Sarah Canary (39 page)

He would marry a woman his mother chose. Because of Adelaide, he would treasure his wife and he would treasure his big-footed daughters as they came. He hoped that his memory was also sweet to her, but this was unlikely, leaving as he had, without a word. He wondered if Adelaide was the sort of person who could let her whole life be poisoned by regret. He was afraid that she was.

He tried to tell himself that he had left her out of kindness rather than cowardice. He wasn’t sure this was true. Certainly, he had wanted to see her again. He had wanted to tell her how brave she was. ‘Are you all right?’ he had wanted to ask her. He had wanted to tell her lies beginning with the word
someday.
He couldn’t let himself do this. In the end, he had decided to let Adelaide stay forever in the happy world where B.J. was still alive, although this meant, of course, that Chin could never see her again.

Chin began to write down the side of the page. ‘This reminds me of another story I heard once,’ he wrote. ‘In this story, instead of a kiln, there is a cage, and instead of a son, there is a woman, and instead of a storm, there is a tiger.’

Chin had felt so completely Chinese in Golden Mountain. But back in China, every word he spoke seemed odd and Western. Half Chinese. ‘You are too flexible,’ his uncle had always told him. ‘Make a place to fit yourself.’ Perhaps he would pass the examinations and become important. Perhaps the time in China was just right for him. A new approach to the Western imperialists was being cautiously suggested. In this approach, Chinese learning and culture remained as the theoretical base, or
ti,
but Western learning was recognized for its many practical applications, or
yung.
Chin had a vision of steamships on the Yangtze. Chin wrote:

There are many stories of the conflict between Chou Kung and the Maiden, which is the conflict between fate and chance.

We imagine ourselves as creatures of destiny. We listen to stories and forget that the listening also tells the story. The story we hear is ourselves. We are the only ones who can hear it.

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story. They all tell us that nothing is meant to be.

That nothing is meant.

That nothing is.

They tell us nothing. We dream our little dreams, dream that we are dreamers—

Chin dipped his brush in the ink again.

—while all about us the great dream goes on. Sometimes one of the great dreamers passes among us. She is like a sleepwalker, passing through without purpose, without malice or mercy. Beautiful and terrible things happen around her. We discern symmetries, repetitions, and think we are seeing the pattern of our lives. But the pattern is in the seeing, not in the dream.

We dare not waken the dreamer. We, ourselves, are only her dreams.

He had blotted the paper with a long, mounded worm of ink. Neatness counted. Chin would have to start over. He folded the ruined paper once down the middle, running the fold between his thumb and forefinger. He opened it up to look at it. The wet ink had spread under the pressure of his fingertips into a curved shape on both sides of the fold. With no intent of any kind, except to discard the paper, Chin had drawn the Caucasian ideogram for the heart, which, when broken like this, into two parts, is also the butterfly.

~ * ~

xi

Nineteen eighty-seven was the Year of the Rabbit. Religious leader Jim Bakker lost his pulpit in a sexual scandal involving a twenty-one-year-old church secretary; the police in Utah exchanged gunfire with polygamists; animal-rights activists burned a partially constructed laboratory in Davis, California, while in Berkeley, university officials were accused of enforcing an unspoken quota system that limited the number of Asian Americans accepted as students. Ronald Reagan, the American president, made a speech about the American Indians.

The Australian
People
magazine took considerable heat over a projected charity program whose schedule included a dwarf-throwing and bowling contest. During this event, dwarves were to be strapped onto skateboards and rolled at the pins. The editor of the magazine defended the program by saying that only stunt-dwarves were to be used. These men are professional projectiles, the editor said. These men like being thrown.

In 1988, a genetically engineered mouse with an enhanced susceptibility to cancer became the first animal to be patented. The Pullyap tribe was given $162 million in land, cash, and jobs in exchange for their claim to some of the most valuable land in Tacoma. Religious leader Jimmy Swaggart was involved in a scandal of sex and prostitution.

In 1989, herpetologists at Seattle’s Woodland Park had a hatch of hundreds of Solomon Island leaf frogs. These frogs had never before been successfully bred in captivity. Suddenly the herpetologists were drowning in them.

In 1989, the Chinese government killed an estimated four hundred to eight hundred civilians as a response to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

~ * ~

According to eyewitness accounts, President Reagan’s speech went something like this: ‘They from the beginning announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life . . . And we set up these reservations so they could, and have the Bureau of Indian Affairs take care of them . . .

‘Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, “No, come join us. Be American citizens along with the rest of us,” and many do.’

The President went on to say that some Indians had become very wealthy from oil on their reservations, ‘and so I don’t know what their complaint might be.’

~ * ~

In 1990, the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Times
reported new evidence, in the form of hairs, of the existence of a Chinese wild man, a creature weighing five hundred to six hundred pounds, standing six to seven feet tall, and having humanlike features.

The following headline appeared in the
Weekly World News’.
‘Wounded Civil War Soldier Found in Georgia. “This man is not from our century,” experts tell police.’

And in the
Worldwide Gazette:
‘Flea Circus Horror! Trainer Attacked by Ravenous Fleas!’