Author Topic: Lost Time (A Chinese Tale) (Read 1949 times)

gwillybj · « **on:** April 01, 2014, 01:20:39 AM »

So I opened a window in Google Chrome and typed "tell me a story" in the search box, and this little ditty is what came up:

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Lost Time
Long ago in China, there lived two boys, cousins named Liu Ch'en and Yuan Chao. Wherever one boy went, the other followed.
One spring day, their mothers sent them to the stream to fetch pails of water, but the boys loved to play, and they were distracted by a carpet of beautiful flowers beneath their feet. Soon they set their pails by the stream and began to play.
"What harm can it do?" Liu Ch'en asked.
"We have all the time in the world!" Yuan Chao agreed.
After all, that is the way young boys think of time.
They ran and leaped and walked along the trail of flowers. They climbed trees and wandered the hills. "Let's collect as many flowers as we can," they said as they daydreamed. They continued to wander about until suddenly they came to a cave.
This would not have been strange, but just outside the cave two fairies sat on a great rock, playing chess.
"Do you see those fairies?" Liu Ch'en whispered to his cousin.
Yuan Chao nodded but could not speak.
They stared in silence, but the fairies seemed not to notice the boys, so intent were they on their game.
Time passed.
Soon a white hare appeared and began to bounce up and down. Each time the hare leaped up, another sea of flowers bloomed. But when the hare touched earth, those flowers paled and withered and died.
Up and down, up and down. Flowers bloomed, flowers died.
The boys continued to watch the chess game until one of the fairies moved a piece and said, "Checkmate."
Then the fairies noticed the boys. "How long have you been here?" the first fairy asked.
"A little while," said Liu Ch'en, and his cousin echoed him, "a little while."
"Don't leave," said the second fairy. "You'll regret it if you do."
The boys were confused by this. "We have to bring pails of water to our mothers," they said.
"Your mothers have missed you," said the fairies. "Stay here."
The boys shook their heads. "We cannot. Our families would mourn us."
"They already have," the fairies said.
"Then we must hurry," said the boys.
"If you insist on leaving," said one of the fairies, "take a reed with you."
The other fairy added, "When you return, if the entrance to the cave is locked, you just have to wave the reed and it will open for you."
The fairies handed each boy a slender reed.
"When you go home, if you find everything has changed, come back here," they said.
"Thank you," the boys said, but they had noticed that the sun was beginning to set, so they ran back in the direction from which they had come. When they reached the stream where they had left their buckets, they found tall trees growing where once there had been only flowers, and the stream had dried up. They could not find their buckets anywhere, although they ran this way and that as they searched for them, losing their reeds along the way.
"We'd better hurry home," said Liu Ch'en, and they began to run, but soon they discovered the world around them had changed.
When they reached their village, they could not find their houses. In their place, they found an empty meadow where two old men sat playing chess.
"Hello," the boys said. "Have you seen our families?"
"Who are you?" the old men asked.
"We are Liu Ch'en and Yuan Chao," the boys replied.
The old men shook their heads. "Do not speak lightly of our ancestors," they said. "We are the seventh generation of descendants of those great men."
"That cannot be," said Liu Ch'en.
"We are just boys," Yuan Chao agreed, but the men turned away, appalled by the boys' disrespect.
Confused, the boys puzzled over their afternoon. They thought about the flowers and the jumping hare. They thought about the way the flowers bloomed when the hare leaped up and how they paled and withered and died when the hare landed on the ground again.
"Perhaps each leap was a season," Liu Ch'en said.
"It seems our visit lasted more than a few hours," said Yuan Chao.
They realized they had been gone for more than one hundred years.
They shook their heads. It was impossible.
"We are Liu Ch'en and Yuan Chao," they said to the old men. "Surely you know us."
Now the old men were angry. "Go away or you will be punished for taking our ancestors' names in vain," they warned.
When the boys saw other villagers running toward them, anger on their unfamiliar faces, they turned and ran back into the hills.
They raced to the cave, but they found the entrance closed this time.
"We need the reeds," they said, but they could not remember where they had put them.
They looked at each other with fear in their eyes. This day -- or these many decades -- felt like a terrible dream. They knocked on the cave entrance.
"Let us in," they cried, but the entryway stayed closed.
They knocked harder. They wept. Frustrated, they knocked their heads against the walls of the cave, and then they died.
But the ruler of the heavens took pity on them. To repay them for their loss, they were appointed gods -- Liu Ch'en of good luck, Yuan Chao of bad luck. And so it was that from that day on, they were remembered.