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  REVENGE OF THE MOONCAKE VIXEN

  ALSO BY MARILYN CHIN

  Poetry

  Rhapsody in Plain Yellow

  The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty

  Dwarf Bamboo

  REVENGE OF THE MOONCAKE VIXEN

  A MANIFESTO IN 41 TALES

  Marilyn Chin

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

  Copyright © 2009 by Marilyn Chin

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chin, Marilyn

  Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: a novel / Marilyn Chin.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07727-8

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Twins—Fiction. 3. Chinese American women—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.H48975R37 2002

  813’.54—dc22 2009012347

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For My Sisters

  Annoyed by a pesky girl, who is dancing around in circles, making donkey ears and sassy rhymes, the young monk loses his temper and pelts her with dung. The Master scolds the monk by saying, “Don’t you recognize her? She is the same little girl you pelted in a previous state of existence. And the same girl you pelted in a previous existence before that…” Then the Master bestows upon his pupil a continuous battery of lessons, hoping to hasten his path toward enlightenment.

  Contents

  1. MOONCAKES AND MATRIARCHS

  Moon

  Round Eyes

  Parable of the Cake

  Parable of the Fish

  Parable of Squab

  Monologue: Grandmother Wong’s New Year Blessings

  Ax Handle

  2. OH LORD! HERE COME THE DOUBLE HAPPINESS TWINS

  Oh Lord! Here Come the Double Happiness Twins

  3. A PORTRAIT OF MY SISTER SEXING TOFU

  Immigrant Dreams I (Sister and Serpent)

  Immigrant Dreams II (Wading)

  Immigrant Dreams III (A Portrait of My Sister Sexing Tofu)

  Duets

  Reductio ad Absurdum

  Moonie’s Penis

  4. AFTER ENLIGHTENMENT, THERE IS YAM GRUEL (THIRTEEN BUDDHIST TALES)

  After Enlightenment, There Is Yam Gruel

  Why Men Are Dogs

  That Ancient Parable about Nanzen’s Doll

  Gutei’s Finger, Redux

  Putai

  Ryokan’s Moon

  The Equanimity of All Things

  Third Eye

  Impermanence

  Wiping One’s Ass with the Sutras

  The Theory of the One Hand

  How Was I Conceived?

  Lantau

  5. BEASTS OF BURDEN (SEVEN FABLES)

  Liars

  The Wolf and the Chinese Pug

  Fox Girl

  Beast of Burden

  Cicada

  Piglets

  Twin Birds

  6. TEN VIEWS OF THE FLYING MATRIARCH

  Ten Views of the Flying Matriarch

  7. HAPPINESS: A MANIFESTO

  A Zygote’s Confession

  Singing Worm

  The Ghost of Pig-Gas Illusions

  Parable of the Guitar

  Happiness: A Manifesto

  Three Endings

  Postscript/Some Notes

  Acknowledgments

  I

  Mooncakes and Matriarchs

  Moon

  A CHINESE AMERICAN REVENGE TALE

  Moon was a little fat Chinese girl. She had a big, yellow face befitting her name. She was sad and lonely as were all little fat Chinese girls in 1999, and she had a strange, insatiable desire for a pair of trashy blond twins named Smith (no accounting for taste, of course). Every night she would wander on the beach in search of them, hoping to espy them taking a joyride around Pacific Beach in their rebuilt sky-blue convertible Impala: their long blond hair swept backward like horses’ manes, their faces obscenely sunburnt, resembling ripe halves of peaches.

  One chilly September evening the boys stopped to make a campfire on the beach; and Moon, feeling quite full and confident that day, descended upon them, waddling so fat, so round and shiny with sea spray. She offered them chocolate Macadamia nut clusters and began to sing, strumming a tiny lute-like instrument her grandmother sent her from China. She began singing, in an ancient falsetto, a baleful song about exiled geese winging across the horizon, about the waxing and waning of stormy seas, about children lost into the unknown depths of the new kingdom.

  The boys were born and raised in “the valley” and were very unsophisticated. They were also functional illiterates and were held back twice in the fifth grade—and there was no way that they could have understood the complexities of her song. They huddled in that sporting male way and whispered surreptitiously, speaking in very short sentences between grunts or long, run-on sentences with ambiguous antecedents, so that Moon was not quite sure whether she was the subject of their discussion. Finally, the boys offered to give fat Moon a ride in the stainless-steel canoe they got for Christmas. (We know, of course, that they were up to trouble; you don’t think their hospitality was sincere, do you?)

  Moon graciously accepted their invitation. Actually, she was elated, given the bad state of her social life; she hadn’t had a date for centuries. So the two boys paddled, one fore, one aft, with fat Moon in the middle. Moon was so happy that she started strumming her lute and singing the song of Hiawatha. (Don’t ask me why; this was what she felt like singing.) Suddenly, the boys started rocking the boat forcefully—forward and backward—making wild horsy sounds until the boat flipped over, fat Moon, lute, and all.

