Illustration by Christian Clayton

The Monkey King was made God of Victorious Strife. At the beginning of the pilgrimage a helmet had been fitted on the Monkey King’s head which contracted upon his skull when he was wayward or wanton. The agony of the contractions had caused him to refrain from wickedness. When, therefore, he was given his new title, the Monkey King begged to have his helmet removed since he had now become an enlightened one. The answer that was given was that if the Monkey King was indeed enlightened, the helmet would have gone of its own accord. The Monkey King reached up to feel his head and found that the helmet had disappeared.
—Ending of one of the many versions of the Chinese legend of the Monkey King

She laughs a lot. Reads relentlessly. Plays herself down with casual, unselfconscious charm.

From her home in Santa Monica, California, a cheerful Cristina Garcia endures the hopeful awkwardness of her daughter Pilar’s clarinet exercises — scales, scales and scales again. With the exact same breeziness, Garcia shares her passion for Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Anne Carson and her quest for the Perfect Cuban Black Beans. In all the talk about writing and books, Garcia doesn’t mention that, in addition to Monkey Hunting, her first novel in six years, Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature was also published in April. She edited the collection.

Cristina Garcia was born in 1958 Havana, the year the United States withdrew military aid to Batista — the year before Castro led his army into her hometown. In 1960, of course, the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations in Cuba. For toddler Cristina, it meant moving with her family to New York City. She lived in Queens and Brooklyn, surrounded by Italians and Spaniards, but not so many Cubans. Today Garcia lives near the California shore, but considers herself a New Yorker. A self-titled “incorrigible Cuban,” she still finds it surprising that people often consider her a “professional” one.

By the early 1980s, Garcia was a Barnard and Johns Hopkins (School of Advanced International Studies) graduate and on her way, via a copywriting gig at The New York Times, to becoming a Time correspondent in San Francisco, Miami and Los Angeles. She eventually landed as Time‘s bureau chief for Florida and the Caribbean. As a journalist, she wrote about everything from Salvadoran rightists accused of threatening refugees in California, to corporate crisis management, to the hopelessness of poverty in Haiti. By 1984, though, she was feeling “alienated” in Miami. Garcia had begun reading and writing poetry and decided, at 25, to go back to Cuba. Meeting her relatives “was like finding the missing link in my own identity.”

When she moved to California, in 1988, to write what would become Dreaming in Cuban, a story of three generations of women torn apart by Castro’s revolution, Garcia had no idea, of course, that the novel would be nominated for a National Book Award. She was on a path to becoming a Guggenheim Fellow, a Princeton Hodder Fellow and a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award. Dreaming began as a poem, and is a fragrant quilt of a novel: scent and sense memories, tense epiphanies and densely inhabited, kaleidoscopic lives. Sentence after graceful sentence woven through, touchable and strong as satin cord. The novel lulls with its lusciousness, but instead of torpor, what readers gain is the assurance that beauty and hideousness exist in every way contemporaneously, that weirdness is a virtue and that the possibilities of real magic are ever-present.

In Garcia’s Monkey Hunting, her characters move, but with heavy steps. The author feels the weight of history on protagonist Chen Pan and his progeny, even when they don’t. Reading the book is like walking back from a hanging tapestry, the images and relationships becoming more clear with each step. Monkey Hunting encourages (and to some degree, demands) a broad view. As Garcia continues to feed on the dark joys of her hero, Lorca — on what Stevens calls the “supreme fiction of poetry” — her language takes on the bright, warm dampness and near-impossible brilliance of an evening rainbow.

All this because when Cristina Garcia returned from her homeland, she “had this very strong image of a woman sitting on her porch by the sea, scanning the Cuban coast for invaders.” It came to her clearly: Garcia decided to put away journalism, along with its rules and travels and sometime glories. It was time to become a fiction writer.

When Dreaming in Cuban was published, writers like Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991) and Victor Villasenor (Rain of Gold, 1991) were just getting started. This was when books like Oscar Hijuelos’ 1989 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and Sandra Cisneros’ 1992 collection Woman Hollering Creek were beginning to challenge, in popularity, the translated works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

“This is a new literary landscape,” said Garcia, not long after the publication of Dreaming. “Now this is our language, and [America] is our place ... yet we’re still close enough to our culture — and to the migration — to be both scarred and enriched by it.”

