An excerpt from Banyaga: A Song of War

By Charlson Ong

Chapter Two: “Customs House Boy” 

When he saw the line of humanity filing down the ramp of

the Chungking, Ernesto Yu panicked for a moment. He saw mostly men, in dark blue and gray
slacks, some still sporting pigtails— provincials unaware of the great changes that have taken
place across the middle kingdom—carrying bundles, rattan baskets filled with grain and
preserves. There were a few women, one or two worth a second look, but he could see no
teenage boys. This was the third time Ernesto had sent money home to his cousin Ah
Fan, who’d been promising to send over his “biggest, brightest” boy to apprentice with
Ernesto. But twice before Ah Fan had sent letters of apology, written by the village scribe See
Co, explaining how he needed every hand for the coming harvest or that his son had suddenly
fallen ill. This time though, Ah Fan had written:
 “Honorable brother, Wei Bun, my third son Hap Sun is on his way. He is slightly
smaller and less strong than his brothers, and is sometimes given to constipation. But he is
quite intelligent, and quick to learn, a virtue which I believe is most welcome in Lu-song. In
truth, if I had the means I would have sent him to the provincial capitol or even to Shanghai
where he might make most of his wits. But, alas, the poor are cursed. Still, I thank you once
more for your generosity. I beg you to have patience with my son, to treat him fairly, if sternly.
Teach him well and do not spare him the rod. Beat him as you might a lazy, disobedient
caribou if so doing will make him a useful man. Remind him always of his responsibilities
at home: his blind grandmother, his suffering mother, his unwed sisters whose futures can
only be secured by dowry, his youngest sibling who is weak-minded. When he is come of age,
perhaps in three or four years, I expect you will send him home to marry a good daughter of
Am-kaw. In the meantime, steer him clear of the vices of the huanna as well as of our own
people who are given to excess and debauchery. Let him worship the ancestors each morning,
and swallow bitter gourd at supper to remind him of his station in life and of the long journey
ahead. I expect you will send me religiously the amount we have agreed upon in exchange for
my son’s services. You may subtract the cost for his board and lodging which I expect to be
minimal as our Hap Sun is used to a most frugal lifestyle. Let him sleep in the workplace and
share his meals with house pets, if that is what you deem best. And if the most untoward fate
should befall him, I expect you will provide him all the services befitting a member of the clan.
Otherwise, you may do as you wish. 
“Your unworthy brother, Lee Mo Fan.”
 Ernesto cringed at the memory of his cousin’s letter. He wondered what his long
absence from home had done to his reputation that he should be thought of as one who
could treat a boy, and a relative at that, as a draft animal. He wondered what his own
father had written in his letter to Ernesto’s distant uncle all those years back when Ernesto, as
a gangly fifteen-year-old Lee Ah Bun, was sent over to apprentice to Yu Bien. Did his father
mention “our Ah Bun wetting his bed on his wedding night?” Did his old man also ask Yu
Bien to “provide every service befitting a member of the clan should the most untoward fate
befall the boy?” 
Finally, Ernesto saw a group of teenage-looking boys heading for the Customs House.
He quickly made his way into the concrete and wood building and saw the boys approaching
the officer’s desk. His heart sank. He saw two, perhaps three, anemic-looking boys who
seemed hardly able to lift a bale of silk much less stir huge vats of dye ten hours a day. He
remembered Yu Bien’s look all those years back. “What?” Yu Bien had shouted as Ah Bun
stood outside the Customs House, “Your father promised me a stallion, now I’m stuck with
this donkey!”
 Ernesto felt like doing as Yu Bien did back then and rail at the boys, if only to exorcise
memories of that long-ago day when he became a Customs House boy for nearly a month. Yu
Bien was so disgusted by the sight of the young Ah Bun; the bull of a man dragged the boy
back inside the Customs House and handed him back to the officer. “This is the wrong boy,”
Yu Bien told the huanna, “this is not my nephew, he is a stowaway, send him back.” “Who will
pay for his passage?” “I don’t care!”
The stunned Customs Man scratched his head and told Ah Bun to sit in a corner. Ah
Bun sat there watching the people from the boat file through the Customs Men. He saw
people greeting each other, overjoyed, while others wept, perhaps upon hearing about the
death of a loved one. He heard people shouting, arguing. He thought his uncle would return
for him later, perhaps in a carriage drawn by four horses. He sat until all the people from the
boat had left and the day became night and night gave way to light. He might have dozed off a
while, dreaming of the nearly ripe lychees in their backyard when the huanna Customs Man
woke him. “What will we do with you?” the huanna asked the teen-aged boy who
