Straw Dogs of the Universe: A Novel

by Ye Chun

Genres: Asian American

Synopsis

A harrowing and redemptive immigrant story for readers of Pachinko

A Chinese railroad worker and his young daughter—sold into servitude—in 19th century California search for family, fulfillment, and belonging in a violent new land

"Heaven and earth do not pick and choose.
They see everything as straw dogs."

A sweeping historical novel of the American West from the little-seen perspective of those who helped to build it, Straw Dogs of the Universe traces the story of one Chinese father and his young daughter, desperate to find him against all odds.

After her village is devastated by famine, 10-year-old Sixiang is sold to a human trafficker for a bag of rice and six silver coins. Her mother is reluctant to let her go, but the promise of a better life for her beloved daughter ultimately sways her. Arriving in America with the profits from her sale and a single photograph of Guifeng, her absent father, Sixiang journeys across an unfamiliar American landscape in the hopes of reuniting her family. 

As she makes her way through an unforgiving new world, her father, a railroad worker in California, finds his attempts to build a life for himself both upended and defined by along-lost love and the seemingly inescapable violence of the American West. A generational saga ranging from the villages of China to the establishment of the transcontinental railroad and the anti-Chinese movement in California, Straw Dogs of the Universe considers the tenacity of family ties and the courage it takes to survive in a country that rejects you, even as it relies upon your labor.

 

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Release date: October 17, 2023

Publisher: Catapult

Print pages: 336

Sample

1

To the Land of the Lost

1876

THE CHILD STOOD BY THE SHIP RAILING, WIND AND SALT ON HER face. There was nothing but sky and sea at this moment, not even a gull or a flash of fish: the sky spread blue and luminous; the sea glimmered but did not conceal its cold carelessness. The night before, a storm had thrown her and the other passengers in the hold off their berths and rolled them back and forth across the dank floor. Through the porthole, she had seen a slice of sky, lightning-lit and starless. Foamy water poured down the hatchway: drops splashed into her mouth with the taste of bile.

Although this was her first time on the sea, ten-year-old Sixiang was no stranger to fickle waters. The past summer, a typhoon had hit her village, Yunteng, where the river jumped the bank and kept surging. Her grandmother teetered in indecision about what to save in her tub: the ancestral tablets, the Guanyin statuette, or the antique bowls and cups reserved for the deceased, which were also the household’s last valuables not yet traded for food. It was Sixiang’s mother who grabbed the jar of rice, the five sweet potatoes, and two salted fish; who picked up the sheets of oilcloth for covers and the shoulder poles for oars; and who asked her grandmother to leave the other things where they were: “We can’t eat those when we are starving.”

Sixiang and her mother huddled in one tub, her grandmother in another. They swirled in the currents of muddy water with other villagers and livestock animals, dodging branches, debris, and courtyard furniture. Before nightfall, the flood had dwarfed tall palm trees and erased houses, leaving only their tiled rooftops no bigger than grave vaults. Under the oilcloth, Sixiang pressed against her mother’s thumping chest. The water lapped and licked, rumbled and hissed. Darkness wrapped them like fur.

After the third night, Sixiang awoke to a cool morning of light rain. Her mother was pushing something away from the tub with the pole. A body, face down, floated in the water, long loosened hair spread like spent wings. The current lifted the drowned woman’s dark blouse and bared her lower back, pale as the weak sun. Jaw clenched, Sixiang’s mother was trying to push their tub away from the body, but it followed, head knocking, hair netting their tub. After a while of such futile maneuvering, her mother put down the pole, hugged her knees, buried her face to her chest, and sobbed. Sixiang’s grandmother was floating in her own tub a little way ahead of them, in the direction of their roof that now resembled an old buffalo’s scrawny back. She was chanting Amituofo, lips shuddering.

Sixiang had heard stories of water ghosts, how they crept into the living and took hold. She picked up the shoulder pole, dipping it back into the water. “I’m pushing it away, Mama,” she said. “Look, it’s away.”

Her mother looked up, nodded at her, and took over the pole again.

NOW NO MOTHER was with Sixiang, nor anyone she could call kin. Madam asked her and the four other girls in the group to call her Loumou, because, she said, she would be taking care of them like their own mothers until they arrived in Gold Mountain and moved in with their new families. Madam had changed from her silk blouse into a coarse cotton top before they boarded the ship. She no longer wore powder and rouge either: just a plain, bare face. “When the ship arrives, there will be white men asking who you are,” she said, moving her eyes down the row of girls one by one. “If you don’t say you’re my daughter, they’ll lock you up in a dark room filthier than this hold.”

