dry peapods.

It’s only a girl, her parents kept saying. Just a girl.

Yes, said Ah Goong. Pretty little sister. Pretty miss.

Away from her he detached a fuzzy green melon from its nest and tucked it for a moment inside his sweater next to his heart. Whenever he had to leave her, he felt the time until he would see her again extend like an unplowed field, the sun going down and a long country night to come. No, he would not endure it.

He went home and put on the brown greatcoat that he had bought in San Francisco. Where are you going with that coat in this weather? asked Ah Po, who did not follow him about the house because of her bound feet; the three maids who fanned her and helped her walk were working in the kitchen. When she walked unassisted or with one maid, she touched the walls gracefully with thumb and little finger spread, index and middle fingers together, fourth finger down. I’ll just take a peek at the baby, he said, then go out. He picked up his wife’s baby and hid him inside his greatcoat. If you had been a little older, BaBa, you might have felt proud, singled out for an excursion that made Ah Goong dance down the road, a bright idea in his head.

He ran into the neighbor’s house and unwrapped the baby, first the greatcoat, then the diapers to show the family that this doggy really was a boy. Since you want a boy and I want a girl, he said, let’s strike a bargain. Let’s trade. The family was astounded. They would have let him buy the girl if only he’d asked. They would have had to give her away eventually anyhow. And here was this insane man who did not know the value of what he had. What a senile fool. Take him up on it before he comes to his senses. As if his son’s boyness were not enough, he pointed out his attributes. This boy will be very intelligent, he said. He’s got scholar’s hands. And look what a smart forehead he has. He’ll win a name for you at the Imperial Examinations. He’s very skinny and eats hardly any food.

Yes, we’ll take him, said the neighbors. Ah Goong placed the girl inside his greatcoat. He did not remove the boy’s fancy clothes, the gold necklace, the new shoes, nor the jade bracelet that signified that you would not have to do physical labor. He hurried out before her family could change their minds. His heart beat that they would reclaim her at the last minute. The girl wore no jewelry, but with his soul he adopted her, full diapers and all.

He walked slowly, adoring the peachy face. He sat by the side of the road to look at her. He counted her pink toes and promised that no one would break them. He tickled her under the chin. She would make his somber sons laugh. Kindness would soon soften the sides of their mouths. They would kneel to listen to her funny requests. They would beguile her with toys they’d make out of feathers and wood. I’ll make you a doll, he promised her. I’ll buy you a doll. And surely his wife would get used to her soon. The walk home was the nicest time. He showed her, his daughter, how the decorative plants grow wild and the useful plants in rows. Flower, he said, pointing. Tree. He rested by the stream for her to listen to its running.

At home, he walked directly to the crib and tucked her in. He drew the quilt over her as a disguise. Then he hung up his greatcoat and returned to the crib, gave the quilt a pat. She was a well-behaved baby and made no noise. He kept strolling past the crib. His happiness increased in her vicinity. My heart and my liver he called her. (Sweetheart is an English word that emigrants readily learn.)

Ah Po heard the sniffing and squeaking of a baby waking up. She swayed over to the crib. The baby noises sounded unfamiliar. She screamed when she saw the exchanged baby.

Ah Goong came running. What’s wrong? What’s wrong? he asked.

What is this? Where’s my baby? Ah Po yelled.

It’s all right. He patted the baby. Everything’s all right. He’s at the neighbors’. They’ll take good care of him.

What neighbors? she yelled. What’s he doing at the neighbors’? Whose is this ugly thing?

Oh, no, she isn’t ugly. Look at her. He picked her up.

Where’s my baby? You crazy old man. You’re insane. You idiot. You dead man.

The neighbors have him. I brought this one back in his place. He held his little girl. All we have are boys. We need a girl.

You traded our son for a girl? How could you? Who has my son? Oh, it’s too late. It’s too late. She thrust her arms as far as she could reach; she bent her torso from side to side, backward and forward, a woman six feet tall on toy feet. Take me to that family, she cried. We’re trading back. Lunging her weight at Ah Goong, who hunched his shoulders and caved in his chest to protect the baby, she pushed him out the door. She walked in back of him, shoving him while hanging on to his shoulder. She was not used to dashing about on the roads. I’m coming to rescue you, BiBi. Your mother’s coming. Ah Goong clung to his baby as if she were holding him up. Dead man, Ah Po raged, trading a son for a slave. Idiot. He led her to the neighbors’ house, weeping as he walked. Dead demon. The villagers lined the road to look at Grandfather and Grandmother making fools of themselves.

Ah Po scolded the girl’s family. Cheating the greedy pig, huh? Thieves. Swindlers. Taking advantage of an idiot. Cheaters. Trying to catch a pig, are you? Did you really think you’d get away with it? Pig catchers. A girl for a boy. A girl for a boy. The family hung their heads.

She pulled the girl out of Ah Goong’s arms and shoved her at an older child. Her own baby she snatched and held tight. She sent for her sedan chair and waited for it in the road. She carried her son herself all the way home, not letting Ah Goong touch her baby, not letting him ride. He hardly saw the road for his tears. Poor man.

Perhaps it was that very evening and not after the Japanese bayoneted him that he began taking his penis out at the dinner table, worrying it, wondering at it, asking why it had given him four sons and no daughter, chastising it, asking it whether it were yet capable of producing the daughter of his dreams. He shook his head and clucked his tongue at it. When he saw what a disturbance it caused, he laughed, laughed in Ah Po’s irked face, whacked his naked penis on the table, and joked, "Take a look at this sausage."

When BiBi was walking upright instead of in cow position on all fours, his second brother, Ngee Bak, walked him to the fields. Come on, BiBi, he said, taking his hand. Let’s go look at what shoots came up overnight. He slowed his steps for the toddler, but walking the veering way children walk, the two boys often turned around and went back the way they came, each one following the other here and there, lifting rocks, prodding bugs, squatting to part the grass and thrill at the small live movements. But a plan kept reappearing in Ngee Bak’s mind so that they did eventually arrive at the rice field, which looked like a lake on fire with rows of doubling green flames.

Isn’t it beautiful? said Ngee Bak, who threw a pebble at the water in front of BiBi. Waterdrops spattered his knees, and laughter gurgled up inside his chest like ripples and like the waterdrops. With both hands, he plucked stones out of the dam. He threw one rock after another and loved the giggles that splashed happily out of his mouth. Then he pushed the mud and rice straw and rocks aside and jumped into the water, kicked it, watched the rings spread and fade. He touched the shoots, grasped them, and pulled, such a satisfying loosening and snapping of roots from the earth. He collected the green rice in his pockets.

Meanwhile, Ngee Bak ran tattletaling to the house, Come quick. Hurry. Look. Look. Look at BiBi.

Grandfather and Grandmother lifted him out of the water and ordered their oldest son, Go cut a switch. Dai Bak did not climb a tree for a fresh switch; he hunted in the faggots for a brittle branch that had fallen during a winter storm. He trimmed off the twigs. He knelt at his parents’ feet and knocked his forehead on the ground.

Please beat me, Father and Mother, to teach me a lesson, he requested.

They took turns hitting him across the back and shoulders, not his head because they did not want to damage his brains. This—will—teach—you—to—teach—your—younger—brother—to—watch—his—younger—brother, a switch with each word. They administered what Tu Fu called "the beating by which he