by Leslie Li
If my family’s observation of the Moon Festival on Fieldston Road in New York City was prosaic, celebrating it at Nai-nai’s house on Die Cai Lu in Guilin was as poetic as the names of her street address and her natal city translated into English: Folded Brocade Road in the Forest of Osmanthus Trees. As twilight fell, Tanmin, Nannan, and Jiunyang hung red-and-gold paper lanterns from the eaves of the terrace, then dragged the dining room table and several chairs out of the house and into the front yard, careful to place them near but not under the blooming osmanthus tree — the better to view the moon. On the table they set five platters — one each of apples, mandarin oranges, pomegranates, grapes, and melons.
“It’s strange that there are no pears,” I remarked, to call attention to the irony of the profusion of people bearing our surname (the ideogram for li signifies “pear”) and the absence of the actual fruit. In fact, I was wearing the heirloom bracelet my mother had given me years after she and my father separated. He had given it to her soon after they were wed. Cast in Chinese silver, the richly fruited and intertwined boughs of a pear tree encircled my wrist.
“No pears. Never pears,” Tanmin replied, taking me literally. “Only round fruits, like the round moon. Round shapes symbolize family unity and harmony Besides, the li that means ‘pear’ sounds just like the li that means ‘separation.’”
My parents had been separated for nearly two decades, but when I first arrived in Guilin, Tanmin greeted me by saying, “I met your mother when she accompanied your father last fall. You look just like her.” I hid my confusion and displeasure as best I could behind a protracted smile and deflected the charge by switching to another subject as soon as it was polite for me to do so. It was not my mother who had traveled to China with my father but the woman he had been living with for the past several years. Not only had my father concealed the fact that his marriage had disintegrated, he had produced an ersatz “wife” as proof that it was intact.
Several teacups and dessert plates, two pots brimming with hot tea, a tray bearing a dozen or so moon cakes completed the table setting, the centerpiece of which was a porcelain rabbit. When I asked Tanmin about the figurine (the alluded-to change of subject) she smiled, delighted to withhold the answer while divulging a secret: “One of our invited guests lived in London and teaches English at Guangxi Teachers College. She’s also an amateur ethnologist. She will be the best one to tell you.”
“Ah, the Jade Rabbit,” the lover of myths said when we were introduced.
She and the other invited guests — all women, and bearers of more moon cakes — had taken their places at the table and were admiring the luminous orb in the indigo sky while they nibbled at the cakes and fruits and sipped their tea.
“In your country, you see a man in the moon. In China, we see a rabbit. Perhaps that’s because in America, you see one side of the silvery satellite, while we in China, half the world away, see the other, where a short-tailed rabbit pounds the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pestle under the branches of an osmanthus tree” — she looked over her shoulder — “much like this one.”
“I prefer the Chinese vision,” I admitted. “It’s more imaginative. How did the rabbit get to the moon?”
“Through a story, of course. In this case, an old Buddhist tale. Would you like to hear it?”
I settled back in my chair, indicating yes. She leaned forward in hers, ready to begin.
“One day, the Buddha, who had assumed the form of a bodhisattva, appeared in a forest glade, where he made a fire to warm himself. He asked the animals living there if they might give him some food and drink, for he was hungry and thirsty. The otter brought him seven fishes. The jackal shared part of his kill. When it was the rabbit’s turn, the timid creature deeply regretted that he could give only herbs and grasses, the simple food he ate. Noticing the fire, the rabbit realized that there was something more that he could offer and, with that thought, he jumped into the flames. For this selfless act, the Buddha announced that henceforth the image of the rabbit would forever emblazon the surface of the moon as a shining example of modesty, compassion, and self-sacrifice.”
After a sip of tea, the woman continued. “The Taoists went the Buddhists one better. Their rabbit received a second life, which is why they say he lives on the moon. He also was given the recipe for immortality — an elixir he pounds into a pill, a jade pill, under the shade of an osman-thus tree. Tell me now, when you look at the moon, what do you see? Look carefully before you answer.”
