My Debts to Gods and to Men

Prologue

What do we owe the people who trusted us, even when life—not ill will—carried us away from them?

1

Lately, nearly every day, there would come a moment when Axia Yiruo would return, rising from memories of days long gone, days which I had thought were lost forever, no longer existing except perhaps in some forgotten corner of my mind. In those moments, the thought of her would return, stay, linger, and weigh upon my heart like a rock.

It would happen in the evening, sitting quietly with the sun setting behind the trees on the hills across the valley. Or at night, sitting alone in the dark, phone by my side, waiting for a message from Axia sent through the phone before the phone was even invented. Still, she would return, followed by the thought of her, the memory of those days.

In such moments I felt drowned in guilt, shame, pity, regret, and remorse. I longed for some way to right the wrongs I had done her. I wished for a miracle, wished for divine intervention, wished that I might somehow be transformed into thin air, a disembodied soul, some wandering alien, so that I could be transported—or teleported, whichever would work—back into the past. I wanted only to stand before her, lower my head, and say, “Axia, forgive me. I didn’t mean to. I was young, and I didn’t know better.”

2

As I watched the sun setting, with Axia weighing heavily on my heart, I found myself thinking of The Republic, a book I have read more than once.

It tells of Socrates, accompanied by his companions, going down to the port of Piraeus to watch the festival. Afterwards, they are persuaded to visit the house of Cephalus. The old man receives them warmly. I swear, a young slave served them kalamata olives, wine, and Greek salad with plenty of feta cheese. Or perhaps none of that was in Plato at all, and I have simply supplied it myself over the years. Memory has a habit of decorating old books.

In any case, as everyone enjoyed their food, Socrates asked the question: “What is justice?”

Since Cephalus was both the host and the eldest among them, he was invited to answer first. The old man replied, in effect, that justice is to pay one’s debts to both gods and men before one dies.

I have always thought the theory Socrates eventually develops is something only a zealot could truly believe. By contrast, the old man’s view—that justice is paying one’s debts—struck a chord with me. It was something I could immediately relate to, something I myself had believed long before I ever read Plato’s dialogue.

Like the old man Cephalus, I would like to have all my debts, to gods and to men, paid before I lie upon my deathbed.

But I could not pay the debt I owed Axia simply by sitting here, turning over in my mind a conversation written more than two thousand years ago.

Still, Plato himself offered another idea that spoke to me more deeply than his teacher’s definition of justice. Unlike Socrates, Plato believed in a previous existence. Knowledge, he argued, is recollection of what the soul already knew before this life. We never truly learn anything; what we call learning is merely remembering.

I have always liked that idea.

If life does not end here, if there truly is such a thing as a life before this one and another life after it, then there is comfort in that thought.

For if justice is indeed paying one’s debts to both gods and one’s fellow human beings before one dies, and this life is the only life we shall ever have, then I shall most likely die an unjust man. At this moment in my life, I can see no way to repay what I owe Axia, no way to undo the harm I caused, no way to make right what I made wrong.

But if Plato is right, then there is solace.

Perhaps Cephalus valued paying one’s debts before death because he hoped to enter a better place afterwards. My reason is different.

If I cannot repay my debt to Axia before I die, yet life continues beyond death, then perhaps I shall be given another chance. Another meeting. Another opportunity to make things right.

That is a comforting thought.

3

Long ago, in my student years, I read a book by a Chinese American anthropologist. It described a belief that seemed to be shared, in one form or another, by many of the peoples living around the Pacific Rim. The belief, though expressed differently from culture to culture, is that existence consists of many realms.

Most ordinary people remain confined to a single realm. They are born there and die there. But a very small number of privileged individuals possess the ability to travel between realms.

Shamans are the obvious example. By taking certain substances, or by subjecting themselves to intense physical ordeals, they enter a trance and journey into another realm, where they may visit the dead on behalf of the living.

I remember reading that and thinking, “I want to be able to do that! I really do!”

At the time I was a graduate student writing my thesis on Confucianism. It suddenly occurred to me that Confucian philosophy might simply be another version of the same underlying belief shared by so many cultures around the Pacific.

The shaman crosses between realms through supernatural power. The Confucian sage reaches across those same boundaries through moral power. The one relies upon trance; the other upon the lifelong cultivation of virtue.

“The great man,” it says in the Doctrine of the Mean, “is in harmony, in his attributes, with Heaven and Earth; in his brightness, with the sun and moon; in his orderly procedure, with the four seasons; and, in his relation to what is fortunate and what is calamitous, in harmony with the spirit-like operations of Heaven.”

Perhaps they are not so different after all.

I liked what I read then, and I find myself drawing comfort from it now. Whether it is literally true I do not know. Perhaps no one does. Yet I have always found it striking that so many peoples, separated by oceans and centuries, should arrive at the same hope: that one life need not be the end of our unfinished business.

If they are right, then I am not completely without hope. There remains the possibility—not of salvation, for I do not know what that would even mean—but of one day paying the debt I owe you, Axia Yirou.

4

Of the many stories in Liaozhai Zhiyi, I have always been especially fond of “Three Lives.”

It tells of Liu, a provincial graduate, who remembers his previous incarnations. Having lived his first life as a rich but unkind man, he is punished after death by successive rebirths as a horse and then as a dog. Later, reborn as a snake, he makes a solemn vow never again to injure another living creature. Because he lives—and dies—without wrongdoing, the King of Hell is moved and permits him to return once more as a human being.

I always liked the story, though I never quite knew why, nor did I bother to ask myself.

Only now, sitting in the dark pondering my own life, the things I did and the things I failed to do, have I gradually come to understand why it has remained with me all these years.

The story is not really about punishment. It is about resolution.

Like the snake, I wish I could say: from this life onward, I shall do no harm.

Not wishing that the past had been different, but wishing that, in another life, I might become the kind of person who would never commit the same wrong again.

5

A few years ago, by chance, I passed the site of the old Western Coach Station, or what I believed to be its former location.

I had just stepped off a brand-new subway train and climbed the stairs to the street. As I emerged from the station, a gust of February wind swept across my face—so familiar, yet so strangely unfamiliar—and I stopped in my tracks.

Before me stretched a broad modern boulevard, three lanes wide, with little traffic. Wide sidewalks lined both sides of the road, shaded by rows of newly planted trees. In the distance stood a solitary indoor stadium-like building.

That was all.

The place was so open, so spacious, so utterly unrecognizable.

I saw none of the old eucalyptus trees, their trunks splashed with dried mud from passing buses. I saw none of the muddy roads where passengers picked their way through puddles toward the long-distance coach station. Nothing of the old place remained.

Yet in my mind, I had left it only yesterday.

I had just stepped off the long-distance bus from Lumeiyi in Lunan, asking Axia and her mother for their address, hoping that one day I might come back to see her again.

For a moment I thought I had made a mistake. Surely I had gotten off at the wrong subway station.

Then I looked to my left.

The sign above the entrance read unmistakably:

Western Coach Station.

The final page of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude leaves us with the unforgettable image of the abandoned town of Macondo being consumed by ants, lizards, termites, heat, dust, and wind, until no trace of human life remains and nature quietly reclaims what had once been taken from it.

No. What I saw that day was nothing like Macondo.

It was not nature reclaiming the works of man.

It was a lived place being completely erased by what came after it—a modern, precise, almost clinical rewriting of the old. Nothing remained that I could recognize.

And I felt that something which had once existed in this world died in me that day.

I love you, Axia Yiruo!