Peony in Love

I was incensed that the doctor would even suggest this. I wished I had the abilities of a vengeful ghost, for I would have made the doctor pay for those accusations.

“I could not ask for a better wife in this regard,” Ren said.

“Have you”—and here the doctor hesitated before going on—“been giving her your vital essence? A woman must take this internally to maintain good health. You cannot just spend it between the scented softness of her bound feet.”

After much prompting, Ren confided the activities that took place each day and night in the bedchamber. Once everything was revealed, the doctor could not fault one party or the other for a lack of enthusiasm, knowledge, frequency, or ingestion.

“Perhaps something else is causing your wife’s lovesickness. Is there something else she wants?” the doctor asked.

Ren left town the next day. I didn’t try to follow him, because I was busy with Ze. Madame Wu, on instructions from the doctor, entered the ( 1 6 8 )

bedchamber, opened the doors, and took away the heavy curtains that covered our windows. The heat and humidity so common in Hangzhou during the summer months filled our room. It was horrible, but we tried our best to be dutiful daughters-in-law by adapting, putting our personal feelings and comfort aside, and complying. I stayed as close as possible to Ze to offer her solace from the intrusion. I was gratified to see her put on another coat over her jacket. Mothers-in-law can tell you what to do, and we can appear to submit, but they can’t watch us every minute.

Three mornings later, Ren returned.

“I went to every village between the Tiao and Zha rivers,” he said. “My persistence paid off in Shaoxi. I’m sorry I didn’t do this sooner.” From behind his back he brought out a copy of The Peony Pavilion, with parts one and two together in one volume. “This is the best gift I could ever give you.” He hesitated then, and I knew he had to be thinking of me. “I give you the entire story.”

Ze and I collapsed in his arms with happiness. What he said next convinced me that I was still very much in his heart.

“I don’t want you to be lovesick,” he said. “You’ll be better now.”

I thought, Yes, yes, I will be better. Thank you, Husband, thank you.

“Yes, yes,” Ze echoed and sighed.

We had to celebrate.

“Let us celebrate,” she said.

Though it was still morning, servants brought a bottle of wine and jade drinking cups. My sister-wife was not accustomed to drinking and I’d never had wine, but we were happy. She drank the first cup even before Ren picked up his. Each time she set down her cup, I touched the rim and she’d fill it again. It was broad daylight and the windows were open to the heat, but there was another kind of light and heat that husband and wife began to feel. A cup, another cup, and another cup. Ze drank nine cups.

Her cheeks were dizzied by the tide of wine. Ren was far more chaste, but he’d made his wife glad and she repaid him with our combined gratitude.

The two of them fell asleep in the early afternoon. The next day, Ren woke up at his usual time and went to his library to compose. I let my sister-wife, so unused to wine, continue to sleep, because I needed her to be fresh and ready.

( 1 6 9 )

Dreams of the Heart

wh e n th e sun st ruc k th e h ook s of th e b e d c ur -

tains, I roused Ze. I had her gather up all the small pieces of paper she’d been writing on during the last few months and sent her to Ren’s library. She bowed her head and showed him the papers in her hands.

“Might I be allowed to copy my commentary, along with that of Sister-Wife Tong’s, into our new copy of The Peony Pavilion?” she asked.

“I’ll allow it,” he said, not even looking up from his papers.

I thought how lucky I was that marriage had not closed the door to his broad-mindedness, and my love for him deepened.

But let me be clear: It was my idea for Ze to copy my commentary into the new volume. It was my idea for her to add her comments to my comments. And it was my idea for her to continue the work I hadn’t finished when my mother burned Volume Two. It made sense for everything to be in the one new book.

It took two weeks for Ze to finish copying my commentary neatly into the first half of our new volume. It took another two weeks for her to organize her little pieces of paper and transcribe them onto the clean pages of the second half. Then we began to add new comments in both halves.

The Dao tells us that we should write what we know from experience and that we have to move outside the mind and come in contact with real things, people, and experiences. I also believed what Ye Shaoyuan wrote in ( 1 7 0 )

his introduction to his daughter’s posthumous literary collection: It may be that the numinous spirit of the written word does not perish and so, too, bestows life after death. So when I had Ze write, her expressions about the opera’s struc-ture and plot were more extensive than what I’d written as a lovesick girl in my bed. I hoped Ren would see Ze’s handwriting, hear me, and know he could have me still.

Three months passed. The sun stayed behind clouds and sank early in the day. Windows were closed and draperies hung. Doors shut out the constant chill and braziers were lit. This change in the environment was good for me and stimulated my mind. For weeks I stayed transfixed by my project, barely allowing Ze out of the room, but one night I watched and listened to Ren as he talked to my sister-wife before retiring. He sat on the edge of the bed with his arm around her shoulders. She seemed very small and delicate next to him.

“You’ve grown pale,” he said. “And I see you’re thinner.”

“Your mother complains about me still, I see,” she commented dryly.

“Forget your mother-in-law. This is your husband speaking.” He touched the circles that hung like dark moons beneath her eyes. “You didn’t have these when we married. It hurts me to see them now. Are you unhappy with me? Do you need to visit your parents?”

I helped Ze with the proper response.

“A girl is only a guest in her parents’ home,” she recited weakly. “I belong here now.”

“Would you like an excursion?” he asked.

“I’m content here with you.” She sighed. “Tomorrow I will pay more attention to my toilet. I’ll try harder to please you—”

He cut her off sharply. “This isn’t about pleasing me.” When she trembled in response, he went on in a gentler tone. “I want to make you happy, but when I see you at breakfast you do not eat or speak. I rarely see you during the day anymore. You used to bring me tea. Do you remember that? We used to chat in my library.”

“I’ll serve you tea tomorrow,” she promised.

He shook his head. “This is not about you serving me. You’re my wife and I’m troubled. The servants bring dinner and you do not eat. I’m afraid we’ll have to ask the doctor to come again.”

I couldn’t bear his distress. I slipped down from my place in the rafters, hovered just behind Ze, then reached out with my fingertip and touched the back of her head. We were so close now, so intimate, that she followed ( 1 7 1 )

my directions without resistance. She turned her head and without a word covered his mouth with her own. I didn’t want him to worry and I didn’t want to hear his concerns.

My methods for silencing him had always worked in the past, but not tonight. He pulled away, and said, “I’m serious about this. I thought bringing you the copy of the opera would cure your illness, but it seems only to have made it worse. Believe me, this is not what I intended.” There I was again, sneaking into his mind. “Tomorrow I’m going out and will return with the doctor. Please be ready to receive him.”

When they got in bed, Ren wrapped his arms around Ze, pulled her back against his chest, and held her protectively.

“Beginning tomorrow things will be different,” he whispered. “I’ll read to you by the fire. I’ll have the servants bring our meals and we’ll eat alone.

I love you, Ze. I will make you better.”

Men are so sure of themselves, and they have such courage and conviction. They believe—truly believe—that they can make things happen just by speaking words, and in many cases they can. I loved Ren for this and I loved seeing his effect on my sister-wife. When I saw the way the warmth of his body bled into hers, I thought of Mengmei caressing Liniang’s cold ghostly flesh back into existence. As Ren’s breathing slowed and deepened, Ze’s breathing responded in kind. I could barely wait for him to fall asleep. As soon as he did, I dragged Ze from the marital bed and made her light a candle, mix ink, and open our project. I was excited, invigorated.

This was my way back to Ren and our life together.

I wouldn’t make Ze write much, just a little:

What is amazing about the opera is not Liniang but the scholar. There are many love-crazed women in the world like Liniang, who dream of love and die, but they do not return to life. They do not have Mengmei, who laid out Liniang’s portrait, called out to her, and worshipped her; who made love to her ghost and believed that it was flesh and blood; who con-spired with Sister Stone to open her coffin and carried her corpse without fear; who traveled far to beg his father-in-law and suffered at his hands. The dream was so real to him that opening her grave did not frighten him. He cried for her without shame. All this he did with no regrets.

I smiled, pleased with my accomplishment. Then I let Ze return to the comfort and warmth of her husband’s arms. I slithered back up the wall ( 1 7 2 )

and resumed my perch in the rafters. I had to keep Ren satisfied with his wife or I wouldn’t be able to keep using her to write; if I couldn’t use her, Ren wouldn’t hear me. All through the night as I watched the two of them sleep, I searched my memory for the things that Mama and my aunts had said about being wives. “Every morning get up a half hour earlier than your husband,” Mama used to say. So the next morning I made Ze get up before Ren wakened.

“Losing a half hour of sleep doesn’t harm your health or beauty,” I whispered to Ze when she sat down at her dressing table. “Do you think your husband likes to see you sleeping soundly? No. Take fifteen minutes to wash your face, brush your hair, and dress.” I drew on the pampered ways of the women’s chamber to help her mix her powder, put on rouge, coil her hair, and set it with feather adornments. I made sure she dressed in pink. “Take the other fifteen minutes to prepare your husband’s clothes and lay them beside his pillow. Be ready when he wakes with fresh water, a towel, and a comb.”

After Ren left the room, I reminded Ze, “Never stop improving your taste and style as a woman. Don’t bring into our home your toughness, your stubbornness, or your jealousy. He can see that on the street. Instead, keep learning. Reading will enrich your conversation, the art of pouring tea will warm him, and playing music and flower arranging will deepen your powers of emotion and enliven him at the same time.” Then, remembering my mother on the day I helped her bind Orchid’s feet, I added, “Your husband is Heaven. How could you not serve him?”

Today, for the first time, I pushed her out the door and guided her to the kitchen. Needless to say, Ze had never been there before. When she squinted at a servant in disapproval, I pulled on her lashes to keep her eyes open and carefree. She may have been a spoiled girl and an absentminded wife, but surely her mother had taught her to make something. I kept Ze there until the simplest of all recipes came to her mind. The servants watched nervously as Ze set a pot of water to boil, poured in a handful of rice, and stirred constantly until it turned into creamy congee. She looked through baskets and cupboards until she found fresh greens and raw peanuts, which she chopped and put into condiment bowls. She poured the congee into a serving dish, put it and the side dishes, bowls, and soup-spoons on a tray, and carried it to the breakfast hall. Madame Wu and her son sat speechless as Ze served them, her head bowed, her face prettily pink from the steam and the reflected color from her tunic. Later, Ze followed her mother-in-law to the women’s chamber, where the two of ( 1 7 3 )

them sat together to embroider and make conversation. I did not allow sniping words to come out of either of their mouths. And Ren did not feel the need to call for the doctor.

I insisted Ze follow these rituals to appease her husband’s anxiety and earn her mother-in-law’s respect. When Ze cooked, she made sure that all the flavors were compatible and that the food was fragrant. She brought to the dinner table fish from West Lake and watched quietly to make sure the others enjoyed the taste. She poured tea when her mother-in-law’s or husband’s cup was low. Once these obligations were fulfilled, I drew her back to the bedchamber and we’d get back to work.

By now I’d learned a lot about married life and sexual love. It was not the sordid thing that Sister Stone joked about or that the Flower Spirit liked to make bawdy innuendo about in The Peony Pavilion. I now understood it to be about spiritual connection through physical touch. I made Ze write: Liniang says, “Ghosts can be careless about passion, but humans must affect propriety.” Liniang cannot and should not be considered ruined for having made clouds and rain with Mengmei in her dream. She could not become pregnant in a dream nor could she become pregnant as a ghost.

Clouds and rain in a dream is without consequence, demands no responsibility, and should bring no shame. All girls have dreams of this sort.

This does not soil them, far from it. A girl who dreams of clouds and rain is preparing herself for the fulfillment of qing. As Liniang says, “Betrothal makes a wife, elopement only a concubine.” Between a husband and wife, what some consider lascivious becomes elegant.

But qing couldn’t just be limited to husbands and wives. What about mother love? I still missed my mother and longed for her. Across the lake, she had to be missing me too. Wasn’t that qing also? I had Ze turn to the scene of Mother and Daughter Reunited, when Liniang—once again alive—meets her mother by accident in the Hangzhou guesthouse. Years ago, I’d considered this scene merely a respite from all the battles and political intrigue that riddled the last third of the opera. Now, when I read it, I was drawn into the world of qing—feminine, lyrical, and very emotional.

Madame Du and Spring Fragrance are horrified when Liniang emerges from the shadows, believing they’re seeing a ghost. Liniang weeps, while the other two women shrink back in fear and disgust. Sister Stone steps into the room with a lamp. Quickly assessing the situation, she takes Madame Du’s arm. Let the lamplight aid the moon to show your daughter’s fea-

( 1 7 4 )

tures. From the darkness of misunderstanding. Madame Du sees that the girl before her truly is her daughter and not just a ghost. She recalls the desperate sadness she felt at Liniang’s death; now she must overcome her fear of an otherworldly creature. That’s how deep her mother love is, but it was even more than that.

I held Ze’s hand as she wrote:

In believing that the creature before her is human, Madame Du not only acknowledges Liniang as human but also gives her back her place in the human world.

To me, this was the purest definition of mother love. For all the pain, for all the suffering, for all the disagreements between the generations, a mother gives the child her place in the world, as a daughter and as a future wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, and friend.

Ze and I wrote and wrote and wrote. By spring, after six obsessed months, I was finally worn out. I thought I’d written everything I could about love. I looked at my sister-wife. Her eyes were swollen with fatigue.

Her hair hung limp and stringy. Her skin had gone very pale from our work, the sleepless nights, and keeping her husband and mother-in-law happy. I had to acknowledge her role in my project. I gently blew at her.

She shivered and automatically picked up the brush.

On two blank pages at the front of the opera, I helped Ze compose an essay explaining how the commentary had come to be written, leaving out anything that would seem strange or improbable in the earthly realm.

There had once been a lovesick girl who loved The Peony Pavilion. This girl, Chen Tong, was betrothed to the poet Wu Ren, and at night she wrote her thoughts about love in the margins of the opera. After she died, Wu Ren married another girl. This second wife came upon the copy of the opera with her predecessor’s gentle words. She was compelled to finish what her sister-wife had started, but she didn’t have the second part of the opera. When her husband came home with a text of the entire opera, she got drunk with happiness. After that, whenever Wu Ren and Tan Ze passed time appreciating flowers, he teased her about the time she drank too much, fell asleep, and slept all one day and into the next. Tan Ze was diligent and thoughtful. She completed the commentary and decided to offer it to those who embrace the ideals of qing.

It was a simple explanation, pure and mostly true. Now all I needed was for Ren to read it.

( 1 7 5 )

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.

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i was s o accustomed to having Ze obey me that I didn’t pay attention when, after Ren left the house to meet friends at a lakeshore teahouse, she pulled out my original copy of Volume One. I didn’t give a moment’s thought when she took it outside. I believed she was going to reread my words and think about everything I’d taught her about love. I wasn’t even concerned when she crossed the zigzag bridge that led across the water to the summer pavilion in the middle of the Wu family’s pond. Under no circumstances could I navigate the sharp corners of the bridge. Still, I heard no alarms. I sat on a jardinière near the edge of the pond, under the plum tree that refused to leaf, bloom, or bear fruit, and prepared myself to enjoy the serenity of the scene. It was the fifth month in the eleventh year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, and I thought how tranquil the late-spring day was, with Ze—a pretty if thin-lipped young wife—enjoying the lotus blooms on the pond’s placid surface.

But when she pulled out a candle from her sleeve and lit it outside in daylight, I jumped to my feet. I paced back and forth anxiously, and the air around me swirled in response. I watched in absolute horror as she tore a page out of Volume One and slowly and deliberately placed it in the flame. Ze smiled as the paper crinkled into blackness. When she could hold it no longer, she dropped the tiny shred that remained over the railing. The last of the paper trailed down, burning into nothing before hitting the water.

She tore out another three pages from the book. Again she set them on fire and dropped them over the edge of the pavilion. I tried to run to the bridge, but my bound feet were useless. I fell, scraping my chin and hands.

I scrambled back to my feet and hurried to the zigzag bridge. I stepped onto it, made my way to the first turn, and stopped cold. I couldn’t walk wide around this corner. Zigzag bridges were designed this way as a barrier to spirits like me.

“Stop!” I screamed. For a moment the whole world shivered. The carp stilled in the pond, the birds went quiet, and flowers lost their petals. But Ze didn’t even look up. She methodically tore out another few pages and burned them.

I ran, tripping, scrambling, flailing, back to the shore. I shouted across the pond, sending waves against the zigzag bridge and the pavilion, spinning the air in hopes of blowing out the candle. But Ze was wily. She took ( 1 7 6 )

the candle from the ledge and sank to her knees on the pavilion floor where she’d be sheltered from the breezes and gusts I sent her way. Once she was settled, a new even crueler idea seized her mind. She tore out all the pages from the book, crumpled them, and put them into a pile. She tipped the candle, and then hesitated for a moment, letting the wax drip down onto the wadded sheets. She glanced around, her eyes furtively scanning the shore and the surrounding halls to make sure no one was looking, and then she touched the flame to the paper.

So often we hear about this or that Manuscript Saved from Burning.

This wasn’t an accident or even a momentary loss of faith in the quality of the writing. This was a deliberate act committed against me by the woman I’d come to see as my sister-wife. I wailed in agony, as though I’d been set on fire myself, but she didn’t care. I whirled my body and thrashed my arms until spring leaves fluttered down around us like snow. But this was the worst thing I could have done; the frenzied air fed the flames. If I’d been on the pavilion, I would have swallowed the smoke, sucking in all my words. But I wasn’t there. I was on the shore, on my knees, sobbing with the knowledge that the writing that had come from my own hand and been stained by my tears had disappeared into ash, smoke, nothing.

Ze waited on the pavilion until the ashes grew cold and then she brushed them into the pond. She came back across the bridge not with worry or remorse in her heart but with a quickness to her step that made me apprehensive. I followed her back to the bedchamber. She opened the copy of The Peony Pavilion into which she’d transcribed my comments and added her own. With every page she turned, I trembled with fear. Would she destroy this too? She thumbed back to the first two pages that explained the “true” authorship of the commentary. In a movement as sharp, brutal, and quick as the stabbing of a knife, she ripped out those pages.

This was worse than when my mother had burned my books. Soon there’d be nothing left of me on earth beyond an undotted ancestor tablet lost in a storage room. Ren would never hear me, and I would be completely forgotten.

Then Ze took the two ripped pages and hid them in the folds of another book.

“For safekeeping,” she said to herself.

With that, I was saved. That is what I felt: saved.

But I was physically and spiritually wounded. In the time it took Ze to perform her wickedness, I became almost nothing. I crawled out of the ( 1 7 7 )

room. Hand over hand I pulled myself along the covered corridor. When I felt I could go no farther, I dropped over the edge, made myself very small, and slipped under the foundation.

I skittered out two months later to find nourishment during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. There was no roaming for me, no visit to my old home, no trek out to the countryside to see my father’s lands and sample the Qian family’s offerings. I had only the energy to uncoil myself from my hiding place, slither down to the pond, and eat the pellets the gardener dropped in the water for the carp. Then I scuttled back up the bank and once again hid myself in the dank darkness.

How was it that I—who’d been born into privilege, who’d been educated, who was pretty and clever—had had so many bad things happen?

Was I paying for misdeeds committed in a former life? Did I go through these things to amuse the gods and goddesses? Or was it merely my fate as a woman to suffer? During the following months, I found no answers, but I began to regain my strength, find my resolve, and once again remember that I, like all women and girls, wanted—needed—to be heard.

