Petals from the Sky (9 page)

Finally, I could only think to say, “How have you been?”

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

“When did you come back to Hong Kong?”

“A couple of months ago.”

“Oh…did you ordain as a nun in this temple?”

“Yes.”

“So you plan to stay?”

“Yi Kong Shifu has asked me to be her assistant to take charge of the temple’s affairs.”

My cheeks felt hot. Hadn’t Yi Kong always implied that she wanted
me
to be her successor?

Dai Nam, as though reading my mind, said, “It’s only temporary. And she asked me only last week.” She paused, her gaze resting on her tea cup.

“Oh.” I put my cup down with a sharp
clank
. What had I done to my life? I’d turned down Michael’s proposal, neglected Yi Kong, and so far had no news about any interviews I’d applied for.

I squeezed out a smile. “Do you plan to take the position?”

Dai Nam stared at the construction outside for long seconds before she returned her gaze to me. “Do you think anyone could turn down such a call from Yi Kong Shifu?”

I could not think how to answer.

She changed the subject. “How was your talk with Chan Lan?”

Why was she suddenly asking about something totally irrelevant? “You mean the old lady in the garden?”

Dai Nam nodded and I said, “Interesting but sad…she told me she had a child but no husband. I wonder why.”

“She was a comfort woman in the thirties.” Noticing the shock on my face, Dai Nam sighed. “In 1932, the Japanese Navy set up comfort houses in Shanghai where more than a hundred Chinese women were forced to work. Chan Lan, even though already in her fifties, was one of them. A year later, she escaped from the comfort house and managed to board a ship to Hong Kong. There she washed dishes at a restaurant for twenty years. She’d saved some money and used it to open a small noodle shop. When she was too old to run her restaurant, she came to the nursing home in this temple.”

“Oh, I see…and her child died of some sickness?”

“No, her child didn’t just die. Chan Lan had an abortion.”

Dai Nam’s face now transformed into something indescribable, like images frozen in a distant dream; the scar was inert, in hibernation. She spoke as if talking to herself. “The father was one of the Japanese sailors, so she had to end her pregnancy. Otherwise the child would just grow up to be an object of humiliation….” DaiNam’s voice trailed off and the uncomfortable silence returned.

Since Dai Nam had only been in this temple for a few months, I wondered how she knew all this about Chan Lan.

My friend’s face stirred as if awakened from a trance. She sipped her tea and again changed the subject. “I heard you’ve got your Ph.D.”

“Hmmm…not quite. I still have to go back to Paris for my oral defense. I think the Fragrant Spirit Temple made a mistake about the information….” I paused. “Were you also at the retreat?”

“Yes.”

“Then you saw me there?”

“Yes.”

“And you also saw me in the garden just now?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly I realized Dai Nam had been avoiding me all along, which explained my spotting the red scar several times in the Fragrant Spirit Temple without getting a clear view of her. Why was she hiding from me?

After a pause, I mustered all my courage. “Dai…Miao Rong Shifu…what happened…to your fingers?”

“I burned them off.”

“What?” I gasped and spilled my tea on the floor. “But why?”

“To show that I’m not attached, not even to my own body.” She stared intently at the stain on the glossy floor. “I also burned them as offerings to Buddha.”

“But…Miao Rong Shifu, did you really have to do that?”

“Yes. If you really want to show your devotion and detachment.”

I tried to feel her mind with mine, but was lost in its unreadable remoteness. I wanted to argue, but nothing came out when I parted my lips. I could not understand how someone could do this to her own body.

Isn’t the desire for detachment an attachment in itself?

Dai Nam continued calmly, “I didn’t feel terrible pain when I was burning them.”

“But how can that be possible?”

“I was in deep meditation. Anyway, I chose the pain as an ordeal.”

I thought to remind her of the first line of Confucius’s
Ode to Filial Piety
: “My body and hair are inherited from my father and mother; therefore, I would not harm nor damage them. This is the beginning of filial piety.” But looking at her emotionless face, I finally swallowed my words.

After a pause, I asked, “You did this here in this temple?”

“No, in China.”

I had been dying to know about her disappearance in China, but now had no courage to ask, fearing that another nightmare revelation would writhe out from her mouth to assault me.

Dai Nam stood abruptly from her chair. “Nice to see you again, Miss Du. Now I have to get ready for the temple meeting.”

Before, in Paris, she hadn’t called me Miss Du. I knew it was now meant to stretch a distance between us. Or, between her and what I knew of her past.

