Peony in Love

( 8 3 )

Would my poet find me and bring me back to life? The idea pleased me, but my mother had a very different reaction to the doctor’s news. She buried her face in her hands and wept.

The doctor led her away from my bed and lowered his voice. “This kind of melancholy syndrome is also associated with spleen dysfunction.

It can cause someone to stop eating. What I’m telling you, Lady Chen, is that your daughter could die from her congested qi. ”

Aiya! Doctors always try to scare mothers. This is how they make money.

“You must force her to eat,” he said.

And that’s exactly what they did. Shao and Mama held down my arms, while the doctor pushed clumps of cooked rice into my mouth and held my jaw shut. A servant brought in stewed plums and apricots. The doctor shoved the soggy pieces into my mouth until I vomited out everything.

He looked at me in disgust, but to my mother he said, “Do not worry.

This stasis is related to the passions. If she were a wife already, I would say that a night of clouds and rain would cure her. Since she is not yet married, she must silence her desires. Good Mother, on her wedding night she will be cured. But you may not have enough time to wait for that. I’m going to recommend that you try something different.” He took her elbow again, pulled her close, and whispered in her ear. When he let her go, a mask of grim determination covered her fear. “Anger is often enough to release the stasis,” he added reassuringly.

Mama escorted the doctor out of the room. I laid my head back on the pillow, my books spread out about me on the bedclothes. I picked up Volume One of The Peony Pavilion, closed my eyes, and let my mind drift across the lake to my poet’s home. Was he thinking of me as I was thinking of him?

The door opened. Mama entered with Shao and a couple of other servants.

“Start with those over there,” Mama said, pointing to the stack of books I had on a table. “And you, get those on the floor.”

Mama and Shao approached my bed and gathered up the books nestled near my feet.

“We’re removing the books,” Mama announced. “The doctor has instructed me to burn them.”

“No!” Instinctively I tightened my arms around the book I was holding. “Why?”

“Doctor Zhao says it will cure you. On this he has been very clear.”

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“You can’t do this!” I cried. “They belong to Baba!”

“Then you won’t mind,” Mama replied calmly.

I dropped the book I was holding and frantically scrambled free of my silk quilt. I tried to stop Mama and the others, but I was too weak. The servants left with their first piles of books. I screamed, my arms stretched out to them as though I were a beggar instead of the privileged daughter in a family of nine generations of imperial scholars. These were our books!

Precious with learning! Divine with love and art!

On the bed I had my editions of The Peony Pavilion. Mama and Shao started to take those too. The horror of what they were about to do sent me into a frenzied panic.

“You can’t! They’re mine!” I screamed, gathering together as many of the volumes as I could reach, but Mama and Shao were suprisingly strong.

They ignored me, slapping away my efforts to save my books as easily as they might a pesky gnat.

“My project, please, Mama,” I cried. “I’ve worked so hard.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You have only one project: to get married,” she said, as she swooped up the edition of The Peony Pavilion that Baba had given me for my birthday.

Outside, in the courtyard below my room, I heard voices.

Mama said, “You need to see what your selfishness has created.”

She nodded to Shao and the two of them pulled me from the bed and dragged me to the window. Below, the servants had lit a fire in a brazier.

One by one they dropped Baba’s books into the flames. The lines of the Tang dynasty poets he loved disappeared into the air as smoke. I saw a volume of women’s writings burn and curl into nothing. My chest heaved with sobs. Shao released me and went back to the bed to gather up the rest of the books.

When she left the room, Mama asked, “Are you angry?”

I was not that. I felt nothing but despair. Books and poems can’t keep away hunger, but without them I didn’t have a life.

“Please tell me you are angry,” Mama pleaded. “The doctor said you’d get angry.”

When I didn’t answer, she spun away from me and sank to her knees.

Below, I watched as Shao dropped the editions of The Peony Pavilion I’d collected into the flames. As each one was eaten by the fire, I shriveled inside. Those were my most treasured possessions. Now they’d been reduced to tiny feathers of ash that drifted up on the wind and out and away from our compound. My project and all my hopes for it disappeared. I was ( 8 5 )

numb with despair. How could I go to my husband’s home now? How would I survive my loneliness?

Next to me, Mama cried. Her body bent forward until her forehead was on the ground, and then she shuffled to me, as submissive as a servant. She gathered the hem of my skirt into her fingers and buried her face in the silk.

“Please be angry with me.” Her voice was so soft I could barely hear her. “Please, daughter, please.”

I let my hand rest lightly on the back of her neck, but I didn’t say a word. I just stared at the fire.

A few minutes later, Shao came and took Mama away.

I stayed by the window, my arms resting on the sill. The garden was bleak in winter. Storms and frost had stripped the trees bare. The shadows lengthened and the light dimmed. I didn’t have the strength to move.

Everything I’d been working on had been destroyed. At last, I pulled myself up. My head spun. My legs trembled. I thought my lily feet wouldn’t be able to bear my weight. Slowly I made my way across the room to the bed. The silk quilt was twisted and rumpled from my futile attempts to save my books. I pulled back the quilt and climbed back in the bed. As my legs slipped down under the cool silk I felt them bump into something. I reached under the fabric and pulled out Volume One of the copy of The Peony Pavilion that my future sister-in-law had sent me. In the madness of the purge, this one book with all the writing in the margins had been saved. I sobbed in gratitude and grief.

s om et i m e s late at night after that horrible day I’d leave my bed, step over Shao’s sleeping form, and go to the window, where I’d pull aside the heavy curtains that kept out the winter cold. The snows had come and the thought of once-fragrant blossoms being crushed by the bitter whiteness troubled me. I stared at the moon and watched its slow trek across the sky.

Night after night, dew dampened my gown, weighted my hair, chilled my fingers.

I could no longer bear the endlessness of the frigid days. I thought of Xiaoqing and how she had dressed every day, smoothing her skirts about her. She had sat up in bed so as not to muss her hair, she had tried to remain beautiful, but the bleak gloom I felt about my future life paralyzed me and I did none of these things. I even stopped caring for my feet. Shao washed and wrapped them with great tenderness. I was grateful but wary ( 8 6 )

too. I kept my saved volume of The Peony Pavilion hidden in the silks around me, afraid that she would find it and tell Mama, and it would be taken away to be burned.

Doctor Zhao came again. He examined me, frowned, but then said,

“You took the correct action, Lady Chen. You exorcised the curse of literacy from your daughter. Burning those inauspicious books has helped ward off the evil spirits that surround her.”

He listened to my pulses, watched me breathe in and out, asked me a few meaningless questions, and then announced, “Maidens, particularly at the moment of marriage, are susceptible to the evil attention of malevolent spirits. Young girls often lose their minds to these apparitions. The more beautiful the girl, the more she will suffer from chills and fever.

She’ll stop eating, much as your daughter has stopped eating, until she dies.” He squeezed his chin thoughtfully before going on. “This, as you might expect, is not something a future husband wants to hear. And I can say from experience that many girls in our city have used this claim to keep from having conjugal relations upon marrying into their husbands’

homes. But, Lady Chen, you should be grateful. Your daughter is clear of such debauchery. She claims no improper relations with any gods or spirits. She is still pure and ready for marriage.”

These words did not cheer my mother, and I felt even worse. I saw no way out of my wedding night or the unhappy years that would come af-terward.

“Tea brewed from fresh snow will cause her cheeks to bloom in time for the ceremony,” Doctor Zhao said as he left.

Every day Mama came to stand by my bed, her face wan with dread.

She begged me to get up, visit my aunts and cousins, or eat a little. I tried to laugh lightly at her concern.

“I’m fine here, Mama. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”

But my words gave her no comfort. She brought back the diviner. This time he slashed the air around my bed with a sword, trying to scare away the evil spirits he claimed lurked there. He hung an amulet of stone around my neck to prevent my soul from being stolen by a hungry ghost.

He asked my mother for one of my skirts into which he tied bundles of peanuts, telling her that each peanut would serve as a prison for predatory spirits. He shouted out incantations. I pulled the bedclothes up over my face so he wouldn’t see my tears.

.

.

.

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f or dau g h te r s, marry i ng out is a little like dying. We say goodbye to our parents, our aunts and uncles, our cousins, and the servants who cared for us, and go into an entirely new life, where we live with our true families, where our names will be listed in our in-laws’ ancestral hall. In this way, marriage is like experiencing death and rebirth without having to travel to the afterworld. These are morbid thoughts for any bride, I know, but mine were compounded by my unhappy situation. That morbidity sent my mind into darker and darker places. Sometimes I even believed—

hoped—I might be dying like Xiaoqing or the other lovesick maidens. I let my mind dwell in theirs. I used my tears to mix the ink, and then I took up my brush. Lines of poetry flowed from the tip: I have learned to use the pattern of butterflies and flowers in my embroidery.

I have been doing this for years, because I’m expecting my wedding day.

Do people know that once I go to the afterworld The flowers will not be fragrant, nor the butterflies fly for me?

For days my mind burned with words and emotions. I wrote and wrote. When I felt too tired and weary to lift my brush I had Shao write down my poems for me. She did as she was told. Over the next few days, I dictated another eight. My words floated out one by one, like peach flowers floating on a grotto stream.

We reached the twelfth month. Charcoal burned all day and night in the brazier, but I was never warm. I was to be married in ten days.

My silk slippers are only seven centimeters long.

My waistband is loose even though I fold it in half.

Since my fragile being does not allow me to walk to the afterworld, I have to lean on the wind to go there.

I worried that someone would find them and laugh at my melodrama or say my words had as much importance and permanence as the songs of insects. I folded the pieces of paper and looked around the room for a place to hide them, but all my furniture would eventually be taken to my husband’s home.

I was adamant that my poems not be found, but I didn’t have the strength of will to set fire to them. Too many women burn their words in a fit of thinking them not worthy, only to regret it later. I wanted to keep ( 8 8 )

these, imagining that one day, after I was a married lady with children of my own, I might forget my poet. I would come to visit my family, find my poems, read them again, and remember my lovesick girlhood. Wouldn’t that be for the best?

But I would never forget what had happened. This made me even more determined to find a safe place for my poems. No matter what the future held, I would always be able to come here and relive my sentiments. I forced myself out of bed and went into the corridor. It was early evening and everyone was at dinner. I made my way—and it seemed to take forever to get there as I steadied myself by holding on to the walls, grasping pillars, or clinging to the balustrades—to my father’s library. I pulled out a book no one would ever look at, on the history of dam building in the southern provinces, and tucked my poems between its pages. I put the book back and stared at it to remember the title and its place on the shelf.

When I returned to my room, I picked up my brush for the last time before my marriage. On the outside of my volume of The Peony Pavilion, I painted my interpretation of The Interrupted Dream, the scene where Mengmei and Liniang first meet. My painting showed the two of them before the rockery, just moments before they would disappear into the grotto for clouds and rain. I waited until my ink dried, and then I opened the book and wrote:

When people are alive, they love. When they die, they keep loving. If love ends when a person dies, that is not real love.

I closed the book and called for Shao.

“You saw me when I came into the world,” I said. “Now you see me as I leave for my new home. I can trust no one else.”

Tears ran down Shao’s stern face. “What do you want me to do?”

“You must promise to obey, no matter what Mama or Baba say. They have taken away so much from me, but I have things that must go with me to my new home. Promise you will bring them three days after my marriage.”

I saw hesitation in her eyes. She shivered once, and said, “I promise.”

“Please bring me the shoes I made for Madame Wu.”

Shao left the room. I lay very still, staring at the ceiling, listening to the honking of orphaned geese as they crossed the sky. They made me think of Xiaoqing’s poems and the way she’d invoked that sorrowful sound.

( 8 9 )

Then I remembered the nameless woman who’d written her despair on a wall in Yangzhou. She too had heard the calling of geese. I sighed as I remembered her line, If only my tears of blood could dye red the blossoms of the plum tree. But I will never make it to spring. . . .

A few minutes later, Shao returned with the shoes, still in the silk I’d wrapped them in.

“Put them in a safe place. Don’t let Mama know you have them.”

“Of course, Peony.”

I had not been called by my milk name since my father changed it on the final night of the opera.

“There is one more thing,” I said. I reached under my bedclothes and pulled out my saved copy of The Peony Pavilion.

Shao drew back in alarm.

“This is the most important item in my dowry. Mama and Baba don’t know about it and you must never tell them. Promise!”

“I promise,” she mumbled.

“Keep it safe. Only you can bring it to me. Three days after my marriage. Don’t forget.”

baba returne d f rom his trip to the capital. For the first time in my life he came to visit me in my room. He hesitated by the door, too nervous to approach.

“Daughter,” he said, “your marriage is only five days away. Your mother tells me you refuse to rise and perform your toilette, but you must get up. You don’t want to miss your wedding.”

When I hung my head in resignation, he crossed the room, sat on the bed, and took my hand.

“I pointed your husband out to you on the last night of the opera,” he said. “Were you unhappy with what you saw?”

“I didn’t look,” I answered.

“Oh, Peony, I wish now I’d told you more about him, but you know how your mother is.”

“That’s all right, Baba. I promise to do what’s expected of me. I won’t embarrass you or Mama. I’ll make Wu Ren happy.”

“Wu Ren is a good man,” Baba went on, ignoring what I’d said. “I’ve known him since he was a boy and I have never seen him do anything improper.” He smiled lightly. “Except for one time. That night after the opera he approached me. He gave me something to give you.” Baba shook ( 9 0 )

his head. “I may be master of the Chen family, but your mother has her rules and already she was angry with me about the performance. I didn’t give it to you then. Even I knew it was improper. So I saved what he gave me in a book of poetry. Knowing both of you, I thought that was the right place.”

A gift five months ago or now wouldn’t change how I viewed my future husband or my marriage. I saw duty and responsibility, nothing more.

“And now here we are, just a few days before . . .” Baba shook his head as though he was driving out an unpleasant thought. “I don’t think your mother will mind if I give it to you now.”

He let go of my hand, reached into his tunic, and pulled out something small folded in rice paper. I didn’t have the strength to lift my head off the pillow, but I watched as he unfolded the paper. Inside was a dried peony, which he set in my palm. I stared at it in disbelief.

“Ren is just two years older than you,” Baba said, “but he’s done so much already. He’s a poet.”

“A poet?” I echoed. My mind was having a hard time accepting what I held in my hand, while my ears seemed to be hearing Baba’s words from the bottom of a cave.

“A successful one,” Baba added. “His work has already been published, even though he’s so young. He lives on Wushan Mountain just across the lake. If I hadn’t left for the capital, I would have shown you his home from my library window. But I was gone, and now you are—”

He was talking about my stranger, my poet. The dried flower I held in my hand was the one he’d caressed me with in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. Everything I had been dreading was wrong. I was going to marry the man I loved. Fate had brought us together. We truly were like two mandarin ducks mated for life.

My body began to shake uncontrollably, and tears streamed from my eyes. Baba lifted me up as though I weighed no more than a leaf and held me in his arms.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, trying to comfort me. “Every girl is afraid to marry out, but I didn’t know how bad it was with you.”

“I’m not crying because I’m sad or scared. Oh, Baba, I am the happiest girl ever.”

He didn’t seem to have heard me, because he said, “You would have been happy with Ren.”

He laid me gently back down on my pillow. I tried to bring the flower up to my nose to see if its scent still lingered, but I was too weak. Baba ( 9 1 )

took the flower and placed it on my chest. It felt as heavy as a stone on my heart.

Tears gathered in Baba’s eyes. How perfect that father and daughter should be united in their happiness.

“I need to tell you something,” he said urgently. “It’s a secret about our family.”

He had already given me the greatest wedding gift possible.

“You know I once had two other younger brothers,” he said.

I was so elated—because Wu Ren was my poet, we were to be married shortly, and we were living a miracle—that it was hard for me to focus on who Baba was talking about. I had seen these uncles’ names in the ancestral hall, but no one ever went to clean their graves at Spring Festival. I’d always supposed they’d died at birth, which was why so little attention was paid to them.

“They were just boys when my father got his posting to Yangzhou,”

Baba went on. “My parents trusted me to take care of this villa and the family in their absence, but they took the youngest boys with them. Your mother and I went to Yangzhou for a visit, but we couldn’t have chosen a worse time. The Manchus came.”

He paused to gauge my reaction. I didn’t know why he was telling me something so grim at this wonderful moment. When I didn’t say anything, he continued.

“My father, my brothers, and I were herded along with the other men to a gated area. We didn’t know what happened to the women, and your mother to this day has not spoken of it, so I can only tell you what I saw.

My little brothers and I had one duty as sons, and that was to make sure our father survived. We stood around him, shielding him not only from the soldiers but also from the other desperate prisoners, who would easily have turned him over to the Manchus if they thought it might save them.”

This was more than I had ever known. But as happy as I was, my mind was troubled. Where were my mother and grandmother?

Snatching this thought from my head, my father said, “I did not have the privilege of witnessing my mother’s bravery, but I saw my brothers die. Oh, Peony, men can be very cruel.”

He suddenly seemed unable to speak. And again I wondered, Why tell me all this now?

After a long while, he went on. “When you meet them, please tell them I’m sorry. Tell them we try to honor them as best we can. Our offerings ( 9 2 )

have been great, but they still have not granted our family sons. Peony, you’ve been a good daughter. Please see how you can help.”

I was confused and I think my father was too. My responsibility was to bring sons to my husband’s family, not to my natal family.

“Baba,” I reminded him, “I’m marrying into the Wu family.”

He closed his eyes and turned his face away. “Of course,” he said gruffly. “Of course. Please forgive my mistake.”

I heard people coming down the hall. Servants entered and removed my furniture, clothes, draperies, and dowry—everything but my bed—

from my room to take to my husband’s home.

Then Mama, my aunts, uncles, cousins, and the concubines entered and gathered around my bed. Baba must have made a mistake in counting how many days were left until my wedding. I tried to stand so that I could properly kowtow to them, but my body was weak and tired even as my heart was full of happiness. Servants hung a sieve and a mirror in the doorway of my room to render favorable every inauspicious element.

I wouldn’t be allowed to eat during the course of my wedding ceremonies, but I needed to taste a bit of the special foods my family had prepared for my wedding-day breakfast. I wasn’t hungry, but I would do my best to obey, because every bite would be an omen of a long life in har-mony with my husband. But no one offered me pork spareribs, which I was supposed to eat to give me the strength to have sons, while refraining from gnawing the bones to protect the vitalization of my husband’s fertility. They would want me to eat the seeds of the water lily, pumpkin, and sunflower to bring many sons. But they didn’t offer these things either.

Instead, my family stood around my bed and wept. They were all sad to see me marry out, but I was ebullient. My body felt so light and unburdened that I thought I might just float away. I took a deep breath to steady myself. I would be with my poet before the sun set. Between now and then, I would enjoy all the traditions and customs for marrying out a beloved daughter. Tonight—much, much later tonight—and at intimate times in years to come, I would entertain my husband with my memories of these beautiful moments.

The men left, and my aunts and cousins washed my limbs, only they forgot to add pomelo leaves to the water. They brushed my hair and pinned it up with jade and gold hairpins, forgetting to put on my wedding headdress. They put white powder on my face, ignoring the pots of color that would brighten my lips and cheeks. They placed the dried peony in ( 9 3 )

my hand. They dressed me in a thin white silk underskirt with sutras printed on it. With so many tears around me, I didn’t have the where-withal to point out that they’d forgotten to tie the pig’s heart into my underskirt.

