Reading Notes: Chinese Fairy Tales, Part A – Yang Oerlang
The portulucca plant.
The daughter of the Ruler of Heaven one day came down to explore the earth that she spent her life watching from above. During her adventures, she met a mortal man named Yang and fell in love with him. When she came back up to heaven, she found out that she was pregnant and had a son. The Ruler of Heaven was so angry and ashamed of her actions that he expelled her from heaven to live a live on earth and then trapped her under the Wu-I hills.
Her son was named, Oerlang, and Oerlang was unlike any other boy that walked the earth. He could make himself invisible to the human eye, he could transform into the shape of any creature or any object, and he had the strength of all of those in the heavens combined. Oerlang was so strong that he could move a mountain from one place to the other and he did exactly that and when he went to rescue his mother, pushing the Wu-I hills just enough so she could slip out.
His mother looked very feeble so he picked her up and starting walking away from the hills while carrying her on his back. She felt so weak that they had to stop and rest of the flat ledge of a rock. "I desperately need something to drink", she said. Oerlang took off in a sprint in search of water for his mother and when he found some in a nearby river, he returned to where his mother was resting and she was nowhere to be found. His mother was gone and all that remained in the place she was resting was her skin and bones.
While there were ten suns in the sky, the daughter of the Ruler of the Heavens had lost her magic ability to withstand the heat of the burning sun after being trapped under the hill for so long that the sun's beaming rays disintegrated her body after she sat under them for so long. Oerlang was absolutely devastated. While he was overcome with grief and sadness, he was also filled with rage. He picked up two mountains on his shoulders and smashed them together with the sun being crushed in between them. He crushed the sun into a disk, threw it away, and then grabbed two more mountains to use to crush another sun.
He crushed nine of the ten suns and the last sun was so scared that he hid underneath the leaves of a portulucca plant. A rainworm peeked out of the ground and shouted "He's over here!" Oerlang lunged toward the sun and the Ruler of Heaven appeared in front of him out of nowhere. "Stop! You know that all things on this earth need sunshine to live. We know what happened to your mother isn't fair, but because you rescued her, you showed that you are worth of being her son and a part of my family. You will be a god in the heaven and you will be my bodyguard. You will rule over good and evil in the mortal world."
The sun came out from under the leaves of the portulacca leaves and because he was so thankful to the plant for saving him, he gave the plant the power of never being vulnerable to the sun. The rainworm on the other hand was not at the mercy of the sun, and the sun shriveled up the worm dry.
Story source: The Chinese Fairy Book, ed. by R. Wilhelm and translated by Frederick H. Martens (1921).
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