Yi Kong blinked and muttered, “Thank you.”
Michael nodded as he walked away to check on the others.
Yi Kong reached out her hand to touch the eye-twitching nun’s sleeve. “Make sure everyone is all right…” A tear trickled down from the corner of her eye. “Oh, those books in the Sutra Storing Pavilion!”
Though I’d known her for more than fifteen years, I’d never before seen her face and voice filled with emotion. Despite the tragedy, I felt a secret pleasure at this unexpected revelation.
She spotted me. “Meng Ning, is that you?”
I went to kneel down by her side. “Yes, Yi Kong Shifu.”
She muttered, taking my hand. It was also the first time she’d touched me like this-filled with tenderness. My hand brushed against her bare shoulder-so warm and soft.
“You’re back-How long have you been away? Five years?” The stressful situation didn’t seem to have confused her sharp memory. But as I was about to reply I saw she had already closed her eyes.
As I watched the ambulance carry Yi Kong away, from the corner of my eye I saw a face with a red scar like a snake slithering under the sun. I quickly turned, but saw nothing except the sad- faced nuns with their excited orphans.
7. One Day When We Were Young
Michael and I stayed in the Fragrant Spirit Temple to help. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, for everybody had gotten out through the windows in time.
By the time everything settled down, we were limp with exhaustion. Then I saw Michael looking at my leg. I followed his eyes and noticed my blood-stained knee and ankle. The bleeding had stopped, but the knee was badly scraped. I burst out crying. He took hold of my shoulders and propped me up. Tears of fear, pain, exhaustion, and pent-up emotion rolled down my cheeks, my Buddhist robe, and spilled onto Michael’s. Some young nuns in the front court inspected us with curious eyes.
Finally I stopped crying. “I’m sorry, Michael,” I said. He was still holding me; I didn’t care anymore about the nuns.
Michael took my hand and led me back to his dormitory. It was embarrassing to be standing in front of him in my torn robe. So when he said I needed to take off my stockings for him to clean the scraped skin, I hesitated.
He seemed amused, then pointed toward the exit. “There’s the bathroom.”
Although I saw no one in the dormitory besides us, I still didn’t want to use a men’s room. Finally I backed up against the wall. I lifted up my skirt at the back, found the rim of my panty hose, and pulled them down over my knees and past my shins, feeling the nylon scrape my flesh. Then I peeled the shreds first off one foot and then the other. Now my thighs, legs, and feet were bare; a pool of heat swelled inside me.
I sat while Michael examined my knee and ankle. Then he went to the sink, got a cup of water, and poured it slowly over my leg, rinsing off the gray streaks of dirt. I gasped.
He looked up and touched my arm. “Relax, Meng Ning; you’re fine. I won’t hurt you. Trust me.”
I did. And I was surprised. For I had never thought of trusting a man before. I’d only trusted Yi Kong and Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. But now, although my breath was shallow and my heart raced, I felt secure in front of this man kneeling before me and tending my feet with his skillful doctor’s hands. I battled tears and watched him bandage my knee with his clean, white handkerchief. He looked totally focused as if giving full expression to his Buddha mind.
After he had finished bandaging my knee, Michael began to examine my swollen toes. He lifted them and squeezed them lightly one by one, asking me whether they hurt.
I nodded. “Not terribly, just a little.”
“Don’t worry. Your toes are not broken and the swelling will be gone in a few days.”
My knee, ankle, and feet looked much better now and the pain had also stopped. Fortunately, only my robe was torn and stained with blood; my dress underneath was fine. I didn’t want to explain about the retreat or the fire to Mother when I got home.
Finally, still dazed, I went back to my dormitory to change, wash, and gather my belongings. Michael and I met later at the main temple gate and we exchanged phone numbers and addresses. He insisted on taking me home; I thought I should refuse-he had already done so much for everyone-but I had no energy-nor desire-to do so.
It took us almost two hours to travel from Lantau Island back to the city. First we took the ferry to Central, then from there took the MTR to Cheung Sha Wan, two blocks from my apartment. When we had climbed up to the street, I politely turned down his offer to walk with me.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. I didn’t want to risk running into Mother with a gweilo by my side-I was too tired to explain.
It was almost eleven when I arrived home. Luckily Mother was asleep, and I went straight to my room to change and rest. Unable to unwind, I lay in bed and looked out the window. Suspended in the royal blue sky, the silver moon peeked at me through a few scattered clouds. Su Dongpo’s poem popped into my mind. “Even a thousand miles apart, the same moon shines over us all.”
What was Michael doing now in the Kowloon Hotel? Sleeping? Watching TV? Or staring at the same moon and thinking of me? I closed my eyes…
Under the pearlescent moonlight, the scarred nun wandered around the Golden Lotus Temple where Yi Kong resided. She looked up at the window of Yi Kong’s dormitory and wailed, “Shifu, please give me your beautiful face! And your fingers! Those long, elegant fingers!”
