Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization Read online

  Contents

  Ms. Ming’s Guide

  Copyright © 2019 Jan Alexander. All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  A Note from the Author

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part II

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  From Ming’s Notebook

  Acknowledgements

  Ms. Ming’s Guide

  to

  Civilization

  Jan Alexander

  Regal House Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Jan Alexander. All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  Raleigh, NC 27612

  All rights reserved

  ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781947548046

  ISBN -13 (epub): 9781947548053

  ISBN -13 (mobi): 9781947548855

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931665

  All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any cirmstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

  Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene

  lafayetteandgreene.com

  Cover images © by C. B. Royal

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  https://regalhousepublishing.com

  The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For Jean-Marc

  A Note from the Author

  In this novel I find myself breaking and entering into the head of a character named Xiao Ming Cheng, who comes from China, a culture not my own. How I became a cultural burglar has something to do with my formal education in Chinese studies and years spent there. More than that, though, the time I spent in Ming’s head told me that both imagination and identity extend far beyond geographic boundaries.

  Ming’s plight is born of the international divide between those engaged in the pursuit of dollars/euros/yuan and those who see life as a quest for fulfillment, yet find that wealth is necessary to meet “the requirements of the imagination,” as Henry James put it long ago.

  I could borrow from Flaubert and say Ming c’est moi, the only known excuse we have in a long tradition of male authors appropriating the female mind and possibly an apocryphal quote at that. But we do know that Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, in a letter to Louis Colet: “… the heart I was studying was mine. How often have I felt at my best moments the cold of the scalpel that entered me in the flesh! Bovary (to a certain extent, as far as I could, so far as it was more general and human) will be in this respect, the sum of my psychological science…”

  Ming, too, entered my being like a scalpel, appointing herself my mouthpiece as we both imagined a world order that has a place for scribblers and dreamers like ourselves.

  Part I

  The Spy in the Pagoda

  Chapter One

  Ming Cheng was born in the cruelest place on earth—a village that sprawled through six green hills, so far out west in Sichuan province that the maps had no names for what was there. The village lay beneath a dome of clouds, with rain that could bite right through her clothes. Hardly anyone came through and no one left; a bus was supposed to pass through town once a week, but many days it couldn’t get through the clouds and was forced to take another route.

  Ming’s town was called Yang Guang, or Sunshine Village, and everyone thought that was a mean joke. Mama and Papa said the sun used to shine there, though. They could tell, from the deep gorge where the Tuo River ran, that a million years ago the rains had made a mighty river. Then the sun had dried it out, then the rains had come, then the sun, then the rains had come again and carved a deeper riverbed, then the sun again and then the rain.

  Mama and Papa had named her Xiao Ming, which meant “Little Bright One.” They told her she was their bright little pearl, but Ming had a shard of mirror, and the mirror told her that was a joke too; she was an ugly girl, with grownup teeth coming in rotten. At least she wasn’t a monkey.

  There was a monkey hiding in the village, Ming knew—a monkey that could talk. She was only eight when she first saw him, and she kept it secret. If she’d told anyone that she’d met a talking monkey, the people would have called a struggle meeting, dragged her up the fourth hill to the amphitheater, put her on the stage and pitched stones at her. “Enemy of the revolution, you believe in the olds, the superstitions!” they would have jeered.

  Things were supposed to be different now that Mao Zedong was dead. He’d died the same year Ming was born, 1976. Chairman Mao had sent Mama and Papa to Sunshine Village because they were scientists, and the revolution needed them to help make silicon products for the Chinese army. So in 1969, they’d boarded a train from Beijing with at least a thousand other people, carrying just one suitcase, Mama pregnant with Ming’s big brother Han, not knowing where they were going until the train stopped in the Sichuan city of Chengdu and a local Army sergeant stepped on and called out their names.

  The revolution still needed Mama and Papa. But now the people of Sunshine Village would watch their new leader, Deng Xiao Ping, on television, urging them to get rich so that they’d help make China strong and glorious, and they knew that somehow the new ways just couldn’t get through the clouds that surrounded them.

  Ming saw the monkey twice—the first time, in the pagoda. Except for the Red Guards who’d destroyed the old idols, nobody had gone near the pagoda in over a hundred years. Villagers said pale-haired foreign devils lived at the top of the pagoda, nine stories up, waiting to swat you with X-rays that would make you shrivel down into a tiny pebble. Ming wondered, though, if she might be able to convince the foreign spies to whisk her away, outside the wall of clouds to some faraway land with beautiful flowers and lots to eat. So one day after school, she crept up to the doorway, trembling all over, but she made herself peek inside. There was only a thick blackness and a strong animal scent. Then, suddenly, she saw two fiery golden circles staring right back at her. With the light from those golden eyes she could just make out a monkey form.

