"Beneath one moon over Chang'an, ten thousand households pounding clothes."
Li Bai wrote those lines about the sound of laundry beaten under moonlight. We have no Chang'an here, but the sound of pounding clothes on these banks hasn't stopped in centuries — cloth has to be beaten on stone to soften and shed its dirt. I've pounded for forty years; the ravine has washed three generations of my family's clothes.
My grandmother pounded clothes here too, when she was young. And while she pounded, she saw the Monkey King.
The real one — not the opera one. Grandmother said the monkeys of Flower-Fruit Mountain came down in troops to drink, bathe, and snatch the girls' soap pods for fun. The King came once. He squatted on the biggest washing stone and watched them pound. She said he made no noise at all, and his eyes shone like the moon in the water. She asked: Great King, do you want to pound clothes too? The King shook his head and said one sentence.
Grandmother practiced that sentence all her life, and only passed it to me on her deathbed. The King said: the sound of you pounding clothes is finer than the music of Heaven.
In those days the curtain of water over the cave ran laughing.
Not anymore. Since the plague, the washerwomen go in pairs and pack their mallets before sundown. The monkeys don't dare come down either. A few days ago, pounding at my stone, I half-saw a little monkey squatting on a far rock, watching me — for a whole noon. I called: little thing, come here. It ran.
Let it run. The clothes still need pounding; the days still need living. The day the pounding sounds thick on these banks again, the monkeys will come back on their own.
I believe my grandmother.