Petals from the Sky

by Mingmei Yip

  “Beautiful,” I said. “Looks like champagne.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Dai Nam cast me another chiding glance. “Ancient connoisseurs said that wine emboldens heroes’ guts while tea inspires scholars’ thoughts. So the two are completely different.”

  I nodded; she continued, adopting the tone a teacher uses when directing her student. “Now smell.” She brought the cup to her nose, deeply inhaling. Immediately I did the same.

  “Good!” She lowered her cup, her eyes closed.

  Indeed, the fragrance seemed pure to the point of intoxication.

  With her thumb and index fingers holding the upper rim of the cup and her middle finger its bottom, Dai Nam lifted the cup to her mouth and took a sip. I did the same, but burned my tongue; I let out a small cry.

  She squinted at me. “Meng Ning, you don’t drink good tea in one big gulp-that’s considered to be very crude, not to mention that you’ve wasted it.”

  My ears felt hot. “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  “You hold the tea in your mouth for a few seconds to savor its sweet, pure taste before you swallow it.” She demonstrated with another cup and I followed suit.

  “Now do you feel a cool breeze in your armpits?”

  Of course she didn’t mean it literally, but symbolically-that I should feel as light as a spirit.

  “Thanks, it’s great tea.”

  She contradicted me again. “It’s good, but not great. It’s not just the leaves that matter. In Paris, it’s impossible to get good water to brew tea. I only use bottled spring water.”

  “That’s not good enough?”

  “Of course not. The best is water from a mountain, second is water from a river, third is water from a well.” She paused, then spoke again meditatively. “Melted snow gathered from petals of plum blossoms and stored over years in tightly sealed ceramic jars is also supposed to be very good.”

  She must have read about the nun Wonderful Jade in Dream of the Red Chamber. Like the nun who’d brewed tea from snow, had Dai Nam also been longing for a man? I was wondering, but I said instead, “I never knew there was so much scholarship behind tea drinking.”

  “There’s always more to things than what meets the eye.”

  Meaning what-that there was a poignant love story behind that scar of hers?

  She was now busy preparing another round. I asked, “Why is the cup so small that we have to drink so many to quench our thirst?”

  “Meng Ning, you’ve completely missed the point.”

  “What is it?”

  “The point is not to quench thirst, but to quench one’s restlessness and arrogance. Preparing and tasting tea is a process of self-pursuit and cultivation.”

  As I listened to Dai Nam’s rough voice speak of the philosophy of tea and watched her calloused fingers deftly maneuvering the tea utensils, I was intrigued by this newly revealed side of her character. I wondered what other sentiments lay concealed under her emotionless face.

  She went on. “I learned tea ceremony from a nun I met in the Buddhist college I attended in Hong Kong. I have to drink a lot of tea to keep me from falling asleep when I meditate.” She broke off, then began again. “Also, the ritual of preparing tea pacifies me. The ancients said that tea drinking could dissolve loneliness, dissipate troubles through one’s pores, purify one’s heart, and lead one to enlightenment.”

  I nodded in agreement while she slowly wiped the pot with a clean towel. “This is to nurture the heart as well as the pot.”

  Watching Dai Nam’s practiced fingers, I suddenly realized that the warmth and fragrance of tea and the order of tea ceremony must be a source of sanity in her life, and the stylized ritual a means to channel her trapped emotions.

  Dai Nam picked up a handful of leaves and put them under my nose. “Smell-this is the best oolong tea.”

  I inhaled deeply. “Very good indeed. Where did you get it?”

  I wondered how, as a student, she could afford these luxuries for the tea ceremony.

  She said, “It was a gift. Almost all my possessions are gifts. My school fees and living expenses here are all sponsored by a nunnery in Hong Kong.”

  “You’re so lucky, Dai Nam.”