Next they would help me into my outer wedding costume. I smiled at them. I would miss them. I cried as I was supposed to. I’d been selfish and stubborn to hide away with my project when my time with my family was so limited. But before they brought out my wedding skirt and tunic, Second Aunt called for the men to return. I watched as servants took the door off the frame and brought it to my bedside. I was gently lifted onto the door. Whole taro roots were placed around me as symbols of fertility. I looked like an offering to the gods. It seemed I would not even have to walk to my palanquin. Tears of gratitude ran from the corners of my eyes, down my temples, and into my hair. I didn’t know I could be so happy.

They carried me downstairs. A beautiful procession formed behind me as we moved along the covered corridors. We needed to go to the ancestral hall so I could thank all the Chen family ancestors who’d looked out for me, but we didn’t stop there. We went straight to the courtyard just before the Sitting-Down Hall that lay before our main gate. The bearers set me down and stepped aside. I looked at our wind-fire gate and thought, It will just be moments now. The gate will open. I’ll step into my palanquin. One last goodbye to Mama and Baba, and then I’ll go to my new home.

One by one, all the fingers in our household—from my parents down to the lowest servant—passed by me and performed obeisance. And then strangely, peculiarly, they left me alone. My heart calmed. Around me were my belongings: my chests filled with silks and embroideries, my mirrors and ribbons, my quilts and clothes. The courtyard at this time of year was desolate and cold. I heard no firecrackers. I heard no cymbals or voices raised in celebration. I heard no bearers bringing the palanquin that would carry me to my husband’s home. Melancholy thoughts started to unreel, ensnaring me like tangled vines. With terrible sadness and desperate panic, I realized I was not going to Ren. My family—following the custom for all unmarried daughters—had brought me outside to die.

“Mama, Baba,” I called, but my voice was too faint to be heard. I tried to move, but my limbs were at once too heavy and too light to stir. I closed my hand into a fist and felt the peony crumble into dust.

It was the twelfth month and bitterly cold, but I survived the day and the night. As pink light began to infuse the sky, I felt like a pearl sinking beneath the waves. My heart felt like jade shattering. My mind was like ( 9 4 )

powder fading, perfume melting, clouds drifting away. My life force became as thin as the lightest silk. As I took my last breath, I thought of lines from the last poem I’d written:

It is not so easy to wake from a dream.

My spirit, if sincere, will stay forever under the moon or by the flowers. . . .

And then in an instant I was flying on and on for thousands of li across the sky.

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gggggggggggggggggggg

p a r t i i

Roaming with

the Wind

ggggggggggggggggggg

The Separated Soul

i d i e d i n th e seve nth h our on th e seve nth day of the twelfth month in the third year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign.

I was just five days from my wedding. In those first moments of death, much of what had happened in the last few weeks and days became clear to me. Obviously I had no idea I was dying, but my mother had understood it when she first entered my room after not seeing me for so long. When I’d gone to the Spring Pavilion, my cousins, my aunts, and the concubines had tried to get me to eat, recognizing I was already starving myself. In my final days, I’d been obsessed with writing just as Liniang had been obsessed with painting her self-portrait. I’d thought my poems had emerged from love, but deep inside I think I knew I was dying. What the body knows and what the mind chooses to believe are two different things, after all. Baba had come to give me the peony because I was dying and the proprieties didn’t matter anymore; I’d been happy to find out I was marrying my poet, but I was too close to death to recover.

The drapes in my room had been taken down not for me to take to my new home but because they resembled fishing nets and my family didn’t want me to be reborn as a fish. My father told me about my uncles because he wanted me to carry a message to them in the afterworld. “One day you may meet them,” he’d said. He couldn’t have been more direct than that, and yet I hadn’t understood. My family had placed taro around me. Taro is carried by a bride to her new home, but it is also offered to the dead to ensure future sons and grandsons. Tradition demands that an unmarried ( 9 9 )

girl be taken outside when there is “only one breath left.” But how can anyone gauge these things? At least I wasn’t a baby when I died. I would have been left to be eaten by dogs or buried in a shallow grave and quickly forgotten.

As children, we learn about what happens to us after we die from our parents, didactic tales, and all the traditions we perform for ancestor worship. Certainly much of what I knew about death came from The Peony Pavilion. Still, the living can’t know everything, so I was often bewildered, lost, and unsure as I began my journey. I had heard that death is darkness, but that’s not how I experienced it. It would take forty-nine days to push me out of the earthly realm and pull me into the afterworld. Every soul has three parts, and each must find its proper home after death. One part stayed with my body to be buried, another part traveled toward the afterworld, while the last part remained in the earthly realm, waiting to be put in my ancestor tablet. I was rent through with terror, sadness, and confusion as my three parts began their separate journeys, each fully aware of the other two at all times.

How could any of this be?

Even as I flew across the sky, I was conscious of the wailing that began in the courtyard when my body was discovered. Great sadness filled me when I saw my relatives and the servants who’d cared for me stamp their feet in grief. They loosened their hair, took off their jewelry and ornaments, and dressed themselves in white sackcloth. A servant adjusted the sieve and mirror that hung in the doorway to my room. I thought they’d been placed there to protect me as I went to Ren’s home in marriage, but these items had actually been used in preparation for my death. Now the sieve would allow goodness to pass through, while the mirror would change my family’s misery back to happiness.

My first concern was for that part of my soul that would stay with my body. Mama and my aunts stripped my corpse and I saw how horrifyingly emaciated I was. They washed me an uneven number of times and dressed me in layers of longevity clothes. They put me in padded under-garments so I might be warm in winter, and then they slipped my limbs into the silk gowns and satin tunics that had been made for my dowry.

They took great care to make sure no fur trimmed my clothes, for fear I might be reborn an animal. For my outer layer, I wore a padded silk jacket with sleeves embroidered in an elaborate and very colorful kingfisher feather pattern. I was dazed—as any spirit is who has just left its body—

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but I wished they had used my wedding costume for one of my longevity layers. I was a bride, and I wanted my wedding clothes in the afterworld.

Mama placed a thin sliver of jade in my mouth to safeguard my body.

Second Aunt tucked coins and rice in my pockets so I might soothe the rabid dogs I’d meet on my way to the afterworld. Third Aunt covered my face with a thin piece of white silk. Fourth Aunt tied colored string around my waist to prevent me from carrying away any of our family’s children and around my feet to restrain my body from leaping about should I be tormented by evil spirits on my journey.

Servants hung sixteen white paper streamers on the right side of the Chen Family Villa’s main gate, so our neighbors would know that a girl of sixteen years had died. My uncles crisscrossed the city to shrines for local gods and deities, where they lit candles and burned spirit money, which the part of my soul that was traveling to the afterworld used to bribe my way through the Demon Barrier. My father hired monks—not many, just a few, because I was a daughter—to chant every seventh day. In life, no one is allowed to wander at will, and so it is in death. My family’s job now was to tie me down so I would not be tempted to roam.

On the third day after my death, my body was placed in my coffin, along with ashes, copper coins, and lime. Then the unsealed coffin was set in a corner of an outer courtyard to wait until the diviner found the right date and place for me to be buried. My aunts put cakes in my hands, and my uncles laid sticks on either side of my body. They gathered together clothes, binding cloth for my feet, money, and food—all made from paper—and burned them so they would accompany me to the afterworld.

But I was a girl, and soon enough I learned they hadn’t sent enough.

At the beginning of the second week, the part of my soul that was journeying toward the afterworld reached the Weighing Bridge, where demon bureaucrats went about their duties without pity. I stood in line directly behind a man named Li, watching as those ahead of us were weighed before being forwarded to the next level. For seven days, Li quivered and shook, even more terrified than I was by what we were seeing and hearing.

When his turn came, I watched in horror as he sat on the scale and all the misdeeds he had done in life caused it to drop several meters. His punishment was instantaneous. He was ripped into pieces and ground into powder. Then he was brought back together and sent on his way with an admonition.

“This is just a sample of the suffering that is waiting for you, Master ( 1 0 1 )

Li,” one of the demons declared mercilessly. “Don’t cry or beg for le-niency. It is too late for that. Next!”

I was petrified. Hideous demons surrounded me, herding me to the scale with their terrible faces and screeching cries. I was not lighter than air—the sign of the truly good—but my misdeeds in life had been minor and I continued on my journey.

The whole time I stood in line at the Weighing Bridge, friends and neighbors paid their condolences to my parents. Commissioner Tan gave my father spirit money for me to spend in the afterworld. Madame Tan brought candles, incense, and more paper objects to be burned for my comfort. Tan Ze inspected the offerings, measuring their modesty, and offered my cousins empty words of sorrow. But she was only nine years old.

What could she possibly know about death?

In my third week, I passed through the Bad Dogs Village, where the virtuous are met with wagging tails and licking tongues and the evil are torn apart by powerful jaws and ragged teeth until their blood flows in rivers. Again, I had not been so bad in life, but I was very happy for the cakes my aunts had placed in my coffin to appease the beasts of two, four, and more legs and for the sticks my uncles had given me to beat away the truly unruly. In the fourth week, I arrived at the Mirror of Retribution and was told to look into it to see what my next incarnation would be. If I had been wicked, I would have seen a snake slithering in the grass, a pig wallowing in muck, or a rat nibbling on a corpse. If I had been good, I would have glimpsed a new life better than my last. But when I looked in the mirror, the image was murky and unformed.

th e f i nal th i rd of my soul was roaming, lingering on earth until my ancestor tablet was dotted and I would come to a final rest. My thoughts about Ren never left me. I blamed myself for my stubbornness in not eating and I grieved for the wedding we would not have, but I never once despaired that we wouldn’t be joined. In fact, I believed more than ever in the strength of our love. I expected Ren to come by the house, weep over my coffin, and then ask my parents for a pair of bound-foot slippers I’d recently worn. These he would carry home with three lighted sticks of incense. At each corner, he’d call out my name and invite me to follow.

Once he reached home, he would put my shoes on a chair, along with the incense. If he burned incense for two years and remembered me every ( 1 0 2 )

day, he would be able to honor me as his wife. But he didn’t do these things.

Since it is against nature for even the dead to be without a spouse, I began to dream about a ghost wedding. It wasn’t as easy or romantic as an Asking-for-the-Shoes ceremony, but I didn’t care, as long as it brought me quickly into marriage with Ren. After our ghost wedding was held—with my ancestor tablet sitting in for me—I would pass forever out of the Chen family and into my husband’s clan, where I belonged.

When I didn’t hear talk about this happening either, the third of my soul that was not with my body or traveling to the afterworld decided to visit Ren. My whole life had been about going in. As I died, I felt myself going in, in, in, until there was nothing left. Now I was free from my family and the Chen Family Villa. I could go anywhere, but I didn’t know the city or how to find my way, and I found it difficult to walk on my lily feet.

I could go no more than ten steps without swaying in the breeze. But for all my pain and confusion, I had to find Ren.

The outside world was both far more beautiful and uglier than I’d imagined. Colorful fruit stands were sandwiched between stalls that sold pig carcasses and plough parts. Beggars with dripping sores and amputated limbs entreated passersby for food and money. I saw women—from noble families!—walking on the street as though it were nothing, laughing on their way to restaurants and teahouses.

I was lost, curious, and excited. The world was in constant movement, with carts and horses rolling through the streets, salt wagons drawn by lumbering water buffaloes, flags and pennants flapping from buildings, and too many people pushing and shoving in great eddies of humanity.

Hawkers sold fish, needles, and baskets in piercing voices. Construction sites battered my ears with their hammering and shouting. Men argued about politics, gold prices, and gambling debts. I covered my ears, but the wisps of vapor that were my hands could not keep out the raucous, tortur-ous sounds. I tried to get off the street, but as a spirit I couldn’t navigate around corners.

I went back to my family home and tried a different street. This brought me to a shopping area, where they sold fans, silks, paper umbrellas, scissors, carved soapstone, prayer beads, and tea. Signboards and trappings of one kind and another blocked the sunlight. I continued on, passing temples, factories for making cotton, and mints where the sound from the stamping machines pounded at my ears until tears poured from ( 1 0 3 )

my eyes. The streets of Hangzhou were paved with cobblestones, and my lily feet bruised and tore until spirit blood oozed through my silk slippers.

They say that ghosts feel no physical pain, but this is not true. Why else would dogs in the afterworld tear the evil limb from limb or demons spend eternity eating the heart of a miscreant again and again and again?

After another long straight line that led nowhere, I returned to my family home. I set off in a new direction, walking along the edge of the ex-terior wall until I came to the crystal waters of West Lake. I saw the cause-way, lagoons with shimmering ripples, and verdant hillsides. I listened to doves croon for rain and magpies bicker. I glimpsed Solitary Island and remembered how Ren had pointed out his house on Wushan Mountain, but I couldn’t figure out how to get from here to there. I sat on a rock. The skirts from my longevity clothes draped about me on the shore, but I was now of the spirit world and they didn’t get wet or muddy. I no longer had to worry about soiled shoes or anything like that. I left no shadow or footprints. Did this make me feel free or uncontrollably lonely? Both.

The sun set over the hills, turning the sky crimson and the lake deep lavender. My spirit trembled as a reed in the breeze. Night draped itself over Hangzhou. I was alone on the bank, separated from everyone and everything I knew, sinking deeper and deeper into despair. If Ren wouldn’t come to my family’s home for any of my funeral activities and I couldn’t go to his since I was hampered by corners and noises, how would I find him?

In the houses and business establishments around the lake, lanterns were turned down and candles blown out. The living slept, but the shore shimmered with activity. Spirits of trees and bamboo breathed and quivered. Poisoned dogs came to the lake desperate for a final drink of water before death shudders took them. Hungry ghosts—those who’d drowned in the lake or had resisted the Manchus, refused to shave their foreheads, and lost their heads as punishment—dragged themselves through the un-derbrush. I also saw others like myself: those just dead and still roaming before the three parts of their souls found their proper resting places.

There would be no peaceful nights filled with beautiful dreams for us ever again.

Dreams! I leaped to my feet. Ren knew The Peony Pavilion nearly as well as I did. Liniang and Mengmei first met in a dream. Surely since I’d died Ren had tried to reach me in his dreams, only I hadn’t known where or how to meet him. Now I knew exactly where to go, but I’d have to turn right to get there. I tried several times to go around the corner of the com-

( 1 0 4 )

pound, each time widening my turn until finally I arced out wide enough to make it. I crept along the water’s edge, stepping on rocks, not worrying about puddles, pushing aside the rock roses and other bits of shrubbery that impeded my way until I reached my family’s Moon-Viewing Pavilion.

Just as the tiniest sliver of sun peeked over the mountain, I spotted Ren, waiting for me.

“I’ve been coming here, hoping to see you,” he said.

“Ren.”

When he reached for me, I didn’t shy away. He held me for a long time without speaking, and then he asked, “How could you die and leave me?”

His anguish was palpable. “We were so happy. Did you decide you didn’t care for me?”

“I didn’t know who you were. How could I know?”

“At first, I didn’t know it was you either,” he answered. “I knew my future wife was Master Chen’s daughter and that her name was Peony. I didn’t want an arranged marriage, but like you I had accepted my fate.

When we met, I thought you might be one of the cousins in the household or one of the guests. My heart changed, and I thought, Let me have these three nights, believing they were as close as I’d ever get to what I wanted from marriage.”

“I felt the same way too.” I was filled with regret as I added, “If only I had said my name.”

“I didn’t say my name either,” he said ruefully. “But what about the peony? Did you get it? I gave it to your father. You had to know it was me then.”

“He gave it to me when it was too late to save me.”

He sighed. “Peony.”

“But I still don’t understand how you knew it was me.”

“I didn’t until your father made the announcement about our marriage. To me, the girl I was going to marry had no face and no voice. But when your father spoke your name that night I heard it in a whole new way. Then when he said your name had to change because it was the same as my mother’s, somehow I felt—understood—he was talking about you.

You don’t look like my mother, but the two of you share the same sensi-bility. I hoped when he made the announcement and pointed to me that you would see me.”

“I had my eyes shut. After meeting you, I was afraid to see the man who would be my husband.”

Then I remembered opening my eyes and seeing Tan Ze with her ( 1 0 5 )

mouth pulled into a taut oh. She had seen exactly who it was. She had told me on the first night of the opera that she had set her heart on the poet.

No wonder she was furious when we were walking back to the women’s quarters.

Ren stroked my cheek. He was ready for something more, but I had to try to make sense out of what had happened.

“So you decided it was me based on intuition?” I persisted.

He smiled, and I thought, If we had married, this is how he would have responded to me at those times when I couldn’t release my obstinacy.

“It was very simple,” he said. “After the announcement, your father dismissed the women. When the men stood up, I quickly separated myself from them and hurried through the garden until I saw the procession. You were at the front. The women were treating you as a bride already.” He bent down and whispered in my ear. “I thought how lucky we were that we wouldn’t be strangers on our wedding night. I was happy—with your face, your golden lilies, your manner.” He straightened up again and said,

“After that night, I dreamed about our future life. We were to spend our days in words and in love. I sent you The Peony Pavilion. Did you get it?”

How could I tell him that my obsession with it had caused my death?

So many mistakes. So many errors. So much tragedy as a result. In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only. If only I hadn’t left the opera on the first night, I would have gone to my marriage and met Ren on my wedding night without incident. If only I had kept my eyes open when my father pointed out Ren. If only my father had given me the peony the next morning or a month or even a week before I died. How could fate be so merciless?

“We can’t change what’s happened, but maybe our future isn’t hopeless,” Ren said. “Mengmei and Liniang found a way, didn’t they?”

I didn’t yet fully understand how things worked here, or what I would be allowed to do, but I said, “I won’t leave you. I’ll stay with you forever.”

Ren tightened his arms around me and I buried my face in his shoulder. This was where I needed to be, but then he pulled away and gestured to the rising sun.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

“But I have so many things to tell you. Don’t leave me,” I pleaded.

He smiled. “I hear my servant in the hall. He’s bringing my tea.”

Then, just as he had on the first night of the opera, he asked me to meet him again. With that, he was gone.

I stayed right there all day and into the night, waiting for him to come ( 1 0 6 )

to me in his dreams. Those hours gave me a lot of time to think. I wanted to be an amorous ghost. In The Peony Pavilion, Liniang had done clouds and rain with Mengmei first in her dream and then later as a ghost. When she became human again, she still had her virginity and was unwilling to compromise her chastity before marriage. But could that happen in real life? Apart from The Peony Pavilion, almost every other ghost story in-volved a female spirit who ruined, maimed, or killed her lover. I remembered a story my mother told me in which the ghost-heroine kept herself from touching her scholar with the words “These moldering bones from the grave are no match for the living. A liaison with a ghost only hastens a man’s death. I could not bear to harm you.” I couldn’t risk hurting Ren in this way either. Like Liniang, I was destined to be a wife. Even in death—

especially in death—I couldn’t show my husband that I was anything less than a lady. As Liniang observed, A ghost may be deluded by passion; a woman must pay full attention to the rites.

