In Rita Chang-Eppig's "The Miracle Girl," the reader comes across a number of open questions, which are voiced or merely implied to varying degrees. The point-of-view character is Xiao Xue, overlooked and underloved second sister to Xiao Chun, who miraculously experiences the stigmata while attending a Catholic school run by missionaries in Taiwan soon after Mao's revolution has swept Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland. Xiao Xue finds her older sister's miraculous signs and wonders to be more of a nuisance than a blessing. It reminds Xiao Xue how much more everyone loves and adores her older sister than her. Xiao Xue's feeling of being second-best in a race between two people (i.e. last place) is mirrored by the feelings of racial inferiority inculcated into her by the missionary school, where she is taught to believe that "Mongoloids" are a second-class race of people.
The answers to the following open questions will be answered differently by every reader, such that the text is holding up a mirror to the reader as much as it is opening a window into its characters. Here are some of the half-spoken questions going on in the story:
Open questions
1. Is Xiao Chun really experiencing miraculous signs? One need not be a Christian to accept that within the context of this fictional story, a character could "really" be replicating Jesus's wounds in her own body. The narrator begins the story by off-handedly treating it as a miracle: "On the first day of her stigmata...." However, in the second paragraph, the village doctor Wong Daifu asks her whether she "didn't hurt herself accidentally," a doubt that never quite goes away. The wounds are described as "thin ovals with fringes of red, protruding skin." Would that be a miraculously repeated crucifixion wound, or is that more like what you'd see if someone had dug into her own skin in order to fake a stigmata?
Xiao Chun generally evinces a truly devout and generous soul, giving away her lunches to others, showing generosity to her sister when others are upset by her, and generally being "the inside of a nautilus shell, bright and pure." But there are hints that Xiao Chun isn't all she seems. As much as Xiao Chun talks about God's love, Xiao Xue certainly never felt that love when she was being punished by Sister Eunice at the missionary school. "Xiao Chun never once defended her or begged Sister Eunice to stop. Instead she watched Sister Eunice mete out the punishment, "the impulse of a smile at the corner of her lips." Xiao Chun does seem genuinely pious, and as such would be the sort of person blessed with the stigmata. But is she a little too pious, such that we might suspect she is stigmata-ing herself because she wishes to have that level of approval from God? In the most cynical reading, might she be faking miracles just to show up her sister?
2. A second question is the obverse of question number one: Is Xiao Xue guilty of the sin of envy, such that she is at odds with her sainted sister for no reason, or is she a victim of being made to feel second-class by everyone such that her rebellion is justified? Is Xiao Xue like the unnamed narrator of Robert Browning's Poem "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," in which one monk spews hatred and jealousy of another one for imagined hypocrisy?
Certainly, there are people in Xiao Xue's world who think she's guilty of envy. Xiao Chun for one, who forgives Xiao Xue when she hacks up Xiao Chun's hair while she is asleep. When Xiao Xue shows herself ungrateful for being forgiven, Xiao Chun warns her that "envy is a dangerous sin." We could write off Xiao Chun's interpretation of her sister as Xiao Chun's own self-interested interpretation, but in at least one point in the story, it does seem that Xiao Chun is genuinely not a phony. It comes when Xiao Xue tries to steal attention back from Xiao Chun by eating berries she knows will make her sick. The plan fails and everyone ends up thinking Xiao Chun has miraculously healed her sister, making Xiao Xue even more jealous. On the way home from school, Xiao Chun delivers what seems like true and good advice:
"'Have you ever thought,' she said, 'that maybe I get more attention because I'm not constantly making trouble just to get it? Because I actually think about other people? All those times Mom had trouble standing after scrubbing the floor, did you once offer to help? Maybe you don't get attention because you don't deserve it.'"
She walks off, leaving Xiao Xue to stew over her words for a beat that feels significant, like Xiao Xue should be reflecting on these words a bit just as we we as readers can't help but do. If this were a movie, that beat would strongly suggest sincerity on Xiao Chun's part (although we'd also want to read a lot into the tone of how the line was delivered, something we don't get in the text of the story).
Of course, Xiao Chun could be right in a sense but also wrong in another. Perhaps Xiao Xue is petty and jealous. But can we blame her? She's an unwanted second daughter, told that she "always shows up at the wrong time," that Mongoloids are second-class, that she has ugly and untamable hair, that she should accept her ming (fate, more or less). Shouldn't we celebrate her rebellion, if that's what she's rebelling against?
When Xiao Xue eventually begins an escalating series of self-harm actions to get attention, it's fairly understandable. If the stigmata are fake, then Xiao Xue is right to be upset, because her sister is faking it to get attention. But if they're real, then Xiao Xue also has reasons to feel bad. She already thinks that possibly her "sister was beautiful because God favored her." If God has also shown his approval of Xiao Chun through miraculous signs, how worthless does that make Xiao Xue by comparison?
