C.P. Chicken Chatcharin Chaiwat Translated by Susan F. Kepner

(Copyright 2014 Susan F. Kepner, Berkeley CA) 1...

By the time Egg 37859 had commenced to crack, and the small body of its chick to emerge, the other chickshad already enjoyed several minutes of warm, dry air. Their wet down, once gluey with the pale and viscous stuff that coated the inside of their egg, had dried nicely so that now, to a chick, they were fluffy. When Egg 37859 gave way to the pecking of its creature,and that creature--Chick 37859--struggled its way out into the world at last, the other chicks could not helpbut laugh, nor were they able to stifle a sense of pride in their own splendid appearance. Chick 37859, they all agreed, was a sight not fit for a chicken's eyes. Not, surely, if one compared his appearance to theirs. Perhaps Egg 37859 had chanced to roll into a corner of the incubator and got stuck, with too much heat going to some parts of his egg and not enough to others. In any event, it was plain to see that Chick 37859 had entered this world a cripple. One wing was pitifully deformed; his left leg was crooked and the foot was withered; and his down, instead of being lush

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and fluffy, stuck sparsely to his skin. To move about, he used his stiff little ankle as a crutch.

The very warmth of the incubator that had caused Chick 37859 to peck his way out of the egg had the further effect of making him unable to suppress a greatdesire to open his beak and fill the warm air with his cries: Cheep-cheep! cheep-cheep! He had no idea why he felt this irresistible urge to cry cheep-cheep! asloudly as he could; but it was an irresistible longing located deep inside him, and it could not be denied. It was as if the louder he could cry cheep-cheep! thesafer he would be . . .but safer from what, he had no idea. And then as he hopped on his good foot and triedto flap his tiny deformed wing, and cry cheep-cheep! with all his might, he became aware of the faces of hisfellows and of their raucous laughter.

Every one of those chicks was fluffy, soft and pale yellow, with a becoming yellow and brown beak. They crowded around him, and for a long moment they stared with amazement at his tottering gait, some of their merry expressions changing to pity. He compared himself with them, point by point. Now he understood why they were laughing. He became depressed and began to pity himself very much; and he attempted to conceal himself in a corner of the incubator to keep his deformities hidden as best he could.

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Suddenly, the incubator was opened, and a giant white rubber glove descended and began scooping up the best looking and fluffiest of the chicks and carrying them up and away, which caused their fellows to cheep-cheep! in panic. In a moment, the floor of the incubator was the scene of pandemonium, as terrified chicks rioted, cheeping their fluffy heads off, and trying to escape the relentless white glove that seizedthem and gently tossed them into a white basin. They stretched their wings, twisted their necks frantically,turned over, and scrabbled away; but there was no escape from the glove.

And then the glove seized Chick 37859. He tried to shrink his head into his shoulders, and he cried outfor . . . for something, he knew not what. Somehow itseemed that louder must be safer, and yet the hand had come for him just as it had come for the others. It held him so tightly that he felt the pain within his bones. He heard deep, rumbling sounds above the hand and felt his bad leg pressed into his body until he wassure its crooked, frail bones must break. He screamed,and the hand shifted its grasp to his crippled wing, which made him scream again. More rumbling sounds, andthen the hand tossed him, not into the white basin, butinto a pail, a little black pail, and when he came to himself, he saw that he was quite alone.

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2...Chick 37859 cried out again and again, until his

throat was dry and he was thirsty, but his cries were drowned out by the enthusiastic cheeping of the chicks in the white basin.

He hobbled carefully around the floor of the blackpail. There were clear plastic ribs around the bucket,through which he could peer outside at the fluffy chicks in their fine white basin. Pandemonium ensued all over again, as more giant white gloves were descending into their midst. As each chick was lifted,its face was seized and then came a "chup" sound, and when the gloves moved, the chick's little yellow and brown beak had been reduced to a snub. Still holding the chick, the white gloves swiftly changed position and with another "chup," the fluffy ends of the chick'swings were gone. As soon as a chick had been "chupped," it was tossed into a spacious pen to flutterand run about and cheep in dazed consternation.

