Chapter 267: Lily's Plan

Monday, June 27, 2005 (Continued)

Our sex session was interrupted by my cellphone receiving a text message. Unlike the phone Dad originally bought for me, the one I have now is state of the art, including being able to assign different ring- and text-tones to different people. I recognized the tone for Carol, and stopped what I was doing to read it in case she was having trouble with Logan.

Nothing like that, fortunately for Logan. Carol was just letting us know that when she'd gotten home, there'd been a courier package for her, containing the cellphone I'd asked Lily to buy for Carol in Hong Kong. Carol LOVED it, texting that I'd chosen the perfect one for her. Carol hadn't had time to charge the battery yet, let alone use any of the phone's features, but - being a girl - she could tell it was perfect just by looking at it. Girls are very clever that way.

I passed on the news to Julia, which caused Pat to say, "Lily's very vague about when she's coming back. She says she has to stay for family reasons and doesn't know for how long. She won't tell me what the reasons are. She sounds strange."

Julia said, "Family's very important to Chinese. Much more than for Americans."

True, but I had better things to be doing than comparing cultures, so that was the end of our discussion about Lily.

^

[[Now is a good time to explain about Lily, even though I didn't discover most of the following until a couple of minutes ago, when my writing of my autobiography got up to introducing Lily and I did some research on her. It doesn't really have any direct bearing on my ascendancy, but it's interesting enough to explain.

We later emailed Lily a "Thank you" for Carol's cellphone, getting back not much more than "You welcome."

We tried exchanging emails with Lily, but her replies were slow and so terse as to be almost non-existent. Pat had Lily's number in Hong Kong, but Lily was equally uninformative on the phone.

We didn't think it was a big deal until just before school was about to restart, and Lily still hadn't returned to Corvallis. Pat called her, and was told that she'd probably be staying in Hong Kong rather than coming back to school. The only reason given was "family."

Lily never returned to Corvallis. After a few months she stopped replying to our emails and clearly didn't want to talk with us on the phone, so she was out of our lives.

I had more than enough distractions going on in my life, so Lily's absence barely registered. Occasionally I'd have the amusing thought that I REALLY didn't understand Chinese girls, because I could've sworn that serving me was very important to her. Judging by the complete absence of contact, or even a significant farewell, I'd apparently misunderstood the situation.

As it happened, I'd also misunderstood the magnitude of my misunderstanding.

Lily and her family were, like the vast majority of Hongkongese, Buddhists. Buddhism is not a religion in anything close to the strict sense of that word, in that there's no divine being who is prayed to, who created the World, will intervene on behalf of supplicants, will absolve or punish sins, etc. Instead of an externally judgmental "God On High", Buddhism is a "bottom up" path to self-improvement. Buddhists consequently believe that there are some human individuals who are more "self-improved" than others. It is entirely reasonable to most Buddhists that the most highly improved of such people would have attained powers and abilities well beyond those of normal people.

The acquisition of special powers is a common aspect of many religions because it's a very common and strong human yearning and fantasy. Christianity, for example, maintains that its saints acquire the ability to perform miracles through their devotion to their religion. In fact, being able to perform miracles is an essential prerequisite for sainthood. People routinely bend their religion to fit their personal desires (fundamentally, that's all that religion is an accumulation of). For example, 25% of Americans who identify themselves as Christians say they also believe in reincarnation, even though it's a heresy that directly contradicts damned near every core aspect of Christian theology. Wish fulfillment is a powerful source of self-delusion, especially for religious people (who are, by definition, deluded to start with - I'm stating a simple fact; not being sarcastic). Buddhism is not a closed set of beliefs, so the existence of vastly superior humans is easily included and is widely accepted in Buddhist communities, which includes Hong Kong.

Lily had decided that I was one such "superior human", mainly because of my intelligence, which is a big deal for ambitious Asians. There were also my physical abilities (playing soccer, my 10k running win, how fit I looked, bowling 300, etc.) Those were less important, but the fact that I was superbly gifted mentally and physically amazed Lily, as most extremely gifted people are gifted in one or the other direction, and almost never in both.

Sixteen-year old Americans tend to live in the present, but Lily looked ahead. She had some understanding that my abilities were more profound than showed up in the artificial world of school. It gave her an idea that she talked to her parents about. They were fairly open to Lily's request, as there was no real reason why not, and Lily had some very good reasons why. Before granting permission, they had to check me out, watching my soccer game in Salem being the first step. After that impressive display, they pretty much agreed with Lily.