I looked up, then at the masterful storyteller. She held out a philosophical tag, like a card in a game of cards, and I took it up.
“That’s difficult to say What I saw there when I looked a few minutes ago has changed into something else.” Luna é mobile.
“Ah!” She clapped her hands together with pleasure. Evidently, I had plucked the right card. “A different image. A different image requires a different story, doesn’t it? One that’s just as memorable. Could it be a woman that you see? If she’s beautiful and wearing flowing white robes, then she’s the Moon Lady, the goddess Chang E.”
I nodded, indicating that this was so. Whether or not it was, I was eager to hear Chang E’s story. The amateur ethnologist settled back in her chair, nibbled at her moon cake, and continued.
“She wasn’t always a goddess, you know, and she didn’t always live on the moon. How she came to be there is quite the opposite of the Jade Rabbit’s story Chang E used to live on earth, with her husband, Hou Yi. With his magic bow and quiver of arrows, he was the archer nonpareil of the Imperial Guard. One day, ten suns appeared in the sky. Ten! Our poor planet Earth! Drought withered the crops. Lakes and seas dried up. Every family was visited by famine and hunger. Finally, the emperor thought of a way to end his people’s suffering. He ordered Hou Yi to shoot nine of the suns out of the sky. Summoning all his strength and skill, the archer executed the task to the letter, leaving only one sun in the sky As his reward, the Queen Mother of the West summoned Hou Yi to her palace in the distant Kunlun Mountains and there she presented him with the pill of immortality. The gift came, however, with a warning. To demonstrate his worthiness, he had to pray and fast for twelve months before taking it. This Hou Yi was prepared to do, and he immediately settled into the regimen, but not before hiding the pill in his house. Unfortunately, when her husband was away in battle, Chang E noticed a faint light and a pleasing odor emanating from where he had concealed it. Being a curious woman — what woman worth her salt isn’t? — and being Chinese, Chang E couldn’t resist having a taste. However, she swallowed the pill and as soon as she did, gravity no longer had any power over her. Up she rose into the air and flew halfway to the moon. Hou Yi, returning home just then, gave chase across the sky, but all the magic in all his arrows was powerless to halt Chang E’s flight or return her to him. She flew all the way to the moon, her new domicile, while her husband took up residence on the sun. From their separation, the concepts of yin — female, moon, receptive — and yang — male, sun, active — came into being, the duality which governs the universe.”
I looked at my bracelet of silver pears that symbolize my surname and bespeak separation — the state which the Chinese fear most but what, in large doses and in the form of voluntary and essential solitude, sustains me. Then I glanced at the round moon cakes, the round fruits, the round moon, all of which proclaim unity and family harmony. Oh, yes. There she was, shining bright and beautiful, clear as day.
“Of course, their separation isn’t absolute,” the ethnologist continued.
“Isn’t it? And why ‘of course’?”
“Husband and wife meet on the fifteenth day of every month, when the moon is completely round, like it is tonight. One day out of every twenty-eight” — she smiled, I thought, rather slyly — “often enough to sustain a committed relationship, and seldom enough to maintain a sense of the other’s incomparable worth.”
My parents, separated for nearly twenty years, saw each other once a month or thereabou
ts. Their separation, instigated by my mother, had been neither mutual nor amicable and resulted in an estrangement which might have lasted forever — “I never wanted to see your father again” — had I not, in turn, become estranged from my father.
I had been living in Paris, an expatriation which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, in my father’s eyes, that I had rejected my paternal heritage, my Chinese blood and upbringing. During that time, a period of four years which were neatly coterminous with my parents’ estrangement and during which I longed to have a child but not a husband, I bore a son, Anton. It was also a time when I was consumed by idealistic desires, impossible dreams, and magnificent obsessions, when the lure of “a chance encounter sparked by an obscure hunger, a neat coincidence, and a fatal attraction for the defective,” as the writer Judith Thurman described such passions — all of which described my rationale for choosing Heinz, the man who would be Anton’s father — was more than I could resist
“You know, you don’t have to have the baby,” my mother said soon after I’d returned to America a month and a half pregnant.
