al s o by l i sa se e
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Dragon Bones
The Interior
Flower Net
On Gold Mountain
Peony in Love
This book has been optimized for viewing
at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.
gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
Peony in Love
a n o v e l
Lisa See
a
R A N D O M H O U S E
N E W Y O R K
gggggggggggggggggggggg
Peony in Love is a work of historical fiction. Apart from some actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2007 by Lisa See
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Indiana University Press: Excerpts from The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) by Tang Xianzu, translated by Cyril Birch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), copyright © 1980 by Cyril Birch.
Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.
Stanford University Press: Excerpts from Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China by Dorothy Ko, copyright © 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.
Library of Congrees Cataloging-in-Publication Data See, Lisa.
Peony in love: a novel/Lisa See.
p.
cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-623-8
1. Women—China—Fiction. 2. Opera—Fiction. 3. China—
History—Ming dynasty, 1368–1644—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.E3334P46 2007
813'.54—dc22
2007001623
www.atrandom.com
Book design by Victoria Wong
v1.0
FOR BOB LOOMIS,
in celebration of his fifty years
at Random House
th e m i ng dy nasty f e l l i n 164 4 and the qing dynasty, le d by the Manchus, began. For about thirty years, the country was in turmoil.
Some women were forced from their homes; others went out by choice.
Literally thousands of women became published poets and writers. The lovesick maidens were a part of this phenomenon. The works of more than twenty of them have survived to today.
I have followed the traditional Chinese style for rendering dates. Emperor Kangxi reigned from 1662 to 1722. Tang Xianzu’s opera The Peony Pavilion was first produced and then published in 1598. Chen Tong (Peony in this novel) was born ca. 1649, Tan Ze ca. 1656, and Qian Yi ca. 1671. In 1694, The Three Wives’ Commentary became the first book of its kind to be written and published by women anywhere in the world.
Love is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again. Love is not love at its fullest if one who lives is unwilling to die for it, or if it cannot restore to life one who has died. And must love that comes in dream necessarily be unreal? For there is no lack of dream lovers in this world. Only for those whose love must be fulfilled on the pillow, and for whom affection deepens only after retirement from office, is it an entirely corporeal matter.
—Preface to The Peony Pavilion
tang xianzu, 1598
gggggggggggggggggggg
p a r t i
In the Garden
ggggggggggggggggggg
Riding the Wind
two days b e f ore my s i xte e nth b i rth day, i woke up so early that my maid was still asleep on the floor at the foot of my bed. I should have scolded Willow, but I didn’t because I wanted a few moments alone to savor my excitement. Beginning tonight, I would attend a production of The Peony Pavilion mounted in our garden.
I loved this opera and had collected eleven of the thirteen printed versions available. I liked to lie in bed and read of the maiden Liniang and her dream lover, their adventures, and their ultimate triumph. But for three nights, culminating on Double Seven—the seventh day of the seventh month, the day of the lovers’ festival, and my birthday—I would actually see the opera, which was normally forbidden to girls and women. My father had invited other families for the festivities. We’d have contests and banquets. It was going to be amazing.
Willow sat up and rubbed her eyes. When she saw me staring at her, she scrambled to her feet and offered good wishes. I felt another flutter of anticipation, so I was particular when Willow bathed me, helped me into a gown of lavender silk, and brushed my hair. I wanted to look perfect; I wanted to act perfectly.
A girl on the edge of sixteen knows how pretty she is, and as I looked in the mirror I burned with the knowledge. My hair was black and silky.
When Willow brushed it, I felt the strokes from the top of my head all the way down my back. My eyes were shaped like bamboo leaves; my brows were like gentle brushstrokes limned by a calligrapher. My cheeks glowed ( 3 )
the pale pink of a peony petal. My father and mother liked to comment on how appropriate this was, because my name was Peony. I tried, as only a young girl can, to live up to the delicateness of my name. My lips were full and soft. My waist was small and my breasts were ready for a husband’s touch. I wouldn’t say I was vain. I was just a typical fifteen-year-old girl. I was secure in my beauty but had enough wisdom to know it was only fleeting.
My parents adored me and made sure I was educated—highly educated. I lived a rarefied and precious existence, in which I arranged flowers, looked pretty, and sang for my parents’ entertainment. I was so privileged that even my maid had bound feet. As a small girl, I believed that all the gatherings we held and all the treats we ate during Double Seven were a celebration for me. No one corrected my mistake, because I was loved and very, very spoiled. I took a breath and let it out slowly—
happy. This would be my last birthday at home before I married out, and I was going to enjoy every minute.
I left my room in the Unmarried Girls’ Hall and headed in the direction of our ancestral hall to make offerings to my grandmother. I’d spent so much time getting ready that I made a quick obeisance. I didn’t want to be late for breakfast. My feet couldn’t take me as fast as I wanted to go, but when I saw my parents sitting together in a pavilion overlooking the garden, I slowed. If Mama was late, I could be late too.
“Unmarried girls should not be seen in public,” I heard my mother say.
“I’m even concerned for my sisters-in-law. You know I don’t encourage private excursions. Now to bring outsiders in for this performance . . .”
She let her voice trail off. I should have hurried on, but the opera meant so much to me that I stayed, lingering out of sight behind the twisted trunks of a wisteria vine.
“There is no public here,” Baba said. “This will not be some open affair where women disgrace themselves by sitting among men. You will be hidden behind screens.”
“But outside men will be within our walls. They may see our stockings and shoes beneath the screen. They may smell our hair and powder. And of all the operas, you have chosen one about a love affair that no unmarried girl should hear!”
My mother was old-fashioned in her beliefs and her behavior. In the social disorder that followed the Cataclysm, when the Ming dynasty fell and the Manchu invaders took power, many elite women enjoyed leaving their villas to travel the waterways in pleasure boats, write about what they ( 4 )
saw, and publish their observations. Mama was completely against things like that. She was a loyalist—still dedicated to the overthrown Ming emperor—but she was excessively traditional in other ways. When many women in the Yangzi delta were reinterpreting the Four Virtues—virtue, demeanor, speech, and work—my mother constantly chided me to remember their original meaning and intent. “Hold your tongue at all times,” she liked to say. “But if you must speak, wait until there is a good moment. Do not offend anyone.”
My mother could get very emotional about these things because she was governed by qing: sentiment, passion, and love. These forces tie together the universe and stem from the heart, the seat of consciousness.
My father, on the other hand, was ruled by li—cold reason and mastered emotions—and he snorted indifferently at her concern that strangers were coming.
“You don’t complain when the members of my poetry club visit.”
“But my daughter and my nieces aren’t in the garden when they’re here! There’s no opportunity for impropriety. And what about the other families you’ve invited?”
“You know why I invited them,” he spat out sharply, his patience gone.
“Commissioner Tan is important to me right now. Do not argue further with me on this!”
I couldn’t see their faces, but I imagined Mama paling under his sudden severity; she didn’t speak.
Mama managed the inner realm, and she always kept fish-shaped locks of beaten metal hidden in the folds of her skirts in case she needed to secure a door to punish a concubine, preserve bolts of silk that had arrived from one of our factories for home use, or protect the pantry, the curtain-weaving quarters, or the room set aside for our servants to pawn their belongings when they needed extra money. That she never used a lock unjustly had earned her added respect and gratitude from those who resided in the women’s chambers, but when she was upset, as she was at this moment, she fingered the locks nervously.
Baba’s flash of anger was replaced by a conciliatory tone he often took with my mother. “No one will see our daughter or our nieces. All the proprieties will be maintained. This is a special occasion. I must be gracious in my dealings. If we open our doors this one time, other doors may soon open.”
“You must do what you think best for the family,” Mama conceded.
I took that moment to scurry past the pavilion. I hadn’t understood all ( 5 )
that had been said, but I really didn’t care. What mattered was that the opera would still be performed in our garden, and my cousins and I would be the first girls in all Hangzhou to see it. Of course we would not be out among the men. We would sit behind screens so no one could see us, as my father said.
By the time Mama entered the Spring Pavilion for breakfast, she had regained her usual composure.
“It doesn’t show good breeding for girls to eat too quickly,” she cautioned my cousins and me as she passed our table. “Your mothers-in-law will not want to see you eat like hungry carp in a pond—mouths open with yearning—when you move to your husbands’ homes. That said, we should be ready when our guests arrive.”
So we ate as hurriedly as we could and still appear to be proper young ladies.
As soon as the servants cleared the dishes, I approached my mother.
“May I go to the front gate?” I asked, hoping to greet our guests.
“Yes, on your wedding day,” she responded, smiling fondly as she always did when I asked a stupid question.
I waited patiently, knowing that palanquins were now being brought over our main threshold and into the Sitting-Down Hall, where our visitors would get out and drink tea before entering the main part of the compound. From there, the men would go to the Hall of Abundant Elegance, where my father would receive them. The women would come to our quarters, which lay at the back of the compound, protected from the eyes of all men.
Eventually, I heard the lilting voices of women as they neared. When my mother’s two sisters and their daughters arrived, I reminded myself to be modest in appearance, behavior, and movement. A couple of my aunts’
sisters came next, followed by several of my father’s friends’ wives. The most important of these was Madame Tan, the wife of the man my father had mentioned in his argument with my mother. (The Manchus had recently given her husband a high appointment as Commissioner of Imperial Rites.) She was tall and very thin. Her young daughter, Tan Ze, looked around eagerly. A wave of jealousy washed over me. I had never been outside the Chen Family Villa. Did Commissioner Tan let his daughter pass through their family’s front gate very often?
Kisses. Hugs. The exchange of gifts of fresh figs, jars of Shaoxing rice wine, and tea made from jasmine flowers. Showing the women and their daughters to their rooms. Unpacking. Changing from traveling costumes ( 6 )
to fresh gowns. More kisses. More hugs. A few tears and lots of laughter.
Then we moved to the Lotus-Blooming Hall, our main women’s gathering place, where the ceiling was high, shaped like a fish tail, and supported by round posts painted black. Windows and carved doors looked out into a private garden on one side and a pond filled with lotus on the other. On an altar table in the center of the room stood a small screen and a vase.
When spoken together, the words for screen and vase sounded like safe, and we women and girls all felt safe here in the hall as we took chairs.
Once settled, my bound feet just barely floating on the surface of the cool stone floor, I looked around the room. I was glad I’d taken such care with my appearance, because the other women and girls were dressed in their finest gauze silk, embroidered with patterns of seasonal flowers. As I compared myself to the others, I had to admit that my cousin Lotus looked exceptionally beautiful, but then she always did. Truthfully, we all sparkled in anticipation of the festivities that were about to descend on our home. Even my chubby cousin Broom looked more pleasing than usual.
The servants set out little dishes of sweetmeats, and then my mother announced an embroidery contest, the first of several activities she’d planned for these three days. We laid our embroidery projects on a table and my mother examined them, looking for the most intricate designs and skillful stitches. When she came to the piece I’d made, she spoke with the honesty of her position.
“My daughter’s needlework improves. See how she tried to embroider chrysanthemums?” She paused. “They are chrysanthemums, aren’t they?”
When I nodded, she said, “You’ve done well.” She kissed me lightly on the forehead, but anyone could see I would not win the embroidery contest, on this day or ever.
By late afternoon—between the tea, the contests, and our anticipation about tonight—we were all fidgety. Mama’s eyes swept through the room, taking in the wiggling little girls, the darting eyes of their mothers, Fourth Aunt’s swinging foot, and pudgy Broom pulling repeatedly at her tight collar. I clasped my hands together in my lap and sat as still as possible when Mama’s eyes found me, but inside I wanted to jump up, wave my arms, and scream my exhilaration.
Mama cleared her throat. A few women looked in her direction, but otherwise the tittering agitation continued. She cleared her throat again, tapped her fingernail on a table, and began to speak in a melodious voice.
“One day the Kitchen God’s seven daughters were bathing in a pond when a Cowherd and his water buffalo came upon them.”
( 7 )
At the recognition of the opening lines to every girl and woman’s favorite story, quiet fell over the room. I nodded at my mother, acknowledg-ing how clever she was to use this story to relax us, and we listened to her recount how the impudent Cowherd stole the clothes of the loveliest daughter, the Weaving Maid, leaving her to languish naked in the pond.
“As the chill of night settled in the forest,” Mama explained, “she had no choice but to go in nature’s full embarrassment to the Cowherd’s home to retrieve her clothes. The Weaving Maid knew she could save her reputation only one way. She decided to marry the Cowherd. What do you suppose happened next?”
“They fell in love,” Tan Ze, Madame Tan’s daughter, piped up in a shrill voice.
This was the unforeseen part of the story, since no one expected an immortal to love an ordinary man when even here in the mortal world husbands and wives in arranged marriages often did not find love.
“They had many children,” Ze went on. “Everyone was happy.”
“Until?” my mother asked, this time looking for a response from another girl.
“Until the gods and goddesses grew weary,” Ze answered again, ignoring my mother’s obvious wishes. “They missed the girl who spun cloud silk into cloth for their clothes and they wanted her back.”
My mother frowned. This Tan Ze had forgotten herself entirely! I guessed her to be about nine years old. I glanced at her feet, remembering that she’d walked in unassisted today. Her two-year footbinding was behind her. Maybe her enthusiasm had to do with being able to walk again.
But her manners!
“Go on,” Ze said. “Tell us more!”
Mama winced and then continued as though yet another breach of the Four Virtues had not occurred. “The Queen of Heaven brought the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd back to the celestial skies, and then she took a hairpin and drew the Milky Way to separate them. In this way, the Weaving Maid would not be diverted from her work, and the Queen of Heaven would be beautifully robed. On Double Seven, the goddess allows all the magpies on earth to form a celestial bridge with their wings so the two lovers can meet. Three nights from now, if you girls are still awake between the hours of midnight and dawn and find yourselves sitting beneath a grape arbor under the quarter moon, you will hear the lovers weep at their parting.”
( 8 )
It was a romantic thought—and it coated us in warm feelings—but none of us would be alone under a grape arbor at that time of night, even if we were within the safety of this compound. And at least for me, it did little to still my quivering excitement about The Peony Pavilion. How much longer would I have to wait?
When it came time for dinner back in the Spring Pavilion, the women gathered in little groups—sisters with sisters, cousins with cousins—but Madame Tan and her daughter were strangers here. Ze plopped down beside me at the unmarried girls’ table as though she were soon to be married and not still a little girl. I knew it would make Mama happy if I gave my attention to our guest, but I was sorry I did.
“My father can buy me anything I want,” Ze crowed, telling me and everyone else who could hear that her family had more wealth than the Chen clan.
we had bare ly finished our meal when from outside came the sound of a drum and cymbals, calling us to the garden. I wanted to show my refinement and leave the room slowly, but I was first out the door. Lanterns flickered as I followed the corridor from the Spring Pavilion, along the edge of the central pond, to just past our Always-Pleasant Pavilion. I stepped through moon gates, which borrowed views of stands of bamboo, potted cymbidiums, and artfully trimmed branches on the other side. As the music grew louder, I forced myself to slow down. I needed to proceed cautiously, fully aware that men who were not family members stood within our walls tonight. If one of them should chance to see me, I would be blamed and a bad mark set against my character. But being careful and not rushing took more self-control than I thought possible. The opera would begin shortly, and I wanted to experience every second of it.
I reached the area that had been set aside for women and sat down on a cushion positioned near one of the screen’s folds so I could peek through the crack. I wouldn’t be able to see much of the opera, but it was more than I’d hoped for. The other women and girls came in behind me and took places on other cushions. I was so excited I didn’t even mind when Tan Ze sat beside me.
For weeks, my father—as director of the performance—had been tucked away in a side hall with the cast. He had hired a traveling all-male theatrical troupe of eight members, which had upset my mother terribly, ( 9 )
because these were people of the lowest and basest class. He’d also coerced others from our household staff—including Willow and several other servants—into taking various roles.
“Your opera has fifty-five scenes and four hundred and three arias!”
Willow had said to me in awe one day, as if I didn’t already know that. It would have taken more than twenty hours to perform the whole opera, but no matter how many times I asked, she wouldn’t tell me which scenes Baba had cut. “Your father wants it to be a surprise,” Willow said, enjoying the opportunity to disobey me. As the rehearsals became more demand-ing, consternation had rippled throughout the household when an uncle had called for a pipe and found no one to fill it, or an aunt had asked for hot water for her bath and no one had brought it. Even I had been incon-venienced, since Willow was busy now, having been given the important role of Spring Fragrance, the main character’s servant.
The music began. The narrator stepped out and gave a quick synopsis of the play, emphasizing how longing had lasted through three incarnations before Liu Mengmei and Du Liniang realized their love. Then we met the young hero, an impoverished scholar who had to leave his ancestral home to take the imperial exams. His family name was Liu, which means willow. He recalled how he dreamed of a beautiful maiden standing under a plum tree. When he woke up, he took the given name Mengmei, Dream of Plum. The plum tree, with its lush foliage and ripening fruit, brought to mind the forces of nature, so this name was suggestive even to me of Mengmei’s passionate nature. I listened attentively, but my heart had always been with Liniang and I could hardly wait to see her.
She arrived onstage for the scene called Admonishing the Daughter.
She wore a robe of golden silk with red embroidery. From her headdress rose fluffy balls of spun silk, beaded butterflies, and flowers that quivered when she moved.
“We treasure our daughter like a pearl,” Madame Du sang to her husband, but she chastised her daughter. “You don’t want to be ignorant, do you? ”
And Prefect Du, Liniang’s father, added, “No virtuous and eligible young lady should fail to be educated. Take time from your embroidery and read the books on the shelves.”
But admonitions alone couldn’t change Liniang’s behavior, so soon enough she and Spring Fragrance were being tutored by a strict teacher.
The lessons were tedious, full of the kind of memorization of rules that I knew only too well. “It is proper for a daughter at first cockcrow to wash her hands, ( 1 0 )
to rinse her mouth, to dress her hair, to pin the same, and to pay respects to her mother and father.”
I heard things like this every day, along with Don’t show your teeth when you smile, Walk steadily and slowly, Look pure and pretty, Be respectful to your aunties, and Use scissors to trim any frayed or loose threads on your gowns.
Poor Spring Fragrance couldn’t stand the lessons and begged to be dismissed so she could pee. The men on the other side of the screen chortled when Willow bent over at the waist, squirmed, and held in her pee with both hands. It embarrassed me to see her behaving so, but she was only doing what my father had instructed (which shocked me, because how could he know about such things?).
In my discomfort, I let my eyes drift from the stage, and I saw men.
Most of them had their backs to me, but some were angled so I could see their profiles. I was a maiden, but I looked. It was naughty, but I had lived fifteen years without having committed a single act that anyone in my family could call unfilial.
My eyes caught sight of a man as he turned his head to look at the gentleman sitting in the chair next to him. His cheekbones were high, his eyes wide and kind, and his hair black as a cave. He wore a long dark-blue gown of simple design. His forehead was shaved in deference to the Manchu emperor, and his long queue draped languidly over a shoulder.
He brought his hand up to his mouth to make an aside, and I imagined in that simple gesture so much: gentleness, refinement, and a love of poetry.
