Half Bowl of Mengpo’s Soup
After I died, I found myself standing on a narrow stone bridge. In the middle of it was a woman cooking a pot of soup, and though she had a crooked back, had wrinkles deep as ravines crisscrossing on her face, her eyes were youthful—the whites were the palest shade of blue.
Recalling the stories I’d heard as a little girl, I recognized her as Mengpo. I heard that she guarded a bridge called Naihe, and she would make the dead drink her soup, which was said to erase all their memories before they were born again. If one refused to drink, she could deny rebirth to that person, who’d then become a ghost wandering forever.
As I approached Mengpo, she picked up a clay bowl with a chipped rim, into which she ladled the soup till it brimmed. She told me to drink to the last drop, and when asked, confirmed that it’d make me forget all. “Then,” she pointed over her shoulder and said, “cross the bridge and enter the living world through a womb again.”
Up till then, I had not looked at anything other than Mengpo, her soup, and the bridge. Now I saw that above the bridge it was all dark, but underneath it, there was light. Vines with leaves smooth as jade had grown out of the light, and from these vines hung emerald fruits the size of small plums, heavy and alluring. At the two ends of the bridge, mists that were lighted here and darkened there shifted and squirmed.
The mists reminded me of the day my parents died. I was nine. There was a great flood. A fog rose dense from the flood, but I still saw my parents drown, while I survived clinging to a floating tree trunk. After that I was a beggar for a decade. I suffered from hunger, from cold in winter, from the illness I died of, which I had no money to ask a doctor about, but I feared one thing above all in those ten years: the feeling, when I thought of death, that I was falling into an infinitely large and pitch-dark canvas. My stomach would churn at the mere thought, so much so I had to gasp for breath.
Now I knew it was not nothing after death. The sight of the bridge and the fact that there would be a next life had come as such a relief. My fear on earth turned out to be pointless. But I would forget about all this, once I’d drunk the soup, and I worried I would have to live with pointless fear all over again.
“You don’t have to,” Mengpo said, to my surprise. I must’ve thought aloud. “You can choose to turn around and go back the way you have come. You’ll be a ghost among the living”; she produced what looked like a hemp sack large enough to hold a hundred jin of rice, with a drawstring to tighten the mouth; “and if you use this to collect the last breaths of ninety-nine humans and come back here to empty the breaths into my soup, you could then go down there, where an eternity of no suffering, as well as other immortals, will be.”
When alive, my instinct was to find fault in whatever sounded too good. If I heard this or that wealthy family was offering the poor free pork, I’d think the pig had died of poison. Eternity without fear, that sounded too good, but there was no fault to be found, the light down below being constant, warm, embracing. So I asked why she had picked me, and if there would be any punishment should I fail.
“Old heaven’s will is not up to me to say,” Mengpo said, looking up at the darkness above. “And no, no punishment, but remember, no one is ever offered the sack a second time.”
I took the sack. Along with it Mengpo gave me a long scroll, on which were written the names whose last breaths I was going to collect. Beside the names were their addresses and dates of birth and death. The dates of death spanned a hundred years. The places I had to go, even those that were thousands of li from my home city, or those that had not come into existence yet, I somehow knew the way to. When alive, I’d never been farther than fifty li from my birthplace.
When I had taken the sack, I’d expected obstacles. It shouldn’t be too easy to acquire eternal bliss. I imagined places hard to get to, and feared that two deaths on the list might occur too close to one another in time, yet far away in space, and I would be late. I also worried I had to witness deaths so gruesome I could not carry on, or someone would tempt me into wanting the earthly life again. The temptation was there: I didn’t eat or sleep anymore, and I missed them; and now that I had let out my last breath and could no longer smell, I missed the scent of woods in rain, even more than moon cakes and rice wine, or a good night’s dreams.
