1
Jiang had grown up in a quiet village; the kind where very little took place. The most that ever happened was that a few sheep went missing, someone got married, or someone else may have died of old age. That was the extent of it.
They were close to the mountains and when you looked up to try to make out the top of the summit all you saw were impenetrable clouds. They were so thick that no human eye could see through them. They had legends about what was there. A goddess lived there and from time to time she would come down to the village and they would see her.
To witness her would bring good luck, inevitably many went to see her and all returned having failed. So it was that many believed it was just a myth, a fairy tale, and that no such girl existed. She was called the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses.
2
They were from the Far East, where people worshipped their ancestors and looked to dragons for good luck. They ate with chopsticks and lived in accordance to the mandate of heaven and saw their Emperor as the Son of Heaven. These were traditions that had been passed down since ancient times, times that were long ago, times that had been forgotten, relegated to the misty moors of legend and pseudo-history.
The times were changing. The last emperor had been enthroned. The tremors of revolution were felt throughout the country and this was all happening under the watchful eye of the summit in which the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses was said to live.
Fortune it seemed was no longer smiling upon them and with that many were turning to new ideas, the old ancestors were forgotten. Science and technology, these were the new gods and like the rest of the world, the old gods were abandoned, and magic was no more.
This was the world Jiang lived in, a world of change and he was born into it. He was ready for the change and young enough that the change would not turn his world upside down, what he was not ready for was to discover how real the old ways were, how the old gods are not so easily forgotten, how they come back, how they simply slumber to awaken once more.
3
Jiang was a child when he first saw her; he was playing in the fields with his sister, Yue. They were in the middle of a game of hide and seek, and it was as he was looking for Yue, he saw the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses walking on a pond. She wore a snow-white robe, her black hair like silk and her skin so pale it was like ivory or freshly fallen snow, much like the robe she wore. Ethereal and ghostly, with each step she took a white lotus appeared under her feet. They glowed and the day turned into night. She became even more ghostly in her appearance.
She was like a walking dream, a walking phantom that came from another world and into the next. He knew it was her that she was the girl from the summit and he ran to her.
They met each others gaze for a moment and the stare she gave in return to him was unlike anything he had ever received. It was like she saw him for what he was, in every way possible and then just as quickly as she’d appeared, she was gone.
4
He was left stunned by what he saw. The sun shone once more as if no darkness had descended on it. Everything was as it was, as if she had never been there and perhaps he thought, she had never been there. He had forgotten about looking for his sister who by now was tired of waiting for him to find her and found him instead.
“Why are you looking at the pond?” she asked.
“Didn’t you see her?” he asked.
“See what?”
That was enough of an answer. He said nothing else to her about it.
5
Should he tell someone about what he saw? This question he asked himself. He didn’t. He kept it all to himself letting the days pass by, doing nothing about the girl. He could ask the village elder if he felt intrepid enough, but right now he didn’t.
He dreamed of her. He could not get her image out of his mind. She haunted him and he knew that she wanted him to find her. He could hear her calling to him.
He grew older, becoming a young man. By this time he was engaged to a woman in the village, his future wife, Mei. Mei was certainly pretty, but she would never match the grace and loveliness that was the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses. But he was satisfied with Mei and he seemed to like her enough, although he was not sure he loved her, because what he felt for the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses was love. Can one love a dream? The Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses was by now a dream, a dream that he kept chasing, but unable to find.
He went to college. He had gotten an education, leaving behind his village, doing so from the help of a wealthy childless uncle living in a nearby city.
In turn Jiang came to believe that the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses had given him good luck. His future was going to be far more prosperous than he thought. He felt he had to thank her. But still he wanted to see her again and not just in his dreams.
6
Jiang could not hide his secret anymore. He went to the village elder
The elder greeted the boy who sat down beside him.
The elder was in his nineties and blind, nevertheless his wisdom was sought after by many throughout the province. His fame reached across the land. Despite his old age, his mind was still good, untouched by the senility that takes hold of some of the elderly.
“What brings you here?” he asked Jiang.
“Many years ago when I was a small boy, I saw her, the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses.”
“Ah you saw her too,” the old man smiled. “I also saw her a long time ago. I was a young man, your age. I didn’t believe any of the tales until that moment. Afterwards, I tried to find her again and failed everytime. Tell me, do you want to see her again?”
“Yes,” Jiang replied.
“Give it up. It will only end in heartache.”
“I have to do it.”
“Try it then, but you have my warning.”
7
The elder’s warning did Jiang little good. He married Mei and had three children. They immigrated to the United States. He struggled to make a living, tried to be the breadwinner everyone wanted him to be, but he couldn’t do it, he was always distracted by the girl.
As before, she came and went in his dreams. Every year he went back to the village to search for her, even took his family with him. Mei was not pleased but she went along with it.
The years were wasted; for he realized as they went on he was unhappy. Each trip he never saw her. He even climbed the mountain to the summit and again he saw nothing, no sign of her, no whisper that she even existed.
It was more than he could take, the disappointment left him bitter and with little hope. He came to believe the elder who was by now long dead was right. It would end in heartache.
8
His two sons and daughters graduated from college. Now they were married as well, living their own lives. As for he and his wife, their lives were changing as well.
Dissatisfied with Jiang, Mei had an affair. She fell in love with another man and when she was tired of hiding the affair, she finally told her husband the truth. Jiang seemed not to care.
It only further validated her opinion of him. She packed her bags and off she went. He never saw her again.
9
His relationship with his children had become strained. They wanted little to do with him. He withered away in his lonely house and by the time he had his final sickness, his daughter was the one who took charge of his affairs, less out of love and more out of a sense of duty than anything.
Now he was alone and dying in the hospital with no one visiting him, not even his children, not even the daughter who seemed to be waiting with bated breath for her waste of a father to pass on.
He wondered how he had gotten there? Was it the Girl of the One Thousand Lotuses? Perhaps she’d cursed him; perhaps this had been the price he was to pay for looking upon her forbidden beauty?
The Elder had said it would end in heartache? But isn’t that life? Life is heartache and joy? One cannot be known without the other. And so he came believe that he would never have been worthy of looking at her beauty had he not suffered so.
His children may have grown up to be the most selfish people he could imagine, but he still loved them and he tried, he tried his best, but he could not excuse his faults. And that was when he knew what he had done wrong. He had been seeking happiness outside of himself, little wonder his wife had felt so isolated and unhappy, looking elsewhere for love. Why else had she cheated on him?
And his children they had an absent father, a father who was only partially there.
He had been looking for the divine when he already had it.
And that was when after some eighty years of looking for her, of seeking her, that he saw her again in that room. She stood beside his bed and caressed his forehead.
Her touch was as light as a feather, as soft as silk. She was as beautiful as she’d been the first time. Now he understood why he had never seen her again. He was unworthy. Those that seek happiness never find it. Those that do not seek for it, find that it is already there.
Some would think he was a fool. He had used so much time on what was a useless pursuit. Or was it useless? In the end he was with her. The real fool is the one who would have died not having this realization, and he would never have come to this epiphany had it not been for the seeking.
She touched his cheek. She whispered his name and kissed his forehead. With that he blissfully and peacefully died.