That night, when Ren came again to the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, we talked about poetry and flowers, about beauty and qing, about lasting love and the temporary love of teahouse girls. When he left at daybreak, I was disconsolate. The whole time I was with him, I wanted to reach inside his tunic and touch his skin. I wanted to whisper the messages of my heart into his ear. I wanted to see and touch what he kept hidden inside his trousers, just as I wanted him to peel away my layers of longevity clothes until he found that place that was yearning, even in death, to be touched.

The following night, he brought with him paper, ink, inkstone, and brushes. He took my hand and together we ground the ink against the stone, and then we walked to the lake, where he cupped my hands so that I might bring back water to mix the ink.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me the words to write.”

I thought of my experiences of the last weeks and then began to compose.

“Soaring across the sky in never-ending sleeplessness.

The mountains are fresh with dew,

The lake glimmers.

You draw me to you from across the clouds.”

When the last words fell from my lips, he set down the brush and removed my padded jacket with the sleeves embroidered in the kingfisher pattern.

( 1 0 7 )

He wrote the next poem, his calligraphy as sumptuous as a caress. He called it “Visitation from a Goddess,” and it was about me.

“Unable to express the sadness of your parting, Darkness without end.

You come to me in a dream.

I am flooded by thoughts of what should have been.

But I find it here, with you, goddess of my heart.

A sudden sob wakes me from my dream.

Alone again.”

Together we wrote eighteen poems. I’d say one line and he’d come up with the next, often borrowing from the opera that we loved. “Tonight I come to you whole in body, full of love, yours in every desire,” I quoted Liniang after her secret marriage. Each line was a revealed intimacy. Each line brought us closer together. And each poem got shorter and shorter as layer after layer of my longevity clothes fell to the ground. I forgot my concerns.

Everything was reduced to words like pleasure, ripples, temptations, surging, clouds.

Dawn broke, and he was ripped away from me. Simply gone. The sun was fully up in the sky and I was down to my last layers of clothes. The dead don’t feel heat and cold in the usual way. Rather, we feel something deeper, something connected to the emotions of these sensations. I shivered uncontrollably, but I didn’t dress again. I waited all day and into the night for Ren to come back to me, but he didn’t. The next thing I knew, strong forces pulled me away from the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. I wore only my inner garment and a gown embroidered with birds flying in a pair above flowers.

i had b e e n dead five weeks, and the three aspects of my soul began to wrench apart irrevocably. One part settled forever in my corpse, the roaming part began to drift to the ancestor tablet, while my afterworld soul arrived at the Viewing Terrace of Lost Souls. At this point, the dead are so sad and filled with longing that they are given one last chance to look at their homes and listen to their families. From my great distance, I searched along the shore of West Lake until I came to my family home. At first all I could see were trivial things: the servants emptying my mother’s chamber pot, the concubines arguing over a dish of lion’s head, Shao’s ( 1 0 8 )

daughter hiding her embroidery patterns between the folds of my copy of The Peony Pavilion. But I also saw my parents’ sorrow and was stabbed through with remorse. I had died from too much qing. I had left the world because an abundance of emotion had overwhelmed me, sapped my strength, and clouded my thoughts. Below me, Mama cried and I realized she’d been right. I should have stayed away from The Peony Pavilion. It had brought out too much passion, despair, and hope in me, and now here I was, separated from my family and my husband.

Baba, as the eldest son, was in charge of all the rites. His main duty and responsibility now were to see me properly interred and my ancestor tablet dotted. My family and our servants prepared more paper offerings—all those things they thought I might need for my new life. They made clothes, food, rooms, and books for my entertainment. They did not provide a palanquin, because even in death Mama did not want me to go abroad. On the eve of my funeral, these offerings were burned in the street. From the Viewing Terrace, I saw Shao use a stick to beat at the fire and the leaves of paper as they twisted in the flames to keep away the spirits who wanted to take my belongings. My father should have had one of my uncles do this to show he meant business and my mother should have thrown rice around the edges of the fire to attract the attention of the hungry ghosts who craved the food, because Shao did not scare away the spirits and nearly everything was stolen before I had a chance to receive it.

When my coffin reached the wind-fire gate, I saw Ren. Even as my Second Uncle broke a cup with holes in it just over where my head rested—from now on I would only be allowed to drink the water I’d wasted in life—I rejoiced. Firecrackers exorcised from around the compound inauspicious influences associated with me. I was placed in a palanquin, not a red one for marriage but a green one to represent death. The procession started. My uncles tossed spirit money to secure my right of way to the afterworld. Ren, his head bent, walked between my father and Commissioner Tan. They were followed by palanquins holding my mother, aunts, and girl cousins.

At the cemetery, my coffin was lowered into the ground. The wind soughed through the poplars in ghostly song. Mama, Baba, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins each picked up a handful of dirt and threw it on my coffin. As the soil covered the lacquer surface, I felt that third of my soul disappear from me forever.

From the Viewing Terrace, I watched and listened. No ghost marriage ceremony was performed. No banquet was presented at the graveside, ( 1 0 9 )

which would introduce me to my new companions in the afterworld and pave the way for good understanding between me and my new associates.

Mama was so weak from grief that my aunts had to help her back into the palanquin. Baba led the procession, and once again Ren and Commissioner Tan were beside him. For a long while, no one spoke. What comfort could anyone give a father who has lost his only child? What could anyone say to a groom who has lost his bride?

Finally, Commissioner Tan addressed my father: “Your daughter is not the only one to be affected by this terrible opera.”

What kind of solace was this?

“But she loved the opera,” Ren mumbled. The other men stared at him, and he added, “I heard this about your daughter, Master Chen. If I’d been fortunate enough to marry her, I never would have kept it from her.”

It’s hard to describe my feelings at seeing him there when so recently we had been in each other’s arms, composing poetry, letting qing flow between us. His mourning was real, and once again I was filled with regret for the stubbornness and foolishness that had brought me to this place.

“But she died from lovesickness, just as that sorry girl died in the opera!” Commissioner Tan spat out. It seemed he was unaccustomed to anyone disagreeing with him.

“It’s true that life’s tendency to imitate art is not always a comfort,” my father admitted, “but the boy is right. My daughter could not live without words and emotion. And you, Commissioner, don’t you sometimes wish you could visit the women’s chambers and experience the true depths of qing?”

Before Commissioner Tan could respond, Ren said, “Your daughter is not without words or emotion, Master Chen. For three nights, she visited me in my dreams.”

No! I shouted from my spot on the Viewing Terrace. Didn’t he know what revealing this would mean?

My father and Commissioner Tan looked at him in concern.

“Truly we have met,” Ren said. “A few nights ago, we were together on your Moon-Viewing Pavilion. When she first came to me, her hair was pinned for marriage. The sleeves of her outer jacket were embroidered the color of kingfisher feathers.”

“You describe her perfectly,” my father agreed suspiciously. “But how did you know her if you had not met her before?”

Would Ren give away our secret? Would he ruin me in my father’s eyes?

( 1 1 0 )

“My heart recognized her,” Ren answered. “We composed poems together: Soaring across the sky in never-ending sleeplessness. . . . When I woke, I wrote down eighteen poems.”

“Ren, you have proved once again that you are a man of sentiment,”

my father said. “I could not have asked for a better son-in-law.”

Ren reached into his sleeve and pulled out several folded pieces of paper. “I thought you would like to read these.”

Ren was wonderful, but he’d made a terrible, nearly irreversible, mistake. When we’re alive, we’re told that if a dead one appears to someone in a dream and that person tells others about it—or, worse, if he shows through writing the words of the dead—then the spirit will be driven away. This is why fox spirits, ghosts, and even immortals beg their human lovers not to reveal their existence to the world. But humans cannot keep a secret. Of course, the spirit—whatever form it takes—doesn’t “disappear.” Where would it go? But the ability to visit in dreams becomes nearly impossible. I was devastated.

i n th e s i xth week after my death, I should have crossed the Inevitable River. In the seventh week, I should have entered the realm of the Prince of the Wheel, where I would be brought before judges who would decide my fate. But none of these things happened; I remained on the Viewing Terrace. I began to suspect that something was terribly wrong.

I never saw Baba approach Ren about a ghost marriage. My father was too busy, preparing to move to the palace in Beijing to take up his new post. I should have been distressed about this—how could he allow himself to make obeisance to the Manchu emperor?—and I was. I should have worried for my father’s soul when he decided to give up his morals in exchange for making a fortune—and I did. But I was far more anxious that Baba would try to trap a husband other than Ren to accept me as a ghost bride. It would have been easy for Baba to throw some money on the road outside our gate, wait for some passerby to pick it up, and tell the man that in picking up the “bride price” he had accepted me as a wife. But this didn’t happen either.

Mama said she wouldn’t follow Baba to Beijing, refusing to waver in her steadfastness never to leave the Chen Family Villa. I took comfort in this. For Mama, the joys and laughter of our once happy days in the Spring Pavilion before I retired to my room had disappeared, only to be replaced by tears of blood and woe. She spent hours in the storeroom where my ( 1 1 1 )

belongings were kept, finding my scent clinging to my clothes, touching the brushes I’d handled, letting her eyes rest on the items I’d embroidered for my dowry. I had resisted my mother for so long; now I longed for her all the time.

Forty-nine days after my death, my family crowded into our ancestral hall for the dotting of my ancestor tablet and a final goodbye. Storytellers and a handful of singers gathered in the courtyard. Someone of great distinction—a scholar or member of the literati—is always given the honor of placing the final precious dot on the ancestor tablet. Once this was done, a third of my soul would be transferred to the tablet, where it would watch over my family. The dotting would allow me to be worshipped as an ancestor and give me a place to inhabit on earth for all eternity. My dotted ancestor tablet would also be the object through which my family would send their offerings to sustain me in the afterworld, make requests for my help, and provide comfort to me as a way of averting potential hos-tility. In the future, when my family embarked on a new business venture, named a child, or considered a marriage proposal, they would consult me through my tablet. I was sure Commissioner Tan, who was the highest-ranked person my father knew in Hangzhou, would perform the dotting.

But my father chose the one person who would mean more to me than anyone else: Wu Ren.

He was more distraught than he’d been on the day of my funeral. His hair was tousled as though he’d given up sleep altogether. Pain and regret filled his eyes. Now that I’d been banned from his dreams, he understood his loss all too clearly. That part of me that was to reside in my ancestor tablet came to rest next to him. I wanted him to know I was there at his side, but neither he nor anyone else seemed aware of my presence. I was less substantial than a whiff of incense smoke.

My ancestor tablet stood on an altar table. It had been inscribed with my name, the hour of my birth, and the hour of my death. Next to the tablet stood a small dish of cock’s blood and a brush. Ren dipped the brush in the blood. He lifted the brush to animate my tablet, hesitated, and then dropped the brush, groaned, and ran from the hall. Baba and the servants followed him outside. They had him sit under a ginkgo tree. They brought him tea. They comforted him. Then Baba noticed my mother was missing.

We all followed him back into the hall. Mama lay on the floor, sobbing and clutching my tablet. Baba stared at her, helpless. Shao crouched down ( 1 1 2 )

next to Mama and tried to pry the tablet from her hands, but she wouldn’t let it go.

“Husband, let me keep this,” Mama sobbed.

“It needs to be dotted,” he said.

“She’s my daughter, let me do it,” she begged. “Please.”

But Mama was not someone of distinction! She was not a writer or a member of the literati. Then to my absolute bafflement, a look of deep understanding passed between my parents.

“Of course,” Baba said. “That would be perfect.”

Then Shao wrapped her arms around my mother and led her away. My father dismissed the storytellers and singers. The rest of my family and the servants dispersed. Ren went home.

All through the night, my mother cried. She refused to let go of the tablet, despite Shao’s constant coaxing. How could I have not seen how much she loved me? Was this why Baba had given her permission to dot my tablet? But that didn’t make sense. This was Baba’s duty.

In the morning, he stopped by Mama’s room. When Shao opened the door, he saw Mama hidden under quilts, moaning her sadness. Sorrow pierced his eyes.

“Tell her I had to leave for the capital,” he whispered to Shao.

Reluctantly, he turned away. I went with him to the front gate, where he got in a palanquin to carry him to his new post. After the palanquin disappeared from view, I returned to my mother’s room. Shao knelt on the floor next to Mama’s bedside, waiting.

“My daughter’s gone,” Mama whimpered.

Shao hummed her sympathy and smoothed away strings of damp hair from my mother’s wet cheeks.

“Give me the tablet, Lady Chen. Let me take it to the master. He must perform the rite.”

What was she thinking? My father was gone.

Mama didn’t know that, but she tightened her arms around the tablet, refusing to let go of it, of me.

“You know the ritual.” Shao spoke sternly. How like her to rely on tradition to try to relieve my mother’s sorrow. “This is a father’s duty. Now give it to me.” When she saw my mother waver, she added, “You know I’m right.”

Against her will, Mama gave the tablet to Shao. As Shao left the room, Mama buried her face in the quilts again to cry. I followed my old wet ( 1 1 3 )

nurse as she walked to a storage room at the back of the compound and watched helplessly as she tucked the tablet on a high shelf behind a jar of pickled turnips.

“Too much trouble for the mistress,” she said, and cleared her throat as if getting rid of a bad taste. “No one wants to see this ugly thing.”

Without the dot I was unable to enter the tablet, and the part of my soul that was supposed to settle there united with me on the Viewing Terrace.

( 1 1 4 )

The Viewing Terrace

of Lost Souls

i was unable to journey b eyond th e v i ew i ng te r -

race, so I had no opportunity to plead my case before the panel of infernal judges. As the days went by, I discovered that I still had all the needs and wants I had when I was alive. Death, rather than quelling my emotions, had intensified them. The Seven Emotions we talk about on earth—joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, and desire—had traveled with me to the afterworld. These ancestral emotions, I saw, were more commanding and enduring than any other force in the universe: stronger than life, more persistent than death, more powerful than what the gods can control, floating about us without beginning and without end. And while I was awash in them, none was stronger than the sorrow I felt for the life I’d lost.

I missed the Chen Family Villa. I missed the smells of ginger, green tea, jasmine, and summer rain. After so many months without an appetite, suddenly I hungered for lotus roots braised in sweet soy, preserved duck, lake crabs, and crystal shrimps. I missed the sound of nightingales, the chatter of the women in our inner quarters, and the lapping of the lake along the shore. I missed the feel of silk on my skin and the warm wind coming through my bedroom window. I missed the smell of paper and ink. I missed my books. I missed being able to step into their pages and into another world. But what I missed most was my family.

Every day I looked over the balustrade to watch them. I saw Mama, my aunts, my cousins, and the concubines go back to their usual routines. I ( 1 1 5 )

was happy when Baba came home to visit, have meetings in the Hall of Abundant Elegance with young men in handsome robes in the afternoons, and sip tea with my mother in the evenings. I never heard them talk about me, however. Mama didn’t mention that she hadn’t dotted my ancestor tablet, because she thought Baba had done it. And he didn’t bring it up, because he thought she’d done it. Which meant, of course, that Baba didn’t invite Ren back to dot my tablet either. With my tablet hidden away, I might be stuck here forever. When I got too scared about that, I comforted myself with the knowledge that Prefect Du had left for his appointment right after Liniang’s death and had forgotten to dot her tablet too.

With so many parallels between Liniang and me, surely I would also be brought back to life through true love.

I began to look for Ren’s home. Finally, after countless attempts, my vision found the way by skimming across the surface of West Lake, passing over Solitary Island, and crossing onto the north shore. I located the temple where torches had burned so brightly on the night of the opera and from there located Ren’s family compound.

I was supposed to be a jade maiden marrying a golden boy—meaning that our family status and wealth matched—but the Wu family’s villa had just a few courtyards, a handful of pavilions, and only 120 fingers. Ren’s older brother had moved to a posting in a distant province, where he lived with his wife and daughter, so the Wu compound was home now only to Ren, his mother, and ten servants. Did I question this? No. I was lovesick and saw only what I wanted to see, which was a small but tasteful villa.

The main doors were painted the color of cinnabar. The green tile roof blended beautifully with the willow trees that surrounded the compound.

The plum tree Ren had told me about stood in the central courtyard, but it had lost its leaves. And then there was Ren, composing in his library during the day, taking his meals with his widowed mother, and wandering in the garden and along the dark corridors at night. I watched him all the time and forgot about my own family, which is why I was unprepared when Shao came to call at the Wu home.

My old wet nurse was escorted to a hall and told to wait. Then a servant brought Ren and his mother into the room. Madame Wu had been a widow for many years and dressed appropriately in somber hues. Her hair was shot through with strands of gray and her face showed the suffering of the loss of her husband. Shao bowed several times, but she was a servant, so they did not exchange pleasantries and Madame Wu did not offer tea.

“When Little Miss was dying,” Shao said, “she gave me some things to ( 1 1 6 )

give to your family. The first—” She peeled back the corners of a silk kerchief that lined a basket and brought out a tiny package also wrapped in silk. Shao lowered her head and held out the bundle cupped in the palms of her hands. “Little Miss intended these for you as a token of filial piety.”

Madame Wu took the package and slowly opened it. She picked up one of the shoes I’d made for her and examined it with a mother-in-law’s shrewd eyes. The peonies I’d embroidered were striking against their deep blue background. Madame Wu turned to her son, and said, “Your wife was very talented with a needle.”

Would she have said that to me if I’d been alive? Or would she have criticized me as a proper mother-in-law should?

Shao reached back into the basket and pulled out my copy of The Peony Pavilion.

Here’s a truth about death: Sometimes you forget things that you once thought were important. I’d asked Shao to bring Volume One to my new home three days after my marriage. She hadn’t done that for obvious reasons, and I’d forgotten about her promise and my project. Even when I’d seen her daughter hiding her embroidery patterns in the folds, I didn’t remember.

After Shao explained that I’d stayed up late at night reading and writing, that my mother had burned my books, and that I’d hidden the volume in my bedclothes, Ren took it in his hands and opened it.

“My son saw the opera, and then he searched the city to find this particular copy,” Madame Wu explained. “I thought it best if my daughter-in-law gave it to your Peony. But this is only part one. Where is the second volume?”

“As I said, the girl’s mother burned it,” Shao repeated.

Madame Wu sighed and pursed her lips in disapproval.

Ren leafed through the pages, stopping here and there.

“Do you see?” he asked, pointing to characters blurred by my tears.

“Her essence glistens on the paper.” He began to read. A few moments later he looked up and said, “I see her face in every word. The ink looks vivid and new. Mother, you can sense her hand’s moisture on the pages.”

Madame Wu regarded her son sympathetically.

I felt sure Ren would read my thoughts about the opera and know what he had to do. Shao would help him by telling him to dot my tablet.

But Shao mentioned nothing about my missing dot, and Ren didn’t look hopeful or inspired in any way. Rather, sadness deepened his features. My pain was so deep I felt as though my heart was shredding.

( 1 1 7 )

“We’re grateful to you,” Madame Wu said to Shao. “In your mistress’s brushstrokes, my son finds his wife. In this way, she continues to live.”

Ren closed the book and abruptly stood. He gave Shao an ounce of silver, which she pocketed. Then, without another word, he stalked out of the room with my book under his arm.

That night I watched him in his library as he sank deeper and deeper into melancholy. He called for servants and ordered wine. He read my words, delicately touching the pages. He held his head, drank, and let tears fall down his cheeks. Distraught at this reaction—this was not at all what I wanted—I looked for Madame Wu and found her in her bedchamber.

