Daughter of Heaven

by Leslie Li

  “Xing is distraught, close to despair. The brutal wind whips his torn trousers about his knees and whistles around the corners of the flimsy hut he has built for shelter. He raises his arms above his head and cries: ‘Father! Father! I have no money to keep my promise. Even if I did, how could I return to you like this, a failure?’ He drags himself to a rocky ledge overlooking the sea where the surf spatters him with its chilling spray and his only thought is the simple desire to sink peacefully beneath the waves, when a blinding ball of light rises out of the sea. When Xing can open his eyes again, a beautiful woman is standing beside him and the once-furious water is smooth as glass. Stunned by the apparition and at the end of his tether, Xing pours out his heart to her: all the physical hardships he has endured and, finally, his unfulfilled promise whose deadline is that very day”.

  “The woman is touched by Xing’s story,” I said when Lao Shi paused, indicating I should continue, “particularly the sincerity with which he speaks about his about-to-be broken word. To help him keep it, she gives him a pearl the size of a litchi nut. She tells Xing that his father has grown very old since his departure and that he should set out immediately for Guilin. Then she disappears.

  “Xing sells the pearl for several ounces of silver, enough for the journey home. But how can he face his father empty-handed? He must invest it, he decides, and make a profit, so that his father will be proud of him, so that all the misery of the past three years can be forgotten. With the silver, Xing buys a day’s catch of fish straight off the wharf, which he takes to the city of Canton and sells. With the handsome profit he buys manufactured goods: tackle, rope, nets, canned goods, clothes. These he takes back to Hepu and sells at the marketplace, where his profits grow even greater. Great enough so that he buys himself a boat and sets himself up as a merchant selling and buying his way between Canton and Hepu. His profits continue to increase, almost exponentially and, with them, thoughts of taking a wife, one of the willowy beauties brought to his attention by several Cantonese matchmakers, who know a good catch when they see one. Thoughts of his father in far-off Guilin and his unkept promise grow fainter with every tael of silver he pockets, with every new deal he makes. Besides — and you’ll excuse me for saying so, but the story requires me to say it — how can Xing possibly take his beautiful urbanite bride back to the rural home of an impoverished old stonemason?”

  “An impoverished old stonemason who has hardly been idle since his son left,” Lao Shi intervened authoritatively, a bit of pique flavoring his gravelly voice. “Oh, no, since Xing’s departure, I worked harder than ever so I could buy a small plot of land that might root my son to Guilin, from which he would never stray again. Hacking and carving rock for this purpose was my sole hope, the one thing that kept me alive. Every tap of my hammer on my chisel was one less second that I would have to wait for Xing’s return, one more copper coin to purchase a piece of property to hold my son to native soil. The day you say the woman rose from the sea and appeared before Xing was the day I threw down my hammer and chisel and ran to this very hill where he would find me waiting for him. Whenever I saw a young man in the distance with a load over his shoulder, I waved and shouted, beside myself with gladness. But never were any of them Xing. And so I returned to this hill every day. And every day brought the same results. Other fathers whose sons had gone off to make their fortunes all had letters and gifts from them. I had only silence. Silence grew heavy on me. Heavy as my footsteps as I made my way up the hill to see if Xing had come home that day, then down the hill to my home knowing he had not. Until one day, having climbed the hill, I decided it would be for the last time. At sunset, instead of returning home, I sat where I am sitting now and vowed I would not budge until my son returned to me, even if it took forever. So here I sit, waiting still. I don’t know when I turned to stone. Perhaps soon after my heart did.”

  We remained in silence for a few minutes, both of us gazing out over the South China Sea where the sun was slung low on its diurnal arc.

  “Your son broke his promise to you, but it was out of an overdeveloped sense of ambition, of wanting to please you, to make you proud of him.”

  “Out of greed and self-importance,” Lao Shi rackled, his chin set more solidly than ever.

  “At least you have the pleasure of knowing that he was successful in what he chose to do,” I replied.

  “You say that because you feel the opposite about yourself. You displeased your father and your mother by your life choices, your familial transgressions. But just think. You gave your father the son you weren’t and that your mother didn’t. By not marrying, by carrying the onus of unwed mother, no small shame in Chinese society, you were able to become your father’s ‘son,’ demonstrate your filial piety, and carry on the family name through a son of your own. You had to break an honored custom in order to fulfill a sacred duty, the foremost duty a son has toward his parents. To carry on the family name.”

