Petals from the Sky
Read Petals from the Sky Online
Authors: Mingmei Yip
Tags: #Fiction - General, #Asian American Novel And Short Story, #Buddhist nuns, #Contemporary Women, #Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), #Fiction, #Romance, #Buddhism, #General, #China, #Spiritual life, #General & Literary Fiction, #Asia, #Cultural Heritage, #History
Petals from the Sky
A
LSO BY
M
INGMEI
Y
IP
Peach Blossom Pavilion
To Geoffrey, loving husband and precious treasure
A thousand miles apart, yet the same moon shines over us all.
—Su Dongpo (1036–1101), Song dynasty poet
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
In writing a novel, between the first word and the last one, there is a long, head-scratching, and pencil-biting process of filling in the hundreds of pages in between.
This daunting task, seemingly solitary, could not have been completed without the help and support of many others.
First and foremost, I owe each of these 338 pages of
Petals from the Sky
to my husband, Geoffrey Redmond, an endocrinologist specializing in women’s hormones, himself an excellent writer with six books to his credit. Geoffrey is always my first reader, friendly critic, and trusted adviser, literary and otherwise.
I owe my ability to cheerfully complete my work to the great support and contagious enthusiasm of my agent, Susan Crawford, and my editor, Audrey LaFehr, whose appreciation and kindness would be any writer’s elixir.
I also want to give special thanks to my other Kensington supporters: Karen Auerbach, Maureen Cuddy, and Martin Biro, whose hard work and generosity contributed to the success of my first novel,
Peach Blossom Pavilion
.
I must mention some of the many other writers and writing instructors who helped me along a writer’s arduous, yet wonderful, path:
Neal Chandler, director of Cleveland State University’s Imagination Workshop, and a writing teacher par excellence.
Lewis Frumkes, director of Marymount Manhattan College’s Writing Center, who graciously invited me to many of Marymount’s literary events, where I was privileged to meet some of the great authors of our time.
Max Byrd, author of historical novels and workshop director of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
Karen Joy Fowler,
New York Times
best-selling author of
The Jane Austin Book Club,
and instructor at the Imagination Workshop.
Andre Dubus III, author of
House of Sand and Fog,
an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and instructor at the Imagination Workshop.
Ray Strait, instructor, Palm Springs Writers’ Conference.
Kitty Griffin, my German “sister,” fellow children’s book writer, and coauthor of
The Foot-Stomping Adventures of Clementine Sweet
, whose generosity and kindness are rarely matched.
Lee Kochenderfer, author of young adult fiction—though our encounter was brief, her support for me has been more than generous.
Ellen Scordato, instructor and virtuoso grammarian, New School University, who patiently and generously answered my questions and solved my many puzzles of grammar that have no equivalent in my native Chinese.
Victor Turks, gracious host during my event at the City College of San Francisco.
My writer friends Sheila Weinstein, Esta Fischer, Chun Yu, Kathleen Spiveck, Baixi Su, and Shobhan Bantwal, for their generous help and delightful friendship.
Hannelore Hahn, founder and executive director—and her daughter Elizabeth Julia Stoumen—of the International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG), for their untiring efforts to help make many women writers’ dreams come true.
And others to whom I am connected through happy karma in this Thousand-Miles-Rest Dust:
Teryle Ciaccia, close friend of two decades and fellow Tai Chi instructor, who never ceases to send me good
qi,
whether by phone or in person.
Elsbeth Reimann, fellow IWWG participant, who always keeps me cheerful at the IWWG’s annual conference at Skidmore.
Eugenia Oi Yan Yau, my one-time student, now distinguished professor of music and vocalist, upon whom I have always been able to rely. And, of course, her husband, Jose Santos.
In Chinese fashion, I must also acknowledge the overwhelming debt of a daughter to her parents. Without my parents’ vision and selfless support, I would not be who I am today: a happy woman whose dreams have come true.
For my other friends and readers, wherever in this world or another, the same moon shines over us all.
