I was about 11 years old when I started having thoughts about who I want to be and what I want to do in the future. My decision was simple; I wanted to be a nun. During that time in China, when women wanted to enter the nunnery, they had to be at least 12 years old. However, my father applied to the nunnery to allow me to enter at the age of 11. Entering the nunnery at such a young age seems like a crazy idea but it actually offers a lot of benefits for women. Young girls, like me, enter the nunnery, not only to avoid arranged marriages, but also to have the opportunity of education. We are being taught how to write, read, and dress properly, what prayers to say at a given time of the day, how to pack clothes when traveling, how to speak and greet people, and how to clean. In my case, that was not these were not the only reasons that influenced my decision. It was a poem written at the time of my birth and my aunt’s death. The poem was written by a young woman who recounted what had happened during the time when the rebels entered Chang.
My parents did not disagree about me entering the convent, rather than that they encouraged me. So, here I am, years later, living among monks and nuns. Sometimes I’m stuck wondering if my life would be different from what it is like now. Then, I decide that I am happy with my decision. Life of a nun is not as strict or boring as some might say. We do not spend our whole time praying and thinking about the afterlife and such. We are allowed to go out, visit our families and help them in the fields, we engaged ourselves in the community by attending different events and trying to help the poor. Not only am I engaged in all these activities, but I also have to fulfill my duties in the nunnery, such as helping to clean or handing everything that I learned to another new nun.
I have noticed that there are times when I think or rather question me if I am a good person, a good nun, it bothers me knowing that there are things that I would have done better and some that I should not have done at all. What I am talking about is my stubbornness, my own benefit, and lack of interest in my family.
Being a nun or a monk makes you an important part in the community, creates a good social status for you. That’s exactly what happened to me. I felt so important among the people of my community that I did not even wanted to go back to my uncle’s house and help to care for them, like other members of my monastery did. I preferred to stay in the nunnery, although I did not know why. Maybe it was because I had everything I needed in the nunnery or perhaps I thought that I was too good to do anything else. Those are the things that, at the moment, make me feel like a spoiled, self-centered brat.
One of the things that I liked when I was younger was to learn about the world outside of Dunhuang. It was a curiosity that arose in me since my young day when my father and grandmother told me stories about China and Tibet. Of course, I never had the opportunity to travel. And that was one thing that I missed after becoming a nun. I did not travel along the Silk Road instead the Silk Road traveled to me. The soldiers, the merchants, the prisoners of war, and the people of exile were leaving or coming back. Each one of them shared their stories of laughter, joy or pain and sorrow. And I enjoyed hearing them, mostly because the came from a primary source, if you can call it that. Those people were there; they saw it or experience every bit of it. And the passion with which they told their stories amazed me. I do not recall missing home, probably because of the fact that I never left, or maybe because I wanted to get away of my own free will, but they wanted nothing else except coming back. I, then, remembered how my father and grandmother used to talk about the glory days of China with great nostalgia in their voices, and how they wished for those days to come back.
Those encounters made me think of how I have changed. I have been living this ‘perfect’ life, without any worries of what I will do with my life, where will I live or if I have someone to look out for me when I get older. The convent fulfilled that. It provided me with protection and respect in the community. I never really worried or for that instance paid attention to the real world outside the gates of the monastery, instead I read the sutras and scripts that were given to me to learn from. And now, looking back at my life in the monastery I wonder if I fulfilled the goals of the monastic life, and not focused on the things that I might get from them. After all, I am proud of the things that I have done and achieved by being a nun unlike other women. However, I would like to experience something else except the monastic life.
