Monkey Hunting

Cristina Garcia's lovely Monkey Hunting tells the story of a Chinese family divided between Cuba and China, the US and Vietnam, in a way no academic text ever could capture. Garcia's fictional account of Chen Pan's family across multiple generations provides a humanising portrait to the rather dry historical accounts of Chinese indentured labor. Intriguingly, Garcia's tale extends this family saga into one of multiple diasporas, connecting Vietnam, rural China, Shanghai, New York, and Havana (as well as Africa, through Chen Pan's Afro-Cuban wife, Lucrecia, and the role of Afro-Cuban spirituality and music). Home and family are, as seen through the contours of this complex family's trials and tribulations, fluid and encompassing in ways that are both illuminating and moving. Chen Pan and his descendants are never free from his shadow, and neither is he ever a distant figure in the lives of his progeny. 

Impressively, Garcia manages to fuse Chinese folklore, literary references, and religion into the Afro-Cuban spiritual worldview quite well, attesting to the importance of Chinese immigrants in Cuban history, culture, and family bloodlines. The political and racial questions are never absent, whether dealing with the 1912 race war in Cuba, discrimination against people of color in New York and troops serving in Vietnam, or the role of the state and politics in sowing division. As one may suspect from Garcia's politics, she is no fan of Castro, and even more critical of Mao and the Cultural Revolution (the life of Cheng Fang, imprisoned for alleged capitalist values), albeit avoiding the capitalism versus communism debates for a more humanistic approach on the ways in which modernity and tradition enclose our worlds.