  “Hmm…yes and no.” She pondered. “People back home are nice to me, but my professors here are not giving me enough help with my research. I have a feeling that since I am Chinese and my French is no good, they just don’t want to bother.” Dai Nam went on to complain about how all the courses on Buddhism in the Université de Paris VII were too elementary for her and a waste of her time, how people snubbed her in the Cité Universitaire dormitory so she’d had to move here, how the library of L’Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises didn’t have the books she needed for her dissertation…

  She had finished preparing the second round of tea and handed me another cup. This time I had learned my lesson and sipped the tea carefully.

  Her raw, intense voice filled up the room. “I’ve always liked tea as my father liked cigarettes,” she said. “But I’m disgusted by his smoking, the rotten addiction and attachment behind it.” Finally she took a long, noisy sip, then added matter-of-factly, “Anyway, I don’t like my father, smoking or not.”

  This open criticism of her father shocked me; I put down my tea. “What makes you dislike your father?”

  Taking another noisy sip, Dai Nam said, her eyes half closed and her voice distant, “Because he never liked me. I’m a girl, his first born.” She broke off, put down her cup with a hard thud, then went on as if talking from a dream. “In Canton where we lived, my father worked as a waiter. Every night after the restaurant was closed and the owner had finished calculating the bill and paid everyone, my father would dash off to a prostitution house owned by a middle-aged widow. My father went crazy over her and spent almost everything he earned buying her clothes, jewelry, perfume, and food, and then gambled what was left in her prostitution house.

  “My father had always wanted a son, but for a long time didn’t have the luck. Like a typical Chinese man, he blamed my mother for failing to give him one, and me for bringing him ill fortune. He still cherished hope for a son; that’s why he named me Dai Nam-Bringing a Boy. In fact, I did bring him a boy later. When I turned eleven-my mother gave birth to a son, but this good luck left us as quickly as it had come. My brother died at four.”

  “Oh, Dai Nam, I’m so sorry.” I looked at her directly to show my concern.

  But Dai Nam avoided my gaze. She went on: “My mother was always sick, so it was I who actually raised and took care of my brother. When he was a baby, I carried him on my back in a red cloth embroidered with the characters ‘lucky child, one hundred years long life.’ I carried him everywhere: when I was cooking, sweeping the floor, washing clothes in the river, shopping in the market. Whenever he had a bad dream and cried, I’d rock him and stick a piece of sweetmeat in his mouth. When he got older and too heavy to carry, he’d follow me everywhere, hanging on to the hem of my clothes. That’s why my clothes were quickly torn, so my father constantly scolded me. He said I was a boor and wasted his money because he had to buy me new clothes. Actually he hardly bought me any. I mended the old ones and wore them again and again until the village kids followed me around calling me ‘beggar’ and snatched my brother away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ignoring my question, Dai Nam continued. “One day, as usual, I took my brother with me to wash clothes at the river. He had been happy catching small crabs and playing by the bank, then got tired and fell asleep. Fearing that he might fall into the river, I carried him on my back. Then suddenly three village kids materialized a few feet in front of me and began to sing ‘beggar girl, beggar girl, why don’t you go to hell?’ I felt so angry that I splashed water onto them and cursed. They cursed back, then picked up stones to throw at me. One sharp rock hit my bare foot; I slipped and dropped my brother into the river.”

  “Oh! What happened?”

  Dai Nam waved her hand as if to dis
pel an ugly thought; her voice trembled a little. “The kids quickly disappeared while I ran and cried for help until I bumped into two villagers on their way home from work. They rushed back with me to the river to search for my brother. By the time they pulled him out, he lay unconscious and his breathing was like a thread breaking on the threshold of death.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  A long, uncomfortable pause, then Dai Nam spoke again. “My brother cried to me, ‘Mama!’ before he took his last breath. This broke my mother’s heart, for she felt she’d lost her son twice. At the funeral, when I looked at his small body lying lifeless in the tiny coffin, I suddenly realized the brevity of life, remembering how happy I’d felt when I was carrying him on my back, and how fast my happiness fled!

