Today we pick back up in the conversation that Clete was having with Mu, who has decided, whether Clete likes it or not, to disclose their immediate family history and why they sit on the island and just wait.
If any of you come out of a religious tradition similar to mine and you find the Islanders' tenacious clinging to this myth of triumphant redemption oddly reminiscent of something you once heard somewhere, I don't what to tell you ... other than just stay tuned.
Just a warning, there will be one more installment in this exposition chapter, and it will look just a little farther back into Island history. But for the time being it's time to learn a little more about the First Princesses ...
... as the story continues ...
“And that is how Dog Island’s current phase of development, the era of exclusive
royal exile, began.”
“Have any of missing 47 every washed up or been recovered?”
“No. But they remain commemorated in our consciousness. The Festival of
Souls Lost at Sea is for them. Prior to the surge it was observed on the
traditional date of Hungry Ghosts, on the 15th or the full moon. We
moved it keep the memory of the 8th day, back-to-back with
Seven-Seven. It was not fully explained to you, but on Lost Souls, we cook
enough food to ritually feed 47 people, and that is what we set onto the ocean in the
little leaf boats on that night.
“And so, we were returned to
The Island, but we were totally on our own for a year, living in a virtual
stone age. But it was not too much different than conditions that we have today,
and we just got used to it. Their legislature did not want to grant us any aid.
We sued for independence, but they relented and agreed to provide a certain
number of prefabricated buildings and materials for rebuilding our
infrastructure. And our regular supply allowance of grain, medicine, and fuel.”
“This cataclysm of 1988,” I said, “you said it was payback for a
generation’s misconduct? Tell me about that.”
“That would be our mothers. ‘The children who forgot their duty,’ the
Tiny Empress called them. They were a great disappointment to
Great-Grandmother. I suppose I need to tell you about her first.”
“This was the woman known as ‘The Tiny Empress of the Moon?’”
“The ‘Numinous Moon’ in English. Let’s get that right, shall we?”
“So she was small?”
“Four feet, six inches in your measurement system.”
“Na told me about her.”
“Ah, so you know the story of Na’s freckles then. Because there were so
many unique things about her—her diminutive size, her great intellect, her
miraculous healing from smallpox, her beautiful pox scars, her ethereal beauty,
her ability to play the guqin with her tiny child’s hands—it was thought that
surely The Prince would come in her time, but he did not.
“At some time in an avatar’s life, she must give up hope for herself as
a maiden in waiting and instead marry someone else and produce the next avatar,
a daughter. This has always happened in an avatar’s mid to late 30s.”
“So these are arranged marriages then?”
“Extremely. The men who have been
chosen as consorts do it out of duty and because they are guaranteed a male heir,
a son.”
“Late life pregnancies are rare and not easy. What if a son is never
conceived? Or no child at all?”
“It’s never happened. As I said. There are no coincidences here. A
married avatar has always produced at least one son and one daughter. Oh, and
once an avatar’s daughter has reached womanhood, the mother never lives too
long after that.”
“By that logic, your clock is about to run out. Right? Nu is certainly a
woman now.”
“I accept that. That is the way it is.”
“Our mothers’ generation was unusual though. They seemed to hold on
tenaciously to life. The gods tolerated it for a while, but in the year of the
surge, they took them, one by one, on a strict schedule, in no particular
order.”
“They were not all the same age like you guys?”
“Oh no, among the the nine of them there were three shared birthdays. The Tiny Empress had a multiple
birth and produced three identical triplet daughters.”
“The mothers of the Three Branches that Qi told me about?”
“Ah. Exactly. A birth like that is considered portentious and it was
thought surely that within their time, The Prince would come, but he did not.
Like their mother, they all married, but also like their mother they each
produced triplet births, but not in the same year. So, that successive
generation was thought more auspicious than the previous. But our mothers took
it for granted that one of their cousins would be the chosen wife for The Great
Prince, so no one bothered to live faithfully in waiting, forcing the advent of
the Prince to bypass their generation. Many of them married early. Like I said,
they were a great disappointment to the Tiny Empress’ ideal of holding oneself
until the end.”
“Wai... , wai… , wait a MINUTE!” I said. “This system of yours will
NEVER resolve. If this Prince shows up, he’s going to have to steal another
man’s wife and child, totally violating your virtue of loyalty. If he shows up
before the woman marries, there’s no child for him to claim as his own. This
makes absolutely NO SENSE. If you believe this stuff, have you considered THAT’S
WHY you’ve been stuck here for centuries?”
“You are not the first to think that way.”
“Yeah, well. Who am I to judge? Maybe you like it this way? Continual
and eternal non-resolution?”
“I agree it defies conventional logic. We will never find the resolution
in reason. When he does come, and I believe he will, it WILL make a sense that
we cannot currently see.”
“Man, you guys sound like a bunch of Protestant theologians when they’re
backed into a corner and forced to explain things like blood sacrifice, virgin
birth, and the trinity. They end up saying something like: ‘It’s a mystery!’”
“Well then. You should be quite constitutionally equipped to accept
paradoxes.”
“Not really. But it's where I unhitch reason from religion. And how does having all nine of you—you, Feng, Lee, Qi, Lum,
Ting Ting, Mei, Na, and Lian—having children out of wedlock, but disqualifying
their sires from being The Prince, make any sense either?”
