iii.   Janet Librado’s hair was jet black and straight, her face slightly oval, her eyelids epicanthic and tucked. While her skin was a chestnut glow—from her father’s side—she did not have the lighter, Cantonese skin of the small percentage of other Fornay Indians who had a more direct line to their Chinese forebears.      Janet looked different from her brother because his mother was Maria Librado, Abraham Librado’s one and only wife. But Maria Librado was not Janet Librado’s mother.    Janet learned this around the age of twelve when she began putting the story of her life together. While Janet was dark like her brother Peter, the common features of her brother were not in line with her’s. It was Maria Librado, her “mother,” who explained to Janet why she looked different.    Janet’s real mother was Chen Arroyo, a s`ant or “family apprentice.” Much like a housekeeper but entrusted with more duties than the traditional European notions of a housekeeper, a s`ant was a mandarin-like figure employed by the Fornay elite as a way to create a balance between the traditional needs of running a home while performing what can best be described as the tasks of royalty. S`ants handle the family finances, act as a right hand to the lady of the house and schedule domestic events. In some cases, as with Chen, they are consulted on major decisions and directions within the household, including affairs of the children and even the family legacy. This is why they have often had the term “mandarin” used as a descriptor. They advise, even intimately.    Abraham Librado impregnated Chen Arroyo in 1962, on his sixty-second birthday when Chen was thirty-two years old.    Librado had been a loyal husband to his wife Maria, but Maria always knew that it was her husband’s responsibility, as head of the tribe, to create more than one line of children. Librado’s father and grandfathers had at least three lines of offspring by the time they died. Perhaps it was Mayor Librado’s sense of the modern, or that he simply enjoyed family life with Maria and their other children, that he never pursued the king’s right to produce a more diverse line of offspring. While his memoir, Mestizo King, published in 1982, shed light on his life—and answered questions that had been asked for decades—Mayor Librado’s decision to produce only one child outside of his main marriage is not discussed.    Chen Arroyo was descended from Zhou Man’s fleet sent in 1423 to the West Coast of what is now called California by way of Zheng He’s armada commissioned by the Chinese Emperor Zhu Di in 1421. The Fornay have always told this story, but its veracity was continually met with doubt, particularly by European colonists of the first few centuries of post-Columbian discovery. They, after all, had discovered the Americas before anyone and drawn the maps to prove it. It wasn’t until the arrival of the contemporary scholarship of retired British Navy Captain Gavin Menzies that Fornay claims to this story could be supported.    Menzies, a one-time submarine commander, seemed likely to have the only resume possible to have done the work he compiled. He was no common historian, nor anthropologist—and he also wasn’t an Erick Van Damien “Chariots of the Gods”-type spectaculist. Like Zheng He and his commanders, Gavin Menzies was a mariner, a real sailor who understood the ocean’s currents and seasons, its challenges and opportunities.    On a trip to the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s to peruse a collection of early maps and charts—for the sheer benefits of cartographical fetish—Menzies had the mettle to look at a map dated 1424 by a European cartographer, detailing the New World, and realize that no European was capable of knowing about the coastlines and islands depicted in the map. No European had ever been to these places in 1424. Because of his professional background, Menzies knew this to be sure and set himself on a ten year journey of research that led the retired seaman to re-account the Chinese voyages of North and South America and their circumnavigation of the planet Earth a near century before Europeans. It was this single map that sent Menzies on his mission, obtained from the Chinese fleet by a Portuguese merchant who was a guest on board one of the vast armadas.    Consider 35,000 people, men, eunuchs, and concubines, with ships as large as an American football field, tanks of fish, vessels given over to the maintenance of cavalry. A group of these ships, commanded by Zhou Man, came along the California coast in 1423.    As for El Fornio, at least two vessels shipwrecked off the coast, while others landed to colonize the area. The ships that dropped them gave assurances that they would return; it was the beginning of the colonization of the world by the Chinese. But upon return to China, Zhu Di, the emperor, had died, his son and competing Mandarins assuming the throne. All overseas adventure was banned, the records destroyed, ships left to rot in harbors. In a single austere, beauracratic stroke, humankind’s greatest achievement in exploration and travel was quashed.    Colonists set to wait in places like Massachusetts, California, Central America and New Zealand were left to search the horizon, waiting for the large red sails to return. They didn’t. Some colonies intermixed; some stayed true; and some saw the men murdered and the women gathered up by local males as seems to be the case in New Zealand. It was one of history’s great moments that had been completely forgotten even as its legacy walks among us.    To look at Chen Arroyo, Janet’s biological mother, who was from the pure Chinese side of the Fornay, was to look upon any woman of Cantonese descent living in any major city of the Americas today. She was light skinned to olive, with straight black hair, standing about five foot six inches tall. She was well put together and rewarded these gifts by spending her free time spelunking, or cave exploring. The Fornay have their own word for it, bak’lai-it, which loosely translates as “visiting caves saying hello to them.”    Chen Arroyo had climbed through all of the caves in the Fornay Pass, memorizing their secret routes, and became a member of the Fornay sect in charge of this kind of knowledge. Outgoing as she was, she brought her daughter Janet with her on her back within six months of the child’s birth. Janet, who became a member of the cave sect like her mother, remembers her mother this way: climbing down a sandstone shaft, affixed to her back, ropes dangling. Janet recovered this memory in her late teens when, just before she left for college, traversing one of the routes on which her mother had taken her. “I’ve been here before,” Janet thought, and sat for a moment as the memory developed. She realized it was the last image of her mother she had.    