We shared the same name and we both loved Ren. I had to believe that she would do whatever she could to ease her son’s mind. In this we had to be

“sames.”

Madame Wu waited until the household grew quiet, and then she padded along the corridor on her lily feet. She quietly opened the door to the library. Ren had put his head down on the desk and fallen asleep.

Madame Wu picked up The Peony Pavilion and the empty bottle of wine, and then she blew out the flickering candle and left the room. Back in her bedchamber, she slipped my project between two folded gaily colored silk gowns that, as a widow, she would never wear again, and closed the drawer.

month s we nt by. Since I couldn’t leave the Viewing Terrace, I saw everyone who stopped here on their journey through the seven levels of the afterworld. I saw chaste widows dressed in layer upon layer of longevity clothes meet their long-dead husbands in joyful reunions and knew that they would be treasured and honored for decades to come.

However, I saw no mothers who’d died in childbirth. They’d gone straight to the Blood-Gathering Lake, a place where women suffered in a perpetual hell for the pollution of their failed childbearing. But for all the others who passed this way, the Viewing Terrace gave the newly dead a chance to say goodbye to those below and at the same time be reminded of what their duties were now as ancestors. From now on, they would return to this spot to look down on the world, weigh how their descendants were doing, and then grant wishes or send punishments. I saw angry ancestors, who taunted, teased, or humiliated those left behind; I saw other ancestors—plump with offerings—reward their families with plentiful harvests and numerous sons.

( 1 1 8 )

But for the most part I watched the newly dead. None of them knew yet where they would end up once they passed through all seven levels.

Would they be sent to one of the ten yamens with all its different hells?

Would they wait hundreds of years before being allowed to return to earth and inhabit another body? Would they be reincarnated quickly, as educated men if they were lucky, or transmigrated into a woman, a fish, or a worm if they weren’t? Or would Guanyin whisk them to the Western Par-adise, ten thousand million li from here, where they would escape all further rebirths and spend the rest of eternity in a blissful haven of everlasting happiness, feasting, and dancing?

Some of the other lovesick maidens I’d heard about when I was alive came to meet me: Shang Xiaoling, the actress who died onstage; Yu Niang, whose death inspired Tang Xianzu to write poems eulogizing her; Jin Fengdian, whose story was almost identical to mine, except that her father had been a salt merchant; and a few others.

We commiserated. In life, we had all known the danger that emanated from the opera’s pages—reading it, reading anything, could be fatal—but we’d each been bewitched by the allure of dying young, beautiful, and talented. We were seduced by the pain and pleasure of contemplating the other lovesick maidens. We read The Peony Pavilion, we wrote poems about it, and we died. We thought our writing would live beyond the ravages of time and the decay of our bodies, thereby proving the power of the opera.

The lovesick maidens wanted to know about Ren, and I told them I believed two things: first, Ren and I were a match made in Heaven; second, qing would bring us back together.

The girls looked at me pityingly and murmured among themselves.

“We all had dream lovers,” the actress finally confided, “but that’s all they were—dreams.”

“I believed my scholar was real too,” Yu Niang admitted. “Oh, Peony, we were just like you. We had no say in our lives. We were all to be married to husbands unknown into families unknown. We had no hope for love, but we longed for it. What girl doesn’t meet a man in her dreams?”

“Let me tell you about my love. In my dreams, we used to meet at a temple. I loved him very much,” said another of the girls.

“I too thought I was like Liniang,” the salt merchant’s daughter added.

“I expected that after I died my young man would find me, fall in love with me, and bring me back to life. We would have real love, not obligation or duty love.” She sighed. “But he was just a dream, and now here I am.”

( 1 1 9 )

I looked from pretty face to pretty face. Their sad expressions told me that they each had nearly identical stories.

“But I actually met Ren,” I said. “He touched me with a peony blossom.”

They looked at me in disbelief.

“All girls have dreams,” Yu Niang repeated.

“But Ren was real.” I pointed over the balustrade to the earthly realm below. “Look there. That’s him.”

A dozen girls—not one over the age of sixteen—looked over the edge and followed my finger to Ren’s home, where they saw him writing in his library.

“That’s a young man, but how do we know he’s the one you met?”

“How do we know you met him at all?”

In the afterworld, we are sometimes able to be transported back through the years to relive our experiences or see them through another’s eyes. This is one reason that the hells are so terrible. People are given the opportunity to relive their misdeeds forever. But now I relived very different kinds of memories so the lovesick maidens could see them. I carried the girls back to the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion, the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, and to my final visit as a spirit to Ren. They cried at the beauty and truth of my story, and below us a storm fell on Hangzhou.

“Only in death did Liniang prove her undying passion,” I said, as the girls wiped their eyes. “You’ll see. One day Ren and I will be married.”

“How is that going to happen?” the actress asked.

“How can the moon be scooped from the water’s surface, or flowers be plucked from the void?” I asked in return, quoting Mengmei. “The scholar didn’t know how he was going to bring Liniang back from the dead, but he did it. Ren will figure it out too.”

The girls were lovely and sweet, but they didn’t believe me.

“You may have met and talked to this man, but your lovesickness was just like ours,” Yu Niang said. “We all starved ourselves to death.”

“All you can hope is that your parents will publish your poems,” the salt merchant’s daughter offered helpfully. “In this way you may live again a little. That’s what happened to me.”

“And me too.”

The others chimed in that their families had also published their poetry.

“Most of our families don’t make offerings to us,” the merchant’s ( 1 2 0 )

daughter confided, “but we receive some sustenance because our poems are in print. We don’t know why this happens, but it does.”

This was hardly good news. I’d hidden my poems in my father’s library and Ren’s mother now had Volume One hidden in one of her drawers.

The girls shook their heads disconsolately when I told them this.

“Perhaps you should talk to Xiaoqing about these matters,” Yu Niang suggested. “She has more experience than we do. Maybe she can help you.”

“I would love to meet her,” I said eagerly. “I would appreciate her advice even more. Please bring her the next time you come.”

But they didn’t bring her. And the great Tang Xianzu didn’t come to visit either, although the lovesick maidens said the author was nearby.

So mostly I was alone.

i n l i f e, i ’d been told many things about the afterworld; some were right, some were wrong. Most people call it the underworld, but I prefer to call it the afterworld, because it isn’t really under, although some parts are. Beyond the actual geography of the place, where I was seemed to be after—simply a continuation. Death doesn’t terminate our associations to our families, and the positions we held in life don’t change either. If you were a peasant in the earthly realm, you continued your work in the fields here; if you were once a landowner, a scholar, or a member of the literati, you spent your days reading, writing poetry, drinking tea, and burning incense. Women still had bound feet, were obedient, and focused their attention on their families; men still oversaw the outer realm by navigating through the infernal judges’ bureaus upon bureaus of darkness.

I continued to learn what I could and couldn’t do. I could float, drift, melt. Without Shao or Willow to help me, I learned to care for my feet with the spirit bindings my family had burned for my use in the afterworld. I could hear from a great distance, but I hated noise. I couldn’t turn sharp corners. And when I looked over the balustrade, I could see a lot, but I was unable to look beyond Hangzhou’s environs.

After I’d been on the Viewing Terrace for many months, an old woman came to visit. She introduced herself as my grandmother, but she didn’t look at all like the stern-faced woman in the ancestor portrait that hung in our ancestral hall.

“Waaa! Why do they make ancestors look like that?” she cackled. “I never looked so disapproving in life.”

( 1 2 1 )

Grandmother was still handsome. Her hair was pinned with ornaments made of gold, pearls, and jade. Her gown was of the lightest silk.

Her lily feet were smaller even than my own. Her face was etched with fine lines but her skin was luminous. Her hands were covered in long water sleeves in the old style. She seemed delicate and ladylike, but when she sat down next to me and pressed against my thigh I felt surprising strength.

Over the next few weeks, she came to visit often but she never brought Grandfather and always evaded questions about him.

“He’s busy in another place,” she might say. Or, “He’s helping your father with a negotiation in the capital. People at court are devious and your father is out of practice.” Or, “He’s probably visiting one of his concubines . . . in her dreams. He likes to do that sometimes, because in their dreams the concubines are still young and beautiful, not the old hens they’ve become.”

I liked listening to her wicked comments about the concubines, because in life I’d always heard that she’d been kind and generous toward them. She’d been an exemplar of what a head wife should be, but here she liked to tease and banter.

“Stop looking at that man down there!” she snapped at me one day, several months after her first visit.

“How do you know who I’m looking at?”

She jabbed me with her elbow. “I’m an ancestor! I saw it all! Think about that, child.”

“But he’s my husband,” I offered lamely.

“You were never married,” she retorted. “You can be happy for that!”

“Happy? Ren and I were fated to be together.”

My grandmother snorted. “The idea is ridiculous. You weren’t fated to be together. You simply had a marriage arranged by your father, like every other girl. There’s nothing special in that. And in case you’ve forgotten, you’re here.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. “Baba’s going to arrange a ghost marriage for me.”

“You should consider more carefully what you see below.”

“You’re testing me. I understand—”

“No, your father has other plans.”

“I can’t see Baba when he’s in the capital, but what does it matter anyway? Even if he doesn’t arrange a ghost marriage, I’ll wait for Ren. That’s why I’m stuck here, don’t you think?”

( 1 2 2 )

She ignored my question.

“Do you think this man will wait for you?” Her face crinkled as though she had opened a jar of stinky tofu. She was my grandmother—a cherished ancestor!—so I couldn’t contradict her. “Don’t worry so much about him,” she said, patting my face through the water sleeve that covered her hand. “You were a good granddaughter. I appreciated the fruit you brought me all those years.”

“Then why didn’t you help me?”

“I had nothing against you.”

It was a strange comment, but often she said things I didn’t understand.

“Now pay attention,” Grandmother ordered. “You need to think about why you’re stuck here.”

al l th rou g h th i s time, important dates came and went. My parents forgot to include me in their New Year’s offerings, which were just days after my death. On the thirteenth day of the first month after the New Year, they were supposed to place a lighted lamp at my tomb. At Spring Festival, they should have cleaned my grave, exploded firecrackers, and burned spirit money for me to use in the afterworld. On the first day of the tenth month, the official start of winter, they should have burned padded jackets, woolen caps, and fur-lined boots all made of paper to keep me warm. Throughout the year, my family should have been making offerings to me of cooked rice, wine, plates of meat, and spirit money on the first and fifteenth of every moon. All these offerings had to be presented to my dotted ancestor tablet for me to receive them in the afterworld. But when Shao didn’t bring it out of its hiding place and no one asked for it, I concluded that everyone was still too upset by my absence to look at my ancestor tablet.

Then, during the Festival of the Bitter Moon, which occurs during the darkest, cruelest days of winter, I discovered something that shattered me.

Just before the first anniversary of my death, my father returned home for a visit and my mother prepared special Bitter-Moon porridge with various grains, nuts, and fruits, flavored with four different kinds of sugar. My family gathered in the ancestral hall and offered the porridge to Grandmother and others in the family. Once again, my ancestor tablet wasn’t brought out of its hiding place in the storage room and I didn’t receive an offering. I knew I hadn’t been “forgotten”; Mama cried bitter tears for me every night. This neglect meant something far worse.

( 1 2 3 )

Grandmother, who must have been somewhere eating her porridge with Grandfather, saw what happened and came to me. She was a plain speaker, but I didn’t want to hear or accept what she had to say.

“Your parents will never worship you,” she explained. “It goes against nature for a parent to worship a child. If you’d been a son, your father would have beaten your coffin to punish you for being so unfilial as to die before him, but eventually he would have relented and seen that you were provided for. But you’re a girl—unmarried at that. Your family will never make offerings to you.”

“Because my tablet isn’t dotted?”

Grandmother snorted. “No, because you died unmarried. Your parents raised you for your husband’s family. You belong to them. You are not considered a Chen. And even if your tablet were dotted, it would be kept out of sight behind a door, in a drawer, or in a special temple, which is what happened to those girls who visit you.”

I’d never heard any of this before, and for a moment I believed Grandmother. But then I shook her bad thoughts out of my head.

“You’re wrong.”

“Because no one told you before you died that this would happen? Ha!

If your mother and father put your tablet on the family altar, they would risk punishment from the other ancestors.” She held up a hand. “Not from me, but there are others here who hold to the traditional ways. No one wants to see such an ugly thing on the family altar.”

“My parents love me,” I insisted. “A mother who didn’t love her daughter wouldn’t have burned her books to try to keep her alive.”

“This is true,” Grandmother agreed. “She didn’t want to do it, but the doctor hoped it would spark anger in you so strong that you’d be shaken from your path.”

“And Baba wouldn’t have mounted the opera for my birthday if he hadn’t loved me like a precious pearl.”

Even as the words left my mouth I felt they were wrong.

“The opera wasn’t for you,” Grandmother said. “It was for Commissioner Tan. Your father was lobbying for his appointment.”

“But Commissioner Tan disapproves of the opera.”

“So he’s a hypocrite. Men in power often are.”

Was she suggesting my father was a hypocrite too?

“Political loyalty is a natural extension of personal loyalty,” Grandmother went on. “I’m afraid your father—my son—has neither.”

( 1 2 4 )

She said nothing more, but the expression on her face caused me to look back—to finally see—and understand what I’d ignored in life.

My father was not a Ming loyalist or the man of integrity I’d always believed him to be, but from my perspective this was minor. In life, I’d known my father regretted I was a girl. Despite that, in my heart I’d believed, truly believed, that he cherished, adored, and loved me, but the fact of my tablet and all it implied—that I was an unmarried girl being raised for another family—had proved otherwise. With no one to care for me through my tablet in the earthly realm, my soul was in terrible trouble.

I was like a torn-off remnant of silk. That I’d been abandoned—

orphaned—in this way provided one explanation for why I was stuck on the Viewing Terrace.

“What’s going to happen to me?” I cried. Only a year had passed, and already my gown had faded and I’d grown thinner.

“Your parents could send your tablet to a maiden’s temple, but this is a distasteful idea, since those places house not only the tablets of unmarried daughters but those of concubines and prostitutes as well.” Grandmother drifted across the terrace and sat down next to me. “A ghost marriage would remove the ugly thing from the Chen Family Villa—”

“I could still marry Ren. My tablet would be used in the ceremony.

Everyone would see my missing dot,” I said hopefully. “It would be dotted, and from then on my tablet would be worshipped on the Wu family altar.”

“But your father hasn’t arranged that. Think, Peony, think. I’ve been telling you to look, really look. What have you seen? What do you see right now?”

Time is strange here: sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Now it was days later, and another succession of young men visited my father.

“Baba has appointments. He’s an important man.”

“Don’t you listen, child?”

Business belonged to the outer realm. I’d deliberately not listened to my father’s conversations, but I did now. He was interviewing those young men. Instantly I was terrified that he was trying to arrange a ghost marriage for me to someone other than Ren.

“Will you be loyal and filial?” he inquired of one young man after another. “Will you sweep our graves at New Year and make offerings in our ancestral hall every day? And I need grandsons. Can you give me grandsons to care for us after you’re gone?”

( 1 2 5 )

Hearing these questions, Baba’s intention became clear. He was going to adopt one of those young men. My father couldn’t have sons—an embarrassment for any man and a disaster when it came to ancestor worship.

Adopting one for purposes of filial piety was common enough and Baba could afford it, but I was being replaced in his heart completely!

“Your father did a lot for you,” Grandmother said. “I saw how solici-tous he was of you—teaching you to read, write, and question. But you weren’t a son, and he needed one.”

My father had shown me devotion, love, and many kindnesses over the years, but I now saw that my being a girl had diminished me in his affec-tions. I cried and Grandmother held me.

Barely able to accept any of this, I looked down to Ren’s home, hoping his family might have offered me porridge. Naturally, they hadn’t. Ren stood beneath an awning in the pouring rain, relacquering in cinnabar red the front gate to his family compound as a symbol of the rebirth of the coming New Year, while in my father’s library a young man with small eyes signed a contract of adoption. My father patted the young man on the back and said, “Bao, my son, I should have done this many years ago.”

( 1 2 6 )

The Cataclysm

i t i s sa i d that death i s eve r f ol lowe d by l i f e and the end is always a new beginning. Clearly that is not how it was for me. Before I knew it, a river of seven years rolled past.

Holidays and feast days—especially the New Year—were particularly hard for me. I had been thin when I died, and without offerings I became frailer and more translucent with each passing year until now I was little more than a wraith. The single gown I’d worn here was faded and frayed. I’d become a pathetic creature, always hovering by the balustrade, unable to leave the Viewing Terrace.

The lovesick maidens came to visit for New Year, knowing how sad I would be. I enjoyed their company, because—unlike in the Chen Family Villa—we had no petty jealousies between us. After all this time, they finally brought Xiaoqing. She was exquisite. Her forehead was high, her eyebrows were painted, her hair was festooned with ornaments, and her lips were soft and pliant. She wore a gown of the old style—elegant, flowing, decorated with flowers—and her feet were so tiny that she appeared weightless as she swayed delicately onto the terrace. She was too beautiful ever to have been a wife, and I could see why so many men had been entranced by her.

“I titled the poems I left behind Manuscripts Saved from Burning, ” Xiaoqing said, in a voice that sounded as melodious as wind chimes, “but what’s extraordinary in that? The men who write about us call us lovesick.

They say we are the sickly sex, always suffering from blood loss and body ( 1 2 7 )

depletion. The result, they conclude, is that our fates must match those of our writings. They don’t understand that fires aren’t always an accident.

Too often women—and I count myself among them—doubt their words and skill, so they decide to burn their work. This is why so many collections have the exact same title.”

Xiaoqing regarded me, waiting for me to say something. The other lovesick maidens also looked at me expectantly, urging me with their kind eyes to be clever.

“Our writings don’t always pass away like a spring dream,” I said.

“Some remain in the earthly realm where people weep over them.”

“May they do so for ten thousand years,” the salt merchant’s daughter added.

Xiaoqing looked at us benignly. “Ten thousand years,” she repeated.

She shivered and the air around her trembled in response. “Don’t be so sure. They’re beginning to forget about us already. When that happens . . .” She stood. Her gown billowed around her. She nodded to each of us, then drifted away.

The lovesick maidens left when Grandmother arrived, but what comfort could that old woman offer me? “There is no such thing as love,” she liked to say, “only obligation and responsibility.” Her words about her husband were always bound by duty, not love or even affection.

Forlorn and disconsolate, I listened to Grandmother—she talked about nothing in particular—and watched the New Year’s preparations in Ren’s home. He paid his family’s debts; his mother swept and cleaned; servants prepared special foods; and the picture of Kitchen God, which hung above the stove, was burned and sent here to report on the good and bad deeds of the family. No thought was given to me.

Reluctantly, I turned my eyes to my natal family home. My father had returned from his posting in the capital to perform his filial duties. Bao, my brother of seven years, had married in. Disappointingly, his wife had only succeeded in birthing three stillborn sons. Whether it was from this failure or from a general weakness of character, Bao had taken to spending most of his time with pleasure women along the shores of West Lake. My father didn’t seem perturbed by this, as he and my mother went to the family graveyard on New Year’s Eve to invite the ancestors home for the holiday.