  “I’ve never thought about it that way,” I said, hoarsely. “I never thought about it, consciously, at all.”

  “And you came back to Guilin. You came back in your father’s company That meant more to him than if your novel had sold a million copies. What mattered is that you wrote it. You revealed your Chinese side. More than that, you appreciated it.”

  “He never read it”.

  “He died before he could. He read a third of it. Do you know how hard it is to read when you can’t breathe? Try doing anything when you’re suffocating.”

  “I know he read enough to tell me that I’d misspelled Nai-nai’s given name.”

  “You spelled Nai-nai’s name wrong.”

  My father was flipping through a copy of Bittersweet. They were his first words regarding my book, which had just been published. They were more than a correction. They were an accusation, a reproof.

  “I deliberately changed Nai-nai’s name so that I could write about her in a fictional way, so I could write about her, and our family, at all.”

  “Its Xiuwen, not Xuewen.”

  “Stop pitying yourself. Think of it this way: that he gave your book that much attention. That he was searching for ways to say something, anything, to you that revolved around you and what mattered to you, and not him and his illness. He was not an articulate man, even in Chinese. He showed his love in other ways, maladroit though they were. It was for you to ferret them out, translate them. He hefted your novel and declared it ‘solid as a rock.’ Remember?’”

  “I think I’d better be getting back.” I stood up, opened my bag, and shoved my hand into it, feeling for paper and stone.

  “We haven’t finished the story yet. Please sit down.”

  I looked up at him, irritated, but I sat back down glumly, my legs splayed as when I was a child. I tossed a pebble on the ground in front of me, a chip off the old block. “My turn, or yours?”

  “Mine, since I know how it ends. For both Xing and me. Successful, you say. Yes, more successful than you think and than I’d dreamed. The same year that I turned to stone, the Dragon King held a birthday party for himself and invited all the lesser dragons and water gods and goddesses, including the beautiful water spirit who had appeared before my son in his moment of need. As part of the celebration, the guests had to tell a story, a story that revolved around an event that had happened to them that year. A minor goddess who inhabited the Li River near Guilin chose to tell my story, of how I had turned into stone. The Dragon King and everyone present, especially the water spirit, were appalled and incensed to learn of Xing’s unfil-ial behavior, his broken promise and its terrible results. After the party ended, the water spirit swam to Hepu and inquired about my son’s whereabouts. Told he was a rich merchant living in Canton, she swam upstream and appeared before him on his sumptuous boat, where he was busy writing up new orders. When he didn’t recognize her, thought she was some groupie hoping to become part of his entourage, she spoke: ‘You promised me that, with the pearl I gave you, you would leave immediately for Guilin and your f
ather, to whom you had promised to return after three years. You broke your word not once but twice. Why didn’t you return to Guilin?’

  “Xing was silent, stunned by the woman’s sudden apparition as well as her words, words that had to do with the past he’d rather forget and nothing to do with what was important to him now.

  “‘Your father has turned into stone waiting for you. And I am here to reclaim the pearl I gave you, believing that you were telling me the truth. Have you nothing to say for yourself?’

  “Xing, forgetting where he had come from and remembering who he had become, finally spoke up. ‘My father has turned into stone, you say? Saves me the expense of buying a casket, doesn’t it? As for the pearl you gave, not lent, me, I thank you for your generosity It’s turned me into a very rich man.’

  “The water spirit let out an angry, anguished howl that made the hairs on the nape of Xing’s neck stand on end, then she vanished from sight. A storm blew up out of nowhere, churning the black water and frothing the dark waves that rose higher and higher over Xing’s boat. A thick wall of water gathered and climbed with appalling speed, hovered over Xing’s boat like a menacing ghost, then with its fall force plummeted onto the deck with a thunderous roar, snapping the craft in two like a dry twig and sending it and everyone aboard to the bottom of the sea.”

  “My father requested that his ashes be scattered at sea,” I murmured, after a while. “The moment we did, the water grew choppy The boat pitched and yawed. We had to hold on to the railings and poles not to be thrown about, or off. The turbulence lasted for several minutes. It was a bit frightening, and somehow appropriate, as though my father were speaking, which he so rarely did. Making his presence known, now that he was absent. I’m sorry about your son.”

  “But satisfied with the story, I hope, though it lacks a happy ending.”

  “Are there endings to myths? They seem to go on and on, at least as they touch the lives of the living.”

  “And the dead, I assure you. Or not the dead, the mythic.”

