Tiger Girl by May-lee Chai

Author:May-lee Chai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: GemmaMedia
Published: 2013-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

After Uncle regained his composure and was able to drink a full cup of hot tea, Paul decided to tell us a story. I thought he’d start with how he came to be in America, his sponsors, how he’d been living all these years, but no, he wanted to tell us about something he remembered from back when he was a rich kid with too much time on his hands.

“Do you remember I captured a baby white crocodile? Everyone was talking about the ghost crocodile in those days. It was a bad sign, a magic beast. The servants were so afraid, but you told them not to worry. It was just a superstition, just a story. It couldn’t really hurt us.”

“I’d forgotten. You caught something. Some kind of animal. Your mother was upset about some animal. I don’t remember.”

“It was a baby white crocodile. Just like the story,” Paul insisted.

He described how he and his friends had overheard the servants talking about the rumors of this giant beast swimming into the city via the Mekong, escaping the river and climbing the banks near a rubber factory. It was living in the slums around Phnom Penh, hiding in the shanties that had sprung up after the peasants started moving from the countryside, trying to escape the Americans’ bombing raids on the northeastern border. Entire villages were being built from the bits and pieces of garbage that the city people had thrown away, the scraps of tin and the bricks they could steal here and there. The boys had been warned to stay away from the shanties; it was dangerous, there were soldiers hiding there, spies, thieves. But my brother had heard about the crocodile and now he wanted to see for himself.

The white crocodile had appeared in Phnom Penh in the first year after the fall of the old government, after it became clear that Prince Sihanouk would not return. Workers spotted it lurking in the shallows of the Mekong where factory effluent poured directly into the muddy water. Then refugees from bombed-out villages swore they’d seen it crawling in the shadowy overgrown alleyways where they sold fruit. The rumors grew more urgent: The white crocodile is hungry. It eats small children and dogs. Teach your children to run, fast. Every missing person became a sign that the crocodile was near. The police stayed clear, but a group of soldiers came and shot up a farmer’s fruit stand, saying the smell of rotting papaya in the sunlight was attracting the beast. The rumors continued, spreading like a summer influenza from the shanties to the street markets to the schools and temples and churches. At the cathedral, a priest offered up a Mass and the penance of his parishioners if God would remove the monstrosity. Monks and their novices chanted through the night: the white crocodile has returned, the world is ending, a new world is dawning. Over and over, their prayers drifted on the wind, thick as incense. It was hard to tell if the monks were mourning or rejoicing.

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