Chick 37859 felt very agitated. He tried to pullhis crippled wing close to his body. Yet he could not help but be cheered by the thought that perhaps, when his own wings had been clipped, he would not look so very different from the other chicks, including those who had laughed nastily at him when he first hatched. He looked with longing at the large and splendid pen in

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which the others scurried about, and especially envied the white plastic ponds with blue tops in which they twittered, splashed and played. Watching them made himfeel even thirstier, and now he waited impatiently forthe giant hands and their clippers; he longed to be seized, clipped, and join his fellows.

But as he watched them flap and scurry about the great pen, cheeping and beating their strong wings, Chick 37859 began to have new, worrying thoughts. Onlyhe had been chosen to go into the black pail. When he compared himself point by point with the fluffy, prettychicks with two good legs, he felt his heart wither. He brooded over their blunt beaks, their now shortened but still strong wings. He listened to their hearty cheeping, and he felt a terrible envy. He had been craning his neck to watch all the excitement, but now he lowered it, leaned against the side of the black bucket, and uttered a soft groan. He did not know why he even bothered to groan. He knew only that he longedfor something . . . that the sound coming from his throat was a cry for something far beyond this place tocome to him, to save him.

Suddenly, the black bucket began to rock. A giantglove had seized the handle and was carrying it away. Almost before he could begin to struggle, the bucket was put down, and the glove came toward him, clutched him, tossed him--not into the great pen with the white

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plastic ponds at which he had looked with such envy, but into a small pen with coarse straw strewn thickly on the floor and walls made of wire. Using his bad legas a crutch, he stumped his way up to the top of the straw and surveyed his new home. A large, strange animal stared down at him from the far corner, blinkingits eyes slowly. On its head was a curious pale brown,knobby looking thing that seemed to be attached. Its beak was dark yellow. It stretched its quivering neck and emitted a strange cry: da-guk da-guk! The flesh ofthe creature's great neck shook importantly. In another corner lay a chick, a bit larger than himself but not nearly as large as the animal with the big brown knobby thing on its head.

Cheep-cheep! Chick 37859 called out bravely, but it came out as more of a moan than a cheep, and he began to feel terribly sad, and fearful.

"Well, well--there's certainly nothing crippled about your cheep," the big animal with the strange thing on his head announced, closing the announcement with a portentous da-guk da-guk . . . Chick 37859 realized that he understood every word. For the firsttime, he knew that he could communicate with other beings, and then his own story came tumbling out in a torrent of cheeps.

"Cheep-cheep-- where am I? And what--cheep-cheep-- am I? And you, cheep-cheep --what are you?"

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All the questions that were in his heart. When he had asked them all, the big animal let out great roaring squawks of laughter.

"Gawk! Gawk! What are you, eh? Why, you are a chicken--and a C.P. chicken, at that, gawk-gawk!" He seemed to have more laughing to do, but suddenly his throat began to twitch alarmingly and a spasm of pain crossed his face.

"I am afraid that is not correct, Sir," Chick 37859 replied politely. "Somehow I know that I am Chick 37859 from Egg 37859. I'm afraid that I don't know why I know that--but I am sure that I do know it, if nothing else."

The big animal looked at him with pity in his eyes, and seemed to be trying to swallow something withdifficulty. "Yes, you are Chick 37859, to be sure--butyou have come into the world in an incubator belonging to C.P., just like all of these other chicks you see about you. But I--kr-a-a-wk kr-a-a-wk-- I am not quite like the rest of you. I am a rooster, and I haveno number. Nonetheless, I can hardly deny that I, alas, am also a C.P. chicken, in my way."

Chick 37859 considered the rooster's words, and his gaze wandered across the pen to the third occupant,crouched all alone in its corner, eyes shut tight, soundless. It had nothing growing on its head, unlike

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the rooster. Its beak had been clipped, like those of the fluffy, perfect chicks, as had its wings.

"Is he a C.P. chicken, too?" Chick 37859 asked the rooster.

"Of course! He has a number," the rooster said. "He told me that he is Chick 25000. A little older than you. He got his beak and his wings clipped like the others, but since then he has become of no use--just like you and me."