The hold held hundreds of Chinese men and thirty or so women and girls who were squeezed in its dimmer and fouler end, away from the porthole where the only fresh air was let in. The girls were divided into several groups, each led by a madam. Sixiang’s group consisted of little Ah Fang, a year and half younger than Sixiang; two teenagers who had soon become inseparable and whispered everything in each other’s ears; and Ah Hong, the oldest among them, who had not stopped crying since Sixiang first saw her several days earlier in the boat cabin, before they were brought to Hong Kong to board the steamship. Hands and feet tied then, Ah Hong had to raise both her arms to wipe away tears from her face. The sight of her had momentarily shocked Sixiang out of her own sobbing, sobering her as she was led into the cabin, which she had originally thought would only hold buckets of fragrant rice.

The group occupied two narrow berths in the hold: Madam, Sixiang, and little Ah Fang on the lower bunk; the older girls on the upper. All of them save Madam were struck by seasickness, and for the first three days of the voyage, Sixiang had curled into a ball on her bedroll, enduring the churning in her stomach. She got up only briefly to vomit in the waste bucket that kept refilling to its rim.

She also got up for the meals, yearningly. Even with nausea, her hunger would resurge. Two meals were served a day: morning, rice porridge; night, steamed rice—each topped with a few slivers of salted fish and a few pieces of sautéed cabbage. Sixiang chewed carefully, not taking a single bite for granted. The crying girl Ah Hong, however, would only eat a little, the rest of her food soon divided up by the two other teens. “You all are lucky,” Madam said, glancing at Ah Hong. “Just a few years ago, folks had to bring their own food onboard. And they’d starve if they didn’t bring enough.”

Sixiang and little Ah Fang lay face to face on their bunk, and when less sick, they would talk about life before the flood. Their favorite dish: roasted duck for Sixiang; barbecued pork for Ah Fang, though it had been years since they last tasted them. Ah Fang had been bought by Madam on the same day as Sixiang, from a neighboring village down south, and had the look of a startled hare when she was dragged into the cabin. But at night, each time Sixiang reached for her mother in her sleep and felt Ah Fang’s sharp little shoulder instead, she would find Ah Fang sound asleep as if without a care.

With caution, Sixiang approached the topic of ending up here. “What about your mama?” she asked Ah Fang in a casual voice, like it was an everyday question.

“What about her?”

“Why did she sell you?”

“She’s dead.”

“Your baba?”

“Dead too. Yours?”

“My mama is not dead,” Sixiang said. “My baba, I don’t know . . . He shouldn’t be dead either.” Sixiang decided not to pursue the subject any further, as she was clearly the luckier one between the two of them.

That night, when the storm hit, Sixiang and Ah Fang held hands while being tossed about on the soggy floor. Later, after they climbed back onto their berth, Sixiang started to hum a tune her mother used to sing to her at night. Ah Fang asked her to hum louder so that she could hear too. Sixiang did so and patted Ah Fang on the back as well, the way her mother had done. They fell back asleep that way.

In the morning, waking up to the hold’s rustle and a quiet blue trickling down the hatchway, they both felt better in the stomach. After breakfast, they followed Madam past the men’s bunks and up the slimy ladder to the steerage deck. It was smaller and more packed than the main deck above, which was off-limits to them, reserved only for first- and second-class passengers. Sixiang stood stunned by the sun for a moment. Then, one hand held in Madam’s and the other holding Ah Fang’s, she needled through the crowd to an opening by the railing. She let go of both hands and grabbed the cool metal bar and, tilting her face to the wind, breathed.

In all directions within her vision, only sky and sea, and in all directions, a thin line between the two sheets of blue. Far, unceasing, a hollow medium, a phantom shore, where lands vanished, villages disappeared.

WHEN YUNTENG VILLAGE finally emerged from water, their house was reduced to a dripping cave with a dead fish on the floor. Each remaining grain of rice they’d saved in the tub was now countable. They divided a sweet potato three ways for three meals, cooking each with a spoonful of rice in a potful of water so the quantity appeared to expand tenfold. But their stomachs wouldn’t be fooled.