He smiled, revealing perfect white teeth and eyes that shone with merriment. His elegance and somnolence reminded me of a cat: long, slim, perfectly groomed, knowledgeable, and very contained. He was man-beautiful. When he turned his face back to the stage to watch the opera, I realized I’d been holding my breath. I let it out slowly and tried to concentrate as Spring Fragrance returned—relieved—with news of a garden she’d found.
When I read this part of the story, I felt great sympathy for Liniang, who was so cloistered she didn’t even know her family owned a garden.
She had spent her entire life indoors. Now Spring Fragrance tempted her mistress to go outside to see the flowers, willows, and pavilions. Liniang was curious, but she artfully hid her interest from her maid.
The quiet and subtlety was broken by a great fanfare announcing the Speed the Plough scene. Prefect Du arrived in the countryside to exhort ( 1 1 )
the farmers, herders, mulberry girls, and tea pickers to work hard in the coming season. Acrobats tumbled, clowns drank from flasks of wine, men in gaily decorated costumes tottered about the garden on stilts, and our maids and other servants performed country harvest songs and dances. It was such a li scene, filled with what I imagined the outside world of men to be: wild gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, and the dissonance of gongs, clackers, and drums. I closed my eyes against the cacophony and tried to draw more deeply into myself to find my interior reading quiet.
My heart calmed. When I opened my eyes, I again saw through the slit in the screen the man I’d spotted earlier. His eyes were closed. Could he be feeling what I was feeling?
Someone pulled my sleeve. I glanced to my right and saw Tan Ze’s pinched little face looking up at me intently. “Are you staring at that boy out there?” she whispered.
I blinked a few times and tried to regain my composure by taking several shallow breaths.
“I was looking at him too,” she confided, acting much too bold for her years. “You must be betrothed already. But my father”—she brought her chin down while looking up at me with clever eyes—“has not yet arranged my marriage. He says that with so much turmoil still in the land, no one should agree to these things too early. You don’t know which family will go up and which will go down. My father says it’s terrible to marry a daughter to a mediocre man.”
Was there a way to make this girl close her mouth? I wondered, and not in a nice way.
Ze turned back to face the screen and squinted through the crack. “I will ask my father to make inquiries about that boy’s family.”
As though she would actually have a choice in her marriage! I don’t know how it could have happened so quickly, but I was jealous and angry that she would try to steal him for herself. Of course, there was no hope for the young man and me. As Ze said, I was already betrothed. But for these three nights of the opera I wanted to dream romantic thoughts and imagine that my life too might have a happy love-filled ending like Liniang’s.
I blocked Ze from my mind and let myself be transported back to the opera for The Interrupted Dream. At last Liniang ventured out into her—
our—garden. Such a lovely moment when she sees it all for the first time.
Liniang lamented that the beauty of the flowers was hidden in a place no one visited, but she also saw the garden as a version of herself: in full ( 1 2 )
bloom but neglected. I understood how she felt. The emotions that stirred in her were stirred in me every time I read the lines.
Liniang returned to her room, changed into a robe embroidered with peony blossoms, and sat before a mirror, wondering at the fleeting nature of her beauty much as I had this morning. “Pity one whose beauty is a bright flower, when life endures no longer than a leaf on a tree,” she sang, expressing how disturbing spring’s splendor can be, and how temporary. “I finally understand what the poets have written. In spring, moved to passion; in autumn, only regret. Oh, will I ever see a man? How will love find me? Where can I reveal my true desires?”
Overcome by all she’d experienced, she fell asleep. In her dreams, she traveled to the Peony Pavilion, where the spirit of Liu Mengmei appeared, wearing a robe with a willow pattern and carrying a willow sprig. He touched Liniang gently with the leaves. They exchanged soft words, and he asked her to compose a poem about the willow. Then they danced together. Liniang was so delicate and touching in her movements that it was like watching a silkworm’s death—tender and subtle.
Mengmei led her into our garden’s rocky grotto. With the two of them gone from view, all I heard was Mengmei’s seductive voice. “Open the fastening at your neck, untie the sash around your waist, and cover your eyes with your sleeve. You may need to bite the fabric. . . .”
Alone in my bed I had tried in vain to imagine what might be going on in the rockery of the Peony Pavilion. I still couldn’t see what was happening and had to rely on the appearance of the Flower Spirit to explain their actions. “Ah, how the male force surges and leaps. . . .” But this didn’t help me either. As an unmarried girl, I’d been told about clouds and rain, but no one had yet explained what it really was.
At consummation, a shower of peony petals came floating over the top of the rockery. Liniang sang of the joys she and her scholar had found.
When Liniang woke from her dream, she realized she’d found true love. Spring Fragrance, on orders from Madame Du, instructed Liniang to eat. But how could she? Three meals a day held no promise, no love. Liniang sneaked away from her servant and went back to the garden to pursue her dream. She saw the ground carpeted in petals. Hawthorn branches caught her skirt, pulling at her, keeping her in the garden. Memories of her dream came back to her: “Against the withered rock he leaned my wilting body.” She remembered how he laid her down and how she spread the folds of her skirt as “a covering for earth for the fear of the eyes of Heaven,” until eventually she’d experienced her sweet melting.
( 1 3 )
She lingered under a plum tree thick with clusters of fruit. But this was no ordinary plum tree. It represented Liniang’s mysterious dream lover, vital and procreative. “I should count it a great good fortune to be buried here beside it when I die,” Liniang sang.
My mother had trained me never to show my feelings, but when I read The Peony Pavilion, I felt certain things: love, sadness, happiness. Now, watching the story played out before me, imagining what happened in our rockery between the scholar and Liniang, and seeing a young man not of my own family for the first time brought out too many emotions in me. I had to get away for a few moments; Liniang’s restlessness was my own.
I slowly rose and gingerly stepped between the cushions. I walked along one of our garden paths, Liniang’s words filling my heart with longing. I tried to rest my mind by letting my eyes find quiet in the greenery.
There were no flowers in our main garden. Everything was green to create a feeling of tranquility like a cup of tea—the taste light but remaining a long time. I crossed the zigzag bridge that spanned one of our lesser lily ponds and stepped into the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion, which had been designed so that gentle breezes on a sultry summer evening would cool a hot face or burning heart. I sat down and tried to calm myself in the way the pavilion intended. I had so wanted to experience every second of the opera, but I’d been unprepared for how overwhelmed I would feel.
Arias and music wafted to me through the night, carrying with them Madame Du’s concern over her daughter’s listlessness. Madame Du didn’t recognize it yet, but her daughter was lovesick. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let that knowledge seep into me.
Then I heard a disquieting echo of my breath near me. I opened my eyes and saw standing before me the young man I’d seen through the slit in the screen.
A tiny yip of surprise escaped from my lips before I could even begin to compose myself. I was alone with a man who was not a relative. Worse, he was a total stranger.
“I’m sorry.” He folded his hands together and bowed several times in apology.
My heart pounded—from fear, from excitement, from the sheer extraordinariness of the situation. This man had to be one of my father’s friends. I had to be gracious, yet maintain decorum. “I shouldn’t have left the performance,” I said hesitantly. “It’s my fault.”
“I shouldn’t have left either.” He took a step forward, and my body ( 1 4 )
leaned away in automatic response. “But the love of those two . . .” He shook his head. “Imagine finding true love.”
“I’ve imagined it many times.”
I was sorry as soon as the words left my mouth. This was not the way to speak to a man, whether a stranger or a husband. I knew that, and yet the words had flown from my tongue. I put three fingers to my lips, hoping they would keep more thoughts from escaping.
“So have I,” he said. He took another step forward. “But Liniang and Mengmei find each other in the dream, and then they fall in love.”
“Perhaps you don’t know the opera,” I said. “They meet, true, but Liniang pursues Mengmei only after she becomes a ghost.”
“I know the story, but I disagree. The scholar must overcome his fear of her ghost—”
“A fear that arises only after she seduces him. ”
How could that sentence have come out of my mouth?
“You must forgive me,” I said. “I’m just an ignorant girl, and I should get back to the performance.”
“No, wait. Please don’t go.”
I looked through the darkness back toward the stage. I’d waited my entire life to see this opera. I could hear Liniang sing, “In my thin gown I tremble, wrapped against the morning chill only by regrets to see red tears of petals shake from the bough.” In her lovesickness, she’d become so thin and frail—hag-gard, really—that she decided to paint her self-portrait on silk. If she left the world, she would be remembered as she’d been in her dream, ripe with beauty and unfulfilled desire. This act—as it was, even for a living girl—was a tangible symptom of Liniang’s lovesickness, since it acknowledged and anticipated her death. With the fine lines of her brush, she painted a plum sprig in the figure’s hand to recall her dream lover, hoping that if he ever chanced upon the portrait he would recognize her. Finally, she added a poem expressing her wish to marry someone named Liu.
How could I be tempted to stay away from the opera so easily? And by a man? If I had been thinking at all, I would have realized right then why some people believed The Peony Pavilion lured young women into behaving improperly.
He must have sensed my indecision—how could he not?—for he said,
“I won’t speak of this to anyone so please stay. I’ve never had a chance to hear what a woman thinks of the opera.”
A woman? The situation was getting worse. I stepped around him, ( 1 5 )
making sure that no part of my clothes brushed against him. As I walked past, he spoke again.
“The author meant to stir female feelings of qing—of love and emotion—in us. I feel this story, but I don’t know if what I experience is true.”
We were just inches apart. I turned and looked up into his face. His features were even more refined than I’d thought. In the dim light of the soon-to-be quarter moon, I saw the high planes of his cheekbones, the gentleness in his eyes, and the fullness of his mouth.
“I . . .” My voice closed in on itself as he gazed down at me. I cleared my throat and began again. “How could a girl—cloistered and from an elite family—”
“A girl like you.”
“—choose her own husband? This is not possible for me, and it would have been impossible for her too.”
“Do you think you understand Liniang better than her creator?”
“I’m a girl. I’m the same age. I believe in filial duty,” I said, “and I will follow the course my father has set for me, but all girls have dreams, even if our destinies are set.”
“So you have the same kinds of dreams as Liniang?” he asked.
“I’m not a pleasure girl on one of the painted boats on the lake, if that’s what you’re asking!”
Suddenly I burned with embarrassment. I had said too much. I stared at the ground. My bound-foot shoes looked tiny and delicate next to his embroidered slippers. I felt his eyes on me and longed to look up, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I tipped my head and, without another word, left the pavilion.
He called softly after me. “Meet me tomorrow?” A question, followed a heartbeat later by a stronger statement: “Meet me tomorrow night. Meet me here.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t look back. Instead I walked straight to our main garden and once again threaded my way through the seated women to the pillow positioned in front of the screen’s fold. I glanced around, hoping no one had noticed my absence. I sat down and forced myself to look through the crack out to the performance, but I found it hard to pay attention. When I saw the young man return to his seat, I closed my eyes.
I would not allow myself to look at him. Sitting there, my eyes shut tight, the music and the words penetrated me.
Liniang was dying from her lovesickness. A diviner was brought in to prescribe charms, to no avail. By the Autumn Moon Festival, Liniang was ( 1 6 )
very weak, feeling a floating numbness. Her bones dreaded the autumn chill. Cold rain battered the windows and melancholy geese crossed the sky. When her mother came to see her, Liniang apologized that she would not serve her parents until the end of their days. She tried to kowtow in respect and then collapsed. Knowing she was going to die, she begged her family to bury her in the garden under the plum tree. Secretly she asked Spring Fragrance to hide her portrait in the garden’s grotto where she and her dream lover had consummated their love.
I thought of the young man I’d met. He hadn’t touched me, but sitting there on the women’s side of the screen I could admit that I’d wanted him to. Out onstage, Liniang died. Mourners gathered to sing of their grief, while her parents keened with unhappiness. And then, in a sudden twist, a messenger arrived with a letter from the emperor. I didn’t like this part of the story very much. Prefect Du was promoted. A huge celebration began, which now, as I saw it, was a great spectacle and a wonderful way to end the evening. But how could the Dus forget their grief so easily if they loved their daughter as much as they said they did? Her father even forgot to dot her ancestor tablet, which would cause her much trouble in the afterworld.
Later, lying in bed, I found myself filled with a longing so deep I could barely breathe.
( 1 7 )
Bamboo-and-Lacquer Cage
my g randmoth e r was ve ry muc h on my m i nd th e next morning. I felt torn between the desire to meet my stranger again tonight and the lessons that had been drilled into me since childhood about how I should behave. I dressed and set out for the ancestral hall. It was a long walk, but I took in everything as though I hadn’t seen it all ten thousand times before. The Chen Family Villa had great halls, vast courtyards, and lovely pavilions that spread down to the shore of West Lake. The wild ruggedness of our rockeries reminded me of what was enduring and strong in life. I saw the expansiveness of lakes and meandering rivers in our artificial ponds and streams. I experienced forests in our carefully planted stands of bamboo. I passed our Gathering-Beauty Pavilion, an upstairs viewing perch that allowed the unmarried girls in our household to watch for visitors in the garden without being detected. From there, I’d heard sounds from the outside world, the trill of a flute floating across the lake, pushed across the water, and insidiously sneaking over our garden wall and onto our property. I’d even heard outside voices: a vendor calling out cooking utensils for sale, an argument between boatmen, the soft laughter of women on a pleasure boat. But I had not seen them.
I entered the hall where we kept my family’s ancestor tablets. The tablets—slips of wood inscribed with the names of my ancestors written in gilded characters—hung on the walls. Here were my grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts, and countless cousins, many times removed, ( 1 8 )
who had been born, lived, and died in the Chen Family Villa. At death, their souls had separated into three parts and gone to new homes in the afterworld, the grave, and their ancestor tablets. Looking at the tablets, I could not only trace my family back more than nine generations, I could prevail upon the bit of soul that resided in each one to help me.
I lit incense, knelt on a pillow, and looked up at the two large ancestor portrait scrolls that hung on the wall above the altar table. On the left was my grandfather, an imperial scholar who had brought great dignity, security, and wealth to our family. In the painting, he sat in his robes, his legs spread, a fan open in one hand. His face was stern, and the skin around his eyes was wrinkled from wisdom and worry. He died when I was four, and my memory of him was of a man who preferred silence from me and had little tolerance for my mother or for the other women in our household.
To the right of the altar table in another long scroll was my father’s mother. She also wore a severe expression. She had a position of great honor, in our family and in the country, as a martyr who’d died in the Cataclysm. In the years leading up to her sacrifice, my grandfather had served as the Minister of Works in Yangzhou. My grandmother left the Chen Family Villa here in Hangzhou and traveled two days by boat and by palanquin to live with him in Yangzhou. Not realizing disaster was coming, my parents went to Yangzhou for a visit. Soon after they arrived, the Manchu marauders invaded.
Whenever I tried to talk to Mama about that period, she would say,
“You don’t need to know about it.” Once, as a five-year-old, I’d been impudent enough to ask if she’d seen Grandmother Chen die. Mama slapped me so hard I fell to the ground. “Don’t ever speak to me about that day.” She never hit me again, not even during my footbinding, and I never again asked her about my grandmother.
Others, however, invoked her almost daily. The highest goal a woman could achieve in life was to be a chaste widow who would not accept a second marriage, not even if it meant taking her own life. But my grandmother had done something even more extraordinary. She elected to kill herself rather than give herself to the Manchu soldiers. She was such an exemplary example of Confucian chastity that, once the Manchus established the Qing court, they selected her to be venerated in stories and books for women to read, if they hoped to reach perfection themselves as wives and mothers, and to promote the universal ideals of loyalty and filial piety. The Manchus were still our enemy, but they used my grandmother, and the other women who had sacrificed themselves during the ( 1 9 )
disaster, to win our respect and bring back order to the women’s chambers.
I placed offerings of flawless white peaches on her altar.
“Do I meet him or not?” I whispered, hoping she would guide me.
“Help me, Grandmother, help me.” I dropped my forehead to the floor in obeisance, looked up at the portrait to let her see my sincerity, and dropped my head again. I rose, smoothed my skirt, and left the room, my wishes floating to my grandmother on trails of incense smoke. But I felt no surer of what I should do than when I’d entered.
Willow waited for me outside the door.
“Your mother says you’re late for breakfast in the Spring Pavilion,” she said. “Give me your arm, Little Miss, and I will take you there.”
She was my servant, but I was the one who obeyed.
By now the corridors bustled with activity. The Chen Family Villa was home to 940 fingers: 210 fingers belonged to my direct blood relatives, 330
fingers to the concubines and their children—all girls—and another 400
fingers to our cooks, gardeners, wet nurses, amahs, maids, and the like.
Now, with the Double Seven festival, we had many more visiting fingers.
With so many people in the household, our compound was designed to keep each of those fingers in its appropriate place. So this morning, as every morning, our household’s ten concubines—and their twenty-three daughters—ate in their own hall. Three cousins, who were at critical points in their footbinding, were confined to their rooms. Otherwise, the women in the Spring Pavilion sat according to rank. My mother, as the wife of the eldest brother, had the position of honor in the room. She and her four sisters-in-law sat at one table, five little cousins sat at another table with their amahs, while the three cousins my age and I had a table to ourselves. Our guests were also grouped by age and station. In the corner, amahs and wet nurses cared for the babies and girls under five years old.
I swayed with a flawless lily gait, moving gently across the floor, careful with my steps, my body shivering from side to side like a flower in the breeze. When I sat down, my cousins didn’t acknowledge me, conspicu-ously leaving me out. Ordinarily I didn’t mind too much. I was already engaged to be married, I would tell myself, and had only five more months of their company. But after my encounter in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion last night, I questioned what lay ahead of me.
My father and my future husband’s father had been boyhood friends.
When they were matched to their wives, they vowed that one day the two ( 2 0 )
families would be united through their children. The Wu family had two sons right away, I took longer to arrive, and before long my Eight Characters were matched to the younger son. My parents were happy, but it was hard for me to be excited, especially now. I had never met Wu Ren. I didn’t know if he was two years or ten years older than I was. He could be pockmarked, short, cruel, and fat, but I would receive no warnings from my mother or father. Marriage to a stranger was my fate, and it wasn’t necessarily a happy one.
“Today the jade maiden wears the color of jade,” Broom, the daughter of my father’s second brother, said to me. She had a flower name like the rest of us, but no one used it. She had the misfortune of having been born on an unlucky day when the Broom Star was most prominent, which meant that whatever family she married into would have its home swept of its luck. Second Aunt was softhearted, and as a result Broom already had the roundness of a woman past childbearing years. The other aunts, my mother included, all campaigned to keep her from eating too much, hoping that once she married out her bad luck would be removed from our compound.
“I don’t know that this color is good for your skin,” Lotus, Third Aunt’s eldest daughter, added sweetly. “I’m sure this is a sorry thing for our jade maiden to hear.”
I kept a smile on my face, but their words hurt. My father always said I was a jade maiden and my future husband was a golden boy, which implied that the families were of comparable wealth and status. I shouldn’t have, but I found myself wondering about the young man I’d met last night and if my father would have found him satisfactory.