  “Are you the Monkey King?” she asked. The golden eyes were just like the ones in her old picture book, the one about the myth of the
immortal Monkey King. Even Mao Zedong had turned out to be mortal, but the Monkey King, born, or so the legend said, from a stone egg, had reached the highest form of enlightenment. He had trained his mind so that his spirit could come back from the heavens; on earth, he could transform himself into seventy-two different shapes, from monkey to man, or from butterfly to gnat. He could also somersault across oceans and fly like a bird.

  Papa had read stories to Ming about the Monkey King and how mischievous he could be. In one story, the Monkey King got drunk on peach wine and stomped all over a banquet table. But he also protected the powerless, and he could fell a greedy warlord with one forward kick. What Ming loved most of all, however, was the ancient myth that the stone egg from which he had hatched was located somewhere along the cliffs near Sunshine Village. Papa told her another tale, about how the Monkey King had flirted with many ladies, but his true love was a poor peasant maiden named Zenia, who had lived in Sunshine Village. There was an old superstition—not that anyone believed in superstitious old stories now—that the chilly rain was a curse Zenia had put upon the village when she was deprived of her Monkey King’s love.

  With those golden eyes practically daring her to believe in some terrible feudalist myth, Ming glanced behind her, terrified someone might have seen her venturing toward the old pagoda. When she turned back, the eyes and the monkey form were gone. She shivered, the winter chill biting through the holes in her jacket, and her stomach let out a savage growl. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she saw pigs, tigers, and monkeys flying—Mama and Papa said these were hunger visions. Of course, this monkey, these eyes, had to be one of those visions. It was the last week of January and the pound of pork that Sichuan State Sunshine Village Silicon Works Enterprises had provided on the first of the month was long gone. Mama’s vegetable patch lay beneath a blanket of snow, and all they had to eat was the rice Mama boiled three times to make it puffy.

  As she walked home, Ming composed a poem in her head. “The monkey’s golden eyes of fire / A land beyond the clouds, much higher.”

  Ming spotted the monkey again just a few days later. She was walking the long route home from school—the one Mama and Papa said she must never take because she might get lost in the pine grove, or fall off the cliff. Ming took the forbidden route whenever no one was around to see her turn into the pine woods, because getting lost seemed like a good way to have something exciting happen. A massive stone Buddha sat on the cliff; some sculptor in the nineteenth century had carved it from granite, smoothing the big round thighs and belly, and the flowing robes. For some reason, the sculptor had left the face incomplete, leaving a pocked slab of stone instead of a mouth to chant and eyes to guard the river. Beside the Buddha was a dark black hole of a cave. The earth could swallow you up if you went in there, people said.

  The clouds grew darker as she wandered through the pine forest, and a rain began to fall. Ming sloshed through fresh puddles down toward the Buddha. She opened her mouth to swallow raindrops and felt them tickle her throat. But they dissolved into nothing long before they might have reached the empty space that was her stomach. Then suddenly the monkey appeared from nowhere, leaping up to sit on the Buddha’s shoulder. Ming stared at him, transfixed, wondering if she really was crazy.

  “Do you have any peaches?” the monkey asked. His voice was deep, sending out sound waves that she could almost feel like a palpable force against her skin. Tears filled his eyes as he said the word peaches.

  “What do peaches look like?”

  “Or a banana?”

  Ming had seen a bunch of bananas once in a movie at the village cinema.

  “Modern Chinese people don’t get hungry.” She knew she was being mean, but people in Sunshine Village were always saying mean things. Everyone knew the old rule about filling your stomach with good socialist thoughts instead of food was just another joke. The monkey probably saw food in his dreams, just like Ming did. The monkey stared down at her from his perch, his fiery eyes taking in the holes in her cotton jacket, her chaffed hollow cheeks, and the chill bumps on her hands. Then he peered into her eyes as if he were looking right through to her soul.

  “Help me,” he pleaded.

  Ming started to ask, “Help you what?” but the damp air made her cough before she could get the first word out. As she was coughing, the monkey raised his haunches, turned a somersault, and rolled right over the edge of the cliff. Ming, catching her breath, ran to the cliff edge and peered over. He was nowhere to be seen. She shivered, figuring the current had washed his corpse downriver.