They had a fan palm in the yard that the family had planted when Sixiang was little. They picked its seeds and cooked them like rice. They were saving the palm’s heart for last to delay the killing of the tree, but one morning when they stepped out of the house, only the stump was left.

Sixiang dreamed of bowls of rice turning into pebbles and roasted duck bursting into fire the moment she reached them, as if she were a hungry ghost in the underworld, condemned to eternal starvation. When she woke in the middle of the night aching with hunger, she would sometimes see her mother staring blank-eyed at the ceiling, with the look of the dead fish stranded on their floor, as if the soul of the drowned woman clinging to their tub had indeed crept its way into her.

Sixiang’s grandmother asked Sixiang and her mother to kneel with her in front of the altar, its wooden shelves now warped after days of soaking. The wooden tablets with their ancestors’ names carved on them were cracking and peeling, standing limp on the uneven top like a small, ruinous graveyard. Sixiang’s grandmother handed three sticks of lit incense each to Sixiang and her mother. They bowed and prayed. The bronze Guanyin statuette cast her all-knowing eyes upon them.

Villagers were leaving. Some carried their valuables on shoulder poles or pushed their old and young on wheelbarrows out of the dragon gate. Some left with nothing, having eaten their last edibles and spent their last pennies burying their dead. Some left their dead covered with grass mats, too weak to dig graves. They were heading north to the mountainous areas to beg. Sixiang went to the now-tamed river, hoping to catch a fish with an earthworm, but the water stank of death and rot. The earthworm wriggled in her palm. She tore a bit off its tail end and put it in her mouth. It tasted like mud, but that did not stop her from eating the rest. She went home, dug up more worms in the yard, and brought them to the kitchen where her mother and grandmother were boiling weeds into a green gruel. She asked them to try.

“We can’t eat that,” her grandmother said. “We’re not savages.”

Her mother looked away, as if even saying no took too much effort.

They couldn’t leave. Both Sixiang’s mother and grandmother had gotten their feet bound when they were six and were unable to travel far. They’d tried to bind Sixiang’s when she turned six too, folding her toes beneath her soles despite her screaming. But each night, Sixiang would wake up in the middle of sleep and unwind the strangling bandages. After a while, her mother gave up trying to stop her, and eventually her grandmother did too, although she continued to bemoan the future of a low farmhand’s wife destined for Sixiang with her fast-growing feet. Now, it occurred to Sixiang that she was the only one in the family who could walk long distances. And who would eat earthworms if she had to.

As the village emptied out, a man in a fisherman’s bamboo hat rowed a boat down the river to their shore. A woman in an embroidered silk blouse emerged from the cabin, her face powdered, her forehead shaved high. Sixiang had been trying to catch a frog or crab by the shore. The woman eyed her before disappearing into the cabin again. She reemerged with a steaming bowl of rice and waved Sixiang over. “Here, little one, eat this.” She handed her the bowl and a pair of chopsticks.

Sixiang had not touched a grain of rice for three months now. She took the bowl with shaky hands and stuffed a chunk of rice into her mouth. She did not stop until she had her third mouthful. Then she looked up at the woman: “My mama and grandma?”

“Don’t worry.” The woman smiled. “Eat it up. There’s more.”

The woman went back to the cabin and came out with a larger bowl of steamed rice. “Take me to your family,” she said. Her other hand clutched a small gunny sack. Judging by its shape and the lovely shasha sound it made, Sixiang could tell it was a bag of rice, enough for them to live on for a month if they were careful to make it last.

Sixiang thought maybe the woman was Guanyin Goddess disguised in flesh, descending to answer their prayers.

UNLIKE SIXIANG, HER mother seemed to know right away that the woman wasn’t Guanyin in any manner. Even while Sixiang jumped and hollered at their doorway, saying, “Rice, this kind lady has brought us rice,” her mother’s eyes were turning mournful. When her mother and grandmother finally sat down to eat the rice, trying not to gobble too greedily in front of the stranger, her mother’s face was straining hard to hold back tears.

