Once upon a time, there was a mountain.
On the mountain, there was a temple.
In the temple, there was an old monk and a young monk.
One day, the young monk told the old monk, “Tell me a story.”
And the old monk began, “Once upon a time, there was a mountain…”
The young monk giggled, interrupting the old monk’s story. He was seven and giggled at everything. He giggled when the fat orange cat fell off the windowsill halfway through its nap; when the overripe persimmon exploded under its own weight, spilling juice over the sutra scripts; when the old monk tripped on his own robe and swore under his breath, which was not very monkish of him. The young monk’s laugh, like pearls spilling onto a jade plate, was the sweetest sound in the temple, and the old monk told the story every night just to hear it.
Once upon a time, there was a mountain. Roughly fifty years before, the old monk, clad in a green straw cape, shod in wooden clogs, with a bamboo staff in hand, climbed up the mountain. In the village below, a girl named Xuan had broken his heart. She was eighteen and he was twenty. She was wed off to a pot-bellied, silk-robed salt merchant who commanded the rivers between Hankou and Chongqing. He whimpered for three whole days, felt possessed by spirits for six whole months, then retreated to the monastery and had not come down since. That was the Tenth Year of the Xianfeng Emperor, or 1860, the year when the British and French armies ravaged the Summer Palace. The empire, too, seemed possessed by spirits, its sun sinking behind the western hills.
Half a century later, a peddler selling lamp oil and gossip made his way up to the mountain and was surprised to find a hale, spirited old man. Monastic life served the monk well. Moss crept green on the steps, grass shimmered through the blinds; in this tiny corner of the world, he had cast out every errant thought and become a Buddha where he stood. As for the old stirrings of carnal love, those had been flicked away like a persimmon pit, gone to Heaven knows where.
“The Qing is finished,” the peddler said. “There is a republic now.”
The old monk bought his oil. A republic. He turned the word over in his mouth the way he turned prayer beads in his palm.
Soon after the peddler left, the boy arrived. He had walked for four days from a village to the southeast, where he went to school under a certain Professor Sun. He was seven, thin, didn’t speak a word, and couldn’t quit twirling his hair.
The first thing the old monk did for the boy was shave his head bald. Coal-dark hair came off like a thick goose feather, falling through the cracks of the wooden floor.
The next was to prepare a decent meal for him: a bowl of fragrant, steaming white rice, a dish of pickled radish, a few stalks of greens, and a cup of rainwater collected over several days.
“This is a welcome gift,” the old monk said. “From now on, you’ll have to endure a hard life with me.” The little monk stared at the plates, not daring to eat. So the old monk pushed them forward, kept piling radish into his bowl. “Eat, eat.”
The little monk ate every last grain, licking the bowl spotlessly clean.
By this time the stars had come out. But the young monk had trouble falling asleep while thunder roared outside the monastery’s thin wooden walls and wind and rain rattled against the bamboo eaves. He tossed and turned in his new bed, paced back and forth around the room. The old monk had never looked after a child before and had never seen anything like this. For a moment he had no idea what to do.
“Tell me a story,” the little monk piped up. “Ma always told me a story before bed.”
The old monk gave him the simplest one he knew, which was also the only one he knew.
Once upon a time, there was a mountain. In the temple, there was an old monk and a young monk. One day, the young monk said to the old monk, “Tell me a story.”
And the old monk said, “Once upon a time, there was a mountain…”
The young monk fell asleep, taking less than half an incense stick’s time.
That was the whole story. A world that contained itself, like a circle that returned to where it started. The circle kept rolling forward, as did the lives of the old monk and the young monk. Ringing the bell, feeding the chickens, watering the flowers and vegetables, chanting sutras…the days just slipped by in a muddle like that. Before he knew it, the young monk was ten, then fifteen, then twenty. Everything, as if following Heaven’s will, rolled gently forward.