I didn’t know how I was going to break the news to her, but she had made it easy, not knowing that the father of my child was Austrian, by taking me to dinner at Wienerwald, a Viennese restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue, where I broke down and cried into my schnitzel. I knew what she meant: an abortion (in more progressive Paris) or giving up the baby for adoption.
“But I want this child,” I snuffled.
“Do you know how hard it is to raise a child? Hard enough with two parents. But with one, it will be ...” She caught herself. “You can have other children, by another man, one who will—”
I sat up. “I want this child,” I interrupted her, “by this man.”
I had never been so sure of anything in my life, nor have I been since. My sudden composure and calm determination prevented my mother from trying any further to dissuade me. As for ultimatums, she knew better — better than Heinz, who had offered me the choice: “The baby or me” — to employ that tactic. Instead she told me that we — the baby and I — could live with her. She would help me raise him. She would get a larger apartment. In the meantime, we could have the sole bedroom and she would be fine on the sofabed in the living room. She had already begun buying a layette when I told her that I — we — were going back to Europe. The expression on her face! But she didn’t contradict me. She didn’t try to deter me or change my mind. She simply nodded and lowered her eyes so that I wouldn’t see her pain and disappointment. How could I tell her that everything I had lived and learned in Paris and Sicily was at stake, would go up in smoke if I allowed myself and my child to live under her roof, according to her rules, when I was just beginning to formulate my own? So I told her that I couldn’t live in the United States. I wanted to return to Europe, where I had been happy.
“That’s all I want for you,” my mother said throatily. “I just want you to be happy”
At those words, my composure crumbled and my tears flowed anew. “I don’t want to be happy I want to be whole.”
Improbably, Anton possessed the nondominant characteristics, the blond hair and green eyes of his father, which seemed to my father to be a second slap in the face. When I returned to the United States with Anton, we stayed with my mother in her New York apartment. My father had sold our house in Riverdale and was living in Westchester. The most recent letter I had written him, as short and infrequent as the others I’d sent him, had been mailed weeks prior from Europe.
“Have you told him?”
“That I’m back in the United States? About Anton? Not yet.”
“Will you tell him?
“Why? I know what he’s going to say”.
“He has a right to know. He’s your father, after all.”
My mother had not seen my father since I’d left for Europe; she had only spoken with him over the phone, and then regarding legal matters. More communication than that she didn’t want and strictly avoided. She was thriving, both personally and professionally, and she didn’t want to be drawn into the vortex of the past. I did write to my father, a brief explanatory letter posted in New York. My father wrote back that “what you have done” was unforgivable, that my life was essentially over, and that he would henceforth consider me dead. I wasn’t surprised by my father’s words, both their bluntness and their censorious lack of specificity, and to prove I wasn’t, I read them aloud to my mother. Moreover, his letter — longer and more descriptive than mine — let me know where I stood, gave me ground under my feet, the foundation I needed to build my new life, back in New York with a new son. When I looked up from the letter at my mother, I saw in her eyes a melting softness, a deep sadness, but her mouth was set in grim determination.
“Well, that’s that, I suppose,” she said, with a nod of resignation.
Resignation? Quite the contrary. That minimal gesture foretold steely resolve and quiet defiance, as I would learn, and within two weeks.
“Do you have any plans for tomorrow?” By my mother’s tone of voice, whose range was symphonic, I knew this wasn’t a question but the overture to a request.
“Not really. Nothing special,” I said, warily. “Why?”
“Do you think you could be home before three o’clock tomorrow?”