"Of no use? We are of no use?""Quite so," the rooster answered. "Look at

yourself. A broken wing from the moment you hatched, acrippled leg--and you can't use that foot for anything.As for me, I'll die quite soon. Look--do you see the way my eyes are clouded over? I am old, chick. Too old to withstand the disease I have, which is some sortof nasty fungus about the eyes. As for that little onein the corner--be careful not to accidentally eat any of his shit. Look, it's almost pure white! Very bad, you know, it's a very bad thing for a chick, to be shitting white like that. Nobody wants to be near him.It's on account of his white shit that he ended up in here with an old rooster like me."

Chick 37859 scrutinized the corner in which the other chick crouched with its eyes shut, looking quite woebegone and surrounded by piles of white shit. In

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spite of everything, he suddenly remembered his thirstand looked about.

"Poor thing, you want water!" the rooster said, with pity and kindness in his clouded eyes. "Over there," he nodded. "We don't have white plastic containers with nice blue tops, just that old tin can. You'll have to push the straw off the top of it. Go on-- have a drink."

Chick 37859 hobbled swiftly in the direction the rooster had indicated. He could barely see the can, itwas so covered with straw, and when he found it, it washalf filled with a thick, dirty liquid. Without a thought he dove into it, with beak and feathers, and soon he felt surprisingly cheered.

3..."Why didn't they cut eng's beak and wings?" Chick

37859 inquired, using the familiar eng because the rooster was, he supposed, his friend if anyone was. The old rooster's clouded eyes rolled upwards, and he cleared his throat with a jik-jik sound before saying, "You have many things to learn. First of all, I am not eng to you."

"Then what am I supposed to say?""Uncle will do. I have a name of my own, too, not

a number. I used to be called 'Toong'--'Papa Toong.' And I know far more of this world than all the chickensin all of the C.P. pens on earth. And when I think of

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certain things, I am filled with pity for all of you." The rooster shut his eyes, a faint smile curled about his dark yellow beak, and the gnarly old comb on his head trembled.

"Why didn't they cut your beak and wings?" the chick persisted.

The rooster made a sound like "hrgghh," and moanedsoftly. He blinked, and despite the moldy-looking pale spots that ringed his damaged eyes, the suggestion of a twinkle began to glimmer in them.

"It is a long story," the rooster began, craning his neck as if seeing things far beyond the pen. "I was a great father of our race, a race known as kay pheun baan -- 'native chickens.' We also were known as kay naa --'chickens of the fields.' And then, there were those who preferred to call us kay chon --a bit more difficult to explain, something like 'working class chickens.' In any event, when C.P. came for me, I was already grown, and in those days I crowed so loudly that my mother was forever being startled and telling me to shush."

"Your . . . mother?""Er . . . my mother." The rooster seemed a bit

irked at having been interrupted. But when he saw the bewilderment on the face of Chick 37859, he cleared his

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throat, the vexed expression disappeared, and his eyes gleamed through their web of disease.

"My mother was not a warm incubator, which was the first sight that met the eyes of all of you when you hatched. I had a big, fat, real mother. My mother was so fat that her head looked like a little knob on the top of her body. When I hatched from my egg, the first thing I felt against my head was my mother's big, fat, lovely bottom. Chick, my mother's bottom smelled so good that I cannot possibly describe it to you. That smell was a smell that never has existed anywhere in the world and never will again.

"Never, when I was a chick, did I drink such nastywater as the stuff in that can you have to drink from. The first drop of water that touched my belly came frommy mother's beak into mine-warm, and sweet--and it mademy voice strong and clear, and I grew. By the time I was grown, my voice could be heard three houses away, then eight houses away. Ah, my dear chick . . ."

"Who was my mother?" Chick 37859 interrupted, using the word khaa to refer to himself.

"Eh? You refer to yourself as khaa? You must refer to yourself as phom --it's far more polite. At least you can learn some manners before you die."

Chick 37859 lowered his voice politely and asked, "Sir, who was the mother of phom?"