Contents
8. The Same Moon Shines Over Us All
12. The Nun and the Prostitute
21. Why Don’t You Try It with a Woman?
24. Men Are Nothing but Trouble
31. Great Protector of the Dharma
PART ONE
1
The Retreat
M
other choked and spilled her tea. “
Ai-ya,
what evil person has planted this crazy idea into your head?”
I was twenty and had just told her my wish to become a Buddhist nun.
She stooped to wipe the stain from the floor, her waist disappearing into the fold of flesh around her middle. “Remember the daughter of your great-great-grandfather, who entered the nunnery because she was jilted by her fiancé? She had no face left; she had no name, no friends, no hair.
“She just sat the whole day like a statue; the only difference was she had a cushion to sit on. And she called that meditation.” Mother looked me in the eye. “Is that the life you want? No freedom, no love, no meat?”
Before I could respond, she plunged on: “Meng Ning, there are only three reasons a girl wants to become a nun: before she meets the right man, after she has met the wrong one, or worse, after the right one has turned out to be the wrong one.” Mother clicked her tongue and added, “Not until after you’ve tasted love, real love, then tell me again you want to be a nun.”
That had been ten years ago, but my wish to be a nun had not faltered.
Not until 1987, on a hot summer day in a Buddhist retreat in Hong Kong.
I hopped off the bus on Lantau Island and walked toward the Fragrant Spirit Temple—the oldest in the colony. The path led up a hill beside a maze of crumbling monastery walls over which trees spilled out as if to taste the forbidden world outside.
As I joined the crowd hastening to get under the cool shade of the foliage, a plump, middle-aged woman caught up with me, panting and grinning.
“Miss, is this the route to the Fragrant Spirit Temple for the Seven-Day-Temporary-Leave-Home-Buddhist-Retreat?”
I nodded and gestured toward the throng. Two thick, round pillars flanked the temple’s crimson gate. Above its lintel hung a wooden sign with four large, yellow, Chinese characters in ancient seal script:
MARVELOUS SCENERY OF GREAT COMPASSION
.
My heart raced. Within this gate for the next seven days, I would be tested for my karma to be, or not be, a Buddhist nun. At twenty, I had made up my mind to avoid the harassment of marriage. Now at thirty, I still couldn’t decide whether to remain in the dusty world as a single career woman, or to enter the empty world as a career nun.
Why should I feel so nervous? After all, in the absolute sense, is there a difference between a shaved head and one with three-thousand-threads-of-trouble?
Gingerly, I stepped through the crowd into the temple’s expansive lobby and a soothing aroma of jasmine incense. Activities were in full swing, with people assembling for the opening ceremony of the retreat. Electronic Buddhist music boomed from different corners of the two-hundred-year-old temple. I listened intently, seeking the music through layers of noise arising from gray-robed monks and nuns, black-robed workers, volunteers, and retreat participants. It was a synthesized version of the traditional Buddhist chant “Precious Incense Offered for Discipline and Meditation.” My heart instantly warmed to the familiar tune that I’d heard so many times. However, I still preferred the human voice, even when sung from the wrinkled lips of old monks and nuns. I hurried to the end of a long, slowly moving queue.
A little ahead of me stood a thirtyish man with a robust frame and light hair—a foreigner. Surely a devout Buddhist to have come all the way here to join the retreat.
I flung back my hair, feeling dulled by the heat and hating the sticky feeling of my blouse pasted to my back, unwilling to let go.
Looking around, I saw a gilded Buddha statue on a tall table, hands in the
abhaya
and
dana
mudras—the have-no-fear and wish-granting gestures. Flowers, fruits, and thick incense sticks in bronze burners crowded the rosewood surface encircling the golden figure. Under Buddha’s all-seeing gaze, an expensively dressed woman stuffed a pile of banknotes into the capacious belly of the
gongde xiang
—Merit Accumulating Box. How would she look if she shaved her head and wore a Buddhist robe?
“Looks very bad,” my mother would say whenever she saw a nun. “Meng Ning, you’re a very beautiful woman. Beautiful women deserve nice clothes, nice jewelry, and a nice husband.”
