by Xiaolu Guo
But the Heaven Emperor is in rage. Not only has this new king killed six of his pet birds but he also has the audacity to want to be immortal! How dare he! The Heaven Emperor considers how best to punish Houyi. In Heaven, there are four levels of punishment. The lightest one is Sorrow, then comes Fear. The third level is the absolute Loneliness. And the most cruel punishment of all is absolute Despair. With an impulsive temper and a thoughtless mind, the Heaven Emperor decides that the new King Houyi deserves the highest punishment. So Houyi becomes the most despairing man on Earth. He sees no future in life, he distrusts everyone in the kingdom, he has no belief in love, and he thinks of death in every quiet moment.
Every night, lying beside Houyi, Chang’e inhales the new king’s despairing breath and, as before, she perceives in each of her husband’s sighs their flesh rotten in an airless tomb, bones dissolving in the vegetable roots. The death ink is seeping into the night, darkening their life with total obscurity. She is fearful – fearful of a future doomed by fate. One night, Chang’e gets up, steals the key from Houyi’s robe and enters the castle where the specialists make the elixir of longevity. She finds a huge jade jar and, tentatively lifting the lid, she smells bitter roots. She takes the glowing liquid back to her quarters. Then the next night she leaves her bed and does the same again, collecting as much as she can. After three hundred and sixty-six days and nights, her task is complete. She holds in her hand the essence of immortality. She stands under the one-petal jasmine tree and drains all the precious medicine while Houyi lies in a depressed sleep. Before the rooster breaks the dawn, she finds herself starting to float – she is flying, flying, and flying. She passes the South Heaven Gate, where Wu Gang is still asleep, and enters into the realm of the shining moon.
5. Moon
The Emperor of Heaven is angry again. He wants to punish Wu Gang for not paying attention to his job, and letting a human being enter the world of the Immortals. So the Great Impulsive Mind decides to expel Wu Gang from his job and impose upon him the greatest Sorrow. He sends Wu Gang to the moon to chop a cinnamon tree. This is how the Sorrow is inflicted upon him: as soon as Wu Gang stops chopping the tree, it grows back again even stronger and thicker. His punishment never ends.
In the moon, all Wu Gang wants is to be mortal again, to return to the Earth and be a man. But when he raises his axe on the lonely cinnamon tree in the space of silver, he discovers another human being – Chang’e, the most beautiful girl, the one he saw in the jasmine-tree garden all those years ago. The sight of Chang’e reanimates his heart with a vague emotion, as her eyes are the loneliest he has ever encountered. The sight of her face clutches at his heart, but it is too withered from the long absence of love. He strains to remember how he felt towards people when he was on the Earth. He tries to recognise Chang’e, her human emotion – her fragile flesh which envelops her heart. During shadowless days and nights on the moon Wu Gang tries to recover the feeling of his heart, while ceaselessly chopping down the stubborn tree. Perhaps Wu Gang is no longer the most sorrowful man in the universe. He is with Chang’e, who reflects the only recognisable human feeling still inside him. But while the cinnamon leaves keep falling on Chang’e’s hair, she transforms into a being of absolute solitude. Her soul dwells nowhere. In her formlessness, she understands that a chasm of separation exists between her and the earth, and that she must accept this absolute solitude, for death is no longer her destiny.
As the image of the Earth subsides in Wu Gang’s mind, all he can do is to chop the cinnamon tree, day after day. He sweats, sweats, and sweats from exhaustion. And on Earth it rains, drenching the warm soil from time to time, rain that is the sweat of a man’s labour. King Houyi stands under his jasmine tree and looks up into the dark sky above; he sees two human shadows on the moon with his great archer’s eyes. He senses that these rains on the Earth are born from that land of silver.
Each moonlit night, in the absence of Chang’e, the despairing King Houyi steps silently on the withered, one-petalled flowers deeply buried in his soil. He contemplates the moon, yearning for his long-lost companion, in the abyss of absolute solitude.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As well as the muffled but intense whisperings I heard on the road, these beautiful people helped to shape this book: Rebecca Morris, Pamela Casey, Philippe Ciompi, Juliet Brooke, Clara Farmer, Rebecca Carter, Claire Paterson, Steve Barker, Rao Hui, Simon Chambers, Rebecca Folland, Tina Bennett, Klaus Maeck, Anne Rademacher, Susanne Klumpp, Cindy Carter and Enda Hugh.
Xiaolu Guo, 2009
Germany – England
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Copyright © Xiaolu Guo, 2010
Xiaolu Guo has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A version of the story ‘An Internet Baby’ was printed in Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, published by Amnesty, 2009.
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