Chang’e’s Lament

Short story about the Chinese moon goddess

In Chinese mythology, Chang’e was a moon goddess who stole her husband Yi’s immortality elixirs and now spends eternity on the moon. I’ve told a different version of the story below in honor of the upcoming eclipse, my first fiction in a while. Enjoy!

Sometimes on lonely and sleepless nights, when the moon is bright and full, I can’t help but fixate on the past and weep. I know it’s unwise to linger on my mistakes, and I out of all people have no excuses. I’m an old hag who has lived thousands of years by now, shouldn’t I have reached enlightenment already? I suppose one can grow older without becoming wiser, and perhaps the poets were right about me after all — that I, Chang’e, the immortal moon goddess, was beautiful but foolish, prone to laughter but also to thoughtlessness, ignorant to how one mistake, one cup of green tea too many, could irrevocably alter my life for the worse, banishing to me to a life of loneliness on the moon.

One of the most famous poems about me, by Li Shangyin, claims that I stole the immortality elixir from my husband Yi. But that simply isn’t true. I never meant to take his elixir. Yes, I coveted immortality and had a tendency towards impetuousness, but the elixir was his reward and not mine. It was he who had aimed his silver bow towards the heavens and shot down nine of the ten scorching suns, and  not me. He was the reason why we could farm rice again, why the plants didn’t wither under the extreme heat. 

And although he had shot down the suns in an effort to impress me — for I had many suitors, and what better way to woo a woman than to give her the purple mountains and the lotus flowers? — even I could not be so bold as to take what was not mine.  

That’s what some of the poets get wrong about me. I was not cunning. I could not slip into Yi’s chambers undetected and take what was rightfully his. The palace maids always said that if I hadn’t had lips like cherry blossoms and a laugh like morning dew, then not even one man would have professed his love for me, for I was too stupid to even have ever won at a game of go. If my outsides had any relation to my intellect, then Yi would have seen me for the boar demon that I was.