They knew that Lily had no chance of getting and keeping me permanently. At best she had a 'window of opportunity' - or the equivalent Chinese expression - of a few months, and then I'd move beyond her reach (status was another concept the American girls who chased me never thought of. The only "reaches" they thought of were geographic, or my being surrounded by too much female competition). Lily's parents agreed with her that the most she could hope to achieve was to get pregnant by me.

The Chengs never intended to use Lily's pregnancy to coerce me in any way, either into marriage or to give them money (credit to them for that). They didn't even want me to know about it (debit to them for that), because they wanted the child raised to be solely a Cheng. Their only goal was for me to get Lily with child, which their extended family would raise in Hong Kong. Adding a markedly superior human to the family tree was irresistible to them, as they believed my descendants would be very special.

Chinese believe family to be far more important than Westerners do. Westerners know that about Chinese, but underestimate its effects, thinking the Chinese attitude is just more of the same feelings that Westerners have. That's not the case. Ancestor worship is a very big deal to many Chinese, which means that the living Mr. and Mrs. Cheng had a serious responsibility to their descendants, extending hundreds of years into the future. If I was the superior type of person Lily claimed I was, then her parents would feel great pride in adding my blood-line to their family tree.

There's an inconsistency here. I was superior because I was SELF-improved, so my superiority shouldn't have been able to be passed on genetically. The short explanation is that you shouldn't expect people's religious beliefs to be self-consistent. The Chengs DID believe I was special, and they DID believe I would have special children. That their motivations were deluded didn't alter their desire to act on them. There's nothing particularly Chinese or Buddhist about being self-deluded. For example, millions of words have been written about the possible descendants of Jesus Christ. If Jesus' DNA was somehow discovered, there'd be a frenzy of DNA testing all over the world, to discover his 'best' descendants - as if that mattered at all (they'd most likely be Islamic Arabs, which amuses me).

Lily wasn't immediately given the go-ahead. That was going to wait until after the dinner party. Her parents insisted on getting a better personal understanding of me first, including the little martial arts test they planned with Lily's cousin Tony. That wasn't important; just an opportunity not to be missed. I deprived Mr. Cheng of the chance to see something godlike by my hiding behind him, to his considerable annoyance.

A week before the dinner party, I did my "Hide the Hair" trick in the hot tub during the Liaison Meeting. My performing magic blew Lily away. It made her lose her self-control, and to gush about her offer to serve me. Lily's being honored to serve me was a load of crap; she just wanted lots of unprotected sex with me. She and her parents had invented that fake explanation. Lily's gushing her offer in the hot tub was getting ahead of herself, but when she rushed home to tell her parents that I could do magic, they got equally excited. They'd previously thought I was a very special human, but my ability to do magic upgraded their opinion of me substantially, as only VERY special people can do real magic. They had no doubt it was real. The Chengs decided I was a demigod, or at least a semi-demigod, not that they thought in those terms, as Chinese have some weird - to Europeans - ideas of what makes a god. Repeating my trick during the dinner party at Lily's home several days later confirmed my semi-demi-deified status.

Lily's returning to Hong Kong immediately after the dinner party was for her and her mother to visit a fertility clinic, to get Lily's chance of conceiving increased. Not that the Chengs ever considered going to one, but American clinics wouldn't have touched a 16-year old girl. More likely they'd have called a social welfare organization or six after they learned that Lily lived in a state with an 18-years old age of consent. An American clinic would also have been far too slow. In Hong Kong it's easy to get to the head of a line. For a start, the Chinese don't believe in waiting patiently in lines, and they do believe in "money talks." The Chengs were in a hurry, and they had money, so everyone else got bumped down. As far as Chinese are concerned, money is for making life easier, the pun being very appropriate in this case.

Lily had found out I was comfortable having unprotected sex with Julia and Ava because they were on the pill, so that's what she pretended to do. Other contraceptive forms could've allowed us to start having sex immediately after returning from her doctors visit, but they would've gained her only two days, and they might not have been so acceptable to me. She never took the pills, of course, instead discarding one a day so she could show me the packet to 'prove' she was taking them.