  “Then my mother found out she was sterile due to an infection in her tubes that she’d caught from my father. This convinced my father even more that I was his curse-his all-destroying star-and that I had not only cut off his offspring, but his family name. He began to abuse me more. Whenever my mother tried to stop me from overworking, my father would yell at her, ‘Stupid woman, let this creature do what her fate allots her! Don’t you know she has to labor for our family to redeem the evil deeds accumulated in her past lives, or else she will be doomed even more in her next?’

  “When he uttered the word ‘doomed,’ he’d roll his eyes as large, and open his mouth as wide, as if he were actually witnessing my doom. Then he would hit me with whatever he could lay his hand on-a shoe, a pan, a broom, even a chair. And I would burst out crying. ‘What are you crying for?’ he once yelled. ‘Is your father dead? Of course you wish me dead, don’t you? You’ve already destroyed your brother and now you want to destroy me so that you can have more graves to kowtow to. But I won’t let that happen! You hear me?’ He slapped my face. ‘I don’t know what I did in my past life to have you as my punishment!’

  “After the death of my brother, my mother slept by herself every night. My father rarely came home. We both knew that he spent his nights in the whorehouse. He also stopped bringing money back for the family. He said he’d rather throw his money into the gutter than squander it on me-a money-losing shrew, or my sickly mother-a medicine cauldron. Then my mother had to work as an amah to support me and herself. She died when I turned fourteen.

  “Then my father had to take me back with him, and by that time he had already been living with the widow for more than two years. Of course the widow didn’t like me, so she made me do all the chores, not only at her house but also at her prostitution house-cooking, cleaning, scrubbing the floors, washing clothes, waiting on her favorite money-bringing prostitutes, everything except shopping, for fear that I’d cheat her of her money. I only got one meal a day of cold leftover soup or thin, meatless congee made from broken grains. She wouldn’t let my father live in her house for free either; she made him work as a guard at the prostitution house.

  “Finally when I reached nineteen and thought myself strong enough, I planned my escape-to swim to Hong Kong, my dreamland of freedom. I failed seven times before I made it on the eighth attempt. In Hong Kong, I also succeeded in finding my great-aunt, who took me in, bought me a Hong Kong identity card, and enrolled me in a charitable Buddhist school. Later I attended a Buddhist college, then went to beg in Thailand. When I returned to Hong Kong, a nunnery learned about my ordeal and offered to sponsor me to write a dissertation based on my experience. That’s how I’m here.”

  After she finished her account, Dai Nam’s spirit seemed to come back to the room. She sipped her tea and said after some silence, “I still have nightmares of my escape to Hong Kong…one time I was almost drowned and another time almost eaten by sharks…”

  I gasped, then blurted out, “Then is…the scar on your face-”

  “No, that has nothing to do with my escape; it was cut by a little boy, a neighbor’s son.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused.

  And I was surprised, for the first time in this terrible narration, to see sadness flicker in her eyes.

  “I was ten, playing by myself in front of our house, when a neighbor boy came over, picked up a piece of broken glass from the floor and cut my face, just like that.”

  “You mean you were not in a fight?”

  “No, not at all. I was playing by myself, and so was he. Then he just came up and slashed me. You may not believe it. It sounds so strange, but that’s exactly what happened. His parents rushed me to the hospital, where I had a tetanus shot and eighteen stitches. Later when his parents asked him why he did this to me, he said he didn’t remember the event at all. They beat him severely anyway. Since he was only six, everyone wondered where his strength came from. As you can see, my wound was long and deep. It should have been the work of someone much older. Some neighbors said he must be possessed by a demon. So the parents hired a professional exorcist to fix him. He made the boy drink water boiled with magic figures, he scribbled sutras on the boy’s face with red ink, and chanted incantations for him for hours-with the result of giving him a high fever for a week.

  “As Buddhism says, his deed was merely wuming, no reason. There’s no reason for a little boy of six…nor for an adult like my father.”