When Janet was five, Chen was killed—along with my mother, Elizabeth, and the driver of their car—in an automobile accident outside of the Pass.    The city was growing in those days and a new signal light was put in to accommodate the increased population. Nobody in the car knew it was there. They were hit by a lumber truck full of two-by-fours heading to build a new sub-division. My mother was thirty-five, Chen Arroyo thirty-seven, a graduate of Stanford, never married, loyal to the Librado family, a near eunuch, leaving five year old Janet behind to be raised by Maria and her half-siblings.    In her honor, Mayor Librado had Chen Arroyo entombed, beside his family, on the Island of Sirenas, off the coast. People close to Mayor Librado at the time have told me that throughout the years, whenever he passed the White Hills sub-division, he thought of the lumber used to build the houses as the same wood that killed Chen and he would let out, “Chen, it took a whole forest of trees to bring you down.”    Sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. The pre-Columbian Chinese presence in California was one of them. When the Spanish first arrived, the place was spotted with the reminders of the descendants of Zhou Man and his far-flung fleet.    While paralleling Coronado’s inland expedition, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s 1542 journey up the coast of California found itself in the Santa Barbara Channel. The date was October 16. The air was dry, skies clear, high pressure in charge of the weather. Still shadowed by enthusiastic Chumash in tomol canoes who had followed him up the coast from Carpinteria, Cabrillo dropped anchor in front of two towns that were set on either side of a stream. Its citizens were of differing language and ethnicity. They could not easily communicate with one another. The populace on one side of the creek was short and thick and much darker in complexion than the people of the other side, who were slender and much lighter. To this day the place is stilled called Dos Pueblos—Two Towns. A local high school is named after it.    In the Sacramento Delta reports of light-skinned “Indians” wearing long robes rather than skins were reported upon first contact. Anza and Serra reported the same upon arriving in El Fornio in 1776. A stone inscribed with an unfamiliar language was close to the beach. Asiatic chickens were kept by the Fornay. Chinese roses grew along the trails and stone installations leading up the Pass where, mysteriously, the sound of a cast bell could be heard in the mornings and afternoons by the Spanish who could not figure out how an iron bell could be had by the local population. Drake had reported the same in 1579 as had Sebastián Vizcaíno in his mapping voyage from 1602 when he wrote “the Natives curiously toll a bell from high upon their coastal mountain. It sounds of iron, but no tribe we have encountered makes iron.”    Chinese stone anchors had been found off the coast by fisherman and modern scuba divers for years. And they certainly were Chinese anchors but not from Zhou Man’s fleet. With all the interest in pre-Columbian Chinese visitors, the anchors were a kind of welcome McGuffin: they were indeed Chinese—from Cantonese abalone fisherman working the area in the 19th century.    One of the most outstanding features of Chinese presence was the existence of a very old banyan tree situated in what is now downtown El Fornio (Librado Park, exactly). This tree was thought to be around six hundred years old and not even close to being native to the area. The Chinese, during their voyages of the early 1400s, were known to plant Banyan trees upon arriving at a newly discovered port and within the young roots of the newly sunken tree carved jade offerings and effigies were placed. In 1952, after heavy rains, a figurine of Shu Lao, a god representing long life in Taoism—a uniquely Chinese religion—was found in the mud of the recently exposed roots. Although the Fornay would have liked to have found the effigy first and taken it for safe keeping up the Pass, the object was taken in by the historical society decades before my tenure. It was still on view there, some twenty feet from where Junipero Serra’s heart had been, just yesterday.    To be sure, what was at the historical society and what was kept in the Pass has created a kind of archival tension between the historical society and the Fornay.    The Fornay had some grand secrets up the Pass that few outsiders had even come close to seeing. Many had hypothesized what important relics and their historic connections might be possessed by them. When Anza visited, his diarist Pedro Font, mentioned that they dined on “exquisite blue and white porcelain” and “caught sight of large caves illustrated with the story of the tribe that people the mountain area . . . Our party was certain we had seen depictions of ships drawn upon the walls and they were unlike those of the Europeans. We were told that the ships were from Cathay. And there were a clique of people who lived among the natives who claimed Cathay ancestry.”    Font also described that some of the caves and dwellings of the Fornay were decked out with hardwood fittings and “what seemed to be refitted ship’s masts and decks. Our thoughts were that perhaps some diabolical plot had taken place amongst the natives and that the ships of Cathay, if it is true that they came, had been snatched from the sailors, disassembled and brought up into the natives’ mountain retreat.”    The desire to recover Fornay religious and cultural objects put many of the tribe through the front doors of most of the antique and collectible shops in the state. By the 1930s, the Fornay had created an entire department of lawyers and investigators whose very charter was the recovery of Fornay property. Janet herself had originally become an attorney with just this task in mind and recovered a couple dozen artifacts for the tribe until she was seduced by the Clean Water Act. There she found a calling: squeezing the pure wet rag of environmental law into polluters’ faces. Next up, drinks at the Rusty Pelican READ Chapter 4

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