Baba wore his mandarin robes with great dignity. The elaborately embroidered emblem on his chest told anyone who saw him of his rank and ( 1 2 8 )

importance. He carried himself with far greater assurance than he had when I’d been a daughter in the household.

My mother seemed far less secure. Mourning had caused her to age.

Her hair was now streaked with white and her shoulders seemed thin and brittle.

“Your mother still cares for you,” Grandmother said. “This year she will break with tradition. She’s a very brave woman.”

I couldn’t imagine my mother doing anything that strayed from the Four Virtues and Three Obediences.

“You left her childless,” Grandmother went on. “Her heart fills with grief whenever she sees a book of poetry or catches the scent of peonies.

These things remind her of you and are a heavy burden on her heart.”

I didn’t want to hear this. What good would it do me? But my grandmother didn’t often attend to my feelings.

“I wish you’d known your mother when she first married into our family,” Grandmother continued. “She was just seventeen. She’d been highly educated and her womanly skills were flawless. It’s a mother-in-law’s duty, obligation, and reward to complain about her daughter-in-law, but your mother did not allow me this gift. I didn’t mind. I had a house full of sons. I was happy to have her company. I came to look at her not as a daughter-in-law but as a friend. You can’t imagine the places we went and the things we did.”

“Mama doesn’t go out,” I reminded her.

“She did in those days,” she countered. “In the years leading up to the fall of the Ming emperor, your mother and I questioned the true nature of a woman’s calling. Was it the traditional womanly arts that she so excelled at or was it her adventurousness, her curiosity, and her beautiful mind?

Your mother, not your father, was the first to take an interest in the women poets. Did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“She felt it was the responsibility of women to collect, edit, antholo-gize, and critique the work of others like ourselves,” Grandmother continued. “We traveled many places in search of books and experience.”

This seemed far-fetched. “How did the two of you go? Did you walk?”

I asked, trying to make her stop her exaggerations.

“We practiced walking in our rooms and in the corridors in the villa,”

she answered, smiling at the memory. “We toughened our golden lilies so they wouldn’t hurt, and what pain we still experienced was soothed by the ( 1 2 9 )

pleasures of what we saw and did. We found men who were so proud of the women in their families that they published their writings to memori-alize the domestic bliss in their households, establish the family’s sophistication, and honor their wives and mothers. Like you, your mother stored in her heart all the plunder of her readings, but she was modest in her own writing. She refused to use ink and paper, preferring instead to mix powder with water and then write on leaves. She wanted to leave behind no trace of herself.”

Below us, New Year’s Day arrived. In our ancestral hall, my parents laid out trays of meats, fruits, and vegetables, and I watched as my grandmother’s flesh began to fill out. After the ceremony, Mama took three small rice balls, went to my old room, and left them on the windowsill.

For the first time in seven years I was fed. Just three rice balls and I was strengthened.

Grandmother looked at me and nodded knowingly. “I told you she still loves you.”

“But why now?”

Grandmother ignored my question and continued her earlier topic with renewed fervor. “Your mother and I went to poetry parties held under the full moon; we traveled to see jasmine and plum blossoms in bloom; we went to the mountains and made rubbings of stone stelae at Buddhist retreats. We rented pleasure boats and journeyed on West Lake and along the Grand Canal. We met women artists who supported their families with their paintings. We dined with professional women archers and celebrated with other gentry women. We played instruments, drank late into the night, and wrote poetry. We had fun, your mother and I.”

When I shook my head in disbelief, Grandmother observed, “You’re not the first girl not to know her mother’s true nature.” She seemed pleased that she’d surprised me, but her pleasure was brief. “Like so many women in those days, we enjoyed the outer realm, but we knew nothing about it. We employed our calligraphy brushes and had our parties. We laughed and sang. We didn’t pay attention to the Manchus’ southward trek.”

“But Baba and Grandfather knew what was coming,” I cut in.

Grandmother tightened her arms over her chest. “Look at your father now. What do you think?”

I hesitated. I’d come to regard my father as someone without loyalty, either to our Ming emperor or to his only child. His lack of deep feelings for me still hurt, but my emotions hadn’t kept me from observing him.

( 1 3 0 )

No, not at all. Some perverse place inside me wanted to see him. Watching Baba was like picking at a sore. I turned to look for him now.

In these past few years, my abilities had expanded and I could now see beyond Hangzhou. As part of my father’s New Year’s duties, he ventured into the countryside to visit his lands. Not only had I read the Speed the Plough scene in The Peony Pavilion, I had seen it performed in our family garden. What I saw now was a visual echo. The farmers, fishermen, and silk laborers brought him dishes prepared by the best cooks in each village.

Acrobats tumbled. Musicians played. Big-footed peasant girls danced and sang. My father praised his workers and ordered them to provide good harvests of crops, fish, and silk in the coming year.

Even though I’d become disillusioned by my father, I still hoped to discover I was wrong and that he was a benevolent man. After all, I’d heard about our lands and these workers for years. But what I saw was extreme poverty. The men were thin and wiry from their labors. The women had been used up from a lifetime of hauling water, having babies, keeping house, spinning silk, and making clothes, shoes, and meals. The children were small for their ages and dressed in clothes handed down by older brothers and sisters. Many of them also worked; the boys were in the fields while their sisters used their unprotected fingers to unravel silk cocoons in boiling water. For these people, the only purpose in life was to provide for my father and those who lived in the Chen Family Villa.

My father stopped at the house of the headman of Gudang Village. The husband was a Qian, as were all the people who lived in the village. His wife was unlike the other women. She had bound feet and carried herself as though she were once from the gentry class. Her words showed refinement and she did not cower before my father. She held a baby in her arms.

My father tweaked one of the infant’s pigtails, and said, “This one is very pretty.”

Madame Qian stepped back, out of my father’s reach.

“Baby Yi is a girl—another worthless branch on the family tree,” her husband said.

“Four daughters,” my father said sympathetically. “And now this fifth one. You are unlucky.”

I hated to hear those words spoken so bluntly, but were they worse than what I’d experienced? My father had spoken to me with a smiling face but to him, it seemed, I too had been just a worthless branch on the family tree.

Feeling bereaved, I looked at Grandmother.

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“No,” I said, “I don’t think he would pay attention to anything beyond his own enterprises.”

She nodded sadly. “This is how it was with your grandfather too.”

Although Grandmother had been visiting me for years, I’d been careful not to ask certain questions. Partly I’d been afraid of her unpredictable moods, partly I hadn’t wanted to appear unfilial, and partly I didn’t want to know the answers. But I’d held on to my blindness for too long. I took a deep breath and let my questions flow, fearing I might not survive her truths, whatever they were.

“Why don’t you ever bring Grandfather to visit me? Is it because I’m a girl?” I asked, remembering that as a small child he hadn’t cared very much for me.

“He’s in one of the hells,” she answered, in her usual brusque way.

I took this to be her customary wifely rancor. “And my uncles? Why do they not come?”

“They died away from home,” she said, and this time her voice held no edge, only sorrow. “They have no one to clean their graves. They roam the earth as hungry ghosts.”

I shrank into myself. “Hungry ghosts are horrible, disgusting creatures,” I said. “How could we have them in our family?”

“Are you finally asking this question?”

Her impatience was obvious, and I drew farther away. Would she have been this way in the earthly realm, treating me as the insignificant girl I was? Or would she have indulged me with sesame sweets and little treasures from her dowry?

“Peony,” she went on, “I love you. I hope you know that. I listened to you in life. I tried to help you. But these last seven years have left me wondering. Are you only a lovesick maiden, or is there something more inside you?”

I bit my lip and turned away. I’d been right to keep a respectful distance. My mother and grandmother may have been friends, but it seemed my grandmother also saw me as nothing more than a worthless branch on our family tree.

“I’m glad you’re here on the Viewing Terrace,” she continued. “For years I’ve come here to look over the balustrade for my sons. For these last seven years, I’ve had you at my side. They’re down there somewhere”—

she gestured with her long water sleeves to the land below us—“wandering as hungry ghosts. In twenty-seven years, I haven’t found them.”

“What happened to them?”

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“They died in the Cataclysm.”

“Baba told me.”

“He didn’t tell you the truth.” Her eyes narrowed and she crossed her water sleeves over her chest. I waited. Grandmother said, “You won’t like the story.”

I didn’t say anything, and for a long time neither of us spoke.

“On the day you and I first met here,” she began, “you said that I wasn’t like my portrait. The truth is, I wasn’t at all like what you’ve been told.

I wasn’t tolerant of my husband’s concubines. I hated them. And I didn’t commit suicide.”

She gave me a sideways look, but I kept my face impassive and untroubled.

“You have to understand, Peony, that the end of the Ming dynasty was terrible and wonderful at the same time. Society was collapsing, the government was corrupt, money was everywhere, and no one was paying attention to women, so your mother and I went out and did things. As I told you, we met other wives and mothers: women who managed their families’ estates and businesses, teachers, editors, and even some courtesans.

We were brought together by a failing world and found companionship.

We forgot about our embroidery and our chores. We filled our minds with beautiful words and images. In this way we shared our sorrows and joys, our tragedies and triumphs, with other women across great distances and time. Our reading and writing allowed us to form a world of our own that was very much against what our fathers, husbands, and sons wanted.

Some men—like your father and grandfather—were attracted to this change. So when your grandfather got his official posting in Yangzhou, I went with him. We lived in a lovely compound, not as grand as our family home in Hangzhou but spacious and with plenty of courtyards. Your mother often came to visit. Oh, did we have adventures!

“For one of those visits, your mother and father came together. They arrived on the twentieth day of the fourth month. We had four lovely days together, feasting, drinking, laughing. None of us—not even your father or grandfather—gave any thought to the outer world. Then, on the twenty-fifth day, Manchu troops entered the city. In five days, they killed over eighty thousand people.”

As Grandmother told her story, I began to experience it as though I’d been at her side. I heard the clang of swords and spears, the clatter of shield against shield and helmet against helmet, the pounding of horses’

hooves on cobblestones, and the screams of terrified residents as they ( 1 3 3 )

sought safety when there was none. I smelled smoke as houses and other buildings were set on fire. And I began to smell blood.

“Everyone panicked,” Grandmother remembered. “Families climbed onto roofs, but the tiles crumbled and people fell to their deaths. Some hid in wells, only to drown. Others tried to surrender, but that was a serious miscalculation; men lost their heads and women were raped to death.

Your grandfather was an official. He should have tried to help the people.

Instead, he ordered our servants to give us their coarsest clothes. We changed into them and then the concubines, our sons, your parents, and your grandfather and I went to a small outbuilding to hide. My husband gave us women silver and gems to sew into our garments, while the men tucked pieces of gold into their topknots, shoes, and waistbands. On the first night, we hid in the dark, listening as people were killed. The cries of those who were not blessed with a quick death, but suffered for hours as their blood ran out of them, were pitiful.

“On the second night, when the Manchus slaughtered our servants in the main courtyard, my husband reminded me and his concubines that we were to safeguard our chastity with our lives and that all women should be prepared to make sacrifices for their husbands and sons. The concubines were still concerned with the fate of their gowns, powders, jewels, and ornaments, but your mother and I did not need to hear this admonition. We knew our duty. We were prepared to do the correct thing.”

Grandmother paused for a moment and then continued. “The Manchu soldiers looted the compound. Knowing they would eventually come to the outbuilding, my husband ordered us onto the roof, a tactic that had already proved fatal to many families. But we all obeyed. We spent the night in the pouring rain. When dawn broke, the soldiers saw us huddled together on the roof. When we refused to come down, the soldiers set fire to the building. We scrambled quickly back to the ground.

“Once our feet touched the earth,” Grandmother went on, “they should have killed us, but they didn’t. For this we can thank the concubines. Their hair had fallen loose. They weren’t accustomed to such rough clothes, so they’d loosened them. Like all of us, they were soaked, and the weight of the water pulled their garments away from their breasts. This, in addition to the pretty tears on their eyelashes, made them so alluring that the soldiers decided to keep us alive. The men were herded to an adjacent courtyard. The soldiers used rope to bind us women together around our necks, as if we were a string of fish, and then they led us into the street. Babies lay on the ground everywhere. Our golden lilies, which your mother ( 1 3 4 )

and I had tried so hard to strengthen, slipped in the blood and smashed organs of those who’d been trampled to death. We walked next to a canal filled with the floating dead. We passed mountains of silks and satins that had been looted. We reached another compound. When we walked in, we saw perhaps a hundred naked women, wet, muddy, crying. We watched men pull women out of that quivering mass and do things to them—in the open air, in front of everyone, with no regard to propriety.”

I listened in horror. I felt terrible shame as my mother, my grandmother, and the concubines were told to strip and the rain pelted their naked bodies. I stayed by my mother’s side as she took the lead and wormed her way safely into the center of the crowd, all the while attached by the rope around her neck to her mother-in-law and the concubines. I saw that women in these circumstances no longer lived in the human world. Mud and excrement were everywhere, and my mother used them to smear the faces and bodies of the women in our family. All day they held on to one another, always shifting to the center as women from the edges were grabbed, raped, and killed.

“The soldiers were very drunk and very busy,” Grandmother went on.

“If I could have killed myself, I would have, because I’d been taught to value my chastity above all else. In other parts of the city, women hanged themselves and cut their own throats. Others locked themselves in their chambers and set fire to the rooms. In this way whole households of women—babies, little girls, mothers, grandmothers—burned to death.

Later they would be venerated as martyrs. Some families would argue over who would claim this or that dead woman for her virtuous suicide, knowing of the honors that would be bestowed on them by the Manchus. We are taught that only in death can we preserve our virtue and integrity, but your mother was different. She was not going to die, and she wouldn’t allow herself or any of us to be raped. She made us crawl through the other naked women until we reached the back edge, and then through sheer will she convinced us to attempt an escape through the rear of the compound. We made it and were once again outside. The streets were lit by torches, and we scurried together like rats from one dark alley to another. We stopped when we thought it was safe, freed ourselves of the rope, and stripped the dead and clothed ourselves. Several times we dropped to the ground, grabbing loose entrails to drape over our bodies and pretending to be corpses. Your mother insisted that we return to find your father and grandfather. ‘It is our duty,’ she kept saying, even as my courage wavered and the concubines cried and whimpered.”

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Grandmother paused again. I was grateful. I reeled from what I was seeing, feeling, and hearing. I fought back the tears I felt for my mother.

She’d been so brave and suffered so much, and she’d kept it all a secret from me.

“On the morning of the fourth day,” Grandmother continued, “we reached our compound and miraculously found our way to the girls’ lookout pavilion, which your mother was sure would be unattended. We used it as girls and women have before and since, to see but not be seen. Your mother held her hands over my mouth to muffle my screams when we saw my sixth and seventh sons hacked to pieces with sabers and then hauled out to the street in front of the compound, where they—like so many others—were trampled until there was nothing left but mush and fragments of bone. My eyes were parched by the horror.”

This is how my uncles came to be hungry ghosts. With no bodies, they couldn’t be buried properly. The three parts of their souls were still roaming, unable to complete their journeys, unable to find rest. Tears dripped down Grandmother’s cheeks, and I let mine flow as well. Below us in the earthly realm a terrible storm lashed Hangzhou.

“Your mother could not sit and wait,” Grandmother remembered.

“She had to do something—with her hands, if nothing else. At least that’s what I thought. She told us to rip out the stitches that held the silver and gems. We did as we were told and then she held out her hands to take the glittering pieces. ‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘I will send help.’ Then, before any of us could stop her—we were paralyzed with fear and grief—she got to her feet and stepped out of the girls’ lookout pavilion.”

I felt sick and filled with dread.

“An hour later, your father and grandfather came to us,” she said.

“They’d been beaten and they looked frightened. The concubines threw themselves on your grandfather’s feet, sobbing and thrashing on the ground. Making noise is what they were doing, attracting attention. I had never loved your grandfather. It was an arranged marriage. He did his duty, I did mine. He had his business and left me alone to follow my own interests. But in that moment I felt nothing but contempt for him, because I could see there was a part of him—in this most terrible of circumstances—that enjoyed having those pretty girls slithering like greased snakes all over his shoes.”

“And Baba?”

“He did not say a word, but he had a look on his face that no mother should see—guilt for having left your mama behind, combined with a de-

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sire for survival. ‘Hurry!’ he said. ‘Get up! We must move quickly.’ And we did as we were told, because we were women and we now had men to tell us what to do.”

“But where was Mama? What happened to her?”

But Grandmother was reliving what happened next. As she continued speaking, I searched for my mother, but she remained hidden. It seemed I could only follow this story through my grandmother’s eyes.

“We crept back downstairs. Your mother may have procured your father and your grandfather’s freedom, but that didn’t mean we were safe.

We edged along a passageway lined with severed heads until we reached the back of the compound, where we kept our camels and horses in cor-rals. We crawled under the animals’ bellies through more filth, blood, and death. We didn’t dare risk going back out on the streets, so we waited. Several hours later, we heard men coming. The concubines panicked. They slipped back under the bellies of the horses and camels. The rest of us decided to hide in a pile of straw.”

Grandmother’s voice swelled with remembered bitterness. “ ‘I know your foremost concern is for me and our eldest son,’ your grandfather said to me. ‘My mouth wants to go on eating for a few more years. It is good of you to choose death, protect your chastity, and save your husband and son.’ ”

She cleared her throat and spit. “Go on eating for a few more years! I knew my duty and I would have done the right thing, but I hated being volunteered by that selfish man. He hid in the back of the pile of straw. Your father went in next to him. As the wife and mother, I had the honor of lying on top of them. I covered myself as best as I could. The soldiers came in.

They were not dumb. They’d been killing for four days already. They used their lances to stab into the pile. They stabbed and stabbed until I died, but I saved my husband and my son, I preserved my chastity, and I learned I was expendable.”

My grandmother loosened her gown and for the first time pulled her water sleeves up and over her hands. She was horribly scarred.

“Then I was flying across the sky,” she said, a slight smile on her face.

“The soldiers got bored and wandered away. Your grandfather and father stayed hidden for another full day and night with my cold body as their protection, while the concubines retreated to a corner and stared for hours at the silent, bloody pile of straw. Then, like that, the Manchus’ lesson ended. Your father and grandfather crawled out of the straw. The concubines washed and wrapped my body. Your father and grandfather per-

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formed all the proper rites for me to become an ancestor, and in time they took me back to Hangzhou for burial. I was honored as a martyr.” She sniffed. “This was a piece of Manchu propaganda that your grandfather was happy to receive.” She gazed around the Viewing Terrace appraisingly.

“I think I have found a better home.”

“But they capitalized on your sacrifice!” I said indignantly. “They let you be canonized by the Manchus so they wouldn’t have to acknowledge the truth.”

Grandmother looked at me as though I still didn’t understand. And I didn’t.

“They did what was proper,” she admitted. “Your grandfather did the right and sensible thing for the entire family, since women have no value.

You still don’t want to accept this.”

I was disappointed in my father yet again. He hadn’t told me anything resembling the truth about what happened during the Cataclysm. Even when I was dying and he’d come to me to beg forgiveness from his brothers, he hadn’t mentioned that his mother had saved his life. He didn’t ask for her absolution or send his thanks.

“But don’t think I’ve been happy with the result,” she added. “The imperial support of my female virtues brought many rewards to my descendants. The family is wealthier than ever and your father’s new post is very powerful, but our family still lacks something it wants desperately. That doesn’t mean I have to give it to them.”

