EPTBenjamin Chen = Chen Jie... they are the same people
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Chen Jie was born in a dirt-floored farmers’ hut in Yunnan, along the Sino-Vietnamese border. When he was two, his parents moved into the balcony of his uncle’s tiny two-room apartment. The brilliant green of Yunnan became the brilliant yellow-gray of the Pearl River Delta. And such were Ben’s earliest memories—the howl of typhoons outside his window, rainwater dripping on his crib as his aunt and uncle ignored his crying. He remembered his parents leaving for work at five in the morning and coming back at midnight, day after day. One day, he remembered his father arguing with his mother, his father beating her with a brick, and then he didn’t see his dad for another six months. The next time Ben saw his father’s face, he remembered a new suit opening a door to two rooms with a flush toilet, a shower, and a gas stove. Their fortunes continued to improve as the city grew around them. First a motorcycle, then a refrigerator, then a small truck, then a brand-new color TV, a push-button Hitachi model with a limit of ten possible channels. Ben remembered that the entire family came over that day, watching the state-sanctioned evening news as if it was the most entertaining thing in the world.
Through his room, Ben watched the city grow before his eyes, apartment blocks growing like copses of gray, concrete trees, roots extending deep into the silty clay of the Pearl River Delta. The year was 1985 when Ben finally understood.
It had always been a mystery, where all his father’s money came from. His dad didn’t have much of an education; Ben knew that when he saw him struggling to read the crime section of the newspaper every morning. But he seemed to always have friends over—drinking, loudly cursing, playing mahjongg, cheering the rare instances when the Chinese men’s soccer team didn’t get shut out, drinking some more. And each time they came over, the appearance of their clothes and call girls improved. They were making money, although it seemed Ben’s father never spent a single cent on anything except more trucks, more friends, more certificates hung in plaques from the living room wall.
In 1985, finally, then, Ben’s father decided to take him back to his hometown. Ben remembered riding in the cramped rear seat of a small hatchback out to the countryside, where it seemed the trees stood taller than the buildings, and being carried into a well-hidden blue truck. He did not understand why his father then drove the truck back to the city, this time driving over beat-up dirt paths and side streets along the ragged border between town and country. They arrived at a small brick structure, nondescript, with the words “work hard and trust the party” written on the walls.
Some of daddy’s friends came over and loaded up a beat-up blue truck with wooden boxes. Ben’s parents had hired him an English tutor ever since he began learning Chinese—but even so, he could not figure out what the words, “fragile”, “Pyrex” and “Switzerland” meant. But he did know what “this side up” meant. Consequently he was not surprised when the friend that put that side down had two teeth knocked out of his mouth. It would be the first of many lessons along that trip.
Cut to the groan of a bad back, the thwack of gigantic, multicolored plastic sacks onto corrugated iron, the smell of freshly cut tobacco and male sweat, a jungle village that looks lifted from a Coppola movie. A four-year old lunges once, twice, gets the passenger door open, and stares in wide-eyed wonder at odd-looking poles made out of wood and stamped metal that he has just knocked over. The men grab the leather straps off the poles, clean off the dirt, and laugh at him. One shows the kid how to pull on a small piece of metal that sticks out from the bottom of the pole; it shakes and a puff of smoke emerges from the metal end.
The other children in the village appear. They’re dressed strangely, not like the kids in the city—they boys lack pants, and some of them are naked. They are playing with a small piglet, a trail of screaming and squealing through the dirt lanes of the village. One of the older boys, much bigger than the rest, gives the four-year old a gift inside a straw box, which he cautiously opens. Out pops a giant grasshopper onto his face. He swats it and begins to cry; the others laugh. Suddenly the tears stop—even though his cheeks are still wet, his face has become expressionless, a mask.
This is the last time he will cry for the next fourteen years.
He picks up a rock, spins around, and whirls it into the older boy, leaving behind blood, mashed flesh, and shattered primary tooth where a laughing mouth had once been. The children scream; Chipped-tooth’s mother appears, but upon seeing the four-year old’s clothes, immediately slaps her son and drags him away.
Later, the feast. Men eating, speaking in a strange language, not Chinese, that the kid doesn’t understand. Beneath a rich brown sauce, at once pungent yet delicate, lies the piglet whose last squeal was drowned in a tub of boiling water. Ben and the village chief’s son sit with adults that have those wooden poles slung across their backs; his father sits next to the chief at the central table. The chief whispers in the elder Chen’s ear, points at someone with a line of dots running along his arms sitting next to the four-year old; both men laugh heartily. Later, Ben would learn to recognize the track marks and brittle veins from prolonged intravenous heroin use.
The four-year-old had been pretending to sleep for nearly three hours, ever since the banquet. His father is careful to not him see the other passenger on the truck.
Two headlights, one steady, one faltering, illuminate a thin strip of gray between subtropical jungle, so dark and dense on this moonless night it would induce a psychological reaction in a ‘Nam veteran. One fish, two men, and one four-year-old are encased in an amalgam of metal, glass, and rubber on asphalt. It hurtles through the night, powered by unleaded regular and Betel nut, before jerking violently to a stop by the side of the road.
Two men step out, go some distance from the road, and water the vegetation with a solution of water, urea, and purine. By now only pretending to be asleep, Ben watches his father, in one fluid motion, unsling his pole, point it at the place where the other man’s head and neck join, and pull on the pole’s metal hook. The startled calls from fauna deep in the jungle echo Ben’s internal amazement; the jungle’s still visage mirrors Ben’s placid, sleeping facade. The man with track marks twitches in the soft grass. His face, brainstem, and midbrain are now a Jackson Pollack piece—paintbrush, a 7.62x54mm 148 grain spitzer tip—canvas, the dark green jungle. Fifty six shovelfuls later (Ben counted) the truck door slams shut and the engine coughs to life. The fish resumes swimming, Michael Jackson resumes singing. Ben’s father checks that Ben is still asleep, and keeps driving.
The moon and trees give way to the morning sun reflecting off of vast rice paddies, cranes silhouetted against the pink sky. Behind a deserted factory, underneath crumbling brick and rotting slogans from another political era, they pull up alongside four interlocking silver rings on a grille. The other car rolls down its power windows; the kid in the passenger seat pretends to be jolted awake by the parking brake. Again, he watches through the back window of the cab as his father cuts open one of the sacks, digs through a pile of sweet-smelling leaves, and finds the brick of powder the police checkpoint missed. Four hands, two pasty and white, two rough and tanned, engage in that ancient ritual of commerce. Ben’s father climbs back into the truck holding thick roll of pink paper.