The woman sat across the table from them, sipping the water Sixiang’s grandmother had poured from their kettle—they’d run out of tea, her grandmother had apologized. The woman sighed. “Life is too hard here,” she said. “I’ve seen so many deaths along the river, people of all ages, not just the old but those in their prime. But the hardest to see were the little kids.” She sighed again. “We all want our kids to live, don’t we? We want them to live a better life than us. I know you all do. You love your child, I have no doubt.” She looked at Sixiang. “What a sweet girl! When I gave her a bowl of rice at the river, the first thing on her mind was her mama and grandma.” She took Sixiang’s hand, stroking it. “She deserves to live better. You all must know Gold Mountain, the land of fortunes and riches. I live there most of the time, and I tell you, no one ever starves there. I give you my word: I’ll find her a good family who will treat her like their own.”

Sixiang’s heart tightened as the woman’s hands fastened around hers. Ever since she was little, her grandmother had called her peibenhuo when she was mad at her for one reason or another, like the time Sixiang dropped a hot teapot on the floor. You peibenhuo! Something to be sold for less than its cost, something that, instead of profiting the family, would bring a loss. Over the years, Sixiang had asked her mother many times if her grandmother would indeed sell her one day. And her mother’s answer would vary, seemingly depending on her mood. Often, she would say it was just an expression for girls, all girls: “Don’t mind your grandma. She’s bitter. What good words could come out of a bitter woman’s mouth?” But sometimes her mother’s words seemed to be steeped in the same anger that lived in her grandmother: “Yes, if you don’t behave, you’ll be sold to a mother-in-law just like your grandma and to a husband just like your father who will leave you and never come back.” In moments like this, Sixiang would almost blame herself for not knowing when to ask, as if her future depended on her mastery of timing.

But there was no question of timing now. This well-dressed, well-fed woman who had come out of nowhere was offering to give them the bag of rice she’d put on the table, plus six silver coins to weather the famine, and a good life for Sixiang beyond the corpse-strewn village. They would sail away to Hong Kong, where they were to board a steamship to Gold Mountain. Sixiang’s grandmother watched Sixiang across the table, as if to appraise her value, a shimmer in her eyes that could have been greed, or hope, or a flash of fear. Sixiang pulled her hand out of the woman’s grip and came to bury her face in the curve of her mother’s neck. “Don’t sell me,” she whispered.

But her mother said nothing. She eased Sixiang into her arms, held her and patted her on the back as if she were a baby.

The woman asked them to prepare a bedroll and some clothes for Sixiang. “I know this is hard, but it’s better for everyone.” Seeing no one move, she pressed on, “The boat is waiting. The ship is leaving the day after tomorrow. It’s difficult, I know, but trust me, I’ll take care of her and make sure she ends up with a good family.”

Sixiang’s mother gave her a little shove. “Come with me,” she said, rising. She led Sixiang to their room and opened the wooden trunk at the end of the bed that they’d shared since Sixiang was born. Inside the trunk were their clothes and linens, most old and worn, the better ones long traded for food. Her mother lifted a corner of the linens, reached a hand to the bottom, and retrieved a flat, palm-sized thing wrapped in a silk kerchief. She unfolded the silk to reveal a photo: the portrait of Sixiang’s father. At one time, for as long as Sixiang could remember, it had sat in a frame on their bedside table, but a couple of years before, it had mysteriously disappeared. When she asked where it had gone, her mother simply said, “Lost.” Her father had mailed the photo home along with one of his first letters, and it had arrived on the exact day Sixiang was born. “Because your father wanted to be here for your birth,” her grandmother had told her. She’d also told her that in the same letter her father had chosen a name for her—Sixiang, meaning “remember home,” so that she would never forget where she came from. On every holiday before the famine, her grandmother would place an extra chair by the dinner table, along with an extra bowl of rice, topped with a portion from each plate, for the father who had given Sixiang her name and whom she had never seen except in the photo.

Now her mother held Sixiang’s hand open and placed the photo on her palm. Her father’s face looked young, even boyish, much younger than her mother now—maybe not that much older than Sixiang herself.

“Sixiang, go to Gold Mountain with the woman. You will find your father there, and he’ll take care of you.”

Sixiang tried to give the photo back. “Don’t make me go. I want to stay here at home.”

But her mother folded Sixiang’s fingers over the photo. “Listen to me. We won’t be able to do this for long, you know that. Now, you go to Gold Mountain and find your father. You bring him home with you. I will be here waiting. Your grandma will be waiting too.”

“But how? How can I find him?”

“You will find a way. You are growing up fast. You are strong, stronger than me.” Her mother held Sixiang’s face in her palms, looking into her eyes as if to plant the belief in her.

