by May-lee Chai
CHAPTER 2
The Apsaras Who Fell to Earth
Ma liked to tell me stories. When I was little, she complained that I was a naughty and difficult girl, noisy and precocious, the kind who refused to fall asleep. She would tell me stories late at night, trying to put me to sleep, trying to keep me from waking the other kids. With each story, I grew more alert. I tugged on her sleeve as she started to doze. I pinched the inside of her arm. “Tell me another story,” I whispered. “Tell me more.”
She told me stories about her own life—the big house she’d lived in as a child; her grandfather’s Chinese restaurant, three stories high; her father, the teacher, who loved her so much that he killed every bug in the house before she went to bed just because they frightened her. When talking about the past made her too sad, she told me made-up stories. The dancing girl who fell in love with a man and lost her immortality, the monk who tried to ride a crocodile and drowned, the monkey who fell in love with a princess and was cast out of Heaven. In Ma’s telling, her life mixed with ancient tales, and she became a heroine battling demons, a princess choosing among suitors, a goddess living among mortals.
The story of the Apsaras who fell to Earth was my favorite.
Once there was a dancing girl who defied Heaven’s will and chose to live on Earth. She wasn’t like her sisters. When she was born, rising fully formed from the Sea of Milk at the beginning of the universe, foam and salt still clinging to her ankles and her skin glistening wet, she did not cast her glance to the side, modest as a mouse. Instead she danced smiling, eyes shining; she wanted to see everything at once, taste everything. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut; she couldn’t keep her eyes open wide enough. Life in the Heavenly Palace, surrounded by the gods, bored her. She stared at the blue-green pearl in the sky and plotted her escape.
One night when the moon hid her face behind a cloud, the dancing girl stepped off the edge of Heaven and fell to Earth like a meteorite.
To earn her living, she danced barefoot on the sandstone floors of a temple, incense in her skirts, her earrings jangling like small bells. She danced as her sisters had taught her, as they had always danced in their palace at home in Heaven. No one had seen such grace before, her hands stroking the air like smoke, her hips swaying like a breeze. Soon men came from the four corners of the city, from all the provinces, from the twelve cardinal directions of the world, just to watch her dance.
She fell in love with a minor court official. She saw how he treated the servants, never losing his temper. She saw how he treated the elder courtiers, never losing his patience. He was shy, casting his glance downward, staring at the earth when she smiled at him. Later, when she danced for him, he blushed, but this time he did not look away. He looked into her face and said he loved her, would love her forever. Of course that was impossible, she knew, because she would live forever and the man would not. The dancing girl agreed to marry him without telling him her secret.
While her husband went to work in the king’s court, the dancing girl passed her days in their modest home on the road to the temple. The monks came by every morning to beg for food, offering to earn merit for her family.
She smiled and gave them rice.
When her husband returned from court, she danced just for him in the light of the candles that flickered throughout their home.
They were very happy together, the man and the dancing girl.
But while she stayed young, the man grew older. His belly grew round, his skin became rough under her fingers, his black hair turned gray and then white, exposing the lumpy shape of his skull. She put her hands against his cool, dry skin, the mosquito nets drawn tight against the bedroll to protect his soft flesh. His breathing was labored now, so slow. One night she laid her hands against his forehead and knew his soul was ready to leave his body.
Before the man could take his last breath, though, she impulsively snatched his soul in the palm of her right hand. She was not supposed to intervene. The cycles of birth and rebirth were ordained by dhamma. But she flew away, high above the banyan trees. The roots dangling from the branches clawed the air, reaching for her skirts as she rode atop the wind as though it were a wave of water and flew safely through the night, home to the Palace.
Her sisters wept to see her; laughter was not strong enough to express their happiness. They gathered around her, pressing their palms together before their faces. They had thought she was gone forever.
But when the Lord Buddha discovered that she had brought a human soul to the Palace before its time, he was very disturbed, and called her before his lotus throne. She walked carefully in small steps, carrying her husband’s soul tucked in her hand. The vermilion streamers before the altar flicked at her calves like the tongues of a dozen snakes.
She knelt to the floor and placed her forehead on the smooth stones. “Forgive me,” she said. “But I love him. I cannot bear to be separated.” And she cried with tears of pearls.
Her sisters wept again, now with fear and sorrow.
Then the Lord looked at her with compassion. Raising his right hand, he said, “Let it be so,” and suddenly the dancing girl felt as though she were falling through the floor. The light of day went out like a candle flame snuffed between two fingers. Stars streaked by like strings of firecrackers popping as she fell backward into night.
When she awoke, she lay on a reed mat on a rough wooden floor, next to an old man who snored beneath his mosquito net. The wind blew through the open windows, carrying the sound of a river.
The dancing girl sat up slowly. She felt dizzy, a new sensation. She tried to climb to her feet, but found that her knees creaked, and her ankles were stiff. She rose only with difficulty. Pain was new for her. She tried to understand these feelings.
She walked around the tiny room, saw the small low table, the rough benches, the open windows. She saw that she was in a house on stilts at the edge of a brown river. Silver fish leapt against the current. Two oxen and a pig sniffed through the dirt below the floor in the blue light of the moon. The dancing girl felt a terrible pain in her stomach, as though a great hole were opening up from within. She knelt to the floor, clutching at her intestines. She cried out.
