Episode 14 — Two Suns: Hou Yi & Chang’e

The goddess descends

Chang’e comes down to the human world — and she does not come alone. In her arms is her little Jade Rabbit, carried along as her companion. She does not know what the audience knows: the rabbit is Wu Gang, the suitor she kept at a distance, wearing her poisoned pet’s shape. The most dangerous passenger in the story rides into it in the heroine’s embrace, petted and trusted.

Her arrival lands the way the arrival of the goddess of the Moon should land. Everyone who sees her is stunned by her beauty. This is not court flattery; the guide states it flatly, of the whole human world she walks into. The lonely woman of the Moon Palace, whose existence the mortal world treats as a decorative myth, is suddenly standing in it, and the town has no defences.

Bajie falls

Bajie meets her — in person now, not in a drunken vision by the Jade Pool — and falls in love. The vision was the warning; the meeting is the fact. The man who was made human nine-tenths by accident, whose heart has been claimed since childhood by a dragon girl he has only just been tricked into misunderstanding, looks at Chang’e and is gone.

The timing is its own cruelty. Heaven has sent Chang’e down for one stated purpose, and it is not Bajie. It is her husband.

The training

Chang’e sets about her mission with a wife’s urgency. She pushes Erniu — daily, insistently — to train at archery. Her hope is written plainly: the training will remind him that he was Hou Yi. Every arrow is supposed to be a memory surfacing; the archer is supposed to wake up inside the baker through his hands. And the sooner he wakes, the sooner the mission is complete and the extra sun comes down.

Erniu does not cooperate, because Erniu cannot. He only knows his big flatbreads. He does not know he is Hou Yi — the guide is blunt about the blank where the legend should be. Heaven’s key fits the lock, but the lock is on a door the man doesn’t have: there is no Hou Yi in Erniu to appeal to, only a good-natured seller of excellent flatbreads, being pestered daily by the most beautiful woman in the world to take up a weapon for reasons he cannot grasp.

The shop prospers

And then commerce does what mythology cannot. The flatbread shop prospers — even more than before — thanks to Chang’e’s presence. A goddess at the stall is the best advertising in the province; the town comes to buy bread and look at her, and the till fills. The episode leaves the pieces in their beautifully wrong places: the wife drilling a husband who isn’t there, the goddess’s beauty selling flatbreads, the spy asleep in her arms, and Bajie in love with the woman heaven sent down to belong to somebody else — standing in a queue of men, gods and charlatans all reaching for the same unreachable woman.

Thoughts

The arc’s tragedy assembles itself quietly here, in a comedy about a bakery. Chang’e’s mission is built on an assumption the episode keeps disproving: that Erniu is Hou Yi waiting to be reminded. The guide’s phrasing — he only knows his big flatbreads — is funny and absolute. Reincarnation in this story is not a costume a soul wears; Erniu is a complete person, and the legend heaven wants back may simply no longer exist in him. Which raises the question the whole arc will have to answer: if the archer cannot be woken by training, what exactly is Chang’e’s love supposed to wake — and what happens to her, stranded by the Queen Mother’s private order, if it never wakes at all? Into this steps Bajie, in love, at the worst possible address: the one woman in the cosmos whose story is already written, and written around another man.

Next

A secret bodyguard, a gold pig plaque nearly pawned for a dress, and an enchanted wine that gives Bajie the wrong woman’s husband’s face — Episode 15.