Mianmian and the Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden

Much later, when Mianmian was a grown-up, this was how she would tell the story:

“All right, all right, my mum’s pretty great, but she’s got her flaws too, you know?”

“Oh really?” Mianmian’s mum, who had once had the same nickname before passing it on to her daughter, asked with a raised eyebrow.

There was a scatter of laughter around the group, sitting in the comfortable gloom backstage with their bottles of beer and half-empty pizza boxes. Mianmian’s mum and dad were the only parents there, but a couple of the techies had a boyfriend or girlfriend squeezing affectionately alongside them on one of the mismatched chairs. It was the middle of the play’s run; plenty of the crew had trundled home to sleep after a single drink to mellow out their adrenaline, but a golden core gave you a certain advantage there. She was full of secret pride to introduce her birth family to the little theatre family that had pulled itself together over the last two terms.

“Well,” Mianmian said, “there was the time you didn’t believe me about the fairies at the bottom of the garden.” She paused to give her words the proper weight.

“Are you sure you’re the director and not the prima donna?” her dad teased her.

More laughter, but Holly Wu, her actual leading lady, said, “Come on, then, tell us the story,” so Mianmian did.

“So, this was when I was really little, five or six. Mum got sick for while back then, and it was pretty scary for a kid, you know?”

“Your mum got sick?” Chris the lighting guy asked. His girlfriend Liz elbowed him in the ribs, but Mianmian could understand his confusion, at least—Chris had been there in the late afternoon, when the big scenic flat at the back of the stage had started to wobble dangerously, not just annoyingly like it had before. He’d seen Mianmian’s mum vault up onto the stage and hold the whole thing vertical while the set techs replaced screws and bolts.

Mianmian flicked her eyes at her parents; they didn’t give her the nod okay that they would have in another setting, so she carried on: “She’s completely better now, obviously. But at the time, she was out of the house most days—” let them believe Mum had been at the hospital, not searching for spiritually powerful herbs “—and Dad was busy working. At least he could work from home. We were staying out in the country then, so I could run around a bit wild, and in this big meadow behind our cottage—” she widened her eyes “—I saw two fairies.”

“And you didn’t believe her?” Hollie Smith asked, his candid amber eyes turned on her mum and dad.

“Not at first,” Dad admitted cheerfully. “I thought Mianmian had made some imaginary friends. She was the right age for it.”

“The first time I saw them, they were just passing by,” Mianmian continued. “The second time, they stopped and talked to me, and gave me the—most—delicious cake I’d ever had.”

“Uh oh,” said a few of the group.

“Yeah, okay, stranger danger,” she said with a wave of her hand, “but I could tell these fairy ladies were friendly, you know? I just had this magical sense of safety around them. And you know how when you’re little, there are all these categories about the world that aren’t totally clear to you yet, what fits into which description? Well, that second day, I went home and told mum and dad I’d been mistaken before. I hadn’t met fairies, I’d met angels. Two beautiful Chinese angels.”

“Did they believe you then?” Holly Wu asked, falling happily into the role of chorus.

“No, of course they didn’t!” Mianmian cackled. “If anything, they were even more convinced I was playing imaginary games out there.”

“We had a lot on our minds,” Mianmian’s mum said. She was relaxed, playing into the story, Mianmian noted; there wasn’t a shred of worry in her tone that Mianmian would overstep a boundary into things too difficult to explain to this mostly-non-Chinese group.

“Well, the third time I saw them out in the meadow, I was sobbing and bawling because I’d scraped up my knee falling out of a tree,” she said. “Suddenly, there’s my two angels, even though I hadn’t seen them for a few days and even I was starting to think I’d made them up, you know?” Mianmian took a second to remember the sheer relief she’d felt on seeing grown-ups she knew, who might be able to carry her home. “The taller lady, who always wore blue—the other one wore all white—just leaned down over me and blew on the graze, and all of a sudden it stopped bleeding. And I felt great.”

“Impressive,” said Amal. “My mum always had to kiss it better for me when I fell down, not just blow.”

“Right?” She grinned. “So, in my kid’s mind, I thought, if they could heal my knee like that, obviously they could cure whatever was wrong with Mum. I jumped up and marched them all the way home with me. And it turned out—Mum knew them.”

“They were real people, then?” asked Liz.

