I watch him set the kitten free. I watch him watch it wander away happy.
I cannot see his face—so much like mine—from this window, but I see it in my dreams. I see his eyes, which are like mine. I see his skin which is paler than mine because my father’s people left China so long ago that their skin darkened and their bodies grew smaller and thinner. I see the special suit he wears, his “cloak,” which clings to his body like a woman’s glove and sparkles in the night like the Phoenix Bird my father’s brother told us of, how its magic was stronger than the Tiger’s, though it never brought harm to a soul.
His suit sparkles in the night on the roofs of Chinatown but only I can see it. Because he wants it that way. He wants me to know he is looking, looking for me.
We have a secret, don’t we, Chu—you and I? he tells me in my dream, as if we were in a comic book together.
The comic books that Mister Thupak brings for me to read (because he will not let me leave this room to get them for myself) are not in the language of my people or Mister Thupak’s or even Chinese. But I have studied them and I know what those heroes do. We had comic books in My Tho—where I was born—and in the Thai camps, and in the bigger camp in Malaysia. Everywhere you go in the world, there are comic books, I know. That is how I know what the green man with the lamp is able to do, or the man who looks like a bat, or the man who is afraid of the green rock, or the man who climbs the sides of buildings. They are heroes because they want to save us. They want to save people who are about to be robbed. They want to save children who have no parents and kittens from rooftops. It is all the same for them. It is what they do. They do it sometimes without people knowing it, and they do it without asking for thanks. They spend their lives looking for ones to save—in cities, in rooms just like mine. That is why they are our heroes, why there are comic books in every country about them, and why so many of them have names like the one I have given my friend: Captain China.
Captain China has come from a world far far away, he tells me, in my dreams. He, too, is looking for someone to save—
Someone like me.
The most famous story in my country is not a comic book. It is the story of Kim Van Kieu, a girl who does what she must because it is right. She gives up the young man she loves to take care of her father. She gives up a free life, out of duty. She gives up everything, because she must so that she will know, at the end of the her life, that she has lived her life correctly, and, most importantly, so that she will not have to return to this world and live again.
If I could believe that my own life is like hers, I would be happy. But it is difficult to do. I have lost everything—but for what? For the men who come to me in this room?
Captain China knows I am somewhere, but not where. Mister Thupak, the villain, has hidden me very well. If I try to escape, Mister Thupak will catch me and beat me. If I try to shout through the window (to let Captain China know where I am, of course), Mister Thupak will catch me and beat me. The window is never open. My shout cannot get out. The walls are thick, not like those of the house of my childhood. With the windows closed and the walls so thick Captain China cannot find me, except in dreams. This is the way of his kind, he tells me. If you cannot find the one you love in the real world, there are always dreams…
In my dreams he smiles, to let me know he is looking, and that he will not stop.
The men that Mister Thupak brings to my room are of many kinds. Some wear expensive clothes—suits like the ones I see on the tourists down the hill, or suits made in Hong Kong, or suits I have never seen before. Some are dressed no better than Mister Thupak himself, smelling like him. Are they his cousins or brothers? I must wonder. Some of the men who come to my room speak languages I have heard before, though I do not understand them. Some do not. If they speak the language of my own people, I do not hear it. I do not want to. Some want me to face them when I do what they want me to do, or when they do to me what they want to do. A few ask only that I stand by the window, so that they can see me in the sunlight. That is all. They look at me and touch themselves and then leave. Most ask me to get down on my hands and knees, tell me not to look at them. This is what I prefer. This way I cannot see them. I can close my eyes and see Captain China jumping from roof to roof, his dark cape flying behind him. This is what I would rather see.
The touch of skin is the touch of skin, but people—no matter who they are—are more than this. They are what they feel. I know what the men feel who come to my room. I know what Captain China feels.
I would rather see Captain China, and by seeing him, feel what he must feel.
They do not hit me, or if they do, it is only once or twice. Mister Thupak has his rules. Mr. Thupak may hit me—if I am standing by the window when he comes in with nuoc mam or pho soup from the restaurant, or if one of the men complains that I have not been worth the money and tells Mister Thupak, with words or gestures of the hand, what I did wrong. But the men, they cannot—unless they have paid for it—and even then, only once or twice.
Captain China knows about all of this, and it makes him angry. He believes that no one should hit a boy like me. He says this in my dreams. He says it with tears in his eyes, so I know that he is feeling it.
This room is on the highest hill in Chinatown, but Chinatown isn’t Chinatown any longer. There was a part of Saigon called Cholon, I remember. A part where the people spoke Chinese. Maybe it is still there, maybe not. After the war many people left Cholon to come across the ocean, just as I did, to the Chinatown in this city, and by coming they have changed it. They speak Chinese but are not Chinese. They are from my country, yet we do not speak the same language. They have money. My father’s people do not. I can see them on the streets in my dreams. I can hear them speaking Chinese, though I do not know that language. Were it not for my dreams—and the nuoc mam and pho that Mister Thupak brings from a restaurant down the hill—I would not know any of this. I would sit in my room without anyone to talk to and not know how Chinatown has changed.
When, in my dreams, I hear the Cholonese of this Chinatown speak my language (because they know both languages, because they had to) I am sad. I wake up crying. How could hearing your father’s language not make you sad? I ask myself.
When people lose what is most important to them, they are always sad. That is how people are. No matter where they go, or what they do, or what is done to them afterward, they are sad.
Could he speak my father’s language, Mister Thupak—who is darker than my people, whose eyes are rounder than mine, whose hair is coarse and very dark—would call me moi. That is our word for animal—and it is the word we use for the simple people who live in the mountain jungles of our country and live like animals.
That is how I live—like an animal, on my hands and my knees in a little room full of the sounds each night that animals make. That is how Mister Thupak has kept me since he bought me four years ago.