Nuwa Mends the Sky

This evening, just as the sun slipped below the horizon, a band of cloud in the west suddenly took on every color. Pink, purple and orange spread across it, with a streak of pale gold that shimmered like freshly poured honey. The sky does not put on that bright robe every evening. But whenever it does, anyone who sees it stops for a moment and looks up. They wonder why the sky turns so beautiful just as the day is ending.

An old tale from China says those colors are not always just the sunset. Once, very long ago, they were also the trace of the hardest work the world has ever known: the mending of the sky. In those days, heaven and earth had long since parted and settled into place, as peaceful as they had been for ages. The people living under that gentle sky were the children of a goddess named Nuwa. She had shaped them with her own hands from yellow clay and given them life.

Then one day, beneath that quiet sky, a great anger broke out. Gonggong, the god of water, and Zhurong, the god of fire, fell into a quarrel and fought a battle that shook heaven and earth. Gonggong lost. Still burning with rage, he flung himself headfirst against Mount Buzhou. That mountain was one of the pillars that had quietly held up the whole sky above every living thing for ages.

Mount Buzhou snapped in two. A corner of the sky came crashing down. It left a huge tear in the air, where before there had only been a calm, deep blue. The ground below split open along with the broken pillar. Fire blazed through the mountain forests everywhere. Water rose and kept rising from somewhere deep underground, spilling across the fields, the valleys and the familiar roads. The whole world of people below, the world Nuwa had shaped with her own hands, was suddenly in danger.

Nuwa looked down from on high, and her heart ached. These were the children she had made herself. This was the world she had loved and watched over for so long. She could not stand by while that tear swallowed everything she had built. Nuwa decided to mend the sky, however much labor it might cost her.

She went searching for stones of five colors, rare stones that shimmered in every shade, and gathered them into great heaps. Then she lit an enormous fire and sat patiently smelting the stones. At last they melted into a thick glue that sparkled in every color, just like the sunset cloud in the sky this evening. When it was ready, Nuwa carried that glue of precious stone up to the heights of heaven. She pressed it carefully into the tear, bit by bit, patching one place after another and working without rest. She was like someone sewing up the most precious garment of her life, allowing not a single careless stitch.

The sky was sealed, but it still wobbled. Just then, a giant sacred turtle came slowly to her. Of its own free will, it held out its four strong legs. Moved, Nuwa accepted them. She stood the four legs upright at the four quarters of heaven and earth. They became four new pillars, sturdier than any pillar that had ever stood before.

Now the sky was firmly held up. The land was slowly leveled again. The fires died down, one patch after another. Nuwa also burned great bundles of reeds and used the ash to stop the floodwater. The water slowly drained away, uncovering the fields and familiar roads of the old days. The world was at peace again. The children of Nuwa could once more lift their heads to the sky without fear.

But there was one thing Nuwa could not set perfectly level again, the way it had been at the very beginning. After that mending, the sky leaned a little toward the northwest, and the land sank toward the southeast. Later generations in China kept telling their children that this is why the sun, the moon and the stars seem to drift slowly toward the northwest every day. And, they said, it is why the rivers keep flowing toward the southeast and never change course, a quiet trace left over from the day the sky was torn.

And whenever the western sky takes on every color at sunset, just like the cloud this evening, some people in China still tell one another a story. They say it is the light lingering from the five-colored stones Nuwa once used to mend the sky. Each time the sky puts on that bright robe again, it is like a quiet message: some things that seem broken can still be mended, and sometimes they end up even more beautiful than before they were torn.