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"H-r-r-m . . . that's another long story. All of you chicks have mothers, but I am afraid that none of you can say who she is. Everyone must have a mother! Otherwise, we could not have been born. Believe me, the incubator is not your mother. Your mother looks like-- well, like all the rest of us. She is a chicken." For a few moments, Uncle Rooster Toong looked as though any further explanation was beyond hisstrength and fell back, uttering kr-a-a-w kr-a-a-w until his strength returned. When he continued, he said, "Think back, Chick. There you were, cracking your way out of your shell, crying and cheeping--but what were you crying and cheeping for? Why, you were crying and cheeping for your mother! Although you hadno idea what the face of your mother might look like, you knew that you had a mother. And how did you know it? Because you had those feelings!"

Chick 37859 tilted his head and blinked. He had felt such feelings, and new and troubling sensations began to grow in his tiny heart.

The rooster continued, "I promise you that everyone has a mother--and a father, too. My own father was a 'working class chicken' of considerable fame. And my mother --well, my mother was quite a beauty when she was young. In my youth, I was the best-looking rooster in the neighborhood. My comb was not, I assure you, the poor thing you behold today.

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It was brilliant red, and the feathers on my entire body simply flashed with color. My tail was exceedingly long and my legs were strong, thrusting me into the air to fly far on my powerful wings. Rest assured that this broken-down pen would not have held me for a moment in my prime."

"What happened to you, Uncle? Why are you like this now?"

The response was a long, long sigh. Chick 37859 stared into the rooster's face and saw drops of clear liquid spill over the caked white substance around his eyes.

"Well, Chick, that's another long story. C.P. came and bought me from my owners."

"Who is 'C.P.'?""Humans, Chick--C.P. humans, the beings above the

big white gloves who move us from here to there. You see, the C.P. humans wanted me, a native working male, to mate with their farang chickens. They wanted to combine my endurance with the thick flesh of the farangfemales. And that is how I became a C.P. chicken.” Tears now ran steadily from Uncle Rooster's pitiable eyes.

"You became a C.P. chicken," Chick 37859 murmured."But not an ordinary C.P. chicken!" Uncle Rooster

thundered. "Not the kind that hatches in an incubator

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and gets its beaks and wings clipped, and then goes to play in a big pen and eat the good food and the nice clean water the C.P. humans give it. And grows up to get its own tiny pen, in which it can bob its head and get food and water full of vitamins, and drugs, and injections, too, until it is big and strong enough to be useful. And then finds itself--finished!"

"Finished?""Finished . . . dead. If you are a C.P. chicken,

the last honor is that you are sent to have your throatsliced. No mere clipping of beaks and wings on this occasion, my friend. The C.P. humans take you, neckless and headless, dump you into a big pot of boiling water; and then, when your flesh has plumped from the boiling, they rip off your feathers. Your stomach is slit, your guts scooped out, and the wings, breast and legs are sliced off your carcass, popped into plastic bags, and piled in a freezer. Dead!"

Chick 37859 was shaking from head to tail. He tottered and stumbled, and only his stiff crippled leg kept him upright. He twitched his bad wing against hisbody, thankful to feel both poor appendages still attached.

"Does that happen to all chicks?""If they're C.P. chickens, it does. Except, of

course, for myself and Chick 25000

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over there because we are diseased. And you because you were born a cripple."

"Are you trying to scare me, Uncle?" Chick 37859 asked in a hopefully brave voice. The old rooster onlyshook his head slowly.

"But I don't understand! All those other chicks--the fluffy and pretty ones with the handsome beaks and the smartly trimmed wings--they were so cute, so lovable and cheerful, running and playing in the nice big pen, drinking clear water. There was nothing frightening about them, nothing to deserve being--finished."

Before Uncle Rooster Toong could begin to answer this question, he saw that a C.P. human was approaching, and he tucked his sickly old body down beneath the coarse straw. The human tossed a handful of feed into a battered dish in the midst of the cage, and walked on.

4..."Uncle, why don't the C.P. humans kill us, too, if

we are of no use?"Almost a month had passed. The chick had grown,

and he was able to pose very difficult questions. The old rooster was nearer to death each day, as was Chick 25000, who grew sicker and sicker, and did nothing but lie quietly and expel his dazzling white shit.

