Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  Zoe was spilling tears dangerously close to his signature.

  Jeff yelled and banged his fists when she told him. “I’m finally over Ming and I’m boycotting all goods made in China to prove it, which means I’ll have to stop buying clothes and go naked, and now you’re going off to see the fucking, lying, cheating, evil seductress Dragon Lady?”

  “You should come too.” Zoe wasn’t above imagining a showdown.

  “You’re the China hand. I don’t even want to be a China ass. By the way, the detective came back and said if she ever tries to come back to the US they’ve got her in a database. But there’s something else you should know.”

  He was just mad, Zoe figured. She told him stop over-dramatizing, that she’d thought it over a million times, and was prepared to travel to Sunshine Village on her own if Ming flaked out. Jeff insisted she sit down, though.

  “Ming had some kind of thing for the man you think might be your father.”

  Zoe said, “bullshit,” but it felt like a barren defense.

  “There was one clue that slipped her devious little mind. She cancelled her cell phone subscription but the bill came. So I went through all the numbers. Lots of guys. Lots of calls to China and from China. And then there were some calls to this number with an 854 prefix, so I knew it was Columbia. So, I called it at three in the morning and the voicemail said, ‘This is Charles Engelhorn at the East Asian Institute, please leave a message and I’ll have my underling Zoe deal with your plebian business…’”

  “They met. Doesn’t mean they were having an affair.”

  “I didn’t say they were having an affair. She called him; he didn’t call her. My deduction, dear Zoe, is she was pursuing him.”

  Jeff’s smile was like that of a child caught in the act.

  Everything swirled around her once again. All those days and nights Jeff and his bride-of-convenience had spent together in their screened-off space; Jeff would have searched the world for stories that would entertain Ming, except he had something at the ready. Zoe had seen the way Ming inched away while Jeff kept inching toward her, the way he’d hung his arms around her, and she’d looked as if the man glomming onto her were a noose. He would have offered Ming all that he had—credit cards, objects of art, and, especially, gossip that the two of them could ponder for infinity, like the tale of how Professor Engelhorn just might be Zoe’s father.

  Zoe opened her mouth to chastise him, but she knew it would do no good. Jeff loved to hear himself talk. You might as well punish a dog for barking, a sparrow for warbling.

  Chapter Seven

  The same morning that two thugs defeated Zoe, Ming, met Tang Fei at the entrance to Sunshine Village Silicon Works Enterprises. He was ready to show her the silicon dioxide research lab—where her parents had once worked.

  It was spotless, as a silicon research lab was supposed to be, but Ming spied a thick layer of dust on the windowsill and suspected that a cleanup crew had been brought in for her benefit.

  Two men in white coats sat at computer consoles, while several others were bent over small sheets of silicon, busy with forceps. They’d had an entire day to prepare themselves for this brief performance, Ming realized. She imagined getting back to Beijing and laughing with Tom about how it should be called Potemkin Silicon Works Enterprises.

  “We’re working on the production of a silicon battery,” said Tang Fei. “Silicon dioxide has thousands of uses. You probably used some in your toothpaste this morning.”

  Ming ran her tongue over Dr. Perlmutter’s little sculptures. Tang Fei told her Sunshine Village Silicon Works Enterprises had evolved from the production of Plexiglas for military planes and jeeps, and they were now manufacturing optical fibers for export. “But like any good manufacturing facility, we pride ourselves on a diversified portfolio,” Tang Fei said. He showed her a brochure that had pictures of dozens of silicon products—gloves, spatulas, lipstick, packets of silica gel, baby pacifiers, green rubber watchbands, a pair of breast implants, even a life-sized sex doll.

  “You make all of these things?”

  Tang Fei looked down at the brochure, then, as if realizing he could embellish only so much, admitted, “We just supply the raw material.”

  “The world runs on silicon,” he added, sounding more salesmanly.