  Dai Nam paused to study the submerged tea leaves. “But it seems now that my father regrets what he did to me. I received a letter a week ago written for him by his old neighbor. He said he’s in his terminal stage of lung cancer and probably won’t make it through Double Nine Festival. He wants to see me before he dies. That’s why I have to go back right away.” Dai Nam turned to look at me. “Meng Ning, if you don’t mind, can you come over here once a week to take care of the altar and make offerings to the Buddha while I’m away?”

  “Of course I will.”

  Dai Nam refilled my cup. Savoring the bittersweet taste of the newly brewed tea, I began to tell her about my family, the death of my little brother, and my father, who had gambled away everything. When concluding my story, I said that, unlike her father, my father had never abused me.

  Dai Nam surprised me by saying, “Maybe we were sisters in our past life. It’s just that our father liked you because you’re beautiful and talented, but hated me because I’m a boor.”

  Chan Lan’s loud and comical “Have children, many many!” jolted me back to the nunnery-the here and now. Now the sun had vanished and the street lights cast deep shadows. Nuns or not nuns, I thought, our lives are like shadows fleeting past the splendors of this floating world.

  14. Under the Paris Sun

  A few days after my visit to Dai Nam in the Golden Lotus Temple, I received a call from the French consulate, asking me if I was ready to go back to the Sorbonne for my oral defense. I was. Besides, if I went to Paris now, I could at least leave behind my confusion for a while. As I packed, I felt pangs of sadness that Michael had never called. Maybe Yi Kong was right after all-men are not trustworthy. Nor would they feel magnanimous after being turned down and their egos wounded.

  The next day, with an uneasy mind, I boarded the plane.

  Paris looked as if I’d never been away. I felt a little strange that it had not changed, because I had. I had been at one time innocent, curious, and eager for life. But now I felt as if I’d been holding a lamp that had lighted many paths, but missed the one home.

  It was six-thirty when I stepped from the taxi and walked to the entrance of La Maison d’Asie. The sense of strangeness grew because this was where I’d first lived when I came here to study. In the twilight, I climbed up the stairs to the entrance, silently greeted by the two stone lions standing guard before the building.

  I took the key from the man at the reception desk, went to my room on the third floor, put down my luggage, then headed straight to the communal bathroom to take a shower. After fifteen minutes, refreshed from the scalding water, hot steam, and the pleasant smell of sandalwood soap, I went back to my room, changed into my pajamas, and sat in bed to prepare for my oral defense the next aft
ernoon. I could study only halfheartedly, distracted by thoughts about Dai Nam. While I tried to imagine what had happened to her, I also could not keep from thinking about Michael and his haiku proposal:

  These thirty-eight years

  All empty now.

  Can the rest be full?

  I felt a rush of feelings. Did I want to fill this man’s life? I stared at my Ph.D. dissertation and could not come up with an answer.

  The next morning the ringing of my alarm clock startled me awake. It was seven-thirty and my oral defense was scheduled at two. I bathed and dressed, then glanced through my dissertation one last time. At eleven, I walked to the Cité canteen and ate a small lunch of cheese, fruit, and coffee, then took the Metro to the Sorbonne.

  Since my purple floral dress had survived the fire, I deemed it very lucky. So I wore it again today to bring me more luck. And it did. Not only did I pass the exam, my dissertation got an unanimous “très honorable” from the three professors. After the hour-long ordeal, they all came to shake my hand and wished me the best of luck. My supervisor, always cool, distant, and too busy to grant me more than five meetings during my five years of study with him, hugged me and whispered pleasantries. After more felicitations and small talk, they all went back to their seats to get ready to interrogate the next candidate.

  Outside the exam hall, I felt sad that none of my friends had been there. In fact, I had not told any of them. Because except for Dai Nam, the others were really only casual acquaintances, and most of them had left Paris before I did.

  Feeling a bit sad, nostalgic, and sentimental, I went straight to the café a few blocks from the Sorbonne’s main entrance-the same one where I’d had my first meal on my first day in Paris.

  I sat down in the front row and a gray-haired waiter came to take my order. Wondering if he’d waited on me on that first day, I smiled generously and asked for an espresso and a croque madame-exactly what I’d had during my first visit here five years ago.