The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(95)

“Please, come in. All are welcome here,” he said. “My name is Shi.”

“Fei-jin.” For some reason her Chinese name seemed more appropriate here. Not just in its formality, but in its honesty. Then she relaxed and said, “Call me Faye.”

She removed her shoes and followed the monk to a small zendo, where a cast-iron stove heated the open space. Faye stepped gently on the wooden floor, tiled with large white and magenta squares in a checkerboard fashion. The floor was adorned with well-worn rugs and cushions. On the far side of the room, illuminated by candles and hanging lanterns, was a wide wooden altar with a golden statue of the seated Buddha, a sun behind it, like a flower, with eight petals radiating from the center. Around the statue were more figures of beings in various states of enlightenment and repose, surrounded by offerings of fruit and flowers, cups of tea and water, and prayer sticks, always in groups of three. Smoke from the burning incense swirled, caressing the statuary as it floated to the ceiling. Faye thought the wisps of smoke looked like butterflies caught in a jar, trying to escape.

She followed the monk up a flight of wooden stairs to a landing with a dozen potted orchids in different stages of growth, beneath a closed window, streaked with rain. The dark sky flashed with bolts of electricity or bomb explosions—from inside it was hard to tell. He led her to a simple kitchen where a kettle was beginning to boil.

“Please, sit,” he said.

She sat as he placed two cups on the table.

“Do you live here by yourself?” Faye asked.

The monk thought for a moment, as if this were a question with many possible answers. “I suppose I do. I’ve never really thought of it that way.”

He carefully poured tea for both of them. Found some flower cakes—Dian-style mooncakes—which smelled like the roses that grew nearby in the hills.

“I don’t get many visitors these days,” he said. “What brings you here? You seemed a bit lost back there, grieving, yet at the same time curious.”

Faye thought about her ah-ma, who had come from America as a little girl, fleeing a plague. She rarely talked about her childhood, but when she did she spoke in fables. How her mother was made of fire. How her father had become a ghost hero. Faye wanted to know more, but as a child she never asked. Now she felt like asking.

“I have some odd questions. I’m hoping you might be able to help me?”

Shi nodded and sipped his tea.

“The man back there, the pilot,” Faye said. “He was searching for me. Yet I just met him and now he’s gone. But I can’t help feeling like I’ve known him. That we’ve spent time together or will spend time together.” Faye thought about the photo with her handwriting on it. She wished she still had it. Was it real? The more she thought about the photo, the more she worried the monk must have thought she was a drunkard. Or a poor soul who has seen so much violence, hardship, and death that her mind had found relief in some fictional world in the far corners of her imagination.

“Maybe you have.” He smiled. “Maybe you did know him?”

That wasn’t the answer Faye was expecting.

“If you’re asking me about some sort of past life, or rebirth, I’m afraid I will be of little help at best, and at worst, somewhat disappointing. My Buddhist teaching encourages me not to dwell on those conceptions. Because this thing we might call a past life insinuates that we had a primary one to begin with. It implies the existence of a soul that transmigrates from body to body. That alone can be motivating, almost intoxicating, but that idea is also a myth. The Buddhist view of the nonself rejects the existence of an essential soul. It’s my belief that we are just an ever-changing collection of memories that, when added up, create the illusion of self. Does that make sense?”

Faye hesitated, then shook her head.

Shi thought for a moment, then took a sip of tea.

“If you plant an acorn,” he said, “it may grow to become an oak tree. Yet there is no acorn within that wooden body. Has the acorn been reborn as a tree? Or does the acorn grow to be something else entirely? It’s my belief that the acorn and the tree are an idea, spread out over an abstraction of time. And if that new tree, when fully grown, drops one acorn or one hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand, that idea keeps progressing as this thing we call life.”

Faye listened and tried to comprehend what he was saying, but her thoughts wandered. She remembered how John Garland had tried to smile through his pain and injuries when he saw her on the runway. How natural it felt to hold his hand while she read to him. How when he’d died in her arms it felt as though the sun had gone down in winter, leaving her hoping, longing for spring.

“How does this explain how I felt about the stranger in the morgue?” she asked. “I see people die every day. I care for them. At times, I become quite fond of them. But this one…” Faye hesitated, sighed, and then sipped her tea.

“Perhaps he is a part of you,” the monk said. “But instead of trees and acorns, you’re both waves on the same ocean. Of course, you are separate, you crest and you fall as individual waves, but fundamentally you come from the same place, and when the ocean is calm, it is impossible to tell where he ends and you begin.”

Faye furrowed her brow, trying to process what the monk was saying. “I just wish I could remember him the way he remembered me.”