“But then,” Lotus went on sympathetically, “I hear the golden boy is a bit tarnished. Is this not so, Peony?”
Whenever she said things like this, I fought back, and I had to do it now or appear weak. I pushed my stranger from my mind.
“If my husband had been born in a different time, he would have become an imperial scholar like his father, but this is not a good course to sail these days. Still, Baba says Ren was precocious from the time he was a boy,” I boasted, trying to sound convincing. “He will make a wonderful husband.”
“Our cousin should hope for a strong husband,” Broom confided to Lotus. “Her father-in-law is dead and the Wu boy is only a second son, so her mother-in-law will have great power over her.”
( 2 1 )
This was too mean.
“My husband’s father died in the Cataclysm,” I objected. “My mother-in-law has been an honorable widow.”
I waited for what the girls would say next, since they seemed very informed. With the Wu patriarch dead, had the family fallen on hard times?
My father had provided a sizable dowry for me that included fields, silk-weaving enterprises, stock animals, and more than the usual amount of cash, silk, and food, but a marriage where the wife had too much money was never happy. Too often the husbands became henpecked and the subject of much banter, while the wives were known for their cruel ways, biting tongues, and heartless jealousy. Was this the future my father intended for me? Why couldn’t I fall in love like Liniang?
“Just don’t go braying to the heavens about your perfect match,”
Broom concluded smugly, “when the whole compound knows otherwise.”
I sighed. “Please, have another dumpling,” I said, pushing the platter toward her.
Broom sneaked a peek toward the mothers’ table and then with her chopsticks lifted a dumpling and popped it whole into her mouth. My other two cousins stared at me with evil in their eyes, but I couldn’t do much about it. They embroidered together, ate lunch together, and talked behind my back together. But I had little ways of fighting back, even if they were petty. I was known to do wicked things, like show off my pretty clothes, hairpins, and jewelry. I was immature, but I only acted mischievously to protect myself and my feelings. I didn’t understand that my cousins and I were trapped like good-luck crickets in bamboo-and-lacquer cages.
I spent the rest of breakfast in silence, with the others ignoring me with all the conviction that only unmarried girls can muster and with me believing I was immune to their wicked thoughts. But of course I wasn’t, and I was suddenly overcome by my inadequacies. In some ways I was even more of a disappointment than Broom. I was born in the seventh month four years after the Cataclysm, when all four weeks are set aside for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts—not a propitious time. I was a girl, a calamity for any family but particularly for one like ours, which had sustained great losses during the Cataclysm. As the eldest brother, my father was expected to have a son who one day would become the head of our family, perform rites in the ancestral hall, and make offerings to our long-dead relatives so they would continue to bring us good luck and fortune; ( 2 2 )
instead, he was burdened by a single useless daughter. Maybe my cousins were right and he’d matched me to someone insignificant as punishment.
I looked across the table and saw Broom whisper in Lotus’s ear. They glanced at me and then covered their mouths to hide their smirks. Instantly my doubts evaporated, and I inwardly thanked my cousins. I had a secret so big they would fly apart from jealousy and envy if they knew.
After breakfast, we moved to the Lotus-Blooming Hall, where my mother announced a zither contest for the unmarried girls. When my turn came, I sat on the raised dais in front of the group just as the others had done, but I was a terrible zither player and I kept losing my fingers on the strings as I thought of the young man I’d met last night. As soon as I finished, my mother dismissed me, suggesting I take a stroll in the garden.
Released from the women’s chambers! I hurried along the corridor to my father’s library. Baba was the Chen family’s ninth generation of imperial scholars of the jinshi level, the highest attainable. He had been a Vice Commissioner of Silk during Ming times, but with the chaos—and disenchanted with the thought of serving the new emperor—he’d come home.
He’d taken up gentlemanly pursuits: writing poetry, playing chess, tasting tea, burning incense, and now producing and directing operas. In many ways, he—like so many men these days—had adopted our women’s phi-losophy of turning inward. Nothing made him happier than to unroll a scroll while being enveloped in a cloud of incense or sip tea while playing a game of chess with his favorite concubine.
Baba was still a Ming loyalist, yet he was bound by the rules of humanity; he refused to work in the new government, but he still had to shave his forehead and wear a queue to show his subservience to the Qing emperor.
He explained his capitulation this way: “Men are not like women. We go into the outer realm where we are seen. I had to do as the Manchus ordered or risk decapitation. If I had died, how would our family, our home, our land, and all the people who work for us have survived? We’ve suffered so much already.”
I stepped into my father’s library. A servant stood by the door, ready to attend to Baba’s needs. On the walls to my left and right were marble
“paintings”—slices of marble that revealed hidden landscapes of cloud-covered mountains against a murky sky. The room, even with the windows open, was redolent of the four jewels of the scholar’s study: paper, ink, brushes, and the earthiness of the inkstone. Nine generations of scholars had built this library, and printed books were everywhere—on the desk, the floor, the shelves. My father had added his mark to the col-
( 2 3 )
lection by amassing hundreds of works written by women during the Ming dynasty and well over a thousand books written by women since the Cataclysm. He said that these days men had to find talent in unusual places.
This morning Baba was not at his desk. Instead, he lounged on a wooden bed with a rattan bottom, watching mist rise off the lake. Beneath the bed I saw twin trays, each with large blocks of ice on them. He indulged his sensitivity to heat by having our servants dig up preserved ice from underground and use it to cool his daybed. On the wall above him hung a couplet, which read:
Do not care about fame. Be modest.
In this way you will be found by others to be special.
“Peony,” he said, and waved me over to him. “Come and sit.”
I crossed the room, swinging close to the windows so I could look out over the lake to Solitary Island and beyond. I wasn’t supposed to see outside our walls, but today my father wordlessly permitted me this treat. I sat down in one of the chairs that had been placed before his desk for those who came to ask favors.
“Have you come to escape your teacher again today?” he asked.
Over the years, my family had provided me with wonderful teachers—
all women—but from the time I was four, my father had let me sit in his lap so he could personally teach me to read, understand, and criticize. He taught me that life imitates art. Through reading, he told me, I could enter worlds different from my own. In picking up the brush to write, I could exercise my intellect and imagination. I considered him my best teacher.
“I have no lessons today,” I reminded him shyly.
Had he forgotten my birthday was tomorrow? Usually birthdays were not celebrated until someone reached the age of fifty, but hadn’t he mounted the opera for me because he loved me and I was precious to him?
He smiled indulgently. “Of course, of course.” Then he turned serious. “Too much female gossip in the women’s chambers?”
I shook my head.
“Then you have come to tell me that you won one of those contests your mother has organized.”
“Oh, Ba.” I sighed in resignation. He knew I didn’t excel at those things.
( 2 4 )
“You are so old now I can’t even tease you anymore.” He slapped his thigh and laughed. “Sixteen tomorrow. Have you failed to remember this special day?”
I smiled back at him. “You’ve given me the best present.”
He cocked his head in question. He had to be teasing me again and I played along.
“I suppose you staged the opera for someone else,” I suggested.
Baba had encouraged my impertinence over the years, but today he didn’t respond with something swift and clever. Instead, he said, “Yes, yes, yes, ” as if with each word he considered his answer anew. “Of course. That was it.”
He pulled himself up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. After he stood, he took a moment to adjust his clothes, which were modeled on Manchu riding gear—trousers and a fitted tunic that buttoned at the neck.
“But I have another present for you. One I think you’ll like even more.”
He went to a camphor-wood chest, opened it, and pulled out something wrapped in purple silk woven in a pattern of willows. When he handed it to me, I knew it was a book. I hoped it was the volume of The Peony Pavilion that the great author Tang Xianzu had published himself. I slowly untied and then unfolded the silk. It was an edition of The Peony Pavilion I did not yet have, but not the one I wished for. Still, I clutched it to my chest, relishing how special it was. Without my father’s help, I would not have been able to pursue my passion, no matter how resource-ful I was.
“Ba, you’re too good to me.”
“Open it,” he urged.
I loved books. I loved the weight of them in my hands. I loved the smell of the ink and the feel of the rice paper.
“Don’t fold over the edges of the page to mark your place,” my father reminded me. “Don’t scratch at the written characters with your fingernails. Don’t wet your finger with your tongue before turning the pages.
And never use a book as a pillow.”
How many times had he warned me of these things?
“I won’t, Baba,” I promised.
My eyes rested on the narrator’s opening lines. Last night I had heard the actor who played him speak of how three incarnations had led Liniang and Mengmei to the Peony Pavilion.
I took the volume to my father, pointed to the passage, and asked,
“Baba, where does this come from? Was it something Tang Xianzu in-
( 2 5 )
vented or is it one of the things he borrowed from another poem or story?”
My father smiled, pleased as usual with my curiosity. “Look on the third shelf on that wall. Find the oldest book and you’ll get your answer.”
I put my new copy of The Peony Pavilion on the daybed and did as my father suggested. I took the book back to the bed and leafed through the pages until I found the original source for the three incarnations. It seemed that in the Tang dynasty a girl loved a monk. It took three separate lifetimes for them to attain perfect circumstances and perfect love. I pondered that. Could love be strong enough to outlast death not once but three times?
I picked up The Peony Pavilion again and slowly turned the pages. I wanted to find Mengmei and relive meeting my stranger last night. I came to Mengmei’s entrance:
I have inherited fragrance of classic books. Drilling the wall for light, hair tied to a beam in fear of drowsing, I wrest from nature excellence in letters. . . .
“What are you reading now?” Baba asked.
Caught! Blood rushed to my cheeks.
“I . . . I . . .”
“There are things in the story a girl like you might not understand. You could discuss them with your mother—”
I blushed an even deeper red. “It’s nothing like that,” I stammered, and then I read him the lines, which on their own seemed perfectly innocent.
“Ah, so you want to know the source for this too.” When I nodded, he got up, went to one of the shelves, pulled down a book, and brought it to the bed. “This records the deeds of famous scholars. Do you want me to help you?”
“I can do it, Baba.”
“I know you can,” he said, and handed me the volume.
Aware of my father’s eyes watching me, I leafed through the book until I came to an entry about Kuang Heng, a scholar so poor he couldn’t afford oil for his lamp. He drilled a hole in the wall so he might borrow his neighbor’s light.
“In a few more pages”—Baba urged me on—“you’ll find the reference to Sun Jing, who tied his hair to a beam, so fearful was he of falling asleep at his studies.”
( 2 6 )
I nodded soberly, wondering if the young man I’d met was as diligent as those men of antiquity.
“If you’d been a son,” Baba went on, “you would have made an excellent imperial scholar, perhaps the best our family has ever seen.”
He meant it as a compliment and I took it that way, but I heard regret in his voice too. I was not a son and never would be.
“If you’re going to be here,” he added hurriedly, perhaps aware of his lapse, “then you should help me.”
We went back to his desk and sat down. He carefully arranged his clothes around him and then adjusted his queue so that it hung straight down his back. He ran his fingers over his shaved forehead—a habit, like wearing Manchu styles, that reminded him of his choice to protect our family—and then he opened a drawer and pulled out several strings of silver cash pieces.
He pushed a string across the desk and said, “I need to send funds to the countryside. Help me count them out.”
We owned thousands of mou planted with mulberry trees. In the Gudang area, not far from here, whole villages relied on our family for their livelihood. Baba cared for the people who raised the trees, harvested the leaves, fed and nurtured the silkworms, pulled the floss from the cocoons, spun thread, and, of course, made cloth. He told me what was required for each enterprise, and I began putting together the proper amounts.
“You don’t seem like yourself today,” my father said. “What troubles you?”
I couldn’t tell him about the young man I’d met or that I was worrying about whether or not I should meet him again in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion, but if Baba could help me understand my grandmother and the choices she’d made, then maybe I’d know what to do tonight.
“I’ve been thinking about Grandmother Chen. Was she so very brave?
Did she have any moments when she was unsure?”
“We’ve studied this history—”
“The history, yes, but not about Grandmother. What was she like?”
My father knew me very well, and unlike most daughters I knew him very well too. Over the years I’d learned to recognize certain expressions: the way he raised his eyebrows in surprise when I asked about this or that woman poet, the grimace he made when he quizzed me on history and I answered incorrectly, the thoughtful way he pulled on his chin when I asked him a question about The Peony Pavilion for which he ( 2 7 )
didn’t know the answer. Now he looked at me as though he were weighing my worth.
“The Manchus had seen city after city fall,” he said at last, “but they knew that when they got to the Yangzi delta they’d find strong loyalist resistance. They could have chosen Hangzhou, where we live, but instead they decided to make Yangzhou, where my father served as a minister, a lesson to other cities in the region.”
I’d heard this many times and wondered if he’d tell me anything I didn’t already know.
“The generals, who until then had kept the soldiers under strict control, gave the order for their men to let loose their desires and take whatever riches they wanted—in the form of women, silver, silk, antiques, and animals—as reward for their service.” My father paused and regarded me in that same appraising way. “Do you understand what I’m saying . . .
about the women?”
In all honesty I didn’t, but I nodded.
“For five days, the city ran with blood,” he continued wearily. “Fires destroyed homes, halls, temples. Thousands and thousands of people died.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“Everyone was scared, but my mother taught us how to be brave. And we had to be brave in so many ways.” Again he scrutinized me as though considering whether or not to continue. He must have found me lacking, because he picked up a string of cash and went back to his counting. Without taking his eyes from the pieces of silver, he concluded, “Now you know why I prefer to look only at beauty—to read poetry, do my calligraphy, read, and listen to opera.”
But he hadn’t told me anything about Grandmother! And he hadn’t said anything that would help me decide what to do tonight or help me understand what I was feeling.
“Baba . . .” I said shyly.
“Yes,” he answered, without looking up.
“I’ve been thinking about the opera and Liniang’s lovesickness,” I blurted in a rushed tumble. “Do you think that could happen in real life?”
“Absolutely. You’ve heard of Xiaoqing, haven’t you?”
Of course I had. She was the greatest lovesick maiden ever.
“She died very young,” I prompted. “Was it because she was beautiful?”
“In many ways she was a lot like you,” Baba answered. “She was graceful and elegant by nature. But her parents, members of the gentry, lost ( 2 8 )
their fortune. Her mother became a teacher, so Xiaoqing was well educated. Perhaps too well educated.”
“But how can anyone be too well educated?” I asked, thinking of how happy I had just made my father by showing interest in his books.
“When Xiaoqing was a little girl, she visited a nun,” Baba answered. “In one sitting, Xiaoqing learned to recite the Heart Sutra without missing a single character. But as she was doing this, the nun saw that Xiaoqing did not have good fortune. If the girl could keep from reading, then she’d live to thirty. If not . . .”
“But how could she die of lovesickness?”
“When she turned sixteen, a man in Hangzhou acquired her to be a concubine and secreted her away just out there”—he gestured to the window—“on Solitary Island to keep her safe from his jealous wife. Xiaoqing was all alone and very lonely. Her only comfort came from reading The Peony Pavilion. Like you, she read the opera constantly. She became obsessed, caught a case of lovesickness, and wasted away. As she weakened, she wrote poems likening herself to Liniang.” His voice softened and color came to his cheeks. “She was only seventeen when she died.”
My cousins and I sometimes talked about Xiaoqing. We made up explanations for what we thought “being put on earth for the delights of men” might mean. But as Baba spoke, I saw that somehow Xiaoqing’s frailty and dissipation excited and fascinated him. He wasn’t the only man who’d been captivated by her life and death. Lots of men had written poems to her, and more than twenty had written plays about her. There was, I realized now, something about Xiaoqing and how she died that was deeply attractive and enthralling to men. Did my stranger feel the same way too?
“I often think of Xiaoqing as she reached the end of her days,” Baba added, his voice dreamy. “She drank only one small cup of pear juice a day.
Can you imagine?”
I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He was my father, and I didn’t like thinking he might have feelings and sensations similar to the ones I’d had since last night when I had always told myself that he and my mother were distant with each other and that he received no real joy from his concubines.
“Just like Liniang, Xiaoqing wanted to leave behind a portrait of herself,” Baba went on, oblivious to my unease. “It took the artist three attempts to get it right. Xiaoqing grew more pathetic with each passing day, but she never forgot her duty to be beautiful. Each morning she dressed ( 2 9 )
her hair and clothed herself in her finest silks. She died sitting up, looking so perfect that those who came to see her believed her still to be alive.
Then her owner’s terrible wife burned Xiaoqing’s poems and all but one of the portraits.”
Baba gazed out the window to Solitary Island, his eyes glassy and filled with . . . pity? desire? longing?
Into the heavy silence, I said, “Not everything was lost, Baba. Before Xiaoqing died, she wrapped some jewelry in discarded paper and gave it to her maid’s daughter. When the girl opened the package, she found eleven poems on those abandoned sheets.”
“Recite one of them for me, will you, Peony?”
My father hadn’t helped me understand what I was feeling, but he did give me a glimmer of the romantic thoughts my stranger might be experiencing as he waited for me to come to him. I took a breath and began to recite.
“The sound of cold rain hitting the forlorn window is not bearable—”
“Please close your mouth!” Mama ordered. She never came here, and her appearance was startling and unsettling. How long had she been listening? To my father, she said, “You tell our daughter about Xiaoqing, but you know perfectly well she was not the only one to die upon reading The Peony Pavilion. ”
“Stories tell us how we should live,” my father responded easily, covering the surprise he must have felt at my mother’s presence and her accu-satory tone.
“The story of Xiaoqing has a lesson for our daughter?” Mama asked.
“Peony was born into one of the finest families in Hangzhou. That other girl was a thin horse, bought and sold like property. One girl is pure. The other was a—”
“I’m aware of Xiaoqing’s profession,” my father cut in. “You don’t need to remind me. But when I speak to our daughter about Xiaoqing, I’m thinking more of the lessons that can be learned from the opera that inspired her. Surely you see no harm in that.”
“No harm? Are you suggesting our daughter’s fate will be like that of Du Liniang?”
I glanced furtively at the servant standing by the door. How long before he reported this—gleefully, probably—to another servant and it spread throughout the compound?
“Peony could learn from her, yes,” Baba answered evenly. “Liniang is ( 3 0 )
fair, her heart kind and pure, her vision farsighted, and her will steadfast and true.”
“Waaa!” Mama responded. “That girl was stubborn in love! How many girls need to die from this story before you see the perils?”
My cousins and I whispered about these unfortunates late at night when we thought no one was listening. We spoke of Yu Niang, who became enamored of the opera at the age of thirteen and died by seventeen, with the text at her side. The great Tang Xianzu, heartbroken at the news, wrote poems eulogizing her. But soon came many many more girls, who read the story, became lovesick like Liniang, wasted away, and died, hoping that true love would find them and bring them back to life.
“Our daughter is a phoenix,” Baba said. “I will see her married to a dragon, not a crow.”
This answer did not satisfy my mother. When she was happy, she could change ice crystals into flowers. When she was sad or angry—as she was now—she could turn dark clouds into swarms of biting insects.
“An overeducated daughter is a dead daughter,” my mother announced. “Talent is not a gift we should wish on Peony. All this reading, where do you think it will end—in nuptial bliss or in disappointment, consumption, and death?”