( 1 7 8 )

The Good Wife

anothe r five months passe d. one day i heard people scurrying back and forth on the corridor above me: rushing to meet guests, calling out propitious greetings, and bearing fragrant offerings on trays and platters to celebrate the New Year. The clang of cymbals and the burst of firecrackers brought me back out into the daylight. My eyes burned from the harshness of the bright rays. My limbs were stiff from being folded for so many months. My clothes? They were too pathetic even to consider.

Ren’s brother and wife returned from Shanxi province for the festivities. Ren’s sister-in-law had sent me Tang Xianzu’s edition of The Peony Pavilion all those years ago. I hadn’t lived long enough to meet her. Now here she was, small and graceful. Her daughter, Shen—just sixteen and already married to a landowner in Hangzhou—came to visit too. Their gowns were exquisitely embroidered and personalized with scenes from antiquity to show mother and daughter’s individuality and sensitivity.

Their soft voices carried refinement, education, and a love of poetry. They sat with Madame Wu and talked about their excursions during the holiday.

They’d visited monasteries in the hills, they’d walked in the Bamboo Forest, and they’d visited Longjing to see tea leaves harvested and cured. They made me long for the life I’d missed.

Ze entered. During the last seven months as I lay under the corridor, I hadn’t heard much from her. I expected to see thin lips, a set jaw, and ( 1 7 9 )

scornful eyes. I wanted her to look that way and she did, but when she opened her mouth, only charming words came out.

“Shen,” Ze said, addressing Ren’s niece, “you must make your husband proud with your entertaining. It’s good for a wife to display her elegant taste and style of manners. I understand you’re a wonderful hostess and that you make the literati feel comfortable.”

“Poets often come to our home,” Shen conceded. “I’d love for you and Uncle to visit one day.”

“When I was a girl, my mother took me on excursions,” Ze replied.

“These days I prefer to stay home and make meals for my husband and mother-in-law.”

“I agree, Auntie Ze, but—”

“A wife needs to be extra careful,” Ze went on. “Would I try to walk across the lake after the first winter freeze? Under the full sun, there are those who will report on you. I don’t want to humiliate myself or bring shame on my husband. The only safe place is within our inner chambers.”

“The men who visit my husband are important,” young Shen replied calmly, ignoring everything Ze had said. “It would be good for Uncle Ren to meet them.”

“I have nothing against excursions,” Madame Wu cut in, “if my son will benefit from new connections.”

Even after two years of marriage she refused to openly criticize her daughter-in-law, but in every gesture and look she made it plain that this wife was not a “same” in any way.

Ze sighed. “If Mother agrees, we shall come. I’ll do anything to make my husband and mother-in-law happy.”

What was this? When I’d been in hiding, had the lessons I’d drilled into Ze somehow taken hold?

During the weeklong visit, the four women spent their mornings together in the women’s quarters. Madame Wu, inspired by her daughter-in-law and granddaughter, invited other relatives and friends to visit. Li Shu, Ren’s cousin, arrived with Lin Yining, whose family had been tied to the Wus for generations. Both women were poets and writers; Lin Yining was a member of the famous Banana Garden Five Poetry Club, which had been founded by the woman writer Gu Ruopu. The members of the club, seeing no conflict between the writing brush and the embroidery needle, had taken the idea of the Four Virtues in a new direction. They believed the best exemplar of “womanly speech” was women’s writing, so Li Shu and Lin Yining’s visit was a time of strong incense, open windows, and ( 1 8 0 )

active calligraphy brushes. Ze played the zither for everyone’s entertainment. Ren and his brother performed all the rites to appease, feed, and clothe the Wu ancestors. Ren was affectionate with his wife in front of the others. I was not the merest glimmer of a thought for any of them. I could only watch and bear it.

And then my fortunes changed. I call it fortune, but maybe it was fate.

Shen picked up The Peony Pavilion and began to read my words, the ones Ze had transcribed onto the pages. Shen opened her heart to the sentiments and touched on all seven ancestral emotions. She reflected on her own life and the moments of love and longing she’d experienced. She imagined herself growing old and harboring feelings of loss, pain, and regret.

“Auntie Ze, may I borrow this?” Shen asked innocently. How could my sister-wife deny her?

And so The Peony Pavilion left the Wu family compound and traveled to another part of Hangzhou. I didn’t follow Shen, believing my project was safer in her hands than in Ze’s.

an i nv i tat i on arrive d for Ren, Ze, Li Shu, and Lin Yining to visit Shen and her husband. When the palanquins came to pick them up, I held on to Ze’s shoulders as she walked through the compound. When we reached her palanquin, she stepped inside and I climbed up to the roof. We were carried down Wushan Mountain, past the temple, and around the lake to Shen’s home. This wasn’t the haphazard roaming of a dead girl on her way to the afterworld or the frantic search for food and scraps during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. At last I was doing the very thing that Ren had promised would happen once we were married: I was on an excursion.

We arrived at Shen’s house, and for the first time I stepped over a threshold that did not belong to my father or my husband. Shen met us in a pavilion covered by a wisteria vine that she said was two hundred years old. Huge clusters of the violet flowers hung down and swelled the air with the freshness of their scent. As promised, Shen had also invited established members of the literati. Her tutor, who had a long thin beard to show his age and wisdom, was given the chair of honor. The poet Hong Sheng and his pregnant wife arrived with gifts of wine and nuts. Several married women, some of them poets, congratulated Li Shu on the recent publication of her new drama. I was most impressed by the appearance of ( 1 8 1 )

Xu Shijun, who’d written Reflection on the Spring Wave about Xiaoqing. He was known for supporting the publication of women’s writings. Today he’d been invited to discuss the Buddhist sutras. My mother-in-law was right; Ren would make some interesting connections here today. He and Ze sat side by side, looking like the handsome young married couple they were.

The Book of Rites says that men and women should never use the same hangers, towels, or combs, let alone sit together. But here men and women—strangers—commingled with no regard to the old ways of thinking. Tea was poured. Sweetmeats were passed. I sat on the balustrade and got drunk on the vivid fragrance of the wisteria and the lines of poetry that flew back and forth across the pavilion like birds soaring in the clouds.

But when Shen’s tutor cleared his throat, everyone in the pavilion fell silent.

“We can recite and compose all afternoon,” he said, “but I’m curious about what Shen has let us read these past few weeks.” A few of the guests nodded in agreement. “Tell us”—the tutor addressed Ren—“about your commentary on The Peony Pavilion. ”

Surprised, I slipped from my perch. A gust of wind blew through the pavilion, causing the wives to pull the silk of their gowns closer to their bodies and the men to hunch their shoulders. I had little control over the effect my actions had on the natural world, but I tried to be quiescent.

When the air stilled, Shen looked at Ren, smiled, and asked, “How did you come to write the commentary?”

“Modesty doesn’t allow me to admit the depth of my feelings for the opera,” Ren answered, “but I haven’t written about it.”

“You are being modest,” the tutor said. “We know you’re an accomplished critic. You’ve written a lot about theater—”

“But never about The Peony Pavilion, ” Ren finished.

“How can this be?” the tutor asked. “My student returned from your home with a copy of The Peony Pavilion. Surely it is you who wrote your thoughts in the margins.”

“I haven’t written a thing,” Ren swore. He glanced questioningly at his wife, but she said nothing.

“After Shen read it, she passed it to me,” Hong Sheng’s wife commented lightly. “I don’t think a man could have had such sentiments.

Those words were written by a woman. I imagined a young one like me,”

she added, blushing.

The tutor waved away the idea as though it were a bad smell. “What I ( 1 8 2 )

read couldn’t have been written by a girl—or a woman, for that matter,”

he said. “Shen allowed me to show the commentary to others here in Hangzhou. To a man, to a woman”—and here he gestured to the others sitting in the pavilion—“we’ve been touched by the words. We’ve asked ourselves, Who could have had such amazing insights about tenderness, devotion, and love? Shen invited you here to answer that question for us.”

Ren touched Ze’s hand. “Is this your copy of The Peony Pavilion? The one you worked on for so long? The one started by . . . ?”

Ze stared into the middle distance as though he were speaking to someone else.

“Who wrote these beautiful words?” Hong Sheng asked.

Even he had read my commentary? I forced myself not to move or cry out from happiness. Ren’s niece had done something extraordinary. She’d taken my thoughts not just to her home and to her tutor but to one of the country’s most popular writers.

Ze, meanwhile, had put a look of utter confusion on her face, as though she’d somehow forgotten who’d written in the margins.

“Was it your husband?” the tutor prompted.

“My husband?” Ze inclined her head in the way of all humble wives.

“My husband?” she repeated sweetly. Then after a long pause, she said,

“Yes, my husband.”

Was there no end to this woman’s torture of me? She had once been docile and easy to control, but she’d learned my lessons too well. She’d become too much of a good wife.

“But, Ze, I’ve written nothing about the opera,” Ren insisted. He looked at the others and added, “I know of the commentary, and I did not write it. Please,” he said to Shen. “May I see it?”

Shen nodded to a servant to get the book. Everyone waited, feeling awkward that husband and wife were in disagreement. Me? I balanced on my lily feet, trying to remain as still as possible, while inside my emotions were in a storm of fear, astonishment, and hopefulness.

The servant returned with the book and placed it in Ren’s hands. The guests watched as he turned the pages. I wanted to run to him, kneel before him, and stare into his eyes as he read my words. Do you hear me? But I kept myself in a grip of serenity. To interfere in any way—willfully or negligently—would have destroyed the moment. He flipped the pages, stopping here and there, and then he looked up with a curious expression of longing and loss.

“I didn’t write this. This commentary was begun by a woman who was ( 1 8 3 )

to be my wife.” He turned to Lin Yining and Li Shu, the two women to whom he was related. “You remember that I was to marry Chen Tong. She started this. My wife picked up the project and added her comments in the second half. Surely you who are of my blood know I speak the truth.”

“If what you say is true,” the tutor cut in before the women could respond, “why is Ze’s style so similar to Chen Tong’s that we cannot tell them apart?”

“Perhaps only a husband—a man who has known both women well—

would hear the two voices.”

“Love grows only when a couple is intimate,” Hong Sheng agreed.

“When the moon shines on West Lake, you do not see a husband alone in his room. When a jade hairpin falls onto the pillow, you do not see a wife alone. But please explain to us how an unmarried girl could know so much about love. And how is it you would know her voice if you were never married?”

“I think Master Wu speaks the truth,” one of the wives interrupted shyly, saving Ren from answering the awkward questions. “I found Chen Tong’s words to be romantic. Her sister-wife has also done a good job adding her thoughts about qing. ”

A few of the other wives nodded in agreement; Ze remained oblivious.

“I’d be happy to read these thoughts even without the opera,” Shen proclaimed.

Yes! This was exactly what I wanted to hear.

Then Xu Shijun snorted his skepticism. “What wife would want her name to be known outside the bedchamber? Women have no reason to get caught up in the degrading quest for fame.”

This, coming from a man who was known as an educator of women, who’d shown such sympathy for Xiaoqing’s plight, who’d been known to support the publication of women’s writings?

“No woman—let alone two wives—would want to exhibit her private thoughts in such a public way,” one of the husbands added, picking up on Xu’s surprising stance. “Women have the inner chambers for that. Liber-alism, women venturing out, men encouraging women to write and paint for profit, all these things led to the Cataclysm. We can be grateful that some women are returning to old traditions.”

I felt sick. What had happened to the loyalists? Why didn’t Li Shu and Lin Yining, both professional women writers, correct him?

“Wives need to be literate,” Shen’s tutor said, and for a moment I felt better. “They need to understand the highest principles so they can teach ( 1 8 4 )

them to their sons. But, sadly, it doesn’t always turn out that way.” He shook his head despairingly. “We let women read and then what happens?

Do they aspire to noble thoughts? No. They read plays, operas, novels, and poetry. They read for entertainment, which can only impair contemplation.”

I was paralyzed by the brutality of these words. How could things have changed so dramatically in the nine years since I died? My father may not have let me venture outside the villa and my mother may not have liked me reading The Peony Pavilion, but these ideas were far more strident than what I’d grown up with.

“Then we can agree the mystery is solved,” Shen’s tutor concluded.

“Wu Ren has accomplished something truly unique. He has opened a window for us on the meaning of and reasons for love. He is a great artist.”

“So sensitive,” one of the men said.

“Too sensitive,” Lin Yining added, with an audible touch of bitterness.

Through it all Ze said nothing. She acted polite and sincere. She kept her eyes cast down and her hands hidden in her sleeves. No one could have accused her of being anything less than a perfect wife.

Xu Shijun took the commentary away with him and published it. He included a preface he wrote about Ren, praising him for his insights about love, marriage, and longing. And then he promoted the commentary, traveling around the country and endorsing Ren as the author of this great work. In this way, my words, thoughts, and emotions became extremely popular among members of the literati, not only in Hangzhou but across China.

Ren refused to accept any accolades.

“I did nothing,” he said. “I owe everything to my wife and the girl who would have been my wife.”

Always he got the same response: “You are too modest, Master Wu.”

Despite his denials—perhaps because of his denials—he gained a solid reputation for what Ze and I had written. Editors sought him out to publish his poems. He was invited to gatherings of the literati. He traveled for weeks at a time as his name grew. He earned money, which made his mother and wife very happy. Eventually he learned to accept the compli-ments. When men said, “No woman could ever write anything this in-sightful,” he bowed his head and said nothing. And not one of the women who’d been at Shen’s home that day came to my defense. Clearly it was easier in these changing times not to speak out or celebrate another woman’s accomplishment.

( 1 8 5 )

I should have been proud of my poet’s success. In life, I might have done exactly the same as Ze, for a wife’s duty is to bring honor to her husband in every way possible. But I was not of the living world, and I felt the anger, disappointment, and disillusionment of a woman whose voice has been taken away from her. For all my efforts, I felt Ren hadn’t heard me at all. I was crushed.

( 1 8 6 )

Jealousy-Curing Soup

a f te r th e v i s i t to sh e n ’s , z e we nt h om e and re -

tired to her bed. She refused to light the lamps. She didn’t speak. She turned down food even when it was brought to her.

She stopped dressing and pinning her hair. After the things she’d done to me, I didn’t do anything to help her. When Ren finally returned from his travels, she still didn’t get up. They performed clouds and rain, but it was as though they’d gone back to the first days of their marriage, so disinterested was she. Ren tried to coax Ze from the room with promises of pleasant strolls in the garden or a meal with friends. Instead of accepting, she wrapped her arms around herself, shook her head no, and asked, “Am I your wife or your concubine?”

He stared at her propped up in the bed, her face blotchy, her skin sal-low, her elbows and collarbones protruding from her seemingly fleshless body. “You’re my wife,” he answered. “Of course I love you.”

When she burst into tears, Ren did the only sensible thing a man could do. He sent for Doctor Zhao, who pronounced, “Your wife has had a re-lapse of her lovesickness.”

But Ze couldn’t be lovesick. She’d stopped eating, true, but she wasn’t a maiden. She wasn’t a virgin. She was an eighteen-year-old married woman.

“I’m not lovesick. I have no love in me!” Ze cried from the bed.

The two men regarded each other soberly and then looked back down at the bedridden woman.

( 1 8 7 )

“Husband, stay away from me. I’ve become an incubus, a vampire, an evil temptress. If you sleep with me, I’ll pierce your feet with an awl. I’ll suck the blood from your bones to feed the emptiness inside me.”

This was one way of getting out of doing clouds and rain, but I no longer had a desire to interfere.

“Perhaps your wife is afraid for her position,” Doctor Zhao reasoned.

“Have you been unhappy with her?”

“Be careful,” Ze warned the doctor, “or the next time you fall asleep I’ll use a piece of silk to snap your neck.”

Doctor Zhao ignored the outburst. “Does Madame Wu criticize too freely? Even an offhand remark by a mother-in-law can make a young wife anxious and unsure.”

When Ren assured the doctor this wasn’t possible, he prescribed a diet of pig’s trotters to help restore Ze’s qi.

She was not about to eat something so lowly.

Next the doctor ordered the cook to make a soup of pig’s liver to help strengthen Ze’s corresponding organ. Soon he was trying every organ of the pig to fortify his patient. None of them worked.

“You were supposed to marry someone else,” the doctor said diffi-dently to Ren. “Perhaps she’s come back to claim her rightful place.”

Ren dismissed the idea. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

The doctor jutted his jaw and went back to listening to Ze’s pulses. He asked about her dreams, which she said were filled with vile demons and horrific sights.

“I see a woman with little flesh on her bones,” Ze recounted. “Her longing reaches out to me, wraps itself around my neck, and takes away my breath.”

“I have not been subtle enough in my diagnosis,” Doctor Zhao now admitted to Ren. “Your wife has a different kind of lovesickness from what I originally thought. She has a bad case of that most common of all feminine disorders: too much vinegar.”

This word sounded exactly the same as jealousy in our dialect.

“But she has no reason to be jealous,” Ren objected.

To which Ze pointed a thin finger at him. “You don’t love me.”

“What about your first wife?” Doctor Zhao circled back.

“Ze is my first wife.”

That stung. Could Ren have forgotten me so completely?

“Perhaps you forget that I took care of Chen Tong as she died,” the doctor reminded him. “Tradition would tell you that she was your first ( 1 8 8 )

wife. Were your Eight Characters not matched? Were bride-price gifts not sent to her family home?”

“Your thinking is very old-fashioned,” Ren said disapprovingly. “This is not a ghost infestation. Ghosts only exist to scare children into obeying their parents, give young men an excuse to explain away bad behavior with low women, or make girls languish over something they can never have.”

How could he say these things? Had he forgotten how we’d talked about The Peony Pavilion? Had he forgotten Liniang was a ghost? If he didn’t believe in ghosts, how was he ever going to hear me? His words were so terrible and cruel that I decided he could only be saying them to comfort and reassure my sister-wife.

“Many wives go on hunger strikes because they’re jealous and ill-tempered,” the doctor suggested, trying a different approach. “They try to push their anger onto others by making them suffer with guilt and remorse.”

The doctor prescribed a bowl of jealousy-curing soup made from oriole broth. In one of the plays about Xiaoqing, this remedy had been used on the jealous wife. It had reduced the wife’s emotional disease by half but left her pockmarked.

“You would ruin me?” Ze pushed away the soup. “What about my skin?”

The doctor put a hand on Ren’s arm and spoke loudly enough for Ze to hear. “Just remember that jealousy is one of the seven reasons for divorce.”

If I’d known more, I would have tried to do something. But if I’d known more, maybe I wouldn’t have died myself. So I stayed up in the rafters when the doctor tried to expel the excess fire from Ze’s belly with a less scarring remedy by flushing her bowels with a tonic of wild celery.

Chamber pot after chamber pot was filled and taken away, but Ze didn’t regain her strength.

The diviner arrived next. I stayed out of his way as he brandished a sword wet with blood over Ze’s bed. I covered my ears when he shouted incantations. But no evil spirits haunted Ze, so his efforts produced no results.

Six weeks went by. Ze worsened. When she woke in the morning, she threw up. When she moved her head during the day, she threw up. When her mother-in-law came with clear soups, Ze turned her face away and threw up.

Madame Wu called for the doctor and the diviner to come together.

( 1 8 9 )

“We’ve had a lot of bother in our household over my daughter-in-law,”

she said cryptically. “But perhaps what is happening is only natural. Maybe you should check her again and this time consider that she is a wife and my son is a husband.”

The doctor looked at Ze’s tongue. He peered into her eyes. He listened yet again to the various pulses in her wrist. The diviner moved a limp orchid from one table to another. He consulted Ze’s and Ren’s horoscopes.

