Worst Kept Secrets

Ok, after about twenty minutes of very superficial web reading, I found a Chinese story that I absolutely adore. Here’s my mildly embellished paraphrase:

During the Song Dynasty, there was a white snake demon named Bai SuZhen. While the average Chinese demon spent his or her time wreaking havoc amongst gullible villagers, Bai SuZhen spent hers daydreaming about overcoming her lot in life and becoming a goddess. One day, she took the first step in achieving this goal by taking human form and walking the earth.

She was hanging out the dynastic capital of Hangzhou when she noticed a demonic presence in the neighborhood. A green snake demon named Xiao Qing was causing all kinds of problems. Since Bai SuZhen wanted to be a goddess, the first logical step was to perform good works for worthy humans, and so she managed to trap and imprison Xiao Qing at the bottom of a lake.

However, Bai SuZhen wasn’t a mean-spirited demon in the slightest - in fact, she was a bit of a pushover. And Xiao Qing was a mouthy, spunky sort of demon who was very good at her work. Bai couldn’t quite bear to turn her back completely on her demon sister, so she compromised and promised to return in three hundred years to free her.

She kept her word, and after a three hundred year think, Qing had decided she was bored with being evil and that attempting to be good might be a fun project. The two snake demons became fast friends, and set out to Become Good together.

Unfortunately, they were intercepted by a Taoist monk/sorceror by the name of Fahai. Fahai was a racist sort who believed that all demons should be destroyed on sight, regardless of their character or intention. Qing and Bai managed to give him the slip, but he became obsessed with annihilating them in a sort of Inspector Javier versus Jean Valjean sort of scenario.

With the crazed magical Taoist monk hot on their tracks, Bai and Qing beat it for Ban Bu Duo, a sort of demon refuge world. From the safety of Ban Bu Duo, they started making serious efforts to help humanity. Unfortunately, being demons, they weren’t very good at it - Qing managed to cause a massive flood that killed thousands of people in an effort to end a drought. After that, Guanyin, a Taoist goddess of mercy, told the two that they were out of chances, and that they absolutely must stop their quest for goddess status.

The pair of dejected snake demons headed to Earth to try to clean up the watery mess they’d made, but an encounter with Fahai caused them to make a hasty retreat to the demon world. During the confusion, they accidentally dragged a human scholar by the name of Xu Xian into the demon world with them. Bai, in a frantic effort to correct her snowballing mistakes, tried to protect Xian from the other demons, which led to a very dramatic battle with the entire underworld, after which, surprise surprise, Xu Xian admitted to being head over heels in love with her.

Sadly, Xian could not stay in the demon world, and reentry to the human world required that his memory be erased. So he returned home, and lost all memory of Bai. For her part, Bai stepped up her efforts and managed to cajole Guanyin into letting her back on the goddess track.

While she was hunting for human tears (a requirement for goddesshood), she came across Xian and another woman. She slipped into a nearly suicidal depression, but fortunately Qing kept her head on her shoulders and did her homework. After establishing that Xian was not married, the former green snake demon arranged a meeting between Xian and Bai. Of course they fell crazy in love again, and got married, started a medicine shop, and kicked back intending to live happily ever after.

Bai neglected to mention that she was actually a demon in line to be a goddess masquerading as a mortal, though, and the laws of the gods are quite strict about marriages between demons and humans. Consequently, the couple’s hometown was struck with a nasty, nasty plague. With everyone dying, Fahai, Qing, and Bai temporarily joined forces to find the magic herbal cure (and I’m sure had many interesting adventures that wikipedia isn’t sharing with me). After the town was saved, though, the old animosity heated up again. On the day of the Dragonboat Festival, the two snake demons reverted to their true selves, according to divine law, which caused some romantic strife between Bai and Xian (he died of fright, sending his wife on yet another herb quest, looking for resurrection plants or something).

But Xian was a total sport about the whole thing, and did the back pat + “I love you, infernal nature or no” thing. Bai eventually had Xian’s son, and everything seemed just fine -

Until Fahai attacked her right after the birth when she didn’t have the strength to fight him and eternally imprisoned her in the Leifeng Pagoda.

The End!

Ok, that’s a revamped version - in the classical edition, Fahai is the good guy trying to save poor Xian’s soul from a demon temptress, but I really, really liked the slightly revised version. Snake demon heroines! Rock!