“I’ve told you before, Peony will not die from words.”
Mama and Baba seemed to have forgotten I was in the room, and I didn’t move for fear they would notice me. Just yesterday I’d heard them argue about this subject. I rarely saw my parents together. When I did, it was for festivals or religious rites in the ancestral hall, where every word and action was set in advance. Now I wondered if they were like this all the time.
“How will she learn to be a good wife and mother if she keeps coming here?” Mama demanded.
“How will she not?” Baba asked, no concern in his voice. To my great surprise and my mother’s disgust, he loosely quoted Prefect Du speaking about his daughter. “A young lady needs an understanding of letters, so that when she marries she will not be deficient in conversation with her husband. And Peony’s role is to be a moral guardian, is it not? You should be happy that she cares little for pretty dresses, new hairpins, or painting her face. While she is lovely, we need to remember that her face is not what distinguishes her. Her beauty is a reflection of the virtue and talent she keeps inside. One day she will offer comfort and solace to her husband ( 3 1 )
through reading to him, but ultimately we are training our daughter to be a good mother—no more, no less. Her role is to teach her daughters to write poetry and perfect their womanly skills. Most of all, she will help our grandson in his studies, until he is old enough to leave the women’s chambers. When he completes his studies, she will have her day of glory and honor. Only then will she shine. Only then will she be recognized.”
My mother could not argue this point; she acquiesced. “Just so long as her reading doesn’t cause her to cross any boundaries. You wouldn’t want her to become unruly. And if you must tell our daughter stories, can’t you tell her of the gods and goddesses?”
When my father wouldn’t agree, Mama’s eyes came to rest on me. She said to my father, “How much longer will you keep her?”
“Just a little while.”
As quietly as she’d come, my mother disappeared. My father had won the argument, I think. At least he didn’t seem particularly perturbed as he made a notation in an account book and then set down his calligraphy brush, got up, and walked to the window to look out to Solitary Island.
A servant came in, bowed to my father, and handed him a sealed letter with an official red chop. My father fingered it thoughtfully, as though he might already know what was written inside. Since he didn’t seem to want to open it with me sitting there, I rose, thanked him again for giving me the edition of The Peony Pavilion, and left the library.
( 3 2 )
Desire
an o t h e r lu s h an d war m n i g h t. i n ou r wo m e n ’s chambers we enjoyed a banquet that included beans dried in spring sunshine and then steamed with dried tangerine peel, and red seventh-month crabs, which were the size of hen’s eggs and available from our local waters only at this time of year. Special ingredients were added to the married women’s dishes to help them get pregnant, while others were left out for those who were or might be with child: rabbit meat, because everyone knows it can cause a hare lip, and lamb, because it can cause a baby to be born ill. But I wasn’t hungry. My mind was already in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion.
When the cymbals and drums called us to the garden, I lagged behind, doing my best to be gracious and make small talk with my aunts, the concubines, and the wives of my father’s guests. I joined the last group to leave our chambers. Only cushions on the outer edge of the women’s area remained. I took one and looked around to make sure I’d made the right decision. Yes, my mother, as the hostess, sat in the middle of the group.
Tonight all the unmarried girls but me had been clustered together. Tan Ze—whether of her own accord or because my mother had insisted on it—had been relegated to the section with girls her own age.
Once again my father had chosen highlights for this evening’s performance, which began three years after Du Liniang’s death with the scholar Liu Mengmei falling ill on his long journey to take the imperial exams. Liniang’s old tutor gives Mengmei shelter at her shrine near the ( 3 3 )
plum tree. As soon as the next piece of music started, I could tell that we’d gone with Liniang to the afterworld for Infernal Judgment. Since tonight I couldn’t see the performers, I had to imagine the judge, fearful in his aspect, as he talked about reincarnation and how souls scatter like sparks from a firecracker. They’re sent to any of 48,000 fates in the realms of desire, of form, and of the formless, or to one of the 242 levels of Hell. Liniang pleaded with the judge, telling him a terrible mistake had been made, for she was too young to be there, had neither married nor drunk wine, but had fallen into longing and then lost her life.
“When in the world did anyone die from a dream?” The judge’s voice tore into me as he demanded an explanation from the Flower Spirit, who had brought about Liniang’s lovesickness and death. Then, after checking the Register of Marriages, he determined that indeed Liniang had been destined to be with Mengmei, and—since her ancestor tablet hadn’t been dotted—granted her permission to wander the world as a ghost in search of the husband she’d been fated to marry. After this, he charged the Flower Spirit with keeping Liniang’s physical body from decaying. As a ghost, Liniang returned to the earthly realm to live near her tomb under the plum tree. When Sister Stone, the old nun charged with caring for the tomb, made offerings on a table under the tree, Liniang was so grateful that she scattered plum blossoms into which she infused her loving thoughts.
As Mengmei recovered at the shrine, he grew restless and strolled through the gardens. Quite by accident—except that it had to be fate interfering—he found the box with Liniang’s rolled-up self-portrait scroll.
He believed he’d found a painting of the goddess Guanyin. He took the scroll back to his room and burned incense before it. He delighted in Guanyin’s soft mist of hair, her tiny mouth shaped like a rosebud, and the way love’s longing seemed to be locked between her brows, but the closer he looked, the more convinced he became that the woman on the silk couldn’t be the goddess. Guanyin should be floating, but he saw tiny lily feet poking out from beneath the woman’s skirts. Then he saw the poem that had been written on the silk and realized that this was a self-portrait painted by a mortal girl.
As he read the lines, he recognized himself as Liu, the willow; the girl in the painting also held a sprig of plum in her hand, as though she were embracing Mengmei—Dream of Plum. He wrote a poem in reply and then called upon her to step down from the painting and join him.
Quiet expectancy settled over the women on our side of the screen as ( 3 4 )
Liniang’s dark ghostly side emerged from her garden tomb to tempt, woo, and seduce her scholar.
I waited until she began tapping at Mengmei’s window and he started asking her questions about who she was, and then I rose and swiftly left.
My feelings mirrored Liniang’s as she glided around her scholar, calling to him, teasing him with her words. “I am a flower you brought to bloom in the dark of night,” I heard Liniang sing. “This body, a thousand pieces of gold, I offer to you without hesitation.” I was an unmarried girl, but I understood her wish. Mengmei accepted her offer. Again and again, he asked Liniang’s name, but she refused to give it. It was easier for her to give her body than reveal her identity.
I slowed as I neared the zigzag bridge that led to the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion. I envisioned my lily feet—hidden under my flowing skirt—
blooming with each step. I smoothed the silk, let my fingers play across my hair to make sure that all my pins were in place, and then for a few moments I held my palms over my heart, trying to still its desperate, anxious beating. I had to remember who and what I was. I was the only daughter in a family that had produced imperial scholars of the highest rank for nine generations. I was betrothed. I had bound feet. If anything untoward happened, I would not be able to run away as a big-footed girl might, nor would I be able to float away on a ghostly cloud as Liniang could have done. If I was caught, my betrothal would be broken. A girl couldn’t do anything worse than bring embarrassment and disgrace on her family in this way, but I was foolish and stupid and my mind was dulled by desire.
I pressed my fingers hard against my eyes and brought my mother into that pain. If I had any reason left, I would have seen her disappointment in me. If I had any sense, I would have known how severe her anger would be. Instead, I tried to bring into my mind her dignity, her beauty, her stature. This was my home, my garden, my pavilion, my night, my moon, my life.
I stepped across the zigzag bridge and into the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion, where he waited for me. At first we didn’t exchange words. Perhaps he was surprised that I had come; it didn’t say much about my character, after all. Perhaps he was as afraid as I was that we’d be caught. Or perhaps he was breathing me in just as I was letting him come into my lungs, my eyes, my heart.
He spoke first. “The portrait doesn’t just represent Liniang,” he said, using formality as a way to keep us both from making a terrible mistake.
“It holds the key to Mengmei’s destiny with her—the plum blossom in ( 3 5 )
her hand, the words of invitation to someone named Willow in her poem.
He sees his future wife in that fragile piece of silk.”
These were hardly the romantic words I longed for, but I was a girl and I followed his lead.
“I love the plum blossoms,” I responded. “They appear again and again. Did you stay to see the scene where Liniang scatters the petals on the altar under the plum tree?” When he nodded, I went on. “Would the blossoms sprinkled by Liniang’s ghost appear different from those brought there by the wind?”
He didn’t answer my question. Instead he said, his voice thick, “Let us look at the moon together.”
I let Liniang’s courage come into my heart and then I took small steps across the pavilion until I reached his side. Tomorrow would be the quarter moon, so it was little more than a sliver hanging low in the sky. A sudden breeze came off the lake, cooling my burning face. Tendrils of hair came loose, caressing my skin and sending shivers along my spine.
“Are you cold?” he asked, moving behind me, putting his hands on my shoulders.
I wanted to turn and face him, look into his eyes, and . . . ? Liniang had seduced her scholar, but I didn’t know what to do.
Behind me, he dropped his hands. I felt slightly adrift. The only thing keeping me from running or fainting was the warmth emanating from his body, that’s how close we stood. And I didn’t move.
From the distance came the opera. Mengmei and Liniang continued to meet. Always he asked her name; always she refused to give it. Always he asked: “How can your footfall be so soundless?” And always Liniang admitted that it was true she left no footprints in the dust. Finally, one night, the poor ghost girl arrived, fearful and trembling, because at last she was going to tell him who and what she was.
In the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion two people stood paralyzed, too afraid to move, too afraid to speak, too afraid to flee. I felt my young man’s breath on my neck.
From the garden, Mengmei sang in question, “Are you betrothed?”
Even before I could hear Liniang’s answer, a whispered voice came into my ear. “Are you betrothed?”
“I’ve been betrothed since infancy.” I barely recognized my voice, because all I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears.
He sighed behind me. “A wife has been chosen for me too.”
( 3 6 )
“Then we shouldn’t be meeting.”
“I could say good night,” he said. “Is that what you want?”
From the stage, I heard Liniang confide to her scholar her worries that now that they had done clouds and rain together he would only want her as a concubine and not as a wife. Hearing this, indignation suddenly bubbled up inside me. I wasn’t the only one doing something wrong here. I turned to face him.
“Is this what your wife can expect in her marriage, that you would meet strange women?”
He smiled guilelessly, but I thought about how he had prowled through our garden when he should have been watching the opera with my father, my uncles, Commissioner Tan, and the other male guests.
“Although men and women are different, in love and desire they are the same,” he recited the popular saying. Then he added, “I’m hoping not only for a companion in the home but in the bedchamber as well.”
“So you’re looking for concubines even before you’re married,” I responded tartly.
Since marriages were arranged and neither the bride nor the groom had any say in the match, concubines were every wife’s fear. Husbands fell in love with concubines. They came together by choice, had no responsibilities, and could delight in each other’s company, while marriages were a matter of duty and a way to provide sons who, in time, would perform rites in the ancestral hall.
“If you were my wife,” he said, “I would never have need of concubines.”
I lowered my eyes, oddly happy.
Some might say all this is too ridiculous. Some might say it could never have happened this way. Some might say this was in my imagination—a fevered imagination that would eventually lead to my obsessed writings and no-good end. Some might even say, if everything happened the way I’ve recounted, that I deserved my no-good end and had earned worse than death, which in truth is what I got. But at the time I was joyous.
“I think we were destined to meet,” he said. “I didn’t know you would be here last night, but you were. We can’t fight fate. Instead, we must accept that fate has given us a special opportunity.”
I blushed deeply and looked away.
All the while, the opera played in our garden. I knew it so well that even though I was distracted by what was happening with my stranger, a ( 3 7 )
part of me was letting the story seep into my consciousness. Now at last I heard Liniang admit who she was: a spectral image locked between life and the afterworld. Mengmei’s terrified screams echoed through the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion. I shivered again.
My young man cleared his throat. “I think you know this opera very well.”
“I’m just a girl and my thoughts are of no importance,” I answered, trying to be modest, which was foolish given our circumstances.
He looked at me quizzically. “You are beautiful, which pleases me, but it is what is inside here”—without touching me, he reached out and brought the tip of his finger to a spot over my heart, the seat of all consciousness—“that I’d like to know.”
The place on my chest where he’d almost touched me burned. We were both bold and reckless, but where Liniang’s enticing words and her scholar’s equally suggestive actions eventually ended in consummation, I was a living girl who could never give herself away so easily without paying a severe price.
In the garden, Mengmei overcame his fear of the ghost, proclaimed his love, and agreed to marry Liniang. He painted the dot on Liniang’s ancestor tablet, something her father had been too hurried with his promotion to do. Mengmei opened the grave and removed the jade funeral stone that had been placed in Liniang’s mouth. With that, her body once again breathed the air of the living.
“I must go,” I said.
“Will you meet me again tomorrow?”
“I can’t,” I said. “They’ll miss me.”
I considered it a miracle that no one had come after me on either night.
How could I take one more chance?
“Tomorrow, but not here,” he went on as though I hadn’t just refused him. “Is there another place? Perhaps somewhere farther from the garden?”
“Our Moon-Viewing Pavilion is by the shore.” I knew where it was, but I’d never been there. I wasn’t even allowed to go there with my father.
“It is the farthest from the halls and the garden.”
“Then I will wait for you there.”
I longed for him to touch me, but I was afraid.
“You will come to me,” he said.
It took great willpower for me to turn away and head back to the opera.
( 3 8 )
I was fully aware of his eyes on me as I crossed back and forth across the zigzag bridge.
No girl—not even the spoiled Tan Ze—could meet her future husband like this, let alone a strange man, of her own volition, of her own choosing, with no watchful eyes, no condemnation. I had been carried away by the story of Liniang, but she was not a living girl who would suffer any consequences.
( 3 9 )
Spring Sickness in Summer
al l g i r l s th i nk about th e i r we dd i ng s. we worry that our husbands will be cold, mean, indifferent, or neglect-ful, but mostly we imagine something wonderful and joyous.
How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?
So, during the darkness as the nightingales sang, I imagined my wedding, my husband waiting for me in his home, and everything leading up to the moment we would be united—only, in place of a faceless man, I envisioned my handsome stranger.
I dreamed of the final bride-price gifts arriving. I imagined the sparkle and weight of the hairpins, earrings, rings, bracelets, and loose jewels. I thought of the Suzhou silks that would rival even what my father made in his factories. I dreamed of the last pig that would be part of the livestock my father would receive in exchange for me. I imagined the way my father would have the pig butchered and how I would wrap the head and tail to send back to the Wu family as a sign of respect. I thought of the gifts my father would send with the pieces of pig: sprigs of artemisia to expel evil influences before my arrival, pomegranates to symbolize my fertility, ju-jubes because the word sounded like having children quickly, and the seven grains, because the character for kernel was identical in writing and sound to offspring.
I dreamed of what the palanquin would look like when it came to fetch me. I thought about meeting my mother-in-law for the first time and how she would hand me the confidential wedding book that would instruct me ( 4 0 )
on what to do when the time came for clouds and rain. I imagined my first night alone in bed with my stranger. I conjured our future years together unhampered by worries about money or officialdom. We would enjoy the day, the night, a smile, a word, a kiss, a glance. All lovely thoughts. All pointless dreams.
When morning came—my birthday and the Double Seven Festival—I had no appetite. My mind was dense with memories of the young man’s breath against my cheek and his whispered words. This was, I realized with great happiness, lovesickness.
Today I wanted everything I did—from the moment I got up until I met him in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion—to be of my own choosing. I had Willow unwrap my bindings, letting her hold my right ankle in her palm and watching as her fingers unwound the cloth over, under, and around my foot in a hypnotic motion. She set my feet to soak in a bath of pomelo leaves, to keep my flesh soft and easy to bind, and then washed away the old skin. She used powder made from the root bark of the wolfberry to smooth away rough spots, sprinkled alum between my toes to ward off in-fection, and finished with a fine dusting of fragrant powder to entice.
My bound feet were extremely beautiful—my best feature—and I took great pride in them. Ordinarily I paid strict attention to Willow’s ministra-tions, making sure that my deep crease was fully cleaned, calluses cut away, any fragments of broken bone that poked through my skin sanded down, and my nails kept as short as possible. This time, I relished the sensitivity of my skin to the warmth of the water and the cool of the air. A woman’s feet were her greatest mystery and gift. If some miracle happened and I married my stranger, I would care for them in secret, powder-ing them to accentuate their odor, and then rewrapping them tightly so they would appear as small and delicate as possible.
I had Willow bring me a tray laden with several pairs of slippers. I gazed at them pensively. Which pair would he prefer, the magenta silk embroidered with butterflies or the pale green with the tiny dragonflies?
I looked at the silks Willow brought out for me and wondered if he might like them. Willow put me into my clothes, combed my hair, washed my face, and applied powder and rouge to my cheeks.
I was hopelessly lost in thoughts of love, but I still had to make offerings to my ancestors on Double Seven. I was not the first in my family to go to the ancestral hall this morning. We all wish for wealth, good harvests, and offspring, and already offerings of food had been made to encourage reciprocal gifts of fecundity from our ancestors. I saw whole taro ( 4 1 )
roots—a symbol of fertility—and knew that my aunts and the concubines had been here to ask my ancestors to bring sons to our line. My grandfather’s concubines had left little piles of fresh loquats and lichee. They tended to be excessively extravagant, knowing that in the afterworld they would maintain their status as my grandfather’s property and hoping Grandmother was whispering good words about them in his ear. My uncles had brought rice to ensure peace and plenty, while my father had offered a warm platter of meats to encourage more wealth and a good crop of silkworms. Chopsticks and bowls had been provided for my ancestors as well, so they might dine with elegant ease.
I had started toward the Spring Pavilion for breakfast when I heard Mama call me. I followed her voice to the room for little girls. When I entered, I was assailed by the unique scent of a special broth of frankincense, apricot kernel, and white mulberry that my old amah used for all the Chen daughters during the footbinding process. I saw Second Aunt holding Orchid, her youngest daughter, on her lap, my mother kneeling before the two of them, and all the other little girls who lived in this room—not one of them older than seven—clustered around them.
“Peony,” Mama said when she saw me, “come here. I need your help.”
I’d heard Mama complain that Orchid’s footbinding wasn’t going fast enough and that Second Aunt was too softhearted for the job. Mama held one of the little girl’s feet lightly in her hand. All the required bones had broken, but no effort had been made to mold them into a better shape.
What I saw looked like the body of an octopus filled with broken and jagged little sticks. In other words, a useless, ugly, purple-and-yellow mess.
“You know the men in our household are weak,” Mama scolded Second Aunt. “They resigned their commissions and came home after the Cataclysm. They refuse to work for the new emperor, so they no longer wield any real power. They’ve been forced to shave their foreheads. They no longer ride horses, preferring the comfort of palanquins. In place of battle, the hunt, and argument, they collect delicate porcelains and paintings on silk. They have retreated and become more . . . feminine.” She paused before going on briskly. “Since this is so, we have to be more womanly than ever before.”
With this she shook Orchid’s foot. The girl whimpered, and tears rolled down Second Aunt’s cheeks. Mama paid no attention.
