The Bird and the Sea

Jingwei did not mourn herself. There was no time for mourning. From the first morning she stood on the rock, she had a work to do. She flew inland, to the mountains that ran down to the coast, and she chose a twig — a small, dry twig, no bigger than her claw. She took it in her beak, flew out over the sea, and dropped it.

The twig fell, and sank, and the sea closed over it without a sound. It was nothing. It was a single twig, dropped by a single bird, into an ocean that stretched out to the edge of the sky. Any other living thing would have looked at it and seen its own foolishness, and flown home, and forgotten. Jingwei looked at it, and flew back for another.

This is the strange thing about the story. The sea was endless. The bird was the size of a dove. A single twig, a single pebble, would not be noticed by the water; it would not even be felt. And yet she flew, and she dropped, and she flew again, and she dropped again, all day, until the sun went down and she could not see the water.

The sea, when it noticed her at all, laughed. The stories say the sea spoke to her once, in a voice like the grinding of waves: little bird, what do you think you are doing? You will not finish this in a hundred thousand years. Go home, and be still, and forget that you were ever a girl. Jingwei did not stop. She said, between flights: I will fill you, even if it takes until the end of time. I will fill you because you had no right to take me.

And so she went on. She carried twigs from the mountains. She carried pebbles from the beaches, in her small beak, one at a time. She flew out over the water when the sun was high, and when the wind was hard, and when the rain beat her feathers back. She built no nest. She sang no song. She did not rest, except when the dark made it impossible to see, and then she perched on her rock and waited for the light.

The people of the coast saw her. They pointed her out to their children: there, there is the bird that fills the sea. The children thought it was a game. The adults understood that it was not. They saw in her the thing that they themselves lacked: a will that had not been broken by the thing it had failed against. The sea had taken her body, and she had answered by setting herself to take the sea back, one twig at a time.

It was, by every measure that men use, a foolish labor. The sea cannot be filled by twigs. It has not been filled, and it will not be filled, not by Jingwei, not by a hundred thousand such birds, not by all the pebbles in all the mountains. The ocean is older than all of us, and it will outlast us all. Every pebble she drops is swallowed without a trace.

And yet the story does not call her foolish. It calls her Jingwei, and it tells the story because she does not stop. The point was never to fill the sea. The point was that she would not accept the sea's right to take her. The labor itself — the flight out, the small beak, the dropping of the twig into the vast indifferent water — is the answer she gives to death.

Her father, the emperor, walked the shore in those years and saw her flying back and forth, small and black against the vast gray of the water. He is said to have stood and watched her for a long time, and then turned away, because he could not bear to watch. She was his daughter, and she was not his daughter, and she was doing, in her way, what he had not been able to do: she had refused to be defeated.

To this day, the old stories say, on the coast where Nüwa drowned, you may see her still: a small dark bird, flying out over the water, dropping her twigs. She has not filled the sea. She has not even begun. But she has not stopped, and that is the whole of the story, and that is why it is told.