  The boys laughed and taunted Moon to reappear from the rough water. When she didn’t surface after a few minutes, it suddenly occurred to them that she was drowning; they watched in bemusement while the last of her yellow forehead bled into the waves. Finally, they dove in and dragged her heavy body back into the boat, which was quite a feat for she was twice as heavy wet than dry—and she was now tangled in sea flora.

  When they finally docked, Moon discovered that the boys saved her only to humiliate her. It appeared that they wanted a reward for saving her life—a blood-debt, if you will. In this material world—where goods are bartered for goods—actions, however heroic or well intentioned in appearance, are never clearly separated from services rendered. And in the American ledger, all services must be paid for in the end, and all contracts must be signed at closing, bearing each participant’s legal signature. Thus, the boys ripped off Moon’s dress and took turns pissing all over her round face and belly, saying, “So, it’s true, it’s true that your cunts are really slanted. Slant-eyed cunt! Did you really think that we had any interest in you?”

  After the boys finished their vile act, they left Moon on the wharf without a stitch on, glowing with yellow piss. And she cried, wailed all the way home on her bicycle. Imagine a little fat Chinese girl, naked, pedaling, wailing.

  When Moon got home, her mother called her a slut. Her father went on and on about the Sino-Japanese war and about the starving girlchildren in Guangdong—and look, what are you doing with your youth and new prosperity, wailing, carrying on, just because some trashy white boys rejected you? Have you no shame? Your cousin the sun matriculated Harvard, your brothers the stars all became engineers…where are the I. M. Peis and Yo Yo Mas of your genera
tion? They sent her to bed without supper that night as a reminder that self-sacrifice is the most profound virtue of the Chinese people.

  Up in her room, Moon brooded and swore on a stack of bibles that she would seek revenge for this terrible incident—and that if she were to die today, she would come back to earth as an angry ghost to haunt those motherfuckers. With this in mind, Moon swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills, only to cough them back up ten minutes later. Obviously, they didn’t kill her. However, those ten minutes of retching must have prevented oxygen from entering her brain and left her deranged for at least a month after this episode. (Hey, I’m no doctor, just a storyteller, take my diagnosis with caution, please.) Overnight, she became a homicidal maniac. A foul plague would shroud all of southern California, one that, curiously, infected only blond men. (Both natural and peroxided types, those slightly hennaed would be spared.)

  For thirty days and thirty nights Moon scoured the seaside, howling, windswept—in search of blond victims. They would drown on their surfboards, or collapse while polishing their cars. They would suffocate in their sleep next to their wives and lovers. Some died leaving a long trail of excrement because whatever pursued them was so terrible that it literally scared the shit out of them. And not since Herod had we seen such a devastating assault on male children.

  On the thirty-first night, the horror subsided. Moon finally found the Smith boys cruising in their sky-blue convertible Impala. They were driving south on the scenic coast route between San Clemente and Del Mar when she plunged down on them, her light was so powerful and bright that the boys were momentarily blinded and swerved into a canyon. Their car turned over twelve times. They were decapitated—the coroner said, so cleanly as if a surgeon had done the job with a laser.

  Moon grew up, lost weight and became a famous singer, which proves that there is no justice in the universe, or that indeed, there is justice. Your interpretation of this denouement mostly depends on your race, creed, hair color, social and economic class and political proclivities—and whether or not you are a feminist revisionist and have a habit of cheering for the underdog. What is the moral of the story? Well, it’s a tale of revenge, obviously written from a Chinese American girl’s perspective. My intentions are to veer you away from teasing and humiliating little chubby Chinese girls like myself. And that one wanton act of humiliation you perpetuated on the fore or aft of that boat on my arrival may be one humiliating act too many. For although we are friendly neighbors, you don’t really know me. You don’t know the depth of my humiliation. And you don’t know what I can do. You don’t know what is beneath my doing.

  Round Eyes

  I woke up one morning and my slanted eyes had turned round, which was nothing to be alarmed about. It happened to my rich cousin Sunny, whose mother thought that she was too ugly to capture a rich Chinese American prince; she was gagged, sedated and abducted—then zoomed to Japan in a private airplane to a famous round-eye plastic surgeon. Well—Sunny woke up with huge, round “Madonna” eyes. They fixed her flat nose into a perky “Little Orphan Annie” one, and while she was still deep under, they gave her new mammoth “Pamela Anderson” breasts for half price.

  So when I woke up with round eyes, I was not particularly surprised. But then, I thought, hey, wait a minute, my family’s not rich. We don’t have any money to be vain. We’re immigrants who toiled in sweatshop after sweatshop. We’re the poor relations that everybody spat on. Sunny’s family gave us hand-me-downs and scraps that their Cairn Terriers didn’t want. In the fifties, they bought my father’s papers, shipped him here, and he worked as a slave cook for them in their chain of chop-suey joints for most of his life.