“Not just that, they were, like, celebrities in my mum’s profession. You’re a physical scientist, right? Imagine if you were at home and you met the Nobel Prize winner for physics and the Nobel Prize winner for chemistry down your street, having a holiday in your hometown. It was like that.”

“Not quite that extraordinary,” Mianmian’s mum said. Mianmian could read her smile, though, and it said that if anything, that comparison was too low-key.

“You know the weirdest thing, though?” Mianmian met her dad’s eyes across the room. He was gazing at her with all the warmth of regained hope their little family had shared back then. “I got them back home and gave my little spiel about how mum was ill and they ought to make her well again, please. And the shorter lady, the one who wore white, stepped forwards, took Mum’s hands, and told her—oh, I don’t know exactly, some medical stuff. And that was exactly what she needed to do to get better!”

“It put me on the right path when nothing else had, that’s for sure,” Mianmian’s mum agreed. She had an arm around her husband and pink in her cheeks, and in the low light backstage she didn’t really look any older than Mianmian herself.

Well. Sometimes Mianmian told it that way, sometimes she told it this way:

“Hold on, hold on a minute,” cried Uncle Wei, waving his hands and barely seeming to notice Uncle Lan gently taking his chopsticks to lay them down next to his bowl. “Mianmian—sorry, Qingyang—you’re telling me you were walking around with a curse, looking for a cure, and when little Mianmian told you she’d seen fairies, you didn’t even consider that might be related?”

“Wei shushu, am I telling this story, or are you?” Mianmian asked, a bit sharper than she’d meant to. “Sorry,” she added, after a meaningful look from her mum.

“You are, of course you are. I’m just amazed that Luo Qingyang, brightest rogue cultivator of our generation, would miss such a clue.”

Behind him, Uncle Lan’s lips twitched as though he wanted to say something, and Uncle Wei leaned back to say, “Now, Lan Zhan, I don’t count. I spend at least half my time at the Cloud Recesses these days, bothering your uncle and the elders.”

Uncle Lan replied with an opinionated, “Mn.”

“Wei Wuxian, do you remember what it’s like to have a five-year-old?” Mianmian’s mum asked, squeezing her shoulders. “The week before this, she was playing in the garden with Pigsy and Sun Wukong, and before that it was the trains from Thomas the Tank Engine, except they were all girls.”

“Mum,” Mianmian complained.

“Sorry, Mianmian. Go on.” Mum let go of her and sat back in her chair.

“So, anyway. The first time I saw them, it was only from a distance. They were sort of flying, but I couldn’t really tell if they were gliding over the tops of the trees, or blowing along in the wind above them. I really wanted to figure it out, so I watched as hard as I could, but eventually they got too far to follow and I still wasn’t sure.”

“But you’d seen your mum flying on her sword before, plenty of times,” her dad said. “Another beer, Wei-xiong?”

“Yeah, but it’s different if it’s mum, obviously,” Mianmian said. She made big hopeful eyes at her dad until he came back to the table with a beer for her as well as for Uncle Wei. “That’s just normal. The point is, neither of you believed me.”

“What happened then?” Uncle Wei asked cooperatively, although he must have heard this story before, from at least one other side.

“Well, the next day I was playing in the meadow again, and the two fairies came back, except this time they really came over to me and had a conversation. I was amazed! They were so beautiful, and friendly, and they spoke Chinese! They asked me my name and then one of them just kind of—waved her hand in the air, and a whole tray of cakes appeared out of nowhere.”

“You told a couple of strangers your name, just because they asked?” Uncle Wei laughed. “That doesn’t sound like the suspicious little Mianmian we know and love.”

“They had swords like Mum’s, so I trusted them,” she admitted, blushing. “Plus, I hadn’t just seen them making out behind a tree where they didn’t think anyone would see them, Wei shushu!”

“We spent quite a lot of time after this working on when to trust people and when to run straight to Mum and Dad,” her mum said, and Mianmian was old enough now to realise that this was probably embarrassing for her too. “As you can probably tell by her first reaction to you two a few years later.”

Mianmian took a mouthful of beer to reset herself a little. “After that, I decided I was wrong, and they weren’t fairies but angels,” she said. “I still didn’t see any wings, but angels felt more right… maybe because I’d had angel food cake at a party a bit before this, so there was an association there.”