He wrote a question on a piece of paper, burned it in a censer so the words would travel to Heaven, and consulted the ashes to receive his answer.

Then the two men bent their heads together to confer and refine their diagnosis.

“Mother is very wise,” Doctor Zhao declared at last. “Women are always the first to recognize the symptoms. Your daughter-in-law has the best type of lovesickness: She’s pregnant.”

After so many weeks of this and that diagnosis I didn’t believe it, but I was intrigued. Could it be true? Despite the presence of the others in the room, I dropped onto Ze’s bed. I sat astride her and peered into her belly.

I saw the tiny speck of life, a soul waiting to be reborn. I should have spotted it earlier, but I was young and unknowing about these things. It was a son.

“It’s not mine!” Ze shrieked. “Get it out!”

Doctor Zhao and the diviner laughed good-naturedly.

“We hear this often from young wives,” Doctor Zhao said. “Madame Wu, please show her the confidential women’s book again and explain what has happened. Mistress Ze, rest, avoid gossip, and eat the proper foods. Stay away from water chestnuts, musk deer, lamb, and rabbit meat.”

“And make sure you wear a daylily pinned to your waist,” the diviner added. “It will help relieve the pains of childbirth and ensure the birth of a healthy son.”

With much jubilation, Ren, his mother, and the servants discussed the possibilities. “A son is best,” Ren said, “but I would welcome a daughter.”

This was the kind of man he was. This is why I loved him still.

But Ze was not happy about the baby, and her condition did not improve. She had no opportunity to encounter a musk deer, and the cook completely banned rabbit meat and lamb from the household, but Ze sneaked into the kitchen late at night to nibble on water chestnuts. She crumpled the flower at her waist and threw it on the floor. She refused to feed the child growing inside her. She stayed up late writing that the baby ( 1 9 0 )

was not hers on pieces of paper. Every time she saw her husband, she wailed, “You don’t love me!” And when she wasn’t crying, accusing, or turning away food, she was throwing up. Soon enough we could all see pink pieces of stomach lining in the bowls the servants took away from the room. Everyone understood the seriousness of the situation. No one wants a loved one to die, but for a woman to die pregnant or in childbirth consigned her to a terrible fate: deportation to the Blood-Gathering Lake.

The Autumn Moon Festival came and went. Ze stopped taking in even water. Mirrors and a sieve were hung in the room. Fortunately, neither of these things was pointed up to where I kept my vigil.

“Nothing is wrong with her,” Commissioner Tan announced, when he came to visit. “She doesn’t want a baby in her womb because she has nothing in her heart.”

“She’s your daughter,” Ren reminded the man, “and she’s my wife.”

The commissioner was unimpressed and left with advice and a warning: “When the baby comes, keep it away from her. That will be safest. Ze does not like to see eyes on anyone but herself.”

Ze had no peace. She seemed terrified by day—shivering, crying, hiding her eyes. The nights gave her no respite. She tossed from side to side, cried out, and woke up in pools of sweat. The diviner made a special altar of peach wood and set incense and candles on it. He wrote a charm, burned it, and then mixed the ashes with water from a spring. With his sword in his right hand and the cup of watery ashes in his left, he prayed:

“Purge this dwelling of all evil lurking here.” He dipped a sprig of willow in the cup and sprinkled it to the four compass points. To reinforce the spell, he filled his mouth with the ashy water and spurted it onto the wall above Ze’s bed. “Cleanse this woman’s mind of the spirits of darkness.”

But her nightmares did not cease and the effects grew worse. Dreams were something I knew about and I thought I could help, but when I went abroad with Ze in this way I found nothing frightening or unusual. She wasn’t being hunted or harmed in her dreams at all, which mystified me greatly.

The first snows came and the doctor visited yet again. “This is not a good child your wife carries,” he told Ren. “He is hanging on to your wife’s intestines and won’t let go. If you give me permission, I’ll use acupuncture to get rid of it.”

On the surface, this seemed like a logical explanation and a practical solution, but I could see the baby. He was not an evil spirit; he was just trying to survive.

( 1 9 1 )

“What if it’s a son?” Ren asked.

The doctor wavered. When he saw Ze’s writing scraps scattered about the room, he said sadly, “Every day I see it and I don’t know what to do.

Literacy is a grave threat to the female sex. Too often I’ve seen the health and happiness of young women fade because they will not give up their brush and ink. I’m afraid”—and here he put a comforting hand on Ren’s arm—“that we will look back and blame the lovesickness caused by writing for your wife’s death.”

I thought, not for the first time, that Doctor Zhao knew very little about women or love.

at t h i s m o st grim moment, as the Wu household settled in for the deathwatch, my adopted brother arrived. Bao’s appearance shocked us all, for we were all so focused on someone who was literally wasting away while he was abundantly fat. In his pudgy fingers he held the poems I’d written when I was dying and hidden in the book on dam building in my father’s library. How had Bao found them? Looking at his soft white hands, he did not seem the type to be commissioning or designing a dam.

His little eyes seemed too narrow and close together to find joy in reading out of intellectual curiosity, let alone pleasure. Something else had caused him to open that particular volume.

When he demanded money for my simple poems and I saw that this was no gift from one brother-in-law to another, I understood that things could not be well in the Chen Family Villa. I suppose I expected this.

They couldn’t ignore my death and not expect some consequences. Bao had to be dismantling the library and had come across the poems. But where was my father? He’d sell his concubines before selling his library.

Was he ailing? Had he died? Wouldn’t I have heard something if he had?

Should I rush back to my natal home?

But this was my home now. Ren was my husband and Ze was my sister-wife. She was sick, right here, right now. Oh, yes, I’d been angry with her at times. I’d even hated her on occasion. But I would be at her side when she died. I would welcome her to the afterworld and thank her for being my sister-wife.

Ren paid my adopted brother. Things were so bad with Ze that he didn’t even look at the poems. He selected a book from his library, tucked the papers inside, placed the volume back on the shelf, and returned to the bedchamber.

( 1 9 2 )

We went back to waiting. Madame Wu brought tea and snacks for her son, which he left mostly untouched. Commissioner Tan and his wife came again to see their daughter. Their harshness faded as they realized Ze was actually dying.

“Tell us what the matter is,” Madame Tan begged her daughter.

Ze’s body relaxed and color flushed her cheeks when she heard her mother’s voice.

Encouraged, Madame Tan tried again. “We can take you away from here. Come home and sleep in your own bed. You’ll feel better with us.”

At these words, Ze stiffened. She pursed her lips and looked away. Seeing this, tears streamed down Madame Tan’s face.

The commissioner stared at his intractable daughter.

“You’ve been stubborn forever,” he observed, “but I always go back to the night we saw The Peony Pavilion as the moment your emotions con-gealed to stone. Since that time, you’ve never listened to a single warning or piece of advice I’ve given you. Now you pay the price. We will remember you in our offerings.”

As Madame Wu showed the Tans back to their palanquins, the sick girl moaned the ailments she would not tell her parents. “I feel a floating numbness. My hands and feet will not move. My eyes are too dry for tears. My spirit is frozen by the cold.”

Every few minutes she opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling, shivered, and closed them again. All the while, Ren held her hand and spoke softly to her.

Later that night when all was darkness and I had no fear of reflection from the mirrors, I let myself down into the room. I blew open the curtains so that moonlight illuminated the bedchamber. Ren slept in a chair.

I touched his hair and felt him shiver. I sat with my sister-wife and felt the cold piercing her bones. Everyone else in the household was wandering in their dreams, so I stayed at Ze’s side to protect and comfort her. I placed my hand over her heart. I felt it slow, skip beats, race, and slow again. Just as darkness began to give way to pink, the air in the room shifted. Tan Ze’s bones crumbled, her soul dissolved, and just like that she was flying across the sky.

( 1 9 3 )

The Blood-Gathering Lake

z e ’s s ou l b r o ke i n to t h r e e. o n e part b e gan i t s journey to the afterworld, one part waited to enter its coffin, and the last part roamed until it was time to be placed in its ancestor tablet. Her corpse submitted humbly to the rites that had to be performed. The doctor cut the baby from Ze’s stomach and threw it away, so it wouldn’t go with her to the Blood-Gathering Lake and would have a chance at rebirth. Then her emaciated body was washed and dressed. Ren remained at her side, refusing to take his eyes off her pale face and still-red lips, seemingly waiting for her to waken. I waited in the bedchamber for the roaming part of her soul to appear. I was convinced she would be relieved to see someone familiar. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The moment she saw me, her lips drew back and she bared her teeth.

“You! I knew I would see you!”

“Everything will be fine. I’m here to help you—”

“Help me? You killed me!”

“You’re confused,” I said soothingly. I too had been disoriented upon my death. She was lucky I was here to ease her mind.

“I knew even before my marriage that you would try to harm me,” she went on, in a no-less-furious tone. “You were there on my marriage day, weren’t you?” When I nodded, she said, “I should have smeared your tombstone with the blood of a black dog.”

This was the worst thing a person could do to a dead soul, since this ( 1 9 4 )

type of blood was believed to be as odious as a woman’s monthly excre-tions. If she’d done that, I would have been set on a path to kill my natal family. I was surprised by her bitterness, but she wasn’t done.

“You haunted me from the very beginning,” she continued. “I heard you crying in the winds of stormy nights.”

“I thought I made you happy—”

“No! You made me read that opera. Then you made me write about it.

You made me imitate you in everything I did, until finally there was nothing left of me. You died from the opera, and then you made me copy you copying Liniang.”

“I only wanted Ren to love you more. Couldn’t you tell?”

This calmed her somewhat. Then she looked at her fingernails. They’d already turned black. The harsh reality of her situation crushed her remaining anger.

“I tried to protect myself, but what chance did I have against you?” she asked pitifully.

So many times I’d said the reverse of this to myself: My sister-wife didn’t have a chance against me.

“I thought I could make him love me if he read the commentary and believed the work to be all mine,” she continued, reproach creeping back into her voice. “I didn’t want him reading about your lovesickness. I didn’t want him believing I’d continued your project as a way of honoring the

‘first’ wife. I was the first wife. Didn’t you hear my husband? You two were never married. He cares nothing for you.”

She was ruthless in death.

“We are a match made in Heaven,” I said, and I still believed it to be true. “But he loved you too.”

“You were sick with cleverness. You made me cold, kept me in darkness, and hunted me in my dreams. You made me careless with my meals and careless with my rest—”

That this line came from The Peony Pavilion didn’t reassure me, because I had made her careless.

“The only way I could escape you was in the safety of the pavilion on the pond,” she went on.

“The zigzag bridge.”

“Yes!” Her lips drew back again, showing her dead-white teeth. “I burned your copy of The Peony Pavilion to exorcise you from my life. I thought I’d succeeded, but you never left.”

( 1 9 5 )

“I couldn’t leave, not after what you did next. You let people believe our husband wrote the commentary.”

“What better way to show my devotion? What better way to prove I was an ideal wife?”

She was right, of course.

“But what about me?” I asked. “You tried to make me disappear. How could you do that when we’re sister-wives?”

Ze laughed at the stupidity of my question. “Men are the flowering of pure yang, but ghosts like you are all that is deathly and sick in yin. I tried to fight you, but your constant interference killed me. Go away. I have no need or want of your friendship. We are not friends. And we are not sister-wives. I will be remembered. You will be forgotten. I made sure of that.”

“By hiding the missing pages that describe the true authorship—”

“Everything you made me write was a lie.”

“But I gave you credit. Almost everything was about you—”

“I didn’t pick up the commentary out of a desire to continue your work. I did not write from the heart. You made your obsession my obsession. You were a ghost and you wouldn’t admit what you’d done, so I tore those pages out of the book. Ren will never find them.”

I tried again to make her see the truth. “I wanted you to be happy—”

“So you used my body.”

“I was happy when you got pregnant—”

“That child was not mine!”

“Of course he was yours.”

“No! You brought Ren to my bed night after night against my will. You made me do things. . . .” She shivered with anger and disgust. “And then you put that baby inside me.”

“You’re wrong. I didn’t put him there. I only watched that he’d be safe—”

“Ha! You killed me and the baby too.”

“I didn’t . . .”

But what was the use of denying her accusations when so many of them were true? I’d kept her up all night, first with her husband and then with writing. I’d made her room cold, closed her in the dark to protect my sensitive eyes, and sent breezes with her everywhere she went. When I forced her to work on my project, I’d kept her from joining her husband and mother-in-law for meals. Then, when she retired to her room after burning my original work and giving all credit to Ren, I hadn’t encour-

( 1 9 6 )

aged her to eat because I was so dispirited. I’d been fully aware of all this even as I’d denied what I was seeing and doing to myself. I started to feel sick with the truth. What had I done?

She pulled back her lips, once again revealing her ugly essence. I turned my eyes away.

“You killed me,” she proclaimed. “You hid in the rafters where you thought no one could see you, but I saw you.”

“How could you?” All my earlier confidence was gone. Now I was the one who sounded pitiful.

“I was dying! I saw you. I tried to close my eyes to you, but every time I opened them you were there, staring at me with your dead eyes. And then you came down and put your hand on my heart.”

Waaa! Had I truly played a part in her death? Had my obsession for my project made me so blind that first I had died and now I had killed my sister-wife?

Seeing the horror of understanding on my face, she smiled triumphantly. “You killed me, but I’ve won. You seem to have forgotten the deepest message of The Peony Pavilion. It’s a story about fulfilling love through death, which is exactly what I’ve done. Ren will remember me and he will forget about the foolish unmarried girl in her inner rooms.

You will waste away to nothing. Your project will be forgotten and no one— no one—will remember you.”

Without another word, she turned away from me, left the room, and went back to roaming.

f o rty - n i n e day s later, Ze’s father came to dot her ancestor tablet, which was then set in the Wu family’s ancestral hall. Since she’d died pregnant and married, one part of her soul was sealed inside her coffin, which would remain exposed to the elements until her husband’s death, when the family would be reconstituted through simultaneous burial, as was proper. The last part of her soul was dragged to the Blood-Gathering Lake, which was reputed to be so wide that it would take 840,000 days to cross it, where she would experience 120 kinds of torture, where she would be required each day to drink blood or be thrashed with iron rods.

This was her eternity, unless her family bought her freedom through proper worship, offerings of food to monks and gods, and prayers and bribes to the bureaucrats who governed the hells. Only then might a boat ( 1 9 7 )

carry her from the lake of anguish to the bank where she might become an ancestor or be reborn into a blissful land.

As for me, I realized that if I’d helped Tan Ze and her baby die—know-ingly or not—then I no longer had moral thoughts: no empathy, no shame, no sense of right and wrong. I thought I’d been very clever and even helpful, but Ze was right. I was a ghost of the worst sort.

( 1 9 8 )

gggggggggggggggggggg

p a r t i i i

Under the

Plum Tree

ggggggggggggggggggg

Exile

mama u se d to say that g h o st s and sp i ri t s we re n ’t bad by nature. If a ghost had a place to belong, it would not become evil. But many ghosts are roused to action by the desire to retaliate. Even a small creature like a cicada can bring about savage vengeance against those who have harmed it. I hadn’t thought I wanted to hurt Ze, and yet if what she said was true I’d done just that. Filled with a desire for self-punishment and terrified that I might do something deadly to my husband by accident, I banished myself from Ren’s home. In the earthly realm, I was twenty-five and I’d given up. I wasted away to almost nothing, just as Ze predicted.

Exile . . .

Not knowing where to go, I made my way around the lake to the Chen Family Villa. The house, to my surprise, was more beautiful than ever.

Bao had added furniture, porcelains, and jade carvings to every room.

Shimmering new silk tapestries hung on the walls. But as magnificent as it all was, a disturbing quiet infused everything. Far fewer fingers lived here now. My father was still in the capital. Two of his brothers had died.

My grandfather’s concubines had also died. Broom, Lotus, and some of my other cousins had married out. With fewer Chen family members in the compound, servants had been sent away. The villa and the grounds screamed beauty, abundance, and great wealth, but they were poor in the sounds of children, joy, and miracles.

Into the eerie silence came the haunting sound of a zither. I found Or-

( 2 0 1 )

chid, now fourteen, playing for my mother and the aunts in the Lotus-Blooming Hall. She was a pretty girl, and I had a momentary flash of pride that her bound feet had turned out so well. Sitting next to her was my mother. Only nine years had passed, but in that time her hair had gone gray. Deep sadness filled her eyes. When I kissed her, she shivered and rattled the locks hidden in the folds of her gown.

Bao’s wife’s face was pinched with the sadness of infertility. She hadn’t been sold, but her husband had taken in two concubines. They too were infertile. The three women sat together, not fighting but mourning what they could not have. I didn’t see Bao, but I had to consider that maybe I’d been wrong about him. He’d been perfectly within his rights to sell off these women, but he hadn’t. These past years, I’d expected—wanted?—

this adopted stranger to ruin my family through bad management, gambling, and opium. I’d envisioned the estate dwindling and Bao selling off my father’s book, tea, rock, antiques, and incense collections. Instead, these things had been built up and enhanced. Bao had even replaced the volumes my mother had burned. I hated to admit it, but Bao had probably found my poems when he’d read that book on dam building. But why had he sold them? No one needed the money.

I went to the ancestral hall. Grandmother and Grandfather’s ancestral portraits still hung above the altar. I was a ghost, but I paid obeisance to them. Then I bowed to the ancestor tablets for my other relatives. After that, I went to the storage room where my tablet had been hidden. I couldn’t go in, because the corner was too sharp, but I saw a dusty edge of it on a shelf covered with mouse and rat droppings. Even though my mother mourned for me, I’d been forgotten by the rest of the family. I wished none of them ill, but there was nothing for me here.

Exile . . .

I had to go somewhere. The only other place I’d been was to Gudang Village during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. The Qian family had fed me for two years. Maybe I could find a place with them.

I set out as night covered the land. Fireflies flitted about me, lighting my way. It was a long walk when I wasn’t driven by hunger and had only my regrets for company. My feet hurt, my legs ached, and my eyes burned when dawn broke. I reached the Qian home as the sun hit the apex of the sky. The two eldest daughters worked outside under an awning, tending trays of silkworms that ate their way through freshly cut mulberry leaves.

The next two daughters were in an open shed with another dozen or so girls, their hands in steaming water, washing the cocoons, and pulling and ( 2 0 2 )

spinning the silk floss into thread. Madame Qian was inside the house, preparing lunch. Yi, the child I’d first seen as a baby in her mother’s arms, was now three years old. She was a sickly little thing, thin and pale. She rested on a low wooden platform in the main room, where her mother could watch her. I sat down next to her. When she wiggled, I put a hand on her ankle. She giggled softly. It didn’t seem possible that she would reach seven.

Master Qian, although it was hard for me to think of this farmer as a master of anything, came in from the mulberry grove and everyone sat down to lunch. No one gave anything to Yi; she was just another mouth to feed until she died.

As soon as the meal was done, Master Qian motioned to his oldest daughters. “Hungry worms do not produce silk,” he snapped at them.

With that, they got up and went back outside on their big flapping feet to resume their work. Madame Qian poured tea for her husband, cleared the table, and carried Yi back to the platform. She pulled out a basket and handed the child a piece of cloth with a needle and thread tucked into it.

“She doesn’t need to learn to embroider,” the girl’s father said scornfully. “She needs to get strong so she can help me.”

“She’s not going to be the daughter you need and want,” Madame Qian said. “I’m afraid she takes after her mother.”

“You were cheap, but you’ve cost me a lot. Only girls—”

“And I’m no help with the worms,” she finished for him.