The old man woke with a start. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” gasped the dancing girl. “I’ve never felt like this before.” Suddenly her stomach growled with the sound of a tiger cub, and she shrieked. “Did you hear? There’s a wild animal inside me!”
The old man laughed now. “You’ve had a dream, that’s all. Why are you acting so foolish?” It was only her stomach growling, he said. And he told her it was time for her to make them breakfast.
After she had eaten a little and calmed her stomach, she stood up again and discovered that she felt a pressure inside her intestines. The old man explained that she had to go outside to relieve herself, so she climbed down the rungs of the rough wooden ladder, splinters pricking the soles of her feet. The smell of the pig and the oxen assaulted her nostrils immediately. The night wind swept around her, carrying terrifying sounds of laughing birds and chattering monkeys and roaring beasts. The pressure inside her did not abate, so she swallowed her fear and made her way through the tall reeds toward the bank of the river, where she squatted and was able to make the pressure go away.
Then the dancing girl stepped into the river to cool her feet. Splashing the soothing water against her skin, she leaned over the water and gasped. For there in the water looking up at her was the face of a very old woman with loose skin and missing teeth. The old woman stared at the dancing girl.
Finally, she understood what had happened to her.
She went back to the house and continued to live as a human being for many years, until her husband died. Then she wept bitterly. She shaved her head like a nun and rubbed ashes on her skin. Her sadness was like a pin in her heart, always pricking her; each hour now seemed a century long, each day an eternity. The sun shining in the sky did not make her happy and the stars at ni
ght offered no solace.
She had given up her immortality to be with the man she loved, but now he was gone anyway.
The children of the man and the dancing girl worried about their mother. They offered her delicious food to eat, soft noodles and boiled crabs and fine white rice. But she would only eat one bite before she sighed, “My food has no taste anymore,” and she refused to eat another nibble. Finally, to ease her loneliness she began to speak her happy memories out loud. Each day when one of her children came to check on her, instead of eating, she told the child one of her memories. She continued this way for a hundred and twenty days, for she and the man had had many, many children. She described the way the man wrote with a fine hair brush dipped in black ink, the robes he wore when he went to court, the poetry he composed, the first time he’d seen her dance.
The children thought their mother had lost her mind. They remembered none of these things, these stories from the previous lifetime that the dancing girl had spent with her husband before she’d taken his soul to Heaven. The father they remembered was a poor peasant who’d never learned to write his name, let alone a poem.
Finally the dancing girl had no memories left to share, and she died. Her children burned incense for their mother and paid nuns to cry at her funeral, but nothing made them feel any better at all.
They were sitting together in the house of their parents, crying, when one son began to tell the story that his mother had told him. Then a daughter told another story. And they told the dancing girl’s stories to each other all night long and all day. For four months they talked, until finally all her stories were told. While the children were talking, a seed took root in the remains of the dancing girl’s fish pond. This seed grew into a giant tree as tall and as wide as a tree that had been growing for forty years. Then the children all bowed down before the miraculous tree and gave thanks to Buddha.
“That’s not a good ending,” I said, pinching my mother’s elbow, trying to wake her.
She stirred, her eyelids fluttered.
“What really happened? What happened to the dancing girl and her children? She can’t just die.”
My mother smiled slightly and sleepily patted my leg with one hand. She fanned herself with the other, and the breeze brushed against my cheek like a kiss.
“Tell me,” I whispered.
CHAPTER 3
The 108 Little Hells
Back in school for the fall semester of my sophomore year, I was haunted by dreams. I was a child again, lying in bed next to a woman who was telling me stories.
The light on the bed stand flickers—a power surge as a storm approaches on giant’s feet. Lightning cracks the sky like an improperly fired kiln. My mother pulls the mosquito net close around us, creating a cocoon of gauze. The light glows distantly. I press my face into my mother’s side, her nightgown smelling of jasmine oil, smoke and garlic, a hint of perfume. Her skin is smooth against my forehead. She strokes my arm absently.
The rain is coming. The air is thick with water, and sweat collects on both of us, mother and daughter, although we lie very, very still, waiting for the storm. Then my mother begins to tell her story, her voice softer than a whisper, a tickle in my ear.
I lean close, closer, trying to hear what she is saying, but her voice grows raspy, hoarse. I tug on her sleeve, I pull on her gown, but her voice turns to a growl, and I realize I’ve been tricked. This isn’t my mother, it’s a wild animal, a panther about to pounce.
I woke up in a sweat, my heart pounding, my sheets twisted around my waist. My roommate’s snores thundered around me.
Lying in the dark, I watched the charcoal shapes of my dorm room gradually coalesce as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight slicing through the space beneath the shade and the windowsill, its blue light spilling through the shadows. I could see the edge of my desk, the top of my wooden chair, the soft lumpy outline of my roommate’s bed, and the dresser with her ticking alarm clock atop it, the earring tree, and her framed family picture—everyone smiling with all their teeth exposed as they stand in matching ski outfits on a snowy mountain in California, taken when she was a child. I couldn’t imagine my roommate’s childhood. I couldn’t imagine how she lived before she became this person farting softly and snoring loudly in the dark on the other side of the room. Her life seemed like something out of a TV movie.