Mother was born in the year of the cat. And like a cat, she was snobbish, sensitive, sensuous. In elementary school, she was so cute and petite that her classmates used to call her “Little Sweetie.” Then she became “Coca-Cola” in high school. Of course Mother was sweet, bubbly, and as popular as Coke, but she’d told me what her classmates really meant was that her precocious body had the voluptuous shape of the soft-drink bottle.
Mother, beautiful in her youth, had a lot of nice jewelry and, according to her, a nice husband. But a miserable life. My father never bought Mother any of the jewelry; instead, he sold pieces of it so he could go to gambling houses to act like a big spender among the pretty hostesses who’d caress his face with one hand and rummage his pockets with the other. The jewelry came from my grandmother, a businesswoman in Taipei with a chain of jewelry stores.
My grandfather died young, leaving my grandmother with four bony kids and an empty stove. She used the jewelry repair skill she’d learned from Grandfather to obtain work as an apprentice in a small gold store. Later, she was able to start her own business, then expand. She had fourteen stores and more than two hundred employees before she died.
So during those years, the jewelry kept flowing like tap water into my mother’s life. But when Grandmother and Father died, they left Mother and me penniless. Grandmother left nearly all her money to her three sons, in accordance with the old Chinese belief that if one left money to daughters, it would eventually be lost to another name. However, she didn’t feel right leaving Mother nothing, so over the years she secretly sent Mother money and gave her part of her jewelry. But how would Grandmother feel if she could find out that not only had the jewelry not turned into food on our table, it had paid debts to the loan sharks?
Despite what Father had done, Mother’s eyes would moisten and her voice soften when she talked about her first and only love. “Your father was a romantic man. In our age, people had arranged marriages, but we married for love.”
Then she told me how Father had hidden a pistol in his pocket the night he proposed.
“Mei Lin”—he’d aimed the gun at his chest—“if you say no, I’ll blow my heart out!”
He was gone, and Mother had been the one left with a shattered heart.
That pistol always seemed to me a symbol of my parents’ marriage. It had never been fired, but was always there to suggest love, threat, and a bad choice. Their life had constantly shifted between passion and tension, with me squeezed between them like a cushion.
When I was ten, I came home one day and found my parents in a fight.
Mother wagged a finger at Father. “You’re a good-for-nothing poet. I can’t stand you anymore!”
My heart hurt to hear that. An unhappy marriage makes some women quiet and others garrulous; my mother was definitely among the latter.
“I can’t afford you anymore, you spoiled baby!” Father retorted.
“Spoiled? Have you sold your poems or calligraphy to buy me clothes and jewelry?”
Father was speechless for a moment; then he jumped up from the sofa, grabbed me, and shook my arm.
“How did your daughter grow so big if I haven’t paid for anything?”
“Do you really think you pay for her—”
Before Mother finished, Father let go of me and snatched my copy of
Dream of the Red Chamber
from the chipped coffee table. “Doesn’t this dream cost money?” Then he threw the book down and seized Mother’s TV magazines (we couldn’t afford a TV). “Doesn’t this gossip cost money?” He went on to grab the radio, the cracked teapot, my drawing book, my crayons, the day-old bread, asking the same question until he exhausted both the list and himself.
During their fight, I looked down at my feet so I didn’t have to look at their unhappy faces. I imagined my right big toe was my father. The left big one was my mother. The rest were the brothers and sisters I’d never had.
The little toe on the right was chubby, so he was the chubby little brother who’d died three days after he was born. The little left toe was as small as a peanut, and that was me. It always made me sad to look at my two little toes so far from each other, like the unbridgeable distance between us. Would my little brother have lived if Father had stopped gambling?
When Father’s and Mother’s voices grew angrier, I moved my toes together as if they had stopped quarreling. Married life didn’t appeal to me at all, not even when based on love. Perhaps a nun’s life would be better. Later I thought so because of a secret I’d never told anyone since the day I fell into the well.