Chang'e and Hou Yi

Ten suns. Not one, not two, but ten whole discs of fire hung in the sky together, pouring their heat down on the world at the same hour of the same day.

It was like the hottest summer noon anyone has ever endured, multiplied by ten, and no one who lived through that day could ever forget it. The rice fields withered, the rivers and streams slowly ran dry, and the birds and beasts hid deep in the forest to find shade. The earth seemed to be baking in an enormous oven, and people began to look up at the sky, praying that someone would come to their rescue.

People in old China said that this happened long ago, in the days when the finest archer under heaven still lived among ordinary people. His name was Hou Yi. No arrow he shot ever missed its mark, and no wild beast ever escaped his aim. Faced with ten suns scorching the world, Hou Yi decided to do something no one had ever dared to think of.

He drew his bow, aimed straight at the sky, and shot.

The first arrow left the string, and one of the fires in the sky went out at once. It fell as a long streak of light and then vanished. Hou Yi drew again and shot without pause, one arrow after another. One sun went out. Then another went out. One by one the fires fell from the sky, until nine suns had come down. Only one gentle sun was left hanging in the air, lighting and warming the earth as it had in the beginning.

The whole world cheered. The fields turned green again, the rivers and streams filled with water, and the birds sang as if there had never been a day of fire. People called Hou Yi the benefactor of all living things, and his fame spread far and wide.

Hou Yi made his way to the towering Kunlun Mountains, where the Queen Mother of the West, a powerful immortal, had her seat. She gave him a medicine rarer than anything else in the world, the elixir of immortality. Whoever drank all of it, she told him, would live forever, never growing old and never dying. Their body would grow light and rise into the sky, and they would become immortal. Hou Yi thanked her and carried the elixir home.

He did not drink it right away. He still loved this earth. He loved his gentle wife, Chang'e, and the evenings the two of them spent sitting on the porch, watching the red glow of sunset. To Hou Yi, living forever alone in the realm of the immortals was worth less than a whole life beside the one he loved. He gave the elixir to Chang'e and told her to hide it well, until the day the two of them could decide together what to do with it.

But someone had caught wind of the precious elixir. It was Peng Meng, a man from those parts, and no one was greedier than he was. One day, knowing that Hou Yi had gone into the forest to hunt, Peng Meng slipped into the house. He cornered Chang'e and demanded that she hand over the elixir at once.

Chang'e stood frozen in the middle of the room, the elixir clutched tight in her hand. To give it to such a wicked man, she knew, would be to hand a great disaster to the world. With no other way out, she raised the elixir to her lips and drank it all in one swallow.

At that very moment her body became light as air, and her feet no longer touched the ground. Chang'e slowly rose, past the doorway, past the roof, past the tallest tree in the garden. Peng Meng stood rooted to the spot, staring after her. Then he turned and ran, empty-handed.

Chang'e rose higher and higher, the wind billowing around the hem of her robe as the earth grew smaller below. She could have flown farther, to any realm of the immortals she wished. But she stopped at the one place closest to the earth among all the stars and worlds of the high sky. It was the moon. She chose it not because it was the most splendid, but because from there she could still see her home and the little garden. She could still see Hou Yi whenever he raised his eyes to the sky.

That evening, Hou Yi came home and could not find his wife. The neighbors told him what had happened. He ran out into the yard, looked up at the sky, and saw a familiar figure standing on the round, full moon, looking down. There was no longer any way for him to reach her. All he could do was set an altar table in the middle of the yard and place on it the cakes and fruit Chang'e had always loved. Then he stood silently in the moonlight, gazing up, as if by standing there long enough he could make the distance between them shorter.

When the villagers saw this, they too set out offerings and looked up at the moon to remember gentle Chang'e. Year after year, on the full moon of the eighth lunar month, when the moon is said to be at its roundest and brightest of the year, people set trays of cakes out in the yard. They lit incense and sat close together to watch the moon. That was how people of old kept Chang'e near them, even though she now lived far up in the sky.

And ever since, when people look up at the night sky on the full moon of the eighth month, the moon seems rounder than usual, brighter and warmer than usual. Perhaps on that night Chang'e, too, is looking down, searching for the husband who once gave up the realm of the immortals out of love for her. Every eighth-month moon, the trays of cakes are set out again in the middle of the yard, and the scent of incense fills a corner of the sky. So many children gaze upward as the story of the immortal on the moon is told once more. It is as warm as those long-ago evenings when the two of them sat on the porch, watching the red glow of sunset.