Twenty-Six Malignant Gates

“Because then I cannot see you and you will fall down and cry and I will not hear you.”

“How do you know I’ll fall?” whined the girl.

“It is in a book, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, all the bad things that can happen to you outside the protection of this house.”

“ I don’t believe you. Let me see the book.”

“It is written in Chinese. You cannot understand it. That is why you must listen to me.”

“What are they, then?” the girl demanded. “Tell me the twenty-six bad things.”

But the mother sat knitting in silence.

“What twenty-six!” shouted the girl.

The mother still did not answer her.

“You can’t tell me because you don’t know! You don’t know anything!” And the girl ran outside, jumped on her bicycle, and in her hurry to get away, she fell before she even reached the corner.

The Parable above brings four stories together with one thing in common: lessons learned by mother and/or daughter. How they relate to the parable brings about the uniqueness that each story holds.

Within Waverly Jong’s “Rules of the Game” there li

However, in Lena St. Clair’s story “The Voice from the Wall”, the mother, Ying-ying runs and falls out of sight. Always with worry plaguing her mind, Ying-ying placed that worry into her daughter’s mind. With both of them running from the “danger” that threatened their everyday lives, they walked a fine line on an emotional cliff dive. At a point in which they could not be seen, Ying-ying took a dive off the cliff, just around the corner. She plummeted to a point in which she could only be saved on her own behalf for no one else could reach her. Ying-ying’s current condition seemed to be an emotional stupor of fear and sorrow that lay in her past.

Lena came to a point with her mother, always wondering about the worst of things, and letting her imagination get the best of her. Lena snapped out of it when Ying-ying went into her semi-stupor phase, and then pulled her out through the wall that she had been living behind for years.

Rose Hsu Jordan’s “Half and Half” gives a literal term of the parable. Bing, the younger brother put into her care ran from her and to the reef where their father was fishing. Without warning Bing tumbles into the sea. Rose is frozen with fear and at a loss for what to do, whom to scream to. Bing ran from protection and tumbled where he could not be seen, and consequently, he drowned.

Waverly fell after running away from

Some topics in this essay:
Waverly Jong’s, Malignant Gates, Voice Wall”, Soon Jing-Mei, Hsu Jordan’s, Jing-Mei Woo’s, , St Clair’s, parable brings, fine line, sour note,