  Ming had done a beastly thing, raising Tang Fei’s hopes just by being there. The company had no blood left, and behind all of Tang’s boasts was a plea for a cash transfusion. He’d told her yesterday that he knew all about New Icarus Capital. She realized the hot pot lunch had been the beginning of a courtship ritual. The directors would have preferred to meet with Han and Tom, but a low level researcher was better than no one.

  Han and Tom would see through Tang Fei’s fictitious revenue and profit figures; Tang Fei had produced numbers but couldn’t name any customers. Ming had escaped this cruel village only to return as a bearer of false hope, and somehow the sight of Tang Fei, former schoolyard bully, now prostrating himself before Ming with her gold-rimmed New Icarus Capital business cards left her feeling like a toxic ion in the air. Cruel people like Tang knew about begging for kindness and getting kicked instead.

  Trudging back in the direction of the guest house, Ming knew she should find a cell-phone friendly spot where she could call the office and admit that the deal she’d been so eager to chase was a bust.

  Veering toward a circle of poplar trees, she fished into her handbag for her cellphone. Something she didn’t recognize was in there. She pulled out a cylinder of paper, tightly coiled like an ancient scroll. On it was a note, in a delicate swirl of classical characters.

  My deepest apologies for my lack of hospitality, she read. I need your help and it appears that you need mine too. Come, by yourself I implore, to the place where we talked when you were small and hungry. If I may trouble you, I am more rational when I’m fed. Something fermented would be excellent as well.

  Ming’s heart pounded. The handwriting was the same as that on the note that had materialized two days before. The place where we talked. She knew just where to go. I’m not really a private equity intern, I’m an explorer of the unknown. No time to call the office now; she sprinted off to Market Street and bought six pork buns, four oranges, and three bottles of beer, then climbed up the hill to the cliff to where the big Buddha watched over the river and the mouth of the cave.

  Creeping into the musty silence of the cave, she heard the sound of breathing, a breath that sighed with defeat and despair. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she made out a man-creature sitting in lotus position, eyes closed. Before him, on a blue and green striped towel that she recognized, sat the dragonfruit and Zoe’s Swiss Army knife.

  Ming whistled the long lewd whistle of the magpies that came in summer.

  The man, acting oblivious, recited silent words.

  He might be a madman, Ming reminded herself. Perhaps she was crazy too.

  Then his fiery eyes opened. He stared at Ming and she wondered if the whole afternoon might pass with his eyes burning into her.

  “Your name is Cheng Xiao Ming,” he proclaimed, finally, with the gravity of an imperial edict. “Is anyone with you?”

  “I came by myself, as you implored. Now I implore you, come outside.” The dankness was making her bones rattle.

  She crept backward toward the exit and watched him rise and follow her, blinking in the foggy daylight. Ming perched herself on the big Buddha’s left thigh and watched while the hermit stretched his arms to the sky, then began to leap up, bounce down upon his toes as if he were testing a trampoline.

  “I brought you something to make you more rational.” Ming held out her offerings. The hermit devoured three of the pork buns without looking up. Then he bit the cap off a beer bottle and guzzled the entire contents. He tossed the bottle to the ground, where it rolled along the dirt, and emitted a thunderous belch.

  “S
’cuse me. I’m not usually so unrefined.”

  “Really?” Ming folded her arms across her chest and eyeballed him from his oil slick of hair to his soot-stained feet. “Actually, if you could just dive into a vat of disinfectant and win an Armani shopping spree, you wouldn’t look half bad.” The hermit, seemingly emboldened by the beer, sat down on the Buddha’s knee and began to edge up the thigh closer to her. She could see the bugs crawling upon him.

  “When I was small and hungry, twice I saw a monkey. Once the monkey talked to me, right here. I was afraid to tell anyone.”

  “I remember you. You thought you were too good for the other children.” He dug into the grocery bag and bit the top off the second beer bottle. “And you have something else you’re hiding, I know. I can read your true nature.”

  “I…I wanted so much…I’m a…” She shivered in the fog, felt a lump in her throat that contained the confession criminal, though not by choice. But the crazed hermit interrupted her.

