by Samuel Shem
They arrive at a great ancient moon gate, a capricious pink set in a fading orange-pastel wall. An aged monk, in robes that once might have been saffron but now have gone brown, stops them. One yuan each. Pep digs into his fanny pack.
Xiao Lu comes forward. “This is my daughter I was forced to give away ten years ago. Now she has found me again. These kind people have raised her. Please show them every courtesy. Thank you, Venerable Father.” She sees, in the old monk’s eyes, his surprise—not only that she has broken her habitual silence, or that she has left her sweeping early, but that she is a mother. Wordlessly, he motions them through.
She leads them through the first square of two small temples that store the centuries of wooden Buddhas and bodhisattvas, then up the steps of the second square of empty, neglected classrooms, and into the vast open courtyard of the Elephant Temple, its domed roof supported by four soaring, gleaming tree trunks. The front and back are open to the air, and in the center stands the white elephant atop which is the lotus with the golden Buddha. She stops and raises her eyes to the sky. Her ritual devotions are now, for the first time, freed from her burden of sorrow, freed for what she has longed for: to be new. Whenever she enters this place she stares up at the mountain and feels it shadowing the temple like the underbelly of a black dragon, the trees and bushes and flowers all around like its shed scales. Now her mind is whirring in turmoil and confusion, desperate to communicate with her child, hoping that one of the monks or nuns will know their language. She sees how wealthy these people are, and feels embarrassed at how poor she is. How their ten years with Chun have centered them in happiness, their wide round eyes filled with confidence and hope, while her ten years have leached out her heart. She sighs.
Now, even though they will think her even more strange, she must make her bows to the Buddha in the temple. As she passes the Elephant Bathing Pool she wishes she could tell Chun the story of how Pu Gong climbed the mountain and had a vision of a man riding a six-tusked white elephant, and above his head was a halo of colored light. Wishes she could sit beside Chun and tell how Pu Gong traveled to India and visited a Buddhist monk, who told him that the man on the white elephant was the bodhisattva Samantabhadra, protector of Hundred Mile Mountain, and told him to go back and build a temple there. The Elephant Bathing Pool is the exact spot where the bodhisattva landed and gave his elephant a bath, before settling in to forgo his own enlightenment to help others along the Eightfold Path, and to be the protector of the mountain. Chun would like this story. It hurts her not to be able to tell it—not only to her but also to Xia. With sadness she realizes that all she can do now is point to the pool, and then point to the open temple where they can see the statue of Pu Gong’s white elephant, and wave her hand for them to follow her.
Again the man gestures that they need to find someone who can translate.
She cups her hand to her ear and indicates that they should listen, and they will hear the monks and nuns at prayer, the sound carrying from the Pure-Sound Pavilion, which is in the next courtyard, through the gate at the top of the winding steps. She points to his watch and tries to tell them that the monks and nuns are all at their dusk prayers now, and they will see them in about half an hour, for the evening meal. They listen, and nod—she thinks they have understood. Whether or not they have, she has no choice but to do her own devotions to the Buddha before she can do anything else on this sacred ground. She goes into the temple.
The Macys follow her. She points to the elephant, and then goes to the prayer cushions placed in front of it, and kneels down on one of them. She starts to pray, murmuring and bowing her head repeatedly to the divinity.
Clio is touched by her devotion. Xiao Lu puts it ahead of anything, even this. But why isn’t she chanting with the others, with the sangha of monks and nuns? Why is she worshipping apart, alone? Is she part of the monastery, or not? Her sister said she was not at home with people—that she was “selfish.” Living in the woods, alone.
But now, in the first lull from the shock of their meeting, Clio becomes aware of the temple. The flattened dome roof and four stupas at the corners give it a Tibetan feel, but the central arch and arched windows look almost Moorish, as does the inlaid tile work bordering each arch and facade. The chanting, guttural and harsh, sounds like the tapes of Tibetan prayer chants that Tulku, the Spook Rock janitor, played. She, Pep, and Katie walk into the temple. The elephant is life-size, cast in bronze and copper and enameled a gleaming white, with dark eyes, delicate lashes, six tusks, and a short trunk. It stands on four lotus pads, each the size of a child’s plastic wading pool. The setting sun slips in and strikes a golden Buddha sitting in a silver lotus as large as a car on the pachyderm’s back. Clio is awed by the sight. The angled rays burnish the Buddha a liquid, living amber, caressing each fold of his robe, each finger stopped still for two millennia in a classic mudra—one hand palm down on one of his crossed knees, the other raised with an index finger pointing up, in what Clio knows is benediction, but what Pep takes as a warning, and what Katie sees as a light bulb going off inside him, like he has a bright idea.
