BASS 2021: Jane Pek, “Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes (Unidentified Artist, circa Sixteenth Century)” from Conjunctions #75

Central Academy of Fine Arts, China

The Legend Of The White Snake is one of those folktales that I feel like I was just always familiar with, growing up in Singapore, probably from cultural osmosis. There are multiple versions of the story, but the ones I am aware of all focus on the titular immortal female snake spirit (the white snake) falling in love with a human man, and the trials and tribulations they have to undergo before they can be together happily ever after. But before any of that takes place, the white snake’s companion is the green snake, another female spirit, and I wanted to imagine that (to me) much more intriguing relationship.

Jane Pek, Contributor Note

I fell in love with Pek’s story “The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains” in last year’s BASS, and now I find myself falling in love all over again. It’s a very similar story about loss and grief and what one does with time when time in abundance is all one has left. It’s sweet, and sad, and beautiful. And, as I so often say, I’m never happier than when I’m learning something, and here I again learned a great deal. I’ve provided links below for anyone who might share that enjoyment.

The original story is outlined above. In Pek’s hands, it’s a story about two immortal spirits who love each other, but one wants something more: a baby. And that means giving up her immortality, becoming human.

You told me you had calculated the fate of the man who would be your husband based on the ten stems and twelve branches of his birth. He had a delicate constitution. He would pass in twenty-four years, before his fiftieth birthday.
I didn’t say anything.
You said, “What is twenty-four years to you?”
I said, “What will twenty-four years be to you?” I wasn’t thinking twenty-four. I was thinking fifty, sixty, your skin drying to parchment, your hair thinning and graying, your frame stooping ever closer to the ground in which you would—if you did this—someday rot.
You touched my face. I waited for you to ask if I would give up my own immortality, if I was willing to step with you out of the wilderness of myth and into the terraced rice fields and tiled roofs of history.
“You don’t have to stay,” you said.

What do you do when the person you love, have loved for aeons, needs to leave you to fulfill some desire? And though she intends to come back – “What is twenty-four years to you?” – it will not be forever. But even that respite disappears. So the spirit of the Green Snake follows her descendants over the centuries.

This is where Pek excels, in weaving history with the wandering Green Snake. She serves as guardian to the offspring of her beloved; she serves as a muse to such diverse figures as Arthur C. Clarke and Oscar Wilde – and possibly more that I didn’t recognize; you  have to keep an eye out for these things, they’re a delight when you recognize them.

Then there’s the painting, commissioned when they were both still immortal, and an object of her search afterwards.

Back then we didn’t think in terms of time. Our references were geography and action, places we had been, things we had done. In Xiangyang we had talked a jilted, impoverished artist out of jumping into the Hanshui River, and spun a pretext to give him a hundred taels of silver: we would ask him to paint our portrait. We wore our best dresses for it, you in white and I in green, tinted our cheeks and lips, put pins in our hair. We never collected the painting from him. We prided ourselves on traveling light, and, anyway, we saw no use for it, a record of things that would never change.

She finds the painting has ended up in a British museum thanks to the sleight of hand of a missionary who probably convinced himself he was saving it from destruction during the Opium Wars that started days later. In her Contributor Note, Pek acknowledges this is a contribution from her research on the Qing dynasty and the British greed.

She goes on to characterize the Green Snake as “someone who is really quite bad at dealing with that breakup.” It’s pretty arrogant to argue with an author over her intent, but I don’t think she handled it badly at all. In our lifetimes of seventy-odd years, a devastating breakup might easily cause a change in direction that lasts for several years. For an immortal spirit, it might last six centuries. What is six hundred years to her? She didn’t spend it sulking in her tent, but instead tended the descendants of the White Snake until there were no more, as well as her dabbling in archaeology and literature. As Ward writes in her Introduction explaining the stories she categorizes as moving through time:

Both of these artful, beautifully constructed stories tell a tale of time, of how it is mutable, alive, mysterious, and real. How all we have in this strange and bewildering present are those we love, and how even when the times turn terrible, that love remains. In this pandemic year, this was a particularly valuable lesson to read and remember….

Jesamyn Ward, Introduction

Forgive me if I reveal that  I finally had to hand-type the above quote because, while dictating it, I kept breaking into tears that rendered my voice-recognition software useless. Love lasts forever – but so does grief.

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• The story is available online via LitHub.
• Jake Weber’s post on Workshop Heretic looks at the ekphrastic nature of the story: “The main secret of the universe Greenie has to share with us is similar to the one Keats often played with–that death is what makes life beautiful.”
• One version of The Legend of the White Snake, nicely illustrated
• About Stories to Caution the World, where the legend first appears in print.
• The discovery of the submerged Koneswaram temple, written by Arthur C. Clarke: “Ceylon And The Underwater Archaeologist”