Yet I soon found that no place was hard to get to, since I could walk through anything now, mountains or walls. No living person could see, hear, or touch me, thus none could talk me into giving up. At first, my longing for food or other earthly things intensified, but after a year or two, I hardly remembered the taste. Meanwhile, the longer I remained as a ghost, the shorter a person’s lifetime seemed to me. I would watch a baby being born, and drop by later to see he’d grown and fallen in love. He’d tell his wife he wanted to achieve this and buy that, and I’d come back to catch his last breath. His children would mourn, but they were also glad of the inheritance, then two decades later, they’d age to look almost the same as their father or mother on the deathbed. And all this time, around these men and women, wars turned places into rubble; then new buildings rose, and there would be feasts; rivers changed courses, even the sky adopted a new color, a dirty brownish gray. Only the fact that nothing human would last never changed. That made my task easy. To see a tree thousands of years old cut down was a shock, but leaves grew and fell. I watched people die, no matter the manner, with less and less agitation, and eighty-eight years passed uneventfully.
On a winter day of the eighty-eighth year, my scroll told me to go to my home city, to collect the breath of a twenty-two-year-old woman called Mingzhu. By then I’d been back to the city several times and was thus familiar with the sight of all the concrete buildings. Mingzhu’s place was a one-room unit on the second floor of a five-story building. It was one of the many identical-looking ones, all gray like prisons, all wider than tall, all standing only steps away from one another on the outskirts of the city. Each unit of it was like a box with a low ceiling and two layers of doors, the outer door of wrought iron, because the neighborhood was not very safe.
But Mingzhu would not die of any crime. As soon as I entered her home through the two doors, I knew how she was going to die. The small unit had only one window—a wedding shuangxi sticker was pasted on it—and it was shut tight and locked too, to fend off the forceful northwestern wind. Mingzhu was asleep, perhaps sick with a fever, for her cheeks were red without makeup. She was alone, but beside her, the quilt was lifted and the sheet crumpled; at a corner of the room, on a gas burner with a propane tank, a pot of congee was starting to bubble. Her husband must’ve gotten up earlier and cooked the congee, and afterward he’d gone out for work or to buy medicine. But he forgot to turn off the burner. Soon the mixture of white rice and water would rise over the edge of the pot. It would spill onto the burner and quench the fire, then gas would come out to kill her.
An alarm clock on the bedside table said Mingzhu still had twenty minutes to live. When twenty turned into seventeen, the fire on the burner went out. I slid my sack down from my shoulder and sat on the crumpled sheet to wait. I passed the time by trying to decide which of the two, the husband or wife, had the worse fate. She would die young, but she’d also forget herself and him, and live a new life; or even better, she’d be offered the sack too and become an immortal. He would live on, maybe to a very old age, but it also meant he’d have many years before him to look back on this day.
The husband came back twelve minutes to Mingzhu’s death. He must have remembered the burner, for at once he shouted her name and pounded the iron outer door. He had forgotten his keys too. Two identical sets of keys dangled from a hook by the door—so thorough was fate’s doing when it had decided to part this couple.
The shouting and pounding, as well as the clanking of the iron door, drew their neighbors out. They told him to calm down, and they must’ve smelled the gas, for they proposed calling an ambulance, finding a locksmith, or going to the police. But no one owned a phone or knew where the nearest phone kiosk was. No one had seen a locksmith’s shop or a police station in the area either. Then a woman with a gauze pad covering one of her eyes said that she’d seen a long bamboo ladder at the foot of their building, when she went out to buy groceries in the morning, and while she was still explaining that the ladder might’ve been left behind by some electrician, for they’d had so many blackouts recently, the man had run off.
Five minutes to Mingzhu’s death, he dragged the ladder back and leaned it against the wall with a bang. As he climbed, I braced myself for more shouting and pounding. But when his head emerged in the window frame, he stopped moving. He looked straight at me and said, “Who are you?”
I walked through the window to stand, in midair, before him. He was so shocked he nearly lost his balance. There was no more doubt he could see me, and as if to test whether he could hear me too, I said, “No living person is supposed to see me.”