Garcia followed Dreaming with 1997’s potent The Aguero Sisters, a tale of half-siblings, Reina and Constancia, fastened by fierce rivalry and a dispute over memory. The book won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction. Monkey Hunting is the story of the family of Chen Pan, a young Chinese man tricked into indentured servitude and shipped to 1857 Cuba, where he slaves in sugar cane fields for los criollos. The chapter in which Pan struggles to stay alive through his very own Middle Passage is called “To Paradise,” and it freezes bone. His experiences on La Amada plantations, shoulder and breast with African slaves, are eerie and stunning, but not so mesmerizing that sharp details of everyday life — the connections, the superstitions, the language — go limp underneath.

After dark, no lights were permitted in the baracon, so the slaves kept fireflies in tiny twig cages. Sometimes a homesick slave sang a song from his village, monotonous and sad, his words absorbed by the steady night-grinding of the crickets. The restless ones spent hours pulling ticks from their skin. Men and women alike smoked cigars of wild tobacco to ward off evil. Because evil, they said, hung everywhere ... [the African] Cabeza de Pina, who could knock men senseless with a butt of his head, took an interest in Chen Pan, and protected him like a brother ... in turn, Chen Pan taught his friend Chinese exercises to begin the day, to gather energy from the heavens to strengthen his body.

And so the mix begins — of cultures, of lives. Garcia illuminates the obvious. Slaves and indentured servants from various countries toiled side by side. People celebrated and worshipped together before and during slavery. Workers fought each other, ate each other’s foods, created children together. Exchanged lessons and legends. They participated — side by side as well as face to face — in bloody uprisings. And, however warped the exchanges, slaves and workers intimately interacted with the ruling classes. Chinese and Cuban. French and Vietnamese. African and Spanish. Chinese and Spanish. African and Spanish and Chinese. The possibilities — no, the realities — in real life are endless, and in fiction, largely unexplored. But Garcia goes beyond confronting clichéd notions of “mixed identities.” She writes from the awareness that merged racial and cultural identities will soon be the only identities — if they aren’t already.

There are searing chapters in Monkey Hunting that cover Chen Pan’s long life — with his love, a young mulatto mother named Lucretia — but Garcia also returns to China to tell the mournful tale of Chen Fang, a daughter raised (and educated) as a son. Monkey Hunting also ventures to 1960s New York and to wartime Vietnam to strip bare Chen Pan’s great-grandson, Domingo, the young American. Through him, and his sudden love for a Vietnamese prostitute, Garcia shows, in flashes, the mysteries that lead one to abandon not just the other, but The Other:

Domingo looked at her face and wondered what love had to do with memory. Did it ransack the past the way a song could? The body, he suspected, stored everything in its flesh. The sun-warmed spots of his childhood bed. The palms along Parque Martin postponing dusk. His Tio Eutemio had told him once that every person carried the scars of each year in his body like a thick-trunked tree.

But even with the family tree graphic that precedes Monkey Hunting, what actually binds Chen Pan’s clan still comes as a revelation. Truth, she seems to say, isn’t in the branches of our trees. On our own monkey hunts — our quests for enlightenment — we’d do well to look beyond DNA for the essential. It’s so much better to mine, as Garcia does her charaters, the divine muddle of our souls.

This conversation took place during the first week of April 2003, via email and telephone.

It’s been a while since The Aguero Sisters. What’ve you been up to, aside from Monkey Hunting?

I’ve primarily been working on Hunting. It was an extraordinarily difficult book for me to figure out, and I felt as though I wrote four books, writing it. I also have a ten-year-old daughter, moved twice, and have taught at Mills College and UC-Riverside. Plus I think I finally perfected my Cuban black beans, a very time-consuming task. Do I sound like I’m rationalizing?

You don’t. Can you talk about the title, and what it means?

The title was no less difficult than any other part of this book. It’s had about ten different working titles. I settled on Monkey Hunting primarily for two reasons: because it connects with the picaresque tale of the legendary Monkey King of Chinese mythology; and because it suggests, to me at least, a search for origins. There are also a number of bizarre monkey allusions throughout the book ... and they sort of just ... happened. They came early on. The title came much later in the process. It was a subconscious thing. I had the monkey idea all along — the legend of the King — but the weird scene in Vietnam, when the monkeys attack, that came out later. I pushed it forward, like when the women come into Chen’s store browsing, searching for monkey statues. It became deliberate.

“Domingo wondered about these migrations, these cross-cultural lusts. Were people meant to travel such distances? Mix with others so different from themselves? His great grandfather had left China more than a hundred years ago, penniless and alone. Then he’d fallen in love with a slave girl and created a whole new race — brown children with Chinese eyes who spoke Spanish with a smattering of Abakua ...”

