by Huina Zheng
In our family safe there was a Maitreya Buddha statue of pure gold, about the size of a kitten. My mother told me that one of our ancestors had served as a eunuch in the imperial palace in the late Qing dynasty. When the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded the Forbidden City, he risked his life to carry the statue out of the palace and bring it home. This Buddha, she said, would bless and protect our family.
I never understood how, if our ancestor was a eunuch, he could have left descendants. Nor did I understand why, if the Buddha protected us, our family had remained so poor generation after generation. What I did know was that the statue had escaped the war with the Japanese, survived the famine, and endured the Cultural Revolution. No matter how hard life became, my grandparents would rather chew tree bark than even consider selling it.
But I was different. I believed this Maitreya Buddha could haul me out of my mud-soaked life. Again and again I urged my mother to sell it so we could move into a bigger place, so we wouldn’t have to set out basins to catch the rain leaking through the roof of our top-floor flat during typhoons. Besides, she needed money for her illness.
Yet even in the final stage of cancer, trembling with pain, she still shook her head.
“This is a family heirloom,” she said. “Take good care of it. One day you must pass it on to your son.”
After she died, I rushed to open the safe and gathered the gleaming Buddha into my arms. At last I would be able to pay off my gambling debts. At last I could live the life of the rich. Immediately I heard, in my ears, the crisp clatter of casino chips. I could turn money into more money and win a fortune.
But when the jeweler took it, he scraped it lightly with a blade. He lifted his eyelids and said expressionlessly, “It’s gilded. Inside it’s copper.”
Huina Zheng is a writer and college essay coach based in Guangzhou, China. Her work appears in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other journals. She has received multiple nominations, including for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction.
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