He stared at me, then looked down at the neighbors who’d gathered at the foot of the ladder. They only looked up at him. “Are you a deity?” he asked.
“Deity? No, I’m not that important at all.” I could see my own reflection in the window. I still wore the tattered beggar’s clothes I wore when I died. The thought that someone would mistake me for a goddess almost made me chuckle, but it was not a good time. I told him I was a ghost going around to collect people’s last breaths.
That reminded him his wife was dying. His face distorted under the weight of fear and guilt, he said, “Can you open the window, please?”
I could have ignored him. I only had to wait a few more minutes to bag the breath and be done with the couple. But maybe it was his anxious face, or because I had not talked to anybody for decades and missed talking that I explained to him my existence had no effect at all on the living world. I even poked my finger into his chest to demonstrate it. Then, seeing his heartfelt disappointment, I added that there was nothing he or anyone else could do about his wife’s death, the death being old heaven’s work.
“But that cannot be,” he said. “She wouldn’t be dying if I’d remembered to turn off the burner. It’s not fate. It is only my fault.”
“It is your fault and her fate,” I said. “Your fault is part of her fate, and her fate part of your fault. Her name has been on my list all along, and I’d been told to come here by seven-fifty-nine on the morning of this day, long before you made the mistake, even long before you two were born.” At this I took the scroll from under my patched shirt and unrolled it before his eyes. When Mingzhu’s name was revealed, I pointed to it to show him.
But when the man had seen the name too, instead of giving in to despair, he shot one look at his wife across the window, and suddenly grabbed the scroll from me. I had walked through so many people’s bodies, carrying my sack and scroll, as if I, the sack, and the scroll were all less than air to the living, that his action caught me off guard completely. While I was frozen with disbelief, he bit his finger. He bit several times until blood came out, and used the blood to cross out his wife’s name.
“You don’t understand,” I cried. “Ninety-nine names were written on this scroll, so ninety-nine breaths would be collected. Crossing out the names could not change that.”
To be honest I didn’t know if that was true. I wasn’t able to pick up any pen, so I could not cross the names out even if I wanted to. Neither had I imagined a living person could touch my scroll. I said what I said to reassure myself that the man had not messed up my only chance of acquiring eternal bliss.
But he probably took my words as a threat, or a demand. He might even think the power to take or spare his wife lay in my hand. So he forced a deal upon me. He wrote down his own name above the crossed-out one, again with his blood. “Let me die in her place,” he said. “You’ll still have ninety-nine breaths in that way.” Then, as if not to give me time to say no, he jumped from the ladder.
When he jumped, a great gust of wind came and blew him to the bushes that lined one side of the narrow path below. The bushes were bare of leaves and flowers, and they scratched him all over, but his life was saved.
The neighbors pulled him up. Some had been saying, “He’s gone mad,” because for all they knew, he’d been talking to air. They tried to pull him away from the ladder. But he struggled free, and climbed the ladder again to jump a second time.
This time there was no sudden wind, but the wind that had blown last time had loosened a quilt that hung over the window sill directly below, and as he jumped again, the quilt slid off and fell too. Before he hit the ground, he hit the quilt. Together they landed. Though the quilt did not offer as much cushioning as the thicket, his life was saved again.
As he climbed a third time, he only used one arm to steady himself. He must’ve broken the other one in the last fall. When he stood at the window again, the alarm clock on the bedside table had its minute hand nearly vertical, and as if the broken arm had finally reminded him he could ignore me and my words and simply break the window to save his wife, he made a fist and hit the glass in his final desperation. But having no spare hand to hold onto the ladder, he almost threw himself off once more.
He regained his balance. I walked to my sack and untied the drawstring. It was seconds away from the death, I always knew at such moments. I opened the bag. Then the man clutched the ladder with his one good hand, and hit the window with his head. He hit it with such force that not only did he break the glass, but he also flew right toward me, and fell into my sack.
