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.
2. The Fall
It was the day after my thirteenth birthday. Father had just lost five thousand dollars in a casino in Macau, forcing our family to move from Tsim Sha Tsui, the bustling commercial district in Kowloon, to a village house in remote Yuen Long. The rent was two hundred Hong Kong dollars, three times cheaper than what we’d paid in the city.
In the communal backyard behind our house was an abandoned well surrounded by tall grass that whispered when the wind blew on winter nights. Older villagers avoided the well because there were rumors that ghosts dwelled in it. A hundred years before, a young concubine, with a stone tied around her neck, had jumped down the well to prove her innocence after being accused of having an affair with a wandering monk. People believed the well was so old that it had absorbed the essence of the sun, moon, stars, water, air, wind, sound, and light until it acquired a spirit of its own. A blind fortune-teller insisted the well was the third eye of an evil goddess who would observe the people above and snatch down the handsome ones-especially children-to feed her jealousy.
While children were warned to stay away from the forbidden opening, the younger adults didn’t care about it one way or another. They simply regarded the well in a practical way-as a trash bin.
As for myself, the myth pricked my curiosity during my lonely adolescence. I’d sneak to the well and stare down into the space below. Most of the time what I saw was completely different from the villagers’ descriptions. Rather than frightening, I found it fascinating. In the dim light, I could make out all kinds of objects-blankets, books, branches, twigs, papers, clothes-thrown down through a gaping hole in the mesh that covered the well’s mouth. I imagined a diary hidden among the piles of refuse, words inscribed on tear-streaked rice paper in vigorous calligraphy by the doomed concubine to bitterly lament her innocence. I also imagined photographs, faded and brownish, of forgotten people. A young bride, a happy family, the sad-faced concubine with her bald lover, a chubby baby with eyes widened as if asking: why was I thrown into this cold world?
During days of heavy rain, water would rise from the bottom and I’d see my own reflection with a small, round piece of blue sky floating behind my head. Sometimes I’d hear noises whispering below when the wind stirred the long grass aboveground. One evening I saw the reflection of the moon, so round and pregnant that I thought she might burst and drop into the well and make a splash so loud it would wake everybody from their dreams.