looked bewildered but unfazed. He’d seen men killed, he’d seen houses burned. He was
unafraid. “You don’t even understand a word I say, do you?” the huanna asked.
The Customs Man led the boy, almost a young man really, to a table and gave him
something hot and dark and bitter to drink. He gave Ah Bun strange-looking dumplings and
something white and rank-smelling to eat. The boy would soon know that these were
the coffee and bread and cheese which some of the huanna ate when they woke up in the
mornings. The boy pined for some gruel and minced fish and tofu. The man led Ah Bun to a
room with many bunks, some of which were occupied by people from the old country—
people from other boats, the boy surmised. Then he understood what had happened. He
understood that his uncle Yu Bien would not take him; that he, Lee Ah Bun, was now among
the abandoned and unclaimed, among derelicts and criminals, discarded humans. The boy
felt his guts freeze and he could not stop the tears. He wept terribly, angrily. He wanted to be
among the dead, among those he’d seen murdered and mutilated by bandits and soldiers. He
wept until the room crowded around him, until the huanna shook him hard and shouted at
him. When Ah Bun stopped crying he made up his mind that he would never again weep for
the rest of his life.
The older lannang—all of them men—regaled Ah Bun with stories about Manila.
Some had never left the Customs House while others had lived in the city and even traveled to
the provinces before running afoul of the law. Many had debts and fake papers
— they had bought the tua di, alien landing certificates of other lannang who had gone home
to the old country and decided to stay put. Most were charged with petty crimes. Some were
awaiting trial. Others yearned to return home if only some benevolent ship captain would give
them passage. One shook violently and moaned like a sick dog and was often beaten up by
the Customs Men. He was an opium addict, Ah Bun learned.
The men at the Customs House had little to eat. Occasionally, some kind people from
the “benevolent society” brought food, but the Customs Men would have their fill before
giving the lannang their share. Once a Buddhist nun came with hot noodle soup and sutras;
another time a white man in black robes showed up with a pretty young lass, a lannang who
spoke Hokkien, they talked about the Son of God. “The Son of God is also a white man?” Ah
Bun had asked the young lass who reminded him so much of the pretty girls back home, of
Pue An, his own teenage wife of three months, who did not have bound feet. “He is not really
white,” the young woman said. “But his eyes, his hair . . .” “Do you want to know more about
him?”
“What is your name? Where are you from?”
 “I’m Margaret. My Chinese name is Po Kim, precious lute. My parents are from
Xiamen. I was born here. I’m studying to be a nun.”
“Why?” Ah Bun asked, in his heart he regretted that he was already a husband; that he
had agreed to marry a near-stranger because his father wanted a new fish net. He would not
want to make this lovely girl, this fairy of a foreign land, a second wife. But perhaps, he might
stay here forever . . . perhaps.
“This is no place for a young man like you,” Margaret said, “Fr. Andechaga will talk to
the authorities. I will go to your uncle and talk some sense into him. He can’t do this,” she
said, and Ah Bun wanted to touch her, to pull her to him and be with her the way he’d been
with Pue An but different. But he only said, “No! I won’t have anything more to do with him!”
“Don’t be a fool. You don’t want to rot here.”
 Ah Bun learned many things from the lannang at the Customs House. They gave him
foreign cigarettes to smoke and taught him some of the words of the huanna until the boy
tried speaking to the Customs Man. The huanna laughed at Ah Bun’s attempts to
speak Tagalog but gave the young man a bottle of beer and began teaching him how to play
huanna chess. Ah Bun shined the huanna’s shoes and scrubbed the floor. He carried pails of
water from the deep well as he did back home and washed the walls. He fed the few chicken
the Customs Men and the lannang raised behind the building. Ah Bun decided that the
huanna was as good a man as a huanna could be and, years later, when he was asked what
name he wanted to be baptized with, Ah Bun remembered the name the Customs Man had
said before the boy finally left the Customs House: Ernesto.
After spending twenty-four days in the Customs House, Ah Bun finally saw his uncle
Yu Bien again. He was with Margaret and the foreign priest. Margaret smiled at Ah Bun and
he felt his heart beating against his ribcage; in another time and place he would have 
begged her to marry him, he would have sworn to forget Pue An and his past life, but now he
was but a worthless beggar that she had come to rescue. Yu Bien looked agitated; he tried to
smile as Margaret and the priest led Ah Bun out of the Customs House. Still the boy stared
into his uncle’s eyes and saw him look away. Ah Bun knew then that Yu Bien would never
again turn him away. “Why did you have to disgrace me this way?” Yu Bien finally asked