“We must follow the Four Virtues and the Three Obediences. Re-
( 4 2 )
member, when a daughter, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son. Your husband is Heaven,” she said, quoting the Classic of Filial Duty for Girls. “You know what I’m saying is true.”
Second Aunt didn’t speak, but these words scared me. Since I was the eldest girl in our household, I remembered all too clearly each time one of my cousins had had her feet bound. Too often my aunts were merciful and Mama would rewrap the feet herself, making both the girl and her mother weep in pain and misery.
“These are difficult times,” Mama said sternly to the crying pair. “Our footbinding helps us to be softer, more languid, smaller.” She paused again, and then added, in a kinder but no less adamant tone, “I will show you how this is done. I expect you to do this for your daughter four days from now. Every four days, tighter and tighter. Give your daughter the gift of your mother love. Do you understand?”
Second Aunt’s tears dripped from her cheeks into her daughter’s hair.
All of us in the room knew that in four days Second Aunt would be no stronger than she was now and a variation of this scene would be repeated.
Mama turned her attention back to me. “Come sit beside me.” Once we were eye to eye, she gave me a lovely mother smile. “These will be the last set of feet to be bound in our household before your marriage. I want you to go to your husband’s home with the proper skills to bind your own daughter’s feet one day.”
The other little girls looked at me in admiration, hoping their mothers would do this for them too.
“Unfortunately,” Mama said, “we first have to fix what has been neglected here.” She then forgave Second Aunt by gently adding, “All mothers are cowardly when it comes to this job. There were times when I was as feeble as you. It’s tempting not to wrap the bindings tight enough. But then what happens? The child walks and the bones begin to move within their bindings. Don’t you see, Second Aunt, that while you think you’re doing your daughter a favor, you’re only prolonging her ordeal and worsening her pain? You must remember that a plain face is given by Heaven, but poorly bound feet are a sign of laziness, not only of the mother but of the daughter as well. What kind of message does this send to prospective in-laws? Girls should be as delicate as flowers. It is important that they walk elegantly, sway gracefully, and show their respectability. In this way girls become precious gems.”
( 4 3 )
Mama’s voice hardened again as she spoke to me.
“We have to be strong and correct mistakes when they occur. Now take your cousin’s ankle with your left hand.”
I did as I was told.
Mama folded her hand over my own and squeezed. “You’re going to have to hold on very tight, because . . .” She glanced up at Orchid and decided not to finish her sentence. “Peony,” she continued, “we don’t do washing, but surely you’ve seen Willow or one of the other servants wash your clothes or linens.”
I nodded.
“Good, so you know that when they’re done rinsing they wring the clothes as tightly as possible to get out all the remaining water. We’re going to do something like that. Please follow exactly what I do.”
The written character for mother love is composed of two elements: love and pain. I had always thought this emotion was felt by daughters for their mothers, who inflict pain on us by binding our feet, but looking at Second Aunt’s tears and my mother’s courage I realized this emotion was for them. A mother suffers deeply to give birth, bind feet, and say goodbye to a daughter when she marries out. I wanted to be able to show my daughters how much I loved them, but I felt sick to my stomach—in sympathy for my little cousin and in fear that I would fail in some way.
“Mother”—Mama addressed her sister-in-law—“hold your daughter firmly.” She looked at me, gave me a nod of encouragement, and said, “Put one hand around the foot so that it meets your other hand . . . as though you were about to wring clothes.”
The pressure on Orchid’s broken bones caused her to squirm. Second Aunt wrapped her arms even more tightly around her daughter.
“I wish we could do this quickly,” Mama went on, “but haste and a soft heart are what caused this problem in the first place.”
She kept her grip on the ankle with her left hand, while her right slowly pulled away toward the toes. My cousin began to scream.
I felt light-headed but exuberant too. Mama was showing me much mother love.
I followed her movement and my cousin’s screams intensified.
“Good,” Mama said. “Feel the bones straighten beneath your fingers.
Let them fall into place as they squeeze through your hand.”
I came to the toes and let go. Orchid’s feet were still horribly mis-shapen. But instead of strange bumps poking against the flesh, the feet ( 4 4 )
looked like two long chilies. Above me, Orchid’s body heaved with sobs as she tried to catch her breath.
“This next part will be painful,” Mama observed. She looked to one of the cousins standing to her right, and said, “Go and find Shao. Where is she anyway? No matter. Just bring her. And quickly!”
The girl returned with my old wet nurse. She had once been part of a good family, but she came to work for us when she became a widow at an early age. The older I’d grown, the less I liked her, because she was so strict and unforgiving.
“Hold the child’s legs in place,” Mama ordered. “I don’t want to see any movement from the knees down, except what comes from either my daughter’s hands or my own. Understood?”
Shao had been through this many times and knew what needed to be done.
Mama glanced around at the cluster of girls. “Step back. Give us some room.”
Although those girls were as curious as mice, Mama was the head woman in our household and they did as they were told.
“Peony, think of your own feet when you do this. You know how the toes are tucked under and how your mid-foot is folded in on itself? We accomplish this by rolling the bones under the foot as if you were rolling a sock. Can you do that?”
“I think so.”
“Mother,” Mama asked Second Aunt, “are you ready?”
Second Aunt, who was known for her pale skin, appeared almost translucent, as though her soul was barely in her body.
To me, Mama said, “Once again, just follow me.”
And I did. I rolled the bones under, concentrating so hard that I barely noticed my cousin’s shrieks. Shao’s knobby hands held the legs with such strength that her knuckles went white. In her agony, Orchid vomited. The putrid mess shot from her mouth and spattered my mother’s tunic, skirt, and face. Second Aunt apologized profusely, and I heard the bitter shame in her voice. Wave after wave of nausea washed over me, but Mama didn’t flinch or waver for one moment in her task.
Finally, we were done. Mama looked at my work and patted my cheek.
“You did an excellent job. This may be your special gift. You will make a fine wife and mother.”
Never had my mother offered such approval for anything I’d done.
( 4 5 )
Mama wrapped the foot she’d worked on first. She did what Second Aunt couldn’t do; she made the bindings very tight. Orchid was beyond tears by now, so the only sounds were my mother’s voice and the soft swish of the cloth as she passed it up and over and under the foot, again and again, until all three meters had been used on the one tiny foot.
“More girls are having their feet bound than ever before in the history of our country,” Mama explained. “The Manchu barbarians believe our women’s practice to be backward! They see our husbands and we worry for them, but the Manchus can’t see us in our women’s chambers. We wrap our daughters’ feet as an act of rebellion against those foreigners.
Look around; even our maids, servants, and slaves have bound feet. Even the old, the poor, and the frail have bound feet. We have our women’s ways. This is what makes us valuable. It’s what makes us marriageable.
And they cannot make us stop!”
Mama sewed the bindings shut, set the foot on a cushion, and began working on the foot I’d reshaped. When she finished, she set this foot on the cushion as well. She batted her sister-in-law’s comforting fingers away from Orchid’s still-wet cheeks and added a few final thoughts.
“Through our footbinding we have won in two ways. We weak women have beaten the Manchus. Their policy failed so badly that now the Manchu women try to emulate us. If you went outside, you would see them with their big ugly shoes with tiny platforms built in the shape of bound-foot slippers tacked under the soles to give them the illusion of bound feet. Ha!
They cannot compete with us or stop us from cherishing our culture. More importantly, our bound feet continue to be an enticement to our husbands.
Remember, a good husband is one who brings you pleasure too.”
With the sensations I’d had in my body since meeting my stranger, I felt I knew what she was talking about. Strangely, though, I’d never seen my mother and father touch. Did this come from my father or my mother? My father had always been affectionate with me. He hugged me and kissed me whenever we saw each other in the corridors or I visited him in his library. The physical distance between my parents had to come from some lack in my mother. Had she gone to her marriage with the same apprehension I would now take to mine? Was this why my father had concubines?
Mama stood up and pulled her wet skirt away from her legs. “I’m going to change. Peony, please go ahead to the Spring Pavilion. Second Aunt, leave your daughter here and go with Peony. We have guests. I’m sure they’re waiting for us. Ask them to start breakfast without me.” To Shao, ( 4 6 )
she added, “I’ll send congee for the child. Make sure she eats it, and then give her some herbs to ease the pain. She may rest today. I’m counting on you to let me know what transpires four days from now. We can’t allow this to happen again. It’s unfair to the child and it frightens the younger girls.”
After she left, I stood up. For a moment, the room went dark. My head finally cleared, but my stomach was far from calm.
“Take your time, Auntie,” I managed to say. “I’ll meet you in the corridor when you’re ready.”
I hurried back to my room, shut the door, lifted the lid off the half-full chamber pot, and threw up. Fortunately, Willow was not there to see me, because I don’t know how I would have explained myself. Then I got up, rinsed my mouth, walked back down the corridor, and arrived just as Second Aunt emerged from the girls’ hall.
I’d finally done something that made my mother truly proud, but it had also made me sick. For all my desire to be strong like Liniang, I was softhearted like my aunt. I wouldn’t be able to show my mother love to my daughter. I’d be a disaster when it came to binding her feet. I hoped that Mama would never know. My mother-in-law might not let the news of my failure pass beyond the Wu family gates, just as Mama wouldn’t let anyone know of Second Aunt’s continued weakness. This fell under the admonition of never doing anything that would allow the family to lose face, and the Wus—if they were good and kind—would do their part by keeping the secret within the four walls of their home.
I expected hushed tones when Second Aunt and I entered the Spring Pavilion, for surely every woman in the villa had heard Orchid’s screams, but Third Aunt had taken the opportunity to play at being head woman.
Dishes had been set out and the women were busily eating and gossiping as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened on the morning of Double Seven in the Chen Family Villa.
I forgot to harden myself against my cousins’ predictable biting comments that came over breakfast, but oddly their words fell away from me like the old skin that Willow had washed from my feet. I couldn’t eat, however, not even the special dumplings that Mama had Cook prepare for my birthday. How could I put food in my mouth and swallow it when my stomach was still so unsettled—from the binding, from my secret happiness, and from my worries about being caught tonight?
After breakfast, I went back to my room. Later, when I heard the soft padding of lily feet as the others left their rooms and headed for the Lotus-
( 4 7 )
Blooming Hall, I wrapped one of my paintings in a piece of silk for today’s contest, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the corridor.
When I got to the Lotus-Blooming Hall, I sought my mother’s side.
Her warm feelings from earlier seemed to have evaporated, but I didn’t worry. She would be exceptionally busy today between the guests, the contests, and the celebration, I thought, as she walked away from me.
We started with an art contest. If I was sloppy at embroidery and awkward at the zither, I was even worse when it came to painting. The contest’s first category was peonies. Once it seemed all the paintings had been displayed, expectant eyes turned to me.
“Peony, where is your peony?” one of our guests asked.
“It’s her name,” Third Aunt confided to the others, “but she never practices her petal work.”
This contest was followed by one for chrysanthemums, another for plum blossoms, and finally for orchids. I surreptitiously laid my painting on the table. My orchids were too heavy and another girl won the competition. Next came paintings with butterflies, and finally butterflies and flowers together. I didn’t enter either of those categories.
Always the same flowers and butterflies, I thought to myself. But what else could we paint? Our paintings were about what we could see in the garden: butterflies and flowers. Standing there, looking at the beautifully powdered faces of my aunts, cousins, and our female guests, I saw wistful longing. But if I was looking at them, they were observing me too. My mooning did not escape the notice of the other women, who were all trained to spot weakness and vulnerability.
“Your Peony seems to have been overcome by spring sickness in summer,” Fourth Aunt remarked.
“Yes, we have all noticed the heightened color on her cheeks,” Third Aunt added. “What could be on her mind?”
“Tomorrow I will pick herbs and brew a tea to ease her spring sickness,” Fourth Aunt offered helpfully.
“Spring sickness in summer?” my mother echoed. “Peony is too practical.”
“We like to see your daughter this way,” Second Aunt said. “Perhaps she will confide her secrets to the other girls. They all wish to have romantic thoughts too. Every girl should look this pretty on her sixteenth birthday. Five more months to her marriage. I think we can all agree she is ready to be plucked.”
I tried as hard as possible to make my face as unfathomable as a pond ( 4 8 )
on a humid summer night. I failed, and some of the older women tittered at my girlish embarrassment.
“Then it’s a good thing she’s marrying soon,” my mother agreed, in a deceptively light tone. “But you’re right, Second Aunt, maybe she should speak to your daughter. I’m sure that Broom’s husband would be grateful for any improvement on their wedding night.” She clapped her hands softly. “Now come, let us go to the garden for our final contests.”
As the other women filed out, I felt my mother’s eyes on me—
weighing and considering what had been said. She didn’t speak and I refused to meet her eyes. We were like two stone statues in that room. I was grateful she’d protected me, but to say that would be to admit . . . what?
That I was lovesick? That I’d met someone in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion the last two nights? That I planned to meet him tonight in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, a place on our property I was not allowed to go?
Suddenly I realized I’d changed in a fundamental way. Monthly bleeding doesn’t turn a girl into a woman, nor does betrothal or new skills. Love had turned me into a woman.
I called upon my grandmother’s poise and dignity, and without saying a word I lifted my head and walked out the door and into the garden.
I sat on a porcelain jardinière. The garden looked very pretty, and much of the inspiration for this last round of contests would come—as usual—from what we could see. My cousins and aunts offered bits of poetry from famous women poets that invoked the plum blossom, chrysanthemum, orchid, and peony. So many lovely words for such beautiful and evocative flowers, but I scrolled through my memory until I came to a dark poem that had been written on a wall in Yangzhou by an unknown woman during the Cataclysm. I waited until the others had recited their poems and then I began to speak in what I imagined to be the sorrowful voice of that desperate writer:
“The trees are bare.
In the distance, the honks of mourning geese.
If only my tears of blood could dye red the blossoms of the plum tree.
But I will never make it to spring.
My heart is empty and my life has no value anymore.
Each moment a thousand tears.”
This poem—considered one of the saddest of the Cataclysm—reached deep into everyone’s hearts. Second Aunt, still upset over her daughter’s ( 4 9 )
footbinding, once again shed tears, but she wasn’t the only one. Great feelings of qing filled the garden. We shared in the despair of that lost and presumably dead woman.
Then I felt my mother’s eyes piercing me. All color had drained from her face, making her rouge stand out like bruises on her cheeks. Her voice was barely audible as she said, “On this beautiful day my daughter brings misery into our midst.”
I didn’t know why Mama was upset.
“My daughter isn’t feeling well,” Mama confided to the mothers around her, “and I’m afraid she’s forgotten what’s proper.” She looked back at me. “You should spend the rest of the day and evening in bed.”
Mama had control over me, but was she really going to keep me from the opera because I recited an unhappy poem? Tears gathered in my eyes.
I blinked them back.
“I’m not sick,” I said, rather pathetically.
“That is not what Willow tells me.”
I flushed with anger and disappointment. When she’d emptied the chamber pot, Willow must have seen that I’d thrown up and told my mother. Now my mother knew I’d failed—once again—as a soon-to-be wife and mother. But this knowledge didn’t chasten me. It made me very determined. I wouldn’t let her keep me from my meeting in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. I brought a forefinger to my cheekbone, inclined my head, and drew my features into the prettiest, blankest, most harmless picture of a Hangzhou maiden.
“Oh, Mama, I think it is as my aunties have said. On the day we honor the Weaving Maid I have let my mind drift to the celestial bridge that will be formed tonight for the two lovers to meet. I may have had a momentary case of spring feelings, but I don’t have spring fever, aches of any sort, or any womanly complaints. My lapse is only an indicator of my maiden status, nothing more.”
I appeared so innocent, and the other women looked at me with such benevolence, that my mother would have had a hard time sending me away.
After a long moment, she asked, “Who can recite a poem with hibiscus in it?”
Everything—as it was every day in our women’s quarters—seemed a test of some sort. And every test reminded me of my inferiority. I didn’t excel at anything—not footbinding, or embroidery, painting, zither playing, or reciting poetry either. How could I go to my marriage now when I ( 5 0 )
loved someone else so deeply? How could I be the wife my husband deserved, needed, and wanted? My mother had followed all the rules, yet she’d failed to give my father sons. If Mama had been unsuccessful as a wife, how could I ever succeed? Maybe my husband would turn away from me, embarrass me in front of my mother-in-law, and find delights in the singing girls around the lake or by taking in concubines.
I recalled something Mama liked to repeat: “Concubines are a fact of life. What matters is that you choose them before your husband does, and then how you treat them. Don’t hit them yourself. Let him do it.”
That was not what I wanted for my life.
Today was my sixteenth birthday. Tonight, in the heavens, the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd would be reunited. In our garden, Liniang would be resurrected by Mengmei’s love. And in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, I would meet my stranger. I may not have been the most perfect young woman in all of Hangzhou, but under his gaze I felt I was.
( 5 1 )
Soiled Shoes
conf uc i u s w rote : R E S P E C T T H E G H O S T S A N D S P I R I T S
but keep them at a distance. On Double Seven, people forgot about ghosts and ancestors. Everyone just wanted to enjoy the celebration—from our special games to the opera performance. I changed into a silk gauze tunic embroidered with a pair of birds flying above summer flowers to evoke the happiness I felt when my stranger and I were together. Under this I wore a skirt of silk brocade with a band of snow-crabapple blossoms embroidered around the hem, which attracted the eye to my fuchsia-colored silk bound-foot shoes. Gold earrings dangled from my ears, and my wrists were heavy with gold and jade bangles that had been given to me over the years by my family. I was not in the least over-dressed. Everywhere I looked I saw lovely women and girls who tinkled and jangled as they swayed across the room to greet one another in their rhythmic lily gaits.
On the altar table, set up for the occasion in the Lotus-Blooming Hall, sticks of incense burned in bronze tripods, filling the room with a deli-ciously pungent odor. Piles of fruit—oranges, melons, bananas, carambo-las, and dragon eyes—sat in cloisonné dishes. On one end of the table stood a white porcelain bowl filled with water and pomelo leaves to symbolize the ritual bath given to brides. In the middle of the table lay a circu-lar tray—nearly one meter across—with a round center surrounded by six sections. The middle depicted the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd, with his buffalo wading nearby in the stream to remind us of the place the god-
( 5 2 )
dess had hidden her nakedness. The surrounding sections showed the Weaving Maid’s other sisters. One by one, Mama invited the unmarried girls to place an offering for each sister in the corresponding section.
After the ceremony, we sat down to an extravagant banquet. Each dish had a special meaning, so we ate “dragon hoof that sends child”—pig leg with ten kinds of patrimonial seasonings braised over a slow fire—which was reputed to bring sons. The servants brought in a beggar’s chicken for each table. With a strong thwack, the baked clay crust for each chicken was broken and an aroma of ginger, wine, and mushrooms escaped into the room. Course after course arrived, each flavored to satisfy one of the tastes: good, bad, fragrant, stinky, sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. For dessert, our servants presented us with malt cakes made with sticky rice, red beans, walnuts, and riverbank grass, to help us digest, reduce fat, and prolong life.
It was a sumptuous meal, but I was too nervous to eat.