Feeling restless and uneasy after my meeting with Dai Nam, I went to the Meditation Hall to try to meditate, but snakes kept popping from every cranny of my mind, spitting out fiery tongues at me. I went to the library and tried to read, but all I could see in the words of the
sutras
was Dai Nam’s inscrutable face behind her thick-lensed glasses, challenging me with her nonattachment and her mutilated fingers.

Unable to relax, I decided to go back to the garden. Maybe
Ah-po
was still there, and I could find some relief in her cheerfulness.

But
Ah-po,
the old woman, was with someone else. So I stopped at the entrance to watch as a nun helped her walk back to the nursing home.

It was Dai Nam. She asked Chan Lan, “Great-Aunt, how are you feeling today?”

I was startled—so this old woman was Dai Nam’s comfort woman great-aunt, who’d helped her stay in Hong Kong. I moved behind a hibiscus hedge to stay out of sight.

Chan Lan smiled widely. “Very happy. I talked to a pretty girl. She’s thirty but still single. So I told her that’s no good, better get married soon and have children, many, many.”

She poked Dai Nam’s arm with her shriveled, clawlike fingers. “You too, grand niece, get married soon and have children! Many, many!”

I went softly to sit on a bench, to ponder the revelation and to gather my thoughts. However, stray thoughts sleepwalked through my mind, bringing me back to my encounter with Dai Nam in Paris five years before….

13

The Non-Nun Nun

I
had first met Dai Nam in the library of L’Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises. It happened not long after I’d arrived in Paris when I went to the library to borrow a rare version of the Heart Sutra. When the librarian told me that someone had already checked it out, I became curious about this stranger who shared my interest not only in Buddhism, but also in rare texts. I asked the librarian to introduce us.

She arranged for us to meet in her office on a Saturday morning, a time when the library was mostly empty. Dai Nam was already there when I arrived. The first thing I noticed about her were her eyebrows—a weak and flattened Chinese character “eight,” as if executed when the calligrapher was depressed. Then, as I sat down opposite her, a shaft of sunlight entered through a tree-lined window to land on her face. My heart jumped. A large maroon scar, resembling a frightened baby snake, crawled down her right cheek. How had her face been ruined? What kind of accident could have caused this? A car crash? The result of some inexplicable karma? An act of revenge from a spurned love? It must have hurt terribly. As I was wondering how this had happened, suddenly my cheek flared with an itch as I watched the shadow of a many-branched twig, like a witch’s broom, sweep the blood-dark stripe. Dai Nam said, “Hello” in a raspy voice.

Our conversation didn’t last long; Dai Nam said that she had come to the library to study and did not have time to talk. When I suggested we meet another day in a café, she would set no definite time. I was curious to get to know her better, so when I ran into her again in the institute I suggested we meet at the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain. This time she agreed.

Dai Nam had been in Paris longer than I, so I imagined she’d have been to this famous place before. It would be my first time. I hoped I’d have the luck to sit at the same table where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used to sit many decades ago!

Yet on Saturday evening when I arrived at the famous café, I felt disappointed. Except for the prices on the menu by the entrance, it didn’t look particularly special. Maybe it had been when Sartre and de Beauvoir set up literary shop here during World War II. Then I suddenly remembered my guidebook’s comment: “As with all historic cafés, beware of the prices!”

I took a seat on the front row of the terrace. It was one of those days in Paris when people looked as if merely breathing the Parisian air was the greatest blessing in life. Near me sat two giggling young Japanese women with expensive suits and handbags. Two French women lounged and smoked, hurrying sips of espresso amidst ceaseless talk.

I turned to look at the busy boulevard. A taxi pulled to a stop in front of me and spat out a veiled and gloved old woman in a hat and coat. After she’d paid the driver with her shaking hands, she began to wobble along with the support of a crooked cane. Three chattering young women in four-inch heels and miniskirts strode past her, almost knocking her over, but not noticing. The old woman raised her cane to swing at their bared backs. She missed, but was not discouraged. In the middle of the street, she kept waving her cane in threatening arcs and mouthing obscenities at the departing figures.
Bravo,
I almost shouted to her. Where did she get her strength? Surely not from her arthritic hands nor her crooked cane. Was it from jealousy aroused by the aura of youth and beauty that had once shone on her, but had now passed on to the girls? I was lost in this scene when Dai Nam’s voice rang like a broken bell in my ears. “Meng Ning.”

I looked up and saw my friend in a plain white cotton shirt, loose dark blue slacks, and sandals. Her hair seemed shorter than the last time I had seen her. Her large, thick-lensed glasses perched low on her nose, blurring her otherwise quite delicate features. She had a large green canvas bag slung across her sturdy shoulders.