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"I may have misspoken when I said that we were of no use," Uncle Rooster said. "It isn't quite like that. My eyes, the disease you see--it interests the C.P. humans. They want to study the stuff that has grown around my eyes, to see if they can't prevent thisdisease from occurring in whole pens of C.P. chickens. Just as they are interested in the white shit of our friend, Chick 25000. You have seen that they come to fetch a bit of it every morning. And they make him eat all sorts of dreadful stuff that I myself could notget down my throat."

"Then are we even worse off than the other C.P. chickens?" Uncle Rooster shook his head and said, "I don't know. But for myself, I have some wonderful memories of the place where I was hatched and grew up. When I think of all the sights I've seen, why, I believe I've had a better life than any C.P. chicken."

Every time Uncle Rooster Toong began to tell one of the stories of the farmyard that had been his home, Chick 25000 tried valiantly to raise his head, and he and Chick 37859 listened with rapt attention. In theirimaginations, they could see the great yard at the farmwhere Uncle Rooster had lived, the scrub bushes at its edge, and the deep green forest beyond. The details ofthat land could never be truly known to them, but they knew that it was a land of warmth and beauty, infinitely wonderful by comparison with the pen in

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which they lived. It was a place where a chicken could run and scratch while calling to its mate and throw satisfying clouds of dirt into the air. The details of a worm were unclear to the two chicks, yet they were certain of the sweetness of a worm and the way it would dance in a chicken's mouth, far tastier than the C.P. vitamins that, they had heard, produced terrible gas.

Could chickens really fly, as Uncle Rooster had described to them? What did the air feel like? Why did that air move and change, while C.P. air was alwayswarm and still? Did the air outside really blow through a chicken's feathers and flutter through its wings until the heart swelled with joy? They believed that when Uncle Rooster flew up to sit on his perch in those long-ago days, the world must have been a splendid sight indeed.

Today, although his voice was hoarse, Uncle Rooster answered the young chicks' questions forcefullyand with authority. Where did the "sun" of which he had told them come from? Could it be brighter than thelight that came from the ceiling? They found it astonishing to contemplate the idea that a chicken's feathers sometimes fell out--"molted," Uncle Rooster called it--and then all new feathers grew in! Chick 37859 eagerly inquired whether new feathers might

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enable a chicken to fly, even if one of its wings mightbe a bit deformed.

When Uncle Rooster explained how new chicks came to be, at first they found it impossible to believe him; yet the soft laughter of the old rooster when he spoke on this subject, though he might be near to death, conquered their imaginations, and they came to believe that this was a matter which brought great joyto chickens.

"Do such things really happen, Uncle?" Chick 37859 asked in a tone of awe.

"Oh, I promise you they do!" the old rooster replied, suppressing a grin. "The truth of all I say is proven by my intact beak and my wings that are like no others you will see in this place. Proof that I come from another place, far from the pens of C.P."

Chick 25000, who usually lay quiet, caked with thewhite shit that was his affliction, began to inch his way through the straw to Uncle Rooster's side, and whenhe was near him, he paused, forced open his eyes, and stared at him, as if to commit the ravaged old face to memory.

"Wasting time..." Chick 37859 murmured as he watched his friend laboriously drag himself across the pen.

The old rooster lifted his head slowly. "What? What did you say?"

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"I said that it's a waste of time thinking about aplace we'll never see. We're C.P. chickens--and besides that, you're old and Chick 25000 is sick and I'm crippled! We don't get any vitamins or good food, and we don't have our own pen or nice water to drink. What good is thinking?"

"You fool!" Uncle Rooster cried out. "You're a damned fool to want to be a perfect C.P. chicken--to want to sit in your private pen and eat your vitamins. Why don't you think of yourself as infinitely better than any C.P. chicken? You have an imagination--and do you suppose that those 'perfect' C.P. chickens you so admire have had the opportunity to develop an imagination such as yours? They see only their pen andother chickens exactly like themselves. They eat and eat and wait for the knife to slit their neck. Their life is only that. They don't know who--or what--theirown mother is. They have no idea why they cry out, whythey feel compelled to make noise. They don't know that wings are for flying. They don't even know about molting. There is nothing in them. They don't know asingle thing beyond hunger and thirst and bobbing theirsilly heads. But you! You know many things. You could tell them that you have known a chicken whose beak has not been clipped, nor his wings. And you could tell them the interesting and true things I have told you."