The banquet was followed by one last contest. The lanterns were turned down and each of the unmarried girls had a chance to thread a needle by the light from the tip of a single stick of incense. A needle successfully threaded meant that the girl would give birth to a son upon marriage.
There had been much drinking of Shaoxing wine, so considerable laughter accompanied each failed attempt.
I joined in the laughter as best I could, but I was already plotting how I was going to meet my stranger without getting caught. I would have to use the scheming ways of the inner realm and make up what I thought might serve me well from the outside realm. I could only guess and hope and think about each move, as I did when I played chess with my father.
Unlike the first night, I didn’t want to sit in the front row where I’d be closest to the opera but would also be in the one place where all the women could see me. I also couldn’t linger behind as I had last night. If I did that again, my mother would suspect something. She knew I loved the opera too much to be late again. I had to appear as though I were trying to please her, especially after what had happened this afternoon. As my mind searched for the possibilities, my eyes fell on Tan Ze. I began to play out my moves. Yes, I could use the child to cloak myself in innocence.
As Lotus successfully threaded the needle and everyone applauded, I moved across the room to Ze, who perched on the edge of a chair, hoping my mother would choose her to take a turn at the game. That was never going to happen. Ze wasn’t waiting for her wedding ceremonies to take place; she was a little girl who had yet to be matched.
I tapped her on the shoulder.
( 5 3 )
“Come with me,” I said. “I want to show you something.”
She slipped off the chair and I took her hand, making sure my mother saw what I was doing.
“You know I’ve already been betrothed,” I said, as we walked to my room.
The little girl nodded, her face serious.
“Would you like to see my bride-price gifts?”
Ze squealed. Inside, I did practically the same thing but for a very different reason.
I opened pigskin chests and showed her the bolts of airy gauzes, lustrous satins, and heavy brocades that had already been sent.
When the crash of cymbals and the bang of drums began calling us to the garden, Ze got to her feet. Outside my room, women gathered in the corridor.
“You have to see my wedding costume,” I rushed on. “You’ll love the headdress.”
The girl sat back down, eagerly wiggling her bottom into my bedding.
I brought out my embroidered red silk wedding skirt, which had dozens of tiny pleats. The women my father had hired to make it had adjusted their stitches so that the pattern of flowers, clouds, and interlocking good-luck symbols were perfectly aligned. On my wedding day the design would break apart only if I took too large a step. The tunic was equally exquisite. Instead of just four frogs to hold it shut—at my neck, across my breast, and under my arm—the seamstresses had made dozens of tiny braided frogs to confound my husband and prolong the wedding night.
The headdress was simple and elegant: a garden of thin gold leaves that would quiver as I moved and shimmer in the light, with a red veil to cover my face so I wouldn’t see my husband until he removed it. I had always loved my wedding costume, but the emotions it now stirred in me were very dark. What was the purpose of being wrapped like a present if you had no feelings for the person you were being given to?
“It’s beautiful, but my father has promised I will have pearls and jade in my headdress,” Ze boasted.
I barely heard her, because I was listening so hard to what was happening outside my room. The drums and cymbals still called the audience, but the corridor was quiet. I put my wedding costume away. Then I took Ze’s hand and we left my room.
We wandered together to the garden. I saw my cousins grouped together behind the screen. Unbelievably, they’d saved a place for me. Lotus ( 5 4 )
waved to me to join them. I smiled back and then bent to whisper in Ze’s ear.
“Look, the unmarried girls want you to sit with them.”
“They do?”
She didn’t even wait for me to give her more encouragement but threaded her way through the cushions to the other girls, sat down, and immediately began talking nonstop to my cousins. They had shown me a little kindness and this was how I repaid them.
I made a great show of looking around for an available cushion near the front or in the middle, but of course by now there were none. I feigned a look of disappointment and then delicately sank to a cushion on the edge at the back of the women’s section.
Tonight’s opening scene was one I would have liked to have seen but could only hear from my spot at the back of the audience. Liniang and Mengmei eloped—something completely unheard of in our culture. As soon as they were married, Liniang confessed that she was a virgin—this despite her ghostly nocturnal unions with Mengmei. As a ghost, the maiden status of her body in its grave had been preserved. The scene ended with Liniang and Mengmei departing for Hangzhou, where he would complete his studies for the imperial exams.
There was very little in the final third of the opera that I liked. It was mostly about the world beyond Liniang’s garden—with great battle scenes, where everyone was on the move—but it completely captivated the audience on my side of the screen. Around me the women sank deeper into the story. I waited until I couldn’t stand it any longer; then, with my heart pounding, I slowly rose, smoothed my skirts, and walked back as casually as possible toward the women’s chambers.
But I didn’t go to the Unmarried Girls’ Hall. I turned off the main path and then hurried along the south wall of our property, past small ponds and viewing pavilions, until I reached the trail by the lakeshore. I had never been on this path before and was unsure how to proceed. Then I saw the Moon-Viewing Pavilion and sensed my stranger there already.
Only the quarter moon illuminated the night, and I searched the darkness until I found him. He perched on the balustrade that lined the farthest edge of the pavilion, looking not out at the water but at me. My chest constricted with that knowledge. The path had been inlaid with pebbles in designs that created bats for happiness, tortoise backs for longevity, and cash for prosperity. Each step thus brought joy, a long life, and more wealth.
My ancestors had also constructed these pathways for health reasons. As ( 5 5 )
they aged, the pebbles massaged their feet as they walked. This must have been in long-ago days when women weren’t allowed in the garden, because I found the surface hard to walk on with my bound feet. I focused on making each foot find purchase on a pebble, balancing just so before committing myself to moving forward, knowing that this accentuated the delicacy of my lily walk.
I hesitated before stepping into the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. My courage faded. This place had always been forbidden to me because three sides were surrounded by water. Technically, it was outside our garden walls. Then I remembered Liniang’s determination. I took a breath, walked into the middle of the pavilion, and stopped. He wore a long gown of midnight-blue silk. Next to him on the balustrade were a peony and a sprig of willow. He didn’t stand. He just stared at me. I tried to keep perfectly still.
“I see you have a three-ways viewing pavilion,” he said. “I have the same in my home, only ours is on our pond and not the lake.”
He must have seen my confusion, so he explained. “From here you can see the moon three ways: in the sky, reflected in the water, and refracted from the lake into the mirror.” He lifted his hand and languorously pointed to a mirror that hung above the only piece of furniture in the pavilion: a carved wooden bed.
“Oh!” slipped from my mouth. Until this instant I had never considered a bed in a pavilion as anything other than a place for the lazy to rest, but now I trembled at the thought of the bed, the mirror, and the languid nights I wished I could have in his moon-viewing pavilion.
He smiled. Had he found humor in my embarrassment or were his thoughts the same as mine? After a long and to me discomforting moment, he rose and came to my side. “Come. Let’s look out together.”
When we reached the balustrade, I gripped a pillar to steady myself.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he said, looking out across the glassy water.
Then he turned to me. “But you are far more beautiful.”
I felt overwhelming happiness and then a horrible wave of shame and fear.
He stared questioningly into my face. “What’s wrong?”
Tears welled in my eyes, but I forced myself to contain them. “Perhaps you see only what you want to see.”
“I see a real girl whose tears I want to kiss away.”
Twin drops overflowed and ran down my cheeks.
( 5 6 )
“How can I be a good wife now?” I gestured around me hopelessly.
“After this?”
“You’ve done nothing wrong.”
But of course I had! I was here, wasn’t I? But I didn’t want to talk about it. I stepped away, folded my hands in front of me, and said in a steady voice, “I always miss notes when I play the zither.”
“I don’t care for the zither.”
“But you won’t be my husband,” I responded. A pained look came over his face. I’d hurt him. “My stitches are too large and ungainly,” I blurted quickly.
“My mother does not sit in the women’s hall all day for needlework. If you were my wife, the two of you would do other things together.”
“My paintings are weak.”
“What do you paint?”
“Flowers—the usual.”
“You are not the usual. You shouldn’t paint the usual. If you could paint anything you wanted, what would you choose?”
No one had asked me that before. In fact, no one had ever asked me anything quite like it. If I had been thinking, if I had been at all proper, I would have answered that I would keep practicing my flowers. But I wasn’t thinking.
“I would paint this: the lake, the moon, the pavilion.”
“A landscape then.”
An actual landscape, not a landscape found hidden in cold slabs of marble like the ones in my father’s library. The idea intrigued me.
“My home across the lake is high on the hill,” he went on. “Every room has a view. If we were married, we’d be companions. We’d go on excursions—on the lake, on the river, to see the tidal bore.”
Everything he said made me happy and sad at the same time as I longed for a life I would never have.
“But you shouldn’t worry,” he continued. “I’m sure your husband isn’t perfect either. Look at me. Since the Song dynasty it has been the ambition of every young man to achieve distinction in official life, but I have not taken the imperial exams and I have no ambition to take them.”
But this was how it was supposed to be! A man today—one who was loyal to the Ming—would always choose an interior life over one of civil service in the new regime. Why had he said that? Did he think I was old-
( 5 7 )
fashioned or just plain stupid? Did he think I wished him to be in business? Making money as a merchant was vulgar and low.
“I’m a poet,” he said.
I grinned. I had intuited it the first moment I saw him through the screen. “The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.”
“I want a marriage of companions—one of shared lives and shared poems,” he murmured. “If we were husband and wife, we would collect books, read, and drink tea together. As I told you before, I’d want you for what’s in here.”
Again he pointed to my heart, but I felt it in a place far lower in my body.
“So tell me about the opera,” he said after a long moment. “Are you sad not to see Liniang reunite with her mother? I understand that girls love that scene.”
It was true. I did love that scene. As the battles wage on between the brigand and the empire’s forces, Madame Du and Spring Fragrance seek shelter at an inn in Hangzhou. Madame Du is amazed—frightened—to see what she believes is her daughter’s ghost. But of course, by now the three parts of Liniang’s soul have been brought back together and she is a girl once again, of flesh and blood.
“Every girl hopes her mother would recognize her and love her, even if she were dead, even if she were a ghost, even if she eloped,” I said.
“Yes, it is a good qing scene,” my poet agreed. “It shows us mother love.
The other scenes tonight . . .” He jutted his chin indifferently. “Politics don’t interest me. Too much li, don’t you agree? I much prefer the scenes in the garden.”
Was he mocking me?
“Mengmei brought Liniang back to life through passion,” he went on.
“He believed her back into existence.”
His understanding of the opera was so close to my own that I was em-boldened to ask, “Would you do that for me?”
“Of course I would!”
Then he brought his face close to mine. His breath was redolent of orchids and musk. The desire we both felt warmed the air between us. I thought he might kiss me and I waited to feel his lips on mine. My body flooded with blood and emotion. I didn’t move, because I didn’t know what to do or what he expected me to do. That’s not quite true. I was not expected to be doing any of this, but when he stepped away and regarded me with his deep black eyes, I trembled with longing.
( 5 8 )
He didn’t seem much older than me, but he was a man and lived in the outside world. For all I knew, he had much experience with the teahouse women whose voices I sometimes heard floating across the lake.
To him, I must have seemed like a child, and in some ways he dealt with me that way, by retreating just far enough to give me a chance to steady myself.
“I can never decide if the opera has a happy ending or not,” he said.
His sentence startled me. Had that much time passed since I’d come here? He must have sensed my alarm, because he added, “Don’t worry.
There are several more scenes.” He picked up the peony that he’d brought with him with one hand and laid its blossom in his other. “Mengmei wins the top honors in the imperial exams.”
My mind and body were far, far away from the opera and I had to force myself to concentrate, which I suppose is what he wanted.
“But when he presents himself to Prefect Du as his new son-in-law, he’s arrested,” I said. When he smiled, I understood I was doing the exact right thing.
“The Prefect orders Mengmei’s baggage searched, and—”
“The guards find Liniang’s self-portrait,” I finished for him. “Prefect Du has Mengmei beaten and tortured, believing the scholar has defiled his daughter’s tomb.”
“Mengmei insists he brought Liniang back from the spirit world and that the two of them have married,” he said. “Outraged, Prefect Du orders Mengmei’s decapitation.”
The fragrance from the peony in his palm filled my head. I remembered all the things I wished I’d done last night. I picked up the willow sprig from the balustrade. Slowly I began to walk around him, speaking softly all the while, caressing him with my words.
“Will the story end sorrowfully?” I asked. “Everyone is brought to the imperial court to present their problems to the emperor.” I came full circle, stopped to glance up to his eyes, and then glided around him again, this time letting the willow leaves brush against his torso.
“Liniang is presented to her father,” he said gruffly, “but he can’t accept that she’s alive, not even when he’s looking at her.”
“In this way, the great Tang Xianzu illustrated how men can be limited by li. ” I kept my voice low, knowing my poet would have to work hard to hear me. “When something so miraculous happens, people can’t be ra-tional anymore.” He sighed and I smiled. “The Prefect insists that Liniang pass many tests—”
( 5 9 )
“She casts a shadow and leaves footprints when she walks under blossoming trees.”
“That’s right,” I whispered. “And she also answers questions about the Seven Emotions—joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, and desire.”
“Have you experienced these emotions yourself?”
I stopped before him. “Not all of them,” I admitted.
“Joy?” He brought the peony he’d been holding in his hand to my cheek.
“Just today when I woke up.”
“Anger?”
“I told you I’m not perfect,” I answered as he brought the petals along my jaw.
“Grief?”
“Every year on the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.”
“But you have not truly experienced it yourself,” he said, taking the blossom away from my face and letting it trail down my arm. “Fear?”
I thought of the fear I felt coming here, but I said, “Never.”
“Good.” He kept the peony against the inside of my wrist. “Love?” I didn’t answer, but the feel of the flower on my skin caused me to shiver, and he smiled. “Hate?”
I shook my head. We both knew I hadn’t lived long enough or seen enough to hate anyone.
“Only one left,” he said. He brought the peony back up along my arm and then pulled it away, to drop again to a spot just below my ear. Then he slowly let the blossom glide down across my neck to the top of my collar and forward to my throat. “Desire?”
I had stopped breathing.
“I see your answer in your face,” he said.
He brought his lips to my ear.
“If we married,” he whispered, “we would not have to waste time drinking tea and making conversation.” He stepped back and looked out across the lake. “I wish . . .” His voice quavered, which I saw embarrassed him. He felt this moment as deeply as I did. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard. When he next spoke, it was as though nothing had happened between us. I was loose again, on my own.
“I wish you could see my home. It’s just across the lake on Wushan Mountain.”
“Isn’t that it right there?” I asked, pointing to the hill on the other side of the lake.
( 6 0 )
“That is the hill, yes, but Solitary Island—as beautiful as it is—ob-structs the view of the house. My home is just behind the tip of the island.
I wish you could see it, so that you could look across the water and think of me.”
“Perhaps I’ll be able to see it from my father’s library.”
“You’re right! Your father and I have talked politics there many times. I can see my home from the windows. But even if you can see the mountain, how will you know which house is mine?”
My mind, in such a turbulent state, could not think clearly enough to come up with a possible solution.
“I’m going to show you the house, so you can find it. I promise to look out from there every day to find you, if you will look for me.”
I agreed. He led me to the right side of the pavilion near the shore. He took the willow sprig from my hand and put it together with the peony blossom on the balustrade. When he sat down next to them and swung his legs over the edge, I understood that he intended me to do the same. He jumped down, stood on a rock, and reached his arms up to me.
“Give me your hands.”
“I can’t.” And I truly couldn’t. I had done a lot of improper things this evening, but I wasn’t going to follow him. I’d never been outside the Chen Family Villa. On this one thing my mother and father were adamant.
“It’s not far.”
“I’ve never been beyond my garden. My mother says—”
“Mothers are important, but—”
“I can’t do this.”
“What about the promise you just made?”
My will wavered. I was as weak as my cousin Broom when presented with a plate of dumplings.
“You will not be the only girl—woman—outside a garden wall tonight.
I know many women who are boating on the lake this evening.”
“Teahouse women.” I sniffed.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m referring to women poets and writers who have joined poetry and writing clubs. Like you, they want to experience more of life than what is available inside their gardens. By leaving their inner chambers they’ve become artists of worth. It is this outside world that I would show you if you were my wife.”
He left unsaid that tonight was as far as that dream would go.
This time when he extended his arms, I sat down on the balustrade ( 6 1 )
and, as delicately as possible, drew my legs across the stonework and let myself be pulled from the safety of the villa. He led me to the right along the rocks that lined the shore. What I was doing was beyond bad. Amazingly, nothing terrible happened. We weren’t caught, and no ghosts leaped from behind a bush or tree to scare or kill us for this infraction.
He held my elbow, since some of the rocks were slick with moss. I felt the heat of his hand through the silk of my sleeve. Warm air lifted my skirt as though it were a cicada’s wing carried by the wind. I was out. I was seeing things I’d never seen before. Here and there, bits of vines and branches draped over our compound wall, hinting at what was hidden inside. Weeping willows hung over the lake, their tendrils teasing the water’s surface. I brushed against wild roses blooming on the bank and their scent infused the air, my clothes, my hair, the skin on my hands. The feelings that rushed through my body were nearly overwhelming: fear that I would be caught, exhilaration that I was out, and love for the man who had brought me here.
We stopped. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been walking.
“My house is there,” he said, pointing across the lake, past the newly built pavilion on Solitary Island that I could see from my father’s library.
“There’s a temple on the hill. It’s lit by torches this evening. Do you see it? The monks open their doors for all festivals. Just a little up and to the left is the house.”
“I see it.”
The moon was just a sliver, but it was enough to cast a path across the lake from my toes to his doorstep. It felt as though the heavens had agreed that we were meant to have this time together.
In this most extraordinary circumstance, I was distracted by a peculiar sensation. My lily shoes were thoroughly soaked and I could feel water being drawn up into the hem of my skirt. I took a tiny step back from the water’s edge, which sent ripples out across the peaceful surface. I thought about those ripples hitting the hulls of boats that carried other lovers on the lake and lapping at the edges of moon-viewing pavilions where young husbands and wives had sought refuge from the watchful eyes of the household.
“You’d like my home,” he said. “We have a nice garden—not as large as yours—with a small rockery, a moon-viewing pavilion, a pond, and a plum tree whose blossoms in spring fill the entire compound with an enticing fragrance. Whenever I see it, I’ll think of you.”
I wished we would have a wedding night. I wished it would happen ( 6 2 )
right now. I blushed and looked down. When I looked up, he stared into my eyes. I knew he longed for the same thing I did. And then the moment was over.
“We must return,” he said.
He tried to hurry us, but my shoes were now slippery and I was slow.
As we got closer to the villa, the sounds of the opera came more fully into my consciousness. Mengmei’s pained cries as he was tortured and beaten by Prefect Du’s guards told me we were close to the end.
He lifted me up and back into the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. This was it.
Tomorrow, I would go back to preparing for my marriage, and he would go back to whatever young men do to get ready to greet their wives.
“I liked talking to you about the opera,” he said.
They may not seem like the most romantic words a man could have spoken, but to me they were, for they showed that he cared for literature, the concerns of the inner chambers, and that he truly did want to know what I thought.