This passage, to me, is at the heart of Monkey Hunting. Can you talk about this lust for other places and cultures? The wonderful parts of it, and the dangers? And why you’re writing about this, through Chen Pan and his family, at this moment in history?

I personally suffer from chronic wanderlust. Given the practical constraints of my life, I tend to live vicariously (some might say pathetically!) through the experiences of my characters. In one way or another, I work out my own obsessions through them. I’m also exceedingly interested in questions of identity, particularly compounded ones.

What does it mean to be, like my own daughter, a mix of things — in her case, Cuban-Japanese-Guatemalan-Jewish? Are traditional notions of identity even useful anymore? They’re becoming more and more antiquated. I see this not just in my daughter, but in my students, everywhere, these compounded identities. Even the American hyphenated identities aren’t cutting it any longer. And academic departments are becoming obsolete, the way they’re organized.

I was part of an informal working group studying Asians in the Americas. Chinese on the Mexican border. Lebanese in the backlands of Brazil. The thing that came of this group was that people — that things — didn’t quite belong in Asian Studies, didn’t quite belong in Latin Studies. The set-up just doesn’t work.

Monkey Hunting personalizes and illuminates many histories: wars, migrations, takeovers, slavery, indentured servitude, colonialism, uprisings — not to mention very specific moments like the Japanese in Shanghai, the French in Vietnam, the Spaniards in Cuba. Was writing this novel painful for you? Enriching? What was the experience?

The fall-out from colonialism and slavery in all its sad, baroque forms is fascinating to me. While I’m interested in the broader historical strokes, what I was trying to do in Monkey Hunting was look very specifically at the trickle-down effect of these histories on specific individuals of one family over several generations. What are their inheritances — emotional, psychological, physical, etc. — and how do these play out, consciously and unconsciously, in their lives? I think there’s something happening in terms of Domingo — he’s too young to have known his great-grandfather, but still Domingo inherited Chen’s sense of adventure. Chen’s attraction for the Other. I think Domingo also comes full circle. He’s back in Asia, in Vietnam. Chen’s ability to abandon things plays out in Domingo as well. Subtle, psychological inheritances.

Through this merging, things get lost as well?

Yes. Chen Pan, at the end of his life, finds very few people he can talk to. He’s in a cultural limbo. He’s very Cuban, but has these strong Chinese roots. He’s stranded on the hyphen. For all his adaptations, Chen doesn’t belong here or there. Domingo experiences that as well: a chronic sense of displacement.

At times, Monkey Hunting seems as much a family portrait as a novel — the portrait becoming deeper and more textured with each passing chapter. Can you talk about plot? With Monkey Hunting, it often seems you are going in rather than on, digging rather than moving “forward.” Can you talk about how you view and work with the idea of time (and the wrinkles in it)?

I love this question. It so gets at what I was trying to do. As is evident when one reads the book, there is no conventional plot here. Rather, it moves episodically and transgenerationally from epiphany to epiphany, highlighting and underscoring, offering suggestions instead of answers. It is defined as much by what is left out as by what is there.

I see it as a family portrait but also as a kind of continuing dialogue between Cuba and Asia. The most conventional plot [of mine] is The Aguero Sisters. It took place between two sisters, and follows a progression, over nine months, a pregnancy almost. Dreaming in Cuban was more juxtaposed and more episodic, less progression-oriented. Monkey Hunting is about playing with the form, but over 120 years. It asks a lot more of the reader in terms of suspension of disbelief. I wanted to write a book where things were on a Need-to-Know basis. I wanted to make enough of the essentials to suggest the rest. Monkey Hunting is a very distilled, episodic book.

Basically, I try not to bore myself. I try out reams of stuff. If it’s not compelling to me, why would I inflict it on someone else? (Laughter) At the end, every sentence has to justify itself.

You’re influenced by poetry. What kind? Which poets?

Poetry is my daily bread. I could no sooner write without poetry than I could make Cuban food without garlic. It’s that essential to me. I read broadly, from many different traditions. I find reading poetry especially helpful when I’m writing about cultures different from my own — poets help me crack the cultural codes of their homelands. For Monkey Hunting, for example, I read an enormous amount of Chinese poetry in translation. It helped me get into the bloodstream of my main character, Chen Pan.