“Sons?” I asked. I was angry on my grandmother’s behalf, but had she really denied our family this most important treasure?

“I don’t see it as revenge or retribution,” she confided. “It’s just that all those who had real value and honor in our family were women. For too long our daughters have been pushed aside. I thought that might change with you.”

I was appalled. How could my grandmother be so cruel and vindictive as to keep sons from our family? I forgot my manners and demanded,

“Where is Grandfather? Why hasn’t he given the family sons?”

“I told you. He’s in one of the hells. But even if he were by my side right now, he would have no power in this regard. The affairs of the inner chambers belong to women. The other ancestor women in our family—

even my mother-in-law—have acquiesced to my desires, because even here I’m honored for my sacrifice.”

Grandmother’s eyes were clear and at peace. But I was broken, torn apart by conflicting feelings. All this was truly beyond me. I had uncles ( 1 3 8 )

who languished in the earthly realm as hungry ghosts, a grandfather who suffered in a dark and painful hell, and a grandmother who was so far from benevolent that she was actually hurting our family by not giving us sons. But above all, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother.

“You must have seen Mama after you died,” I prompted. “When your soul was roaming.”

“The last time I saw her was when she left us that terrible night with her hands full of jewels and silver. I didn’t see her again until I arrived here at the Viewing Terrace, five weeks after I died. By then the whole family was back in the Chen Family Villa and she’d changed. She’d become the woman you know as your mother, adhering to the old ways, so afraid she could no longer venture out, divorced from the world of words and books, and unable anymore to feel or express love. Since that time your mother has never spoken of the Cataclysm, so I’ve been unable to travel there with her in her mind.”

My thoughts went back to why Grandmother had come here today.

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I thought of my two boy uncles’ deaths.

Grandmother took my hand and looked at me with great kindness.

“Peony, my sweet girl, if you ask your question, I will help you find the answer.”

“What am I?”

“I think you know.”

My uncles had not found peace because they hadn’t been buried properly; I hadn’t been able to move beyond the Viewing Terrace because my ancestor tablet hadn’t been dotted. The three of us had been denied proper burial rites. For us, even access to the hells was denied. Now, as the words came out of my mouth, my last bit of blindness fell away.

“I am a hungry ghost.”

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Red Palanquin

i had nowh e re to g o. i was b e re f t and lone ly. i had no embroidery to work on and for years I hadn’t had brush, paper, and ink to write. I was hungry, but I had nothing to eat. I no longer wanted to fill the long empty hours by staring over the balustrade at the earthly realm below. It hurt too much to see my mother, because now all I could sense was her secret suffering; it hurt to see my father, knowing I’d never been as precious to him as I’d believed. And when Ren entered my mind, my heart constricted in pain. I was alone as no human or spirit should be, unloved and unconnected. For weeks, I cried, sighed, screamed, and moaned. The monsoon was particularly bad that season in my hometown.

Slowly, tentatively, I began to feel better. I folded my arms on the balustrade, leaned over the edge, and looked out. I shielded my eyes from my parents’ home and instead watched the laborers in my father’s mulberry fields. I looked at the girls spinning silk thread. I peeked in on the headman’s family in Gudang. I liked Madame Qian; she was erudite and refined. In other times, she wouldn’t have been married to a farmer, but in the after-math of the Cataclysm she was lucky to have a husband and a home. The five daughters were disappointment upon disappointment. She couldn’t even teach them to read since their futures were tied to work in silk production. She had little time to call her own, but late at night she might light a candle and read from the Book of Songs, the one thing she’d saved from her former life. She had many desires and no way to attain them.

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But truthfully she and her family were just a distraction. They were what I looked at until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Then I would give in to my desires and let my eyes travel to Ren’s home. I teased myself, letting one image after another caress me—the plum tree that still refused to bloom, the peonies heavy-headed with passion, the moonlight glistening on the lily pond—until finally I would seek out Ren, who was twenty-five and still unmarried.

One morning I was going through my ritual when I came upon Ren’s mother walking to the front gate. She looked around to make sure nobody was watching and then tacked something to the wall just above the door.

When she was done, Madame Wu glanced around again. Convinced nobody could see her, she cupped her hands together and bowed three times in the four directions of the compass. Finished with her rite, she wended her way back through the courtyards toward her inner chamber. Her shoulders were hunched and she shifted her gaze furtively from side to side. Clearly she’d done something she didn’t want anyone to see, but her pitiable human actions couldn’t be hidden from me.

I was far away, but by now my eyes were very strong. I focused them until my vision was as solid and as straight as an embroidery needle. I pierced through the great distance, focusing on the spot above the door, and found the tip of a fern frond. I sat back, surprised and startled, because everyone knows that ferns are supposed to blind spirits. I pressed my fingers over my eyes, worried that they’d been damaged. But they hadn’t been harmed at all. In fact, I felt nothing. I gathered my courage and peeked at the fern again. I felt no pain this time either. That frail piece of greenery was useless against me.

Now I was the one to glance around surreptitiously. Madame Wu was trying to protect her house from a ghost or ghosts, but I didn’t see anyone spying on the compound other than myself. Did she know I was watching? Was she trying to protect her son from me? But I would do nothing to hurt him! And even if I could, why would I want to? I loved him. No, the only reason she would try to keep me away was if there was something she didn’t want me to see. After so many weeks of feeling despondent and without purpose, I burned with curiosity.

I observed the Wu household for the rest of the day. People came and went. Tables and chairs were set up in the courtyard. Red lanterns were hung in the trees. In the kitchen, servants chopped ginger and garlic, strung peas, cleaned ducks and chickens, carved pork. Young men came to visit. They played cards and drank with Ren late into the night. They ( 1 4 1 )

made jokes about his sexual prowess, and even so far away I blushed in embarrassment but also in desire.

The next morning, couplets on red and gold paper were festooned on the front gate. Some type of celebration was about to take place. For so long I hadn’t taken care with my appearance, but now I brushed my hair and pinned it up. I smoothed my skirt and tunic. I pinched my cheeks to bring in color. All this, as though I were going to the party myself.

I’d just settled down to watch the events unfold when I felt something graze my arm. Grandmother had come.

“Look below!” I exclaimed. “So much merriment and joy.”

“That’s why I’m here.” She looked down at the compound and frowned. After a long moment, she said, “Tell me what you’ve seen.”

I told her about the decorations, the late-night drinking, and the cooking. I smiled the whole while, still feeling as though I were going to be a guest and not just an observer.

“I’m happy. Can you understand that, Grandmother? When my poet is happy, I feel so—”

“Oh, Peony.” She shook her head, and her headdress tinkled as softly as whispering birds. She took my chin in her palm and turned my face away from the world of the living so she could look into my eyes. “You’re too young to have such heartbreak.”

I tried to pull away, irritated that she wanted to turn my happiness into something dark and unpleasant, but her fingers held me with surprising strength.

“Don’t look, child,” she cautioned.

With that warning, I yanked away from her. My eyes fell to the Wu family compound just as a palanquin draped in red silk and carried by four bearers stopped before the front gate. A servant opened the palanquin’s door. A perfectly bound foot in a red slipper emerged from the dark interior. Slowly a figure stepped out. It was a girl, dressed from head to toe in wedding red. Her head drooped from the weight of her headdress, which was encrusted with pearls, carnelian, jade, and other gems. A veil hid her face. A servant used a mirror to flash rays of light on the girl to ward off any malevolent influences that might have accompanied her.

I frantically tried to come up with an explanation other than what my eyes now told me and other than what my grandmother already seemed to understand.

“Ren’s brother must be marrying today,” I said.

( 1 4 2 )

“That boy is already married,” Grandmother responded softly. “His wife sent you your special edition of The Peony Pavilion. ”

“Then perhaps he’s taking a concubine—”

“He no longer lives in this house. He and his family have gone to Shanxi province, where he’s a magistrate. Only Madame Wu and her younger son live here now. And look, above the door someone has placed a fern.”

“Madame Wu put it there.”

“She’s trying to protect someone she loves very much.”

My body shook, not wanting to accept what Grandmother was trying to tell me.

“She’s protecting her son and his bride from you,” she said.

Tears poured from my eyes, fell down my cheeks, and dripped over the balustrade. Down below, on the north shore of West Lake, mists formed, partially obscuring the bridal party. I wiped my eyes, blinking back my emotions. Once again the sun broke through the mists and I clearly saw the palanquin and the girl who was taking my place. She stepped over the threshold. My mother-in-law led her through the first courtyard, and then the second. From here, Madame Wu escorted the girl into the bridal chamber. Soon the girl would be left in seclusion to calm her thoughts. To prepare her for what was coming, Madame Wu would do what many mothers-in-law do by giving the girl a book, a kind of confidential text that would outline the intimate demands of married life with a man she knew not at all. But all this should have been happening to me!

I’ll admit it. I wanted to kill that girl. I wanted to tear off her veil and see who would dare to replace me. I wanted her to see my ghostly face and then rip her eyes from their sockets. I thought of the story my mother used to tell me about the man who brought in a concubine, who’d laughed at the first wife behind her back and taunted her for how her appearance had changed over the years. The wife turned into a tiger and ate the concubine’s heart and innards, leaving behind her head and limbs for the husband to find. That’s what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t leave the Viewing Terrace.

“When we’re alive we believe many things that we only learn are wrong when we get here,” Grandmother said.

I didn’t absorb her words. I was completely transfixed by what I was seeing. It couldn’t be happening, yet it was.

“Peony!” Grandmother’s voice was sharp. “I can help you!”

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“There is no help or hope for me,” I cried.

Grandmother laughed. The sound was so foreign that it jarred me from my tragic circumstances. I turned to her and her face practically danced with mirth and mischievousness. I had never seen that before, but I was too heartbroken to be hurt by that old woman’s amusement at my desperate circumstances.

“Listen to me,” she continued, seemingly oblivious to the torture I felt.

“You know I don’t believe in love.”

“I don’t want your bitterness,” I said.

“I’m not offering it. Instead, I’m saying that perhaps I was wrong. You love this man; I understand that now. And surely he must love you still or his mother wouldn’t be trying to protect that girl from you.” She glanced over the balustrade and smiled knowingly. “See that?”

I looked and saw Madame Wu present her future daughter-in-law with a hand mirror, which was a traditional gift given to a bride to protect her from troublesome spirits.

“Today when I saw what was happening,” Grandmother went on earnestly, “everything became clear. You must go back to your rightful place.”

“I don’t think I can,” I said, but inside my mind began to spin with the possibilities of how I would seek revenge on the girl dressed in red, sitting in seclusion, waiting to go to her husband.

“Think, child, think. You’re a hungry ghost. Now that you know what you are, you’re free to roam wherever you want.”

“But I’m stuck—”

“You can’t go forward and you can’t go back, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go down. You could have returned at any time, but I interceded with the judges. I selfishly wanted you to stay here with me.” She tossed her head defiantly. “With men there’s always a bureaucracy, and it’s no different here. I bribed them with some of the offerings I received at New Year.”

“Will I ever meet them? Will I ever have a chance to plead my case?”

“Only when your ancestor tablet is dotted. Otherwise”—she gestured below—“that’s where you belong.”

She was right . . . again. As a hungry ghost, I should have been roaming in the earthly realm these last seven years.

My mind at that moment was so twisted between my desire to harm the girl and the realization that I should have been roaming all this time that for a second I didn’t comprehend what she was saying. I took my eyes away from the girl in red and looked at Grandmother.

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“Are you saying I could also get my tablet dotted?”

Grandmother leaned forward and took my hands in hers. “You should hope for that to happen, because then you’ll come back here and become an ancestor. But you won’t be able to make it happen. You’ll have a lot of tricks that you can use with people in the earthly realm to get them to do what you want them to do, but you will be powerless when it comes to your tablet. Remember all the ghost stories you heard as a little girl? There are a lot of different ways people become ghosts, but if all those creatures who didn’t have their tablets dotted could force humans to complete this task, there wouldn’t be very many ghost stories, would there?”

I nodded, taking it all in, thinking first I would ruin the wedding, then I would make Ren remember me, then I would make him to go my father’s house and dot my tablet, then we would have a ghost marriage, and then . . . I shook my head. Vengeance and confusion were so clouding my mind that I wasn’t thinking clearly. In reality, I’d heard a lot of ghost stories, as Grandmother said, and the happy endings only came when those creatures were wounded, maimed, and destroyed.

“Won’t it be dangerous?” I asked. “Mama used to tell me that she would cut any evil spirits that visited me with scissors and that if I wore charms I’d be safe when I walked in the garden. What about ferns and mirrors?”

Grandmother laughed once more, and it was no less extraordinary than the first time.

“A fern will not protect the living from someone such as you. And mirrors?” She snorted at their relative insignificance. “They can hurt you if you get too close, but they won’t destroy you.” She stood and kissed me.

“You won’t be able to come back until you’ve settled things in the earthly realm. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Rely on the lessons you learned when you were alive.” She began to drift away from me. “Use common sense and be wary. I’ll watch out for you from here and protect you as best I can.”

And then she was gone.

I looked down at the Wu household. Madame Wu was walking to her inner chamber, where I was sure she would retrieve the confidential book to give to her future daughter-in-law.

I took one last look around the terrace, and then I lifted myself up and over the balustrade and dropped down into the main courtyard of the Wu compound. I went straight to Ren’s room. I spotted him by the window, ( 1 4 5 )

staring at a stand of bamboo as it swayed in the breeze. I was sure he would turn to me, but he didn’t. I swirled around him so that I floated just before the bamboo. The light played on his high cheekbones. The ends of his black hair hung over his collar. His hands rested on the windowsill. His fingers were long and tapered, perfect for holding a calligraphy brush.

His eyes—as black and limpid as the waters of our West Lake—stared out the window with an expression I couldn’t read. I was right before him, but he didn’t see me; he didn’t even sense me.

A band began to play. This meant Ren would soon meet his bride. If I was going to stop this, I had to try someone else. I went quickly to the bridal chamber. The girl sat on her wedding chair, the mirror held securely in her lap. Even alone, she hadn’t pushed aside her veil. She was dutiful and obedient, this one. She was also strong. I don’t know how to explain it, but in her absolute stillness I felt her fighting against me—me personally—as though she knew I’d be here.

I hurried to Madame Wu’s bedchamber. She was on her knees before an altar. She lit incense, prayed wordlessly to herself, and then put her forehead to the ground. Her actions didn’t frighten me or drive me away.

Instead, I was filled with resolve and a kind of peace I hadn’t felt in years.

Madame Wu rose and crossed to a cabinet. She slid open a drawer. Inside, two books nestled in silk: to the right, her confidential book on marriage; to the left, Volume One of The Peony Pavilion. Her hands reached down and touched the confidential book.

“No!” I screamed. If I couldn’t stop the wedding, at least Ren and his wife’s first night together would be miserable.

Madame Wu’s hands drew back as though the book were in flames.

She tentatively reached down again.

I whispered this time: “No, no, no.”

It was all so sudden—that I was here, that the marriage would happen in minutes—that I acted without thinking about the consequences.

“Take the other one,” I whispered impulsively. “Take it. Take it!”

Madame Wu stepped away from the open drawer and looked around the room.

“Take it! Take it!”

Seeing nothing, she adjusted a pin in her hair and then, in the most indifferent way possible, picked up my book as though it were the one she’d come for and carried it out through the courtyards to the bridal chamber.

“Daughter,” she said to the seated girl, “this helped me on my wedding night. I’m sure it will help you too.”

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“Thank you, Mother,” the bride said.

Something about the girl’s voice chilled me, but I shrugged it off, believing I was finding my powers and that my revenge would come soon.

Madame Wu backed out of the room. The girl stared at the cover of the book where I’d painted my favorite scene from The Peony Pavilion. It was The Interrupted Dream, where Du Liniang meets the scholar and they become lovers. This scene had to be a common one used to decorate women’s confidential books, for the girl didn’t seem distressed or surprised by the subject.

Now that The Peony Pavilion was in her hands, I realized I’d acted rashly when I told Madame Wu to take it. I didn’t want this girl to read my private thoughts, but then a plan slowly began to form in my mind. Maybe I could use my written words to scare this bride away from her marriage. As I’d done with Madame Wu, I began whispering.

“Open it and see who’s here with you. Open it and run away. Open it and admit you can never do what you need to do to be a wife.”

But she wouldn’t open the book. I raised my voice and repeated my orders, but she sat as still as a vase on a nightstand. Even if I’d done nothing, she hadn’t planned on opening the confidential wedding book. Putting my destructive desires aside, what kind of wife did she think she’d be if she didn’t read the instructions for her wedding night?

I perched on a carved chair across the room from the girl. She didn’t move, sigh, cry, or pray. She didn’t push aside her veil to look around the room. With her sitting so quietly, I could see that she’d obviously followed all the rituals for a girl of good breeding and great wealth. Her tunic was of bright red silk, and the embroidery on it was so exquisite that I was sure she’d done none of it herself.

“Open the book,” I tried again. “Open it and run away.”

When nothing happened, I got up, crossed the room, and knelt before her. Our faces were just inches apart, separated only by her opaque red veil. “If you stay, you will not be happy.”

A tiny tremor rippled through her body.

“Go now,” I whispered.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, but other than this she did not move. I went back to my chair. I was as ineffectual with this girl as I’d been with Ren.

I heard the band outside the door. Someone came into the room. The bride took the book from her lap, set it on the table, and left to meet her future husband.

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duri ng th e we dd i ng ceremony and the celebrations that followed, I tried to intervene in many ways. Always I was unsuccessful. I’d been so sure that Ren and I were meant to be together. How could fate be so cruel and so wrong?

After the banquet, Ren and his wife were escorted back to the bridal chamber. Red candles nearly a meter long burned, filling the room with a golden glow. If they burned all night, that would be seen as an auspicious sign. The trickling down of the wax was like the shedding of a bride’s tears on her first night alone with her husband. If one of the candles went out—

even by accident—it would be an omen of a premature death for one or both parties. The band and the party were raucous and loud. Each crash of the cymbals terrified me. Each beat of the drum pounded fear into me.

Bands played noisily at weddings and funerals to scare away bad spirits, but I wasn’t a bad spirit. I was a heartbroken girl, deprived of my destiny.

I stayed at Ren’s side until the firecrackers were lit. The rattling pops tossed me from side to side. It was more than I could bear and I floated up and away from him.

From a safe distance, I saw my poet raise his hands to his wife’s headdress and veil, take out the pins that held them in place, and lift the covering from her head.

Tan Ze!

I was doubly incensed. On the first night of the opera all those years ago, she’d said she wanted her father to make inquiries about Ren. Now she’d gotten what she wanted. How I would make her suffer! My spirit would haunt her. I’d fill her worldly days with misery. I’d felt much pain and wretchedness these past years, but seeing Ze—her perfect white breasts now bared—filled me with excruciating agony and raging despair.

How could Ren’s mother have chosen Tan Ze? I didn’t know why she’d done it, but the result was that out of all the women in Hangzhou, my home country of China, and the world, she’d arranged for her son to marry the one person who would hurt me the most. Was this why Ze had been so still when she was waiting in the bridal chamber? Had she put up hard defenses around herself, knowing I’d be there? The Book of Female Filial Piety calls jealousy the sickest of all the ancestral emotions, and I was sinking in it.