“I suppose I could.” I continued to look at her, waiting for an explanation. “Why three?”
“Daddy’s coming over,” she bit off, like crow. The admission caused the muscles around my mother’s mouth to tighten but the rest of her face to slacken slightly, her skin losing some of its unusually youthful suppleness, her eyes to crackle with both “fire and ice,” as Jean Cocteau had once described the eyes of Michele Morgan, whose likeness — a blond version — to my mother more than one friend or family member had remarked upon. The fire of incipient resentment, the ice of latent sorrow, the two of which met and dissolved into a mist of melancholy forbearance.
I didn’t have to ask her why my father was coming, why she had asked him to come. She had arranged this meeting — God knows how much pride she had to swallow to pick up the telephone and call him (knowing I would not), what craftiness or cajolery she used (knowing that I lacked those skills or was unseasoned in them) to persuade him to disinter me and accept my present reincarnation as a single mother by choice, how much personal peace and happiness she was willing to sacrifice to permit him back into her life — for my, or, more precisely, for Anton’s sake.
My father arrived punctually, at three. If my parents had once been bitterly estranged, one would never have known it now, except for a few brief but not terribly uncomfortable lapses of conversation — hardly pregnant pauses — as between well-behaved and -intentioned people who find that they have little in common and so ask polite questions and recite charming anecdotes to maintain propriety and protocol and make the time pass. Or perhaps I misread the situation. Perhaps there was much more going on under the bland surface of social rectitude than met the eye. But both my parents were maritally savvy enough and separated long enough, or knew that there was too much at stake to blow it, to let any underlying emotional current from the past produce a ripple in the present. When Anton awoke from his nap and I brought him out to meet “company,” my father had already steeled himself with an unconvincing, toothy smile, but his eyes were spontaneously quizzical: Who is this most un-Chinese-looking toddler staring at me? How could such a child be my grandson? My father deflected his puzzlement by producing a Tonka truck from inside the plastic bag at his side (no doubt he had asked my mother’s advice, since Tonka toys were Anton’s favorite), just as he had defused a potentially poignant welcome by thrusting a box of Chinese pastries — coconut tartlets, steamed sponge cakes, egg custard tartlets — at my mother the moment she opened the door. Both peace offering and piece of armor, the pastries permitted my mother to make some tea around which we sat, well-behaved comme-il-faut adults, chatting about nothing and touching upon everything, while Anton played at our feet. After a diplom
atic two cups, my father took his leave, but not before over-smiling at Anton with still-disbelieving eyes and suggesting to me and my mother that he drop by again, perhaps in a few weeks — often enough to sustain a committed relationship, seldom enough to maintain a sense of the other’s incomparable worth — since he came into the city regularly to consult with his stockbroker. There was (or did I imagine it then? do I imagine it now?) a barely perceptible hesitation on my mother’s part — that minimal interstice of time in which she figured that future happiness would be hers if she declined, Anton’s and mine if she accepted — before she nodded and said with telling gravitas, “That would be nice.”
After she had seen my father to the door, my mother glanced at me. If it weren’t for you, said her eyes of fire and ice. If it weren’t for me, she would never have had to see my father again, and her life would have been uncomplicated, happy, free of painful memories? Or, if it weren’t for me, we would never have seen my father again, and life would have lacked a dimension, a dynamic, a wholeness, however imperfect, that is family? Both, probably. Family is rarely one thing or the other, but both, alternating at varying and unpredictable intervals. Yin and yang, the concept goes, evolved and continues to evolve the world as we know it through a dynamic interrelationship of opposites, a continuous interplay of extremes. Sun and moon. Man and woman. Union and separation. “There are no men at our gathering,” I noted.
“The moon is yin, the feminine force,” the ethnologist replied, pouring me and herself another cup of tea. “No men allowed. Or, more diplomatically, as the proverb states, ‘Men do not worship the moon; women do not makes sacrifices to the kitchen god.’ Look.”