  “Let me tell you a story, Miss Ming.” He edged his filthy head closer to hers, as if to conspire. “There once was a magic stone high on a mountain that developed a magic womb, which produced a magic egg. When the wind blew on the egg, it hatched, and out came a monkey. He would play with other monkeys born from flesh and blood mothers; they would climb trees, chase dragonflies, and bathe in a waterfall over a mountain stream. But the rock-womb monkey was the only one brave enough to chase the waterfall all the way to its source in the Kingdom of the Water Curtain. And for this, the other monkeys made him their king. The Monkey King, desiring answers to questions that plagued him, sought out the Patriarch of the Immortals, who taught him to cultivate conduct and thereby become, himself, an immortal. The Patriarch named him Sun Wu Kong, ‘Monkey Awakened to the Emptiness that is Nirvana.’

  “I had a blissful childhood.” He cast a nostalgic gaze out at the river. “You, to your great misfortune, were born in awful times. Long ago there was a forest here, full of strange beasts—wolves, tigers, leopards, deer, wild cats, raccoons, horses, orangutans, bears, little dogs, big dogs, wild boar—and they all paid homage to me because I was the Monkey King. So long ago.” For a moment he looked like he might start sobbing. “But when I returned to earth, it was as if I had plunged into hell. You knew that hell. I landed there,” he pointed to the cave, “at the passageway to the Kingdom of the Water Curtain Cave.”

  “So you really are the Monkey King?” Ming let out a laugh of superiority, even though she wished she could believe him. “All the logic of the modern world says you’re just a psychopath who happens to be a master of classical calligraphy and sleight of hand.”

  He seemed lost in his own cloud of memories, though, and paid no attention to her words. “And when I came back to earth, to the place from where I had come, it was much changed from how I had remembered. The trees no longer bore fruit, there were no wild silkworms, no tigers to skin. Instead there were people, everywhere, people in the same hideous blue clothes.

  “One night, a peasant man spied me scooping some sorry little minnows out of the river. He had a big knife and he came at me with it pointed at my chest. Everyone was hungry then. He was trying to stab me so he could roast me on a fire in the cave and feed me to his family.”

  “Ha, I thought you were immortal!”

  “I am immortal, but I have a heart just like you. A knife can destroy my flesh and then I have to go back up there”—he waved one dirt-stained hand up toward the sky—“and start all over. Anyway, listen to my story so you’ll understand some things. I was dreadfully out of practice but I quickly inhaled enlightenment, just as he lunged at me, and I made my chest bend a knife. Fortunately for me, the peasant was so weak from hunger he collapsed on the spot.”

  “You killed him?”

  “To be a primate is to be a warrior. You are a young maiden, but you ought to know that.” He looked as if he were considering his own words for a moment or two, then continued: “If you have true perception you can dine on the wind and sleep in the dew. You can live with nothing, in the cold, buffeted by the wind and sleeping on rocks, and it’s still better than existing as a savage who eats his fellow man. Or lays him off from his corp-or-ation so New Icarus Capital can get even fatter than it already is.”

  “How do you know about that?” Ming gasped.

  “The walls have ears in modern China and so do sparrows and crickets.”

  Ming opened her mouth to tell him she was tired of delusions and everything else in Sunshine Village, but he interrupted.

  “To answer your question, I didn’t kill the man who tried to kill me. I admit, I didn’t try to revive him, and he wasn’t breathing. I said a few blessings, wishing him a better incarnation. The poor fool, his eyes were wide open, staring, and looked as starved for enlightenment as anyone I’d ever seen. It was damn lonely in the cave, so I twisted the head off the corpse, and I sat by him, talking to him.

  “I can, of course, perform seventy-two transformations, but decided that no animal form was safe, and turning myself into a man was little better than appearing as the Monkey King, but it felt like a natural state to me. I left the cave for the pagoda, because the villagers were all afraid to go there. And rightly so—it’s full of felled spirits, but the ghosts and I made a pact.”