Uncle Wei laughed so loudly he jostled Uncle Lan, who pushed him more upright in his chair with a firm but tender motion. “Angel food cake! I love it!” he gasped. “And thinking about angels at all, you know who we have to blame for this whole confusion? Nineteenth-century English translators, who’d use any word for xian so long as it sounded twinkly and unserious: angel, fairy, peri, elf…”

“Wei Ying,” murmured Uncle Lan, and he quietened down.

Mum started collecting the dishes from the table to bring through to the kitchen. She waved Mianmian back to her seat when she got up to help her, so Mianmian carried on with her story.

“The third time I saw them was a little while after that. To be honest, I’d almost started to believe I’d made them up myself. You know, I was a pretty stressed little kid at that point. I didn’t really understand about Mum’s curse, but I knew there was something serious going on that Dad couldn’t help her with, and there was nothing in my baby cultivation manuals that was relevant either.”

Cultivation practice had been such a treat for her up until that point, a special activity that only she and her mum had shared, just like she and her dad rode their bikes together. It probably wasn’t accurate to say she’d have pursued it to a higher level if her mum hadn’t been cursed back then. In high school, Mianmian had been swept away by the realisation that there were careers in the theatre for more than just show-offs and wannabe stars. She’d known at that moment that she wanted to be a playwright, a director, or both. As for cultivation… she’d worked hard to form her golden core, and cultivated just enough nowadays to maintain it, but the initial glamour had definitely come off it.

“I was moping about in a tree, not even a tall one, when I sort of—leaned too far in one direction before I stuck out my arm to catch hold of the branch in the other one?” Mianmian found herself demonstrating the position. She, her dad, and Uncle Wei all flinched when the leg of her chair grated against the floor.

“Next thing I knew, I was on the ground with one leg underneath me, and my foot was pointing in a direction that just felt wrong. Sorry, Dad.”

Her dad shook his head. “Don’t worry, baobei. I never even saw it, did I? Just don’t like thinking about you being hurt that way.”

Uncle Lan nodded seriously.

“All of a sudden, there they were, right in front of me. My fairies!” This was the best bit of the story. “The taller one, who was always wearing blue hanfu—they were both dressed in hanfu, obviously—bent down to me and said something like, ‘It’s all going to be all right,’ but more poetic. You know.”

“Everything sounds poetic when you’re speaking seventy percent Classical Chinese,” Uncle Wei said, with the smallest and fondest of eyerolls in his husband’s direction.

“Right? It’s not fair to the rest of us,” Mianmian laughed. “She looked me in the eyes and just blew on my leg, while she straightened it out the right way. I should have been screaming, but so long as she was blowing on it, there was no pain whatsoever. I’d been thinking I’d have to ask them to fly me home on their swords, but then the lady in white hanfu helped me stand up and I was fine, just a bit shaky.”

Mianmian’s mum came back into the dining room with a tray, holding a plate of fruit, bowls and cups, and a steaming pot of tea.

“Obviously, by now, I could tell that these were seriously powerful aunties,” Mianmian said, handing tea cups round the table. “So as soon as I’d stopped shaking quite so much, I told them they had to come and help my mum, dragged them up the garden to the cottage and explained as best as I could. Which wasn’t especially accurate, but my junior presentation on curses and ghosts and resentful energy was loud enough that Mum came running down to see what was going on.”

“And that,” her mum said, pouring out the first of the tea, “was how I met your grandmaster, Wei Wuxian, and your ancestor, Lan Wangji.”

“Oh, I’d love to hear six-year-old Mianmian’s opinion on resentful energy,” Uncle Wei mused under his breath.

Grown-up Mianmian snorted—not likely!—and turned her attention to the sliced peaches and plums on the table. Then she had to stop herself from doing a double-take when Uncle Lan spoke, for about the third time that evening.

“Were Baoshan Sanren and Lan Yi able to help you with dissolving the curse?” he asked, in his deep, measured tones.

“Lan xianren was extremely helpful,” Mianmian’s mum said. “To be honest, I owe her my life. I’ve told you that before, I think.”

“Ah, this much you’ve told us,” Uncle Wei put in, “but we’ve never had the opportunity to discuss the workings-out of it in detail, and Lan Zhan and I are both very curious.”

It was sweet, the way Mum glanced at Mianmian and her dad—as if either of them would hold her back from an evening of talk with old friends, just because half or all of it would fly over their heads.

“Go ahead, laopo,” Dad said.

Mianmian rested her head on his shoulder for a moment and settled in to listen.