I shivered in revulsion. It had to be hard for a woman of such refinement to have fallen so low.

“With Yi this way, I won’t be able to marry her out,” he complained.

“What family would want a useless wife? We should have left her to die when she was born.”

He took a last noisy sip of tea and left. Once he was gone, Madame Qian gave her full attention to Yi, showing her the stitches to make a bat, the symbol of happiness.

“My parents were once members of the gentry,” Madame Qian said dreamily to her daughter. “We lost everything in the Cataclysm. For years we wandered as beggars. I was thirteen when we came to this village. Your baba’s parents bought me out of pity. They didn’t have much, but don’t you see? If I’d lived so long on the road, I had to be strong. I was strong.”

My despair grew deeper. Did every girl suffer?

“My bound feet kept me from working at your father’s side, but I’ve brought him prosperity in other ways,” Madame Qian continued. “I can ( 2 0 3 )

make bedding, shoes, and clothes so fine they can be sold in Hangzhou.

Your sisters will do physical labor their entire lives. I can only guess at the pain in their hearts, but I can do nothing for them.”

She bowed her head. Tears of shame dripped from her eyes and stained her plain cotton skirt. I couldn’t swallow any more sorrow. I slunk out of the house and away from the farm, embarrassed for my weakness and afraid of the harm I might do this family even unwittingly, when they were so miserable already.

Exile . . .

I sat down by the side of the road. Where could I go? For the first time in years I thought of my old servant, Willow, but there was no way for me to find her. Even if I could, what could she do for me? I had thought her a friend, but in our last conversation together I’d seen that she’d never felt the same about me. I hadn’t had a single friend in life, and in death I’d hoped to be included in the circle of lovesick maidens. I’d tried to be a good sister-wife to Ze, and I’d failed there. My coming here was a mistake too. I was not part of the Qians nor were they a part of me. Maybe I’d been in exile my whole life . . . and death.

I had to find somewhere to live where I’d be assured I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I returned to Hangzhou. For several days, I scouted along the lakeshore, but too many other spirits already inhabited the caves or had found comfort behind rocks or nestled in the roots of trees. I wandered aimlessly. When I came to the Xiling Bridge, I crossed over it and onto Solitary Island, where Xiaoqing had been banished long ago to keep her safe from a jealous wife. It was quiet and remote, a perfect place for me to languish in my sorrow and regret. I searched until I found Xiaoqing’s tomb, hidden between the lake and the small pond where she’d contemplated her frail reflection. I curled in the tomb’s doorway, listened to the orioles sing to one another in the canopy of trees above me, and brooded about what I’d done to an innocent wife.

ove r th e ne xt two years, however, I was rarely alone. Almost daily, women and girls left their chambers and came to Xiaoqing’s tomb to con-secrate the spot with wine, read poems, and talk about love, sadness, and regret. It seemed I was just one of hundreds of women and young girls who suffered for love, who thought about love, who desired love. They weren’t as deeply affected as the lovesick maidens—like Xiaoqing or me—

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who’d died from too much qing, but they longed to be. They each wanted the love of a man or fretted about the love of a man.

Then one day the members of the Banana Garden Five came to the tomb to pay their respects. By every measure, they were famous. These five women liked to gather together, go on excursions, and write poetry.

They didn’t burn their manuscripts out of self-doubt or humility. They were published—not by their families as mementos but by commercial publishers who sold their works throughout the country.

For the first time in two years, curiosity drove me from the security of Xiaoqing’s tomb. I followed the women as they strolled Solitary Island’s tree-lined pathways, visited the temples, and sat together in a pavilion to sip tea and eat sunflower seeds. When they boarded their pleasure boat, I joined them, sitting on the deck as it sliced through the water. They laughed and drank wine. They engaged in games, challenging one another to compose poems under the open sky in broad daylight. When their outing was over and they went back to their homes, I stayed with the boat.

The next time they gathered to meet on the lake, I was there, cheating my punishment, ready to go anywhere they wanted.

As a living girl, I’d longed to travel and go on excursions. When I first died, I’d roamed blindly. Now I spent lazy days sitting on the edge of the pleasure boat, listening and learning as we drifted past villas, inns, restaurants, and singsong houses. It seemed the whole world came to my home city. I heard different dialects and saw all manner of people: merchants who paraded their wealth; artists who were immediately recognizable by their brushes, inks, and rolls of silk and paper; and farmers, butchers, and fishermen who came to sell their wares. Everyone wanted either to sell or to buy something: Courtesans with tiny feet and lilting voices sold their private parts to visiting shipbuilders, professional women artists sold their paintings and poems to discriminating collectors, women archers sold their skills as entertainment to salt purveyors, and artisans sold scissors and umbrellas to the wives and daughters of fine families who’d come to my beautiful town for leisure, amusement, and, most of all, fun. West Lake was where legend, myths, and everyday life met, where the natural beauty and quiet of bamboo groves and towering camphor trees smacked up against noisy civilization, where men from the outer realm and women released from the inner realm conversed without a gate, a wall, a screen, or a veil to separate them.

On warm days, many pleasure boats—brightly painted with embroi-

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dered tents on their decks—plied the waters. I saw women lavishly dressed in silk gauze gowns with long trains, gold and jade earrings, and kingfisher-feather headdresses. They stared at us. The women on my boat were not of low repute, new money, or too much money. They were from the gentry, like my mother and aunts. They were great ladies, who shared paper, brushes, and ink. They were modest in what they wore and how they dressed their hair. They inhaled and exhaled words, which floated on the air like willow floss.

The philosophers tell us to detach from the worldly. I couldn’t fix all the wrongs I had done, but the Banana Garden Five helped me to understand that all the longing I felt and all the suffering I’d experienced had ultimately released me from everything material and mundane. But while I was relieved of my burdens, a kind of desperation tinged the Banana Garden Five’s activities. The Manchus had disbanded most men’s poetry clubs, but they hadn’t found the women’s groups yet.

“We’ve got to keep meeting,” Gu Yurei, niece of the brilliant Gu Ruopu, said urgently one day as she poured tea for the others.

“We remain loyalists, but to the Manchus we’re insignificant,” Lin Yining responded, unconcerned. “We’re only women. We can’t bring down the government.”

“But, Sister, we are a worry,” Gu Yurei insisted. “My aunt used to say that the freedom of women writers had more to do with the freedom of their thoughts than the physical location of their bodies.”

“And she inspired all of us,” Lin Yining agreed, gesturing to the others around her, who were unlike the women in my family—who followed the lead dog with smiling faces because they had to—and unlike the lovesick maidens, who’d been brought together by obsession followed by early death. The members of the Banana Garden Five had come together by choice. They didn’t write about butterflies and flowers—those things they could see in their gardens. They wrote about literature, art, politics, and what they saw and did on the outside. Through their written words, they encouraged their husbands and sons to persevere under the new regime.

They bravely explored deep emotions, even when they were grim: the loneliness of a fisherman on a lake, the melancholy of a mother separated from her daughter, the despair of a girl living on the street. They had formed a sisterhood of friendship and writing, and then they built an intellectual and emotional community of women throughout the country through reading. In looking for solace, dignity, and recognition, they ( 2 0 6 )

brought their quest to other women who still lived behind locked gates or were being pushed back inside by the Manchus.

“Why should having children and tending to our homes keep us from thinking about public affairs and the future of our country?” Lin Yining continued. “Marrying and having sons are not a woman’s only way to have dignity.”

“You say this because you wish you were a man,” Gu Yurei teased.

“I was educated by my mother, so how could I wish this?” Yining countered, her fingers trailing in the water, sending quiet ripples across the lake. “And I’m a wife and mother myself. But if I’d been a man, I would have greater success.”

“If we were men,” one of the others cut in, “the Manchus might not let us write or publish at all.”

“All I’m saying is that I also give birth to sons through my writing,”

Yining went on.

I thought about my failed project. Had it not been like a child I was trying to bring into the world to tie me to Ren? I shuddered at this. My love for him had never gone away but only changed, growing deeper like wine fermenting or pickles curing. It bore into me with the pervasiveness of water working its way to the center of a mountain.

Instead of letting my emotions continue to torture me, I began to use them for good. When someone got stuck composing a poem, I helped her.

When Lin Yining began a line like, “I feel a kinship with . . .” I finished with “mists and fog.” New moons could be grand up there beyond the clouds, but they could also move us to melancholy and remind us of our impermanence. Whenever we sank into sorrow, these poets remembered the voices of the lost and desperate women who’d written on walls during the Cataclysm.

“My heart is empty and my life has no value anymore. Each moment a thousand tears,” Gu Yurie recited one day, recalling the poem that seemed to speak the sadness of my existence.

The members of the Banana Garden Five could joke about their relative unimportance to the Manchus, but they were clearly disrupting the moral order. How long would it be before the Manchus, and those who followed them, sent all women—from those who floated on the lake on a warm spring day to those who merely read to expand their hearts—per-manently back to their inner chambers?

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Mother Love

f or th re e year s i was a f ra i d to se e re n. but as th i s year’s Double Seven Festival approached, I found myself thinking about the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd and how all the magpies on earth formed a bridge so they could meet on this one special night. Couldn’t Ren and I also have one night to reunite? I’d learned enough by now; I wouldn’t hurt him. So two days before the Double Seven Festival—and the twelfth anniversary of Ren’s and my first meeting—I left Solitary Island and glided up Wushan Mountain until I came to his home.

I waited outside the gate until he left the compound. To me, he was the same: man-beautiful. I relished his scent, his voice, his very presence. I attached myself to his shoulders so I could be pulled along as he went to a bookshop and later gave a talk to a gathering of men. Afterward, he was restless and unsettled. He spent the rest of the night drinking and gambling. I followed him when he went home. His bedchamber had been left untouched since Ze’s death. Her zither rested in its stand in the corner.

Her perfumes, brushes, and hair ornaments collected dust and spider silks on her dressing table. He stayed up late, pulling her books from the shelves and opening them. Was he thinking of her or me or both of us?

Ren slept until after lunch, woke up, and repeated the exact same pattern as the day before. Then, on Double Seven, on what would have been my twenty-eighth birthday, Ren spent the afternoon with his mother. She ( 2 0 8 )

read poetry to him. She poured his tea. She patted his sad face. By now I was sure he was remembering me.

After his mother went to bed, Ren once again looked through Ze’s books. I went back to my old place in the rafters, where my feelings of regret and remorse about Ren, Ze, and my own life and death rippled through me in wave upon wave. I’d failed in so many ways, and now seeing my poet like this—opening one book after another, his mind far into the past—hurt beyond measure. I closed my eyes against the pain of what I was seeing. I put my hands over my ears, which had never adapted to the sounds of the earthly realm, but I could still hear pages turning, each one a reminder of what Ren and I had lost.

When he moaned below me, the sound tore through my body. I opened my eyes and looked down. Ren sat on the edge of the bed, holding two sheets of paper, the book that they’d come from open next to him.

I slipped straight down and came to rest at his side. He held the two pages Ze had so cruelly ripped out of our shared copy of The Peony Pavilion that described how our commentary had been written. Here was the proof Ren needed to know that Ze and I had worked together. I was delighted, but Ren didn’t look happy or relieved in any way.

He folded the papers, tucked them into his tunic, and set out into the night with me hanging on to his shoulders. He pushed his way through the streets until he came to a house I didn’t know. He was let in and led to a room filled with men, who were waiting for their wives to finish their Double Seven customs and games so they could sit down to their banquet.

The air was thick with smoke and incense, and at first Ren didn’t recognize anyone. Then Hong Sheng, who had been at Ren’s niece’s house the day I had gone on my first ever excursion, stood and came forward. Seeing that Ren was not there for the festivities, Hong Sheng picked up an oil lamp with one hand and two cups and a bottle of wine with the other, and the two men walked outside to a pavilion on the property and sat down.

“Have you eaten?” Hong Sheng asked.

Ren politely declined and then began, “I have come—”

“Baba!”

A little girl, still so young her feet hadn’t been bound, came running into the pavilion and climbed into Hong Sheng’s lap. I remembered seeing the poet’s wife pregnant with this child.

“Shouldn’t you be with your mother and the others?” Hong Sheng asked.

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The child squirmed her indifference to the games of the inner chamber. She reached up, put her arms around her father’s neck, and buried her face in his shoulder.

“All right then,” Hong Sheng said, “you can stay, but you must be quiet, and when your mother comes you’ll have to go back with her. No arguments. No tears.”

How many times had I sought refuge with my father? Was this girl as wrong about her father as I’d been about mine?

“Do you remember a few years ago when we visited my cousin’s home?” Ren asked. “Cousin Shen and the others had read the commentary on The Peony Pavilion. ”

“I’d read it too. I was very impressed by your work. I still am.”

“That day I told everyone I hadn’t written it.”

“You remain modest. It’s a good quality.”

Ren pulled out the two sheets of paper and gave them to his friend.

The poet tilted them to the lamplight and read. When he was done, he looked up, and asked, “Is this true?”

“It was always true, but no one would listen.” Ren hung his head.

“Now I want to tell everyone.”

“What good will it do if you change the story now?” Hong Sheng asked. “You will appear a fool at best and a man who is trying to promote women’s fame at worst.”

Hong Sheng was right. What I thought was a wonderful discovery locked Ren further into sadness and despair. He picked up the bottle of wine, poured himself a cup, and drained it. When he grabbed the bottle again, Hong Sheng took it from his hand.

“My friend,” he said, “you need to get back to your own work. You need to forget about your suffering and the tragedies of that girl and your wife.”

If Ren forgot, what would happen to me? But keeping us in his heart was torturing him. I’d seen this in his loneliness, his drinking, and in the way he handled Ze’s books so lovingly. Ren had to get over his grief and forget about us. I left the pavilion, wondering if I would ever see him again.

A sliver of moon hung in the night sky. The air was damp and warm. I walked and walked, believing each step would take me farther into exile. I watched the sky the whole night, and I never saw the Weaving Maid and her Cowherd meet. And I didn’t know what Ren did with those two pages.

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.

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j u st one we e k later, the Festival of Hungry Ghosts arrived. After so many years, I knew what I was and what I needed to do. I pushed. I shoved. I stuffed my mouth with whatever I could grab. I went from house to house. And as usual, as if I could have changed where I went even if I wanted to, I found myself again in front of the Chen Family Villa.

I had my face in a bowl of melon rinds so old they’d gone soft and slimy when I heard someone call my name. I growled, spun around, and came face-to-face with my mother.

Her cheeks were painted white and she was dressed in layer upon layer of the finest silk. She recoiled when she saw it truly was me. Terror filled her eyes. She threw spirit money at me and took several steps back, tripping over her train.

“Mama!” I hurried to her side and helped her to her feet. How could she possibly see me? Had a miracle happened?

“Stay away!” She threw more money at me, which the other nether creatures scrambled to grab for themselves.

“Mama, Mama—”

She started to edge away again, but I stayed with her. Her back came up against the wall of the compound across the street. She looked from side to side, hoping to find a way to escape, but she was surrounded by those who wanted more money.

“Give them what they want,” I said.

“I have nothing more.”

“Then show them.”

Mama held out her empty hands, and then reached into her clothes to show them she had nothing hidden beyond a couple of fish-shaped locks.

The other ghosts and creatures—driven by their hunger—turned away and scurried back to the altar table.

I reached out to touch her cheek. It was soft and cold. She closed her eyes. Her whole body shook with fright.

“Mama, why are you out here?”

She opened her eyes and looked at me in bewilderment.

“Come with me,” I said.

I led her by the elbow to the corner of our compound. I looked down.

Neither of us cast shadows, but I refused to take in the knowledge. I arced out wide to navigate the corner by the shore. When I saw our feet left no prints in the soft mud, nor did our skirts get dirty, I shut my heart to what ( 2 1 1 )

I was seeing. Only when I realized Mama couldn’t take more than ten steps without swaying did I accept the truth. My mother was dead and roaming, only she didn’t know it.

We came to my family’s Moon-Viewing Pavilion, I helped her up, and then I joined her.

“I remember this place. I used to come here with your father,” Mama said. “But you shouldn’t be here, and I should get back. I need to put out New Year offerings.” Again confusion settled over her features. “But those are for ancestors and you’re—”

“A ghost. I know, Mama. And this is not New Year.” She had to have died very recently, because her confusion was still so powerful and complete.

“How can that be? You have an ancestor tablet. Your father had one made, even though it goes against tradition.”

My tablet . . .

Grandmother had said I couldn’t do anything to get it dotted, but maybe I could get my mother to help me.

“When did you last see it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.

“Your father took it with him to the capital. He couldn’t bear to be parted from you.”

I formed the sentences to tell her what had actually happened, but as hard as I tried, the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. A terrible feeling of helplessness washed over me. I could do many things but not this.

“You look exactly the same,” Mama said, after a long while, “but I see so much in your eyes. You’ve grown. You’re different.”

I saw a lot in her eyes too: desolation, resignation, and guilt.

we staye d i n the Moon-Viewing Pavilion for three days. Mama didn’t say much and neither did I. Her heart needed to settle so she would understand she was dead. Gradually she remembered getting the feast for hungry ghosts ready and collapsing on the kitchen floor. Slowly she became aware of the other two parts of her soul, one waiting for burial, the other journeying to the afterworld. The third with me was free to roam, but Mama hesitated to leave the Moon-Viewing Pavilion.

“I don’t go abroad,” she said on the third night, as flower shadows trembled around us, “and you shouldn’t either. You belong at home where you’ll be safe.”

“Mama, I’ve been roaming for a long time now. Nothing”—I considered my words carefully—“physically bad has happened to me.”

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She stared at me. She was still beautiful: thin, elegant, refined, but touched by sorrow so deep it gave her grace and dignity. How had I not seen this in life?

“I’ve walked to Gudang to see our mulberry groves,” I said. “I’ve gone on excursions. I’ve even joined a poetry club. Have you heard of the Banana Garden Five? We go boating on the lake. I’ve helped them with their writing.”

I could have told her about my project, how much I’d done on it and how my husband had received fame as a result. But she hadn’t known about it when I was alive and in death I’d pursued it so hard that I’d caused Ze’s death. Mama wouldn’t be proud of me; she’d be disgusted and ashamed.

But it was as if she hadn’t heard me at all when she said, “I never wanted you to go out. I tried hard to protect you. There was so much I didn’t want you to know. Your father and I didn’t want anyone to know.”

She reached into her clothes and fingered her hidden locks. My aunts must have placed them there when preparing her for burial.

“Even before you were born, I dreamed of you and who you would be,” she went on. “When you were seven, you wrote your first poem and it was beautiful. I wanted your talent to soar like a bird, but when it did I was frightened. I worried about what would happen to you. I saw your emotions were close enough to touch, and I knew you would have little happiness in life. This is when I realized the real lesson of the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd. Her gift of cleverness and her ability at weaving did not put an end to her sorrow, it caused it. If she hadn’t been so good at weaving cloth for the gods, she could have lived forever with the Cowherd on earth.”

“I always thought you told that tale because it was romantic. I didn’t understand.”

A long silence followed. Her interpretation of the story was dark and negative. There were so many things I didn’t know about her.

“Mama, please. What happened to you?”

She looked away from me.

“We’re safe now,” I said, and gestured around us. We were in our family’s Moon-Viewing Pavilion, the crickets were singing, and the lake spread out cool and still before us. “Nothing bad can happen to either of us here.”

Mama smiled at that, and then she tentatively began. She reminisced about marrying into the Chen family and going on excursions with her ( 2 1 3 )

mother-in-law, about her writing and what it meant to her, and about collecting the works of forgotten women poets who had been writing for nearly as long as our country’s existence. I saw and felt everything as Mama spoke.