They walk around the railing that protects the statue. Looking at the elephant’s backside, Clio notices that the hocks in back of the knees are worn smooth—clearly by human hands touching them, for luck. The centuries of touch have worn away the white enamel, and shining silver metal is revealed, as if of exposed bone.
“Can I rub it, Mom, for luck?”
“Good idea.” Clio catches a glimpse of Xiao Lu, still murmuring and touching her forehead over and over to the ground. She feels a kinship with her, a point of contact, and thinks to join her. But something stops her. She feels that she herself has not been serious enough in her own spiritual practice, not devoted enough. A Yankee, with those stiff Hale genes. Dabbling in spirituality, never in real spirit. A suburban seeker, a dilettante. All of this overwhelms her, keeps her from joining Xiao Lu. All of this, but more. But what?
She feels a chill. A damp shadow is crawling down from the peaks, falling over the temple steps, and coating the stone, the rocks, the plants, and the sacred carvings with a dewy sheen that makes Clio apprehensive. She senses the mountain looming over them all, an immense, rough shape that seems ready to come to life in the near dark. She checks on Pep and Katie. He’s sitting on a stone bench beside the little pool, and Katie is bent down, a stick in her hand, playing with a school of red and white carp. To Clio they both look vulnerable, and in some danger. Wherever her eye turns, there, above the interlocking temples of the monastery, is the mountain.
She shivers, and goes to Katie.
She seems fine, a twig in her hand, playing with the fish. When she’s in touch with an animal, she’s always fine. Clio sits beside Pep. He puts his big arm around her, holding her tight to him. She snuggles in. They sit in silence but for the monks’ chanting, billowing up to fill the sails of the fleeing daylight, and the murmuring of Xiao Lu. The place, to her, seems to be caught in a time warp, ancient, the sound of a handul of voices in ragged unison chanting the prayers that have been chanted for two millennia in this decaying place, sending out songs of the spirit to float in the thick, damp air. Xiao Lu is a link to so much!
“Bare ruined choirs,” Pep says, as if reading her mind. She smiles at him, and he holds her more tightly.
Xiao Lu finishes, and walks over to Katie, smiling. She kneels beside her at the pool and takes away the stick she has been using to chase the fish. Katie is surprised and doesn’t understand. Xiao Lu tries to say that it is a sacred pool, and that you cannot play with the fish. Her child nods, gets up, and goes to sit next to the woman. To Xiao Lu she doesn’t look happy, and she feels sorry for that. But it is a rule. Xiao Lu follows her and stands before the three of them. To disguise her turmoil, she smiles.
“I feel bad I did the wrong thing, with the fish,” Katie says. “Sorry, Mom.”
“I’m sure it’s okay, dear, you didn’t know.”
>
“I have like a hundred questions, and I can’t ask any.”
“I know. It’s really frustrating.”
“I guess she feels that way too.”
“I’ll try again,” Pep says, and through gesture asks about a translator.
Xiao Lu points toward the sound of chanting, which is growing even louder, echoing off the faces of the cliffs. Again she points to his watch and makes eating motions, pointing to the roof of a monastery building they can see above a wall, a moon gate of which opens to a garden. In fifteen minutes or so the prayers will end and everyone will go to dinner; the Macys can eat with them. Pep asks where they can sleep. She nods and points in the same direction as the dining hall.
During this, it’s clear to Clio and Pep that Xiao Lu only has eyes for Katie. She rarely even looks at Pep and Clio, as if they are not there. Fascinated with her, she keeps touching her hand, her arm, her cheek, as if sounding a depth, to make sure that this child is real, and really here. She is acting giddy, even girlish, getting Katie to stand back-to-back with her to see who is taller—they are almost exactly the same height—comparing their hair, laughing when she sees, in the low rays of light, the blush of red in Katie’s, and then pointing to the back of Katie’s head, the same double whorl, which she indicates to Katie symbolizes her “big brain”—meaning wisdom. Then she takes her hand and runs with her to one of the two bronze incense holders standing as high as the two of them, and helps her light a stick of incense as large as a whisk broom and place it there. They race each other back to Clio and Pep. Both are laughing.