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| Have you read the good news of Heidi Pitlor? I was going to try to photoshop a Best American Short Stories anthology into their hands, but I lack the skills. |
3. Are the missionaries forces for good or evil? Nowadays, most people who aren't Christians (and many who are) are likely to think of the missionaries of yesteryear as an evil force, one that destroyed cultures and sought to beat the savage out of non-European people. This is especially true after more recent discoveries of massive graves of children at Indian schools in North America. The residents of Xiao Xue's village are a little more ambivalent about the missionaries, though. The missionaries make sure everyone is fed (at least everyone who shows up to church). They provide a school that's nearby so that students don't have to walk uphill both ways six miles in the snow. They speak the language, both the lingua franca of Mandarin and the local language of Hokkien. They're willing to sacrifice. Sister Eunice turned down a rich suitor in order to become a nun. All the missionaries faced danger when the Communists won the revolution. They aren't total hypocrites, and they're willing to back up the commitment in their words with actions.
On the other hand, what the missionaries are preaching is clearly (to us) full of harm. They taught (often, apparently) a story of God giving baths to the various races. He gave white people a bath first, so they came out sparkling clean. Then he gave a bath to "mongoloids," who only got partly clean because the water was a little dirty from the first bathers. Then he gave a bath to people from Africa who got the least clean. Although Xiao Chun claims her sister is missing the point when she sees the lesson of the myth as "Asians are dirty" and "Asians are second-class," we readers in 2021 (2022 for me) can see that Xiao Xue is right. The missionaries, seeking to bring blessings to the poor savages, have caused permanent damage to their self-image, especially among the young people, who lack "immunity" from what they teach.
The missionaries and Xiao Chun
I think we can somewhat pull questions one and three together, because their answers are related. Xiao Chun almost certainly has some hypocrisy lurking behind her rapturous piety, some phoniness. The missionaries also, as countless movies, documentaries, novels, and breaking news items have told us, are hiding hypocrisy on their end as well. But none of that means that there isn't also some sincere goodness about them, nor that people should ignore all of the things they have to say. Xiao Xie is right to object to the world telling her she isn't good enough, but she should also listen when her sister tells her she ought to be more aware of others. We as readers can certainly pick out the hypocrisy of moralizers around us, but that doesn't necessarily free us from the obligation to sometimes do as the moralizers say, if not as they do.
For the missionaries and Xiao Chun, although the story does portray them fairly, including both good and bad characteristics about both, at the end, they are not blameless. They have helped create such an inferiority complex in Xiao Xie that she has gone on a self-harm spree. The stigmata of approval in others has led to Xiao Xie's stigmata of desperation.
Perhaps God/ming/the universe does smile on some people, for reasons that don't make any sense and aren't at all fair. Some are born beautiful, which studies have shown leads to all kinds of social advantages. Some are born in rich countries and have advantages the rest of the world does not, a fact which some of those in rich countries make take as a sign of God's approval. There are all kinds of privilege one can be given. (Privilege itself now being something which moralists of a different stripe are as happy to hit others over the head with as missionaries once were about Jesus.) This story shows the importance of employing that privilege with a light hand. To those without privilege, every exercise of that privilege (or social media post of the #blessed variety) can feel like an accusation or a reminder of how fate has blessed us all unequally, something that always makes those blessed less wonder what that means for them.
Should Xiao Xie envy her sister for being beautiful and (possibly because she is beautiful and others are kind to her) kind? No. Should Xiao Chun be less smug about her own virtue, a virtue that might be a result of good fortune more than hard work? Definitely. There's a lot of blame here that sort of reminds me of the 2003 movie Monster, based on the life of serial killer Diane Wuornos. In that movie, instead of blame lying principally with either society or the criminal, we get blame all around. Society is completely guilty of having let Wuornos down. At the same time, Wuornos is also to blame for her inability to control her rage. It rejects the "personal responsibility/societal responsibility" false dichotomy that liberals and conservatives have been clashing over for two hundred years.
As cleverly ambiguous as "The Miracle Girl" is, I think it's still a story with a moral lesson (as much as that is often seen as a criticism nowadays). It's not a pat lesson, like "envy is bad." It's as complicated as morality in real life is often complicated, with overlapping lanes of blame, responsibility, and the chaos of fate all interweaving. It's a morality built out of the reciprocity of social interaction, how all relationships involve a complex web of responsibilities to one another.
I started by saying that people tend to read into stories what they bring into them. What you as a reader bring out of this will very much depend on where you were in life when you read it. Whether the mirror of this story reflects your status as Xiao Xie or Xiao Chun in the roulette wheel of life, it's a story relevant far beyond its specific historical moment, one that speaks volumes to a status- and social-media-obsessed world that wants to demonstrate God's favor through by self-marketing evidence of their own favor. It's a story that reminds us of the consequences of a world without kindness.
Other readings of this story:
Rhiannon at Notes from this pretty sight (which Karen made me aware of)
I barely even thought about whether the older sister was faking it - everyone in the story took it as genuine, so I did, too, but it wasn't a conscious decision, I didn't even realize it until I read your comments.
ReplyDeleteI have to learn to draw, or use photoshop, or something. I made a semi-passable image with BASS books, but considering how many images I use in a year, I really should get better at it.