“Never let them tell you that women didn’t write. They did,” she said.

“You can go back more than two thousand years to the Book of Songs and see that many of the poems were written by women and girls. Should we assume that they produced those poems by merely opening their mouths and mindlessly spouting words? Of course not. Men seek fame with their words—writing speeches, recording history, telling us how to live—but we are the ones who embrace emotions, who collect the leftover crumbs of seemingly meaningless days, who touch on the cycles of life and remember what happened in our families. I ask you, Peony, isn’t that more important than writing an eight-legged essay for the emperor?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. I don’t think she even wanted one.

She talked about the days leading up to the Cataclysm and what happened when it arrived, and it all matched what my grandmother had told me. Mama stopped when they reached the girls’ lookout pavilion and she had gathered all the jewels and silver from the other women.

“We’d been so happy to be out,” Mama said, “but we didn’t understand that there is a big difference between choosing to leave our inner chambers and being forced out. We are told many things about how we should behave and what we should do: that we should have sons, that we should sacrifice ourselves for our husbands and sons, that it is better to die than bring shame on our families. I believed all that. I still do.”

She seemed relieved that she was finally able to talk about this, but she still hadn’t revealed what I wanted to know.

“What happened after you left the pavilion?” I asked gently. I took her hand and squeezed it. “No matter what you say or what you did, I’ll love you still. You’re my mama. I’ll always love you.”

She stared out across the lake to where it faded into mist and darkness.

“You were never married,” she said at last, “so you don’t know about clouds and rain. It was beautiful with your father—the building of the clouds, the rain that fell, the way we were together like one spirit, not two.”

I knew more about clouds and rain than I would ever tell my mother, but I didn’t quite understand what she was talking about.

“What the soldiers did to me was not clouds and rain,” she said. “It was brutal, pointless, and unfulfilling even for them. Did you know I was ( 2 1 4 )

pregnant then? You couldn’t know. I never told anyone except your father.

I was in my fifth month. The baby didn’t show beneath my tunic and skirts. Your father and I thought we’d take this one last trip before my confinement. On our last night in Yangzhou we were to tell your grandparents. That never happened.”

“Because the Manchus came.”

“They wanted to destroy everything that was precious to me. When they took your father and grandfather, I knew what my duty was.”

“Duty? What did you owe them?” I asked, remembering my grandmother’s bitterness.

She looked at me in surprise. “I loved them.”

My mind scrambled to shift with hers. She raised her chin in an offhand manner.

“The soldiers took the jewels and then they took me. I was raped many times by many men, but that wasn’t enough for them. They beat me with the sides of their swords until my skin split open. They kicked me in the stomach, taking care not to mar my face.”

As she spoke, the mists gathering on the lake turned to drizzle and finally to rain. Grandmother had to be listening on the Viewing Terrace.

“It felt like a thousand demons driving me toward death, but I swallowed my sorrow and hid my tears. When I began to bleed from inside, they stepped back and watched me crab-crawl away from them into the grass. After that, they left me alone. The agony was so great it overpowered my hatred and fear. When my son spilled out of me, three of the men who’d put their organs inside me came forward. One cut the cord and took away my baby. Another lifted my body during the contractions to expel the placenta. And the last held my hand and murmured in his gruff barbarian dialect. Why didn’t they just kill me? They’d killed so many already, what was one more woman?”

All this had happened on the last night of the Cataclysm, when men suddenly began to remember who they were. The soldiers burned some cotton and human bone together and used the ashes to treat my mother’s wounds. Then they dressed her in a clean gown of raw silk and found cloth in the piles of looted goods to pack between her legs. But they were not so pure of heart.

“I thought they’d remembered their own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. But no, they were thinking of me as a prize.” The locks in Mama’s clothes rattled as she handled them anxiously. “They argued about which of them would take possession of me. One wanted to sell me ( 2 1 5 )

into prostitution. One wanted to keep me in his household as a slave. The last one wanted me for a concubine. ‘She’s not repulsive,’ the man who wanted to sell me said. ‘I’ll pay you twenty ounces of silver if you let me keep her.’ ‘I won’t let her go for less than thirty,’ barked the one who wanted me as a slave. ‘She looks like she was born for singing and dancing, not weaving and spinning,’ the first man reasoned. And it went on that way. I was only nineteen, and after everything that happened and everything that was still to happen this was my darkest moment. How was selling me as the bride of ten thousand men so very different from the general trade in women as wives, concubines, or servants? Was selling me or bartering me any different from dealing in salt? Yes, because as a woman I had even less value than salt.”

The next morning, a high-ranking Manchu general dressed in red with a rapier at his waist arrived with a Manchu woman with big feet, her hair drawn back in a bun and a flower clipped to one temple. The two of them were scouts for a Manchu prince. They took Mama away from the soldiers, back to the compound where she’d been held the night before with her mother-in-law, the concubines, and all the other women who’d been separated from their families.

“After four days of rain and killing,” Mama remembered, “the sun came out and cooked the city. The stench of corpses was staggering, but above us the sky blurred blue into forever. I waited my turn to be examined. All around me, women cried. Why hadn’t we killed ourselves? Because we had no rope, no knives, no cliffs. Then I was brought before that same Manchu woman. She checked my hair, arms, palms, and fingers.

She felt my breasts through my clothes and prodded my swollen belly. She lifted my skirts and looked at my lily feet, which said everything about who I was as a woman. ‘I see where your talent lies,’ she said disdainfully.

‘You will do.’ How could a woman do this to another woman? I was led away yet again and placed alone inside a room.”

Mama thought this might be her chance to kill herself, but she found nothing she could use to cut her throat. She was on the first floor, so she couldn’t throw herself from the window. She didn’t expect to find rope, but she did have her gown. She sat down and tore at her hem. She made several long strips of cloth which she tied together.

“Finally I was ready, but I had one thing I still needed to do. I found a piece of charcoal by the brazier, picked it up and tested it on the wall, and then I started to write.”

( 2 1 6 )

When my mother began to recite what she’d written, I was struck through the heart.

“The trees are bare.

In the distance, the honks of mourning geese.

If only my tears of blood could dye red the blossoms of the plum tree.

But I will never make it to spring. . . .”

I joined in for the last two lines.

“My heart is empty and my life has no value anymore.

Each moment a thousand tears.”

Grandmother had told me my mother was a fine poet. I hadn’t known she was the most famous poet of all—the one who’d left this tragic poem on the wall. I looked at my mother in wonder. Her poem had opened the gateway to the kind of immortality that Xiaoqing, Tang Xianzu, and other great poets had achieved. No wonder Baba had allowed Mama to take my ancestor tablet. She was a woman of great distinction and I would have been lucky—honored—to have her perform the dotting. So many mistakes, so many misunderstandings.

“I didn’t know when I wrote those words that I would live or that other travelers, mostly men, would chance upon them, copy them down, publish them, distribute them,” Mama said. “I never wanted to be recognized for them; I never wanted to be branded a fame-seeker. Oh, Peony, when I heard you recite the poem that day in the Lotus-Blooming Hall, I could hardly breathe. You were my sole small vein of life’s blood—my only child—and I thought you knew, because you and I, as mother and daughter, were so closely tied. I thought you were ashamed of me.”

“I never would have recited that poem if I’d known. I never would have hurt you that way.”

“But I was so afraid, I locked you in your room. I’ve lived with my regrets ever since.”

I couldn’t help it, but I blamed my father and grandfather for what happened in Yangzhou. They were men. They should have done something.

“How could you go back to Baba after he let you save him and after Grandfather used Grandmother to save them both?”

( 2 1 7 )

Mama’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t go back to Baba; he came for me.

He’s why I lived and how I came to be your mother. I finished my poem, looped my handmade rope over the beam, and tied it around my neck, but then that Manchu woman came to get me. She was very mad and slapped me hard, but it didn’t shake me from my plan. If not now, I knew I would have a chance later. If they were going to keep me for some Manchu prince, I would have to be clothed, housed, fed. I would always be able to improvise a weapon.”

The woman procurer led Mama back to the main hall. The general sat at the desk. My father was on his knees, his forehead on the floor, waiting.

“At first I thought they’d caught your father and were going to cut off his head,” Mama went on. “Everything I’d done and everything I’d gone through was for nothing. But he’d come to buy me back. With the days of horror and murder over, the Manchus were trying to prove how civilized they were. Already they were hoping to create order out of disorder. I listened to them bargain. I was so numb with pain and grief that it took me a long time to find my voice. ‘Husband,’ I said, ‘you can’t take me back.

I’m ruined.’ He understood what I meant, but he was undeterred. ‘And I have lost our son,’ I confessed. Tears rolled down your father’s cheeks. ‘I don’t care about that,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to die and I don’t want to lose you.’ You see, Peony, he kept me after what happened. I was so broken he could have sold me or traded me—just as those men who’d raped me wanted to do—or he could have discarded me completely.”

Was Grandmother hearing this? She’d kept our family from having sons to punish my father and grandfather. Did she now see she was wrong?

“How can we blame the men when we made our own choices, your grandmother and I?” Mama asked, as if following my thoughts. “Your father saved me from a terrible fate that would have ended in suicide.”

“But Baba went to work for the Manchus. How could he do that? Did he forget what happened to you and Grandmother?”

“How could he forget?” Mama asked, and smiled at me patiently. “He could never forget. He shaved his forehead, braided his hair, and put on Manchu clothes. This was nothing but a disguise, a costume. He’d proved to me who he was: a man who was loyal to his family above all else.”

“But he went to the capital after I died. He left you all alone. He—” I must have been veering too close to the subject of my ancestor tablet, because I was unable to continue.

“That plan had long been in place.” Mama scrolled back in time to be-

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fore my death. “You were supposed to marry out. He loved you so much.

He couldn’t bear to lose you, so he’d decided to take the appointment in the capital. After your death, his desire to be away from memories of you was even greater.”

For too long I’d believed he was not a man of integrity. I’d been wrong, but then I’d been wrong about so many things.

Mama sighed, and again she abruptly changed the subject. “I just don’t know what will happen to our family if Bao doesn’t have a son soon.”

“Grandmother won’t allow it.”

Mama nodded. “I loved your grandmother, but she could be vindictive. However, in this instance, she’s wrong. She died in Yangzhou and didn’t see what happened to me, and she wasn’t here on earth when you were alive. Your baba loved you. You were a jewel in his hand, but he needed a son to care for the ancestors. What does your grandmother think will happen to her and all the other Chen family ancestors if we don’t have sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons to perform the rites? Only sons can do this. She knows that.”

“Baba adopted that man, that Bao,” I said, doing little to cover the disappointment I still felt that my father had so easily replaced me in his affec-tions.

“It took him a while to learn our ways, but Bao’s been good to us. Look at how he cares for me now. I’m dressed for whatever eternity holds. I’ve been fed. And I was given plenty of spirit money for my journey—”

“He found my poems,” I interrupted. “He went to Ren to sell them.”

“You sound like a jealous sister,” Mama said. “Don’t feel that way.” She touched my cheek. It had been a long time since I’d received a physical show of affection. “I found your poems by accident when I was reorganizing your father’s bookshelves. When I read them, I asked Bao to take them to your husband. I told Bao to make sure Ren paid for them. I wanted to remind him of your worth.”

She put an arm around me.

“The Manchus came to our region because as the richest area in the country we had much that was vulnerable to destruction,” she said. “They knew we would make the best example, but that we also had the best resources for recovery. In many ways they were right, but how could we recover what had been lost in our families? I went home and shut the door.

Now, when I look at you, I know that as much as a mother tries there’s no way to protect a daughter. I kept you locked inside from birth, but that ( 2 1 9 )

didn’t keep you from dying too soon. And now look: You’ve been on pleasure boats, you’ve traveled—”

“And I’ve caused harm,” I confessed. After everything she’d told me, didn’t I owe her the truth about what I’d done to Tan Ze? “My sister-wife died because of me.”

“I heard it differently,” Mama said. “Ze’s mother blamed her daughter for not performing her wifely duties. She was the kind who made her husband fetch water, isn’t that true?”

When I nodded, she went on.

“You can’t blame yourself for Ze’s hunger strike. This strategy is as old as womankind. Nothing is more powerful or cruel than for a woman to make her husband watch her die.” She took my face in her hands and looked into my eyes. “You’re my beloved daughter, no matter what you think you’ve done.”

But Mama didn’t know everything.

“Besides, what choice did you have? Your mama and baba failed you. I feel especially responsible. I wanted you to excel at embroidery, painting, and playing the zither. I wanted you to keep your mouth shut, put on a smiling face, and learn to obey. But look what happened. You flew right out of the villa. You found freedom here”—she pointed to my heart—“in your seat of consciousness.”

I saw the truth of her words. My mother made sure I was highly educated so I’d become a good wife, but in the process she’d inspired me to depart from the usual model of a young woman on the cusp of marriage.

“You have a big and good heart,” Mama continued. “You don’t have to be ashamed for anything. Think instead of your desires, your knowledge, and what’s in here—your heart. Mencius was clear on this point: Lacking pity, one is not human; lacking shame, one is not human; lacking a sense of deference, one is not human; lacking a sense of right and wrong, one is not human.”

“But I’m not human. I’m a hungry ghost.”

There. I’d told her, but she didn’t ask how it happened. Maybe it was too much for her to know right now, because she asked, “But you’ve experienced all that, haven’t you? You’ve felt pity, shame, remorse, and sadness for everything that happened to Tan Ze, right?”

Of course I had. I’d driven myself into exile as punishment for what I’d done.

“How can one test for humanity?” Mama asked. “By whether or not you cast a shadow or leave prints in the sand? Tang Xianzu gave you the ( 2 2 0 )

answers in the opera you love so well, when he wrote that no one can exist without joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, and desire. So, you have it from the Book of Rites, from The Peony Pavilion, and from me, that the Seven Emotions are what make us human. You still have these within yourself.”

“But how can I change the wrongs I’ve done?”

“I don’t believe you’ve done wrong. But if you do, you have to take all your ghostly attributes and put them to good use. You need to find another girl whose life you can repair.”

That girl came to my mind in a flash, but I needed Mama’s help.

“Would you walk with me?” I asked. “It’s very far. . . .”

Her smile radiated, sending beams across the dark surface of the lake.

“That would be a good thing. I’m meant to be roaming.”

She stood and looked around the Moon-Viewing Pavilion one last time. I helped her over the balustrade and down to the shore. She reached into the folds of her clothes and pulled out the fish-shaped locks. One after the other she threw them into the lake, each one hitting the water with a soundless splash that sent barely discernible ripples into infinity.

We began to walk. I guided Mama, her spirit skirts trailing on the ground behind her, through the city. By morning we reached the countryside, where fields stretched out around us like an intricately woven piece of brocade. The mulberry trees were dense with foliage. Big-footed women in straw hats and faded blue clothes climbed up in the branches to cut the leaves. Below them, other women—brown from the sun and strong from their labors—tilled the soil around the roots or carried away baskets of the leaves.

Mama was no longer afraid. Her face glowed with peace and happiness. In days long past, she’d come this way many times with my father and she relished the familiar landmarks. We traded confidences, compas-sion, and love—all those things that only a mother and daughter can share.

For so long I’d wished to be part of a sisterhood. I hadn’t found it in the women’s chambers with my cousins when I was alive, because they hadn’t liked me. I hadn’t found it on the Viewing Terrace with the other lovesick maidens, because their lovesickness was different from mine. I hadn’t found it with the members of the Banana Garden Five, because they didn’t know I existed. But I had it with my mother and grandmother. Despite our weaknesses and failings, a single thread bound us together: my grandmother, as confused as she was; my mother, as broken as she was; and me, a pathetic hungry ghost. As Mama and I walked on through the night, I understood at last that I was not alone.

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A Daughter’s Fate

we reac h e d g udang ear ly th e ne xt morn i ng and made our way to the house of the headman. I’d done so much roaming by now that these long distances no longer hurt me, but Mama had to sit down and massage her feet. A child squealed and ran barefoot out of the house. It was Qian Yi. Her hair had been tied up in little tufts, giving her an appearance of sparkle and liveliness that went against her thin frame and pale face.

“Is she the one?” Mama asked skeptically.

“Let’s go inside. I want you to see her mother.”

Madame Qian sat in a corner embroidering. Mama examined the stitches, looked at me in wonder, and said, “She’s from our class. Look at her hands. Even in this place they’re soft and white. And her stitches are delicate. How did she end up here?”

“The Cataclysm.”

Mama’s puzzlement turned to worry as she conjured up images of what might have happened. She reached into the folds of her skirts to find the locks she’d always relied on. Finding nothing, she clasped her hands together.

“Consider the girl, Mama,” I said. “Should she suffer too?”

“Maybe she’s paying for a bad deed in a past life,” Mama suggested.

“Maybe this is her fate.”

I frowned. “What if it is her fate for us to interfere on her behalf?”

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Mama looked doubtful. “But what can we do?”

I answered her question with one of my own. “Do you remember when you told me that footbinding was an act of resistance against the Manchus?”

“It was. It still is.”

“But not here. This family needs its big-footed daughters to work. But this girl won’t be able to do that.”

Mama agreed with my assessment. “I’m surprised she’s lived this long.

But how can you help her?”

“I’d like to bind her feet.”

Madame Qian called for her daughter. Yi obeyed and came to stand next to her mother.

“Footbinding alone won’t change her fate,” Mama said.

“If I’m to atone,” I hurried on, “then I can’t choose something easy.”

“Yes, but—”

“Her mother moved down in the Cataclysm. Why can’t Yi move up?”

“Up to what?”

“I don’t know. But even if her destiny is only to be a thin horse, wouldn’t that be better than this? If that’s to be her course, perfectly bound feet will put her into a higher home.”

Mama looked around the sparsely decorated room, then back at Madame Qian and her daughter. When she said, “This isn’t the season for footbinding. It’s too hot,” I knew I’d won.

Putting the idea into Madame Qian’s head was easy, but getting her husband to agree was another matter altogether. He listed his reasons against it: Yi wouldn’t be able to help him raise silkworms (which was true), and no man in the countryside wanted to marry a useless woman with bound feet (which was a pointed insult directed at his wife).

Madame Qian listened patiently, waiting for an opportunity to speak.

When it came, she said, “You seem to forget, Husband, that selling a daughter could bring a small fortune.”

The next day, even as my mother reminded me again that we were in the wrong season, Madame Qian gathered together alum, astringent, binding cloths, scissors, nail clippers, needle, and thread. Mama knelt next to me as I placed my cold hands over Madame Qian’s and helped her wash her daughter’s feet and then put them in a softening bath of herbs. Then we cut Yi’s toenails, daubed the flesh with the astringent, folded the toes under, wrapped the binding cloth up, over, and under the foot, and finally ( 2 2 3 )

sewed the cloth shut so Yi wouldn’t be able to free herself. Mama spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me, praising me. She gave me her mother love and I passed it through my hands into Yi’s feet.

The child didn’t begin to cry until later that night as her feet began to burn from the lost circulation and constant pressure of the bindings. Over the next few weeks, as we tightened the bindings every four days and made Yi walk back and forth to put added pressure on the bones that needed to break, I went forward with grim determination. Nights were the worst, when Yi sobbed, sucking in hiccuped breaths through her agony.

This would be a two-year process, and Yi inspired me with her bravery, inner strength, and persistence. The moment the bindings went on her feet, Yi automatically moved up a class from her father and her siblings.

