BASS Review 2021: Demands of Religion in ‘The Miracle Girl’

Part of Hand Anatomy by Basquiat. I've been reading about him in the house we are staying at in Albuquerque, and was glad to find something that worked here!
  

Note: Some spoilers for Midnight Mass; proceed with caution!



I read Chang-Eppig’s ‘The Miracle Girl’ at the same time as watching Mike Flanagan’s ‘Midnight Mass’ on Netflix, and kept comparing the two. The connections are apparent: the worship of miracles in Catholicism, all the blood (why is there so much blood stuff in Christianity? I know the answer, but still—isn’t it a bit much?), the poisoning of oneself to reach a kind of holiness. 


Perhaps ‘reaching holiness’ isn’t quite the motivation of Xiao Xue, our protagonist in ‘The Miracle Girl’. She is fairly skeptical of the religion that has been imposed on her community by the missionaries—or if not fully skeptical, at least unmoved. She is a pragmatist, seeing her religiosity more as a means to get warmth and kindness from the adults in her life, who otherwise can be harsh in their treatment of her. On the one hand, she poisons herself because she wants to seem like a miracle, so everyone will adore her for a while and not her sister. On the other, she seems to be quite adamant that she saw an angel while she was in her poisonous berry stupor—she seemed to believe it herself. We are given an account of the angel, but perhaps she is just trying to convince us, too.


Either way, she is furious with her sister for thwarting her attempts to get some positive attention, and for outdoing her every time. I found it hilarious, the concept of sibling rivalry when one of them (the always ‘better in every way’ sibling) is a stigmatic, or perhaps even an ecstatic. The purest person there is, who gives her lunches away to other children. There is no way to compete with this inhuman level of perfection, and it is funny that the sister trying to compete is somewhat abrasive and prone to missteps. It felt allegorical to me, so I was delighted to read in the contributor’s notes that Chang-Eppig had written this story from the prompt to write the beginning of a fairy tale.


It actually felt like I was reading an origin story of some kind. Despite some dark humor in the premise, there is a lot of trauma being inflicted here—upon both sisters to a certain degree, but it is the emotional abuse of Xiao Xue that is front and center. All the people who have a duty of care to her let her down in some way: she is locked in a cupboard as punishment; she is told she is the cause of the family’s problems; love and kindness is withheld from her. She is treated as much older than she is, expected to adapt and cater to the missionaries and the tourists, told to accept her fate as an unfortunate one (this last one is understood in the context of her family having fled from communist China, but it is clear that it hurts Xiao Xue, who does not readily accept this). So an origin story to what, I don’t know. Hero, villain, anti-hero? It isn’t clear, but what is clearer is that this is the backstory for an epic, powerful rivalry between Xiao Xue and Xiao Chun. It almost feels like a prequel, like we are learning that two superhero nemeses were actually sisters, once. Like maybe Xiao Xue finds a way to equal her sister’s stigmata.  


I do not feel hopeful that Xiao Xue will come out of this unscathed. It seems to me we are witnessing the development of her borderline personality disorder in this story. No wonder she turns to extremes, to self-harm (the “minor bloodletting” of scrubbing herself before she eats the poisonous berries, in an attempt to feel better about herself). She is constantly invalidated by everyone around her, including (and most of all) her own family. And of course we are witnessing the collective trauma of her community at the hands of the white missionaries, who teach them that they will never be as worthy, as clean, as good, as holy as white people. That they are second-class. That Chang-Eppig confirms these messages as accurate replications of the ‘teachings’ her own mother experienced is galling.


I read most of this feeling so sad for Xiao Xue, so indignant at her mistreatment, when Chang-Eppig swiftly turned things—for me, at least. It was Xiao Chun, pointing out that Xiao Xue doesn’t ever offer to help people, or think about others. I’m not sure why this was so effective for me, as this has been a criticism levied against Xiao Xue, a child, by adults throughout the story. Maybe it was the monologue format, as Xiao Chun has been simply delivering holier-than-thou aphorisms before now, or sleeping. This was the girl who said, “I feel so close to Jesus, you can’t possibly understand”, who was tacitly approving of her sister being locked in a cupboard while she was channeling Jesus, who lay across the whole back seat of a car in holiness while her sister had to somehow sit there too (I loved that image, and laughed out loud at the description of it through Xiao Xue’s eyes). But something about this ending monologue made me see Xiao Xue as more of an unreliable narrator, as though maybe things weren’t as one-sided as they had seemed throughout the story. And it made me wonder—is Xiao Chun doing all this to help? Has she found a way to effectively fake her stigmata? I think probably not, but the possibility of that was interesting to me.


Despite the unkind way the adults treat Xiao Xue at times, and the teachings of the missionaries (who presumably think they are doing their best--a cognitive dissonance that is hard to understand), they prioritize and show their love and care by feeding the children, sometimes instead of themselves. Xiao Xue is deemed ungrateful for not remembering her mother scraping her food off her plate to feed her; in turn, the family must accept Catholicism in return for being fed by the missionaries. It’s manipulative, and no example of unconditional love: food for devotion and obedience. Xiao Xue’s father, similar to her in many ways, sets this up at the outset: “‘Either they want to give us food or they don’t. Non-Catholics don’t deserve to go hungry any more than Catholics do.’” In the end, Xiao Xue’s parents punish her by withholding food, sending her to bed without dinner. The final withdrawal of love—except sometimes her mother can’t do it, gives her a bun anyway. Xiao Chun trades food for adoration in a different way, openly giving up her meals to other children, which only increases the reverence others feel for her. Or perhaps she is breaking the mold in behaving altruistically—as ever, it is hard to tell.


There is a lot of talk of what people do and don’t deserve. Xiao Chun suggests that Xiao Xue doesn’t deserve attention (read: love, food) because she doesn’t think of others; the missionaries’ hierarchy of races is their way of justifying the second-rate love of God they say Chinese and Taiwanese people deserve; Xiao Xue’s deserving of second-rate familial love because she caused their mother’s health problems (by simply being born—as far away from meritocracy as it is possible to be, but all dressed up in its language). Xiao Xue’s mother attempts to reframe this cruel meritocracy entirely by talking instead about fate: “‘We all have the ming we have. A man fated to be poor will always be poor.’” Yet this is just as unpalatable to Xiao Xue. No wonder she tries to disrupt this in such a dramatic, violent way. This fairy story is definitely of the older, dark variety, like all the best ones are.


 

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