Discussion Questions

1. Why did Meng Ning consider becoming a nun?

2. What is the significance of these two early accidents: Meng Ning’s falling into the well when she was thirteen, and the fire in the Golden Lotus Temple?

3. Although Meng Ning’s true love was Michael, why was she also attracted to Philip Noble? Why do you think he tried to seduce his best friend’s fiancée?

4. Michael is a scientifically educated medical doctor. How did he react to the visit to the fortune-teller?

5. How would you characterize the relationship between Meng Ning and her mother?

6. Meng Ning’s father plagiarized poems and gambled away everything. Did he have any redeeming traits?

7. When Meng Ning found out her conservative Chinese mother had had an affair with an American ambassador and betrayed her father, how did Meng Ning react, and why?

8. What is the significance of the scarred nun Dai Nam’s role in this novel?

9. How did Meng Ning’s nun mentor, Depending on Emptiness, try to stop Meng Ning from marrying Michael? Why did she do this?

10. Buddhist temples sometimes preserve the bodies of famous monks and nuns. What is the motive for this custom and what is your reaction to it?

11. To what degree does Depending on Emptiness exemplify Buddhist virtues of nonattachment, compassion, and selflessness?

12. Why did Meng Ning finally decide to marry Michael instead of become a nun? What roles did the car accident and elevator fall play?

13. Enlightened to Emptiness, like many nuns, was given to the nunnery by her family before she had had much experience of the world. How do you feel about parents deciding for their children what sort of lives they will lead?

14. What do Meng Ning and Michael experience in the small temple near the end of the novel, and what is the significance of their being unable to find it again?

15. How is Buddhism depicted in the novel?

Mingmei Yip