He picked up the willow sprig and handed it to me. “Keep this,” he said, “to remind you of me.”
“And the peony?”
“I’ll keep it forever.”
I smiled inwardly, knowing that the flower and I shared the same name.
He brought his lips close to mine, and when he spoke his voice trembled with emotion. “We had three nights of happiness. That’s more than most married couples have in a lifetime. I will remember them forever.”
As my eyes filled with tears, he said, “You must go back. I won’t leave here until there’s a safe distance between us.”
I bit my lip to keep from crying and turned away. I walked alone toward the main garden, stopping by the pond to tuck the willow sprig inside my tunic. Only when I heard Prefect Du accuse his daughter, who’d been brought before him, of being a disgusting creature of the dead did I remember how sullied my shoes, leggings, and the bottom of my skirt had become. I needed to get back to my room and change without being seen.
“Here you are,” Broom said, stepping out of the shadows. “Your mother sent me to look for you.”
“I was . . . I had to . . .” I thought of Willow that first night as she played the role of Spring Fragrance. “I had to use the chamber pot.”
My cousin smiled knowingly.
“I’ve been to your room. You weren’t there.”
( 6 3 )
Having caught me in a lie, Broom regarded me suspiciously. I watched her smile broaden as her eyes traveled from my face down across my torso to my skirt, my dirty hem, and my soiled shoes. She pasted a bright mask on her face, looped her arm affectionately through mine, and said in a pretty tone, “The opera is nearly finished. I don’t want you to miss the end.”
I was light-headed enough with my own private happiness to believe she wanted to help me. Whatever hidden strength had surfaced when I allowed myself to go over the balustrade of our Moon-Viewing Pavilion had retreated to a hidden corner deep inside me, because I didn’t break away from Broom and sit down on my cushion at the back of the audience but allowed myself to be led—helplessly, stupidly, but with the ridiculous in-vincibility that came with the bliss I felt—through the seated women, right past my mother, and on to the front row of cushions, where I was squeezed in between little Ze and my cousin. And because I was seated next to Ze, I found myself once more before the crack in the screen that allowed me to peek out to the stage.
I looked across the sea of black-haired men until I found my poet, sitting next to my father. After a few minutes, I forced myself to look away from him and to the stage, where the emperor tried to bring the two fac-tions together. Proclamations were read; honors bestowed. There was great rejoicing for the two young lovers—a truly happy ending—and yet nothing had been or would ever be reconciled between Prefect Du and his daughter.
The men on the other side of the screen jumped to their feet with ap-plause and whoops of appreciation. The women on our side nodded at the truth of this ending.
As he had on the first night, my father took the stage. He thanked everyone for coming to our meager home for our inadequate production.
He thanked the visiting actors and those on our household staff who’d been pulled from their regular duties for the performance.
“This is a night of love and destiny,” he said. “We have seen how Liniang and Mengmei’s story has ended. And we know how the story of the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd will end later tonight. Now let us have a preview of another love story.”
Waaa! He was going to announce something about my marriage. My poet put his head down. He didn’t want to hear this either.
“Many of you know that I’m fortunate to have as my future son-in-law ( 6 4 )
a good friend,” Baba said. “I have known Wu Ren for so long, he is like a son to me.”
As my father lifted his arm to point out the man I was to marry, I closed my eyes. Three days ago, I would have followed his gesture to get a glimpse of my future husband, but right now I couldn’t abandon the tender emotions swimming inside me. I wanted to hold on to them a little longer.
“I’m lucky Ren has such a love of words,” my father went on. “I’m not so lucky when he beats me in chess.”
The men laughed appreciatively as they were meant to. On our side of the screen, there was silence. I felt stares of disapproval and disdain from the women behind me driving into my back like daggers. I opened my eyes, peered to my right, and saw Ze staring through the crack in the screen, her mouth set in an alarmed oh. Then Ze quickly averted her gaze.
My husband had to be really ugly, hideous.
“Many of you are guests tonight and have not met my daughter,” my father continued, “but I also have my whole family here and they’ve known Peony for her entire life.” He addressed my future husband, confiding in front of everyone, “I have no doubt she will be a good wife to you . . . except for one thing. Her name is not suitable. Your mother’s name is also Peony.”
My father looked out across the audience of men, but he spoke to us behind the screen. “From now on, we will call my daughter Tong—
Same—for she is the same as your mother, my young friend.”
I shook my head in disbelief. Baba had just changed my name forever and ever. I was now Tong—a common Same—because of my mother-in-law, someone I had yet to meet but who would have control over me until the day she died. My father had done this without asking me, without even warning me. My poet was right. Three beautiful nights would have to sustain me for a lifetime. But this night was not over, and I refused to sink into despair just yet.
“Let this be a night of celebration,” my father announced. He signaled toward the screen where we women sat. Servants came to escort us back to the Lotus-Blooming Hall. I leaned on Willow’s arm for support and was prepared to let her guide me back to the women’s chambers, when my mother came to my side.
“It seems you are a chosen one tonight,” she said, but the graciousness of her words could not hide the disappointment in her voice. “Willow, ( 6 5 )
allow me to take my daughter back to her room.” Willow let go of me and my mother took my arm in hers. How she managed to look so beautiful and delicate when her fingers were digging into my flesh through my silk tunic, I don’t know. The others parted, and let the head woman of the Chen Family Villa lead her one and only child back to the Lotus-Blooming Hall. The others trailed behind us, quiet as scarves floating on the wind. They didn’t know what I’d done, but clearly I’d been somewhere I shouldn’t have been because they could all see that my feet—
those most private of a woman’s parts—were soiled.
I don’t know what caused me to look back, but I did. Little Ze was walking with Broom. My cousin had a trace of smugness and triumph at the corners of her mouth, but Ze was still too young and unsophisticated to hide her emotions. Her face was red, her jaw clenched, her whole body rigid with anger. I didn’t know why.
We reached the Lotus-Blooming Hall. My mother paused for a moment to tell the others to enjoy themselves; she would return in a few minutes. Then, without another word, she took me to my room in the Unmarried Girls’ Hall, opened the door, and gently pushed me inside.
After she closed the door, I heard something I’d never heard before. It sounded like metal scraping. Only when I tried to open the door again to see what it was did I realize that for the first time my mother had used one of her locks to confine me.
That Mama was angry with me didn’t change the words my poet had spoken in my ear, nor did they alter the feeling that still lingered on my flesh from where he had touched me with the peony. I brought out the willow sprig he’d given me and used it to caress my cheek. Then I put it in a drawer. I undressed my wet feet and wrapped them again in clean bindings. From my window, I did not see the celestial bridge that was supposed to unite the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd, but I did still smell the fragrance of wild roses in my hair and on my skin.
( 6 6 )
Closing Doors,
Opening Heart
mama neve r aga i n m e nt i one d th e wet ne s s and d i rt on my shoes, skirt, and leggings. A servant took those things away, they were never brought back, and I continued to be locked in my room. During the long weeks of my confinement, I would begin to question everything. But at first I was just a sad girl locked in her room with no one to talk to. Even Willow was barred, except to bring me meals and fresh water for washing.
I spent hours at my window, but my view was limited to a small patch of sky above and the courtyard below. I leafed through my copies of The Peony Pavilion. I sought out the scene of The Interrupted Dream, trying to decipher what Liniang and Mengmei were doing together in the grotto. At every moment, I thought about my stranger. The feelings that filled my chest dampened my appetite and emptied my head. I constantly brooded about how I would continue to hold on to my emotions once I got out of this room.
One morning, a week into my confinement, Willow opened the door, padded quietly across the floor, and set down a tray with tea and a bowl of congee for breakfast. I missed her company and the way she cared for me—
brushing my hair, washing and wrapping my feet, keeping the air between us lively with conversation. These past days, she’d been very quiet when she brought my meals, but now she smiled in a way I’d never seen before.
She poured my tea, knelt before me, and looked up into my face, waiting for me to question her.
( 6 7 )
“Tell me what’s happened,” I said, expecting to hear that my mother had decided to release me or that she was going to let Willow stay in my room again.
“When Master Chen asked me to play the part of Spring Fragrance, I said yes, hoping that one of the men in the audience might see me, approach your father, and ask if he would sell me to another household,” she answered, her eyes bright with happiness. “The offer came last night and your father agreed. I’m to leave this afternoon.”
I felt like Willow had just slapped my face. Never in ten thousand years would I have guessed or imagined this.
“But you belong to me!”
“Actually, until yesterday I was your father’s property. Today, I belong to Master Quon.”
That she smiled when she said this unlocked a pocket of anger in me.
“You can’t leave. You can’t want to leave.”
When she didn’t answer, I knew she truly wanted to go. But how could this be? She was my maid and companion. I had never thought about where she’d come from or how she’d come to be my servant, but I’d always believed her to be mine. She was a part of my everyday life like the chamber pot. She was at my feet when I fell asleep; she was the first person I saw in the morning. She started the brazier before I opened my eyes and fetched hot water for bathing me. I had thought she would go with me to my husband’s home. She was supposed to care for me when I got pregnant and had sons. Since she was my age, I had expected her to be with me until I died.
“Every night after you fall asleep, I lie here on the floor and hide my tears in my handkerchief,” she confessed. “For years, I have hoped your father would sell me. If I’m lucky, my new owner will make me a concubine.” She paused, considered, and then added in a practical tone, “A second, third, or fourth concubine.”
That my servant had longings like this shocked me. She was far ahead of me in her thinking, in her desires. She had come from the world outside our garden—the world I was suddenly obsessed with—and I had never once asked her about it.
“How can you do this to me? Where is your gratitude?”
Her smile faded. Did she not answer because she didn’t want to or because she didn’t feel she owed it to me?
“I’m thankful your family took me in,” she admitted. She had a pretty ( 6 8 )
face, but in that moment I saw how much she disliked me, how much she had probably disliked me for years. “Now I can have a different life than the one I was born to as a thin horse.”
I had heard the term before, but I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t fully understand what it meant.
“My family was from Yangzhou, where your grandmother died,” she went on. “Like so many families, mine suffered greatly. The old and ugly women were massacred along with the men. Women like my mother were sold like salted fish—in sacks, by weight. My mother’s new owner was an enterprising man. I was the fourth daughter to be sold. Since then I have been like a leaf in the wind.”
I listened.
“The thin-horse trader bound my feet and taught me to read, sing, embroider, and play the flute,” she continued. “In this way my life was not unlike yours, but in other ways it was very different. Those people grew girls on their land instead of crops.” She lowered her head and glanced at me furtively. “Spring came, autumn went. They could have kept me until I was old enough to sell into pleasure, but inflation and a glut on the market lowered prices. They had to unload some of the crop. One day, they dressed me in red, painted my face white, and took me to market. Your father examined my teeth; he held my feet in his hands; he patted my body.”
“He wouldn’t do that!”
“He did, and I was ashamed. He bought me for a few bolts of cloth.
These last years I hoped that your father might take me as his fourth concubine and that I might bring him the son your mother and the others can’t give him.”
The thought curdled my stomach.
“Today I go to my third owner,” she said matter-of-factly. “Your father has sold me for pork and cash. It’s a good deal, and he’s happy.”
Sold for pork? I was to be married in exchange for bride-price gifts, which included pigs. Perhaps Willow and I were not so different after all.
Neither of us had any say in our futures.
“I’m still young,” Willow said. “I may change hands again if I don’t bear a son or I stop making my master smile. The thin-horse trader taught me that buying a concubine adds to a man’s garden. Some trees bear fruit, some give shade, some give pleasure to the eye. I’m hopeful that I will not be weeded out and sold again.”
“You’re like Xiaoqing,” I said in wonder.
( 6 9 )
“I don’t have her beauty or talent, but I hope my future is better than hers and that in my next life I will not be born in Yangzhou.”
This was my first true understanding that my existence in our garden villa was not at all like that of girls in the outside world. Terrifying and horrible things happened out there. This had been kept a secret from me, and I was grateful but curious. My grandmother had been out there and now she was worshipped as a martyr. Willow had come from out there and her future was as set as my own: Make the man in her life happy, bear him sons, and excel in the Four Virtues.
“So I’m going,” Willow said abruptly, as she got up off her knees.
“Wait.” I stood, crossed to a cabinet, and opened a drawer. I fingered my jewelry and hair ornaments, looking for a piece that would be neither too ordinary nor too extravagant. I settled on a hairpin of blue kingfisher feathers shaped into a soaring phoenix, its tail flowing delicately behind it.
I placed it in Willow’s hand.
“To wear when you meet your new owner.”
“Thank you,” she said, and with that she left the room.
Not two minutes later, Shao, my old wet nurse and our head amah, entered. “I will be taking care of you from now on.”
I could not have received worse news.
my moth e r had plans for me, and Shao, who now lived in my room, had to make sure they were fulfilled. “Tong—Same—you will prepare for your wedding, nothing else,” Shao announced, and she meant it.
Hearing my new name, I had an inward shiver of despair. My place in the world was set by label and designation; through my name I was already changing from a daughter into a wife and daughter-in-law.
For the next seven weeks, Shao brought my meals, but my stomach had become an abyss of anguish and I ignored the food or stubbornly pushed it away. As time passed, my body changed. My skirts started to hang on my hips instead of my waist, and my tunics swung loose and free.
My mother never visited.
“She’s disappointed in you,” Shao reminded me every day. “How could you have come from her body? I tell her a bad daughter is a typical daughter.”
I was book-smart but no match for my mother. Her job was to control me and see me married out to a good family. Although she still did not ( 7 0 )
want to see my face, she sent emissaries. Every morning, Third Aunt arrived just before dawn to teach me to embroider properly.
“No more sloppy or clumsy stitches allowed,” she said, her voice tinkling like white carnelian. If I made a mistake, she made me pull out the stitches and start again. With no distractions and Third Aunt’s exacting instruction, I learned. And with every stitch, I ached for my poet.
As soon as she swept out of the room, Shao let in Second Aunt, who drilled me on my zither. Despite her indulgent reputation, she was very strict with me. If I erred in my plucking, she struck my fingers with a stalk of green bamboo. My zither playing improved surprisingly quickly, becoming clear and limpid. I imagined each note floating out the window and traveling across the lake to my poet’s home, where the music would make him think of me as I was thinking of him.
In the late afternoons, as the colors of evening began to appear in the west, Fourth Aunt, widowed and childless, came to teach me the purpose of clouds and rain.
“A woman’s greatest strength is to give birth to sons,” Fourth Aunt instructed. “It gives a woman power and it can take it away. If you give your husband a son, you might keep him from entering the pleasure quarters on the lake or bringing in concubines. Remember, a woman’s purity grows through seclusion. This is why you’re in here.”
I listened hard to what she said, but she told me nothing about what to expect on my wedding night or how I could participate in clouds and rain with someone I didn’t love, like, or know. I relentlessly conjured the hours leading up to it: my mother, aunts, and cousins washing and dressing me in my wedding clothes; the five grains, the piece of pork, and the pig heart they’d hide in the underskirt I’d wear next to my skin; the tears shed by everyone as I was led outside to the palanquin; stepping over the Wu family threshold and letting that underskirt with its hidden treasures drop to the floor to ensure the fast and easy births of sons; and finally being led into the wedding chamber. These thoughts, which had once filled me with happy expectation, now made me want to run away. That I had no way to escape my fate made me feel even worse.
After dinner, Fifth Aunt took time from the nightly gathering in the women’s chambers to improve my calligraphy. “Writing is a creation of the outer world of men,” she said. “It is by its nature a public act—something that we, as women, should avoid—but you need to learn it so that one day you can help your son with his studies.”
( 7 1 )
We worked through sheet after sheet of paper, copying poems from the Book of Songs, doing drills from Pictures of Battle Formations of the Brush, and limning lessons from the Women’s Four-Character Classic until my fingers were stained with ink.
Apart from perfecting my brushstrokes, Fifth Aunt’s lessons were pure and simple: “The best you can do is take the ancients as your teachers. Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts, or emotions. Make yourself presentable, speak gently but don’t say anything, wash yourself diligently and frequently, and keep a harmonious mind. In this way you will wear your virtue on your face.”
I dutifully obeyed, but each stroke of my brush was a caress I gave my poet. Each swish of my brush was my fingers on his skin. Each character completed was a gift to the man who had so invaded my thoughts.
Every moment of the day and night that one of my aunts wasn’t in my room I still had Shao. Like Willow, she slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. She was there when I woke up, there when I used the chamber pot, there when I did my lessons, there when I went to sleep. I was there for her too, listening to her snoring and farting, smelling her breath and what left her body and went into the chamber pot, watching her scratch her rump or clean her feet. No matter what she did, she was unrelenting in what spewed from her mouth.
“A woman—and your mother has recognized this in you—becomes unruly through knowledge,” she told me, contradicting my aunts’ teach-ings. “In your mind you go too far beyond the inner chambers. It’s dangerous out there; your mother needs you to understand that. Forget what you’ve learned. Instructions from Mother Wen tells us that a girl should know only a few written characters, like firewood, rice, fish, and meat. These words will help you run a household. Anything more is perilous.”
Just as door after door was closing me in, my heart was opening wider and wider. A dream visit to the Peony Pavilion had given Liniang a case of lovesickness. Visits to pavilions in the Chen Family Villa had given me my lovesickness. I had no control over my activities—how I dressed or my future life with this Wu Ren—but my emotions remained untrammeled and free. I’ve come to believe that part of lovesickness comes from this conflict between control and desire. In love we have no control. Our hearts and minds are tormented, teased, enticed, and delighted by the overwhelming strength of emotions that make us try to forget the real world. But that world does exist, so as women we have to think about how to make our ( 7 2 )
husbands happy by being good wives, bearing sons, running our households well, and being pretty so they don’t become distracted from their daily activities or loiter with concubines. We are not born with these abilities. They must be instilled in us by other women. Through lessons, aphorisms, and acquired skills we are molded . . . and controlled.
My mother controlled me through her instructions even as she refused to see me. My aunts controlled me through their lessons. My future mother-in-law would control me after marriage. Together, these women—from the time I was born until the day I died—would control every single minute of my life.
Yet for every effort at control, I was spinning away. At every moment, my poet invaded my thoughts—during every stitch, every strum, every didactic lesson. He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him. Each time petal-scented air came through my window, my emotions were thrown into turmoil. Did he long for a traditional wife or a new wife, like the one he talked about the night we met in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion? Would his future wife give him what he wanted? And what about me? What would happen to me now?
At night, as moonlight sent scattered shadows of bamboo leaves across my silk bedding, I dwelled in these dark thoughts. Sometimes I would get up, step over Shao, and go to the drawer where I kept the sprig of willow my poet had given me on our last night together. As the weeks went by, leaf after leaf fell away and crumbled to nothing, until all that was left was the twig. My little speck of a heart was soaked through with sadness.
Over time I improved on the zither, memorized rules, and worked on my embroidery. Two months into my seclusion, Third Aunt announced,
“You are ready to make shoes for your mother-in-law.”
