The Divided Daughter
During the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese chronicler Chen Hsuan Yu recorded a strange story entitled, The Divided Daughter. I will try to retell it in as few words as possible.
In the sixth century, a young man named Wang Chou and his beautiful cousin, Chien Niang, fell in love. Their families knew nothing of their feelings for each other, however, and married the girl off to an eligible member of her father's staff. The news caused Wang Chou to become terribly sad and, unable to remain in his native province, he told his family that he had been transferred to a government post and left for the capital by boat. By sundown, he had gone several miles downriver and was lying on his back, unable to sleep, when he became aware of a sort of pattering sound along the shore. He went up on deck and saw Chien Niang running barefoot along the clay riverbank. She told him that she had run away to be with him and, overjoyed, the young lovers traveled to Szechwan in the far east. Five years passed, during which Chien Niang bore Wang Chou two sons. In all that time she had no contact with her parents, but one day, the guilt of having abandoned them finally caught up to her. She told her husband how she felt and, sorry for his wife, Wang Chou suggested that they pay her family a visit. And so the elopers returned to Hengchou. Chien Niang, overcome with anxiety, waited outside in the garden while Wang Chou entered the house of his uncle and confessed the whole affair. "But what kind of crazy talk is this," his uncle replied when he had heard the confession. "This very minute my daughter is in her room where she has been bedridden for as many years." "Your daughter who has just arrived from Szechwan and is waiting outside in the garden?" Wang Chou asked with equal astonishment. To settle the question, Chien Niang's father sent a servant to her chamber. Wang Chou sent another to the garden. A moment later two identical woman entered the room, came together, and when they touched, their two bodies stepped into each other, fitting together perfectly, so that there was a double suit of clothes on the single body. The family, we are told, kept the entire affair secret in the belief that it was abnormal. Borges observes that, "reading Gibbon, what matters to us is not what Attila's camp was like but how an Englishman of the eighteenth century imagined it." If The Divided Daughter were written today, it would be dismissed as a trite allegory. Written in the first century, on the other hand, it is fascinating and strangely moving—and not owing to the content of its narrative but the insight that narrative offers into the mind of the man who wrote it. Chen Hsuan Yu believed in the enigmatic division and conflation of a living woman. He reported the event as sober fact and it was received as such by his readership. In a scientific age it is easy to treat such credulity with derision but the world of lost marvels and extinct enchantments that the story invokes may add to that derision a tinge of sadness and regret—similar to what one feels when they recall believing in magic as a child and contemplating a world where causation was governed by imagination and in which, therefore, every imaginable wonder seemed constantly on the point of taking shape. Today, it is true, we have the wonders of the natural world revealed to us by science. But we will never again know what strange and numinous thing a city or a forest or the moon is when viewed through the prism of an absolute belief in magic. |