his nephew when they were alone, heading for home.
“I only told the truth.”
“Truth? The truth is you must learn to be a man. You must know that the food I will
feed you is food I deny my own child. You must know how fortunate you are to have a home
in this strange land!”
“Yes, uncle. I have learned my lesson,” Ah Bun said before dropping suddenly to the
ground in front of Yu Bien, kowtowing, “thank you for teaching me well.”
“Get up! Get up you fool!” Yu Bien said trying not to attract more onlookers. “You’ve
brought me enough shame!”
And now, as Ernesto Yu eyed the Customs Man who was inspecting the two boys in
front of him, a strange sensation came upon Ernesto briefly; he remembered his boyhood, the
time before war and pestilence and the journey across the sea, and he wondered if he’d ever
been happy.
“There is only one name on this document, Mr. Yu,” the huanna said, “which one of
them is Lee Hap Sun?” Ernesto’s pleasant mood turned to irritation. “Let me talk to them,”
Ernesto told the officer and dragged the two boys to a corner. “Which one of you is my
nephew?” he asked. The two boys looked at each other and the smaller one raised his hand.
Ernesto’s heart sank deeper. “I only sent for you, Ah Sun, it was very clear in my letter to your
father. I only need one apprentice. I can only afford one. Who is this?”
“I am Ah Tin, distinguished uncle . . . ”
“Shut up!”
“This is Ah Tin, uncle. He is the eldest son of third Aunt Mei Lu.”
“Who?”
“Aunt Mei Lu, your niece by grandfather’s third wife the former maid servant,
grandmother Po Lian.”
“I don’t know any Mei Lu! His name is not on this document! Do you know what that
means? He is here illegally! He’ll have to be sent back or else be kept in the Customs House
where I must pay for his upkeep!”
 “Not the Customs House, uncle, I beg you,” Ah Sun pleaded. “Or I will have to pay
that thief over there five hundred pesos and be indebted to him for the rest of my life in this
country.”
“I will work off my debt, uncle,” Ah Tin said, fearful but afraid to cry.
“Don’t call me ‘uncle,’ you stowaway. Do you know how much five hundred pesos is?
Not ten of your worthless lives can pay for the trouble you’ve caused.”
“Forgive me,” Ah Tin said and dropped to his knees. Ernesto panicked, he suddenly
saw what Yu Bien saw all those years ago: a pitiful boy kneeling before a curious-looking
Chinaman. “Get up you fool! You’ve done enough harm!”
Meanwhile the huanna had approached. “So what are we going to do with the boy, Mr.
Yu?”
“Do as you wish!” Ernesto was tempted to say for a moment. “Let him learn his lesson
as I did! Let him shine shoes, scrub floors, clean outhouses! Let him sleep among junkies and
thieves!” But Ernesto knew that the boy would not survive as he himself once did. He knew
the world had changed even if he seldom left his own workplace these past twenty years. He
knew the huanna had changed; they were sharper now, wiser, less prone to laugh at Chinese
stowaways trying to speak Tagalog and to teach them chess; the white men have changed, the
Spaniards had left with their noses in the air and their tails between their legs, replaced
by Americans who brought automobiles and running water and electric light, built street cars
and boulevards, paved roads and cleaned up the boats, and paid the right price for everything
they bought but stayed clear of Chinatown.
“We’ve known each other for a long time, Martin, let me have this one,” Ernesto said,
he’d learned enough Tagalog to strike a decent-enough bargain with the huanna. “Ah, what
we do for old friends,” the Customs Man said, shaking his head, “three hundred pesos.”
“Martin!” Ernesto nearly screamed, “I’m not a rich man, Martin. I own no lumberyard
or bank. I’m just a poor dye maker. I’ll send your wife the blue cotton.”
“Cotton? So you think my Melissa is good enough only for cotton?”
Ernesto swallowed the bitterness in his tongue. “I meant to gift her with the silk for
Christmas,” he said, trying to smile. “Thirty pesos,” Martin whispered, showing off his
nicotine-stained teeth. “I don’t have that kind of money on me, here, take this,” the Chinese
replied taking off his watch. “It’s Swiss-made, I’ll redeem it tomorrow.”
Martin eyed the watch briefly and waved it away; he had no use for watches. He had no
use for colleagues talking behind his back. He was surprised that the Chinaman who didn’t
seem to have more than two camisas to wear despite his bolts of textile should have such
fancy silver on him. “Must have accepted it as payment from some bankrupt debtor,” the
huanna thought to himself. “Take the boy,” Martin whispered, “I don’t have much use
for him. My wife will like the silk.”

Source: Ong, Charlson. Banyaga: A Song of War. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing House, 2006.

Activity:
 Draw a chart which shows the differences in the way Ernesto was treated by his uncle
and how Ernesto treats the two young boys, Ah Tin and Ah Bun. Discuss your chart with your
seatmate afterward and try answering this question: How do you think these differences in
their treatment will affect the characteristics of Ah Tin and Ah Bun?