  Of course, we were supposed to be eternally grateful. I remember one steamy episode in which my father banged his head on their giant butcher block and said, “You want grateful! You want thanks! Here, kowtow, kowtow, ten thousand years kowtow!” He banged his head so hard that he opened a gash three inches wide, and the blood streaked down his face. Such histrionics continued until he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1989.

  Sometimes I look in the mirror and expect to see my father’s bloody face. But on this particularly succulent spring morning, the birds were cheeping and the dogs were barking, and in our old cracked bathroom mirror—you know, the kind that is so old that the beveled edges are yellowing—I saw the monster of my own making. This morning some Greater Mother Power had transformed me into a bona fide white girl with big round eyes. My single-creased eyelid turned double, which forced the corners that originally slanted upward to slope downward. My eyes were now as round as orbs and appeared twice as large as before. My eyeballs that were once deep brown, almost black, had suddenly lightened into a golden amber. Even my eyelashes, which were once straight and spare, became fuller and curled up against my new double lids.

  I immediately felt guilty. My conscience said, “Serves you right for hating your kind, for wanting to be white. Remember that old Chinese saying, don’t wish for something too hard, you might just get it—and then, what?” There were no tell-tale signs of expensive surgery—no gauze, no swelling, no pus, no nothing. When the good lord makes a miracle, she does it seamlessly. After surgery Sunny looked like Frankenstein for about two months. She was black and blue and had huge ghastly stitches. Three months later, she was a completely new person cut out from Vogue. She had totally reinvented herself—new clothes, new friends, new attitude. She even lost her Hong Kong accent. And there she was hanging out with the in-crowd, smoking and swearing up a storm like a rich white person, like she had a piece of the American dream in her pocket. “What did you do?” I said. “Pay for your face with your soul?”

  The terrible truth is that I was desperately jealous of Sunny’s new popularity. She said once, while buffing her fake nails, “We’re Americans now, we have to climb that ladder of success, keep up with the Joneses…always one up ourselves.” Well, this has become our new motto—isn’t it quaint?—“Improve ourselves Wongs.” Sunny’s family started this trickle-down effect. In the eighties, the fierce Reaganite competition and struggle for status in Sunny’s family infected ours like the plague. Every day, after my father’s death, my mother would come home from her long day’s work at the factory and scowl blankly at us. My sister and I—we were never good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. My mother was the sacrificial tree on which the next crop was supposed to flourish and bear beautiful fruit—only the present harvest was not quite ready. We were an anemic batch, or one too hard, or green and small to bring a good barter at the market. My mother would scrutinize us in her sleepy sadness and sob, then fold herself up in bed and not come out again until it was already the next morning and time for her to go to work at the factory. There was no end to her misery.

  My father used to say that only in America could you reinvent yourself. Morons become presidents, fools become princes, bandits become CEOs, whores become first ladies. Of course, what he was really getting at was that my uncle, the “immoral two-bit,” four-legged thug sodomist” became a millionaire restauranteur overnight. The “golden mountain dream” had eluded my father. The great lories of gold had passed him by, and all he had left in his wretched soul was rage and envy.

  My father loved to bitch and mutter and spit his venom into the giant wok of chop suey—into that great noxious swill they called Suburban Chinese American food. He would spit and swear, “Your Mother’s cunt! Your turtle’s eggs. Your dead bag of dead girl bones!” He would shovel and toss unidentified chunks of flesh and veggies into his giant sizzling wok. An unfiltered Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, rivers of sweat pouring from his greasy hair. I can still see him now, bless his dead soul, red-faced, shoveling and wokking in the great cauldron of hell, hacking and coughing up bile from his black lungs.

  So on that fine, succulent spring morning in 1985, I stood in front of the mirror of my own enlightenment. After my initial shock and strange shiver of delight, I noticed that the extra epicanthic folds had made deep creases around
the sockets. My eyes felt dry, I supposed, because more surface was now exposed to light. Suddenly, it occurred to me that my new eyes were not beautiful. They looked like they were in a persistent state of alarm. If my cousin had purchased the subtle “Madonna” job at the premium price, I must have had the bargain-basement “Betty Boop.”

  Finally, I managed to pull myself away from the mirror to go downstairs—to ask my wise sister, Moonie, for her opinion. She said, barely looking up from her cereal, “Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s the process of assimilation. Happens to the best of us.” To me, my sister was God. Like my grandmother, she always had this “Buddhistic” attitude, like, “So what, you turned into a donkey, you’ll get over it.” She was never a team player. In fact, as a child she was always relegated to the sidelines to warm the bench. The white kids never chose her to play in their team sports. They used to tease her for being a four-eyed geek, and she didn’t give a damn. “Dodgeball, what kind a game is that? Who wants to be a moving target and get brain-damaged?”