The Joy Luck Club

"O! Hwai dungsyi"-You bad little thing-said the woman, teasing her baby granddaughter. "Is Buddha teaching you to laugh for no reason? " As the baby continued to gurgle, the woman felt a deep wish stirring in her heart.

"Even if I could live forever, " she said to the baby, "I still don't know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason.

"But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well.

"Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, have I not smelled the same bad things? "

The baby laughed, listening to her grandmother's laments.

"O! O! You say you are laughing because you have already lived forever, over and over again? You say you are Syi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the Western Skies, now come back to give me the answer! Good, good, I am listening…

"Thank you, Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever. "