Yi Kong materialized by the window and threw down a pillow. “Go to sleep, fool!” she said in her silvery voice. “Your scar is your best friend, not your enemy. Let go! Detach! That’s what you can learn from it.”
Just after Yi Kong had snapped shut the window, she threw it wide open again and looked down at the scarred nun with frightened eyes, screaming, “Help! Help! Fire!”
Scarred Nun sneered back, “Let go! Detach! The fire is your best friend; you should learn nonattachment from it!” Then she sauntered away, leaving Yi Kong on fire.
I snapped back into my bedroom, sweating heavily. Mother burst in; her face looked as if the Japanese were again invading Hong Kong.
“Come! Meng Ning, run!”
“What?”
“Didn’t you just scream
“Ma, it’s just a bad dream. I’m fine.” I looked at her concerned face and suddenly felt very tender.
Mother put her plump hand on my forehead. “Meng Ning, you look tired. You need a big, healthy breakfast,” she said, then disappeared into the kitchen. Her cheerful whistle pierced through the clanking of pots and pans into my ears.
The tune was “One Day When We were Young.”
That was my parents’ love song. Before he became a gambler, Father was a poet and scholar who taught school in Hualian, a town in Taiwan. Mother, his student, was nine and Father nineteen when they first met. Mother told me the moment their eyes met, she knew their fates were linked. She always boasted how handsome Father looked with his clean white shirt and thick, cropped hair, how he charmed all his students with his humor and erudition, how all the girls in his class had a crush on him, while his torchlike eyes always sought only hers. “Tall and handsome like a Hollywood star, that’s how your father’s friends described him.”
A year later, Grandmother moved the whole family to Taipei. Grandfather had died, and Grandmother believed that only in a big city would she have a chance to lift herself from poverty and give her children a better future. Mother and Father lost contact with each other.
One day, eight years later, when Mother went as usual to help in Grandmother’s store after school, she saw a man chatting with Grandma while choosing gold jewelry from the glass counter. The familiar voice made her heart jump.
“Oh,” she muttered to herself, “Goddess of Mercy, let this be
Grandmother chided her. “Mei Lin, what are you mumbling about over there? Come here and help.”
The man turned around and their eyes locked.
Mother screamed, “Teacher Du!”
“Ah, so this is the Teacher Du you used to talk about all the time,” said her mother. “Now congratulate Teacher Du, for he’s getting married in three weeks. He’s here to buy gold for his bride.”
Instead of congratulating Teacher Du, Mother burst into tears and ran out of the store.
“Mei Lin, let me explain!” Father chased after her out into the street where they fell into each other’s arms.
At first they had no idea what to do. Finally, a week later, they thought of an easy way out of Father’s engagement to the other girl-they just gathered a few belongings, some cash, and boarded a ship to Hong Kong. A year later, at nineteen, Mother gave birth to me. After that, Father and Mother continued to live together without ever getting married. I’d always thought this was because my parents felt guilty about the jilted girl, for her humiliation, her broken heart. Yet I’d never learned the truth, for whenever I asked what happened to the girl, they’d always avoided my question by talking about something else.
Mother never quite got over the fact that she hadn’t had a fancy wedding nor gold-framed wedding pictures. Father, on the other hand, seemed quite proud of the situation. Once, when I was small, he told me, “Ning Ning, since your mother and I were never really married, you’re an illegitimate child. But you know what? That’s also the reason you’re exceptionally handsome and intelligent.”
“Baba, I don’t understand.” I meant my being illegitimate and intelligent and handsome at the same time.
Father smiled mischievously. “Of course you don’t. You’re still a child. Go ask your mother. I’ve already explained it to her a hundred times.”
Mother’s deft hands stopped in the midst of her knitting. She measured the small red sweater against my back, lowering her voice. “Ahhh…it’s because-because when a couple makes a child in a secret way, so to speak, they’re, well…ahh, more intense. They give more energy to the child when they do, well…that thing, you understand? They throw out more qi, more everything. That’s why you’re so beautiful and smart. Lucky child, because you got double what other people have. Double, you understand?”
I didn’t.
“Well,” Mother snapped, “then go back to your father and ask him!” She resumed her knitting in allegro tempo, lowering her head.
Sometimes I felt glad that the other girl hadn’t married Father. Because not only would she have lost face when Father cheated on her after they were married, she’d probably have also lost all the gold that he would have bought her for the wedding. Could she, like Mother, have survived merely on the memory of a song sung one wonderful morning in May? I knew Father had taught “One Day When We Were Young” to his students in his English class, but Mother said, “Actually, your father wanted to teach it only to me, but he didn’t want the others to know of his feelings, so he taught it to the whole class.”
Breakfast was finally ready. I sat down to eat and Mother sat opposite me to read her newspaper. On the table, I found three boiled eggs, two thick pieces of ham, and coffee with milk.
“Ma, you seldom cook Western dishes. Why an American breakfast today?”