I started writing because of Wallace Stevens and [Federico] Garcia Lorca. Up until then, I was just an avid reader. My favorite poet in English is Anne Carson. And I love Charles Wright. I buy him in hardcover — that should tell you. (Laughter) My books are all over the house, disorganized, except for the poetry. My poetry is in my bedroom, and in alphabetical order. I can always find what I need. Poetry, I take seriously.

I read every morning for an hour or two, before I start writing. And when my daughter is at ballet or clarinet lessons. Reading sets up and ends every day. On a good one, I read for four hours. I need it. It’s restorative. I’m one who loves to rummage through used bookstores, good independent bookstores ... the UCLA library. I like the smell and three-dimensional feel of books. Rarely do I buy them online. I need the sensory experience. Even my daughter, at ten, is a real reader — she needs to have [the book] to hold.

What’s your relationship to English? To Spanish? Also, how is it being Cubana in Southern California, where the Latin population is heavily Mexican?

Writing in English is often an act of translation for me, even though it’s my primary language. Since so much of what happens in my books takes place in Spanish, I feel an obligation to force English to accommodate the cadences and musicality of Spanish, to make it cha-cha-cha. It’s a privilege to be working along these rich borderlands of language. I also love living in a city where I can use my Spanish, or at least hear it, every day.

What bearing does journalism have on your fiction?

Journalism has little bearing on my fiction at this point, except for the fact that I’m still a good reporter and can track down obscure things I need for my stories. It was also very useful for developing an eye for details. The best details, I think, are genetically encoded in one’s entire tale. But, I miss journalism sometimes. Between writing novels and raising a child, I can feel cooped up. I used to long for nothing more than to land in a new place, get my bearings, figure out who I needed to talk to, and get the story. The years-long process of novels is more engaging on a deeper level, but I feel like I come up for air every few years, and the world has changed. (Laughter) I finally had to rent Sex In the City ... to figure out what was going on with this “Mr. Big.” I go under for so long, I miss new pop cultural references.

There’s Dauphine feeding Feng mussels in Monkey Hunting, and in your other books I recall an older man feeding his young lover sugared yolks, a niece breastfeeding her adult aunt — and these are only a very few examples. Can you talk about the roles of food and feeding in your work?

Food is the cornerstone of every culture, of nurturance, of sensuality. I’m convinced that how one relates to food is how one relates to life. You won’t go more than a page or two in any of my books without at least a little snack. It’s all about sex: Food is one of the ways you negotiate sensuality. I don’t trust people who don’t eat — people who don’t eat chocolate, people who don’t put whipped cream on things. I love to cook. Love to bake with my daughter. I won’t date a man who doesn’t order dessert.

The Association of American Publishers declared 2003 “the Year of Publishing for Latinos,” and much has been made of the publishing community’s search for a “Latina Terry McMillan” What does this mean for Latino writers and editors, and for American writing? For the literature of the Americas?

I hadn’t heard about the search for a Latina Terry McMillan. But I don’t think a culture or a literature can be concentrated in one voice. It takes a multitude of voices, each exquisitely telling their part of the story, to make up a literature. There is no shortage of talented Latino writers doing this, and every year there are more of us, to everyone’s enrichment.

What is the ratio, in your work, of memory to research? How do the two correlate? Do you enjoy research? I know ornithology has been an obsession — do you have any new ones? Any that emerged through your work on Monkey Hunting?

Memory, research, imagination and obsessions all collaborate in getting the work done. But ultimately, for me, what’s most important is paying attention to the sentences, getting the music and the details just right.

My obsessions are too numerous to list. Right now, though, I’m investigating the history of magic, the anthropology of dreaming, and the revolutions in Iran and El Salvador, for a new book I’m working on. Among the people who compare and contrast different societies is a small group who study dreaming and what the symbols mean in different cultural contexts. [For] some indigenous societies — in Mexico, for example, or the South Seas — there are all kinds of distinct, important signifiers. In the book I’m finishing a first draft of, one of the characters is having a midlife crisis, and she’s studying the anthropology of dreams.

Can you talk about creating magic? Where your brain has to go? Or if it’s even about your brain?

I think the biggest challenge in writing is to let go of your selfconsciousness and submerge yourself in what John Gardner called the “fictive dream.” I think he said something like: The authentic presence of the self is the loss of the self. If you can manage that for a few hours a day, then the possibilities for the writing are endless.

And the secret for perfect Cuban black beans?

(Big laughter) Three times as much garlic. More than even the Cuban cookbooks recommend. A little balsamic vinegar. And some sugar. To taste. The vinegar and sugar round out everything beautifully.