by Adam Tervort
The Legend of Green Snake and White Snake
by Adam Tervort
http://adamtervort.com
http://kungpao.me
Discover other titles by Adam Tervort at Smashwords.com:
Adventures in the Land of Singing Garbage Trucks: A Memoir of Life in Taiwan
The Zodiac Schmodiac Story Cycle, 1st Course: Kung Pao Flavored Short Stories
You Dirty Rat (free!)
The Ghost Who Tried to Love Me (free!)
CC Adam Tervort 2011
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
About the Author
About Kung Pao Stories
Introduction
This novella is part of the Zodiac Schmodiac story cycle, a group of short stories based on the Chinese Zodiac. Remember the paper placemats with zodiac animals from your favorite Chinese buffet? The things it tells you are wildly inaccurate and probably have no resemblance whatsoever to your life or situation, but reading them is fun and writing these stories was too. (This story, of course, is the snake in the Zodiac cycle.)
Ever since I began living in Asia I have loved traditional festivals and the stories that go along with them. One of the most interesting is told at the Duanwu (Dragonboat) Festival. Ask 10 Chinese people for the story of “The Legend of White Snake” and you’ll get 10 or more different versions, all of them wonderful and strange in their own way. Although getting a definitive version isn’t easy, the basic story is easy to grasp. There are two demons, White Snake and Green Snake (who can both turn into human form), a man named Xu Xian who is beguiled by them, and a monk named Fahai who tries to save Xu Xian from the demons. There is usually a tower involved. Green Snake tries to save White Snake from Fahai. Fahai may or may not be successful in saving Xu Xian from the demons. Xu Xian may or may not want to be saved. It is either a love story or a tragedy, it depends on the version you get. (See Wikipedia for more and a list of the variations.)
When I began writing this story I wanted it to take a different tack—wacky from the start. I didn’t intend to write a novella, this was only supposed to be a short story, but once I got into I couldn’t stop. If you have ever read the original story you may be disappointed by some of the things you see here. When my wife heard that there were jackalopes she didn’t think it was very funny or very Chinesey. (But there are and it is funny, at least to me.) When my mom read it she rolled her eyes at all of the wine that Fahai consumes. Could I make the poor monk into any shallower of a person? After all, Jet Li is playing Fahai’s part in the new movie being made in China. Couldn’t he have been a bit more noble? I guess not, because this Fahai jumped of the page in this form from the very start. My wife also thought that all of the ‘faht’ jokes weren’t very funny, and they didn’t even make sense in Chinese. (Jokes about Fahai’s name. She’s right, they don’t make any sense in Chinese.) Luckily for me this book is in English, and I hope you’ll get the spirit of the ‘fahtiness’ as it was intended: wackiness. There are few deep moral lessons in here, just lots of vaguely Chinese jokes, but I hope you’ll enjoy it.
The poetry is, with one exception, my translation of the original Chinese. (Miss Green’s froggie poem is all mine, and I am quite proud of it.) Two famous Tang Poems appear in the story. The first is 靜夜思 (Tranquil Night) by the poet Li Bai 李白, and the second is 春曉 (Spring Morning) by Meng Hao-ran 孟浩然. If you enjoyed them you can check out some of the excellent translations available on the Internet, most much better than those by yours truly.
The Zodiac Schmodiac Story Cycle, 1st Course: Kung Pao Flavored Short Stories will hit the shelves of fine bookstores (Smashwords, Amazon, etc.) at the end of August 2011. If you enjoy this story you might consider purchasing the full book. I appreciate your support and look forward to hearing from you with your comments and reactions. (You can find my contact info at the end of the book, or email me anytime, adam @ adamtervort.com)
1
As far as demons go, Miss White and Miss Green were pretty good. They tried their best to do good deeds, help out the other demons when they were feeling down, and consume as few humans as possible. It was hard work, being a nice demon, but they both really tried.
Miss White had aspirations of making the move from being merely demonic to being divine. It was a big jump, no one since that mean looking dude with the red face and really big sword had done it successfully, but she really wanted to be the second. Miss Green wasn't nearly so ambitious. If she could go a decade or two without flooding towns, causing famines and inciting wars she felt pretty darn good about herself. When you know your death toll for the past ten years is only in triple digits it makes it much easier to look in the mirror in the morning.
Of course they weren't always good. Being demons makes that a given. Miss White had a really bad habit of wanting to sneak away into the human world and bewitch hot guys, especially guys who studied hard. She'd take on a human form, flash some leg, quote some Confucius, and then offer to show them back to her place for wine and poetry reading. It worked every time. She'd lead them back down into the Banbuduo where demons live and keep them there for months at a time. Since the Banbuduo is a different level of reality than the human world she'd have to wipe the memories of the poor guys before she could send them back, but that made the game more exciting for her. Her favorite was picking up the same guy over and over again. He'd never remember her, but she sure remembered him. One poor sap kept getting picked up over and over, and ended up living for 500 years. He became pretty famous back in the human world, but that didn't bother Miss White. Picking up famous guys is a real adventure.
