Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [179]
Nü Gua also appears in one of several Chinese Flood stories, appropriate for a region prone to violent flooding. (The Yellow River has been called “China’s sorrow” for the ferocity of its devastating floods.) Unlike Flood tales in other civilizations, in which men such as Noah and Deucalion play the dominant roles, the Chinese version features Nü Gua, along with her brother, Fu Hsi, and their father. In this legend, a thunder god who is a fishlike deity with a green face, scales, and fins is angry with Nü Gua’s family. Fearing the god, Nü Gua’s father builds an iron cage outside his house and waits with a pitchfork in case of an attack by the fish god. In the midst of a great storm, the thunder god arrives and threatens Nü Gua’s father. But the clever man is able to trap the god in the cage and plans to cook the fish god. With the thunder deity contained, father goes off to buy spices, so that the thunder god will taste delicious once he is stewed up, but first warns his children not to give the god anything to drink. When the thunder god whimpers that he is thirsty, Nü Gua takes pity on him and gives him a drink. Swallowing the water helps the thunder god regain all of his power, enabling him to break out of the cage. Before he escapes, he gives one of his teeth to the children. They plant it, and a tree soon grows, bearing an enormous gourd.
When the father returns, he sees that the god is gone and a tree is growing. Fearing that the thunder god will take revenge on him, he builds an iron boat and gets into it while the children climb inside the great gourd. When the incessant rains come, both the boat and the gourd float up toward heaven. The father bangs on the door of the king of heaven, who is so surprised by his unexpected visitors that he stops the rain. Instantly, the boat and the gourd fall one thousand miles back to earth. While the father dies, his two children in their gourd are spared, and Nü Gua and her brother Fu Hsi then repopulate the world.
In her book Chinese Mythology, Anne Birrell presents a slightly different version of this myth, in which Nü Gua and her brother Fu Hsi—whose name means “prostrate or sacrificial victim”—create humanity but are ashamed of their incest:
Long ago when the world first began there were two people, Nü Gua and her older brother. They lived on Mount K’un-lun. And there were not yet any ordinary people in the world. They talked about becoming man and wife, but they felt shamed. So the brother at once went with his sister up Mount K’un-lun and made this prayer:
Oh Heaven, if Thou wouldst send us two forth as man and wife,
then make all the misty vapor gather.
If not, then make all the misty vapor disperse,
At this, the misty vapor immediately gathered. When the sister became intimate with her brother, they plaited (wove) some grass to screen their faces. Even today, when a man takes a wife, they hold a fan, which is a symbol of what happened long ago.
By the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), these two gods were often depicted as serpent figures with human heads and interlocking tails. And in Chinese tradition, Nü Gua is also the goddess of match-making and a go-between, who helps arrange marriages.
Another popular Flood story involves a god with the body of a serpent and the head of a human, named Gong Gong (Kung Kung or “common work”), who stirs the waters of earth so violently that they threaten the world with chaos. Gong Gong next tries but fails to overthrow his father, Zhu Rong, the benevolent lord of the cosmos. When Gong Gong angrily butts against one of the mountains of heaven that prop up the sky, it causes the cosmos to tip. This myth explains why the rivers on earth flow in a southwestern direction. As the protective creator goddess, Nü Gua restores order by filling the hole in the sky and then propping up the sky with the legs of a giant tortoise.
What role do “family values” play in Chinese myth?
Compared to the sex-obsessed, whoring, cheating, philandering, and otherwise sexually rapacious