Dai Nam sat down and immediately asked me about my life in Paris.

“I love it,” I said.

“Why?”

Both her tone and question surprised me, so I pondered for a while before I said, “The whole city has so much energy, like a piece of calligraphy saturated with
qi
.” Then I looked at her pale, chapped lips, wondering how they’d look if painted a seductive red. “What about you? Do you love Paris?”

Dai Nam’s eyes followed a passing young woman who was fondling her terrier. “I like it OK, but I wouldn’t use the word ‘love’.”

Right then a waiter came to take our order. Dai Nam read the menu very carefully before she whispered into my ear, “There’s almost nothing for me in this café…either too expensive or too strong.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I picked it because Sartre and de Beauvoir used to come here. So I thought you would like it.”

She adjusted her glasses and looked around; her gaze flickered suspiciously. “I’ve never been here before, never even heard about it.”

“None of your friends have ever mentioned the famous Café de Flore to you?”

“I don’t have friends.”

An awkward pause. Finally I ordered espresso and she Orangina. After the waiter had left, I said, “Dai Nam, next time you can order espresso like me; it’s the cheapest. Other drinks cost double.”

“I don’t drink anything with caffeine—except Chinese tea.”

“You can’t sleep at night?”

“No, not that…”

“You don’t like the taste?”

“No, not that either.”

The waiter returned with our order.
“Espresso et Orangina.”

After he left, Dai Nam took a long sip. Her gaze looked abstract while her face seemed to relax a little. “I was a nun in the past.”

The revelation took me by surprise. “Oh, then…” I looked at her full head of hair. “Why did you quit the
Sangha
?” I asked, referring to the Buddhist order of monks and nuns.

“Because my mission had ended.”

“Your mission? What was that?”

Dai Nam took another noisy sip of her Orangina. “To gather materials to write about my experience as a nun.”

I tried but failed to think of a comment on this peculiar reason for becoming a nun.

Dai Nam’s voice was a monotone amid the high-pitched chatters and giggles of the two Japanese women to our right, the earthy, asthmatic voices of the two French women to our left, and the busy traffic in front. “I chose to shave my head in Thailand because in that country nuns are discriminated against within the Buddhist order. I wanted to understand the situation based on firsthand experience.”

Before I had a chance to ask whether she was a feminist, Dai Nam said, her gaze darting between several teenage girls giggling as they walked past the café, “Since women cannot be ordained there, I wanted to break that tradition. Maybe ‘break’ is not the word; ‘break through’ is more appropriate.”

“Did you succeed?”

“No. I completely failed,” she said. “During my four years in Thailand, not a single monk was willing to ordain me.”

“Why?”

“Because the tradition of ordaining nuns had long been abandoned. And no monk is willing to revive it. No one has the courage to shave a woman’s head.”

“But what’s the big fuss about shaving a woman’s head?” Like a mountaineer, my voice climbed higher and higher.

“Monks are not supposed to touch women—not even their heads.”

“But we’re living in the twentieth century!”

“Yes, you are, but not those monks. Inside the temple walls things are pretty much the same as they were a thousand years ago. The monks don’t feel they have any grounds to change the rules that have been the same since the Buddha’s time. So finally I shaved my own head, put on a nun’s robe, rented a small hut, and practiced on my own. Besides meditating, I begged; sometimes I also sat in the back of a temple and joined in the chanting. The Thai monks were very uneasy about what I did.” Dai Nam went on after some consideration. “I looked and lived like a nun, but at the same time I was not a nun.”

“Then how do you feel about being…a non-nun nun?”

She frowned. “The Chinese say, ‘being disappointed by the secular world, one puts on a Buddhist robe. Being more disappointed by the Buddhist regime, one puts it off.’ That’s how I felt.”

I tried to digest what she’d said. “Then are you…content with your life now?”

“I am disappointed both by being a nun and by not being a nun.”

“Then what are you going to do with your life? I mean…what will you do?”

“I’m still looking for the true Dharma and I won’t give up until I find it.”

“What is this truth you want?”

Dai Nam picked up her cup and swallowed the last drop of her drink. The neon lights cast colors of red, yellow, blue, and green on her face. It was like the tension in a theater before the show begins. While everything is ready—music blaring and lights criss-crossing—something is still missing.

Dai Nam’s voice again sounded disturbingly harsh. “An intense spiritual life. Having visions, opening my third eye, being at one with things and beings, and most important, achieving nonattachment.”