She could no longer run away from her mother or follow her sisters barefoot through the dusty village. She was an inside girl now. Her mother understood this too. The house had little ventilation, but my ghostliness brought coolness wherever I was, and on the hottest day of summer, when even I couldn’t overcome the oppressive heat and humidity and Yi’s suffering was great but not as great as it would be in a few more weeks, Madame Qian brought out the Book of Songs. The bright white pain in Yi’s mind lessened as her mother recited love poems written by women tens of centuries ago. But after a while, the burning and throbbing in Yi’s feet overpowered her again.

Madame Qian got up from the bed, swayed to the window on her golden lilies, and stared out over the fields for several minutes. She bit her upper lip and gripped the windowsill. Did she have the same thoughts as I, that this was a terrible mistake? That she was causing her daughter too much pain?

Mama came to my side. “Doubt comes to all mothers,” she said. “But remember, this is the one thing a mother can do to give her daughter a better life.”

Madame Qian’s fingers loosened on the windowsill. She blinked back her tears, took a deep breath, and returned to the bed. She opened the book again.

“With your feet bound, you’re no longer like your sisters,” she said,

“but there’s an even more important gift I can give you. Today, little one, you will begin to learn to read.”

As Madame Qian pointed out certain characters, explaining their origins and their meanings, Yi forgot her feet. Her body relaxed and the blinding whiteness of pain dulled. At six, Yi was old to start a proper edu-

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cation, but I was there to redeem myself, and reading and writing were things I knew very well. With my help, she would catch up.

A few days later, after seeing Yi’s curiosity and aptitude, Mama announced, “I think the child’s going to need a dowry. I’ll be able to help with that once I’m settled.”

With our energies so focused on Qian Yi, I’d stopped paying attention to the passage of time. Mama’s forty-nine days of roaming had come to an end.

“I wish we had more time,” I said. “I wish it had always been like this.

I wish—”

“No more regrets, Peony. Promise me that.” Mama hugged me and then held me away from her so she could look me straight in the face.

“Soon you’ll go home too.”

“To the Chen Family Villa?” I asked, confused. “To the Viewing Terrace?”

“To your husband’s home. That’s where you belong.”

“I can’t go back there.”

“Prove yourself here. Then go home.” As she began to fade away and into her ancestor tablet, she called out, “You’ll know when you’re ready.”

f or th e ne xt eleven years I stayed in Gudang and dedicated myself to Qian Yi and her family. I perfected controlling my basest hungry-ghost qualities by building shields around myself, which I could raise and lower at will. In summer, I moved indoors with the family and cooled the house for them. When fall came, I mastered blowing on the coals in the brazier to make them hotter without singeing my skin or scorching my clothes.

It is said that a clean snow means prosperity in the coming year. Indeed, during my first winter in Gudang, a clean snow blanketed the Qian house and all that lay around it. At the New Year, when Bao came to survey my father’s lands and exhort the workers to increase production, he had news: his wife was pregnant, and he was not increasing the rents and tributes due to the Chen family as usual.

The next winter more clean snow fell. This time when Bao came and announced that his wife had given birth to a son, I knew my mother had been hard at work in the afterworld. Bao did not deliver red eggs to everyone as a celebration for this miracle. He did something even better: He awarded each of the headmen of the villages that housed my father’s workers a mou of land. The following year, another pregnancy, followed ( 2 2 5 )

the year after that by another son. Now that the Chen family’s future was secure, Bao could afford to be generous. With the birth of each new son, he gave another mou of land to the headmen. In this way, the Qian family’s prosperity grew. The older sisters were given small dowries and married out. At the same time, bride-prices came in, increasing Master Qian’s holdings.

Yi grew up. Her lily feet turned out beautifully: small, fragrant, and perfectly shaped. She remained sickly, even though I kept away other spirits who preyed on weakness. With her sisters gone from the house, I made sure she got more to eat, and her qi strengthened. Madame Qian and I turned the girl from a piece of unsculpted jade unfit for use into someone precious and refined. We taught her to dance on her lily feet so she looked like she was floating on clouds. She learned to play the zither in a clear style. Her strategy at chess became as ruthless as a pirate’s. She also learned to sing, embroider, and paint. We lacked books, however. Master Qian didn’t appreciate their purpose.

“Yi’s education is part of a long-term investment,” Madame Qian reminded her husband. “Think of her as a tray of silkworms that must be tended properly so they will spin their cocoons. You would not disregard that asset. If you tend a daughter, she will also become valuable.” But Master Qian was resolute, so we did the best we could with the Book of Songs.

Yi could memorize and recite, but she didn’t quite understand the poems’

meanings.

All too soon Yi was a plum ready to be plucked. At seventeen, she was small, thin, and beautiful. Her features were delicate: jet-black hair, a wide-open forehead like white silk, lips the color of apricots, and cheeks as pale as alabaster. Dimples appeared with every smile. Her eyes shone bright with impudence. Her straight nose and questioning glances revealed her curiosity, independence, and intelligence. That she had survived illness, neglect, footbinding, and a generally weak constitution showed hidden tenacity and fortitude. She needed to be matched.

But her marriage possibilities were slim in the countryside. She could not do the hard labor required of her. She was still sickly, and she had a disconcerting habit of saying whatever came to her mind. She was educated but not to perfection, so even if a city family could be found that would consider a country girl, she would not be judged suitable or ready.

And even in wealthy, some might say enlightened, families, no one wanted a second, third, fourth, let alone a fifth daughter, for it implied that only ( 2 2 6 )

girls could come from the bloodline. For all these reasons, the local matchmaker pronounced Yi unmarriageable. I thought otherwise.

f or th e f i r st time in eleven years, I left Gudang for Hangzhou and went straight to Ren’s home. He had just reached forty-one years. In many ways he seemed the same. His hair was still black. He was still long, thin, and graceful. His hands still entranced me. While I’d been away, he’d stopped drinking and visiting the pleasure houses. He’d written his own commentary on The Eternal Palace, a play written by his friend Hong Sheng, which was published to great acclaim. Ren’s poetry had been collected in editions featuring the finest poets of our region. He’d earned a reputation as a distinguished and respected drama critic. He’d been, for a time, secretary to a juren scholar. In other words, he’d found peace without me, without Tan Ze, and without the company of women. But he was lonely. If I’d lived, I would have been thirty-nine, we would have been married for twenty-three years, and it would have been time for me to start looking for a concubine for him. Instead, I wanted to bring him a wife.

I went to Madame Wu. We were “sames,” and we both shared love for Ren. She had always been receptive to me, so I whispered in her ear. “A son’s only duty in life is to give the family a son. Your first son has failed in this task. Without a grandson, you won’t be cared for in the afterworld and neither will any of the Wu ancestors. Only your second son can help you now.”

Over the next few days, Madame Wu watched Ren carefully, gauging his moods, seeing his solitary ways, and mentioning that it had been a long time since the sound of children had filled their compound.

I fanned my mother-in-law when she rested in the heat of the day. “Do not worry about class. Ren was not a golden boy when he was betrothed to the Chen daughter or when you married in the Tan girl. Both of those arrangements ended in disaster.” I respected my mother-in-law by never sitting in her presence, but I had to rush her along. “This could be your last chance,” I told her. “You have to do something now, while society is fluid and before the emperor has his way.”

That evening, Madame Wu broached the subject of a new wife with her son. He did not object. After that, she called in the best matchmaker in the city.

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Several girls were mentioned. I made sure they were all rejected.

“The girls in Hangzhou are too precocious and spoiled,” I whispered in Madame Wu’s ear. “You had someone like that once before in your household and it didn’t suit you.”

“You must go farther away,” Madame Wu instructed the matchmaker.

“Look for someone who has simple tastes and can keep me company in my old age. I don’t have many years left.”

The matchmaker got in her palanquin and traveled to the countryside.

A few rocks pushed here and there on the road caused her bearers to follow my directions to Gudang. The matchmaker made inquiries and was shown to the Qian house, where two literate, bound-footed women lived.

Madame Qian was remarkably composed and answered all questions about her daughter truthfully. She pulled out a card that recorded Yi’s ma-trilineal ancestors for three generations, including her grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s titles.

“What has the girl learned?” the matchmaker asked.

Madame Qian listed her daughter’s accomplishments, and then added,

“I’ve taught her that a husband is the sun; a wife is the moon. The sun does not change in its fullness, but a woman waxes and wanes. Men act on their wills; women act on their feelings. Men initiate and women endure.

This is why men visit the outside realm, while women remain inside.”

The matchmaker nodded thoughtfully and then asked to see Yi. During the time it took for a single candle to burn down, Yi was brought in and inspected, a dowry was negotiated, and a possible bride-price discussed. Master Qian was willing to give five percent of his silk crop for five years, plus one mou of land. In addition, the girl would go to her new home with several trunks of bed linens, shoes, clothes, and other embroideries—all silk, all made by the bride.

How could the matchmaker not be impressed?

“It is often better for a wife to come from less standing and wealth so that she will more easily adjust to her new position as daughter-in-law in her husband’s home,” she observed.

When the matchmaker returned to Hangzhou, she went directly to the Wu compound. “I have found a wife for your son,” she announced to Madame Wu. “Only a man who has already lost two wives would be willing to take her.” The two women studied the times of birth for Ren and Yi and compared their horoscopes, making sure the Eight Characters were well matched. They discussed what a bride-price might be, considering that the father was only a farmer. Then the matchmaker went back to Gu-

( 2 2 8 )

dang. She delivered silver, jewelry, four jars of wine, two bolts of cloth, some tea, and a leg of mutton to seal the agreement.

Ren and Qian Yi married in the twenty-sixth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign. Yi’s father was relieved to be rid of his unwanted and useless daughter; her mother smiled at the reversal of fortune for her natal family line.

I had many words of advice I wanted to give Yi, but at the moment of parting I let her mother do the talking.

“Be respectful and cautious,” she advised. “Be diligent. Go to bed late and wake up early as you’ve always done. Make tea for your mother-in-law and treat her kindly. If they have domestic animals, feed them. Take good care of your feet, arrange your clothes, and comb your hair. Never be angry. If you do these things, you will have a good name.”

She held her daughter in her arms.

“One more thing,” she said gently. “This has happened very fast and we can’t be sure the matchmaker has been completely forthright. If your husband turns out to be poor, don’t blame him. If he has a clubfoot or is sim-pleminded, don’t complain, become disloyal, or change your heart. You now have no one to rely on but him. The water is spilled and you can’t take it back. Contentment is just a matter of chance.” Tears streamed down her face. “You’ve been a good daughter. Try not to forget us entirely.”

Then she pulled the opaque red veil down over Yi’s face and helped her into the palanquin. A small band played, and the local feng shui man tossed grains, beans, small fruit, and copper cash to propitiate baleful spirits. But I could see there were none of those, only me, happy, and village children who scrambled for the corporeal treats to take home. Yi, who had no choice in any of this, left her home village. She had little expectation of love or affection, but she carried her mother’s bravery in her heart.

Ren’s mother greeted the palanquin at the front gate. She couldn’t see the girl’s face, but she inspected her feet and found them more than adequate. The two of them swayed together through the compound to the bedchamber. Here, Madame Wu placed the confidential book in her daughter-in-law’s hands. “Read this. It will tell you what you need to do tonight. I look forward to a grandson in nine months.”

Hours later, Ren arrived. I watched him lift Yi’s veil and smile at the beautiful girl. He was pleased. I wished for them the Three Abundances—

good fortune, long life, and sons—and then I left.

I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes I’d made with Ze. I wouldn’t live in Ren and Yi’s bedchamber, where I might be tempted to interfere in ways I had in the past. I remembered how Liniang had been drawn to the ( 2 2 9 )

plum tree she’d seen in the garden: I should count it a great good fortune to be buried beside it when I die. There she thought she might marshal her fragrant spirit through the dark rains of summer and keep company with the tree’s roots. When she died, her parents honored her wishes. Later, Sister Stone put a sprig of flowering plum in a vase and placed it on Liniang’s altar.

Liniang’s ghost had responded by sending a shower of plum petals. I went to the Wus’ plum tree, which hadn’t bloomed or borne fruit since I died.

Its neglect suited me. I made a home for myself beneath the moss-covered rocks that surrounded the tree’s trunk. From here, I’d be able to watch over Yi and Ren without intruding too much.

y i adap te d qu i c k ly to being a wife. She had more wealth now than she ever could have imagined, but she showed no signs of extravagance.

From childhood she’d sought inner calm, not outer beauty. Now, as a wife, she strove to be much more than just a pretty dress. Her charm was completely her own: Her skin was smoother than jade, each step she took with her lily feet was so dainty it seemed to cause other flowers to bloom, and her swaying gait was so soft that her skirts swirled about her like mist.

She never complained, not even when loneliness for her mother overpowered her. At those times—instead of crying, yelling at the servants, or throwing a cup—she spent the day sitting at a northern window, practicing being quiet, with nothing but a single incense burner—and me—to keep her company.

She learned to love Ren and respect Madame Wu. There were no conflicts in the women’s rooms, because Yi did all possible things to make her mother-in-law happy. Nor did Yi complain about the women who had preceded her. She didn’t taunt us for dying so young. She didn’t try to hurt the dignity of our memories. She preferred instead to entertain her husband and mother-in-law with her singing, dancing, and zither playing, and they enjoyed her innocence and lively manner. Her heart was like a great road with room for everyone. She treated the servants well, always had kind words for the cook, and dealt with tradesmen as though they were her kinsmen. For all this, she was appreciated by her mother-in-law and doted on by her husband. She had good food to eat, embroidered clothes to wear, and a much better house in which to live. However, she was not yet educated enough for this household. Now that I had access to Ren’s library, I could teach her properly. But I was not alone in my efforts.

I remembered back to how my father taught me to read and under-

( 2 3 0 )

stand, so one day I pushed Yi into Ren’s lap. Beguiled by Yi’s innocence and sincerity, Ren helped her by asking about her reading, forcing her to think and criticize. Yi became a conduit between Ren and me. In our education of her, we were one. She grew to be more than proficient in the classics, literature, and mathematics. Ren and I took pride in her growing knowledge and accomplishments.

But some skills still evaded her. Yi continued to hold her calligraphy brush awkwardly, causing her strokes to be shaky and unsure. Madame Wu stepped in, and through her I drilled Yi on all the lessons Fifth Aunt had taught me, using Pictures of Battle Formations of the Brush; Yi improved just as I had all those years ago. When she sometimes recited poems like a parrot with no sense of their deeper meanings, I knew my efforts still weren’t enough. I remembered Ren’s cousin. I went out and brought Li Shu home, and she became Yi’s tutor. Now when Yi recited, she opened our hearts to the Seven Emotions and transported us to remembered and imagined places. Everyone in the household grew to love her even more.

Not once did I feel jealous, not once did I want to eat Yi’s heart or pull off her head and limbs for Ren to find, and not once did I try to reveal myself to her or visit her in her dreams. But by now I could do almost anything, so when they woke in the morning, I cooled the water they splashed on their faces. When Yi did her hair, I became the teeth in the comb, ef-fortlessly separating each snarl, tangle, and strand. When Ren went out, I cleared his passage, pushed aside obstacles, eliminated dangers, and brought him home safely. During the dog days of summer, I enticed a servant to tie a watermelon in netting and lower it into the well. Then I went down into the darkness, seeped into the water, and chilled it even more. I loved watching Ren and Yi eat the melon after dinner, enjoying its refresh-ing qualities. In all these ways I thanked my sister-wife for being good to my husband and Ren for finding happiness and companionship after so many lonely years. But these were minor things.

I wanted to thank them in a way that would give them the deep-heart happiness I felt when I saw Yi sitting on Ren’s lap or listened to him explain the hidden meaning of one of the Banana Garden Five’s poems.

What was the one thing they could want? What was the one thing every married couple wanted? A son. I wasn’t an ancestor and I didn’t think I could give this. But when spring came, something miraculous happened.

The plum tree blossomed. I had come so far in my own learning that I made it happen. When the petals fell and fruit began to form, I knew I could make Yi pregnant.

( 2 3 1 )

Pearls in My Heart

i remaine d true to the promise i’d made and staye d out of the bedchamber when they were making clouds and rain, but I kept track of the doings in that room in other ways.

Certain nights are inauspicious and potentially dangerous for clouds and rain. On nights that were exceptionally windy, cloudy, rainy, foggy, or hot, I made sure that Yi sent Ren out to visit friends, gather with poets, or give a lecture. On nights threatened by lightning, thunder, eclipses, or earthquakes, I gave Yi a headache. But these nights were rare, so most evenings as soon as the rustling of the bed linens stilled, I slipped through a crack in the window and into the room.

I made myself very small, entered Yi’s body, and got to work, looking for the right seed to bring to the egg. Making a baby isn’t just about clouds and rain, although from the giggles and moans I heard as I waited outside the window, I knew Ren and Yi had fun and brought pleasure to each other. It is also about the union of two souls to bring another soul back from the afterworld to begin a new life in the earthly realm. I searched and searched in the sea of frantic swimming until, after several months, I finally found the seed I wanted. I guided it as it swam to Yi’s egg and entered it. I made myself smaller still so I might comfort the new soul as he arrived in his temporary home. I stayed with him until he traveled to the wall of Yi’s womb and embedded himself. Now that he was safe, I had other practical matters to attend to.

When Yi’s monthly bleeding didn’t come, great happiness infused the ( 2 3 2 )

household. Just under that joy, though, was creeping worry. The last pregnant woman in the compound had died, suggesting evil spirits were after her. Everyone agreed that Yi, with her weak constitution, was particularly vulnerable to mischief committed by netherworld creatures.

“You can never be too careful about previous wives,” Doctor Zhao said, when he and the diviner came for one of their regular consultations.

I agreed, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that Ze was in the Blood-Gathering Lake. However, what the diviner said next chilled me.

“Especially when one of them was not properly married in the first place,” he mumbled ominously, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

But I loved Yi! I would never do anything to injure her!

Madame Wu wrung her hands. “I agree,” she said. “I’ve been worried about that girl too. She took her vengeance on Ze and her baby. Rightfully, perhaps, but it was a hard loss for my son. Tell us what to do.”

For the first time in many years, I burned with shame. I hadn’t known my mother-in-law blamed me for what had happened to Ze. I had to win back her respect. The best way to do that was to protect Yi and her baby from the fears that infested the household. Unfortunately, my job was made more difficult by the instructions that the doctor and the diviner left and by a patient who was tenacious and uncooperative despite her frailty.

The servants made special charms and remedies, but Yi was too modest to accept things from those who had less than she did. Madame Wu tried to keep her daughter-in-law in bed, but Yi was too dedicated and respectful to give up making tea and meals for her mother-in-law, washing and repairing her garments, supervising the cleaning of her room, or bringing hot water when she bathed. Ren tried to coddle his wife by feed-ing her with his chopsticks, rubbing her back, and propping her pillows, but she wouldn’t sit still for his goodness.

From my perspective—as a ghost who lived in the world of demons and other creatures who could cause harm—I could see that these things did nothing to help or protect her. They did, however, embarrass Yi, and make her anxious.

Then, one late spring afternoon during an unseasonable cold snap, I was so frustrated that after the diviner had pushed Yi from her bed to move furniture to build a barrier between her and me, had made her sick to her stomach by burning too many sticks of incense at one time in an effort to drive my spirit from the room, and had poked at her head with his fingers so hard to activate protective acupuncture points that would help guard against me that Yi was left with a throbbing headache, I shouted in ( 2 3 3 )

disgust, “Aiya! Why don’t you just order a ghost marriage and leave her alone?”