Katie asks Xiao Lu where she sleeps. She points back down to the series of courtyards and the gate and the forest, and then makes walking motions.
Suddenly Clio has an idea to help make contact. She takes out Ming Tao’s directions—in Chinese, translated by Rhett—and spreads the piece of paper out on the bench.
Xiao Lu is startled—it’s the sheet she gave to Ming Tao! She told Ming Tao that if, on one of her trips to Changsha, she found them, she was to give it to them and tell them that she wanted to see them. Somehow Second Sister did find her! Xiao Lu gestures to Clio for a pen. Clio hands her a Magic Marker she carries for Katie to draw with. Xiao Lu looks it over. Tilting the wedge tip she swiftly draws a map from the monastery to the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, and up along a stream and across a series of log bridges to a little house.
“I think she’s saying, dear,” Clio says, “that she lives in a house in the woods—just like Ming Tao told us.”
“Mom, can you ask where the monkeys are? Tao said she loves animals.”
“How can I do that, dear?”
“I’ll do it,” Pep says. “Xiao Lu?” He points to the map, wiggles his fingers along the path to the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, and then suddenly jumps, looks up, points high into a nearby tree, puts his hands down on the ground knuckles first and lumbers about and scratches under his arm and jumps and howls.
“Dad, stop!”
It is obvious to Xiao Lu that he is pretending that he has suddenly gone crazy. She laughs and makes eating gestures, thinking it’s because he is hungry. He tries harder. She laughs harder, pointing to the chanting monks and making eating motions.
“I guess she doesn’t know a joking monkey when she sees one,” Pep says.
“Here, gimmee.” Katie takes the map, turns it over, and carefully draws a picture of a monkey with a long tail, eating a banana. She can feel Xiao Lu sitting close to her. Their legs are touching, their heads close together. Her scent is like fresh earth and the eucalyptus soap her mom loves. Xiao Lu taps her shoulder, her neck, with a single finger. Katie wants to touch her hand to reassure her but can’t bring herself to do it. She finishes the drawing and hands it to her.
Now Xiao Lu understands—the man was trying to imitate a monkey. She nods, holds the pen upright between thumb, index, and middle fingers, and with a series of rapid brushstrokes draws not one but three monkeys.
The Macys are astonished. With a few strokes she has captured not only the idea of a monkey, but a particular species—short arms and long legs and stumps of tails, their round, furry heads and faces giving them the look of curious kids, or wise old men. And each of the three monkeys is different, an individual with its own face and expression—one happy, one puzzled, one surprised. All done in an instant, without hesitation or correction, with an elegance of line and a deep sense of the animals.
Katie’s mouth is open in surprise. In her wide grin, her braces catch the last light. Xiao Lu reads her appreciation, and smiles broadly. Then she looks at Katie’s mouth, and tries to tap the metal of the braces with a finger. Katie pulls away and with a gesture asks, “Do you know these monkeys?” Xiao Lu nods. Katie asks, “Where are they?”
Xiao Lu tilts the Magic Marker on edge and draws a mountain peak and lacy trees, up a trail from the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, away from her house. She puts miniscule but clear suggestions of the three individual monkeys in the trees, and hands it back.
Katie makes hand motions for “Can we go there?”
Xiao Lu smiles broadly, delighted. She knows the monkeys well—has visited them often, wishing that she could bring her daughters there, to watch them play.
“Ching?” Katie says, placing her hands together. “Ching-ching?”
“What’s that mean, honey?” Clio says, surprised that she’s using a Chinese word.
“It means ‘please.’” Xiao Lu is startled, and again smiles, and nods. “Great!” says Katie, and asks her, “Can we go tomorrow?”
Xiao Lu is puzzled. Katie makes a quick drawing of the sun going down, and then coming up again on the other side of the earth. Xiao Lu nods again.