I’d never realized such shiny people could actually live a flesh-and-blood life. My roommate Shannon was always cheerful. She drank regularly on weekends beginning Thursday late afternoon, she puked loudly in the women’s bathroom, and then slept heavily, breathing acrid-smelling vomit breath into the air. She had the good grace not to ask me anything about my family after our first awkward conversations. I’d needed a roommate as my freshman roomies had decided to move off campus, and Shannon’s roommate had ended up transferring to a different school, so we’d been paired in the room lottery.
Shannon had a steady boyfriend who played some kind of team sport, whose games she attended regularly. She’d shown me her albums of photos she’d brought to remind her of her wonderful family, her happy days in high school. Here’s me at prom, here I am at drama camp, this was my first boyfriend, this is me with my girlfriends on graduation. If she lacked anything, it seemed to be an imagination, but that worked to my advantage. I didn’t want a curious roommate. I didn’t know how to explain my family to anyone, not even to myself. With Shannon, I could pretend that I too had the bland suburban life that she assumed was normal.
As I lay on my bed in the dark, as she snored like a giant, mouth open, I could not force my nightmare to recede and fade. If anything, each breath made the dream more vivid. The sound of the wind through an open window, lifting the edges of a white mosquito net. The mother reaching out her hand to touch my face. I flinched in my real bed in my dorm. My whole body shaking, I was suddenly cold.
I felt her hand against my skin.
Then I woke up a second time.
Night after night, I dreamed of my mother, not knowing which woman I was dreaming of.
In December, after months of this misery, I woke up in the middle of the night with a feeling like cobwebs around my heart and knew I had to do something. Better to confront the past, or it would keep haunting me.
And so I decided to visit Uncle. I had his last known address and the name of his donut shop.
I sold my textbooks, took my wages from my part-time job washing pots and pans in the school cafeteria, and bought a bus ticket to California to find my father. I had no idea what I’d tell him, what I’d accuse him of, what I’d ask him to do for me.
I didn’t tell Sourdi. I told a story to Ma, said I wasn’t able to come home for Christmas this year. Claimed I was going to spend winter break in California with my roommate. Shannon and I were applying to summer internships there, I said, and I’d have to stay for the interview. Her family said I could stay with them.
Like that, I lied to Ma, and she believed me.
Then I bought a long-distance bus ticket and left.
Riding the bus nonstop across the country, I was reminded of Ma’s story about the 108 little hells. There were eight big hells, she said, for souls that had committed really bad sins like murder or rape, for monks who violated their orders by eating meat or by starting families, obvious things like that. But for everyone else there were the little hells for all the sins that were just bad enough, the ones you had to work off before you could be reincarnated and try again to get life right.
“You mean everyone goes to Hell?” I asked. We were living in Texas in those days, and I was in elementary school. I couldn’t completely understand the Baptists yet, but I knew they’d painted a different picture. “Doesn’t anyone go to Heaven?”
“Maybe saints,” Ma conceded. “I don’t know about Heaven. But in the 108 little hells, there’s room for everybody on Earth in this life and the next and the next and the next after that.” Then she sighed to let me know that I was annoying her, that I was the kind of daughter wh
o was earning her own place in one of the little hells right then and there. The Little Hell for Unfilial Daughters Who Questioned Their Mothers’ Wisdom.
Later we made a joke of it. Every time something went wrong, we’d say which hell we’d landed in. When the car broke down in the heat and we had to pull over and let the radiator cool off while the traffic honked and sped past us, we were in number twenty-eight, the Little Hell of Endless Car Repairs. When the flurry of bills arrived at the end of every month, number sixteen, the Little Hell of Too Little Money. When the Church Ladies brought us another brick of cheese, it was number 102, the Little Hell of Painful Farts. If we fought over which TV channel to watch or which radio station to listen to or which of us was supposed to take out the garbage, Ma said she was in number five, the Little Hell of One Child Too Many, which made each of us feel simultaneously guilty and unwanted and jealous of each other. That was Ma’s genius—she turned guilt into a sibling competition.
Riding in the Greyhound, I leaned my head against the window and watched the flat desert plains of Utah pass by. The interstate seemed to have been built through the ugliest part of each state. Perhaps it was the only land cheap enough to build a highway on, I thought. There was no snow yet, only monotonous waves of sandy dirt. Then the batteries in my Walkman died, and I discovered that all the truck stops charged exorbitant amounts for AA batteries. Then, just as we entered Nevada, the toilet in the back of the bus overflowed. After our half-hour bathroom break in Vegas, one of the other passengers played two dollars in quarters at the slots and, in the final pull, won so much money that he said he could now afford to fly and bid us all adieu. Thing is, I’d played the same machine but had only allowed myself to spend a dollar. I had figured that luck would either be with me or it wouldn’t. In that sense, I was right.
Number sixty-six, I thought. The Little Hell of a Long-Distance Bus Ride.