  From my bag I extracted the requisite gifts, rock and paper. I felt that I had forgotten something. I should have brought an offering of food. Or had I forgotten on purpose, food propitiating both the living and the dead but not the mythic? The paper I’d brought with me was a preface, “Sucking on a Stone,” the barest beginnings of a story, a tentative start, a promise, hopefully, of things to come. The rock was a stone given to me, not by my mother in the form of a story as was the preface but by Nai-nai in actual fact just before she left New York to return to Guilin. It was an oval piece of creamy-white, translucent jade the Chinese call “mutton fat” that fit snugly in the palm of my hand and caused my fingers to curl over it in a loose fist. It was carved to resemble a cicada. I extended both my hands, the one holding the rock, the other holding the paper, toward Lao Shi.

  “You know, of course” — the way he said “of course” led me to believe that whatever it was I was supposed to know I didn’t and that now he would tell me — “as all Chinese know, that the cicada is a symbol of regeneration and immortality. The insect sheds its skin at maturity, then sleeps underground for years before emerging into the world above. The ancient Chinese buried their dead with a piece of jade. They believed it prevented the body from decaying and that it guaranteed a fortuitous rebirth in the next life. The stone was cut and shaped to fit different parts of the body. For example, that cicada-shaped piece in your hand would be placed in the mouth of the deceased in the hope that he would speak in the hereafter. There it would become a ‘tongue of jade,’ an oracle or the vehicle for oracles. The best way to offer a gift is to wrap it, don’t you think? A gift within and a gift without.”

  I looked at the objects in my hands and saw, finally, what he was alluding to. I began to fold the preface around the jade cicada to make it presentable, a present, although Lao Shi already knew what lay inside. Still, there was pleasure in revealing what is known as there was in what is unknown.

  “They say that nothing is as solid as a rock, as enduring as stone. A book is only pages, thin, transient, torn, timefaded, tossed aside, or out. Pages of paper. Isn’t that so?”

  “Now you sound like my father.” I folded the final flap and wound a few blades of long tough grasses growing at my feet around my offering, then tied them tight at the pointy top. The packet looked like a zongzi. I’d brought “food” after all, nourishment for the numinous.

  “Then you must go back farther than your father. To your grandfather, who played finger games with you. Rock-scissors-paper, remember?”

  “Yes. Scissors cuts paper,” I said perfunctorily. “Rock smashes scissors. Paper enfolds rock.” Then I realized: “Paper wins. Paper enfolds rock, every time.”

  “I accept your gifts, but I cannot take them. That is, you’ll have to bring them to me to where I can use them.”

  “You mean I have to ...”

  “Will you? Place the cicada in my mouth? Note how jagged and squat my body is. Stepping-stones practically, and not too many of them. It shouldn’t be difficult for you to climb up my back, across my chin, and crawl into my mouth.”

  It wasn’t difficult at all. His back was gradually stepped, like a miniature Egyptian pyramid, and the sun was setting, so it was cool, with a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea. His neck and chin required a little bit of reconnaissance before I found the best route to his parted lips, where I threw a leg up, pulled my torso across, and crawled inside. Where I found myself reminded me of the kiva I once entered in the tufa cliff dwellings outside of Santa Fe — a tiny cave where members of a tribe of Amerindians long defunct purified their thoughts and meditated.

  “I’m in.” My voice resonated against the stone walls. “Now I know why they call it the ‘mouth’ of a cave,” I couldn’t resist saying.

  “Are you afraid?” The rock floor vibrated slightly, less than a tremble, more like a buzz.

  “No,” I answered truthfully “On the contrary, I like it in here. I feel safe and protected. It’s like a womb, and the sea I see is the amniotic fluid. Just keep your voice low. And by all means, don’t swallow.”

  “How about if I let you do all the talking? Read to me, will you? From the story on the paper around the stone.”

  “It’s not a story. Only a potential story’s possible beginning.”

  “Then begin at the beginning, if you please. Time stands still when one’s being read to.”

  I cleared my throat. Lao Shi gathered his knees even tighter into his chest. The setting sun bathed both our faces with gold. The jade cicada was warm in my hand.

  “When we were little, my mother thought of a uniquely devious way of getting my sisters and me to eat our dinner. It was usual at that time (the 1950s) for mothers of small children who were dilatory at the table to employ the classic admonition, Just think of the starving children in China.’ Or India. Or Africa.

  “My mother told us a story instead.”