“That situation just sort of evolved. Lee was the one who first came up
with the idea to bear a daughter while unmarried. As we all aged there was
anxiety about what to do. She decided to arrange her impregnation with consent
of the donating clan involved all by herself. She thought that by sacrificing
her option of being the chosen wife, and by producing the next avatar it would
take the pressure off everyone else. And it did for a while. But when Ling
became old enough to be a conscious mind, Feng, who has great sensitivity in
this, discerned that for the first time, a girl in the line of descent of The
Empress was NOT an avatar. Our collective anxiety returned. Lee seemed to have
created a sound approach to the problem, so we each took our turn, trying to
produce the next avatar. Lian was to be the last maiden in waiting, but no
young avatar had been produced and then Lian’s period stopped for months. We
decided the gods revenge against our mothers was now fully enacted and that the
only thing to do was to await the end. It was a time of great despair. And then
Lian’s fertility returned. So she acted and when the ninth GIRL of that
generation was born, Qin Qin, we felt the pattern was affirmed, but Qin Qin was
not an avatar either.”
“Do your daughters know all of this?”
“No. We have not told them everything.”
“So you’ve hidden your doubt? You’ve led them to believe they’re part of
a cycle that you yourselves think has ended?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds bad.”
“It is SO DISHONEST! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED. IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE YOUR OWN MYTHS, WHY THE HELL DID YOU SEND ME
OUT ON THAT BOAT YESTERDAY TO GET THE SHIT KNOCKED OUTTA ME?”
“NO need to yell Dr. Wong! Not all of us are totally certain, about the girls that is. There is some disagreement. It’s
easier to support our ‘orthodox’ tradition. And so Professor, here we are, at
the end of our reason, at the end of logic. The thing we feel, all of us First
Princesses, is that we are now in a test of our original resolve, and faith,
and loyalty to what we believe about ourselves. But it’s been hard the last few
years as the Second Princesses have come of age. We are afraid that to change
our beliefs will mean another cataclysm. It’s a difficult for us to know what
to do. The pattern has changed.”
“So you came up with this tidy idea of
creating a Questor’s office?”
“And now you’ve come and the incident
happened yesterday. And I don’t know what it all means.”
“What does it mean that Nu asked
me to cut her hair?” I asked.
They looked at each other, and Mu nodded to Feng to answer.
“It means that Nu has made a legal declaration that she believes you are
the prophesied Great Prince, and that she acknowledges you as her real father
and her sovereign ruler. It means that as your daughter, and subject, she owes
you her loyalty, duty, and obedience in all things, and that you have a
superior claim on her behavior as her father, more so than Mu, her mother.”
“Holy shit! That means I have legal responsibility for her then?”
“At this point,” said Mu, “she told me
you had no idea what you were doing because she didn’t tell you. I’m pretty
sure she figured that if she did tell you, you would have refused. So we should
not consider you bound as her parent and king yet, but should you acknowledge
her claim, then yes.”
“What would that entail?”
“Something as simple as giving her an order, as we would expect a father
to do. So be careful in your dealings with her until you’ve decided how to
resolve it.”
“MU! You need to take responsibility for this fucked-up situation. YOU
sent me out there, chasing a bunch of goddamned pirate kidnappers, flying your
flag, dressed like the Holy Roman Qianlong Emperor. Andou and his crew ALSO
think I’m some kind of fairy-tale character that can order them around and
stick earrings into. What were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry Clete,” said Mu. “That’s just it. I wasn’t thinking. I just
knew I had to do something. It was an existential crisis. And that was the only
thing I could think to do.”
“Did you tell Nu all this?”
“Yes I did. Last night. Over and over.”
“AND?”
“It only made her more convinced that her instincts were correct.”
“NOW what do I do?”
“I don’t know. But I believe you were permitted here by our gods to be
an intervening force, as you have proven.”
“May I?” said Feng.
“Go ahead.”
“There is … one thing … that you could do to turn this into a resolution
or a relatively ‘happy ending,’” said Feng, she leaned over into Mu. “I don’t
know if Mu would agree to it.”
“Marriage? No offense Mu. We could make as good a team as any arranged
couple, but don’t go there,” I said, “I was married before and I am never going
there again. It’s not a happy place for me. Plus it would be inauthentic. I
suspect you’d feel like you were carrying on a charade.”
“Clete,” said Mu, “I am not going to say anything on that topic right
now. It’s premature. We need to let the matter sit. By the way, Nu made the fishballs
for you so it would nice if you said something about them when you see her. For
the time being I suggest that you just carry on your day-to-day work, along
with whatever social obligations you seem to have gotten yourself into. What
this I hear you are committed to being Qi’s bath attendant? If this is
troublesome for you, I can intervene.”
“Are you complaining? She been smelling a lot nicer ever since.”
“And he is my music student,” said Feng. "I don't recommend discontinuing them. You've made good progress."
“And he is my music student,” said Feng. "I don't recommend discontinuing them. You've made good progress."
“Has he? Well Clete, do you have any questions for us?”
“OK, so now I know your immediate family tree, roughly. But how did this legend
of return get started? Why are you here in the first place?”
© Copyright 2012 by Vincent Way, all rights reserved.
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Be truthful and frank, but be polite. If you use excessive profanity, I'll assume you have some kind of character flaw like Dr. Wong. Tks!