The Stone Monkey

stitching together a small stuffed animalfor Po-Yee—a cat, it seemed. The woman made the toy pounce onto the arm of her chair and the girl took it in both hands, studying it with happy eyes. Together they played with the cat, laughing.
    Chang heard a moan on the couch, where his own father rested, curled in a blanket that was virtually the same gray shade as his skin.
    “Baba,” Chang whispered and rose immediately. He found the man’s medicine, opened it and gave him a tablet of morphine. He held the cup of cold tea so that the man could take the pill. When he’d first gotten sick—the heat and dampness spreading quickly through the yang organs of his body, the stomach and intestines—they’d gone to their local doctor, who’d given them herbs and tonics. Soon, though, that hadn’t been enough for the pain and another doctor had diagnosed cancer. But Chang’s dissident status had kept his father waiting on the bottom of the list at the hospitals’ huge queues for treatment. Medical care in China was changing. The state hospitals were giving way to private clinics but they were extremely expensive—a single visit could cost two months’ salary and treating cancer would have been out of the question for a family struggling to survive. The best Chang had been able to find was a “barefoot doctor” in the countryside north of Fuzhou, one of those individuals simply proclaimed by the government to be paramedics and practicing with minimal training. The man had prescribed morphine to ease Chang Jiechi’s pain but there was little else he could do.
    The bottle of the drug was large but it wouldn’t last more than a month and his father was quickly worsening. On the Internet Chang had done a lot of research on the United States. There was a famous hospital in New York that did nothing but treat cancer patients. He knew that his father’scondition was advanced but the man wasn’t old—not by American standards—only sixty-nine, and he was strong from daily walks and exercise. Surgeons could operate and remove those portions of his body destroyed by the cancerous dampness and give him radiation and medicine to keep the disease at bay. He could live for many more years.
    As he gazed at his father the old man suddenly opened his eyes. “The Ghost is angry now that they’ve killed one of his own people. And that he’s failed to kill the Wus. He’ll come after us. I know his sort. He won’t stop until he finds us.”
    This was his father’s way. To sit and to absorb then give his assessments, which were invariably right. For instance, he’d always considered Mao Zedong a psychopath and had predicted some cataclysm would descend upon the country under his reign. And he’d been right: the near annihilation of the Chinese economy in the fifties thanks to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution a decade later, of which his father—like all open-minded artists and thinkers—was a victim.
    But Chang Jiechi had survived the disasters. He’d said to his family in the 1960s, “This will pass. The madness cannot be sustained. We have only to stay alive and wait. That is our goal.”
    Within ten years, Mao was dead, the Gang of Four was imprisoned, and Chang Jiechi had been proven right.
    And he was right now too, Sam Chang thought in despair. The Ghost would come after them.
    The very name “snakehead” comes from the image of the smugglers crawling furtively through borders to deliver their human cargo to their final destination. Chang sensed the Ghost was doing this now—prowling, calling in favors, wielding his guanxi, threatening, perhaps even torturing people to find the Changs’ whereabouts. He might—
    Outside, a screech of brakes.
    Chang, his wife and father all froze.
    Footsteps.
    “Shut the lights out. Quickly,” Chang ordered. Mei-Mei scurried through the apartment, dowsing them.
    Chang walked quickly to the closet, pulled William’s pistol out from its hiding place and walked to the curtained front window. Hands trembling, he looked outside.
    Across the street was a delivery truck—with a large sign for pizza hanging from the window. The driver was carrying a cardboard carton up to an apartment.
    “It’s all right,” he said. “A delivery across the street.”
    But then he looked through the dim apartment, detecting the vague forms of his father, his wife and the infant, illuminated only by the blue light of the television screen. His smile of relief faded and, like