The biggest challenge for demons like Miss White and Miss Green, the kind who like to slip into the human world and make trouble, were the sorcerers. Man, those guys really bugged Miss Green. It seemed that whenever she was really trying hard to be good, trying to help people and prevent natural disasters, really picking up good karma points, some ugly old sorcerer with a scraggly beard filled with lice would show up and chase her off. Sometimes they'd just run her off, but sometimes they'd try to trap her in the human world. She once spent three hundred years stuck in the bottom of a well when a sorcerer caught her off guard, turned her into a turtle and tossed her in the well. She knew she was in trouble when he started to build a temple over the top of the well, and for three hundred years the monks in the temple were trained to keep her captive with incantations and offerings to the gods. She finally got out when a construction crew accidentally uncapped the well and she crawled out. One of the workers caught her and took her home to cook for dinner, but she rose up out of the pot just before he was ready to eat her and ate him. She wasn't very proud of that last bit, but she really needed to get three hundred years of anger out somehow, and anyways he was going to eat her! What else could a demon be expected to do?
Well, for the last couple hundred years Miss White and Miss Green had been really good. The council of demons had seen their improvement and decided to give them a new superpower, shape-shifting. This was seriously cool. The next time some smelly sorcerer locked her down a well Miss Green would
just turn into a cockroach and crawl right back out. (Then she'd go find his house and lay 10 million eggs. In his underwear. That'd teach him to mess with a nice demon.) The council warned them that they'd be fine shape-shifting any time of the year except for during the Duanwu festival. Somehow the gravity and the alignment of the planets worked out so that they were stuck in whatever form they'd shifted to for a full 24 hours. Miss White started to ask for more details, but the council told her not to worry about it. No, they didn't know why. It just happened, OK? They told her to make sure she didn't turn herself into a grain of rice because some local would probably make her into a rice dumpling, and she'd be somewhere in his intestines the next day when he wanted to change back into another shape, and that would just be gross for her and for the human. Surely they would be able to remember that one day a year and not mess up. They told the council that they'd do their best. The council looked like it watching a loop-the-loop roller coaster the way their eyes rolled in unison.
Well, when you get a really cool superpower like the ability to turn into anything, of course you've got to go and play around with it. Miss White went through stages of different animal families. She'd go through the cats; lion, tiger, leopard, mountain lion, house cat, kitten, saber-toothed tiger, then she'd try to combine the best parts of each one into one new type of cat. Thus the saber-toothed liger kitten was born. It could purr, growl, roar, and impale you with teeth longer than the length of its body. She had fun like that. She made all kinds of mashup animals. Where do you think Chinese people got dragons from? That was a mashup of komodo dragons, eagles, and squids. (She really wanted to shoot fire, but the closest she could get was squid ink. She added acid so that it burned, and people remembered it as fire. Whatever. She had a good time with it.)
Miss Green didn't have as much fun with mashups. After watching Miss White do some really crazy stuff, she thought she'd try one, but instead of going for utility she'd make a mashup based on auspicious characteristics. A dragon? Come on, anyone can make a scary mashup. She wanted to make a meek and wise mashup, one that humanity would remember for all time as the wisest and gentlest of all animals. She thought about it for years, and finally decided that a deer and a rabbit would be perfect. I guess she succeeded in a way, the jackalope is definitely an unforgettable animal, and Pixar made a cartoon about how wise they are. The problem was that once people started laughing at her she got flustered and forgot how to change back. After 35 years as a jackalope and she decided that she'd stick with one animal at a time and leave the mashups to Miss White.
Eventually they both found they enjoyed snakes. Miss White liked standing out, causing awe and fear when she showed up as a great white snake. The farmers said she was a heavenly serpent, which made her feel pretty good considering she hoped to turn into a god someday. Miss Green stuck with green, and no one seemed to notice her. After the jackalope fiasco she was fine with that, she just hung out by streams and ate frogs most of the time. It was a pretty nice existence in the whole scheme of things.
Everything was going great until they ran across a new sorcerer named Fahai. It was a pretty stupid name since people could never remember it and just called him "Fahtty" all the time. All the "Faht" jokes drove him crazy as a kid so he took up magic hoping to learn how to turn people into bugs and stuff to get revenge, but his teachers told him they wouldn't teach him that stuff until he learned to control his temper. All the teachers died before he could convince them he'd changed, so he was a pretty half-arsed sorcerer all in all. The one thing he had learned really well was banishing demons, and since he couldn't turn the people who made fun of him into frog spawn he took out his aggression on demons instead. He didn't really care if they were good demons or bad demons; he just liked giving them a hard time. After he turned a demon into a pickle and fed it to a pig he became pretty famous, and offers would come from around the country for him to go and protect villages. Sometimes he'd go to some backwater village and no demons would be around so he'd have to fake it, but most of the time he'd eventually come across a demon or two and so he could justify himself to the townspeople.