Ren untied the knots at Ze’s waist. Her silk skirt slipped through the fingers I’d so admired, that I’d so longed to touch me when we were alone ( 1 4 8 )

in the garden. Tormented, I pulled at my hair. I tore at my clothes. I cried, terrified that I would miss this, ashamed that I had to see it. No mists formed over the lake and no rains fell. The musicians in the courtyard didn’t have to cover their instruments and run for cover. The guests didn’t stop laughing or telling jokes. My tears had nowhere to fall but on my tunic.

Earlier I’d wished for quiet so I could return to Ren’s side. But this silence was worse, because it heightened and accelerated what was happening in the bridal chamber. If I’d been in Ze’s place, I would have unbuttoned the frogs that held Ren’s tunic closed. I would have used my hands to push away the fabric from his chest, I would have let my lips linger on his smooth skin—but Ze did none of these things. She stood there as passively as she had when she should have been reading the confidential book. I looked into her eyes and saw no emotions there. A realization came to me in a way that perhaps only those who reside in the afterworld can understand. She’d wanted Ren, but she didn’t love him.

She had thought she was cleverer and prettier than I, and that she deserved him more. She had won: She was sixteen and alive, and she’d taken what was supposed to be mine. But now that she had Ren, she didn’t know what to do with him. I don’t think she even wanted him anymore.

I made myself watch as they got in bed. He took one of her hands and brought it under the quilt so she might touch him, but she pulled away.

He tried to kiss her, but she turned her face so that his lips fell on her jaw.

He rolled onto her. Ze was either too afraid or too unknowledgeable to feel anything herself or give him pleasure. This should have made me want to do even more evil to her, but another feeling began to creep into my heart. I felt sorry for Ren. He deserved more than this.

Ren’s face tightened at the moment of release. For a moment, he stayed on his elbows, trying to read Ze’s features, but they were as bland and pale as slivers of bean curd. Without a word, he got off her. When she turned on her side away from him, his face settled into that same expression I’d seen just before the marriage ceremony, when he gazed out the window at the stand of bamboo. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized that look before, because it was one that I’d worn for years. He felt the same loneliness and sense of detachment from family and life that I felt.

I shifted my attention back to Ze. I still hated her, but what if I could use her like a puppet to reach Ren and make him happy? As a ghost, I could use my abilities to inhabit Ze and turn her into a perfect wife. If I worked hard enough, he would feel me in her body, recognize me in her caresses, and come to realize that I loved him still.

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Ze’s eyes were tightly shut. I could see she longed for sleep, believing it would provide an escape from . . . what? Her husband, physical pleasure, her mother-in-law, her wifely duties, me? If she was truly frightened of me, sleep was a terrible mistake. I might not have been able to reach her yet in the earthly realm—perhaps she wore an amulet or had received a blessing I was unaware of, or maybe the stubborn selfishness she’d shown when I was alive was really only a hardness of personality that kept her emotions, softness, and vulnerability at bay—but in the world of dreams she’d have no defenses against me.

as s oon as Ze drifted off to sleep, her soul left her body and began to roam abroad. I trailed at a safe distance behind her, seeing where she would go, trying to decipher her intentions. I’d be lying if I didn’t say a part of me still longed for revenge, and I thought of all the ways I could attack her in her dreams when she was most vulnerable. Maybe I could become a barber ghost. In life, we all fear visits from these demons, who come in the night and shave portions of a person’s head when he or she is defenseless. The hair never grows back on those spots, which remain bald and shining, reminders of the touch of death. We also fear traveling very far in our dreams, knowing that the farther we are from home the easier it is to become disoriented and lost. It wouldn’t take much for me to scare Ze into the woods, where I could make sure she never escaped from the dank darkness.

But I did none of these things. Instead, I waited on the periphery of her vision, hiding behind a pillar in the temple she visited, concealing myself in the depths of the pond into which she gazed, and lurking in the shadows when she returned to her new bedchamber, which she freely explored now that she was in the mistaken safety of her dream. She looked out the window and saw a nightingale perched on a camphor tree and a lotus in bloom. She picked up the mirror her mother-in-law had given her and smiled at her reflection, which was much prettier than what she saw by day.

She sat on the edge of the bed, her back to her sleeping husband. Even in her dream she would not look at him or touch him. Then I saw what she was staring at. Her eyes were on The Peony Pavilion, which was on the table.

I fought my desire to step out from the shadows that hid me in Ze’s dream, guessing that a little prudence now would serve me well in the long run. My mind raced. What could I do to catch her attention but not frighten her too much? The lightest, most innocent thing I could think of ( 1 5 0 )

was air. In my hiding place, I stayed as still as possible, and then softly let out a small breath that I sent in Ze’s direction. As quiet and gentle as it was, it had the power to cross the room and brush against her cheek. Her fingers rose to the place where my breath had kissed her skin. In the darkness, I smiled. I had made contact, but in doing so I had learned just how cautiously I needed to proceed.

I mouthed words. “Go home. Wake up. Pick up the book. You will know the right page to read.” No sound came out, only breath, which once again traveled across the room to Ze. Her body trembled as the words wafted about her.

Back in the earthly realm, Ze tossed from side to side, woke up, and then sat up abruptly. Her face shone with a thin sheen of sweat and her naked body shivered uncontrollably. She seemed unsure of where she was, and her eyes searched the darkness until they came to rest on her husband. Instinctively, it seemed to me, she drew back in surprise and alarm. For a moment she remained absolutely still, afraid perhaps that he might waken. Then, as quietly and slowly as possible, she slipped out of the bed. Her bound feet seemed too tiny to hold her upright, and the pale flesh that rose from her red wedding slippers shook with the effort of standing. She went to where her wedding clothes lay in a rumpled heap on the floor, picked up her tunic, put it on, and then wrapped her arms around herself as if to hide her nakedness even more.

On unsteady legs, she crossed to the table, sat down, and pulled one of the wedding candles closer. She stared at the cover of The Peony Pavilion, possibly thinking of her own interrupted dream. She opened the book and flipped through the pages. She came to the page I intended, smoothed the paper with her delicate fingers, glanced one more time back at Ren, and then whispered the words I’d written under her breath.

“Liniang and the scholar’s love is divine, not carnal. But this does not—and should not—stop them from experiencing carnal pleasure. In the bedchamber, Liniang knows how to behave like a lady by bringing desire, amusement, enjoyment, and satisfaction to her lover. This is perfectly fitting for a respectable woman.” How I had known that, as an unmarried girl, I couldn’t say, but these were my words and thoughts and I believed them now more than ever.

Ze shivered, closed the book, and blew out the candle. She covered her face with her hands and began to weep. The poor girl was frightened, un-intelligent, and uninformed about what she could do to bring gratification to her husband and herself. Given time—and that was all I had—I would be even bolder than I’d been with her today.

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Clouds and Rain

the BOOK OF RITES te lls us that the mo st important duty in marriage is to have a son who will feed and care for his parents once they go to the afterworld, since only he can do this. Beyond that, marriage is for the joining of two surnames, thereby bringing prosperity to both families through the exchange of bride-price gifts, dowries, and mutually beneficial connections. But The Peony Pavilion was about something completely different: sexual attraction and physical passion. Liniang began as a shy girl, but she flowered through love, becoming more openly sensuous as a ghost. Having died a virgin, she took her unfulfilled desires with her to the grave. During the worst of my lovesickness, Doctor Zhao had said I needed clouds and rain. He’d been right about that. If I’d lived long enough, my wedding night would have cured me. Now my yearnings—long kept hidden on the Viewing Terrace—were as ravenous and greedy as my stomach. I wasn’t a frightening, malignant, or predatory creature; I was merely in need of my husband’s sympathy, protection, and touch. My longing for Ren was as great as on the first night we’d met. It was as strong as the moon, reaching through the clouds, over the waters, clear to the man who should have been my husband. But of course I had nothing of the moon’s powers. Since I couldn’t connect to Ren directly anymore, I used Ze to reach him. She resisted at first, but how can a living girl win against someone from the afterworld?

Ghosts, like women, are creatures of yin—cold, dark, earthy, and fem-

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inine. For months I made things easy on myself by staying in Ren’s bedchamber, where I didn’t have to worry about the suddenness of sunrises or strategize as to how to navigate an impossibly tight corner. I was a nocturnal creature. I spent my days nesting in the rafters or curled in a corner of the room. When the sun set, I became more brazen, lounging like a concubine on my husband’s bed, waiting for him and his second wife to come to me.

Refusing to leave the room also permitted me less time with Ze. Her dowry had greatly increased the Wu family’s riches—which is why Ren’s widowed mother had agreed to the arrangement—but it barely made up for Ze’s disagreeable personality. As I’d suspected all those years ago, she’d grown up to be mean-spirited and petty. During the day, I would hear her in the courtyard, complaining about this or that. “My tea has no flavor,”

she scolded a servant. “Did you use the tea of this household? Do not do that again. My father sent tea of the highest grade for me to drink. No, you may not use it for my mother-in-law. Wait! I haven’t dismissed you! I want my tea hot this time. I don’t want to say this again!”

After lunch, she and Madame Wu retired to the women’s quarters, where they were supposed to read, paint, and write poetry together. Ze wouldn’t participate in these activities, nor would she play the zither, although she was reputed to be quite adept. She was too impatient for embroidery and more than once threw her project against the wall. Madame Wu tried scolding, but that only made matters worse.

“I don’t belong to you!” Ze screamed at her mother-in-law one day.

“You can’t tell me what to do! My father is the Commissioner of Imperial Rites!”

Under ordinary circumstances, Ren would have had the authority to return Ze to her natal home, sell her to another family, or even beat her to death for being unfilial to his mother, but she was correct. Her father was important and the dowry had been plentiful. Madame Wu did not repri-mand Ze, nor did she report the girl to her husband. The silences that visited the women’s chambers were rare, but they were heavy with bitterness and reproach.

I heard Ze in the late afternoons, her voice so shrill and loud that it carried all the way from Ren’s library to the bedchamber. “I’ve been waiting for you all day,” she carped. “What are you doing in here? Why do you always keep to yourself? I don’t want your words and poems. I need money.

A silk merchant is bringing samples from Suzhou today. I do not ask for gowns for myself, but surely you agree that the hangings in the main hall ( 1 5 3 )

are shabby. If you worked harder, we wouldn’t have to rely so much on my dowry.”

When the servants brought dinner to the table, criticism poured from her mouth. “I don’t eat fish from West Lake. The waters there are too shallow and the fish tastes like earth.” She picked at the pan-fried goose with lemons and ignored the double-boiled chicken with lotus seeds. Ren ate the seeds, which were a well-known aphrodisiac, and put a lot of them in Ze’s bowl, which she pointedly ignored. I was the only one who knew that she was secretly burning lotus leaves and eating the ashes to prevent pregnancy. Same plant, different purposes. I was happy for her choice. A son would solidify her position in the household.

Every marriage encompasses six emotions: love, affection, hatred, bitterness, disappointment, and jealousy. But where were Ze’s love and affection? Everything she said and did was insulting to her mother-in-law and her husband, but Ze seemed impervious. Neither of them dared protest, because daughters of powerful men were allowed to nag their husbands and make their families feel inconsequential. But this was not marriage.

Ze’s parents came to visit. The bride threw herself at their feet and begged to be taken home.

“This was a mistake,” she cried. “This house and the people in it are too low. I was a phoenix. Why did you marry me to a crow?”

Was this how she saw my poet? Was this why she pecked at him all the time?

“You turned down all offers,” the commissioner answered coldly. “I was deep into negotiations with the son of Suzhou’s magistrate. They had a beautiful garden compound, but you wouldn’t consider it. It is a father’s duty to find the right husband for his daughter, but you decided whom you wanted to marry when you were nine years old. What girl chooses her husband by peeking through a screen? Well, you wanted—no, demanded—a mediocre man who lived in a mediocre house. Why? I have no idea, but I gave you what you wanted.”

“But you’re my baba! And I don’t love Ren. Buy me back. Arrange a different marriage.”

Commissioner Tan was unyielding. “You have always been selfish, spoiled, and strong-minded. I blame your mother for that.”

This hardly seemed fair. A mother can spoil her daughter with too much affection, but only a father has the money and power to give a girl the things she wants.

( 1 5 4 )

“You’ve been nothing but a blight on our family from the moment you were born,” he went on, and pushed her away with his shoe. “The day you married out was a happy one for your mother and me.”

Madame Tan didn’t deny this or try to intervene on her daughter’s behalf. “Stand up and stop acting so foolish,” she said in disgust. “You wanted this marriage, and now you have it. You’ve made your fate. Start acting like a wife. Obedience is the only way for a wife. Yang is on top; yin is on the bottom.”

When pleading and tears didn’t work, Ze turned vicious. Her face grew red and horrible words spewed from her mouth. She was like a first-born son—absolutely sure of her position and her right to demand—but Commissioner Tan remained unmoved.

“I won’t lose face for you. We did our best to raise you for your husband’s family. You belong to them now.”

The commissioner and his wife instructed their daughter to behave, gave Madame Wu gifts as compensation for having to accept the company of their unruly daughter, and left. Ze’s disposition did not improve; if anything it got worse. During the day, when she treated the fingers in the household with utter disdain, I didn’t interfere. The nights, however, belonged to me.

At first I didn’t know what to do and Ze often fought against me. But I was so much stronger she had no choice but to obey me. Pleasing Ren was another matter altogether. I learned by trying and failing, by trying and succeeding. I began to follow his cues and react to his sighs, his internal trembling, and the subtle shifting of his body to give me better access. I directed Ze’s fingers along his muscles. I urged her to use her breasts to caress his skin, his lips, his tongue. I made her use the wetness of her mouth to tantalize his nipples, his belly, and that part lower down. I finally understood what Tang Xianzu meant when he wrote about Liniang “playing the flute.” As for that dark moist part of Ze that Ren desired most of all, I made sure it was open and available to him at any moment he chose.

All the while I whispered in her ear the things I’d learned about marriage from The Peony Pavilion and how a wife had to be “agreeable, accommo-dating, and compliant.” When I was a girl, listening to my mother’s and aunts’ endless drills and recitations about marriage, I’d thought I’d never be like them. I’d planned to reject the past, those lessons, and the rigidity of custom and tradition. I’d wanted to be modern in my thinking, but like all girls who’ve just moved sight unseen to their husbands’ homes, I imitated my mother and aunts, calling on all those things I’d so resisted. If I’d ( 1 5 5 )

been alive, I was sure that eventually I would have come to carry locks in my pockets and insist that my daughters follow the Three Obediences and the Four Virtues. I would have become my mother. Instead, my mother’s voice came out of my mouth and entered Ze’s ears.

“Don’t track your husband’s activities all the time,” I instructed. “No man likes to feel his wife watching over him. Don’t eat too much. No man wants to see a wife putting too much food in her mouth. Show respect for the money he earns. Generosity in spending is very different from wasting money. Only a concubine likes to regard a man as a money printer.”

Ze gradually succumbed to my lessons, while I grew out of the girlish romanticism that had made me lovesick. I came to believe that true love meant physical love. I enjoyed making my husband suffer the pain of desire. I spent hours thinking of new ways to prolong that agony. I used Ze’s body freely and without regret, remorse, or guilt. I made her do what she was supposed to do as a wife, and then I watched—smiling, laughing, loving with my entire spirit—as my husband found release in her hands, mouth, and hidden crevice. By now I knew my husband’s greatest desire was to hold Ze’s bound feet dressed in embroidered red silk slippers in his hands, where he could fully appreciate their delicacy, their fragrance, and the pain she had gone through to give him this pleasure. When I saw Ren could do even more with them, I prevented her from pushing him away.

With Ze as my emissary, I experienced sexual love.

That she didn’t feel anything didn’t bother me. That I didn’t know what she was thinking didn’t disturb me either. Even when she was tired, even when she was afraid, even when she was embarrassed, I pushed and used her. Ze’s flesh was there for Ren to taste, fondle, tease, pinch, nuzzle, and penetrate. But over time I saw that her look of indifference and her lack of response disturbed my husband. Whenever he asked what would please her, she shut her eyes and turned her face away from him. For all my efforts, she was less present in the bed with him than she’d been on her marriage night.

Ren began to stay in his library to read until Ze fell asleep. When he came to the room and got in bed, he did not wrap his arms around her to seek warmth, comfort, and companionship for his sleeping hours. He stayed on his side of the bed; she stayed on hers. At first, this satisfied me greatly, because it allowed me to drape my ghostly form around his body like a shroud. I’d stay that way all night, moving as he moved, letting his warmth seep into my coldness. But when he called for the windows to be ( 1 5 6 )

shut and extra quilts to be brought, I retreated back up to the rafter above him.

He started visiting the teahouses on the shore of West Lake. I accompanied him, staying with him when he gambled, when he drank too much, and when—eventually—he started amusing himself with the women whose specialty was men’s delight and satisfaction. I watched, fascinated, entranced. I learned a lot. Mostly I learned that Ze was as selfish and self-centered as ever. How could she not do what she was supposed to do, as a woman and as a wife? Did she have no feelings, emotional or physical? And putting aside Ren’s pleasure, had she forgotten that he might fall in love with one of those women and bring her home as a concubine?

After she’d done clouds and rain with my husband, I journeyed with Ze in her dreams. Since her wedding night, she no longer visited pretty spots. Rather, her dreams took place in fog and shadows. She concealed the moon. She refused to light candles or lanterns. This suited me well.

From my hiding place behind trees or pillars or from the darkness of caves or corners, I haunted her, bullied her, lectured her. The next evening, she would stay awake in bed, pale and shivering, until our husband came to her. She did everything I told her to do, but the look on her face still did not please him.

Finally, one night as she ventured in a dream garden, I stepped out of the black shadows and met her face-to-face. Naturally, she screamed and ran away, but how far could she go? Even in her dream, she tired. I never tired. I couldn’t tire.

She sank to her knees and rubbed her scalp, trying to produce sparks, hoping those bursts of illumination would scare me. But this was a dream and I had no fear of friction static here.

“Leave me alone!” Ze cried, and then bit the tip of her middle finger, doing her hardest to bring blood. “Go away!” She pointed her finger at me, trying to place blame but also knowing that gore in any form was ter-rifying to ghosts. But again, this was a dream and her teeth hadn’t the strength to tear her skin. Her powers of conjuration, as harmful to me as they could be in the earthly realm, had no power over me in a dream.

“I’m sorry,” I said amiably, “but I’ll never leave you.”

She covered her mouth with her hands to smother her petrified screams. No, petrified is the wrong word. It was as though all the fears she’d refused to acknowledge were true.

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I was a ghost, so I was aware of what was happening to her in the earthly realm. There she whimpered and struggled against the covers.

In the dream, I took several steps back. “I’m not here to hurt you,” I said. I extended my hand and sent in her direction a shower of petals. I smiled and flowers bloomed around us. I gently twirled toward her, sending away the shadows and darkness until we were two pretty girls in a garden on a pleasant spring day.

In her bed, Ze’s breathing calmed and her features settled. Here, in her dreams, her hair shone in the sunlight. Her lips were full with promise.

Her hands were slim and pale. Her lily feet were delicate, an enticement even to me. I saw no reason why she couldn’t bring this hidden self back to the earthly realm.

I lowered myself before her.

