# The Distant Temple > **E-OTMES v11.1 \u903b\u8f91\u62d3\u6251+\u8bfb\u8005\u6295\u5c04\u4f5c\u54c1** > `E-OTMES-v11-22076-O9A4U0H2Q6Z3-R3-39D|O:912|A:433|U:044|H:23|Q:63|Z:323|H1d:1|Q0d:1|A1d:1|Z3:2|Z4:4|Z5:3|Z6:1|Z7:0|A9:6|A10:2|Q9:3|H9:0|V9:1|G9:17|LR0:3|LR1:1|PT0:1|IC0:3|IO0:3|AR0:0|RP0:2|LV0:2|LV0i:3` --- The temple had been invisible to Elara for thirty-seven years. Not gone. Never gone. But invisible, the way a word you've spoken ten thousand times becomes soundless, losing all meaning through the sheer mechanics of repetition. She had walked past that corner of Hsinchu for three decades\u2014past the red brick, past the cracked stone lions whose mouths had been eaten smooth by acid rain and time, past the bougainvillea that spilled over the gate like frozen blood\u2014and she had not seen it. Not because her eyes failed. Because her mind had made a contract with survival: look away, look away, look away. Now she stood at the gate again, fifty-four years old, a woman who had built a career in archival conservation\u2014saving other people's manuscripts while her own past collected dust\u2014and her hands shook so violently she could barely fit her key into the lock. The key still worked. It always would. Some things in Taiwan refuse to surrender to entropy. --- I thought distance was geography. I thought if I moved far enough away\u2014from this street, from this city, from the woman who raised me alone in a flat above a pharmacy in Taichung\u2014I could outrun what the temple meant. I thought geography was the answer. It wasn't. It was only the question. --- The temple's name was Guanghua Si, but no one called it that. Everyone called it the Distant Temple\u2014not because of where it was (it sat at the corner of a street anyone could reach by bus), but because of what it distanced itself from. A smaller building nestled inside the compound, almost hidden by a banyan tree so old its aerial roots made curtains against the walls. This was where Lin Meiwei had spent her childhood afternoons while her mother worked double shifts at the pharmacy. Meiwei\u2014because Elara hadn't been called Elara in Hsinchu. Elara was the name she wore now, the one on her passport, the one her students at National Taiwan University used when discussing her papers on Song dynasty manuscript repair. In Hsinchu, she was Mei. Meimei. Little plum blossom. A name someone else had chosen. The Distant Temple was where Meiwei went when the noise of her mother's world became too loud. Not that her mother was cruel. Lin Meiwei was meticulous about this, even now, even when talking to herself in the temple's dim interior: cruel is not the word. Exhausted. Always exhausted. The pharmacy kept them alive. The double shifts kept the lights on. The neighbor Mrs. Chen who sometimes took Meiwei in after school kept them fed. Survival is a kind of love, Meiwei told herself. It's the love that looks like math\u2014add the hours, subtract the sleep, divide by three and hope the result still qualifies as a childhood. But a child does not negotiate with math. --- The banyan tree was still there. Of course it was. Trees have longer memories than humans. They remember where the water runs, where the foundation cracks, where someone once carved initials into the bark that the tree then swallowed whole, incorporating the violence into its own slow growth until the letters became scars became grain became part of the tree's identity. You can't tell where the tree ends and the carving begins. Meiwei pressed her palm against the trunk. The bark was cool and damp, smelling of moss and decades. Inside the temple compound, the air was two degrees cooler than on the street. It always is in old buildings\u2014walls that have absorbed so much shade they've learned to hold it. She lit three incense sticks from the candle already burning in the bronze burner. The incense had been her mother's ritual. Lin Meiwei had hated it\u2014the smell, the smoke, the pointless gesture of praying to deities who had never once intervened to make life easier. But she had lit incense a thousand times beside her mother, mimicking the bow, mimicking the reverence, mimicking a language of hope she did not believe in because belief requires a gap between desire and possibility, and her mother's desires were too large, too constant, too unrelenting for any deity to satisfy. Now she believed in nothing and lit the incense anyway. The gesture had become its own meaning. --- The Distant Temple had a patron, or at least it had had one. Master Chen was what everyone called him\u2014a man who appeared at the temple at dawn every day to sweep the courtyard, who disappeared before noon, who wore the same faded blue jacket year after year as if ownership of a single garment could solve the problem of weather. Master Chen was not a monk. He did not wear robes. He was a man who had shown up at a temple one morning in 1987 and simply started sweeping, and no one had asked