Clio is surprised that Katie is so easily familiar with Xiao Lu—it’s so unlike her. She glances at Pep. He is smiling, nodding. They have rarely seen Katie act this way with adults, except them. With kids she often shows an assertiveness, taking charge on playdates or on the play structure at school. But with adults she’s always been shy. She’ll hardly ever answer their questions, never initiate contact or conversation. Now she is, as if she’s known Xiao Lu for years.
A lone gong sounds. Once, twice, and then a third time, each catching the echo off the mountains of the first, and then the second, and then the third, so that it devolves into a modulated chord that seems to arise in the high live stone itself.
A stream of brown-clad monks and then a few nuns flows out through the gateway above, ripples rapidly down the winding steps, and then switchbacks left through the gateway leading to dinner. Xiao Lu smiles and indicates to them to follow.
26
Picnic-type benches and tables are set end-to-end down the center of a cold, damp, high-ceilinged dining hall, able to seat a hundred or more. Perhaps a dozen or so monks and the few nuns are seated on the benches at the last two tables, waiting for the Macys and Xiao Lu to sit down so that everyone can eat.
Pep has read that the Buddhist monasteries were one of the “Four Olds” that Mao ordered to be destroyed. After the Cultural Revolution, on the Four Sacred Mountains—Emei Shan being one of them—many temples were rebuilt for the tourist industry, populated with token monks and nuns. They are free to practice Buddhism as long as there aren’t too many of them and they don’t try to proselytize. This monastery is not yet on the tourist map, and is still in decline. Following Xiao Lu to their places at a bench, Pep assesses the skeletal crew of monks and nuns that remains. All are elderly, and seem worn, much like their faded robes, which hang loosely on their spare, wrinkled frames. The robes are threadbare at the elbows, and patched. Their teeth are bad, their skin sallow. They seem barely capable of keeping the enterprise going—as if the nursing home residents are running the facility. Everything is dirty and forlorn and echoing with decay. The place is too big for the people in it. A ghost temple. And always in back of it, out there growing like the night over the temples, the black mountain.
>
“Kind of sad, isn’t it?” Pep asks Clio.
“Yes, yes, it is. But I’m in awe of it. They’ve been doing this here, continuously through hell and high water, since the fourth century—almost two thousand years! Hats off to them. I only wish there were some young ones, who would carry it on.”
As they walk in, the Macys see some of the monks and nuns pointing at Xiao Lu and Katie, gossiping among themselves. It is clear that everyone now knows this secret of Xiao Lu’s life. The last ones to sit down, Xiao Lu and the Macys have to squeeze into the space between two of the nuns at one of the long picnic benches. Clio, Katie, and Xiao Lu slip in easily. Pep, last, has trouble fitting his big frame into the last single-person slot. He can get his first leg in okay, but when it comes to his second, it takes all his contorting to do so without hitting the neighboring monk in the back of the head with his foot. This is made more difficult by all eyes being fixed on this struggle, as if he’s a living sutra—say, the Sutra of Human Clumsiness. He doesn’t care all that much, for he’s frantically trying to control his dirt phobia, all this encrusted gunk and current dust.
The nuns lean in toward Xiao Lu and whisper insistently to her. She seems to shrivel up, wrapping herself tightly in her vest, staring down at the empty bowl before her. Pep, Clio, and Katie are intensely aware of the change in her mood. Clearly she is embarrassed and on guard, and has no wish to relate to the nuns. She is stony in her silence, her withdrawal. The noise itself seems to bother her—she covers her ears and bows her head, as if she is trying to protect herself until she can escape.
Finally the hall falls silent. A small bell sings out.
Each monk and nun does a private meditation on his or her empty food bowl, moving lips in silent prayer. Finally the food is ladled out in wooden spoons from two king-sized steel pots.
Through gesture and his passport, Pep asks if anyone speaks English. Except for a few words—“yes,” “no,” “hello,” “goodbye,” “New York,” “Nixon,” “Wisconsin”—they do not. French or German? No. The Macys and Xiao Lu shake their heads—it is a tremendous disappointment, and dooms them to this sign-and-picture-drawing language. Pep then asks, through gesture, about a telephone. None. The bare bulbs dangling from cords from the ceiling mean electricity, and there’s running water—but that’s about it. Green tea is offered. They ask for bottled water. None. Coca-Cola or Sprite or any other bottled drink? Nothing.
