Before novelist Cristina Garcia truly starts her day, she reads for an hour or two and lets the disparate images she conjures float and disrupt more ordered thinking.There is some similarity between this morning ritual and her third novel Monkey Hunting, a vibrant triptych of one Chinese-Cuban family that sets rich details in a non-linear plot and leaves images floating in your imagination.
Monkey Hunting centers on Chen Pan, a young farmer lured from China to Cuba in 1857 by promises of well-compensated work "beyond the edge of the world," where, he was told, the women were "eager and plentiful" and "even the river fish jumped, unbidden, into frying pans." Through chapters that cast forward and backward to stirring effect, the novel interweaves the lives of two descendants: Chen Fang, a granddaughter raised in China as a boy so she could be educated; and Domingo Chen, a great-grandson who immigrated from Cuba to America.
Garcia is the author of two previous novels — Dreaming in Cuban, a National Book Award finalist, and The Agüero Sisters — both of which focus on women within the context of family and deal with dual identity between Cuban and American culture. While Monkey Hunting remains very much in line with her previous work, it's also an ambitious departure.
"I basically read everything I could get my hands on," Garcia says, explaining how she did research for the broad-ranging novel. "Cuban history, Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution, Colonial Cuba …"
Not only was she handling time periods she was initially unfamiliar with, it was the first time she was writing from the perspective of a male main character. Where Dreaming in Cuban was "emotionally autobiographical," she had to struggle to get inside Chen Pan's skin.
The copy printed on the dust jacket gives away as much: Chen Pan escapes his bonds, running away into the jungle, and makes his way to Havana. He prospers selling heirlooms and oddities — "powdered wigs from long-dead judges," "patriarchal busts (frequently noseless)" — in his secondhand shop, the Lucky Find. He marries a mulatto woman out of slavery and finds himself at the end of his life with an amended version of the dynasty he'd hoped for upon leaving China.
Perhaps the book's greatest similarity to Garcia's prior novels is the continued theme of individuals within large historical events and how their experiences filter down through family. Chen Fang, who is thrown in one of Mao's prisons during the Cultural Revolution, dreams of running away to Cuba, to the grandfather she's heard "survived for years as a fugitive in the woods, eating nothing but hairless creatures that swung through the trees." And Domingo Chen, serving in Vietnam, carries his great-grandfather's spectacles in his flak jacket as a charm, respectful of his brave ancestor.
"Our traditional emotions of identity are changing," says Garcia, who was born in Havana and grew up in New York City. She now lives in Santa Monica with her daughter Pilar, who's part Cuban, part Japanese and part Russian Jew.
For younger generations, Garcia says, "The challenge is to find individuality in a culture that's homogenized."
In 1984, at 33, Garcia visited Cuba for the first time since she was 2. She describes the experience as life altering.
"I started dreaming in Spanish for the first time. It was almost like I had a ghost alter ego that I wasn't even aware of. And I was flooded with color."
In 1989, a journalist of 20 years, Garcia first began writing fiction by drawing upon her impressions of that trip to Cuba and the interpersonal dynamics of her own family. The inspiration for Monkey Hunting was more serendipitous.
"It started in my interest in Cuban music," she says. "I wanted to write a story about a musician, Domingo Chen, and I envisioned it as his book with flashbacks to his ancestors. But as I got into it I found the story of his great-grandfather and he slowly took over the book."
Curiously, Garcia also grew up wondering how there came to be the great Chinese-Cuban restaurants on Manhattan's Upper West Side, how she came to eat her black beans with chow mein and why the Chinese waiters spoke Spanish.
Distilled into 272 historically accurate pages, Monkey Hunting is, among other things, gorgeously written. Garcia's style has the lyricism of poetry, the intimacy of Anton Chekhov's short fiction and the air of legend in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
In one scene, Domingo goes to the home of a Vietnamese prostitute favored by a military buddy. We know the purpose of the visit is to deliver personal effects, but we do not know the man has died until Domingo is inside her home, and Garcia writes: "Domingo had collected his friend's remains from the breadfruit tree and then slid him, piece by piece, into a body bag." While not poetic in terms of language, this kind of economic writing runs throughout the novel. Emotion is embedded. Sentiment is suppressed. Stories are packed into sentences.
"I think I'm learning a little bit of that from poetry," Garcia says. "[In poetry] you don't get the full story. You get the image, and it's not plot-driven; it's image-driven."
When Garcia isn't tearing through centuries of foreign history, she returns to loves like the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Charles Wright and Anne Carson.
"I don't think people read enough," she says wistfully, then self-critically adds, "I don't think I read enough."
This article appears in May 7-13, 2003.