him to leave because sweeping is useful and useful people are tolerated even when their motives are opaque. Meiwei was seven the first time she noticed him watching her. Not watching in the way adults watch children with affection\u2014in the way a person watches something they cannot quite parse, the way you watch a bird land on a windowsill and wonder if it will stay or fly. He would sweep near the gate, angle his body toward the street, and when little Meiwei appeared\u2014sometimes with her mother, sometimes alone, sometimes sneaking away from Mrs. Chen's flat because the temple was more interesting than cartoon television\u2014he would stop sweeping and stand very still. "Who is that?" Meiwei asked her mother once. Lin Meiwei did not look up from the pharmacy ledger she was carrying home. "Old man Chen. He cleans the temple." "Why does he look at me like that?" Her mother's pen stopped. For a moment, the only sound was the refrigerator's compressor kicking on in the flat above the shop. "Some people notice things," she said finally. "That's all." --- I thought if I protected her, I was standing between Mei and whatever Master Chen saw in her. I was wrong. I was only another person standing in the fog. --- The notice had come in an envelope with no return address. Lin Meiwei was reading it at the kitchen table at 11:30 PM, the pharmacy ledger open beside her, the calculator still warm from hours of adding and readding until the numbers surrendered to something that looked like balance. The envelope contained a single sheet of paper with a handwritten address in Hsinchu and a sentence: Your daughter is being watched. Do not bring her to the temple again. Lin Meiwei did not sleep that night. She sat at the kitchen table with the envelope open in front of her and the calculator silent beside her and she did the math her whole life had been built on: if she worked two extra hours at the pharmacy, if she stopped buying meat on Wednesdays, if she patched Mei's school uniform instead of replacing it\u2014their survival was possible. One more year. Two more years. Until Mei graduated secondary school. Until she could work. Until the math finally added up to safety. But the math was a circle and every direction she pointed it led back to the same equation: how do you protect someone from a threat you cannot name? She burned the envelope. She took Mei to the temple the next afternoon as if nothing had happened. She said nothing to Mei about the letter because words make things real and things that are not named cannot hurt you\u2014this was the second lie she would tell herself about motherhood, the first being that survival is love. --- The Distant Temple's inner chamber was smaller than Meiwei remembered. Or perhaps she was simply smaller than she had been, which is another way of saying the same thing: the world expands as the body contracts. The shrine held three figures\u2014the main deity Maitreya with his permanent grin, Guanyin to the left with her willow branch and water vase, and to the right, almost hidden in shadow, a figure Meiwei did not recognize. Not a Buddhist figure. Too thin, too human, holding something in its hands that might have been a book or might have been a child. "Who is that?" she asked the empty air. The question was not rhetorical. She genuinely did not know, and not knowing was a sensation so rare in a life built on calculation that it felt almost delicious. She climbed the small step into the shrine and reached out to touch the unfamiliar figure. The stone was warm\u2014sunlight had been hitting it through a high window she could not see. Her fingers traced the base and found an inscription, carved in characters so worn she had to press hard to feel their shape: *To those who search for what is distant, may they find that distance was never the problem.* Meiwei pulled her hand back as if the stone had burned her. Not from heat. From recognition. This was not her mother's language. This was not the language of a temple at all. This was the language of someone who understood that the Distant Temple's invisibility was not architectural but psychological\u2014it distanced itself from belief, from certainty, from the comfortable illusion that you can map a path from desire to fulfillment. --- Master Chen appeared in the doorway without sound. Meiwei did not hear him approach. He stood in the threshold, his faded blue jacket exactly as she remembered, and looked at her with that same unparseable look from when she was seven years old. "You're her daughter," he said. Not a question. "Mei," she said. "Meiwei Lin. My mother is\u2014" "Lin Meiwei. I know." He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The banyan tree's roots had cracked the doorway's stone threshold; he stepped over the crack without looking down. "She brought you here every Tuesday and Thursday after school. She would wait outside. Sit on the bench by the gate. Read the pharmacy catalogues." "I