2
Well, Miss White had started to get sweet on a kid who was trying to prepare for the imperial examination in a village in rural China. The examination was like the civil service exam on super steroids; you could study for it for most of your life and never pass. This kid named Xu was starting to get nervous. He was already 30 and had never had anything like a real job since he spent all day reading 2,000 years of royal edicts. (The palace never told you which years the test would cover, so you never really knew what to study. I hate it when that happens.) Miss White had first seen Xu through a window when she was transformed in her best white snake outfit, hoping to get noticed and called heavenly by some farmer. Xu had passed out after a 30 hour long study session and had spilled ink on his nose when he collapsed on the table and for some reason Miss White thought it was really cute. She hurried back to tell Miss Green about him.
"Green, you've got to come and see this guy. He just passed out from studying so hard, and he got ink on this nose when he fell over. It is so cute!"
"No way. I'm staying in the Banbudao for a while. The last time I went up I ate a poison tree frog and I'm still farting in rainbow colors.”
"You've gotta come, Green. He's gorgeous. You'll like him, I promise."
"But you're the one who wants to eat him up, not me. Why do I have to come?"
"You know, it's always funner to watch guys together with your best girlfriend, right?"
Green knew that White was laying it on pretty thick, but she was flattered in spite of herself. "OK, let's go."
Since Green was still having those gas problems, they decided to go in human form. This could be tricky. All of the immortals have this outrageous clothing that shines in any kind of light, repels dirt and stains, and has no seams. Some of the people in China started to pick up on this and started saying "Heavenly clothing has no seams" as a common phrase. What did they mean by it? No one really knew, probably something that has nothing to do with clothing at all. Chinese can be like that. But since everyone said it, sometimes the demons got ousted from their anonymity because their clothes really didn't have any seams. Miss Green really hated it, but she couldn't figure out a way to draw seams on clothing that repelled everything. The paint just wouldn't stick.
They made their way down the main street of the village trying to be inconspicuous. Miss Green farted rainbows twice, but no one seemed to notice since the gas made them pass out.
"You have got to stop eating tree frogs," Miss White said under her voice. "You're going to kill someone with your flatulence."
"I'm sorry! He just looked so good, all of those bright colors and all. How was I to know he was poisonous?"
"At least wait until to turn into a snake to eat any more, OK?"
They made their way through town without killing anyone, which was a good sign. Miss White led them up the path to young Xu's house and they snuck up next to the window so that they could look at him.
"Isn't he so cute, passed out like that? He reminds me of that handsome poet from a few years back."
"You mean the one that jumped in the river when the emperor said he dressed like a sissy? I never knew what you saw in him."
"Look at the ink on his nose, isn't he just adorable?" Miss White was really getting worked up now, and Miss Green worried that she'd knock the house down if she wasn't careful.
From somewhere inside the house a woman called, and Xu lifted up his head. "I'm studying, mom, I don't have time to take out the garbage!" The woman's voice called back something about finding a job and Xu started to get up. As he rose from his desk he glanced at the window just as Miss White was trying to duck.
"Is there someone there?" he asked. He heard a giggle from outside the window and walked over to see who was hiding there. He stuck his head out, looked around, and didn't see anyone. As he pulled his head back inside he saw two snakes on the ground, one
green and one brilliant white. The white snake giggled again as it slid back through the grass and out of sight.
"I'd better pass the test this year. I'm hearing snakes giggle now. I must be going crazy." Just then Xu's mother opened the door and threw a bag of trash at him. It hit him right on the back of the head and he tumbled out the window. His mother waited until she saw him start to move, and then walked out of his room mumbling something about sons who study all day and will never get a job.
When Miss White and Miss Green got back to the Banbudao, Miss White was giddy. "He heard me giggle, he heard me!"
"Too bad he thought you were just a hallucination. He seemed alright, though. I liked his mom better, she's one tough woman."
"Why would I want to seduce his mom? She's not handsome at all."
"I was just talking about personality; don't get too literal on me, OK?"
"So, what should I do next? How can I capture him? What's the best way to make a guy who spends all day in his room reading dry old scrolls notice a demon like me?"
"Maybe next time you could giggle in human form. He's probably never talked to a woman besides his mother before. This should be an easy one for you White."
"Oh, I hope so. The sooner I can get him down here the better." They spent the rest of the day making plans for how to capture poor, young Xu. At one point Miss White was so excited she turned into a Chihuahua and peed on Miss Green's leg as she yapped. Miss Green was so angry that she turned into a bear and ate the dog. Just about the time she swallowed she remembered that the dog was really Miss White, but it was too late. Miss White had to wait until Miss Green had fully digested her before she could make her exit and reform. It took almost a month. Miss White was not happy.