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"What good would it do?""It would make dreams possible. And dreams will

take you anywhere you want to go."For a moment, Chick 37859 felt benumbed. He

stared at Uncle Rooster's sharp beak and his wings thatonce had flown. He considered his own sharp little beak and began to feel a warm sense of pride. He couldpeck away very nicely with it. And even if one of his wings was awkwardly bent, both were nice and long. Hisstiff leg had grown some. As for Uncle Rooster, though patches of feathers had succumbed to the pale, moldy looking patches that had begun around his eyes, he still had a regal beauty that none of the C.P. chickens in their pens possessed--those fat, torpid birds who sat all day eating and bobbing their empty heads.

A soft cry came from Chick 25000, and Chick 37859 saw that he was smiling feebly. With his last shred ofstrength he had dragged himself to Uncle Rooster's wing, and he laid his head on it, and then he died.

Never had there been such a sight at a C.P. chicken facility. Chickens lived alone, pen by pen, and ordinarily everything looked tidy and nice in the house of death.

5...The next morning, the C.P. inspector looked

mystified as he stared down into the quarantine pen

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where the very odd events had occurred. The old rooster with the unusual fungus they were studying lay dead in the straw, and you might almost believe that hewas cuddling the body of the chick with the intestinal disorder, which lay curled within his wing. And the crippled young chicken, the one with the stunted wing and the crooked leg they were studying for the effects of hatching conditions--it, too, was dead, its small rump sticking up from the straw. Near it, he noticed a hole in the side of the pen. He picked up the crippled chicken, and examined it, and then he carefully examined the hole. What had happened was quite obvious, yet he could scarcely believe it. This young chicken obviously had made that hole--by ramming the side of the quarantine pen with its head until he broke through--and he might have gotten out, had the injuries to his head not killed him first.

This was a death beyond belief for the C.P. humans. They were entirely familiar with dead chickens--chickens with their throats cut; dead, nakedchickens; their flesh plumped from the boiling water that released their feathers; their guts removed; theirpink body cavities clean. Chickens that had been transformed into something delicious to eat for them and for so many other humans.

This was a death unknown in the pens of C.P. There was something . . . hidden. . . something

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mysterious, even, in the deaths of the three chickens in the quarantine pen. Something that made the humans almost think of them as "living things" rather than as "food."

Whatever could have caused a young chicken to batter his head against the side of the pen like that? What--well, what purpose, if one could call it that in the case of a chicken--could it have had? What could have produced this peculiar behavior, so unlike that ofa normal C.P. chicken? As for the other young chicken, why would it drag itself to the old rooster and curl itself within the rooster's wing before dying?They almost reminded him of a human father and son, exchanging loving warmth with each other, dying together. It was so peaceful, not a death of terror, of wild flapping and squawking as the knife sliced across the throat before a chicken was calmly skewered for barbecue, or dropped unto the stew pot.

As the official walked from the quarantine pen carrying the three dead birds, strange and unpleasant feelings began to come over him, and he began to thinkof things that had no connection to his duties as a C.P. official. After he had destroyed the bodies, he returned to his usual tasks, feeding and caring for hisemployer's chickens. But everything looked different, somehow. He looked at the newly hatched chicks in the incubators, listened to their cheep-cheep! cheep-

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cheep! and felt some inexpressible feeling growing within him. He kept seeing the bodies of those three birds in the quarantine pen and thinking about them, and the more he thought, the more his imagination floated him away to . . . a large, grassy farm yard, with scrub bushes at its edge, and a deep green forest beyond. And everywhere, a strong wind blowing.

This kind of thinking made him want to fly away himself! Fly off somewhere far away from this place. No more feeding chickens, dispensing vitamins, cleaningpens. No more turning lights off, turning lights on--which one had to do to keep the chickens from suspecting that the cold season might be near.

This story appears in a short story collection Sanam Luang (1997).

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