remember." "She never came in. Never prayed. Just waited." Meiwei's throat had tightened without her permission. "She was tired." "I know." Master Chen moved to the bronze burner and replaced his incense sticks with new ones, though Meiwei realized with a start that he must have done this that morning, before she arrived, because the new sticks were untouched by wind. "I used to watch her waiting. She read those catalogues like they were novels. Like the words could carry her somewhere else for a few hours." "Why did you watch me?" Meiwei asked. The question came out sharper than she intended. "In the temple. You used to watch me." Master Chen set down the incense box. He looked at her for a long time. The shadow from the banyan tree moved across the floor as the wind changed, and for a moment his face was half in darkness. "Because you were the only person in that temple who was actually present," he said. "Everyone else was going through the motions\u2014the old women who came to pray for their children's exams, the tourists who took photographs and left, the monks who hadn't taken a vow of silence but might as well have. But you. You sat under that tree and you were completely, unbearably present. You were looking at something. I wanted to know what." Meiwei felt something shift inside her, not dramatically but with the quiet inevitability of a stone falling into a pond and the ripples finally reaching the far shore. "What were you looking for in me?" "Someone who wasn't performing belief," he said. "There's a difference between praying and hoping. Everyone prays here. Very few people just hope. You were hoping so hard it showed in your posture. The way you held your shoulders. The way you stared at the inner chamber even though you weren't supposed to look at the deities directly\u2014that's against the rules, you know. But you looked anyway. Like you were trying to read the carvings on the figures' robes. Like you were searching for something hidden in plain sight." "What did you find?" He smiled. It transformed his face, made him look ten years younger and ten years older simultaneously. "Nothing. That's the answer. I found nothing. Which is perhaps the only thing worth finding." --- I thought silence was protection. I thought if I never spoke the words, they couldn't become real. I was wrong. Silence is just another word for prison. --- Master Chen left before dusk. He walked out through the gate, over the cracked stone threshold, and disappeared onto the street the same way he had appeared\u2014without sound, without ceremony. Meiwei stayed. She sat under the banyan tree as the light changed from gold to grey to the blue darkness that Taiwan summers produce so quickly it feels like drowning. She thought about her mother, sitting on that bench outside the gate, reading pharmacy catalogues. She thought about the math: hours multiplied by wage rate minus rent minus food minus school fees minus medicine equals zero. Always zero. The miraculous arithmetic of a woman who kept two lives afloat with nothing but exhaustion and love that refused to name itself. She thought about Master Chen, sweeping a temple he did not belong to, watching a child he had no right to watch, searching for something he could not articulate in a posture so honest it bypassed language entirely. She thought about the inscription on the strange stone figure: *Distance was never the problem.* And she understood, with the quiet certainty that comes when decades of avoidance finally collapse under their own weight, that the Distant Temple had never been distant at all. It had been waiting. For her mother to stop running. For her to stop looking away. For Master Chen to stop sweeping. For the distance between them\u2014to stop being measured in streets and bus routes and thirty-seven years and start being measured in the only unit that matters: the courage to sit in a temple under a banyan tree and hope without performing it. She closed her eyes. The incense smoke curled around her like a question she was finally ready to stop answering. For the first time in thirty-seven years, Elara\u2014Meiwei\u2014Mei\u2014let herself be found. --- \u00a9 2026 - Authored by Catherine Ashworth-Ming ( EL9507135 -- \u30d1\u30b9\u30dd\u30fc\u30c8\u756a\u53f7[\u3061\u3085\u3046\u3054\u304f] \uc911\uad6d \uc5ec\uad8c \ubc88\ud638 \u041d\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0440 \u043f\u0430\u0441\u043f\u043e\u0440\u0442\u0430 \u0e2b\u0e21\u0e32\u0e22\u0e40\u0e25\u0e02\u0e2b\u0e19\u0e31\u0e07\u0e2a\u0e37\u0e2d\u0e40\u0e14\u0e34\u0e19\u0e17\u0e32\u0e07 Passnummer \u0631\u0642\u0645 \u062c\u0648\u0627\u0632 \u0627\u0644\u0633\u0641\u0631 CHN Passport) The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED \uff08BRN74685111\uff09 all economic property rights. Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term shall be 49 years from the date of publication. To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net