  “Oh my god, the skull…?” Ming shook her own head. The hermit put a filthy hand on her shoulder, and she tried not to cringe. Then he began to cry, and the tears left clean streaks upon his cheeks. “I think you really are the Monkey King. I grew up so hungry I swallowed raindrops, and that ought to give me a license to believe in miracles.”

  The hermit leapt up to the Buddha’s shoulder, pounded his own sunken chest and called out, “You mortals can’t touch me!” Then he soared in one arc over the riverbank.

  “Yoo hoo…” echoed across the black water. He waved to her, a figure on the other bank. She could see him bend his knees other there and thrust upward, turning somersaults across the river again, and landing inches from her on his filthy feet.

  After that they sat together for a while, silent and swinging their legs over those of the Buddha’s beneath them. The man who seemed to be the Monkey King slurped his warm beer while Ming turned her gaze to the thick veil of clouds that covered the village.

  “I hate this damn place,” Ming said, finally. “I hate Beijing. I hate my job. I have nowhere to go.”

  “The village is part of you. Mend Sunshine Village and you’ll mend yourself.” He guzzled down the final drop of beer. “The poor old wise man Confucius—and I did like to sit at his table up there in the heavens, although he had a falling out with every protégée who disagreed with him—he said the heavens were harmonious. But what did he know back then? He hated war profiteering on earth and imagined that there was a place on the other side of life where enlightenment dwelt. You know people like that, I’m sure. They live in China and think there’s a paradise at Harvard Business School, they live in America and think everyone in Asia does nothing but chant mantras all day. Still, it was pretty blissful up there for me, and those of like mind, for several hundred years. I have a story to tell you. That’s why I’m here instead of in the heavens. The earth is in dire need of enlightenment, not chanting but real enlightenment.

  “It was in the heavenly kingdom of the Jade Emperor where I spent those halcyon centuries. You get there, as it happens, through that passage in the cave, and if you tunnel through it you reach the sea, and you soar past the birds, so giddy that you would swear you were completely drunk. Life on the clouds is blissful, the air fresh as a spring meadow, the wine exquisite. You wear silk robes, bask in the sunshine, never hungry or tired.” He scratched his head, pulling out a crawling insect. “At least it used to be that way.

  “Just before I left, Siddhartha made a bundle selling short at the celestial stock exchange. Plato did pretty well, too. He started an advertising agency with property developers; all he talked
about was how much he paid for this condo and how much he got for that one. Poor Confucius—one of the few who didn’t buy in—was homeless and ranting.”

  “Maybe they got bored? Eternity lounging around on clouds drinking wine—I’d get restless,” Ming said.

  “Oh, you humans kept us well entertained.” He snickered. “We’d poke a little hole through the clouds and observe the insanity on earth. We’d watch the governments everywhere and the people they governed, and speculate on what each should do, and they always seemed to do just the opposite of what they ought to. Over the centuries I picked my favorite countries to watch, and I learned their languages. You see, I can speak perfect English,” he said in a plummy Oxford accent.

  “Je parle francais too. And Italian. And Czech because I started watching Franz Kafka. And Pa-Russky. I knew Persian and Arabic in their glory days. And Yiddish. So evocative. We would laugh uproariously and call people schmuck or mensch, and, excuse my vulgarity, schtup.”

  Ming felt a deep pang for New York.

  “But your point has validity; bliss is by definition temporary, even for immortals. Sam Clemens—one of my drinking buddies—had said heaven lacked humor because the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow. Once he arrived in heaven, he realized how wrong he’d been. The other thing about the heavens is that we were always falling in love. If you have love, you have sorrow. And I had a great love, my Zenia. Seduction is the key, and the only thing that can keep you enthralled for all eternity. You love as if nothing could ever stop you. Then you fight, then twenty years later you resolve the conflict, only to start fighting about it again ten minutes later—”

  “So what did you do, have a fight with your girlfriend and run out?”

  “I came back for something that’s important to you,” he said, his fierce golden eyes looking irritated. “Don’t fidget. You don’t know it but you have eternity to hear me out.”