Up close, Sixiang saw something she had avoided seeing before—her mother’s sunken cheeks, her wan lips; her eyes, though held steady to hers, were dim and gray. Her mother would need that bag of rice.

SIXIANG KNEW THAT Gold Mountain was not all gold or all mountain. It was where people disappeared, where both her grandfather and father had gone and never come back. She imagined dark holes in mountainsides camouflaged with mats of grass or a thin layer of rocks. People stumbled in, never to climb out again.

But she also knew there were laundries where men like her grandfather bent over, the way women did here, and rubbed and scrubbed. And iron roads built by men like her father where fire-spitting wagons glided along. She knew there were people of all kinds, their skin ranging from bone white to coal black, some eating raw beef, some speaking languages that sounded like bird calls.

It was also perhaps a place where Chinese men were chased like rabbits by gweilo, the white men, where they got their braids cut off and wrapped around their necks as nooses. Granduncle Di told these tales after the bandits attacked their village last year, targeting the households with Gold Mountain connections. During that ransacking, Granduncle Di’s gold tooth was twisted out of his gums and his wife’s finger was chopped off for the gold ring she couldn’t slide off. Afterward, Granduncle Di would sit below the centuries-old banyan with its aerial roots hanging like wild hair and talk, as men and children gathered around him to imagine the world across the waters.

Granduncle Di was the only one among his group of six to have survived a raid by gweilo and to secure his gold and return home with it. The others were either shot or robbed or hanged. “To survive,” he said, “you have to hold your fate in your own hands. Even when odds are against you, you can turn the signpost of your fate to a different angle and mislead Yanluo Wang so he’ll chase another in your place.”

But then, maybe remembering the bandit attack and the eventual loss of his gold here, he would lower his head and sob till his stiff-faced wife came to lead him home.

Sixiang didn’t know how to make sense of these tales of horror alongside Granduncle Di’s earlier stories of fabled sights, or the bits and pieces her grandmother and mother had gathered from letters sent to the village from so many long-departed husbands. But in Sixiang’s imagination, dark holes in that faraway land persisted. She couldn’t know if her grandfather and father had stumbled into the same hole and finally met each other, or if their holes were separate and they had remained strangers.

Like Sixiang, her father had been born after his own father had departed. In his father’s last letter, sixteen years after he’d left, he’d asked Sixiang’s grandmother to arrange a marriage for their son, and, once wedded, send him to San Francisco to help with his father’s laundry business. Sixiang’s grandfather had sent money for the wedding and promised to send more for the passage with the next letter, but neither that letter nor the money ever arrived.

Sixiang’s grandmother consulted the shenpo in a village to their east, a known spirit medium in this part of Xinhui. She told Sixiang how the shenpo threw the rice she had brought with her into the air, while chanting verses and rolling her eyes back in their sockets. Sixiang’s grandmother had hoped that the shenpo wouldn’t be able to find her husband’s spirit in the underworld because he hadn’t passed yet, but the shenpo’s body shook and burst forth with a man’s voice. It was Sixiang’s grandfather’s voice, aged and forlorn. Chills shot up Sixiang’s grandmother’s back, as if her now-deceased husband had touched her with his cold fingers. He beseeched her to set up a tablet for him on their family altar and burn incense twice a day so that his soul could cross the ocean and reside in peace with the other ancestors.

“What happened to you? How did you die?” Sixiang’s grandmother asked her husband in the shenpo’s body. She had spent only six months with him before his departure and had waited for his return for the last sixteen years.

“It doesn’t matter now. It’s over. I’m ready to come home,” the voice said.

Sixiang’s grandmother felt more at ease after she set up his tablet by his ancestors’ at the altar. She made a routine of burning incense for him and serving him a cup of tea in the morning, a cup of wine at night, and a bowl of rice at each meal. But the chill, she told Sixiang, had stayed with her for a long time.

She hadn’t wanted her son, Sixiang’s father, to go to Gold Mountain in the first place, but the idea of going was already rooted in him. Without asking her, he signed a contract with a Gold Mountain railroad company—the contractor had been traveling village to village, peddling fabulous dreams to young men and handing out ready loans for their passage. Sixiang’s father-to-be came home one day and kowtowed to her grandmother three times on the brick floor, saying he was an unfilial son who disobeyed her will, but he would make up for it. ...