  A loud cackle sounded from above, and there he was, in mid-air, soaring up and down and up again like he was on a roller coaster to the sun.

  I know why the magic Monkey King was hiding in the village, hungry and forlorn.

  I’m Ming. He asked me to help him, and when I grew up I did. Zenia too. The three of us changed the world, in fact. Not that I can promise a happy ending, though the story isn’t over yet. Life is a battle where you win, then lose, then win, then lose, then you just might start all over again, like the eternal battle between the sun and the rain in the village where I was born.

  For years afterward, Ming dreamt of riding the monkey’s roller coaster to the sun, and in some ways, she actually did. When Ming was eleven, the Sunshine Village Communist Party officials granted some of the other scientist neighbors who’d come there to work in the silicon factory permission to move back to the cities they’d come from. Mama and Papa discovered that if they saved some money and gave it in an envelope to the local Party they too could get permission. When Ming was twelve, they moved to the bustling city of Beijing.

  Ming didn’t mind climbing the seven floors to their new big-city apartment or dodging the million bicycles and cars when crossing the streets; nor did she mind the chemicals in the air that felt like needles piercing her nostrils. She could look above the tall buildings and see a yellowish sphere of sun, even on days when pollution made the air a chalky gray-white color. Ming loved looking in the stores with their glass cases full of medicinal mushrooms and herbs, bins of wrapped white candy, and headless mannequins wearing dresses.

  She loved Beijing even though she didn’t have many friends at her new school. The girls laughed at her, and she had heard them sneer—in their haughty Mandarin—at her ragged country clothes. In school, Ming had read a story translated from English, about a group of writers who lived in America, in a place called New York City. Someday, she decided, she was going to find a way to get on a plane and get beyond even Beijing, to the city in America where everyone wanted to be a writer.

  Her brother wanted to go to America too. Han had done very well on his Chinese university entrance exams—astonishingly well, his teachers had said, despite his childhood in a dirtwater country village. Han was accepted into Beijing University, or Bei Da as everyone called it—the best school in all of China. A professor from a place called Harvard Business School came to speak to students at Bei Da, and Han introduced himself and, apparently, made a big impression. Big enough that he ended up getting a scholarship to attend Harvard. Mama and Papa called that kind of good fortune “double happiness.”

  But then, in Ming’s last year of high school, Mama and Papa had some serious trouble. One night, they woke to a thunderous knock on the door. Three policemen took Papa away, stating that he had committed some terrible crime—though they didn’t say what the crime was. Mama told Ming the arrest was probably a result of their refusal to hire the local deputy Minister of Industry’s mistress; they’d protested that they didn’t have the budget and the girl didn’t have any skills.

  Mama and Papa, it occurred to Ming, still imagined they were serving a revolution where everyone was honorable and trying to make a better world. Papa spent nearly two months in prison. By the time they let Papa out, the local Party officials had accused the deputy minister himself of corruption. One day in March, the prison guard opened the door to Pap
a’s cell and simply told him he could go. Mama said she didn’t want to work for the government anymore, but things were changing once again and Mama had a big idea; they were going to start their own private enterprise. Lots of people were doing that, now that the laws allowed them to. Mama had rented an old warehouse northwest of the city, in Badaling. The Party was busy there, bulldozing through woods to build the Beijing Badaling Economic Development Zone, complete with industrial parks and office buildings, vast apartment blocks, and a broad stretch of road that led to the Great Wall of China. There, in the warehouse, Mama and Papa started a company they called Rising Phoenix. They hired about a dozen people, including some from the village, and they all got to work making silicone products once again. Instead of military products, however, they made silicone rubber that could be turned into molds for tires or toys or—as Mama and Papa knew but didn’t like to talk about—sex toys.

  Mama and Papa worked hard, saved their money, and after three years of frugal living, they bought a big section of land beyond the green hills of the Huyu Natural Scenic Area, amidst farms that were slowly surrendering to cement. They converted their land into an industrial park that housed their production facilities and residential apartments—for themselves as well as their workers and customers from out of town. By then, people were coming by the thousands from all over the world to worship at the altar of China’s double-digit economic growth.

  Mama and Papa put all their earnings into their company; they wouldn’t even buy new towels to replace the threadbare ones they had brought with them from Sunshine Village. They worked hard, determined that Ming and Han both could have the opportunity to go to business school and help make China rich and powerful.