I almost chuckled. Although I didn’t know her well enough to judge, Dai Nam gave me the impression more of an escapist than a seeker. She rarely even looked at me when she talked, so how could she think she could achieve all these spiritual goals?

I studied her in the twilight. What exactly was the intense spiritual life she so eagerly sought? Perversely, I thought of the Tibetan statue in the Guimet Museum showing the god and his consort in the
yab-yum
posture of copulation. But of course I shouldn’t imagine Dai Nam in that situation.

Now, accented by a shaft of fading sunlight, suddenly her scar seemed to come alive, struggling to tell an intense story I could not grasp.

Dai Nam’s throaty voice piped up again in the cool Parisian air. “The strange thing is, while nuns are not allowed to be ordained in Thailand, temples are scattered everywhere side by side with prostitution houses.”

I thought: The house for “selling smiling lips” and the temple work together: one saves your soul; the other saves your body. Why shouldn’t they exist side by side?

“Do you know whether the prostitutes and the monks—”

Before I finished my question, with “have any social interactions?” Dai Nam’s eyes suddenly glowed. “Look, someone is going to perform.”

I followed her gaze and saw a street performer in front of us, smiling and bowing to the clientele in the café.

Dai Nam’s voice now turned into a child’s shrill. “See, Meng Ning, he’s smiling and winking at us.”

Right then a young couple strolled by, arms around each other’s waists. The girl’s eyes looked dreamy and her lips slightly parted in a half smile. The mime winked at the people in the café, then dashed behind the couple to imitate their gait and the girl’s intoxicated expression. Laughter scattered here and there; the lovers turned and spotted the pursuer. They looked puzzled for a few seconds before big smiles blossomed on their young faces. The performer saluted them as they walked away happily.

Next came a lanky old man clutching a bag tightly to the chest of his expensive suit jacket. The sober, defeated expression on his wrinkled face made it appear longer than it was, like those in Modigliani’s paintings.

The mime quickly went up behind him to imitate his long face and dejected gait. Again, laughter sprinkled the air. Encouraged, the mime pressed closer to the man until his body brushed against the other’s suit. His imitation was now so exaggerated that the audience burst into loud laughter, and, to my utter surprise, among them Dai Nam’s was the loudest.

The old man turned and soon realized what was going on. Anger broke out on his face like the eruption of a volcano. All his wrinkles seemed to flush a flaming red. He yelled and shook his bag at the performer,
“Allez-y, vous merde!”
Go away, shithead! He waved so hard that the bag finally fell and spilled its contents onto the ground—a pink-laced half-bra and bikini pants, garters, a corset, fishnet stockings. Now his whole face seemed to be on fire; then, like a mouse scurrying across a busy street chased by drunks waving broken bottles, he sped away.

Men in the café burst out laughing while the women gave out disgusted sighs. The two Japanese girls lowered their heads to stare at their hundred-dollar shoes. The two French women killed their cigarettes in the ash tray and spat a wet
“Salaud!”
Scumbag!

The mime, probably deciding that as a professional he should finish his show with dignity, began to pick up the underwear piece by piece from the ground. More laughs from the men and disgusted exclamations from the women. When finished, he chased after the old man, waving bras and bikinis and stockings over his head and screeching like the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s
The Magic Flute: “Monsieur, attendez! Vous avez oublié vos trucs!”
Wait, sir, you’ve forgotten your things!

Dai Nam, her face blushing a deep purple and her scar an angry black, shot up from her chair and barked at me, “Meng Ning, let’s go!”

Later, while I thought on and off of telephoning Dai Nam, one day she called me up to invite me to her home for dinner. Her friendliness surprised me, for as far as I knew, she’d never invited anybody to her room, let alone to have dinner. At the end of our short telephone conversation, she said, “It’s also a farewell dinner. I’ll be leaving for China in two weeks.”

Dai Nam lived in the Septième Arrondissement, a relatively expensive area in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower. However, like most students, she didn’t live on one of the main floors but in the attic. I wondered whether she had to clean house in exchange for rent.

Light seeped out from her slightly open door, tinting the gloomy corridor pale yellow, like a moldy lemon. I knocked gently, careful not to wake her from any of her visions. “It’s me, Meng Ning.”

Dai Nam’s voice boomed from inside. “Come in!”

I pushed open the door and was startled by what I saw. Right by the entrance, she was squatting with legs far apart and stirring some broth in a pot on a small stove. I apologized for almost knocking her over; she looked up at me. “Meng Ning, go and sit wherever you like.”