Corinthians (page 85)
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
Great-Grandmother Dowager Li of the Li House of Flying Daggers stroked her clouded-leopard, and faced her great-granddaughter Tang Lili, with a love for posterity the girl would not come to understand or recognize for years to come.
Great-Grandmother Dowager Li just looked at her, just looked at her face, and drank in the soft skin, the blemishes, the perfections, the way the girl unconsciously shook her bangs out of her eyes, the aching earnest way she wanted something. Great-Grandmother Dowager Li knew she didn´t have forever, and the years are numbered, so she drank in her great-granddaughter, so like herself at that age, and her daughter, and her daughter´s daughter had been. To be four generations in one House — was a staggering treasure few held.
“Everything falls apart.”
“Why do you say that, Lili-zi? What´s bothering you?” Zi meant child, and Great-Grandmother Dowager Li tacked it onto Lili´s name, the way her own mother had done, and her mother´s mother before her. One endearment, passed like maternal mitochondria, unbroken, essential.
“I´ll never learn the flying daggers like you and mom, and grandma. You do everything well. You do everything better. I do it bad.”
Great-Grandmother Dowager Li wanted to jump in and refute her, tell her she was wrong, because she hurt to see the child hurt. But she´s done this before, and done this wrong, with her daughter, with her granddaughter, and nearer death only comes the reflection, the re-evaluation, the hard-wished for, hard-worked for wisdom.
“I´ve had a lot of practice,” Great-Grandmother Dowager Li said gently. Of all the things she wanted to say to take the hurt away, the self-criticism away, she, even at this age, after all the practice, was only still half-good at it, but it will have to do. She said what she could, trying not to make it worse.
“You do everything right, and I do it all wrong. I can´t get it right.” Tang Lili´s small face darkened in frustration, angry with herself, and angry with her great-grandmother but too scared to show it. She was unhappy with herself, and that was all right, to show, a little. But she didn´t dare tell Great-Grandmother Li that she was angry at her as well, afraid Great-Grandmother Li would punish her somehow for her anger.
“What does it matter if you get it right?”
“What does it matter? Everybody else gets it right. Everybody else in the whole family can do it. Only me.” Tang Lili was near tears. The tears come easily, quickly, the waters near the surface as her little heart is, too.
“I love you just the same.”
This was the wrong thing to say. It had felt so right to Great-Grandmother Dowager Li, but it didn´t soothe the fury in little Tang Lili. All it did was confirm her incompetence with the daggers, that her own great-grandmother was trying to get her to stop feeling, or expressing the rage, the inadequacy, the full range of emotions that overwhelmed the girl.
“You don´t love me just the same!”
“I do!”
The arguing didn´t help. Great-Grandmother Dowager Li could see she was antagonizing the girl, that with every affirmation of ostensible love she was putting the girl down by telling her she was wrong, that what the girl felt was wrong, what the girl experienced was simply incorrect. And that wasn´t love. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
It keeps no record of wrongs, remembered Great-Grandmother Dowager Li to herself, love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. Of the whole verse, she struggled with self-seeking and easily angered in so particularly grave a fashion. But for Tang Lili, with her own face before her, who´s just as she had been, just as she still is on the inside, for this girl, love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
“Lili-zi, if you were the greatest swordsgirl in all of jianghu I would not love you any more, than if you were the worst. My love for you depends not on what you can do, what you can show, how you can prove. For that would be a low love, measured in units, volatile, up and down, a mean sort of love. Now I´m a mean old lady, but I hope not that mean, not where it counts. It would be a small, weak love indeed, a puny, unworthwhile thing for love to be measured out in tea spoons, for then life itself is measured out in utensils.”
“I thought you wouldn´t like me anymore.”
“That must have felt terrible, worried I wouldn´t like you anymore.”
A nod, because the girl couldn´t speak.
After a while, Tang Lili wanted to try again. And they practiced, together. The clouded-leopard retrieved the daggers each time, and they practiced. Somehow, it was easier, it was light. It was patienter, it was kinder. And the dagger was not envying or boasting, it was not proud. The dagger flew true, not every time, but many times. They kept no record of wrongs.