Mingzhu died anyway. But because of the man, I missed her last breath. I worried his breath wouldn’t count, despite his mutilation of my list, but my only option seemed to be what he’d proposed, to collect his breath in place of hers. It was not my fault that the bargain had not saved his wife after all. I closed my sack’s mouth, and tied an unyielding knot.
He was heavy, but I thought it a small thing if his breath would do in the end. He had blacked out when he fell into my sack. When he woke up, he asked whether Mingzhu had died. I said yes.
He fell silent, then asked if he had died too.
“No, you only fell into my sack.” I paused. “And I’m not letting you out until you have died and given me your breath too.”
Another silence. But after that, he did not beg me to release him, nor did he complain. In fact, he told me it was not uncomfortable inside my sack, that though he could not stretch his arms or legs, no part of his body hurt anymore.
“Even my broken arm gives me no pain now,” he said.
I carried the man for twelve years. At first, I was worried he would tempt me to let him out, or he’d try to escape when I had to open the bag to collect a breath. It even struck me he could tear the sack to pieces if he made an effort. But he never did anything of the sort.
All he did was talk to me. He said the air inside smelled faintly of cooked rice. He said that after I collected a new breath, he’d see a white, shimmering light all around him for a few seconds, before it turned back to darkness. Once the light lasted for minutes. “That was strange,” I said. “It was the last breath of a man who was born blind and never saw light.”
One day, he told me he and his wife had met on a platform at a train station. They had missed the same train, but when he kicked, in frustration, a plastic water bottle left by the railroad track, only to fetch it back and throw it in a trashcan, she laughed out loud. They were nineteen at the time. It flashed across my mind that I had lived to nineteen, but I had never known such tenderness myself.
He also told me of the life he and Mingzhu had lived, or the life they had planned to live. He talked in such a way that I often could not distinguish between the two. Toward the end, I felt he was unable to make the distinction himself. Toward the end he’d even mistake me for his wife, calling me by her name—and I didn’t have the heart to correct him—though on the day he died, he said it might’ve been the best way to remember her, his staying in the sack.
He died in the hundredth year, right after I bagged the last final breath on my list. One second the sack was bulged and heavy, the next it was light and quiet, as it had been before him. I congratulated myself on finishing the task, and went back to Naihe Bridge.
On the bridge, I met him again. He was drinking from the bowl with the chipped rim, under Mengpo’s watch. I hadn’t seen him since he fell into my bag, but the look on his face, the pain of losing what was the dearest to him, was the same as when he saw Mingzhu through the window, dying. He didn’t want to forget his wife.
Then Mengpo spotted me. She shifted all her attention to me. She said she was running out of soup, and hastily took my sack. After weighing it with her palm, she poured the breaths into the pot, from which a pillar of black smoke rose into the darkness above. “Ah, human suffering,” she said as she stirred the soup with her ladle. “So dark, yet so weightless, as if all for nothing.”
While she bent over the pot, her face intent, the man handed me the bowl. He hadn’t finished the soup. He turned hastily to flee, but his legs were crooked—it must’ve been all the years in the sack—and it slowed him down. I suddenly pitied him. I didn’t know what the soup he’d already drunk would do to him, whether he’d remember his wife, or me, even just in his dreams in the next life; but I thought there was no one I must remember, so I drank up what was left in the bowl, lest Mengpo find out about him.
When no more smoke rose from the pot, Mengpo rested the ladle against the pot rim. The man had disappeared into the mist. I handed Mengpo the empty bowl, which she put down by the fire without much of a second look. Then she plucked an emerald fruit from a vine. She told me to eat it and walk on, that at the end of the bridge, it’d weigh me down into the light.
I thanked her and put it in my mouth. But the fruit was hard like a stone. No matter how hard I sucked on it, no taste came out. With the half bowl of soup sloshing in me, I could not recall why I must eat such a thing, or what had been so good about the light. So in the end, I spat out the fruit, and entered the mist too.