Even though the young monk had long since taken to splitting wood and killing chickens, the old monk still told him the same story each night. It was another ritual. A stele too weighty to be removed. It was the old monk’s way of loving the young monk—one among a number of simple gestures the old monk half improvised, half learned from peddlers coming up the mountain. He gave the boy the biggest radish at every meal, carried him ten miles on his back to see a village doctor when he was ill, and kept his room swept free of dust. The old monk’s love was a simple, but heavy one.
Just like the story that he imagined himself living in—simple yet heavy. Simple because it lasted only a few lines. Heavy because it kept reoccuring, endlessly. Oh, how he wished his life with the young monk could be like this forever!
Time did wrinkle, at times. It was early spring. The old monk brought the ten-year-old boy out to the grasslands to catch butterflies. Morning dew hung on the brilliantly colored petals, glistening as if about to drip. The young monk held a butterfly net and charged forward like a piglet. The old monk sat on the little stool he’d brought along and watched everything unfold before him with a cheerful grin.
“I got it! I got it!”
“Haha. You got it.”
It was a cobalt blue butterfly, its wings thin and translucent as if made of glass. It fluttered once inside the net and then gave up the fight.
The young monk couldn’t stop laughing to himself.
He turned around, still laughing, and held the net up for the old monk to see.
The cobalt blue before the old monk’s eyes was not a butterfly: it was a hairpin he had seen long before. On a night of the full moon, he and a girl sat on a field ridge, chatting half-attentively, half-absently, and watched the moon in the distance. When he gazed into Xuan’s round, wide-open almond eyes, he thought that there would never be a more beautiful moment in his life. Before parting, Xuan handed him a cobalt blue hairpin, as a token of love.
Below the mountain, could Xuan still be alive? When it was a full moon again, would she too gaze at the moon, remembering that night when she opened her eyes wide and gave him her blue hairpin? It was too painful to wonder, so the old monk ceased wondering.
The old monk reached out and touched the butterfly’s wing with a fingertip.
“What a color,” he smiled.
He was not talking to the young monk, the young monk could tell. The young monk looked into the old monk’s wrinkled eyes. He could sense, even without the words for it, that the old monk’s tenderness was passing through him and landing somewhere else.
He did not resemble Ma and Ba. No. Ma and Ba had clear, translucent eyes, not the murky ones like the old monk’s.
The murkiness in the old monk’s eyes reminded him of Professor Sun, who’d promised to take care of him after Ma and Ba’s passing. Professor Sun smiled too, but his skin smiled while his flesh did not, his eyes viscous like a pool of dead water. Suddenly, the young monk felt his backside stinging hot, even though those welts had long since faded. He could hear the jeering and cheering of a hundred classmates. He could see Professor Sun’s canine teeth bared when he lifted the cane. It was love. That was what he had been told.
So now he allowed the old monk to love him, allowed him to tell him the same story every night, not out of affection but out of fear. Fear that he might mess up again this time. Fear that he might lose the old monk’s love—even though he felt the love but didn’t necessarily feel loved.
Looking again into the old monk’s murky eyes, the young monk knew nothing else to do, so he giggled.
From beneath the mountain, the old monk and the young monk would hear things: the howling of wolves, the roar of cannons, the weeping that stretched unbroken for dozens of miles. They heard these things the way they heard rain on their roof. Occasionally a family from the village below would climb the mountain to pray for a son, or for rain, or for the soldiers to go somewhere else, and the old monk would light incense and say the words and send them back down the mountain to whatever was waiting for them.
Later, news arrived in the same fragmentary way. Warlords in the north. Students marching in Beijing, burning foreign goods. A new party, then more parties, then war between them. But the old monk wouldn’t live long enough to hear the full story. (Who would?) He had already lived very long, longer than most people from his village. For a long stretch of time, he had one foot in the grave. His other foot joined it in 1926, the year Chiang Kai-shek waved a hundred thousand troops northward across the Central Plains. That day the persimmons were ripe, glowing red like hanging lanterns. The young monk, who had just turned 22, buried the old monk behind the temple.
Once upon a time, Alpha Zhang wrote a story that started with “once upon a time.” Once upon a time, the Nassau Weekly published it. Once upon a time, a time was once upon.