Yi started, blinked several times, and looked around the room. The diviner, who had never once intuited the truth of my presence, packed up his bag, bowed, and left. I stayed in the room by the window. I planned to hold my post all day and night to protect the two people I loved above all others. During the afternoon, Yi rested in bed. She nervously worried the quilt with her fingers, deep in thought. By the time a servant brought dinner, Yi seemed to have reached a conclusion of some sort.

When Ren finally came to the bedroom, Yi said, “If everyone is so concerned that Sister-wife Tong wishes to injure me, the two of you should be joined in a ghost marriage so she can be restored to her proper place as your first wife.”

I was so taken aback that at first I didn’t understand the implication of her words. I’d made the suggestion in a moment of supreme annoyance.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she would hear it or take it seriously.

“A ghost marriage?” Ren shook his head. “I’m not afraid of ghosts.”

I stared hard at him, but I couldn’t read what was inside his mind.

Fourteen years ago when Ze was dying, he’d said he didn’t believe in ghosts. At the time, I thought he was trying to keep Ze calm. But did he really not fear or believe in ghosts? What about when I’d visited him in his dreams? What about when I’d given him a good bed companion and an obedient wife with Ze? And how did he think his recent loneliness had been cured? Did he think the miracle of Yi was a matter of preordained fate?

I may have had doubts about Ren, but Yi didn’t. She smiled at him indulgently.

“You say you’re not afraid of ghosts,” she said, “but I feel your apprehension. I look around and see fear everywhere.”

Ren got up and crossed to the window.

“All this panic is not good for our son,” Yi went on. “Arrange a ghost marriage. It will calm the others. If they are soothed, I will be able to grow our baby in tranquillity.”

Hope overpowered my wounded feelings. Yi, my beautiful, kind-hearted Yi. Was she really suggesting this not for herself but to bring peace to the household? Nothing was going to happen to this baby, of that I was sure. But a ghost marriage? Was it going to come at last?

Ren’s hands gripped the windowsill. He looked wistful, optimistic even. Did he feel me at all? Did he know how much I loved him still?

( 2 3 4 )

“I think you are right,” he said at last, his voice in the distant past.

“Peony was meant to be my first wife.” This was the first time he’d spoken my real name in twenty-three years. I was stunned, ecstatic. “After she died, we should have been married in the manner you’ve suggested.

There were . . . problems, and this ceremony didn’t happen. Peony . . .

she was—” He took his fingers away from the sill, turned to face his wife, and said, “She would never harm you. I know that, and you should too.

But you are right about the others. Let us have a ghost marriage and remove the impediment the others think surrounds you.”

I covered my face and silently wept in gratitude. I had waited— longed—

for a ghost marriage almost from the moment I died. If this came to pass, my ancestor tablet would be brought from its hiding place. Someone would see it wasn’t dotted and finally fill in what was missing. When that happened, I would no longer be a hungry ghost. I would finish my journey to the afterworld and be transformed into an ancestor, the honorable and venerated first wife of the second son in the Wu clan. To have this be suggested by my sister-wife filled me with more happiness than I could have ever thought possible. To have Ren—my poet, my love, my life—

agree was like having pearls poured into my heart.

i at tac h e d myse l f to the matchmaker and went with her to the Chen Family Villa to observe the negotiation for my ghost bride-price. Baba had finally retired and come home to the one place he could enjoy his grandsons. He still looked proud and sure, but just under that I sensed that my death continued to haunt him. Although he couldn’t see me, I knelt before him and performed obeisance, hoping that some part of him would accept my apologies for ever having doubted him. When I was done, I sat back and listened to him try to negotiate a new—and higher—bride-price than the one he had agreed to when I was alive, which at first I didn’t understand.

The matchmaker sought a lower one by appealing to his sense of qing.

“The Eight Characters were matched for your daughter and the second son of the Wu family. They were a match made in Heaven. You shouldn’t ask for so much.”

“My price stands.”

“But your daughter is dead,” the matchmaker reasoned.

“Consider the increase interest on time passed.”

Naturally, negotiations failed and I was disappointed. Madame Wu did not like the matchmaker’s report either.

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“Order me a palanquin,” she snapped. “We are going back there today.”

When they reached the Chen Family Villa and stepped from their palanquins into the Sitting-Down Hall, servants hurriedly brought tea and cool cloths to refresh their faces from the journey around the lake.

Then the two women were led through courtyard after courtyard to my father’s library, where he lounged on his daybed with the youngest of his grandsons and nephews climbing over him like tiger cubs. He sent the children off with a servant, strode to his desk, and sat down.

Madame Wu sat in the same chair across from my father’s desk that I used to occupy. The matchmaker took a spot just behind her right shoulder, while a servant came to stand by the door to await my father’s commands. He smoothed his forehead and ran his hand down the length of his queue just as he had when I was a young girl.

“Madame Wu,” he said. “It’s been too many years.”

“I don’t go on excursions anymore,” she replied. “The rules are changing, but even when I did, you knew that meeting with men was disagreeable to me.”

“You have served your husband and my old friend well in this regard.”

“Friendship and loyalty are what brought me here today. You seem to have forgotten that you promised my husband that our two families would be joined.”

“I never forgot that. But what could I do? My daughter died.”

“How could I not be aware of this, Master Chen? I’ve seen my son suffer from this loss every day for over twenty years.” She leaned forward and tapped a finger on the desk as she spoke. “I send a go-between to you in good faith and you send her back to me with outlandish demands.”

Baba negligently leaned back in his chair.

“You’ve known all along what needed to be done,” she added. “I came to you many times before to negotiate.”

She had? How had I missed that?

“My daughter is worth more than what you’ve offered,” Baba said. “If you want her, you’ll have to pay for her.”

I sighed in understanding. My father still valued me.

“Fine,” Madame Wu said. She pursed her lips and her eyes narrowed.

I’d seen her irritated with Ze, but women weren’t allowed to get angry at men. “Just know that this time I won’t leave until you agree.” She took a breath, and then said, “If you want a higher bride-price, I will need some additional items for her dowry.”

This seemed to be exactly what my father wanted. They bartered. They ( 2 3 6 )

traded. He made a higher demand for the bride-price; Madame Wu reciprocated with an even more outlandish one for the dowry. They both seemed very familiar with the offerings, which was shocking because it meant they had had this conversation many times before. But then the whole thing shocked me . . . and surprised and delighted me.

When it seemed they’d finally reached an agreement, my father suddenly threw in something new.

“Twenty live geese delivered ten days from now,” he said, “or I won’t agree to the marriage.”

This was nothing, but Madame Wu wanted something more in exchange.

“I seem to remember that your daughter was meant to come with her own servant. Even now someone will have to care for her through her ancestor tablet when it comes to my home.”

Baba allowed himself a smile. “I was waiting for you to ask.”

He motioned to the servant standing by the door. The servant left the room and returned a few minutes later with a woman. She came forward, dropped to her knees, and kowtowed before Madame Wu. When she looked up, I saw a face worn by hard circumstances. It was Willow.

“This servant recently returned to our household. I made a mistake when I sold her many years ago. It’s clear to me now that her destiny has always been to care for my daughter.”

“She’s old,” Madame Wu said. “What am I going to do with her?”

“Willow is thirty-nine. She has three sons. They stayed with her previous owner. His wife wanted sons and this one gave them. Willow may not be much to look at,” Baba said practically, “but she could serve as a concubine if you need one. I can guarantee she will produce grandsons for you.”

“For twenty geese?”

My father nodded.

The matchmaker grinned. She would make a good profit from this.

Willow crawled across the floor and put her forehead on Madame Wu’s lily feet.

“I’ll accept your offer on one condition,” Madame Wu said. “I want you to answer a question. Why didn’t you give your daughter a ghost marriage before this? One girl died because of your refusal to entertain my offers. Now the life of one who carries my grandson is threatened. This was something easy to mend. A ghost marriage is common. It alleviates so much trouble—”

“But it wouldn’t help my heart,” Baba confessed. “I couldn’t let go of ( 2 3 7 )

Peony. All this time I’ve longed for her company. By keeping the tablet in the Chen Family Villa, I felt I was still connected to her.”

But I was never here with him!

My father’s eyes clouded. “All these years, I hoped to feel her presence, but I never did. When you sent the matchmaker today, I decided it was finally time to let my daughter go. Peony was meant to be with your boy.

And now . . . It’s strange, but I feel her with me at last.”

Madame Wu sniffed dismissively. “You needed to do the right thing for your daughter, but you didn’t. Twenty-three years is a long time, Master Chen, a very long time.”

With that, she stood and swayed out of the room. I stayed behind so I could prepare myself.

g h o st marri ag e s are not as ornate, complicated, or time-consuming as a wedding when both parties are living. Baba arranged for the transfer of goods, money, and food for my dowry. Madame Wu reciprocated with everything that had been agreed upon for my bride-price. I brushed my hair and pinned it up and straightened my old and tattered clothes. I wanted to wrap my feet in clean bindings, but I hadn’t had new ones since I’d left the Viewing Terrace. I was as ready as I could be.

The only real challenge was that my ancestor tablet needed to be found. Without it, the stand-in bride couldn’t be made and I couldn’t be married. But my tablet had been hidden away for so long that no one remembered what had happened to it. In fact, only one person knew where it was: Shao, the longtime amah and wet nurse to my family. Naturally, she was no longer a wet nurse; she was barely even an amah. She’d lost all her teeth, most of her hair, and a good part of her memory. She was too old to sell and too cheap to let retire. She was useless in locating my tablet.

“That ugly thing was thrown out years ago,” she said. An hour later, she changed her mind. “It’s in the ancestral hall next to her mother’s tablet.” Two hours after that, a different memory surfaced. “I put it under the plum tree just like in The Peony Pavilion. That’s where Peony would have wanted to be.” Three days later, after various servants, Bao, and even my father had begged, ordered, and demanded that Shao tell them where she’d hidden the tablet, she cried like the scared and frail old woman she was. “I don’t know where it is,” she warbled querulously. “Why do you keep asking about that ugly thing anyway?”

( 2 3 8 )

If she couldn’t recollect where she’d hidden my tablet, she certainly wouldn’t recall that she’d caused it not to be dotted. I’d come so far. I couldn’t let everything fail because one old woman couldn’t remember that she’d once hidden an ugly thing in a storage room on a high shelf behind a jar of pickled turnips.

I went to Shao’s room. It was the middle of the afternoon and she was asleep. I stood next to her bed, staring down at her. I reached out to shake her awake, but my arms refused to touch her. Even now, when I was so close to having my ghostliness resolved, I couldn’t do anything to help get my tablet dotted. I tried and tried, but I was powerless.

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Let us do it,” a voice said.

I turned to see my mother and my grandmother.

“You came!” I exclaimed. “But how?”

“You are the flesh of my inmost heart,” Mama answered. “How could I watch my daughter’s wedding from afar?”

“We asked the netherworld bureaucrats and received one time return-to-earth permits,” Grandmother explained.

More pearls filled my heart.

We waited for Shao to wake up. Then my grandmother and mother got on either side of her, held her by the elbows, and guided her through the compound to the storage room, where Shao found the ancestor tablet.

Mama and Grandmother let go of her and stepped away. The old woman brushed it off. Although her eyesight was bad, I felt sure she would notice my missing dot and take the tablet straight to my father. When that didn’t happen, I looked at Mama and Grandmother.

“Help me make her see it,” I begged.

“We can’t,” Mama said regretfully. “We’re only allowed to do so much.”

Shao took the tablet to my old room. In the middle of the floor lay a dummy made from straw, paper, wood, and cloth that the servants had as-sembled to represent me at my wedding. It rested on its back with its stomach exposed. Willow painted two crude eyes, a nose, and lips on a piece of paper and fastened it to the bride’s face with rice paste. Shao got on her knees and stuffed my ancestor tablet inside the dummy so quickly that Willow didn’t have a chance to see it. My old servant threaded a needle and sewed the stomach shut. When she was done, she went to a trunk and opened it. Inside lay my wedding costume. It should have been thrown out with all my other belongings.

( 2 3 9 )

“You kept my wedding clothes?” I asked my mother.

“Of course I did. I had to believe things would be set right again some-day.”

“And we brought some gifts too,” Grandmother added.

She reached into her gown and pulled out clean bindings and new shoes. Mama opened a satchel and brought out a skirt and tunic. The spirit clothes were beautiful, and as they dressed me, the servants mirrored our actions, placing the dummy in an underskirt followed by the red silk skirt with the tiny pleats stitched in the pattern of flowers, clouds, and interlocking good-luck symbols. They slipped on the tunic and closed all the braided frogs. They wrapped the muslin-covered straw feet in long binding cloths, tightening and tightening them until the feet were small enough to fit into my red wedding slippers. Then they propped the dummy against the wall, settled the headdress on its head, and covered the grotesque face with the red opaque veil. If my ancestor tablet had been dotted, I would have been able to inhabit the stand-in fully.

The servants left. I knelt by the dummy. I fingered the silk and touched the gold leaves on the headdress. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. I was so close to righting my path, but with my tablet undotted, the ceremony would be meaningless.

“I know everything now,” Mama said, “and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was too brokenhearted to dot your tablet. I’m sorry I let Shao take it from me.

I’m sorry I never asked your father about it. I thought he’d taken your tablet with him—”

“He didn’t take it—”

“He didn’t tell me, I didn’t ask, and you didn’t tell me when I died. I found out when I reached the Viewing Terrace. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know how. You were confused. And it was Shao who—”

“You can’t blame her,” Mama said, waving away the idea as though it were insignificant. “Your father and I felt so guilty about your death that we abandoned our responsibilities. Your baba blamed himself for your lovesickness and your death. If he hadn’t planted the idea of lovesickness in your mind with all his talk about Xiaoqing and Liniang . . . if he hadn’t encouraged you to read, to think, to write—”

“But those things made me who I am,” I cried.

“Exactly,” Grandmother said.

“Be quiet,” Mama ordered, and not very politely. “You’ve caused this girl enough heartbreak and confusion.”

( 2 4 0 )

Grandmother set her jaw, looked away, and said, “And I’m sorry for that. I didn’t know—”

Mama touched her mother-in-law’s sleeve to keep her from saying any more.

“Peony,” Mama went on, “if you’d listened only to me, you wouldn’t be the daughter I’m so proud of today. Every mother is afraid for her daughter, but I was terrified. I could only think of all the terrible things that could happen. But what’s the worst thing that could happen? What happened to me in Yangzhou? No. The worst thing was losing you. But look what you’ve done these past years. Look at what your love for Wu Ren has caused to flower in you. I wrote a poem on a wall in fear and sadness. When I did that, I closed myself away from all the things that had made me happy. Your grandmother and I, and so many other women, had wanted to be heard. We went out and it started to happen for us. Then the one time I was truly heard—the poem on the wall—I wanted to die. But you’re different. In death, you’ve grown to be an admirable woman. And then there’s your project.”

I drew back instinctively. She’d burned my books and hated my love of The Peony Pavilion.

“So many things you didn’t tell me, Peony.” She sighed sadly. “We lost so much time.”

We had, and there would never be a way to get it back. I blinked back tears of regret. Mama took my hand and patted it comfortingly.

“When I was still alive, I heard about Ren’s commentary on The Peony Pavilion, ” she said. “When I read it, I thought I heard your voice. I knew that couldn’t be, so I told myself I was just a grieving mother. It wasn’t until your grandmother met me on the Viewing Terrace that I learned the truth—all of it. And of course, she had to learn a few things from me too.”

“Go ahead,” Grandmother urged. “Tell her why we’re really here.”

Mama took a deep breath. “You need to finish your project,” she said.

“It won’t be the scribble of a desperate woman on a wall. Your father and I, your grandmother, your whole family—those here in the earthly realm and all the generations of ancestors who watch out for you—will be proud of you.”

I thought about what my mother said. My grandmother had wanted to be heard and appreciated by her husband, only to be relegated to false martyrdom. Mama had wanted to be heard, only to lose herself. I wanted to be heard, but only by one man. Ren had asked this of me in the Moon-

( 2 4 1 )

Viewing Pavilion. He wanted this from me. He’d created the possibility for me, when the world, society, and even my mother and father would have preferred me to keep silent.

“But how can I possibly take it up again after everything—”

“I almost died to write my poem; you did die writing your commentary,” Mama said. “I had to be cut to the bone and have my body invaded by many men to write the words on the wall. I saw you waste away as the words sapped your qi. For so long I thought, Maybe this sacrifice is what’s needed from us. Only after watching you these last few years as you’ve been with Yi have I realized that maybe writing doesn’t require sacrifice.

Maybe it’s a gift to experience emotions through our brushes, ink, and paper. I wrote out of sorrow, fear, and hate. You wrote out of desire, joy, and love. We each paid a heavy price for speaking our minds, for revealing our hearts, for trying to create, but it was worth it, wasn’t it, daughter?”

I didn’t have a chance to respond. I heard laughter in the corridor. The door swung open and my four aunts, Broom, Orchid, Lotus, and their daughters entered. They’d been brought together by my father to make sure I was treated like a real bride. They made adjustments to the dummy, setting right the pleats in the skirt, smoothing the silk of the tunic, and using a few kingfisher feather hairpins to help hold the headdress in place.

“Quick!” Grandmother said as cymbals clanged and drums banged.

“You have to hurry.”

“But my tablet—”

“Forget about it for now,” Grandmother ordered. “Experience your wedding as best you can, because it will not happen again—at least not in the way you imagined when you were alone in your bed all those years ago.” She closed her eyes for a moment and smiled knowingly to herself.

Then she opened her eyes and clapped her hands crisply. “Now, hurry!”

I remembered everything I was supposed to do. I kowtowed to my mother three times and thanked her for all she’d done for me. I kowtowed three times to my grandmother and thanked her. Mama and Grandmother kissed me, and then they led me to the dummy. Since my tablet wasn’t dotted, I couldn’t step inside so I wrapped myself around it.

Grandmother was right. I had to enjoy this as best I could, and it wasn’t hard. My aunts told me I was beautiful. My cousins apologized for their girlhood ways. Their daughters told me they regretted that they’d never known me. Second Aunt and Fourth Aunt picked me up, placed me on a chair, and carried me out of the room. Mama and Grandmother joined the procession of Chen family women through the corridors and past the ( 2 4 2 )

pavilions, pond, and rockery to the ancestral hall. Above the altar table, next to the scrolls of my grandparents, hung an image of my mother. Her skin had been painted in a translucent style, her hair pinned up as a young bride, her lips full and happy. This must have been what she looked like when she and my father were first married. She might not scare anyone into conducting themselves well, but she would inspire them.

On the altar table everything had been grouped into uneven lots to sig-nify that this wasn’t a typical marriage. Seven sticks of incense stood in each of three braziers. Baba’s hands trembled as he poured nine cups of wine for various gods and goddesses, and then three cups of wine for each of my ancestors. He set out five peaches and eleven melons.

Then my chair was lifted and I was carried to the wind-fire gate. For so long I’d wished to pass through this gate to go to my husband’s home, and now it was happening. In a tradition unique to ghost marriages, Willow held a rice-winnowing basket over my head to screen me from heavenly sight. I was helped into a green rather than a red palanquin. Bearers carried me around the lake and up Wushan Mountain past the temple to my husband’s home. The door to the palanquin opened and I was helped out and put on another chair. Mama and Grandmother stood on the steps next to Madame Wu, who greeted me in the customary way. Then she turned to welcome my father. In ghost marriages, parents are usually so happy to see the ugly thing leave their home that they stay behind to rejoice privately, but my father had come with me, trailing behind my green palanquin in one of his own, letting all Hangzhou know that his daughter—the daughter of one of the city’s most respected and wealthy families—was finally marrying out. As I was carried over the Wu threshold, my heart was so full that the pearls overflowed and filled the Wu family’s compound with my happiness.

