Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization
Image: Ming Cheng was born in the cruelest place on Earth—a village that sprawled through six green hills, so far out west in Sichuan province that the maps had no names for what was there. The village lay beneath a dome of clouds, with rain that could bite right through her clothes. Hardly anyone came through and no one left; a bus was supposed to pass through town once a week, but many days it couldn’t get through the clouds and was forced to take another route.
Ming’s town was called Yang Guang, or Sunshine Village, and everyone thought that was a mean joke. Mama and Papa said the sun used to shine there, though. They could tell, from the deep gorge where the Tuo River ran, that a million years ago the rains had made a mighty river. Then the sun had dried it out, then the rains had come, then the sun, then the rains had come again and carved a deeper riverbed, then the sun again, and then the rain.
Mama and Papa had named her Xiao Ming, which meant “Little Bright One.” They told her she was their bright little pearl, but Ming had a shard of mirror, and the mirror told her that was a joke too; she was an ugly girl, with grownup teeth coming in rotten.
At least she wasn’t a monkey.
There was a monkey hiding in the village, Ming knew—a monkey that could talk. She was only eight when she first saw him, and she kept it secret. If she’d told anyone that she’d met a talking monkey, the people would have called a struggle meeting, dragged her up the fourth hill to the amphitheater, put her on the stage, and pitched stones at her. “Enemy of the revolution, you believe in the olds, the superstitions!” they would have jeered.
Things were supposed to be different now that Mao Zedong was dead. He’d died the same year Ming was born, 1976. Chairman Mao had sent Mama and Papa to Sunshine Village because they were scientists, and the revolution needed them to help make silicone products for the Chinese army. So in 1969, they’d boarded a train from Beijing with at least a thousand other people, carrying just one suitcase, Mama pregnant with Ming’s big brother Han, not knowing where they were going until the train stopped in the Sichuan city of Chengdu and a local army sergeant stepped on and called out their names.
The revolution still needed Mama and Papa. But now the people of Sunshine Village would watch their new leader, Deng Xiao Ping, on television, urging them to get rich so that they’d help make China strong and glorious, and they knew that somehow the new ways just couldn’t get through the clouds that surrounded them.
Ming saw the monkey twice—the first time, in the pagoda. Except for the Red Guards who’d destroyed the old idols, nobody had gone near the pagoda in over a hundred years. Villagers said pale-haired foreign devils lived at the top of the pagoda, nine stories up, waiting to swat you with X-rays that would make you shrivel down into a tiny pebble. Ming wondered, though, if she might be able to persuade the foreign spies to whisk her away, outside the wall of clouds to some faraway land with beautiful flowers and lots to eat. So one day after school, she crept
