Christina Garcia\'s Monkey Hunting

Monkey Hunting

Mixed cultures and mixed ancestries are both a large part of the plot and the theme of Monkey Hunting. The characters of course bear the literary responsibility as to the impact of cross-cultural and mixed ancestries; but the setting, the ironies and the various narratives by various characters carry the messages that the author delivers with both eloquence and coarseness.

On many occasions in this book Cristina Garcia brings the reader into the cultural stew that has resulted from Chen Pan's arrival in Cuba and the offspring he is responsible for. Mixed cultures result in clashes in what to eat and how to love. On pages 203-204 for example, readers are treated to the fact that Vietnamese people love to use fish sauce. Anyone who has visited a Vietnamese restaurant knows that you won't find ketchup or mustard on the table, but there will be fish sauce. And here is Chen Pan's great-great grandson, Domingo Chen, of Cuban, African, and Asian extraction, in Saigon in 1970 with Tham Thanh Lan, a Vietnamese woman.

She spread fish sauce on everything," not the least of which was the ice cream (Neapolitan) that Domingo gave her. She hated peanut butter, hamburgers, Oreo cookies and other traditionally American foods. Worse yet, Domingo couldn't teach her to learn even a few Spanish words, but on the other hand, Domingo couldn't kiss her without having fish sauce on his lips and they couldn't make love unless the fish sauce was "spread...everywhere."

Domingo apparently had too much of a blend of African / Cuban / Asian blood in him to suit the officer's club culture, readers learn on page 209. Mixed cultures in this case were not welcome, albeit as for his hair being "afro," the history of the war in Vietnam shows that many African-Americans were in the front lines and in fact took the brunt of the attacks from enemy soldiers in many instances. "His features [were] not immediately identifiable as one of them" (p. 209), Garcia writes, and in this case it is a matter not that Domingo was darker skin than the "norm" but that they didn't know what ethnicity he was connected to. The nurses in the hospital didn't treat him well either? The cops in Guantanamo arrested him for "practicing 'negritude'"? This has the feel of exaggeration and hyperbole on the part of the author, who is not shy about loading up the narrative with impossible acts (on page 206 General Bishop's fake leg flew off and knocked a "startled peasant off his water buffalo" - really?).

But meanwhile the U.S. Army discouraged mixed-ancestry partnerships and tried to keep "the couples apart" especially if "children were involved." Those "American-Asian" babies might not fit into the American culture, the military brass was saying, and indeed that was the author's spin on how the war honchos were approaching the issue. No cure for "gook hoodooed" but "death itself" (p. 208). Domingo wondered about all of this, "these cross-cultural lusts"; were people really supposed to "mix with others from themselves?" (p. 209).

Sometimes in her book, Garcia brings people together from two totally different cultures and they become temporarily close - but that closeness becomes elusive, as though you can't always bring opposites together and expect a lasting sense of belonging. On page 140 Chen Fang explains that her lover, the elitist French woman Dauphine, has "long blond hair [that] hung like a voyage"; and on page 145, in a dream, Chen Fang sees Dauphine in a dream after Dauphine has returned to France, and this time Dauphine's "blond hair bobbed like a New Year's lantern as she caught another plum." Blond is very much the opposite of the color of Latino and Asian hair - blond contrasts dramatically with black hair, which perhaps is part of the literary point that the author is making.

Meanwhile, Chen Fang loved green plums, and Dauphine (p. 142) had made sure to give Chen Fang "an exquisite jade bowl filled to the brim" with plums, albeit plums were "long out of season." Now, a few pages later, in a dream, Chen Fang is seeing her lover in a dream in the river, pulling plums out from the water. Attempting to get closer to Dauphine, Chen Fang is stymied by the "steady wind" - and there are all kinds of images and symbolic messages in those passages. But it seems that this portion of the book shows the clashes between cultures, or at least the opposite of the cultural / ancestral unions hitherto portrayed in the novel.

The Japanese have laid waste to Shanghai and Chen Fang stumbles through life hating the stinking rotting corpses, the unsafe water, the lack of payment for her teaching. It is a cruel world for her run by aliens from Japan, and though reading will not free her "from death," but it allows her to be "immersed in the shadows of other worlds" where she can find some peace. "Other worlds" are of course other cultures and other countries and while she is in Shanghai, she is also experiencing multicultural emotions on the one hand and on the other she is "neither woman nor man but a stone, a tree struck by lightning long ago" (p. 149). The author is exploring ancestries in this case that are lost and wasted and confused.

The blending of cultures through relationships in this book doesn't always mean a watering down of one's own beliefs or rituals will occur. Characters in this story like Lucrecia had good reason to be suspicious of the cultural baggage that goes along with the predominant culture in Cuba. The missionaries and priests had lectured to her about morality, but she only believed that "Whenever you helped someone else, you saved yourself" (p. 129). It was always better to "mix a little of this and that," she believed, and that sounds like a metaphor for the entire novel - mixing a little bit of Asian with a little bit of Cuban and then mix that mix with some African. "She didn't believe in just one thing...she lit a candle here, made an offering there, said prayers to the gods of heaven and the ones here on earth" (p. 129). Indeed Lucrecia, a slave who was bought out of bondage by a Chinese-Cuban, liked the "flores de pascuas" at Easter but did she need to go every Sunday? Of course not (p. 129).