The procession of the living and the dead went to the Wu family’s ancestral hall, where the shadows of red candles dappled the walls. Ren waited there, and when I saw him I was overcome with emotion. He wore the wedding clothes I’d made for him. He was man-beautiful to my ghostly eyes. The only thing that set him apart from any other bridegroom were his black gloves, which reminded everyone present that this ceremony—as joyous as it was for me—was associated with darkness and se-crecy.

The ceremony was performed. Servants picked up my chair and tilted it, so I could join my husband in bowing before my new ancestors. With that, I officially left my natal family and joined my husband’s family. A full ( 2 4 3 )

and very lavish banquet was served. No expense was spared. My aunts and uncles, their daughters and their husbands and children, arrived and filled table upon table. Bao—still fat, his eyes still beady—sat with his wife and their sons, who were also pudgy, with eyes set too close. Even the Chen family concubines had come, although they were relegated to a table at the back of the hall. They gossiped and twittered among themselves, happy to be out for an excursion. I had been given the position of prominence. My husband sat on one side of me and my father on the other.

“Once there were those in my family who thought I was marrying my daughter to someone of lower standing,” my father told Ren as the last of thirteen dishes was set on the table. “And it’s true that money and status were not equal, but I loved and respected your father. He was a good man.

As I watched you and Peony grow up, I knew the two of you were perfectly matched. She would have been happy with you.”

“I would have been happy with her too,” Ren responded. He lifted his cup and took a sip before adding, “Now she will be with me forever.”

“Take good care of her.”

“I will, I will.”

After the banquet, Ren and I were led to the bridal chamber. My dummy bride was placed on the bed, and then everyone left. Nervous, I lay down next to the dummy and watched as Ren undressed. For a long while, he stared down at the dummy’s painted face, and then he joined us on the bed.

“I never stopped thinking about you,” he whispered. “I never stopped loving you. You are the wife of my heart.”

Then he draped his arm over the dummy and pulled it close.

i n th e morn i ng, Willow knocked softly on the door. Ren, who was up and seated by the window, called for her to enter. She came in, followed by my mother and grandmother. Willow set down a tray with tea, cups, and a knife. She poured the tea for Ren, and then she went to the bed. She leaned over the dummy bride and began to unbutton the tunic.

Ren jumped up. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve come to cut out Little Miss’s tablet,” Willow said meekly, her head bowed down. “It needs to go on your family altar table.”

Ren crossed the room, took the knife, and pocketed it.

“I don’t want her cut.” He gazed at the dummy bride. “I waited a long ( 2 4 4 )

time to have Peony with me. I want to keep her as she is now. Prepare a room. We will honor her there.”

I was touched by his idea, but this couldn’t happen. I turned to my mother and grandmother.

“What about my tablet?” I asked.

They held up their hands helplessly and then faded away. And with that, my wedding and my moment of supreme happiness were over.

As Yi predicted, the ghost marriage soothed the household’s fears.

Everyone went back to their usual routines, leaving Yi to grow her baby in peace. Ren set up a nice room overlooking the garden for my dummy bride, and Willow cared for it there. He visited daily, sometimes staying for an hour or so to read or write. Yi followed all the customs and traditions by treating me as the official first wife by making offerings and reciting prayers, but inside I quietly mourned. I loved this family and they had fulfilled my desire to have a ghost wedding, but without my tablet—the ugly thing—dotted, I was still just a hungry ghost with some lovely new spirit clothes, shoes, and bindings given to me by my mother and grandmother. And I certainly didn’t think about my mother and grandmother’s request that I finish my project, not when Yi still had to give birth.

th e last month of pregnancy arrived. Yi abstained from washing her hair for all twenty-eight days as recommended. I made sure she stayed relaxed, didn’t climb stairs, and ate lightly. When her time approached, Madame Wu held a special ceremony to propitiate the goodwill of the demons who like to destroy a woman’s life at childbirth. She placed plates of food, incense, candles, flowers, spirit money, and two live crabs on a table. She chanted protective spells. Once the ceremony was over, Madame Wu had Willow take the crabs and throw them out in the street, knowing that as they crawled away they would take the demons with them. The ash from the incense was wrapped in paper and hung above Yi’s bed, where it would remain for thirty days after the baby was born to protect her from going to the Blood-Gathering Lake. Despite all this, Yi’s labor was not easy.

“A no-good spirit is preventing the child from coming into the world,”

the midwife said. “This is a special class of demon—perhaps someone from a previous life, who has come back to seek payment for an unpaid debt.”

( 2 4 5 )

I left the room for fear it might be me, but when Yi’s screams worsened, I returned. She calmed as soon as I reentered the room. As the midwife wiped Yi’s forehead, I looked everywhere. I found nothing and no one, but I felt something—evil and just outside my range.

Yi weakened. When she began calling for her mother, Ren went to find the diviner, who surveyed the scene—rumpled bedclothes, blood on Yi’s thighs, and the midwife out of ideas—and ordered another altar to be set up. He brought out three charms on yellow paper, seven centimeters wide and nearly a meter long. One he hung on the door of the bedchamber to keep out bad spirits; one he hung around Yi’s neck; the third he burned, mixed the ashes with water, and made Yi drink the concoction. Then he burned spirit money, chanted, and thumped the table for half an hour.

But still the baby suffered. He was being held back by something none of us could see or stop. I’d tried so hard to give this gift to my husband. I’d done everything possible, hadn’t I?

When the diviner said, “The baby has grabbed hold of his mother’s intestines. It is an evil spirit trying to take your wife’s life”—the exact same words he’d spoken at Ze’s bedside—I knew I had to try something drastic and dangerous. I ordered the diviner to renew his chants and incantations, Madame Wu to rub Yi’s belly with hot water, Willow to sit behind Yi to prop her up, and the midwife to massage open the birth canal. Then I traveled up inside until I came face-to-face with Ren’s son. The cord was wrapped around his neck. With each contraction, it pulled a little tighter. I took an end of the cord and pulled to loosen it from the hidden higher depths. Something pulled back and the baby’s body jerked in response. It was cold in here, not warm or hospitable in any way. I slipped under the cord, relieving the pressure on the baby’s neck, and then I grabbed the far end of the cord and pulled as hard as I could to free it from whatever was holding it. We began to move slowly toward the opening. I absorbed each new contraction, protecting Ren’s son, until we slipped into the midwife’s hands. But our joy was tempered.

Even after the baby took his first breath and was placed on his mother’s chest, he was blue and lethargic. There was no question in my mind that the baby had been exposed to unpropitious elements and I was afraid he wouldn’t survive. I was not the only one to worry about this. Madame Wu, Willow, and the matchmaker helped the diviner with four more protective rites. Madame Wu fetched a pair of her son’s trousers and hung them over the end of the bed. Then she sat down at the table and wrote out four ( 2 4 6 )

characters that meant all unfavorable influences are to go into the trousers on a piece of red paper and tucked it in the pants.

After this, Madame Wu and the midwife tied the baby’s feet and hands with loose red string onto which a piece of cash had been looped. The cash served as a talisman against evil, while the tying prevented the baby from ever becoming naughty or disobedient in this and all future lives. Willow took the yellow sheet of paper from around Yi’s neck and used it to fold into a hat, which she placed on the baby’s head to continue the protection from mother to child. Meanwhile, the diviner took the paper from the door, burned it, and mixed the ashes in water. Three days later, that water was used to wash the baby for the first time. As he was purified, the deathly blue finally disappeared, but his breathing remained reedy. Ren’s son needed even more charms, and I made sure they were gathered together, tied into a satchel, and hung outside the door: hair swept from dark corners to keep the sounds of dogs and cats from frightening him, coal to make him hardy, onions to make him quick-witted, orange pith to bring success and good fortune.

Mother and child survived the first four weeks, and a grand one-month party was given with great quantities of red eggs and sweet cakes. The women oohed and aahed over the infant. The men patted Ren on the back and drank cups of strong wine. A banquet was presented, and then the women retired to the inner chambers, where they huddled around Yi and the baby and whispered about Emperor Kangxi’s first visit to Hangzhou.

“He wanted to impress everyone with his love of the arts, but every inch of his journey cost the people of the country an inch of silver,” Li Shu complained. “The route on which he traveled was paved in imperial yellow. The walls and stone balustrades where he walked were carved with dragons.”

“The emperor held a pageant,” Hong Zhize added. I was pleased to see that Hong Sheng’s daughter had grown into a beautiful and accomplished poet in her own right. “He galloped on horseback across the field, shoot-ing arrows. Each one met its mark. Even when the horse bolted, the emperor still hit the target. This stirred something in my husband. That night, my husband’s arrows met their target too.”

This inspired other women to confide that the emperor’s manly ex-ploits had changed their husbands also.

“Don’t be surprised if there isn’t a flurry of one-month parties ten months from now,” one of the women said, and the others agreed.

( 2 4 7 )

Li Shu held up her hands to stop the laughter. She leaned forward, lowered her voice, and confided, “The emperor says this is the beginning of a prosperous age, but I’m worried. He’s very much against The Peony Pavilion. He says it’s a debaucher of girls and puts too much emphasis on qing. The moralists have grabbed hold of this and are stinking up the streets with their added manure.”

The women tried to cheer each other up with brave words, but their voices quavered with uncertainty. What had started as a comment here or there from one husband or another was now becoming imperial policy.

“I say no one can stop us from reading The Peony Pavilion or anything else,” Li Shu said, with a conviction that no one believed.

“But for how long?” Yi asked plaintively. “I haven’t even read it yet.”

“You will.” Ren stood at the door. He strode across the room, took his son from his wife, held him aloft for a moment, and then brought him back down to nestle in the crook of his arm. “You’ve worked long and hard to read and understand the things I love,” he said, “and now you’ve given me a son. How could I not want to share with you something that means so much to me?”

( 2 4 8 )

The Clouds Hall

r e n ’s wo r d s r eawake n e d my d e s i r e to f i n i s h my project, but I wasn’t quite ready and neither was Yi. It had been fifteen years since I’d looked at the opera. During that time, I thought I’d harnessed my harmful qualities, but with the new baby in the house I had to be sure. Also, Yi needed to study more before she would understand The Peony Pavilion. I engaged Li Shu, Ren, and Madame Wu to help me prepare my sister-wife. Then, after another two years, during which I cared for the family without incident, I finally allowed my husband to give Yi the volume of The Peony Pavilion that Ze and I had worked on.

Every morning after Yi dressed, she went to the garden to pick a peony.

Then she stopped by the kitchen for a fresh peach, a bowl of cherries, or a melon. After leaving instructions for the cook, she took her offerings to the ancestral hall. She first lit incense and made obeisance to the Wu ancestors, and then she laid her piece of fruit before Ze’s ancestor tablet.

Once these duties were done, she went to the room where my dummy bride resided and set the peony in a vase. She spoke to the ancestor tablet buried inside the dummy about her hopes for her son and her need for her husband and mother-in-law to remain healthy.

Then we’d go to the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, where Yi opened The Peony Pavilion and looked at all the notes about love that had been written in the margins. She read late into the afternoons—her hair hanging loose down her back, her gown flowing around her, her face set in a small frown ( 2 4 9 )

as she contemplated this or that passage. At other times she’d pause on a line, close her eyes, and hold perfectly still as she transported herself deeper into the story. I remembered that when I’d seen the opera Liniang did the same thing, using stillness as a way for the people in the audience to reach inside themselves to find their deepest emotions. Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming—weren’t our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?

Sometimes I had Yi put aside her reading and wander until she found Ren, Li Shu, or Madame Wu. Then I’d have her ask them about the opera, knowing that the more she learned, the more her mind would open. I had her inquire about other commentaries written by women, but when she heard their writings had been lost or destroyed, she became pensive.

“Why is it,” she asked Li Shu, “that so many women’s thoughts have been like flowers in the wind, drifting off with the current and vanishing without a trace?”

Her question surprised me, showing, as it did, just how far she’d come.

Yi’s curiosity never caused her to become overbearing, intrusive, or forgetful of her duties as a wife, daughter-in-law, and mother. She was passionate about the opera, but I watched to make sure she never tilted into obsession. Through her, I learned a lot more about life and love than when I was alive or even when I guided my first sister-wife. Gone were my girlish ideas about romantic love and my later ideas about sexual love.

From Yi, I learned to appreciate deep-heart love.

I’d seen it when Yi smiled indulgently at Ren when he said he wasn’t afraid of ghosts as a way of soothing her fears when she was pregnant. I saw it in the way she looked at Ren when he held their son on his lap, built kites with him, and taught him to be the kind of man who would care for his mother when she became a widow. I saw it when Yi praised her husband for his accomplishments, minor though they were. He was not the great poet I’d imagined him to be as a girl, nor was he the mediocre man whom Ze had humiliated. He was just a man, with good and bad qualities.

Through Yi, I saw that deep-heart love meant loving someone in spite of and because of his limitations.

One day, after months of reading and thinking, Yi came outside to the plum tree where I lived. She poured a libation on the roots, and said,

“This tree is a symbol of Du Liniang and I give my heart to you. Please bring me closer to my two sister-wives.”

Liniang had responded to this kindness with a shower of petals; I was ( 2 5 0 )

too wary to try anything showy like that, but Yi’s offering proved to me that she was ready to begin writing. I guided her along the corridor to the Clouds Hall. The room was small and lovely, with walls painted the color of the sky. The windows were filled with blue glass. White irises in a celadon vase stood on a simple desk. Yi sat down with our copy of The Peony Pavilion, mixed ink, and picked up her writing brush. I peered over her shoulder. She turned to the scene when Liniang’s ghost seduces Mengmei and wrote:

Liniang’s character shows through in the melancholy that inhabits her as she approaches the scholar. She may be a ghost, but she’s chaste by nature.

I swear I did not plant these words. She wrote them herself, but they mirrored what I’d come to believe. What she wrote next, however, convinced me that her concerns were far different from the ones I’d pondered in my bed long ago:

A mother cannot be too careful when her daughter starts thinking about clouds and rain.

Then she swung back to her own girlhood dreams and the pressing realities of being a woman:

Liniang is shy and bashful when she says, “An insubstantial ghost may yield to passion; a woman must pay full attention to the rites.” She is not wanton. She is a real woman who wants to be loved as a wife.

How these words echoed my own thoughts! I’d died young, but in my roaming I’d come to understand what it meant to be a wife and not just a girl dreaming alone in her room.

Tan Ze had styled her calligraphy after my own. How could she not when I’d guided her hand so often? I’d hoped that, seeing the writing came as if from a single hand, Ren would have understood that all the words were mine. I didn’t worry about that now. I wanted Yi to feel pride in what she was doing.

She wrote some more and then she signed her name. Signed her name!

I’d never done that. I’d never let Ze do that.

( 2 5 1 )

Over the coming months, Yi went daily to the Clouds Hall to add more comments to the margins. Slowly, something started to happen. I entered into a kind of dialogue with her. I whispered, and she wrote: The mournful chants of birds and insects, the soughing of the rain-lashed wind. The ghostliness one feels in the words and between the lines is overwhelming.

Once my thought was complete, she dipped the brush in the ink, and then added her own words:

Reading this alone on an overcast night is frightening.

She called upon her own experience when she wrote: Today, many fine marriages are delayed because people are picky on matters of family status and insist on amassing big dowries. When is this going to change?

How could she not understand that love—not money, status, or family connections—was what marriage should be about when she was living that herself ?

Sometimes to me her words were like flowers flowing off her brush: Mengmei changed his name because of a dream. Liniang fell sick because of her dream. Each had passion. Each had a dream. They both treated their dreams as real. A ghost is merely a dream and a dream is nothing but a ghost.

When I read this, I forgot my years of obsession and glowed with pride at Yi’s insights and persistence.

Yi responded to things I’d written and sometimes to things that had come from Ze’s brush. Along the way, I came to hear Ze in certain passages as clearly as if she were still with us. After all these years, I saw she’d contributed far more than I’d realized. Although Yi showed no inclination to join us in our lovesickness, it was as though she were summoning us.

And we answered with our thoughts, which she read on the page.

I rejoiced in Yi’s accomplishments and helped as best I could. At night, ( 2 5 2 )

when Yi stayed up reading, I brightened the candle flame so she wouldn’t strain her eyes. When her eyes got tired, I reminded her to pour a cup of green tea and hold it first over one eye and then the other, to refresh and soothe the redness. For every passage understood, every pastiche dismantled, every moment of affection deeply felt and written about, I rewarded my sister-wife. I kept her son safe when he wandered in the garden, preventing him from falling off the rockery, being bitten by insects, or escaping out the front gate. I warned the water spirits to make sure they didn’t trick him into drowning in the pond and the tree spirits not to let him trip over their roots.

I also began to change and protect the compound as a whole. When Ze was alive, almost all I’d known was the bedchamber. Back then, I’d compared the house unfavorably to the Chen Family Villa. But what I’d thought was beautiful in my family home was actually the coldness and distance caused by wealth—too many fingers, no privacy, no quiet, and all that gossiping, angling, and strategizing for position. This, however, was the home of a true artist. It was also the home of a woman writer. Gradually, Yi made the Clouds Hall into a room where she could find sanctuary from the demands of the household, write in peace, and invite her husband for quiet evenings. I did what I could to make it even more pleasant by sending the fragrance of jasmine through the window, breathing on the blue windowpanes to make them seem even cooler, and running my fingers along the tips of the flowers that bloomed in the garden so their ruffling petals dappled the walls with quivering shadows.

I made the natural world open and bend to me. I made my feelings known in the prolific blooming of the peonies in spring, hoping the Wu family would remember me in their beauty and scent; in the snow that fell on the trees in winter, the time of year I’d died; in the subtle breeze through the willows, which should have reminded Ren that to me he would be forever like Liu Mengmei; and in the heavy fruit that hung from the plum tree, for surely they appreciated the miracle of that. These were my gifts to Ren, Yi, and their son. A libation poured had to be repaid and honored.

one day as Yi was airing books in Ren’s library, some sheets of bamboo paper fell out of one of the volumes. Yi picked up the brittle and cracked sheets, and read aloud, “I have learned to use the pattern of butterflies and flowers in my embroidery. . . . ”

( 2 5 3 )

I’d written the poem just before I died and had hidden it and the others in my father’s library. Bao had sold them to Ren as Ze lay dying.

My sister-wife read the other sheets, all yellowed and fragile with age.

She wept, and I thought about how long I’d been dead. The crumbling sheets reminded me that somewhere my body was decaying too.

She took the poems back to her writing table, where she read them again and again. That night she showed them to Ren.

“I think I understand Sister-wife Tong now. Oh, Husband, I read her words and feel I know her, but so much is missing.”

Ren, who’d had other concerns when he bought my poems from my adopted brother, read them now. They were girlish and immature, but his eyes filled and glistened as he remembered me.

“You would have liked her,” he said, which was as close as he’d ever come to admitting to someone that we’d met. I floated with the joy of that.

The next day, Yi transcribed my poems onto fresh paper, adding a few lines of her own to those that had flaked away. In this way, we became one.

As she was doing this, a book fell from the shelf, surprising us both. It lay splayed on the floor with papers spilling from it. Yi picked them up.

Here was the “real” story of the commentary that I’d forced Ze to write and that she’d torn out and hidden, only to be found and hidden again by Ren. These pieces of paper weren’t old or disintegrating or in fragments.