Once he boiled and ate his leather belt.
Kuan felt as though he was on his last legs: they were wobbly and prone to bending at unexpected times. Then he remembered his belt. He had buried it in a secret spot behind his hut. Those Chinese communists on their Long March ate the leather of their boots. He had read about it while in high school. Charlie Chaplin ate his bootlaces, too, in the first silent black-and-white movie he had seen with his mother. How strange, at a time like this, to be inspired by the antics of a white man who looked like a pretty girl with a moustache.
Why not a belt?
When the sky was dark, he dug it up. He cut the belt into thin strips and boiled it for hours and hours. His sister and his mother kept a lookout for him. When it was ready, they took pieces hot out of the pot and chewed. And chewed and chewed and chewed.
They kept the buckle.
The year Kuan ate the belt, Chicken Daddy’s whole clan had been cut from him – his wife and his three children. His whole paltry family. Soon after his daughter was buried, Chicken Daddy started to feel a strange itchiness all over his body. Flakes of skin peeled from him, falling like scales from a snake. Kuan’s mother swapped a condensed-milk tin of rice for diesel fuel and rubbed the fuel over his body, hoping it would heal him. Instead he jumped up and down in his hut, screaming, ‘I’m burning! I’m burning!’ before running to leap into the river. The water washed the oil from his skin, but did not cure him of the rash or the hunger. And nothing could cure him of the loss of his own flesh and blood, as close to him as his limbs. Now he felt like an amputee, and he took to lying on the floor of his hut, not wanting to move. Moving was hard work. He looked up at the slits of light on the thatched roof. Looking was hard work, too. He closed his eyes. And finally, breathing. Breathing was the hardest task of all. He decided that he just wasn’t up to it anymore.