“People say you are selfish,” I said. She closed her eyes against the truth of this and her face began to pinch again. “I want you to be selfish. I want you to be selfish here.” I used the tip of my index finger to touch the seat of consciousness that lay embedded in her chest. Under my finger, I felt something open. I drew my finger away and thought about the women I’d spied in the pleasure houses. Emboldened, I reached out with both hands and grazed her nipples hidden under her gown. I felt sudden hardness beneath my fingertips; in the earthly realm, Ze stirred. I remembered the deepest source of sensation I had when Ren had caressed me with the peony blossom. This was a dream and Ze couldn’t get away from me, so I trailed a finger down, down, down until I touched the spot that I knew was the source of pleasure. Through the silk I felt warmth begin to radiate until Ze shuddered and sighed. In her bed, she trembled too. “Be selfish about this,” I whispered in her ear. Remembering what my mother used to say about clouds and rain, I added, “Women should have pleasure too.”

Before I let her waken, she had to promise me something. “Don’t mention our talk or that you saw me,” I said. She had to remain silent about our visits for my connection to her to continue. “No one, especially your husband, wants to hear about your dreams. Ren will think you su-perstitious and ignorant if you talk nonsense about his first wife.”

“But he’s my husband! I can’t keep secrets from him.”

“All women keep secrets from their husbands,” I said. “Men keep secrets from their wives too.”

Was this true? Fortunately, Ze had as little experience as I had and didn’t question me. Still, she resisted.

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“My husband wants a new kind of wife,” Ze said. “He’s looking for a companion.”

At those words—which were so close to what Ren had told me—rage, deep and inhuman, roared out of me. For a moment, I became fearful in my aspect: hideous, repulsive, and frightening. After that, I had no more trouble from Ze. Night after night I visited her in her dreams until she no longer fought against me.

This is how Tan Ze became my sister-wife. Every night I waited for her, coiled in the rafters, when she came to the bedchamber. Every night I slipped down from my perch to the marital bed to guide her hips, arch her back, and help her open to our husband. I relished each moan that escaped her lips. I enjoyed tormenting her as much as I did him. When she resisted, all I had to do was reach out and touch this or that exposed piece of flesh to make desperate warmth seep into her body until she was nothing more than raw sensation, until her hair became disarrayed and her combs and ornaments littered the bed, until she reached her moment of sweet melting and the rains came.

Ze’s sudden fervor brought our husband back home from the pleasure houses. He grew to love his earthly wife. For every moment of enchant-ment she brought him—and there were many, as I thought of new and varied ways to please him—he challenged her right back with his ingenu-ity. There were many places on Ze’s body to explore and he found them all. She did not resist, because I wouldn’t let her. Now when she left the room, I did not hear complaints, criticisms, or angry words fly about the compound. She began to take tea to Ren’s library. His interests became her interests. She started treating the servants kindly and fairly.

How happy all this made Ren. He brought her little gifts. He asked the servants to prepare special foods that would entice and stimulate her. After clouds and rain, he stayed on top of her, looked into her beautiful dream face, and let words of adoration cascade from his mouth and drench her in love. He loved her in the way I’d hoped he would have loved me. He loved her so much that he forgot about me. But a part of her remained cold and distant, because for every shiver I sent through her body, for every sigh I let escape her wet and open mouth, for all the delights I gave her unselfishly—after all, I was wife number one—there was one thing I could not make her do. She would not meet his eyes.

But I never wavered in my determination to make her the wife I wanted her to be. Ren had said he wanted a marriage of companions, so I ( 1 5 9 )

filled Ze’s belly with books. I made her read volumes of poetry and history. She became such a good and deep reader that she kept books on her dressing table, along with her mirror, cosmetics, and jewelry.

“Your desire for knowledge is as strong as your need to maintain your looks,” Ren observed one day.

His words inspired me to be even more persistent. I got Ze interested in The Peony Pavilion. Again and again, she read my saved copy of Volume One. Soon she was never seen without it. She could recite whole portions of my commentary from memory.

“You never miss a word,” Ren said to her in admiration, and I was happy.

Eventually, Ze began writing notes about the opera on little pieces of paper. Were these her original thoughts or mine fed to her? They were both. Remembering what had happened when Ren told my father about his dreams and how we wrote together, I took care to remind Ze never to mention her writing—or me—to anyone. In this regard, she was an obedient second wife, acquiescing to the needs of wife number one.

Nevertheless, although everything was going well, I had a big problem.

I was a hungry ghost and I was becoming less and less.

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Festival of Hungry Ghosts

as living g irls, ce rtain things happe n on sche dule whether we like them or not. We get our monthly bleeding.

The moon waxes and wanes. New Year comes, followed by the Spring Festival, Double Seven, the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, and the Autumn Moon Festival. We have no control over these things, yet our bodies are set in motion by them. At New Year, we clean our homes, prepare special foods, and make offerings not out of duty or custom but because the change in season and the hint of spring prods us, lures us, and compels us to those actions. The same is true in many ways for ghosts. We have the freedom to wander, but we’re also driven and called by tradition, instinct, and a desire to survive. I wanted to stay with Ren every second, but in the seventh month my hunger came on as strong and uncontrollable as bad cramps, a harvest moon, or firecrackers sending the Kitchen God to Heaven to report on a family. Even as I curled around my rafter or hovered over my sister-wife’s bed, I felt myself being beckoned, enticed, pulled outside.

Driven by hunger so powerful I couldn’t stand it, I left the security of the bedchamber. I needed a straight line, and I had it, drifting right through the courtyards and out the gate of the Wu family compound behind two servants holding paper and pots. The minute I passed through the gate I heard it close behind me and watched horrified as the servants pasted protective talismans on the doors and locked them to protect those inside from such as me. It was the fifteenth day of the month set aside for ( 1 6 1 )

the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. I was as much a victim of my desires as my sister-wife; my actions, like hers, were uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

I banged on the gate. “Let me in!”

Around me I heard cries and wails echo my wish: “Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!”

I swirled around to see creatures whose clothes were in shreds, whose faces were gaunt, gray, and wrinkled, and whose bodies sagged with loneliness, bereavement, and remorse. Some had missing limbs. Others reeked of fear, terror, or revenge. Those who’d died by drowning dripped rank fluids and smelled of rotten fish. But the children! Dozens of small children—

mostly girls who’d been abandoned, sold, abused, and ultimately forgotten by their families—scampered together in packs like so many rats, their eyes filled with an eternity of sadness. All these creatures had two things in common: hunger and anger. Some were angry because they were hungry and homeless; some were hungry and homeless because they were angry. Horrified, I swung back to the gate and banged on it as hard as I could.

“Let me in!” I screamed again.

But my fists had no strength against the talismans and protective couplets the servants had used to seal the door against me and my kind. My kind. I put my forehead against the gate, closed my eyes, and let that knowledge seep into my consciousness. I was one of those disgusting creatures, and I was deeply, overwhelmingly, and ravenously hungry.

I took a deep breath, pushed myself away from the wall, and forced myself to turn around. The others had lost interest in me and gone back to their main business: stuffing their faces with the Wu family offerings. I tried to edge my way through their violently writhing bodies, but they easily pushed me away.

I walked along the road, stopping before every house where an altar table had been set up, but either I was too late or the others were too fierce for me. I was reduced to an open mouth and an empty stomach.

Gods and ancestors are worshipped and cared for as social superiors.

They give protection and grant wishes; the celestial aspect of their souls is associated with growth, procreation, and life. Their offerings are carefully cooked and presented on beautiful platters with plenty of serving and eating implements. But ghosts are despised. We’re social inferiors, worse than beggars or lepers. We’re believed to offer nothing but misfortune, unhappiness, and disaster. We’re blamed for accidents, barrenness, illnesses, crop failures, bad luck in gambling, business losses, and, of course, death. So does it come as a surprise that offerings for us during the Festi-

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val of Hungry Ghosts are vile and disgusting? Instead of trays of ripe peaches, fragrant steamed rice, and whole soy-sauce chickens, we receive uncooked rice, vegetables that should have been fed to the pigs, chunks of turned meat with hair still on it, and no bowls or chopsticks. We’re expected to shove our faces into this food like dogs, rip it apart with our teeth, and carry it away to dark nether corners.

People don’t understand that many of us are from refined homes, lonely for our families, and as concerned for others as those ancestors they so cherish. As ghosts, we can’t escape our essential natures, but that doesn’t mean we deliberately try to do harm; we’re dangerous in the same way that a hot stove is dangerous. So far I hadn’t purposely used the darkness of my condition to hurt, maim, or be cruel, had I? But as I wended my way around the lake, I fought off others more timid than myself for the peel of a mildewed orange or a piece of bone that hadn’t already been sucked of its marrow. I walked, drifted, crawled, and dragged myself from house to house, eating what I could, slurping the remains from tables already ravaged by those like myself until I arrived at the wall of the Chen Family Villa. Unknowingly, I’d come all the way around the lake. That’s how deep and unfulfilled my hunger was.

I’d never been right outside my family compound’s wind-fire gate on this festival, but I remembered how the servants had worked for days, chattering among themselves about the wealth of food that they’d placed, tied, or strapped to the altar before our gate: chickens and ducks, dead and alive; slices of pork and pigs’ heads; fish, rice cakes, and whole ripe pineap-ples, melons, and bananas. When the festival was over and the ghosts had eaten their share of the spiritual meal, beggars and the destitute would come to partake of the carnal leavings in the form of an ample banquet courtesy of the Chen family.

Just as at every house, the competition for the offerings was brutal, but this was my home. I was entitled to these things. I pushed my way forward.

A ghost in a tattered mandarin robe with an embroidered insignia on his chest that showed him to be a scholar of the fifth rank tried to elbow me away, but I was small and slipped under his arm.

“This is ours!” he roared. “You have no rights here. Go away!”

I held on to the table—as though that would help someone who has no substance—and addressed him with the respect due his rank.

“This is my family home,” I said.

“Your status in life has no importance here,” a creature to my right growled.

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“If you had any status at all, you would have been buried properly. Another worthless branch,” sniffed a woman, her flesh so corrupted that bits of her skull had broken through her skin.

The man in the mandarin robe dropped his odorous, yawning mouth down to my face. “Your family has forgotten about you and they have forgotten about us. We’ve been coming here for years, but look what they give us now! Almost nothing. Your new brother seems not to understand his mistake. Jaaaaa! ” He spewed his putrid breath on me, and I smelled the rotten offerings in his gullet. “With your baba in the capital, Bao thinks this festival is not necessary. He took the best offerings, such as they were, to his room to share with his concubines.”

With that, the creature in the mandarin robe picked me up by the back of my neck and tossed me away. I hit the wall of the compound across the street, slid to the ground, and watched as the others gnawed and tore at the paltry offerings. I crept around them and knocked futilely on our wind-fire gate. In life, all I had wanted was to leave the compound and go on an excursion; now all I wanted was to get in.

For so long I hadn’t thought about my natal family. Lotus and Broom had to be living in their own homes now, but my aunts were inside. The concubines were still there. My little cousin Orchid would be preparing for her betrothal. I thought of all the hundreds of fingers—the amahs, the servants, the cooks, and most of all my mother—who lived behind the gate. There had to be a way for me to see my mother.

I walked around the compound, making wide turns to avoid the sharp-ness of the corners. But it was hopeless. The Chen Family Villa had only one gate and it was closed against hungry ghosts. Was Mama in the Lotus-Blooming Hall thinking about me? I looked up into the sky, trying to glimpse the Viewing Terrace. Was Grandmother looking down at me? Was she shaking her head and laughing at my stupidity?

Ghosts, like living people, do not like to accept the truth. We delude ourselves to save face, maintain a measure of optimism, and keep going forward in truly untenable situations. I didn’t like to think of myself as a hungry ghost, who was so famished she would shove her face into a platter of moldy fruit to feed her ravenous emptiness. I sighed. I was still hungry. I had to eat enough on this one day to sustain me for a year.

When I was still on the Viewing Terrace, I’d periodically looked in on the Qian family in Gudang that my father had visited during New Year’s Festival soon after I died. I set off in the right direction, fighting off others like myself when I had to, making wide turns when necessary, and getting ( 1 6 4 )

lost in the twisting pathways between rice fields just as the farmers intended.

Night fell, the time when even more creatures should have come out to fill their bellies, but in the countryside I met few other ghosts. Out here, most people met undesirable demises from earthquake, flood, famine, and plagues of various sorts. They died near or in their homes, so their bodies weren’t lost. Rarely did accidents occur where a body disappeared entirely; perhaps an occasional house fire consumed a whole family or the collapse of a bridge during flood season carried away a man going to market with his pig. So most of the dead in the countryside were carefully buried and the three parts of their souls sent to their proper resting places.

I did, however, encounter a few perturbed spirits: a mother who’d been interred improperly so that her body had been pierced by tree roots, causing her unbearable pain; a man who’d been driven from his coffin because it had flooded; a young wife whose body had shifted when her coffin was placed in the ground so that her skull was so twisted that the rest of her soul was unable to proceed to her next incarnation. These spirits were agitated and troubled; in trying to find help, they caused problems for their families. No one likes to hear ghostly wails of unspeakable anguish when trying to fall asleep, feed the baby, or make clouds and rain with your husband. But except for these few souls, my journey was un-eventful and lonely.

I reached the Qian family home. Although they were poor, they had good hearts; their offerings were modest, but the quality was better than anything I’d eaten so far. Once I was sated, I drifted closer to the house, wanting to rest before my journey back to the city, enjoying the sensation of being full, and wishing to connect for just a few moments to people who were closely tied to my natal family.

But during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, wooden screens covered the Qians’ windows and the doors were locked from the inside. I smelled rice cooking. Lantern light leaked from under the doorjamb. I heard the low murmur of voices. I listened very hard, and then the sound of Madame Qian’s voice coalesced. “Since I stopped gathering kingfisher feathers along the emerald river, I have kept to my poor and humble abode, just chanting my poems.” I knew this poem well, and it made me sad and homesick. But what was I to do? I was alone, deprived of my family, companionship, and the gift of words and art. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed. From inside the house I heard the scraping of chairs and sounds of consternation. These ( 1 6 5 )

people had comforted me, and now I’d terrified them with my netherworld cries.

wh e n th e f e st ival was over and I returned to Ren and Ze’s bedchamber, I was fortified, strong, and unexpectedly focused. Being full for the first time since long before I died brought back a different hunger, the one I had once reserved for my project about The Peony Pavilion. What if I could add to what I’d written in the margins and turn it into a self-portrait that Ren would recognize as symbolizing everything I held inside of me?

Didn’t Liniang’s self-portrait and my writings harbor our souls?

Suddenly, I was as selfish as my sister-wife. I’d educated Ze about The Peony Pavilion. I’d touched her thoughts enough so that she’d written on those slips of paper and hidden them in our bedchamber. Now she had to do something for me.

I began to keep Ze in the bedchamber by day, preferring that she stay with me rather than join her husband and mother-in-law in the eating hall for breakfast or lunch. I did not love light, so I forced her to keep the doors closed and the windows covered. During the summer, the room stayed cool, the way I liked it. In fall, quilts were brought in. In winter, Ze took to wearing padded jackets or jackets lined with fur. The New Year came, followed by spring. In the fourth month, the flowers opened their faces to the sun, but inside we found companionship in our shared darkness that refused to warm even by day.

I made Ze reread what I’d written in Volume One. Then I sent her to Ren’s library to find the sources for the three pastiches I hadn’t found before I died. I helped her pick up her brush and write these answers and my thoughts about them on the pages right next to my other writing. If I could make Ze play the flute with my husband, how hard was making her pick up a brush and write? Nothing. Easy.

But I was not remotely satisfied. I desperately needed Volume Two, which begins with Mengmei and Liniang’s ghost swearing eternal love.

Then he dots her ancestor tablet, exhumes her body, and resurrects her. If I could make Ze write down my thoughts and make her give them to Ren to read, wouldn’t he be inspired to follow Mengmei’s example?

At night, in Ze’s dreams, we met by her favorite pond and I said to her,

“You need Volume Two. You must get it.” For weeks I was like a cockatoo, repeating these lines again and again. But Ze was a wife. She could no ( 1 6 6 )

more go out to find this volume than I could have if I’d been alive. She had to rely on her wiles, her charm, and her husband’s love to bring it into our home. Ze had my help, but she also had her own abilities. She could be stubborn, petty, and spoiled. Our husband responded beautifully.

“I long to read Volume Two of The Peony Pavilion, ” she might say, as she poured him a cup of tea. “I saw the opera long ago and now I would love to read the great writer’s words and discuss them with you.” As Ren sipped the hot liquid, she would look into his eyes, run her fingers along his sleeve, and add, “Sometimes I don’t understand what the writer meant with his metaphors and allusions. You are such a fine poet. Maybe you could tell me.”

Or at night, in bed, with Ren lying between us and the quilts piled high to keep them warm, she might whisper in his ear, “I think of my sister-wife each day. The missing second half of the opera is a vivid reminder to me that Same is gone. Surely you miss her too. If only we could bring her back to us.” And then her tongue would dart from her lips and tease his earlobe until other things began to happen.

I grew bolder. By summer I began to leave the bedchamber by placing my hands on Ze’s shoulders and letting her pull me from room to room.

Drifting this way, I didn’t have to worry about corners. I was merely a breath of air that trailed behind my sister-wife. When we arrived in the eating hall for dinner, Madame Wu would put away her fan, call to the servants to close the doors against the sudden chill, and order coal to be lit in the brazier even though these were the hottest months.

“Your lips are growing thin again,” Madame Wu said to Ze one evening.

Such a common mother-in-law complaint, since everyone knows that thin lips show a thinness of personality and this thinness can translate to a thinness of the womb. The unspoken message: Where is my grandson? So typical, so old-fashioned.

Under the table Ren took Ze’s hand. A look of concern came over his face.

“And your hand is cold. Wife, it’s summer. Come outside with me tomorrow. We’ll sit by the pond, look at the flowers and butterflies, and let the sun warm your skin.”

“These days, it is my fate to despise blossoms,” Ze murmured, “while butterflies remind me of dead souls. When I see water, I think only of drowning.”

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“I think,” my mother-in-law observed caustically, “that the sun will not help her either. She brings coldness with her wherever she goes. We should not wish the sun to run from her as well.”

Tears welled in Ze’s eyes. “I should return to my room. I have reading to do.”

Madame Wu pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders.

“Perhaps that is best. I will send a doctor tomorrow to make a diagnosis.”

Ze squeezed her thighs together. “That won’t be necessary.”

“How will you bring a son if . . . ?”

A son? Ze was worth more to me than her ability to give a son! She was helping me. We did not need a son.

But this was not Doctor Zhao’s concern when he came to visit us. I’d not seen him since I died, and I can’t say I was happy to see him again.

He took the usual pulses, looked at Ze’s tongue, took Ren outside, and pronounced, “I have seen this many times before. Your wife has stopped eating and she spends hours alone brooding in darkness. Master Wu, I can draw only one conclusion: Your wife is lovesick.”

“What can I do?” Ren asked in alarm.

The doctor and Ren sat on a bench in the garden.

“Usually a night alone with her husband will cure a wife’s lovesickness,” the doctor said. “Has she been unwilling to perform clouds and rain? Is this why she has not yet conceived? You’ve been married for well over a year now.”