I’m so excited that I’ll be talking and reading at Lady Jane’s Salon about my new novel Petals from the Sky! First, I must say a big thank you to Leanna Renne Hieber for inviting me and giving very valuable advice.
PFS is a poignant love story about a would-be Buddhist nun. Although there have been Buddhist nuns for 2,500 years, their stories are little known in the West.
During my event at Lady Jane, I’ll talk about how my life in Hong Kong with my dysfunctional family and later training in the arts and Buddhism inspired my two novels. After the reading, I’ll also play the guqin, the ancient Chinese musical instrument featured in my first novel, Peach Blossom Pavilion, the story of the last Chinese geisha, or courtesan, who was also a poet, musician, painter and calligrapher.
I learned about the lives of Buddhist nuns from the inside. In my youth, I was befriended by a powerful nun in Hong Kong and groomed to be her successor because of my art and academic background.
A few Buddhist nuns spend their lives in solitary meditation on remote mountains. Yet others are billionaire fund-raisers running multinational organizations and hobnobbing with high society — such as the abbess portrayed in my novel, whom I refer to as a “business nun.”
Girls become Buddhist nuns for several different reasons: Some feel an intense religious calling. Others have been wounded in their love life and want to find a refuge from an uncaring world. Most unlucky are those so poor their families cannot afford the extra bowl of rice to feed them. Some parents also believe that “donating” a daughter to a monastery will bring them merit.
I had a different reason for almost becoming a nun. The arcane philosophy of Buddhism, the esoteric rituals, such as the mudra (sacred hand gestures) that I now perform professionally — and the beautiful yet bald-headed and loose-robed nuns — just seemed to me the coolest things in the world. I craved to enter the rich and mysterious special world within the “empty gate” as nunneries are called.
My nun mentor, an accomplished artist herself, liked me because since my youth, I’d been trained in the four literary arts of poetry, music, painting and calligraphy. When I received my PhD from the University of Paris, Sorbonne, I was deemed perfect to be a head nun. In that era, few nuns had been to college and to have studied abroad was quite rare.
It was not until my late thirties that I ran into my future American husband whom I met in a Buddhist conference.
I still remember my mentor’s words to me right after she agreed to organize a Buddhist wedding for me, the first of its kind held in Hong Kong. Smiling somewhat bitterly, she said, “Tell your husband that he’s stolen you from us!”
Visit: www.mingmeiyip.com
Mingmei will be reading at the March 1st Salon along with Louisa Edwards and Cara Elliot!