Every bride does this as a sign of respect, but for years I’d dreaded this task, knowing my needlework would instantly reveal my flaws. Now I dreaded it even more. While I would no longer embarrass myself or bring shame on my family through my stitches, I had no feelings for this woman and felt no need to impress her. I tried to imagine she was my poet’s mother. What else could I do to protect myself from the hopelessness I felt? My mother-in-law’s name was the same as mine—Peony—so I in-corporated that flower, the hardest of all to paint or stitch, into my design.
I spent hours on each petal and leaf until after a month the shoes were completed. I held the pair in my hand and showed them to Third Aunt.
( 7 3 )
“They are perfect,” she said, and she meant it. I may not have woven in strands of my hair or made them as airy as she would have, but by any other standard they were splendid. “You may wrap them.”
on th e n i nth day of the ninth month, when we commemorate Lady Purple, who was treated so badly by her mother-in-law that she hanged herself in the privy she was required to clean each day, the door to my room opened and my mother entered. I bowed deeply to show my respect, and then I stood still, my hands clasped before me, my eyes cast down.
“Waaa! You look . . . !” The surprise in Mama’s voice caused me to glance up. She must have still been angry with me, because her face was disturbed. But she had perfected the art of hiding her feelings, and her features quickly settled. “Your final bride-price gifts have arrived. You might like to see them before they’re put away. But I expect you to—”
“Don’t worry, Mama. I’ve changed.”
“I see that,” she said, but again I did not detect pleasure in her tone.
Rather, I heard concern. “Come. Take a look. Then I want you to join us for breakfast.”
As I left my room, a single thread held together my emotions—loneli-ness, despair, and my unwavering love for my poet. I had learned to vent my sorrows through sighs.
I followed my mother at a respectful distance to the Sitting-Down Hall. My bride-price gifts had been brought to our home in lacquer-framed boxes that looked like glass coffins. My family had received the usual items: silks and satins, gold and jewelry, porcelains and ceramics, cakes and dumplings, jars of wine and roast pork. Some of these things were for me; most were for my father’s coffers. Ample gifts of cash were for my uncles. This was physical proof that my marriage was going to happen—and soon. I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep from crying.
Once my emotions were under control, I planted a placid smile on my face. I was out of my room at last and my mother would be watching for any lapse in the proprieties. I had to be wary.
My eyes fell on a package wrapped in red silk. I glanced at my mother, and she nodded to let me know I could open it. I peeled back the soft folds. Inside was a two-volume set of The Peony Pavilion. It was the only edition I didn’t already own, the one from Tang Xianzu’s private press. I opened the note that came with the set. Dear Same, I look forward to staying ( 7 4 )
up late with you, drinking tea, and talking about the opera. It was signed by my future husband’s sister-in-law, who already lived in the Wu household.
The bride-price payments were fine, but this gift told me that there was at least one person in the Wu family’s women’s chambers with whom I might find companionship.
“May I keep this?” I asked my mother.
Her brow furrowed and I thought she would say no.
“Take it to your room and then come straight away to the Spring Pavilion. You need to eat.”
I clutched the volumes to my chest, walked slowly back to my room, and set them on my bed. Then, following my mother’s orders, I went to the Spring Pavilion.
I’d been locked away for two months, and I looked at the room and everyone in it with new eyes. The usual tensions bubbled among my aunts, my cousins, my mother, and those women and girls who were unseen in the morning—the concubines and their daughters. But because I’d been away I saw and felt an undercurrent that I’d never fully noticed before. Every woman is expected to be pregnant at least ten times during her lifetime. The women in the Chen Family Villa had trouble getting pregnant, and when they did they seemed incapable of dropping a son.
This lack of sons weighed on everyone. The concubines were supposed to rescue our dying family line, but even though we fed, clothed, and housed them, none of them had birthed a boy either. They may not have been allowed physically to join us for breakfast, but they were with us nonethe-less.
My cousins seemed to have a new attitude toward me. Broom, who’d orchestrated my confinement, used her chopsticks to put a few dumplings on my plate. Lotus poured my tea and handed me her bowl of congee, which she’d flavored with salted fish and scallions. My aunts came by the table, welcomed me back with smiling faces, and urged me to eat. But I didn’t take a single bite. I even ignored the sweet-bean paste dumplings that Shao delivered from my mother’s table.
When the meal ended, we moved to the Lotus-Blooming Hall. Little clusters formed: one group to embroider, another to paint and do calligraphy, yet another to read poetry. The concubines arrived and came to peck at me, present me with treats, and pinch my cheeks to bring in color. Only two of my grandfather’s concubines were still alive, and they were very old. Their face powder accentuated their wrinkles. Their hair ornaments did not make them look younger but only highlighted the white. Their ( 7 5 )
waists were big, but their feet were still as tiny and beautiful as they were on those nights when my grandfather had eased his mind by holding the delicate morsels in his hand.
“You look more like your grandmother every day,” Grandfather’s favorite said.
“You are as kind and good-natured as she was,” the other added.
“Please join us for embroidery,” the favorite went on. “Or choose another activity. It would please us to keep you company in whatever activity you desire. We are a sisterhood in this room, after all. When we were hiding from the Manchus in Yangzhou, your grandmother was very clear on this point.”
“From the afterworld she looks to your future,” the lesser concubine said, in an obsequious tone. “We’ve been making offerings to her on your behalf.”
After so many weeks of solitude, the chatter and competitiveness—all hidden behind the activities of embroidery, calligraphy, and reading poetry—clearly revealed to me the shadow darkness of the women who lived in the Chen Family Villa. I felt tears gather from the exertion of trying to be a good daughter, of listening and protecting myself from their false concern, and of realizing that this was my life.
But I could not fight my mother.
I wanted to submerge myself in my feelings. I wanted to bury myself in thoughts of love. I had no way to get out of my marriage, but maybe I could escape from it in the same way I had here in my natal home, by reading, writing, and imagining. I wasn’t a man and could never compete with the writings of men. I had no desire to write an eight-legged essay, even if I could have taken the imperial exams. But I did have a certain kind of knowledge—all those things I had learned sitting on my father’s lap when I was a small girl and later when he gave me editions of the classics and volumes of poetry to study—that most girls didn’t, and I would use it to save myself. I wouldn’t write poetry about butterflies and flowers. I had to find something that would not only be meaningful to me but would sustain me for the rest of my life.
A thousand years ago, the poet Han Yun wrote, “All things not at peace will cry out.” He compared the human need to express feelings in writing to the natural force that impelled plants to rustle in the wind or metal to ring when struck. With that I realized what I would do. It was something I’d already worked on for years. With the outside world stripped away, I had spent my life looking inward and my emotions were finely tuned. My ( 7 6 )
poet wanted to know my thoughts about the Seven Emotions; now I would find all those places in The Peony Pavilion that illustrated them. I would look inside myself and write not what the critics had observed or what my aunts discussed about these emotions but how I felt them myself.
I would finish my project in time for my marriage, so I could go to Wu Ren’s home with something that would remind me forever of the three nights of love I’d spent with my poet. My project would be my salvation in the coming dark years. I might be locked in my husband’s home, but my mind would travel to the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, where I could meet my poet again and again without interruption or fear of being caught. My poet would never read it, but I could always imagine presenting it to him—me unclothed on his bed and naked in my heart and mind.
I stood up abruptly, scraping my chair against the floor. The sound caused the women and girls to stare at me. I saw the way their hate and jealousy hid behind pretty faces filled with false worry and concern.
“Tong,” my mother said, addressing me by my new name.
My head felt like ants were crawling inside it. I composed my face as best I could.
“Mama, may I go to Baba’s library?”
“He’s not there. He’s gone to the capital.”
The news shocked me. He had not been back to the capital since the Manchus took over.
“Even if he were here,” she went on, “I would say no. He’s a bad influence. He thinks a girl should know about Xiaoqing. Well, look what that kind of lesson has brought you.” She said this in front of every woman who lived in our compound. This is how great her scorn and contempt for me was. “The Cataclysm is over. We have to remember who we are: women who belong in our inner chambers, not wandering in the garden.”
“I only want to look up something,” I said. “Please, Mama, let me go.
I’ll return shortly.”
“I’ll accompany you. Let me hold your arm.”
“Mama, I’m fine. Really. I’ll be right back.”
Nearly everything I said to my mother was a lie, but she let me go anyway.
I left the Lotus-Blooming Hall feeling light-headed and wandered through the corridors until I could step out and into the garden. It was the ninth month. The blossoms had faded, their pitiful petals fallen. The birds had left for warmer climates. With spring feelings so strong in me, it hurt to see this reminder of the frailty of youth, life, and beauty.
( 7 7 )
When I came to the edge of our pond, I sank to my knees so I might see my reflection on the glassy surface. Lovesickness had caused my face to grow thin and pale. My body looked less substantial, as if it could no longer bear the weight of my tunic. My gold bracelets hung loosely on my wrists. Even my jade hairpins seemed too heavy for the lightness of my frame. Would my poet recognize me if he saw me now?
I stood again, lingering for a moment to see my reflection one last time, and then I retraced my steps until I was back in the corridor. I walked to the front gate. Over the last sixteen years I’d come here many times but had never stepped through it or been carried over the threshold. That would happen only on my wedding day. I ran my fingers along its surface.
My father had once explained to me that we had a wind-fire gate. The side that faced the outside world was composed of solid wood. It protected us from all kinds of weather, but it also shielded us from ghosts and bandits by tricking them into believing that nothing of importance or interest resided on our side. The inside of the gate was sheathed in shaved stone to protect us from fire and give us extra fortification against whatever evils might try to penetrate our garden home. Touching those stone sheets was like touching the cold yin of the earth. From there I went to the ancestral hall, made obeisance to my grandmother, lit incense, and begged her to make me strong.
Finally, I went to my father’s library. When I stepped inside I could see that my father had been away for some time. I smelled no tobacco or incense floating on the air. The trays that held his summer ice had been removed, but no braziers had been brought in to heat the room against the autumn chill. More than anything, the energy of his mind was gone not only from this room but—I felt it now—from the compound. He was the most important person in the Chen Family Villa. How had I not noticed his absence, even alone in my room?
I went to the shelves and selected the best collections of poetry, history, myth, and religion I could find. I made three trips to my room to drop them off. I came back to the library and sat for a few minutes on the edge of Baba’s daybed to think if there was anything else I might want. I chose another three books from a stack in the corner, and then I left the library and made my way back to my room. I entered, and this time I closed the door of my own accord.
( 7 8 )
Jade Shattering
i spe nt th e ne xt month p ori ng ove r eac h of th e twelve editions of The Peony Pavilion I’d collected and transcrib-ing all the notes I’d ever written in those copies into the margins of Tang Xianzu’s original two-volume edition my future sister-in-law had sent me. Once I finished that, I gathered my father’s books around me and looked through them until, after another month, I’d identified all but three of the original authors of the pastiches in Volume One and most of those in Volume Two. I didn’t explain terms or allusions, comment on the music or performance, or try to compare The Peony Pavilion to other operas. I wrote in tiny characters, packing them tightly between the lines of the text.
I didn’t leave my room. I allowed Shao to wash and dress me, but I turned away from the food she brought. I wasn’t hungry; being light-headed seemed to make me think and write more clearly. When my aunts or cousins came to invite me to take a walk in the garden or join them for tea and dumplings in the Spring Pavilion, I graciously thanked them but said no. Not surprisingly, my attitude did not agree with my mother. I didn’t tell her what I was doing and she didn’t ask. “You cannot learn to be a good wife by hiding in your room with your father’s books,” she said.
“Come to the Spring Pavilion. Have breakfast and listen to your aunts.
Come for lunch and learn how to treat your husband’s concubines. Join us at dinner and perfect your conversation.”
( 7 9 )
Suddenly everyone wanted me to have a meal, but for years my mother had told me to beware of becoming chubby like Broom and to eat little so I would be slim at my wedding. But how can you eat anyway when you’re in love? Every girl has this experience. Every girl knows this is so. My heart was dreaming of my poet, my head was filled with this project that I was sure would protect me in my married loneliness, and my stomach? It was empty and I didn’t care.
I began to stay in bed. All day I read from the two volumes. All night I read by the flickering light of the oil lamp. The more I read, the more I began to think about the small links that Tang Xianzu had used to create a deeper whole. I pondered the key moments in the opera, the foreshadow-ing, the special motifs, and how every word and action illuminated the one thing I was obsessed with: love.
The plum tree, for example, was an arbor of life and love. It was the place where Liniang and Mengmei first met, where she would be buried, and where he would bring her back to life. In the very first scene, Mengmei changed his name because of a dream, becoming Dream of Plum. But the tree also evoked Liniang, for plum blossoms are delicate, ethereal, almost virginal in their beauty. When a girl falls into marriage, she exhales her beauty and loses forever her romantic image. She still has many obligations to fulfill—giving birth to sons, honoring her husband’s ancestors, becoming a chaste widow—but she has already begun her glide into death.
I pulled out my ink, ground it into the inkstone, added water, and then in my finest hand wrote my thoughts in the upper margin of Volume One: Most of those who grieve over spring are especially moved by fallen blossoms, as I was when I last walked in our garden. Liniang sees the petals and understands that her youth and her beauty are fleeting. She doesn’t know that her life is frail too.
What had always captured my imagination about the opera was its por-trayal of romantic love, which was so different from the arranged loveless marriages that I’d grown up with in the Chen Family Villa or the one I was going to. To me, qing was noble, the highest ambition a man or woman could have. Although my experience of it was limited to three nights under the light of the quarter moon, I believed it gave meaning to life.
Everything begins with love. For Liniang, it begins with her tour of the garden, then her dream, and it never ends.
( 8 0 )
Liniang’s ghost and Mengmei enjoyed clouds and rain. They were both so honest in their love for each other—as my poet and I were—that this was not some ugly thing between a concubine and a man.
Theirs is a purely divine love. Liniang always behaves like a lady.
As I wrote this, I thought of myself on the last night in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion.
I wrote about dreams—Liniang’s, Mengmei’s, and my own. I also thought about Liniang’s self-portrait and compared it to what I was doing with my project. In the upper margin, I wrote in my finest hand: A painting is form without shadow or reflection, just as a dream is shadow or reflection without form. A painting is like a shadow without a frame. It is even more of an illusion than a dream.
Shadows, dreams, reflections in mirrors and ponds, even memories were insubstantial and fleeting, but were they any less real? They weren’t to me.
I dipped my brush in the ink, smoothed off the excess, and wrote: Du Liniang sought pleasure in a dream; Liu Mengmei sought a mate in a painting. If you don’t consider such things illusion, then illusion will become real.
I worked so hard and ate so little that I began to doubt I had ever met a stranger in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion for two nights. Had the poet and I actually left the Moon-Viewing Pavilion to walk along the lakeshore?
Was all that a dream or real? It had to be real, and very shortly I would be sent into a marriage with someone I did not love.
When Liniang goes to the library, she passes by a window and wants to fly out to meet her lover. Naturally, she is too afraid to do so.
Tears came to my eyes, rolled down my cheeks, and fell onto the paper as I wrote this.
Visions of love consumed me. What little appetite that had survived my first confinement left me completely. Xiaoqing used to drink half a cup of pear juice each day; I took only a few sips. Not eating stopped being about maintaining control over my life. It even stopped being about my poet and ( 8 1 )
the tumultuous feelings of love and longing I felt were consuming me.
One of the sages once wrote: Only when you are suffering in extremity will the poetry you write be any good. Gu Ruopu, the great woman poet, responded to this when she commented: Officials and scholars will engrave their very flesh and carve into bone, turning white-haired and using up their lives contriving to produce dark and melancholy lines.
I traveled to a place deep within myself where everything worldly was stripped away and I felt only emotion: love, regret, longing, hope. I sat propped up in bed, wearing my favorite gown with the pair of mandarin ducks flying above flowers and butterflies, and allowed my mind to travel to the Peony Pavilion. Had Liniang’s dreams compromised her chastity?
Had my dreams—my wandering in our family garden—compromised my own? Was I no longer pure because I’d met a stranger and let him touch me with the petals of a peony?
wh i le i f eve ri sh ly wrote, wedding preparations swirled around me.
One day a seamstress put me into my wedding costume and then took it away to make it smaller. Another day Mama arrived with my aunts. I was in bed, my books spread about me on the silk coverlet. They had smiles on their faces, but they weren’t happy.
“Your father has sent word from the capital,” Mama said, in her melodious voice. “He’s going back into service for the emperor as soon as you are married.”
“Have the Manchus left?” I asked. Had I missed a dynastic change during my confinement?
“No, your father will be serving the Qing emperor.”
“But Baba is a loyalist. How can he—”
“You should eat.” Mama cut me off. “Wash your hair, put on powder, and be prepared to greet him when he returns, as a proper daughter should. He has brought great honor to our family. You need to show him respect. Now get up!”
But I didn’t.
My mother left the room, but my aunts stayed. They tried to get me out of bed and make me stand, but I was as slippery and formless as an eel in their hands. My thoughts were just as elusive. How could my father serve the emperor when he was a loyalist? Would my mother leave the compound and follow him to the capital, as she once had to Yangzhou?
( 8 2 )
The next day, Mama brought the family diviner to discuss how to bring more color to my cheeks before my wedding.
“Do you have spring tea from Longjing?” he asked. “Brew it with ginger to improve her stomach and build her strength.”
I tried the tea, but it didn’t help. A light wind would have kept me from walking. Even my bed dress seemed heavy on me.
He gave me ten sour apricots—the common prescription for young women whose thoughts are considered a little overripe—but my mind did not go in the prescribed direction. Instead, I thought about being married to my poet and the salted plums I would eat when I got pregnant with our first son, knowing they would help me with morning sickness.
The diviner returned to sprinkle pig’s blood on my bed in an attempt to exorcise the spirits he was convinced hovered there. When he was done, he said, “If you start eating again, on your wedding day your skin and hair will exceed all earthly models of beauty.”
But I wasn’t interested in marrying Wu Ren and I certainly didn’t care to eat as a way to make him happier on our wedding day. It barely mattered anyway. My future was set and I had already done everything I needed to do to prepare for my wedding. I had perfected my embroidery. I could now play the zither. Every day Shao dressed me in tunics embroidered with flowers and butterflies or two birds in flight as an outward expression of the love and happiness I was supposedly feeling for my coming life in my husband’s home. I just didn’t eat, not even fruit; rarely anything beyond a few sips of juice. I fed myself by ingesting mystic breath, by thinking of love, by remembering my adventure with my poet outside the garden walls.
The diviner left instructions to keep the door to the hall closed at all times, to prevent any malevolent spirits from entering, and to readjust the stove in the kitchen and shift the direction of my bed to take advantage of more favorable aspects of feng shui. Mama and the servants made sure these things were done, but I didn’t feel any different. The moment they left the room, I went back to my writing. You cannot cure a longing heart by changing the direction of the bed.
A few days later, Mama arrived with Doctor Zhao, who listened to the various pulses in my wrist and announced, “The heart is the seat of consciousness, and your daughter’s is congested with too much yearning.”
I was happy to be officially diagnosed as lovesick. A fanciful thought entered my mind. What if I died from my lovesickness as Liniang did?
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги