Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

I had no comforting words to offer, for there were none. She had no great tree for protection and no faithful mountain standing behind her. She stood and swayed out of the kitchen on her delicate lily feet, as frail as if she were a lantern that had been released during the lantern festival and was drifting away. I went back to my stirring.

The next morning when I went downstairs, it seemed as though there had been a shift. Yonggang and two other servants had returned and were cleaning the kitchen and restocking the pile of firewood. Yonggang informed me that Third Sister-in-law had been found dead earlier that morning. She had killed herself by swallowing lye. I often wonder what might have happened if she had waited a few more hours, because by lunchtime my mother-in-law was down with fever. She must have already been sick the night before when she had been so cruel.

Now I had a terrible choice to make. I had kept my children protected in my room, but my duty as my husband’s wife was to his parents above all else. To serve them did not just mean bringing them tea in the morning, washing their clothes, or accepting criticism with a smiling face. Serving them meant that I should esteem them above everyone else—above my parents, above my husband, above my children. With my husband away, I had to forget my fear of the disease, expel all feelings for my children out of my heart, and do the correct thing. If I didn’t and my mother-in-law died, my shame would have been too great.

But I didn’t abandon my children easily. My other sisters-in-law were with their own families in their own rooms. I didn’t know what was happening behind their closed doors. They might have already taken sick. They might have already died. I couldn’t trust my father-in-law with the care of my children either. Had he not spent the night beside his wife? Wouldn’t he be the next to get sick? And I had not seen Uncle Lu since the epidemic began, although he left his empty bowl outside his room each morning and evening for me to refill.

I sat in the kitchen, twisting my fingers with worry. Yonggang came over, knelt before me, and said, “I will watch your children.”

I remembered how she had escorted me to Snow Flower’s house just after my wedding, how she had cared for me after I’d given birth to my babies, and how she had turned out to be loyal and discreet in carrying my letters to my laotong. She had done all this for me, and along the way, without my noticing, she had grown from a ten-year-old girl into a big-boned, big-footed young woman of twenty-four. To me, she was still as ugly as a pig’s genitals, but I knew she had not yet fallen ill and that she would care for my children as though they were her own.

I gave her exact instructions for how I wanted their water and food prepared, and I gave her a knife to keep with her in case things got worse and she had to guard the door. With that, I left my children in the hands of the fates and turned my attention to my husband’s mother.

For the next five days, I cared for my mother-in-law in all the ways a daughter-in-law can. I cleaned her lower half when she no longer had the strength to use the chamber pot. I made her the same congee that I had made my children; then I cut my arm as I had seen my mother do so that my vital fluid could be stirred into the porridge. This is a daughter-in-law’s supreme gift and I gave it, hoping that through some miracle what had given me vitality would replenish hers.

But I don’t have to tell you how terrible this disease is. You know what happens. She died. She had always been fair, and often kind, to me, so it was hard to say goodbye. When her last breath seeped out, I knew I couldn’t do everything that should be done for a woman of her stature. I washed her soiled and desiccated body in warm water scented with sandalwood. I dressed her in her longevity clothes and tucked her nu shu writing in her pockets, sleeves, and tunic. Unlike a man, she had not written to leave a good name for a hundred generations. She had written to tell her friends of her thoughts and emotions, and they had written her in the same way. Under other circumstances, I would have burned these things at her grave site. But with the heat and the epidemic, bodies had to be buried quickly with little thought given to issues of feng shui, nu shu, or filial duty. All I could do was make sure my mother-in-law would have the comfort of her friends’ words for reading and singing in the afterworld. As soon as I was done, her body was carted away for a hasty burial.

My mother-in-law had lived a long life. I could be happy for her in that regard. And, because my mother-in-law died, I became the head woman of the household, though my husband was still away. Now the sisters-in-law would have to answer to me. They would need to remain in my good graces to receive favorable treatment. With the concubines also dead, I looked forward to more harmony, because on one thing I was very clear: There would be no more concubines under this roof.

Just as the servants had intuited, the disease was leaving our county. We opened our doors and took stock. In our household, we had lost my mother-in-law, my third brother-in-law, his entire family, and the concubines. Brothers Two and Four survived, as did their families. In my natal family, Mama and Baba died. Of course I regretted that I had not spent more time with them on my last visit, but Baba and I had stopped having much of a relationship after I had my feet bound, and things had never been the same with Mama after our argument over the lies she had kept about Snow Flower. As a married-out daughter, my only obligation was to mourn my parents for a year. I tried to honor my monkey mother for what she had done to and for me, but I was not heartsick with grief.

All in all, we were lucky. Uncle Lu and I did not exchange words. That would have been improper. But when he came out of his room he was no longer a benign uncle idling away his retirement years. He drilled my son with such intensity, focus, and dedication that we never had to hire an outside tutor again. My son never shirked in his studies, buoyed by the knowledge that the night of his wedding and the day his name appeared on the emperor’s golden list would be the most glorious of his life. In the former, he would be fulfilling his role as a filial son; in the latter, he would leap from the obscurity of our little county to such fame that the whole of China would know him.

But before any of that happened, my husband came home. I cannot begin to explain the relief I felt as I saw his palanquin come up the main road, followed by a procession of oxen-pulled carts loaded with bags of salt and other goods. All the things I had worried about and cried about were not going to happen to me—at least not yet. I was swept up in the happiness that all of Tongkou’s women showed as our men unloaded the carts. We all cried, releasing the burdens, fear, and grief we had been carrying. For me—for all of us—my husband was the first good sign that any of us had seen in months.

The salt was sold throughout the county to desperate but grateful people. The extravagance of these sales washed away our financial worries. We paid our taxes. We bought back the fields we’d had to sell. The Lu family’s standing and wealth abounded. That year’s harvest turned out to be bountiful, which made autumn even more celebratory. Having weathered dark days, we could not have been more relieved. My father-in-law hired artisans to come to Tongkou and paint additional friezes under our eaves that would tell our neighbors and all those who would visit our village in the future of our prosperity and good luck. I could walk outside today and see them now: my husband in his jacket boarding the boat to take him downriver, his dealings with the Guilin merchants, the women of our household wearing flowing gowns and doing our embroidery as we waited, and my husband’s joyous return.

Everything is painted under our eaves just as it happened, except for the portrait of my father-in-law. In the frieze he sits in a high-backed chair, surveying all he owns and looking proud, but in reality he missed his wife and no longer had the heart to care for worldly things. He died quietly one day, walking the fields. Our first duties were to be the best mourners the county had ever seen. My father-in-law was laid in a coffin and placed outside for five days. With our new money, we hired a band to play music, all day and all night. People from around the county came to kowtow before the coffin. They brought with them gifts of money wrapped in white envelopes, silk banners, and scrolls decorated with men’s writing praising my father-in-law. All the brothers and their wives went on their knees to the grave site. The people of Tongkou plus others from neighboring villages followed behind us on foot. We were a river of white in our mourning clothes as we inched our way through the green fields. At every seven paces, everyone kowtowed, foreheads to the ground. The grave site was a kilometer away, so you can imagine how many times we stopped on that rocky road.

Young and old wailed their grief, while the band blared their horns, trilled their flutes, crashed their cymbals, and banged their drums. As the eldest son, my husband burned paper money and set off firecrackers. The men sang; the women sang. My husband had also hired several monks, who performed rites to help lead my father-in-law—and, we hoped, all those who had died in the epidemic—to a happy existence in the spirit world. Following the burial, we hosted a banquet for the entire village. As the guests went home, high-ranking Lu cousins gave each person a good-luck coin in paper, a piece of candy to wash away the bitter taste of death, and a washing towel for body cleansing. That took care of the first week of rites. Altogether we had forty-nine days of ceremonies, offerings, banquets, speeches, music, and tears. By the end—although my husband and I were not yet done with our official mourning period—everyone in the county knew that we were, at least in name, the new Master and Lady Lu.

Into the Mountains

I STILL DID NOT KNOW WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO SNOW FLOWER and her family during the typhoid outbreak. In my concern for my children, in my duties to my mother-in-law, and in the joy of my husband’s return, followed by my father-in-law’s death and funeral, and finally by my husband and I becoming Master and Lady Lu sooner than perhaps we were ready, I had—for the first time in my life—forgotten about my laotong. Then she sent me a letter.

bq. Dear Lily,

I hear you are alive. I am sorry about your in-laws. I am sadder still to hear of your mama and baba. I loved them very much.

We survived the epidemic. In the early days, I miscarried—another girl. My husband says it is just as well. If I had carried all my children to term, I would have four daughters—a disaster. Still, three times to hold a dead child in your hands is three too many.

You always tell me to try again. I will. I wish I could be like you and have three sons. As you say, sons are a woman’s worth.

Many people died here. I would tell you things are quieter now, but my mother-in-law lives. She says bad things about me every day, turning my husband against me.

I invite you to visit. My lowly gate hardly compares to yours, but I long to put our troubles behind us. If you love me, please come. I want to be together before we begin binding our daughters’ feet. We have much to talk about in this regard.

Snow Flower

With my mother-in-law in the afterworld, I thought constantly of what she had told me about a wife’s duty: “Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.” Without my mother-in-law’s watchful eyes, I could finally see Snow Flower openly.

My husband had plenty of objections: Our sons were now eleven, eight, and one-and-a-half, our daughter had recently turned six, and he liked me to be at home. I eased his concerns over several days. I sang to him to calm his mind. I gave each of the children projects, which soothed their father’s heart. I prepared all his favorite dishes. I washed and massaged his feet each night after he came in from roaming the fields. I attended to his below-the-belt area. He still did not want me to go, and I wish I had listened.

On the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month, I put on a lavender silk tunic I had embroidered with a chrysanthemum pattern appropriate for fall. I had once thought that the only clothes I would ever wear were the ones I had made during my hair-pinning days. I hadn’t considered that my mother-in-law would die and leave behind her untouched bolts or that my husband would make enough riches that I would be able to buy unlimited quantities of the very best Suzhou silk. But knowing I was going to Snow Flower and remembering the way she had worn my clothes when we were girls, I took nothing else for the three nights I would be away.

The palanquin dropped me before Snow Flower’s house. She sat waiting on the platform outside her threshold, dressed in a tunic, pants, apron, and headdress of soiled, worn, and poorly dyed indigo and white cotton. We did not go inside right away. Snow Flower was pleased to have me beside her in the cooling afternoon air. As she chattered on about this and that, I saw clearly for the first time the giant wok where the pig carcasses were boiled to remove their hair and loosen their skin. Inside the open door of an outbuilding, I glimpsed meat hanging from beams. The smell turned my stomach. But what was worse was the mother pig and her babies who kept coming up onto the platform, looking for food. After Snow Flower and I finished our lunch of steamed water grass and rice, she took our bowls and set them at our feet so the sow and her babies could eat what we’d left behind.

When we saw the butcher returning home—pushing a cart loaded with four baskets, each containing a pig stretched out full length on its belly—we went upstairs, where Snow Flower’s daughter embroidered and her mother-in-law cleaned cotton. The room was musty and gloomy. Snow Flower’s lattice window was even smaller and less decorated than the one in my natal home, though I could see through it to my window in Tongkou. Even up here we could not escape the smell of pig.

We sat down and spoke of what was foremost in our minds—our daughters.

“Have you thought about when we should start their footbinding?” Snow Flower asked.

It was right and proper for it to begin this year, but I hoped from Snow Flower’s question that she and I were of the same mind.

“Our mothers waited until we were seven, and we have been happy together ever since,” I ventured carefully.

Snow Flower’s face broke into a broad grin. “This is exactly what I thought. You and I had our eight characters matched so perfectly. Should we not only match our daughters’ eight characters but also match those eight characters to ours as much as possible? They could start their binding on the same day and at the same age as we did.”

I looked over at Snow Flower’s daughter. Spring Moon had her mother’s beauty at that age—silken skin and soft black hair—but her demeanor seemed resigned as she sat with her head down, squinting at her embroidery as she assiduously tried not to eavesdrop on her fate.

“They will be like a pair of mandarin ducks,” I said, relieved that we had come to such an easy agreement, though I’m sure we were both hoping that our matched characters would make up for the fact that the girls’ eight characters were not so perfectly in accord.

Snow Flower was truly lucky to have Spring Moon; otherwise she would have been left alone all day with her mother-in-law. Let me say this: That woman was still as biting and mean-spirited as I remembered. She had but one refrain: “Your oldest son is no better than a girl. He’s a weakling. How will he ever have the strength to slaughter a pig?” I thought something not befitting Lady Lu: Why couldn’t the spirits have taken her in the epidemic?

Our evening meal brought back tastes from my childhood before my dowry gifts began to arrive—preserved long beans, pigs’ feet in chili sauce, wok-fried slivers of pumpkin, and red rice. Every meal when I was in Jintian was the same in the sense that we always had some part of the pig. Pig fat in black beans, pig ears in a clay pot, flaming pig intestines, pig penis sauteed with garlic and chili. Snow Flower ate none of it, quietly eating her vegetables and rice.

After dinner, her mother-in-law retired for the night. Although tradition says that two old sames should share a bed when visiting—meaning the husband sleeps elsewhere—the butcher announced that he would not remove himself to other quarters. His excuse? “There is nothing so evil as a woman’s heart.” This was an old saying and probably true, but it was not a gracious thing to say to Lady Lu. Nevertheless, it was his house and we had to do what he said.

Snow Flower took me back upstairs to the women’s chamber, where she made a bed with some of her clean, though frayed, dowry quilts. On the cabinet she placed a low bowl filled with warm water for me to wash my face. Oh, how I wanted to dip a cloth into that water and wipe away the cares that played across my laotong‘s features. As I thought this, she brought out an outfit almost identical to hers—almost, because I remembered when she had pieced it together from one of her mother’s dowry treasures. Snow Flower leaned forward, kissed my cheek, and whispered in my ear, “Tomorrow we will have all day together. I will show you my embroidery and what I have done on our fan. We will talk and remember.” Then she left me alone.

I blew out the lantern and lay beneath the quilts. The moon was nearly full, and the blue light that came through the lattice window transported me back many years. I buried my face in the folds where Snow Flower’s scent was as fresh and delicate as when we had been in our hair-pinning years. The memory of low moans of pleasure filled my ears. Alone in that dark room I blushed at things perhaps best forgotten. But the sounds didn’t go away. I sat up. The noises were not in my head but coming up to me from Snow Flower’s room. My laotong and her husband were doing bed business! My laotong may have become a vegetarian, but she was no Wife Wang of the story. I covered my ears and tried to fall asleep, but it was hard. My good fortune had made me impatient and intolerant. The polluted and polluting nature of that place and the people who lived there rasped against my senses, my flesh, my soul.

The next morning, the butcher left for the day and his mother went back to her room. I helped Snow Flower wash and dry the dishes, bring in firewood, haul water, slice the vegetables for the midday meal, go to the shed where the sides of pork were kept to fetch meat, and attend to her daughter. Once all this was done, Snow Flower set water to heat that we could use for bathing. She carried the kettle back upstairs to the women’s chamber and shut the door. We had never had any inhibitions. Why would we now? The air in that little house was surprisingly warm even though it was the tenth month, but goose bumps rose on my skin behind the path of Snow Flower’s wet cloth.

But how do I say this without sounding like a husband? When I looked at her I saw that her pale skin—always so beautiful—had begun to thicken and darken. Her hands—always so smooth—felt rough on my skin. Lines were etched above her lip and at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was pinned back in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Strands of gray threaded through it. She was my age—thirty-two. Women in our county often do not live beyond forty years, but I had just seen my mother-in-law go to the afterworld, and she had still looked very handsome for a woman who had reached the remarkable age of fifty-one.

That night, more pig for dinner.

I DIDN’T REALIZE it then, but the outer realm—that tumultuous world of men—was pushing its way into Snow Flower’s and my lives. During my second night at her house, we were awakened by terrible sounds. We met in the main room and huddled together, all of us, even the butcher, terrified. Smoke filled the room. A house—maybe a whole village—was burning somewhere. Dust and ash settled on our clothes. The clatter of clanging metal and the beat of horses’ hooves pounded into our heads. In the dark of night, we had no idea what was happening. Was it a catastrophe in just one village or was this something much worse?

A big disaster was coming. The people who lived in villages behind us began to flee, leaving their farms for the safety of the hills. From Snow Flower’s window the next morning, we saw them—men, women, and children—on hand-drawn or oxen-pulled carts, on foot, on ponies. The butcher ran to the edge of the village and shouted to the stream of refugees.

“What’s happened? Is it war?”

Voices called back.

“The Emperor has sent word to Yongming City that our government must take action against the Taipings!”

“Imperial troops have arrived to drive out the rebels!”

“There’s fighting everywhere!”

The butcher cupped his hands and yelled, “What should we do?”

“Run away!”

“The battle will be here soon!”

I was petrified, overwhelmed, and dazed with panic. Why didn’t my husband come for me? Again and again I berated myself for choosing this time—after all these years—to visit Snow Flower. But this is the nature of fate. You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.

I helped Snow Flower assemble bags for her and the children. We went to the kitchen and gathered together a large sack of rice, tea, and liquor for drinking and to treat injuries. Finally, we rolled four of Snow Flower’s wedding quilts into tight bundles and set them by the door. When everything was ready, I dressed in my silk traveling outfit, went outside to stand on the platform, and waited for my husband, but he didn’t come. I looked up the road to Tongkou. A stream of people were leaving there too, only instead of going up into the hills behind the village they were crossing the fields, going toward Yongming City. The two trails of people—one going into the hills, the other going to town—confused me. Hadn’t Snow Flower always said that the hills were the arms that embraced us? If so, why were the people of Tongkou going the opposite direction?

In the late afternoon, I saw a palanquin leave the Tongkou group and veer toward Jintian. I knew it was coming for me, but the butcher refused to wait.

“It’s time to go!” he bellowed.

I wanted to remain behind and wait for my family to get me. The butcher said no.

“Then I will walk out and meet the palanquin,” I said. So many times sitting at my lattice window I’d imagined walking here. Couldn’t I now go toward my family?

The butcher chopped his hand through the air to prevent me from saying another word. “Many men are coming. Do you know what they will do to a lone woman? Do you know what your family will do to me if anything happens to you?”

“But—”

“Lily,” Snow Flower cut in, “come with us. We’ll be gone for only a few hours, then we’ll send you to your family. It is better to be safe.”

The butcher lifted his mother, his wife, the youngest children, and me into the cart. As he and the eldest son began to push us, I looked back across the fields behind Jintian. Flames and plumes of smoke billowed into the air.

Snow Flower kept passing water to her husband and eldest son. It was deep into fall now, and when the sun set the chill came down on all of us, but Snow Flower’s husband and son sweated as if it were the middle of a summer day. Without being asked, Spring Moon hopped down from the cart, taking her little brother with her. She carried the boy on her hip, then on her back. Finally, she set him on the ground, took his hand, and kept her other hand on the cart.

The butcher assured his wife and mother that we would be stopping soon, but we didn’t stop. We were part of a trail of misery that night. At the time of the most forbidding darkness just before dawn, we hit the first steep hill. The butcher’s face strained, his veins bulged, his arms shook with the effort of trying to push the cart up the hill. Finally he gave out, collapsing behind us. Snow Flower slid to the edge of the cart, hung her legs over the side for a moment, then let them drop to the ground. She looked at me. I looked back. The sky behind Snow Flower was red with fire. The sounds that traveled on the wind pushed me out of the cart. Snow Flower and I tied two quilts apiece to our backs. The butcher slung the sack of rice over his shoulder and the children carried as much of the other food as possible. I realized something. If we were only going to be gone for a few hours, why had we brought so much food? I might not see my husband and children for several days. In the meantime, I’d be out here in the elements, with the butcher. I put my hands over my face to collect myself. I could not let him see my weakness.

On foot we joined the others. Snow Flower and I took the butcher’s mother’s arms and pulled her up the hill. She weighed us down, but how like her rat personality this was! When Buddha wanted the rat to spread his word, the wily creature tried to get a free ride from the horse. The horse wisely said no, which is why the two signs have not been a good match ever since. But on that terrible path on that hideous night, what could we two horses do?

The men around us wore grim faces. They had left behind their homes and livelihoods, and now they wondered if they would return to piles of ash. The women’s faces were streaked with tears of fear and from the pain of walking farther in one night than in their entire lives since footbinding. The children did not complain. They were too frightened. We had only just begun our escape.

Late the next afternoon—and we had not stopped once—the road narrowed to a path that wound up steeper and steeper. Too many sights bruised our eyes. Too many sounds scratched our ears. Sometimes we passed old men or women who had sat down to rest, never to get up again. In our county I could not have imagined that I would see parents abandoned in this way. Often, as we went by, we heard mumbled requests, last words spoken to a son or daughter and repeated now as final sustenance: “Leave me. Come back tomorrow when this is over.” Or, “Keep going. Save the sons. Remember to set an altar for me at Spring Festival.” Every time we passed someone like that, my thoughts traveled to my mother. She could not have made this journey with only her cane for support. Would she have asked to be left behind? Would Baba have deserted her? Would Elder Brother?

My feet hurt as they had during my footbinding and pain shot up my legs with each step. But I was lucky in my suffering. I saw women my age and younger—women in their rice-and-salt years—whose feet had broken under the stress of walking so far or had fractured into bits against a rock. From the ankle up they were unhurt, but they were completely crippled. They lay there, not moving, only crying, waiting to die from thirst, starvation, or cold. But we kept going, never looking back, burying shame in our empty hearts, shutting out the sounds of agony and sorrow as best we could.

When the second night fell and our world grew black, despondency enveloped all of us. Belongings were abandoned. People got separated from their families. Husbands searched for wives. Mothers called out for their children. It was late fall, the season when footbinding begins, so many times we encountered young girls whose bones had recently broken and who were now left behind, as had food, extra clothes, water, traveling altars, dowry gifts, and family treasures. We also saw little boys—third, fourth, or fifth sons—who begged anyone who passed for help. But how can you help others when you have to keep moving while holding tightly to your favorite child’s hand with your husband’s hand tightly grasping yours? If you are afraid for your life, you don’t think about others. You think only about the people you love, and even that may not be enough.

We had no bells to tell us what time it was, but it was dark and we were beyond tired. We had been walking now for more than thirty-six hours—without rest, without food, and with only the occasional sip of water. We began to hear horrible long screams. We could not imagine what they were. The temperature dropped. Around us leaves and branches collected frost. Snow Flower wore her indigo cotton and I was in my silk. Neither of our outfits would be much protection against what was to come. Beneath our shoes, the rocks became slippery. I was sure my feet were bleeding, because they felt oddly warm. Still, we kept walking. The butcher’s mother staggered between us. She was a weak old woman, but her rat personality had a will to live.

The path narrowed to a third of a meter. To our right, the mountain—I cannot call it a hill any longer—rose so steeply it touched our shoulders as we trudged single file. To our left, the mountain fell away into blackness. I could not see what was down there. But on the trail ahead of me and behind me were many bound-footed women. We were like flowers in a gale. Our feet were not our only weakness. Our leg muscles—which had never worked this hard—ached, quivered, shook, and spasmed.

For an hour, we followed a family—father, mother, and three children—until the woman slipped on a rock and fell into that pit of darkness below us. Her scream was loud and long, until it abruptly ended. We’d been hearing this kind of death all night. From there on, I passed one hand over the other, grabbing at weeds, allowing my hands to be torn by the jagged rocks that poked from the cliff to my right. I would do anything to keep from becoming another scream in the night.

We came to a sheltered bowl. The mountains were silhouetted against the sky around us. Small fires burned. We were up high, yet with this dip in the landscape the Taipings could not see the glow from the fires, or at least we hoped they couldn’t. We edged our way down into the bowl.

Perhaps because I was without my family I saw only children’s faces in the firelight. Their eyes had a glazed and empty look. Perhaps they had lost a grandmother or a grandfather. Perhaps they had lost a mother or a sister. They were all frightened. No one should see a child in that condition.

We stopped when Snow Flower recognized three families from Jintian who had found a relatively sheltered spot under a large tree. They saw the butcher had a sack of rice on his back and scooted over to make room for us by the fire. Once I sat with my feet and hands close to the flames, they began to burn, not from the heat but from the frozen bones and flesh beginning to thaw.

Snow Flower and I rubbed her children’s hands. They wept quietly, even the eldest boy. We pushed the three children together and covered them with a quilt. Snow Flower and I nestled together under another, while the mother-in-law took an entire quilt for herself. The last was for the butcher. He waved at us dismissively. He pulled one of the men from Jintian aside, whispered a few words, and nodded. He knelt down beside Snow Flower.

“I’m going to look for more firewood,” he announced.

Snow Flower gripped his arm. “Don’t go! Don’t leave us.”

“Without a fire, we won’t last the night,” he said. “Don’t you feel it? Snow is coming.” He gently pried Snow Flower’s fingers from his arm. “Our neighbors will look after you while I’m gone. Do not be afraid. And”—here he lowered his voice—”if you have to, push these people away from the fire. Make room for yourself and your friend. You can do it.”

And I thought, Maybe she can’t, but I couldn’t allow myself to die up here without my family.

As tired as we all were, we were too scared to sleep or even close our eyes. And we were all hungry and thirsty. In our little circle around the fire, the women—who I learned later were post-marriage sworn sisters—distracted us from our fears by singing a story. It’s a funny thing that although my mother-in-law was extremely literate in nu shu—perhaps because she was so familiar with such a variety of characters—singing and chanting had not been very important to her. She was more interested in composing a perfect letter or a lovely poem than in the entertaining or consoling qualities of a song. Because of this, my sisters-in-law and I had forsaken many of the old chants we had grown up with. In any event, the tale sung that night was familiar but one I hadn’t heard since childhood. It told of the Yao people, their first home, and their brave fight for independence.

“We are Yao people,” Lotus, a woman perhaps ten years older than I, began. “In antiquity, Gao Xin, a kind and benevolent Han emperor, was under attack by an evil and ambitious general. Panhu—a mangy, unwanted dog—heard of the emperor’s problems and challenged the general to battle. He won and was given the hand of one of the emperor’s daughters. Panhu was happy, but his betrothed was embarrassed. She did not want to marry a dog. Still, her duty was clear, so she and Panhu fled into the mountains, where she gave birth to twelve children, the very first Yao people. When they grew up, they built a town called Qianjiadong—the Thousand-Family Grotto.”

This first part of the story finished, another woman, Willow, took up the chant. Next to me, Snow Flower shivered. Was she remembering our daughter days, when we listened to Elder Sister and her sworn sisters or Mama and Aunt as they sang this story of our beginnings?

“Could there be a place of so much water and such good land?” Willow asked in the song. “Could it be safer from intruders when it was hidden from sight, the only access through a cavernous tunnel? Qianjiadong held much magic for the Yao people. But such a paradise cannot remain undisturbed forever.”

I began to hear verses sung by women sitting around other fires in the bowl. The men should have stopped our chanting, for certainly the rebels could hear us. But the purity of the women’s voices gave us all strength and courage.

Willow continued. “Many generations later, in the Yuan dynasty, someone from the local government, bold in his explorations, walked through the tunnel and found the Yao people. Everyone was dressed resplendently. Everyone was fat from the wealth of the land. Hearing of this tantalizing place, the emperor—greedy and without gratitude—demanded high taxes from the Yao people.”

Just as the first snowflakes fell on our hair and faces, Snow Flower linked her arm through mine and raised her voice to recount the next part of the story. “Why should we pay? the Yao people wanted to know.” Her voice trilled with the cold. “On top of the mountain that blocked their village from intruders, they built a parapet from stone. The emperor sent three tax collectors into the cavern to negotiate. They did not come out. The emperor sent another three—”

The women around our fire joined in. “They did not come out.”

“The emperor sent a third contingent.” Snow Flower’s voice gathered power. I had never heard her this way. Her voice floated out clear and beautiful across the mountains. If the rebels had heard her, they would have run away, fearing a fox spirit.

“They did not come out,” we women called our response.

“The emperor sent troops. A bloody siege occurred. Many Yao people—men, women, and children—died. What to do? What to do? The headman took a water buffalo horn and divided it into twelve pieces. These he gave to different groups and told them to scatter and live.”

“Scatter and live,” we women repeated.

“This is how the Yao people came to be in the valleys and in the mountains, in this province and in others,” Snow Flower wound down.

Plum Blossom, the youngest woman in our group, finished the tale. “They say that in five hundred years, Yao people, wherever they are, will walk through the cavern again, put the horn back together, and rebuild our enchanted home. That time comes to us soon.”

It had been many years since I’d heard the story, and I didn’t know what to think. The Yao had believed they were secure, hidden behind the safety of the mountain, their parapet, and the secret cavern, but they were not. Now I wondered who would come into our mountainous bowl first and what would happen when they did. The Taipings might try to win us over, while the Great Hunan Army might mistake us for rebels. Either way, would we fight a losing battle and be like our ancestors? Would we ever be able to return home? I considered the Taipings, who—like the Yao people—had revolted against high taxes and rebelled against the feudal system. Were they right? Should we join them? Were we violating our ancestors by not honoring that?

That night none of us slept.

Winter

THE FOUR FAMILIES FROM JINTIAN STAYED TOGETHER UNDER the protection of the large tree with its spreading branches, but the ordeal didn’t end—not after two nights or even a week. We suffered worse snow that year than had been in our province in anyone’s memory. We endured freezing temperatures at every moment. Our breaths became clouds of steam that were swallowed by the mountain air. We were always hungry. Each family hoarded its food, unsure of how long we would be away. Coughs, colds, and sore throats swept back and forth across the camp. Men, women, and children continued to die from these ailments and from the relentlessly frigid nights.

My feet—and those of most of the women in these mountains—had been badly hurt during our escape. We did not have privacy, so we had to unwrap, clean, and rewrap our feet in front of the men. And we overcame our embarrassment about other body functions, learning to do our business behind a tree or in the common latrine, once it was dug. But unlike most women up here, I was without my family. I desperately missed my eldest son and the rest of my children. I worried constantly about my husband, his brothers, my sisters-in-law, their children, even the servants—and if they had reached the protection of Yongming City.

It took almost a month for my feet to heal enough to walk on them again without restarting the bleeding. At the beginning of the twelfth lunar month, I decided I would go every day in search of my brothers and their families and Elder Sister and her family. I hoped they were safe up here, but how could I locate them when we were ten thousand people spread out across the mountains? Each day I draped one of the quilts over my shoulders and gingerly set out, always marking my progress, knowing that if I didn’t find my way back to Snow Flower’s family I would surely perish.

One day—perhaps two weeks into my searching—I came across a group from Getan Village huddled under a rocky overhang. I asked if they knew Elder Sister.

“Yes, yes, we do!” one of the women chirped.

“We were separated from her on the first night,” her friend said. “Tell her, if you find her, to come be with us. We can shelter one more family.”

Yet another—the one who appeared to be their leader—cautioned that they only had space for people from Getan, in case I got any ideas.

“I understand,” I said. “But if you see her, could you tell her I’m looking for her? I’m her sister.”

“Her sister? Are you the one known as Lady Lu?”

“Yes,” I responded warily. If they thought I had anything to give them, they were mistaken.

“Men came looking for you.”

My stomach jumped at these words. “Who were they? My brothers?”

The women looked at each other, then at me, sizing me up. Their leader spoke again. “They were mindful not to say who they were. You know how things are up here. One among them was the master. I would say he had a good build. His shoes and clothes were of good quality. His hair came down on his forehead like this.”

My husband! It had to be!

“What did he say? Where is he now? How—”

“We don’t know, but if you are Lady Lu, know that a man is looking for you. Don’t worry.” The woman reached up and patted my hand. “He said he would come back.”

But as much as I searched, I never heard another story like this. Soon I came to believe that those women had used their own bitterness against me, but when I returned to the spot where I had met them, a different set of families huddled under the rocky shelf. After that discovery, I went back to my camp feeling nothing but deep despair. Supposedly I was Lady Lu, but looking at me no one would know it. My lavender silk with the expertly embroidered chrysanthemum pattern was filthy and torn, while my shoes were blackened with my blood and scuffed from daily wear in the outdoors. I could only imagine what the sun, wind, and cold were doing to my face. From my age of eighty, I can look back now and say with certainty that I was a frivolous and stupid young woman to think of vanity when the lack of food and the unrelenting cold were our true villains.

Snow Flower’s husband became a hero to our small band of people. By being in an unclean profession, he did many things that needed to be done, without complaint and without thanks. He was born under the sign of the rooster—handsome, critical, aggressive, and deadly if required. It was in his nature to look to the earth for survival; he could hunt, clean an animal, cook it over an open fire, and dry the skins for us to use for warmth. He could carry heavy loads of firewood and water. He never tired. Up here, he wasn’t a polluter; he was a guardian and champion. Snow Flower was proud of him for being such a leader, and I was—and am—forever grateful that his actions kept me alive.

Aiya! But that rat mother of his! She was always skulking and slinking about. In these most desperate circumstances, she continued to denounce and complain, even over the most unimportant things. She always sat closest to the fire. She never released the quilt she had been handed that first night and at every opportunity took one of the others until we demanded it back. She hid food in her sleeves, pulling it out when she thought we weren’t looking to shove bits of burnt flesh into her mouth. You often hear that rats are clannish. We saw this every day. She constantly wheedled and manipulated her son, but she didn’t have to. He did what any filial son would do. He obeyed. So when that old woman went on and on about how she needed more food than her daughter-in-law, he made sure that she, and not his wife, ate. Being filial myself, I couldn’t argue with the logic of that, so Snow Flower and I began to share my portion. Then one day, after we had reached the bottom of our rice sack, the butcher’s mother said that the eldest son shouldn’t be given food that the butcher had hunted or scavenged.

“It’s too precious to waste on someone so weak,” she said. “When he dies, we will all be relieved.”

I looked at the boy. He was eleven that year, the same age as my eldest son. He stared at his grandmother with sunken eyes, too pathetic to fight for himself. Certainly Snow Flower would say something on his behalf. He was the first son after all. But my old same did not love that boy the way she should have. Her eyes, even in that terrible moment when he was being consigned to certain death, were not on him but on her second son. As clever, resilient, and strong as the second boy was, I could not let this happen to an eldest son. It went against all tradition. How would I answer my ancestors when they asked how I had let the child die? How would I greet that poor boy when I saw him in the afterworld? As the eldest son, he deserved more food than any of us, including the butcher. So I began sharing my portion with Snow Flower and her son. When the butcher realized what was happening, he slapped the boy and then his wife.

“That food is for Lady Lu.”

Before either of them could respond, his rat mother jumped in. “Son, why give food to that woman anyway? She is just a stranger to us. We must think of our own blood: you, your second son, and me.”

No mention, of course, of the first son or Spring Moon, both of whom had survived this far on scraps and had become frailer with each passing day.

But for once the butcher didn’t buckle under his mother’s pressure.

“Lady Lu is our guest. If I bring her back alive, there may be a reward.”

“Money?” his mother asked.

Such a typical rat question. That woman could not hide her greed and acquisitiveness.

“There are things Master Lu can do for us that go beyond money.”

The old woman’s eyes narrowed to slits as she considered this. Before she could speak, I said, “If there is to be a reward, I will need a larger portion. Otherwise”—and here I twisted my face into one of the spoiled grimaces I remembered from my father-in-law’s concubines—”I will say that I found no hospitality from this family, only avarice, inconsideration, and vulgarity.”

Such a tremendous risk I took that day! The butcher could have thrown me out of the group right then. Instead, despite his mother’s never-ending complaints, I received the largest amount of food, which I was able to share with Snow Flower, her eldest son, and Spring Moon. Oh, but how hungry we were. We became little more than corpses—lying still all day, our eyes closed, breathing as shallowly as possible, trying to harness whatever resources we had left. Maladies considered mild at home continued to reduce our numbers. With little food, energy, hot cups of tea, or fortifying doses of herbs, no one had the strength to fight these nuisances. As more succumbed, few among us had the strength to move the bodies.

Snow Flower’s eldest son sought my side whenever possible. He was unloved, true, but he was not as stupid as his family believed. I thought of the day that Snow Flower and I had gone to the Temple of Gupo to pray for sons and how we wanted them to have elegant and refined tastes. I could see these things lay dormant in the boy, though he had received no formal education. I could not help him learn men’s writing, but I could repeat what I had overheard Uncle Lu teach my son. “The five things the Chinese people respect the most are Heaven, Earth, the emperor, parents, and teachers. . . .” When I ran out of lessons I could remember, I told him a didactic tale carried by the women in our county about a second son who becomes a mandarin and returns home to his family, but I changed it to fit this poor boy’s circumstances.

“A first son runs by the river,” I began. “He is as green as bamboo. He knows nothing of life. He lives with his mama, baba, younger brother, and younger sister. The younger brother will follow his father’s trade. The younger sister will marry out. Mama’s and Baba’s eyes never rest upon their eldest son. When they do, they beat his head until it is as swollen as a melon.”

The boy shifted beside me, moving his eyes from the fire to my face as I went on.

“One day the boy goes to the place where his father keeps his money. He takes some cash and hides it in his pocket. Then he goes to where his mother keeps food. He fills a satchel with as much as he can carry. Then, without a single goodbye, he walks away from his house and through the fields. He swims across the river and walks some more.” I thought of a faraway place. “He walks all the way to Guilin. You think this journey into the mountains was hard? You think living outside in winter is hard? This is nothing. Out on the road, he had no friends, no benefactors, and only the clothes on his back. When he ran out of food and money, he survived by begging.”

The boy colored, not from the heat of the fire but from shame. He must have heard that his maternal grandparents had been reduced to this life.

“Some people say this is disreputable,” I continued, “but if it is the only way to live, then it takes great courage.”

From the other side of the fire, the butcher’s mother grunted. “You’re telling the story wrong.”

I paid no attention. I knew how the story went, but I wanted to give this child something to hold on to.

“The boy wandered through the streets of Guilin, looking for people who were dressed as mandarins. He listened to how they spoke and shaped his mouth to make the same sounds come out. He sat outside teahouses and tried to speak to the men who entered. Only when his speech became refined did someone look his way.”

Here I broke with the story. “Boy, there are people who are kind in the world. You may not believe it, but I have met them. You should always be on the lookout for someone who can be a benefactor.”

“Like you?” he asked.

His grandmother snorted. Once again, I ignored her.

“This man took the boy in as a servant,” I resumed. “As the boy served him, the benefactor taught him everything he knew. When he could teach no more, he hired a tutor. After many years the boy, now a grown man, took the imperial exam and became a mandarin—only at the lowest level,” I added, believing that such a thing was possible even for Snow Flower’s son.

“The mandarin returned to his home village. The dog before his family home barked three times in recognition. Mama and Baba came out of the house. They did not recognize their son. The second brother came out. He did not recognize his sibling. The sister? She had married out. When he told them who he was, they kowtowed, and very shortly thereafter they asked him for favors. ‘We need a new well,’ his father said. ‘Can you hire someone to dig it for us?’ ‘I have no silk,’ his mother said. ‘Can you buy some for me?’ ‘I have taken care of our parents for many years,’ the younger brother said. ‘Will you pay me for the time I have spent?’ The mandarin remembered how badly they had treated him. He climbed back into his palanquin and went back to Guilin, where he married, had many sons, and lived a very happy life.”

“Waaa! You tell these stories and ruin an already ruined boy’s life?” The old woman spat into the fire one more time and glared at me. “You give him hope when there is none? Why do you do that?”

I knew the answer, but I would never tell it to that old rat woman. We were not under normal circumstances, I know, but away from my own family I needed someone to care for. In my mind, I saw my husband as this boy’s benefactor. Why not? If Snow Flower could help me when we were girls, couldn’t my family change this boy’s future?

SOON ANIMALS IN the hills around us became scarce, driven from their homes by the presence of so many people or dead—as so many of us died—from the cruelty of that winter. Men—farmers all—weakened. They had brought only what they could carry; when that ran out, they and their families starved. Many husbands asked their wives to go back down the mountain for supplies. In our county, as you know, women are not to be hurt in wartime, which is why we are often sent to find food, water, or other supplies during upheavals. Harming a woman during hostilities always leads to an escalation of fighting, but neither the Taipings nor the soldiers in the Great Hunan Army were from around here. They did not know the ways of the Yao people. Besides, how were we women, weak from hunger and frail on our bound feet, to go down the mountain in winter and carry back provisions?

So a small band of men set out, treading carefully down the mountain, hoping to find food and other necessities in the villages we had evacuated. Only a few made it back, and they told of seeing their friends decapitated and the heads mounted on stakes. The new widows, unable to bear the news, committed suicide: throwing their bodies over the cliff they had worked so hard to climb, swallowing burning embers from the evening fire, cutting their own throats, or slowly starving themselves. Those who didn’t take this path dishonored themselves even more by seeking new lives with other men around other fires. It seemed that in the mountains some women forgot the rules about widowhood. Even if we are poor, even if we are young, even if we have children, it is better to die, remain true to our husbands, and keep our virtue than to bring shame on their memories.

Separated from my children, I observed Snow Flower’s closely, seeing how they had been influenced by her, learning more about her through them, and—because I missed my own so terribly—comparing mine to hers. In my home, our eldest son had already taken his rightful place and a bright future stretched before him. In this family, Snow Flower’s eldest son had a position even lower than hers. No one loved him. He seemed adrift. Yet to me he was the most like my laotong. He was gentle and delicate. Perhaps this was why she had turned away from him with such a hard heart.

My second son was a good and smart boy, but he did not have the inquisitiveness of my first son. I imagined him living with us for his entire life, marrying in a bride, siring children, and working for his older brother. Snow Flower’s second son, on the other hand, was the bright light of this family. He had his father’s build, short and stocky, with strong arms and legs. The child never showed fear, never shivered from cold, never whined with hunger. He followed his father like a shadow spirit, even going on hunting expeditions. He must have been a help in some way or else the butcher would not have allowed such a thing. When they returned with an animal carcass, the boy sat on his haunches next to his baba, learning how to prepare the meat for cooking. This similarity to his father told me a lot about Snow Flower. Her husband may have been crude, stinky, and beneath my old same in every way, but the love she showed the boy told me that she also cared very much for her husband.

Spring Moon’s face and manner were everything that my daughter’s were not. Jade carried my so-so family’s coarseness in her features, which was why I was so hard on her. Since the moneys made from the salt business would provide her with a generous dowry, she would marry well. I believed Jade would make a good wife, but Spring Moon would become an extraordinary wife, if she were given the chances I’d been given.

All of them made me miss my family.

I was lonely and scared, but this was softened by the nights with Snow Flower. But how do I tell you this? Even here, even under these circumstances, with so many people about, the butcher wanted to do bed business with my laotong. In the cold and open space right next to the fire, they did it under their quilt. The rest of us averted our eyes, but we could not close our ears. Thankfully he was quiet, with only the occasional grunt, but a few times I heard sighs of enjoyment—not from the butcher but from my laotong. I did not understand this thing. After that business was over, Snow Flower would come to me and wrap her arms around me as we had done as girls. I could smell the sex on her, but with the freezing temperatures I was grateful for her warmth. Without her body next to mine I would have been just another woman who died in the night.

Naturally, with all that bed business, Snow Flower got pregnant again, though I hoped that between the cold, the hardship, and our lack of nourishment that her monthly bleeding had simply paused as had mine. She did not want to hear that kind of talk.

“I’ve been pregnant before,” she said. “I know the signs.”

“Then I wish for you another son.”

“This time”—her eyes gleamed with a combination of happiness and certainty—”I will have one.”

“Indeed, sons are always a blessing. You should be proud of your eldest son.”

“Yes,” she responded mildly, then added, “I have watched you two together. You like him. Do you like him enough for him to become your son-in-law?”

I liked the boy, but this proposal was out of the question.

“There can be no man-woman match between our families,” I said. I owed Snow Flower a great deal for what I had become. I wanted to do the same for Spring Moon, but I would never allow my daughter to stoop so low. “A true-heart match between our daughters is far more important, don’t you agree?”

“Of course you are right,” Snow Flower responded, unaware, I think, of my true feelings. “When we get home we will meet with Auntie Wang as planned. As soon as the girls’ feet have settled into their new shapes, they will go to the Temple of Gupo to sign their contract, buy a fan to write of their lives together, and eat at the taro stand.”

“You and I should meet in Shexia too. If we are discreet, we can watch them.”

“Do you mean spy on them?” Snow Flower asked, incredulous. When I smiled, she laughed. “I always thought I was the wicked one, but look who’s scheming now!”

Despite the privations of those weeks and months, our plan for our daughters gave us hope and we tried to remember life’s goodness with each passing day. We celebrated Snow Flower’s younger son’s fifth birthday. He was such a funny little boy and we were entertained watching him with his father. They acted like two pigs together—nosing about, foraging, jostling their strong bodies against each other, both of them streaked with dirt and grime, both of them delighting in each other’s company. The older son was content to sit with the women. Because of my interest in the boy, Snow Flower began paying attention to him too. Under her eyes, he smiled readily. In his expression, I saw his mother’s face at that age—sweet, guileless, intelligent. Snow Flower looked back at him—not with mother love exactly, but as though she liked what she saw more than she had previously thought.

One day as I was teaching him a song, she said, “He shouldn’t learn our women’s songs. We learned some poetry as girls—”

“Through your mother—”

“And I’m sure you’ve learned more in your husband’s home.”

“I have.”

We were both excited, rattling off titles of poems we knew.

Snow Flower took her boy’s hand. “Let’s teach him what we can to be an educated man.”

I knew this would not be so very much since we were both illiterate, but that boy was like a dried mushroom dropped into boiling water. He soaked up everything we gave him. Soon he could recite the Tang dynasty poem that Snow Flower and I had loved so well as girls and whole passages from the classical book for boys that I had memorized to help my son in his lessons. For the first time, I saw true pride in Snow Flower’s face. The rest of the family did not feel the same, but for once Snow Flower did not cower or cede to their demands that we stop. She had remembered the little girl who used to pull back the curtain on the palanquin so we could peek out.

Those days—cold and uncomfortable and as filled with fear and hardship as they were—were wonderful in the sense that Snow Flower was happy in a way I had not seen her for many years. Pregnant, without much food, she seemed to glow from inside as though she were lit by an oil lamp. She enjoyed the company of the three sworn sisters from Jintian and relished not being locked up solely with her mother-in-law. Sitting with those women, Snow Flower sang songs I hadn’t heard for a long time. Out here in the open, away from the confines of her dark and dreary little house, her horse spirit was free.

Then, on a freezing night after we had been up there for ten weeks, Snow Flower’s second son went to sleep curled by the fire and never again woke up. I don’t know what killed him—sickness, hunger, or the cold—but in the early morning light we saw that frost covered his body and his face had gone icy blue. Snow Flower’s keening echoed through the hills, but the butcher took it hardest. He held the boy in his arms, tears running down his cheeks, their wetness sending trails through the many weeks of dirt that were ground into his face. He would not be comforted. He would not release the boy. He had no ears for his wife or even his mother. He hid his face in his son’s body, trying to block out their entreaties. Even when the farmers in our group sat around him, shielding him from our view and comforting him in low whispers, he did not yield. Every once in a while he lifted his face and cried to the sky, “How could I have lost my precious son?” The butcher’s brokenhearted question was one that appeared in many nu shu stories and songs. I glanced at the faces of the other women around the fire and saw their unspoken question: Could a man—this butcher—feel the same despair and sadness that we women feel when we lose a child?

He sat that way for two days, while the rest of us sang mourning songs. On the third day, he rose, hugged the child to his chest, and dashed away from our fire, through the clusters of other families, and into the woods that he and his son had ventured into so many times before. He returned two days later, empty-handed. When Snow Flower asked where her son was buried, the butcher turned and hit her with such ferocity that she flew back a couple of meters and landed with a thud onto the hard-packed snow.

He proceeded to beat her so badly that she miscarried in a violent gush of black blood that stained the icy slopes throughout our campsite. She was not very far along, so we never found a fetus, but the butcher was convinced that he’d rid the world of another girl. “There is nothing so evil as a woman’s heart,” he recited again and again, as though none of us had heard that saying before. We just kept to our ministrations of Snow Flower—stripping off her pants, melting water to wash them, cleaning her thighs of bloodstains, and taking the stuffing from one of her wedding quilts to stanch the putrid ghastliness that continued to flow from between her legs—and never raised our eyes or voices to him.

When I look back, I think it was a miracle that Snow Flower survived those last two weeks in the mountains as she passively accepted beating after beating. Her body weakened from the loss of blood from the miscarriage. Her body bruised and tore from the daily punishment her husband rained down on her. Why didn’t I stop him? I was Lady Lu. I had made him do what I wanted before. Why not this time? Because I was Lady Lu, I could not do more. He was a physically strong man, who did not shy away from using that strength. I was a woman, who, despite my social standing, was alone. I was powerless. He was well aware of that fact, as was I.

At the time of my laotong‘s lowest moment, I realized how much I needed my husband. To me, so much of my life with him had been about duty and the roles we were required to play. I regretted all the occasions when I had not been the wife he deserved. I vowed that if I made it down from that mountain I would become the kind of woman who might actually earn the title of Lady Lu and not be just an actor in a pageant. I wished for this and willed it to come true, but not before I would reveal myself to be far more brutal and cruel than Snow Flower’s husband.

The women under our tree continued to watch over Snow Flower. We tended to her cuts, using boiled snow to douse away potential infections, wrapping them in cloth torn from our own bodies. The women wanted to make her soup from the marrow of the animals the butcher brought to feed us. When I reminded them that Snow Flower was a vegetarian, we took turns walking in groups of two to forage in the forest for bark, weeds, and roots. We made a bitter broth and spoon-fed it to her. We sang songs of comfort.

But our words and deeds did nothing to ease her mind. She would not sleep. She sat by the fire, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. Her whole body rocked with gut-wrenching despair. None of us had clean clothes, but we had tried to remain neat in appearance. Snow Flower no longer cared. She neglected to wash her face with clumps of snow or rub her teeth with the hem of her tunic. Her hair hung loose, reminding me of the night my mother-in-law sank into illness. She became more and more like Third Sister-in-law on that same evening—barely present with us at all, her mind floating, floating, floating away.

There came a point every day when Snow Flower wrested herself away from the fire to wander the snowy mountains. She walked as if in a dream, lost, uprooted, untethered. Every day I went with her, unasked, holding on to her arm, the two of us tottering over the icy rocks on our lily feet as she wound her way to the edge of the cliff, where she wailed into the great expanse, the sound flying away on the strong northern wind.

I was terrified, always thinking back to our terrible escape into the hills and the hideous sounds of the women’s screams as they fell to their deaths so many meters below. Snow Flower did not share my trepidation. She looked out over the cliffs, watching snow hawks soar on the mountain winds. I thought of all of the times Snow Flower had talked about flying. How easy it would have been for her to take one step out and over the cliff. But I never left her side, never let go of her arm.

I tried to talk to her about things that would tie her to earth. I might say something like, “Would you prefer to approach Madame Wang about our daughters or shall I?” When she didn’t respond, I would try something else. “You and I live so close. Why should we wait for the girls to become old sames before they meet? The two of you should come for a long visit. We will bind their feet together. Then they will have those days to remember too.” Or, “Look at that snow flower. Spring is coming and soon we will leave this place.” For ten days she answered only in monosyllables.

Then, on the eleventh day, as she veered to the edge of the cliff, she finally spoke. “I have lost five children, and my husband has blamed me each time. He always takes his frustration and stuffs it in his fists. When those weapons need to find their release, they find me. I used to think he was angry that I’d been pregnant with girls. But now, with my son . . . Was it grief all along that my husband felt?” She paused and tilted her head as she tried to work things out in her mind. “Either way, he has to put his fists somewhere,” she concluded despairingly.

Which meant that these beatings had been going on since the first year she’d fallen permanently into the butcher’s house. Although her husband’s actions were common and accepted in our county, it hurt that she had hidden this from me so well and for so long. I had thought she would never again lie to me and that we would no longer have secrets, but I wasn’t upset about that. Instead, I felt guilty for having ignored the signs of my laotong‘s unhappy life for too long.

“Snow Flower—”

“No, listen. You think my husband has evil in his heart, but he is not an evil man.”

“He treats you as less than human—”

“Lily,” she cautioned, “he is my husband.” Then her thoughts plunged to an even darker place. “I’ve wanted to die for a long time, but someone is always around.”

“Don’t say such things.”

She ignored me. “How often do you think about fate? I think about it nearly every day. What if my mother had not married out to my father’s house? What if my father had not taken to the pipe? What if my parents had not married me out to the butcher? What if I had been born a son? Could I have saved my family? Oh, Lily, I have been so ashamed of my circumstances before you. . . .”

“I never—”

“Ever since you first entered my natal home I have seen your pity.” She shook her head to prevent me from speaking. “Don’t deny it. Just hear me.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “You see me and you think I fell so far, but what happened to my mother was far worse. As a girl, I remember her crying all day and all night in sorrow. I’m sure she wanted to die, but she wouldn’t abandon me. Then, after I went to my husband permanently, she wouldn’t abandon my father.”

I saw where this was heading, so I said, “Your mother never allowed herself an embittered heart. She never gave up—”

“She went with my father on the road. I’ll never know what happened to them, but I’m sure she did not allow herself to die until he was gone first. It’s been twelve years now. So often I’ve wondered if I could have helped her. Could she have come to me? I’ll answer this way. I dreamed I’d get married and find happiness away from the sickness of my father and the sadness of my mother. I did not know I would be a beggar in my husband’s home. Then I learned how to get my husband to bring home food I would eat. You see, Lily, there are things they don’t tell us about men. We can make them happy if we show them pleasure. And, you know, it is fun for us too, if we let it be.”

She sounded like one of those old women who are always trying to frighten girls before they marry out with that kind of talk.

“You don’t have to lie. I’m your laotong. You can be truthful.”

She pulled her eyes away from the clouds and for the briefest moment looked at me as though she didn’t recognize me. “Lily”—her voice came out sad and sympathetic—”you have everything, and yet you have nothing.”

Her words cut me, but I couldn’t think about them now as she confessed. “My husband and I didn’t follow the rules concerning the pollution of a wife after childbirth. We both wanted more sons.”

“Sons are a woman’s worth—”

“But you’ve seen what happens. Too many girls come into my body.”

To this undeniable problem I had a practical response.

“It wasn’t their destiny to live,” I said. “Be thankful, for something was probably wrong with them. We women can only try again—”

“Oh, Lily, when you talk like that my head feels empty. I hear only the wind rushing through the trees. Do you feel how the ground wants to give way beneath my feet? You should go back now. Let me be with my mother. . . .”

Many years had passed since Snow Flower lost her first daughter. Then, I hadn’t been able to understand her grief. But by now I’d experienced more of life’s miseries and saw things very differently. If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband’s family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. In the case of sons, we prepare them to take their first steps into the men’s realm. In the case of daughters, we bind their feet, teach them our secret writing, and train them to be good wives, daughters-in-laws, and mothers, so they will fit into the upstairs chambers of their new homes. But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn’t she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?

“Every day I come to the same conclusion,” Snow Flower admitted, as she looked out over the deep valley below. “But then your aunt comes into my mind. Lily, think how she suffered and how little we cared for her suffering.”

I responded with the truth. “She hurt terribly, but I think we were a comfort to her.”

“Remember how sweet Beautiful Moon was? Remember how demure she was even in death? Remember when your aunt came home and stood over her body? We’d all been concerned about her feelings, so we wrapped Beautiful Moon’s face. Your aunt never saw her daughter again. Why were we so cruel?”

I could have said that Beautiful Moon’s corpse was too horrible a memory to place in a mother’s mind. Instead, I said, “We will visit Aunt at the first chance. She will be happy to see us.”

“You perhaps,” Snow Flower said, “but not me. I remind her too much of herself. But know this. She reminds me every day to endure.” She thrust her chin forward, took one last look out across the misty hills, and said, “I think we should go back. I can see you are cold. And besides, there’s something I want you to help me write.” She reached into her tunic and pulled out our fan. “I brought it with me. I was afraid the rebels might burn my house and it would be lost.” Her eyes stared into mine. She was fully back now. She let out her breath and shook her head. “I said I’d never again lie to you. The truth is, I thought we’d die up here. I didn’t want us to be without it.”

She pulled on my arm.

“Come away from the edge, Lily. Seeing you stand there like that scares me.”

We walked back to our camp, where we improvised ink and a brush. We took two half-burned logs from the fire and let them cool; then we scraped at the charred parts with rocks, carefully preserving what came off. This we mixed with water in which we boiled some roots. It wasn’t as black or opaque as ink, but it would work well enough. Then we loosened the edge of a basket, extracted a length of bamboo, and sharpened it as best we could. This we used for our brush. We took turns recording in our secret language our journey here, the loss of Snow Flower’s little boy and unborn baby, the cold nights, and the blessings of friendship. When we were done, Snow Flower gently closed the fan and tucked it back inside her tunic.

That night the butcher did not beat my laotong. Instead he wanted and got bed business. Afterward she came to my side of the fire, slipped under her wedding quilt, curled up beside me, and rested her palm on my face. She was tired from so many sleepless nights and I felt her body soften quickly. Just before she drifted off, she whispered, “He loves me as best he can. Everything will be better now. You’ll see. He has had a change of heart.” And I thought, Yes, until the next time he throws his grief or his anger into the loving person beside me.

THE NEXT DAY we received word it was safe to return to our villages. After three months in the mountains, I’d like to say we’d seen the last of death. We had not. We had to pass all those who’d been left behind during our escape. We saw men, women, children, babies—all badly decomposed from exposure to the elements, from animal feasts, and from the natural decomposition of flesh. White bones flashed at us in the bright sunlight. Garments brought back instant identification, and too often we heard cries of recognition and remorse.

If all this were not enough, many of us were so weak that death was inevitable—now, at this last stage, when we were almost home. Mostly it was women who died on the way down the mountain. Balancing on our lily feet, we were top-heavy. We were pulled toward the abyss that fell away to our right. This time, in daylight, we not only heard the screams but saw the flapping of women’s arms as they futilely fought the air. A day earlier, I would have worried for Snow Flower, but her face was set in concentration as she carefully placed one foot after the other before her.

The butcher carried his mother on his back. Once, when Snow Flower faltered, drawing back uncertainly at the sight of a mother wrapping the decayed remains of a child to take home for a proper burial, he stopped, set his mother down, and took Snow Flower’s elbow. “Please keep walking,” he pleaded with her softly. “We will be at our cart soon. You will ride the rest of the way back to Jintian.” When she refused to tear her eyes away from the mother and her child, he added, “I will come back in the spring and bring his bones home. I promise we will have him nearby.”

Snow Flower straightened her shoulders and forced herself to step reluctantly around the woman with her tiny bundle.

The hand-drawn cart was no longer where we’d left it. This and so many things that had been discarded three months ago had been taken, either by the rebels or by the Great Hunan Army. But as the land flattened we were drawn to our homes, forgetting our aching, bleeding, starving bodies. Jintian was unscathed, as far as I could tell. I helped the butcher’s mother into the house and went back outside. I wanted to go home. I had come so far that I knew I could walk the last few li to Tongkou, but the butcher ran to tell my husband I was back and to come and get me.

As soon as he set off, Snow Flower grabbed me. “Come,” she said. “We don’t have much time.” She pulled me into the house, even as my eyes yearned to watch the butcher as he loped up the road to my village. When we got upstairs, she said, “Once you did me a great kindness by helping me with my dowry. Now I can repay a small portion of that debt.” She opened a trunk and pulled out a dark blue jacket with a pale blue silk panel woven in a cloud pattern on the front. That silk panel I remembered from the jacket Snow Flower had worn on the first day we met. She offered it to me. “I would be honored if you would wear this when you see your husband again.”

I saw how terrible Snow Flower looked, but I hadn’t considered how I might appear to my husband. I had worn my lavender silk jacket with the chrysanthemum embroidery for three solid months. Not only was it filthy and torn, but looking at myself in the mirror as water heated so I could bathe, I saw three months of living in the mud and snow under an unforgiving sun at high altitude upon my face.

I had time to wash only those places that he would see or smell first—my hands, arms, face, neck, armpits, and that place between my legs. Snow Flower did the best she could with my hair, pinning the grimy matted mass into a bun and then wrapping it in a clean headdress. Just as she helped me step into her dowry pants, we heard a pony’s hooves and the creaking wheels of a cart coming near. Quickly she buttoned me into the tunic. We stood face-to-face. She placed the palm of her hand on the square of sky-blue silk on my chest.

“You look beautiful,” she said.

I saw before me the person whom I loved above all others. Still, I was troubled by what she had said before we came down the mountain about my pitying her for her circumstances. I didn’t want to leave without explaining myself.

“I never thought you were”—I struggled to find tactful words and gave up—”less than I was.”

She smiled. My heart beat against her hand. “You said no lies.”

Then, before I could say anything else, I heard my husband’s voice calling me. “Lily! Lily! Lily!”

With that, I ran—yes, ran—downstairs and outside. When I saw him, I fell to my knees and put my head at his feet, so embarrassed I was by how I must have looked and smelled. He lifted me up and enfolded me in his arms.

“Lily, Lily, Lily . . .” My name came out muffled as he kissed me again and again, oblivious that others watched our reunion.

“Dalang . . .” I had never before spoken his name.

He took me by the shoulders and pushed me back so he could see my face. Tears glistened in his eyes; then he pulled me close again, crushing me to him.

“I had to get everyone out of Tongkou,” he explained. “Then I had to see our children safely on their way. . . .”

These actions, which I didn’t fully understand until later, were what changed my husband from the son of a good and generous headman to a much-respected headman in his own right.

His body trembled as he added, “I looked for you many times.”

So often in our women’s songs, we say, “I had no feelings for my husband” or “My husband had no feelings for me.” These are popular lines, used in chorus after chorus, but on that day I had deep feelings for my husband, and he for me.

My last moments in Jintian went by in a blur. My husband paid the butcher a handsome reward. Snow Flower and I embraced. She offered me the fan to take home, but I wanted her to keep it, for her sorrow was still near and all I felt was happiness. I said goodbye to Snow Flower’s son and promised I would send him some notebooks to study men’s writing. Finally, I bent down to Snow Flower’s daughter. “I will see you very soon,” I said. Then I got on the cart and my husband flicked the reins. I looked back to Snow Flower, waved, and turned toward Tongkou—toward my home, my family, my life.

Letter of Vituperation

THROUGHOUT THE COUNTY PEOPLE WENT ABOUT REBUILDING their lives. Those of us who survived that year had experienced too much, first with the epidemic and then with the rebellion. We were depleted—emotionally, and by the numbers of those we’d lost—but grateful to be alive. Slowly we gained weight. Men went back to the fields and sons returned to the main hall for study, while women and girls retired to their upstairs rooms to embroider and weave. We all moved forward, invigorated by our good fortune.

Sometimes in the past I had wondered about the outer realm of men. Now I vowed I would never venture into it again. My life was meant to be spent in the upstairs chamber. I was happy to see my sisters-in-law’s faces and looked forward to long afternoons spent with them in needlework, tea, song, and story. But this was nothing to how I felt upon seeing my children. Three months was forever, in their eyes and in mine. They had grown and changed. My eldest son had turned twelve while I was away. Safe in the county seat during the chaos, protected by the emperor’s troops, he had studied very hard. He had learned the supreme lesson: All scholars, no matter where they lived or what dialect they spoke, read the same texts and took the same exams so that loyalty, integrity, and a singular vision would be maintained across the realm. Even far from the capital, in remote counties like ours, local magistrates—all trained in an identical manner—helped people to understand the relationship between themselves and the emperor. If my son stayed on this track, one day he would surely sit for the examinations.

I saw Snow Flower more that year than since we were girls. Our husbands did not try to stop us, even though the rebellion still raged in other parts of the country. After all that had happened, my husband believed I would be safe in the butcher’s care, while the butcher encouraged his wife’s visits to my home, knowing she always returned with gifts of food, books, and cash. We shared a bed in each other’s homes, while our husbands moved to other rooms to allow us time together. The butcher dared not object, following my husband’s lead in this regard. But how could they have stopped any of it—our visits, our nights together, our whispered confidences? We had no fear of sun or rain or snow. “Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.”

Snow Flower and I continued to meet in Puwei for festivals as we always had. It was good for her to see Aunt and Uncle, whose lifetime of goodness within the family had earned them love and respect. Aunt was beloved as a grandmother to all her “grandchildren.” At the same time, Uncle was also in a better position than he had been when my father was alive. Elder Brother needed Uncle’s advice in the fields and in keeping the accounts, and Uncle was honored to give it. Aunt and Uncle had found a happy ending that no one could have imagined.

That year when Snow Flower and I went to the Temple of Gupo, our thanks were profound and deep. We made offerings, kowtowing in thanks that we had survived the winter. Then, arm in arm, we walked to the taro stand. Sitting there, we planned our daughters’ futures and discussed the methods of footbinding that would ensure perfect golden lilies. Back in our own homes, we made bindings, purchased soothing herbs, embroidered miniature shoes to place at the altar of Guanyin, formed glutinous rice balls to present to the Tiny-Footed Maiden, and fed our daughters red-bean dumplings to soften their feet. Separately, we spoke with Madame Wang about our daughters’ match. When Snow Flower and I met again, we compared conversations, laughing at how her aunt was still the same, with her powdered face and wily ways.

Even now, looking back at those months of spring and early summer, I see how blithely happy I was. I had my family and I had my laotong. As I said, I moved forward. This was not the case with Snow Flower. She did not regain the weight she had lost. She picked at her food—a few grains of rice, two bites of vegetable—preferring instead to drink tea. Her skin became pale again, while her cheeks refused to fill out. When she came to Tongkou and I suggested that we visit her old friends, she politely declined, saying, “They wouldn’t want to see me” or “They won’t remember me.” I nagged her until she agreed she would come with me next year to the Sitting and Singing ceremony of a Lu girl here in Tongkou, who was Snow Flower’s second cousin twice removed and my next-door neighbor.

In the afternoons Snow Flower sat with me as I did my embroidery, but she gazed out the lattice window, her mind elsewhere. It was as though she had jumped off the cliff after all, on our last day in the mountains, and was in a soundless fall. I saw her sadness but refused to accept it. My husband warned me several times about this. “You are strong,” he said one night after Snow Flower had returned to Jintian. “You came back from the mountains and you make me more proud every day with the way you manage our household and set a good example for the women of our village. But you—and please, do not get angry with me—are blind when you look at your old same. She is not your same in every way. Maybe what happened last winter was too much for her. I do not know her well, but surely you can see she puts a brave face on a bad situation. It has taken you many years to understand this, but not every man is like your husband.”

That he would confide this to me embarrassed me deeply. No, that’s not right. Rather, I was irritated that he dared to interfere in the inner-realm affairs of women. But I did not argue with him, because it wasn’t my place. Still, in my own mind I had to prove him wrong and myself right. So I looked more closely at Snow Flower when she next visited. I listened, really listened. Life had degenerated for Snow Flower. Her mother-in-law had cut back on her food, allowing her only one-third of the rice required for subsistence.

“I eat only clear porridge,” she said, “but I accept it. I’m not so hungry these days.”

Far worse, the butcher had not stopped beating her.

“You said he wouldn’t do it again,” I protested, not wanting to believe what my husband had seen so clearly.

“If he assaults me, what can I do? I can’t fight back.” Snow Flower sat across from me, her embroidery lying in her lap as limp and wrinkled as tofu skin.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She answered with a question of her own. “Why should I trouble you with things you cannot change?”

“We can shift fate if we try hard enough,” I said. “I changed my life. You can too.”

She stared at me with mouse eyes.

“How often does it happen?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm but frustrated that her husband was still using his fists against her, angry that she accepted it so passively, and hurt that she hadn’t confided in me—again.

“The mountains changed him. They changed all of us. Don’t you see that?”

“How often?” I pressed.

“I fail my husband in many ways—”

In other words, it happened more often than she cared to admit.

“I want you to come and live with me,” I said.

“Desertion is the worst thing a woman can do,” she responded. “You know that.”

I did. For a woman it was an offense punishable by death by her husband’s hand.

“Besides,” Snow Flower went on, “I would never leave my children. My son needs protection.”

“But to protect him with your own body?” I asked.

What response could she give?

I look back now and see with the clarity of eighty years that I showed far too much impatience with Snow Flower’s despondency. In the past, whenever I had been unsure of how to react to my laotong‘s unhappiness I had pressured her to follow the rules and traditions of the inner realm as a way of combating the bad things that happened in her life. This time I went further by launching a campaign for her to take control of her rooster husband, believing that as a woman born under the sign of the horse she could use her willfulness to change the situation. With only a useless daughter and an unloved first son, she should try to get pregnant again. She needed to pray more, eat the proper foods, and ask the herbalist for tonics—all to guarantee a son. If she presented her husband with what he wanted, he would remember her worth. But this was not all. . . .

By the time the Ghost Festival arrived on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, I had peppered Snow Flower with many questions that she should have understood were suggestions for her to improve the overall situation. Why couldn’t she try to be a better wife? Why couldn’t she make her husband happy in the ways I knew she could? Why didn’t she pinch her cheeks to bring back the color? Why didn’t she eat more so she would have more energy? Why couldn’t she go home right now and kowtow to her mother-in-law, make her meals, sew for her, sing to her, do what she had to do to make that old woman happy in her old age? Why didn’t she try harder to make things right? I thought I was giving practical advice, but I had nothing like Snow Flower’s worries and concerns. Still, I was Lady Lu and I thought I was right.

So when I ran out of things Snow Flower could do in her home, I questioned her about her time spent in mine. Wasn’t she happy to be with me? Didn’t she like the silk clothes I gave her? Didn’t she present the gifts the Lu family sent to her husband for our continued gratitude with enough deference that he would be pleased with her? Didn’t she appreciate that I had hired a man to teach reading and writing to boys her son’s age in Jintian? Didn’t she see that by making our daughters laotong we would be changing Spring Moon’s fate, much as mine had been changed?

If she truly loved me, why couldn’t she do as I had done—wrap herself in the conventions that protected women—to make her bad situation better? To all these queries she just sighed or nodded. Her reaction made me even more impatient. I stepped up my questions and well-considered reasons, until she surrendered, promising to do as I’d instructed. But she didn’t, and the next time my frustration with her was even more pointed. I didn’t understand that the bold horse of Snow Flower’s childhood had been broken in spirit. I was stubborn enough to believe I could fix a horse that had gone lame.

MY LIFE CHANGED forever on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month of the sixth year of Xianfeng’s reign. Mid-Autumn Festival had arrived. A few days remained before our daughters’ footbinding began. This year, Snow Flower and her children were to visit us for the holiday, but they were not who came to my threshold. It was Lotus, one of the women who’d lived under our tree in the mountains. I invited her to have tea with me in the upstairs chamber.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I am in Tongkou to visit my natal family.”

“A family likes to welcome home a married-out daughter,” I replied, with the customary nicety. “I’m sure they will be happy to see you.”

“And I to see them,” she said, as she reached into the basket of moon cakes that hung on her arm. “Our friend has asked me to give you something.” She pulled out a long slender package, wrapped in a fragment of celadon-colored silk I had recently given Snow Flower. Lotus handed it to me, wished me good fortune, and swayed down the alley and around the corner.

I knew from the shape what I was holding, but I couldn’t fathom why Snow Flower hadn’t come and had sent the fan instead. I took the bundle upstairs and waited until my sisters-in-law set out together to drop off moon cakes to our friends in the village. I sent my daughter with them, saying she should enjoy these last few days outside while she could. Once they left, I sat in my chair by the lattice window. Hazy light filtered through the latticework, casting a design of leaves and vines across my worktable. I stared at the package for a long time. How did I know to be afraid? Finally, I peeled back one edge, then another, of the green silk until our fan was fully exposed. I picked it up. Then I slowly clicked open one fold after another. Next to the charcoal-ink characters we had written the night before we came down from the mountains I saw a new column of characters.

I have too many troubles, Snow Flower had written. Her calligraphy had always been finer than mine, the legs of her mosquito lines so thin and delicate that the ends wisped into nothing. I cannot be what you wish. You won’t have to listen to my complaints anymore. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me as I am. Write to me, not to console me as you have been doing, but to remember our happy girl-days together. And that was it.

I felt like a sword had thrust into my body. My stomach leaped at the surprise of it, then contracted into an uneasy ball. Love? Was she really talking about love with sworn sisters in our secret fan? I read the lines again, puzzled and confused. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me. But Snow Flower and I were laotong, which was a marriage of emotions strong enough to cross over great distances and long separations. Our bond was supposed to be more important than marriage to a man. We had pledged to be true and faithful until death parted us. That she seemed to be abandoning our promises in favor of a new relationship with sworn sisters hurt beyond reason. That she was suggesting that somehow we could still be friends literally took my breath away. To me, what she had written was ten thousand times worse than if my husband had walked in and announced he’d just taken his first concubine. And it wasn’t as though I hadn’t been given the opportunity to join a post-marriage sisterhood myself. My mother-in-law had pushed me very hard in that direction, but I had schemed and plotted to keep Snow Flower in my life. Now she was tossing me aside? It seemed that Snow Flower—this woman for whom I had deep-heart love, whom I treasured, and to whom I’d committed myself for life—did not care for me in the same way.

Just when I thought my devastation could go no deeper, I realized that the three sworn sisters she had written about had to be the ones from her village whom we’d met in the mountains. In my mind, I replayed everything that had happened last winter. Had they been conspiring to steal her away from me from that first night with their singing? Had she been attracted to them, like a husband to new concubines who are younger, prettier, and more adoring than a loyal wife? Were the beds of those women warmer, their bodies firmer, their stories fresher? Did she look at their faces and see no expectations and no responsibilities?

This pain was unlike anything I had felt before—plunging, searing, excruciating, far worse than childbirth. Then something shifted in me. I began to react not as the little girl who had fallen in love with Snow Flower but as Lady Lu, the woman who believed that rules and conventions could provide peace of mind. It was easier for me to begin picking at Snow Flower’s faults than to feel the emotions raging inside of me.

I had always made allowances for Snow Flower out of love. But once I began to focus on her weaknesses, a pattern of deceit, deception, and betrayal began to emerge. I thought about all the times Snow Flower had lied to me—about her family, about her married life, even about her beatings. Not only had she not been a faithful laotong, she had not even been a very good friend. A friend would have been honest and forthright. If all this were not enough, I let memories of the recent weeks wash over me. Snow Flower had taken advantage of my money and position to gain better clothes, better food, and a better situation for her daughter, while ignoring all my help and suggestions. I felt duped and immensely foolish.

And then the strangest thing happened. An image of my mother came to my mind. I remembered that as a child I’d wanted her to love me. I’d thought if I did everything she asked during my footbinding, I would earn her affection. I believed I’d won it, but she had no feeling for me at all. Just like Snow Flower, she had looked out only for her own selfish interests. My first reaction to my mother’s lies and lack of regard for me had been anger, and I never forgave her, but over time I gradually stepped farther and farther away from her until she no longer had an emotional hold over me. To protect my heart, this was what I would have to do with Snow Flower. I couldn’t let anyone know I was dying from anguish that she no longer loved me. I also had to hide my anger and distress, because these were not good qualities for a proper woman.

I folded the fan and put it away. Snow Flower had asked me to write back. I didn’t. A week went by. I did not start my daughter’s footbinding on our agreed-upon date. Another week passed. Lotus came to my door again, this time delivering a letter, which Yonggang brought to me in the upstairs chamber. I unfolded the paper and stared at the characters. Always those strokes had seemed like caresses. Now I read them as daggers.

Why have you not written? Are you ill or has good fortune smiled on your door again? I began my daughter’s binding on the twenty-fourth day, just as you and I began ours. Did you begin on that date too? I look out my lattice window to yours. My heart soars out to you, singing happiness for our daughters.

I read it once, then set one corner of the paper into the flame of the oil lamp. I watched the edges curl and the words become smoke. In the coming days—as the weather cooled and I began my daughter’s footbinding—more letters arrived. I burned them too.

I was thirty-three years old. I would be lucky to live another seven years, luckier still to get seventeen. I could not endure the sick feeling in my stomach for another minute, let alone a year or more. My torment was great, but I summoned the same discipline that had gotten me through my footbinding, the epidemic, and the winter in the mountains to help me. I began what I called Cutting a Disease from My Heart. Anytime a memory came into my mind, I painted over it with black ink. If my sight fell upon a memory, I drove it away by closing my eyes. If a memory came in the form of a scent, I buried my nose in the petals of a flower, threw extra garlic in the wok, or conjured up the smell of starvation in the mountains. If a memory grazed my skin—in the form of my daughter’s touch against my hand, my husband’s breath against my ear at night, or the feel of a limp breeze across my breasts as I bathed—I scratched or rubbed or pounded it away. I was as ruthless as a farmer after harvest, yanking out every last remnant of what last season had been his most prized crop. I tried to clear everything down to bare earth, knowing this was the only way I could protect my damaged heart.

When memories of Snow Flower’s love continued to torment me, I constructed a flower tower like the one we had built to ward off Beautiful Moon’s spirit. I had to excise this new ghost, prevent her from ever again preying on my mind or tormenting me with broken promises of deep-heart love. I purged my baskets, trunks, drawers, and shelves of gifts Snow Flower had made for me over the years. I sought every letter she had written in our lifetime together. I had a hard time finding everything. I couldn’t find our fan. I couldn’t find . . . let’s just say many things were missing. But what I found I pasted or placed in the flower tower; then I composed a letter:

You who once knew my heart, now know nothing of me. I burn all your words, hoping they will disappear into the clouds. You, who betrayed and abandoned me, are gone from my heart forever. Please, please leave me alone.

I folded the paper and slipped it through the tiny lattice window and into the upstairs chamber of the flower tower. Then I set fire to the foundation, adding oil when necessary to burn through the handkerchiefs, weavings, and embroideries.

But Snow Flower was persistent in her haunting. When I bound my daughter’s feet, it was as if Snow Flower were in the room with me, a hand on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “Make sure there are no folds in the bindings. Show your daughter your mother love.” I sang to drown out her words. Sometimes at night I felt her imagined hand resting upon my cheek and I could not fall asleep. I lay there awake, furious with myself and with her, thinking, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. You broke your promise to be true. You betrayed me.

Two people bore the brunt of my suffering. The first, I’m ashamed to admit, was my daughter. The second, I’m sorry to say, was old Madame Wang. My mother love was very strong, and when I bound Jade’s feet you will never know just how careful I was, remembering not only what had happened to Third Sister but also all the lessons my mother-in-law had instilled in me about how to do this job properly, with the least chance of infection, deformity, or death. But I also transferred the pain I felt about Snow Flower out of my body and into my daughter’s feet. Weren’t my lily feet the source of all my pains and gains?

Though my daughter’s bones and disposition were pliant, she wept piteously. I could not stand it, though we had only just begun. I took my feelings and harnessed them, driving my daughter back and forth across the floor of our upstairs room, wrapping her bindings ever tighter on those days that her feet were rewrapped, and chastising her—no, crying bitterly at her—with what my mother had drilled into me. “A true lady lets no ugliness into her life. Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you find peace. I wrap, I bind, but you will have the reward.” I hoped that through my actions I might reap a little of that reward and find the peace my mother had promised.

Under the guise of wanting the best for Jade, I spoke with other women in Tongkou who were binding their daughters’ feet. “We all live here,” I said. “We all have good families. Shouldn’t our daughters become sworn sisters?”

My daughter’s feet came out nearly as small as my own. But before I knew the final outcome of that, Madame Wang paid me a call in the fifth month of the new lunar year. In my mind, she had never changed. She had always been an old woman, but on this day I looked at her with a more critical eye. She was far younger than I am now, which meant that when I’d first met her all those years ago, she was forty years old at most. But then my mother and Snow Flower’s mother were dead by that age—give or take—and had been considered long-lived. Thinking back on it, I believe that Madame Wang, as a widow, did not want to die or go to another man’s home. She chose to live and fend for herself. She would not have succeeded if she had not been exceedingly smart and business-minded. But she still had her body to contend with. She let people know she was unassailable by wearing powder to cover what beauty may have lain in her face and dressing in gaudy clothes to set her apart from the married women in our county. Now, in what I guessed must have been her late sixties, she no longer had to hide behind powder and garish silk. She was an old woman—still smart, still business-minded, but with one flaw that I knew too well. She loved her niece.

“Lady Lu, it’s been too long,” she said, as she plopped down in a chair in the main room. When I did not offer tea, she looked around anxiously. “Is your husband here?”

“Master Lu will be home later, but you get ahead of yourself. My daughter is too young for him to negotiate a marriage match.”

Madame Wang slapped her thigh and chortled. When I didn’t join in, she sobered. “You know I am not here for that. I have come to discuss a laotong match. This business is for women only.”

I slowly began to tap the nail of my index finger against the teak arm of my chair. The sound was loud and unnerving even to me, but I did not stop.

She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a fan. “I brought this for your daughter. Perhaps I can give it to her.”

“My daughter is upstairs, but Master Lu would not consider it proper for her to see something that he has not examined first.”

“But, Lady Lu,” Madame Wang confided, “this is in our women’s writing.”

“Then give it to me.” I reached out my hand.

The old matchmaker saw my hand shaking and hesitated. “Snow Flower—”

“No!” The syllable came out harsher than I intended, but I could not bear to hear that name spoken. I calmed myself, then said, “The fan, please.”

She reluctantly gave it to me. Inside my head I had an army of brushes with black ink, obliterating the thoughts and memories that kept popping up. I called upon the hardness of the bronzes in the ancestral temple, the hardness of ice in winter, and the hardness of bones dried out under an unrelenting sun to give me strength. In one swift movement I opened the fan.

I understand there is a girl of good character and women’s learning in your home. These were the first characters Snow Flower had written to me so many years ago. I looked up and saw Madame Wang’s gaze upon me, watching for my reaction, but I kept my features as placid as the surface of a pond on a still night. Our two families plant gardens. Two flowers bloom. They are ready to meet. You and I are of the same year. Shall we not be old sames? Together we will soar above the clouds.

I heard Snow Flower’s voice in every carefully drawn character. I snapped the fan shut and held it out to Madame Wang. She did not take it from my outstretched hand.

“I think, Madame Wang, there has been a mistake. The eight characters of these two girls do not match. They were born on different days in different months. More importantly, their feet did not match before binding began, and I doubt they will match when they are done. And”—I waved my hand idly to take in the main room—”family circumstances do not match. All of this is common knowledge.”

Madame Wang’s eyes narrowed. “You think I don’t know the truth of these things?” She snorted. “Let me tell you what I know. You have severed your bond with no explanation. A woman—your laotong—weeps in confusion—”

“Confusion? Do you know what she did?”

“Speak to her,” Madame Wang went on. “Don’t disrupt a plan that was agreed upon by two loving mothers. Two girls have a bright future together. They can be as happy as their mothers.”

I couldn’t possibly agree to the matchmaker’s suggestion. I was weak with sorrow, and too many times in the past I’d let myself be taken in—diverted, influenced, convinced—by Snow Flower. I also couldn’t risk seeing Snow Flower with her sworn sisters. My mind was already tormented enough imagining their whispered secrets and physical intimacies.

“Madame Wang,” I said, “I would not bring my daughter so low as to match her to the spawn of a butcher.”

I was intentionally spiteful, hoping the matchmaker would abandon the subject, but it was as though she hadn’t heard me, because she said, “I remember the two of you together. Crossing a bridge, you were mirrored in the water below—same height, same size feet, same courage. You pledged fidelity. You promised you would never be a step apart, that you would be together forever, never separated, never distant—”

I’d done all of those things with an open heart, but what about Snow Flower?

“You do not know of what you speak,” I said. “On the day your niece and I signed our contract, you said, ‘No concubines allowed.’ Do you remember that, old woman? Now go ask your niece what she has done.”

I tossed the fan into the matchmaker’s lap and turned my face away, my heart as chilled as the river water that used to run over my feet. I felt that old woman’s eyes on me, weighing, wondering, questioning, but she did not have the will to go on. I heard her rise unsteadily. Her eyes continued to bore into me, but I did not waver in my steadfastness.

“I will relay your message,” she said at last, her voice filled with kindness and a deep understanding that agitated me, “but know this. You are a rare person. I saw that long ago. Everyone in our county envies your good luck. Everyone wishes you longevity and prosperity. But I see you breaking two hearts. It is so sad. I remember the little girl you were. You had nothing but a pretty pair of feet. Now you have abundance in your life, Lady Lu—an abundance of malice, ingratitude, and forgetfulness.”

She hobbled out the door. I heard her get into her palanquin and order her bearers to take her to Jintian. I could not believe that I had allowed her to have the last word.

A YEAR WENT by. The day of Snow Flower’s cousin’s Sitting and Singing in the Upstairs Chamber next door approached. I was still devastated, my mind beating a never-ending rhythm—ta dum, ta dum, ta dum—like a heart or a woman’s chant. Snow Flower and I had planned to go to the celebration together. I didn’t know if she would still come. If she did, I hoped we could avoid a confrontation. I didn’t want to fight her as I’d fought my mother.

The tenth day of the tenth month arrived—a good and propitious date for the neighbor girl to begin her wedding activities. I walked next door and went to the upstairs chamber. The bride was pretty in a wan sort of way. Her sworn sisters sat around her. I spotted Madame Wang and, next to her, Snow Flower: clean, her hair pulled back in the style befitting a married lady, and dressed in one of the outfits I had given her. That sensitive spot where my ribs came together above my stomach constricted. The blood seemed to drain from my head and I thought I might faint. I didn’t know if I could sit through this event with Snow Flower in the room and still maintain my dignity as a woman. I quickly glanced at the other faces. Snow Flower had not brought Willow, Lotus, or Plum Blossom with her for companionship. I let my breath out in a whoosh of relief. If one of them had been there, I would have run away.

I took a seat across the room from Snow Flower and her aunt. The celebration had all of the usual singing, complaints, stories, and jokes. Then the mother of the bride asked Snow Flower to tell us of her life since leaving Tongkou.

“Today I will sing a Letter of Vituperation,” Snow Flower announced.

This was not at all what I had anticipated. How could Snow Flower possibly want to make a public grievance against me when I was the one who had been wronged? If anything, I should have prepared a chant of accusation and retaliation.

“The pheasant squawks and the sound carries far,” she began. The women in the room turned to her upon hearing the familiar opening for this traditional type of communication. Then Snow Flower began to sing in that same ta dum, ta dum, ta dum rhythm I had been hearing for months. “For five days I burned incense and prayed to find the courage to come here. For three days I boiled fragrant water to cleanse my skin and my clothing so I would be presentable to my old friends. I have put my soul into my song. As a girl, I was prized as a daughter, but everyone here knows how hard my life has been. I lost my natal home. I lost my natal family. The women in my family have been unlucky for two generations. My husband is not kind. My mother-in-law is cruel. I have been pregnant seven times, but only three babies breathed the air of this world. Now only a son and a daughter live. It seems I am cursed by fate. I must have done bad deeds in a former life. I am seen as less than others.”

The bride’s sworn sisters wept in sympathy as they were supposed to. Their mothers listened attentively—oohing and aahing over the sad parts, shaking their heads at the inevitability of a woman’s fate, and admiring the way that Snow Flower drew upon our language of misery.

“I had but one happiness in my life, my laotong,” Snow Flower went on—ta dum, ta dum, ta dum. “In our contract we wrote there would never be a harsh word between us, and for twenty-seven years this was so. We always spoke true words. We were like long vines, reaching out to each other, forever entwined. But when I told her of my sadness, she had no patience. When she saw how poor I was in spirit, she reminded me that men farm and women weave, that industriousness brings no hunger, believing I could change my destiny. But how can there be a world without the poor and ill-fated?”

I watched the women in the room cry for her. I was beyond stunned.

“Why have you turned away from me?” she sang out, her voice high and beautiful. “You and I are laotong—together in our souls even when we couldn’t be together in our daily lives.” Abruptly she brought in a new subject. “And why have you hurt my daughter? Spring Moon is too young to understand why, and you will not say. I did not expect you to have a malicious heart. I beg you to remember that once our good feeling was as deep as the sea. Do not make a third generation of women suffer.”

At this last bit, the air in the room changed as the others took in this final injustice. Life was hard enough for girls without my making it harder for someone far weaker than myself.

I drew myself up. I was Lady Lu, the woman with the greatest respect in the county, and I should have risen above this. Instead, I listened to that inner music that had been pounding in my head and heart for months now.

“The pheasant squawks and the sound carries far,” I said, as a Letter of Vituperation began to form in my mind. I still wanted to be reasonable, so I addressed Snow Flower’s last and most unfair accusation first. I looked from woman to woman as I sang. “Our two girls cannot be laotong. They are not the same in any way. Your old neighbor wants something for her daughter, but I won’t break the taboo. In saying no, I have done what any mother would do.”

Then, “All the women in this room know hardship. As girls, we are raised as useless branches. We may love our families, but we are not with them for long. We marry out into villages we do not know, into families we do not know, to men we do not know. We work endlessly, and if we complain we lose what little respect our in-laws have for us. We bear children; sometimes they die, sometimes we die. When our husbands tire of us, they take in concubines. We have all faced adversity—crops that don’t come in, winters that are too cold, planting seasons with no rain. None of this is so special, but this woman seeks special attention for her woes.”

I turned to Snow Flower. Tears stung my eyes as I sang to her, and I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. “You and I were matched as a pair of mandarin ducks. I always remained true, but you’ve shunned me to embrace sworn sisters. A girl sends a fan to one girl, not writing new ones to many. A good horse does not have two saddles; a good woman is not unfaithful to her laotong. Perhaps your perfidy is why your husband, your mother-in-law, your children, and, yes, the betrayed old same before you, do not cherish you as they might. You shame us all with your girlish fancies. If my husband came home today with a concubine, I would be thrown from my bed, neglected, dismissed from his attentions. I—as all the women here—would have to accept it. But . . . from . . . you . . .”

My throat closed in on itself and the tears I’d been holding back escaped from my eyes. For a moment I thought I couldn’t go on. I shifted away from my own pain and tried to bring this back to something all the women in the room would understand. “We might expect this loss of affection from our husbands—they have a right, and we are only women—but to endure this from another woman, who by her very sex has experienced much cruelty just by living, is merciless.”

I went on, reminding my neighbors of my status, of my husband who had brought salt to the village, and of the way he had made sure that all of the people of Tongkou were transported to safety during the rebellion.

“My doorstep is clean,” I declared, then turned to Snow Flower. “But what about yours?”

At that moment, an untapped spring of anger came bubbling to the surface, and not one woman in that room stopped me from expressing it. The words I used came from such a dark and bitter place that I felt as though I’d been sliced open with a knife. I knew everything about Snow Flower, and I proceeded to use it against her under the guise of social correctness and the strength of my being Lady Lu. I humiliated her in front of the other women, revealing every weakness. I held nothing back, because I had lost all control. Unbidden, a long-ago memory came to me of my younger sister’s leg flailing and her loose bindings twirling around her. With each invective I threw out, I felt as though my bindings had come loose and I was finally free to say what I really thought. It took me many years to realize that my perceptions at this time were completely wrong. The bindings weren’t flying through the air and slapping at my laotong. Rather, they were whirling tighter and tighter around me, trying to squeeze away the deep-heart love I’d longed for my entire life.

“This woman who was your neighbor took with her a dowry that was made from her mother’s dowry, so that when that poor woman went out onto the street she had no quilts or clothes to keep her warm,” I proclaimed. “This woman who was your neighbor does not keep a clean house. Her husband carries on a polluted business, killing pigs on a platform outside her front door. This woman who was your neighbor had many talents, but she squandered them, refusing to teach the women in her husband’s household our secret language. This woman who was your neighbor lied about her circumstances as a girl in her daughter days, lied as a young woman in her hair-pinning days, and continues to lie as a wife and mother in her rice-and-salt days. She has lied not only to all of you but to her laotong as well.”

I paused, gauging the women’s faces around me. “How does she spend her time? I’ll tell you how! Her lust! Animals go into heat seasonally, but this woman is always in heat. Her rutting causes the whole household to go silent. When we were in the mountains running from the rebels”—I rocked forward and the others leaned toward me—”she did bed business with her husband rather than be with me—her laotong. She says she must have done bad deeds in a former life, but I, as Lady Lu, tell you that her bad deeds in this life made her fate.”

Snow Flower sat across from me, tears running down her cheeks, but I was so desolate and confused that I could show only my anger.

“We wrote a contract as girls,” I concluded. “You made a promise, which you broke.”

Snow Flower took a deep quivering breath. “You once asked that I always tell you the truth, but when I tell it to you, you misunderstand or you don’t like what you hear. I have found women in my village who do not look down on me. They do not criticize me. They do not expect me to be someone I am not.”

Every word she spoke reinforced everything I had suspected.

“They do not humiliate me in front of others,” Snow Flower went on. “I have embroidered with them, and we console one another when we are troubled. They do not pity me. They visit me when I have not been well. . . . I am lonely and alone. I need women to comfort me every day, not just at the times of your choosing. I need women who can hear me as I am and not how they remember me or wish me to be. I feel like a bird flying alone. I cannot find my mate. . . .”

Her soft words and gentle excuses were just what I was afraid of. I closed my eyes, trying to block my feelings. To protect myself I had to hold on to this grievance as I had with my mother. When I opened my eyes, Snow Flower had lifted herself to her feet and was delicately swaying toward the stairs. When Madame Wang did not follow her, I felt a pang of sympathy. Even her own aunt, the only one among us who made a living and survived on her wits, would not offer solace.

As Snow Flower disappeared step-by-step down the stairs, I promised myself I would never see her again.

WHEN I LOOK back on that day, I know that I failed terribly in my duties and obligations as a woman. What she had done was unforgivable, but what I said was despicable. I had let my anger, hurt, and ultimately my desire for revenge take control of my actions. Ironically, the very things that embarrassed me and that I later felt much regret over completed my passage to becoming Lady Lu. My neighbors had seen me be brave when my husband was away in Guilin. They knew how I’d cared for my mother-in-law during the epidemic and shown proper filial piety at my in-laws’ funerals. After I survived the winter in the mountains, they’d watched as I’d sent teachers to outlying villages, attended ceremonies in nearly every home in Tongkou, and generally acquitted myself well as the wife of the headman. But on that day, I truly earned the respect that came with being Lady Lu by doing what all women are supposed to do for our country but can rarely accomplish. A woman must set an example of decorum and right thinking in the inside realm. If she is successful, these things will travel from her door to the next, making not only women and children behave properly but inspiring our men to make the outside realm as safe and settled as possible so the emperor can look out from his throne and see peace. I did all that in the most public way possible by showing my neighbors that Snow Flower was a low and base woman who should not be a part of our lives. I had succeeded even as I destroyed my laotong.

My Song of Vituperation became known. It was recorded on handkerchiefs and fans. It was taught to girls as a didactic lesson and sung during the month of wedding festivities to warn brides of life’s pitfalls. In this way, Snow Flower’s disgrace spread throughout the county. As for me, all that had happened crippled me. What was the point of being Lady Lu if I didn’t have love in my life?

Into the Clouds

EIGHT YEARS PASSED. DURING THAT TIME, EMPEROR XIANFENG died, Emperor Tongzhi assumed power, and the Taiping Rebellion ended somewhere in a distant province. My first son married in and his wife got pregnant, fell into our home, and had a son—the first of many precious grandsons. My son also passed his exams to become a shengyuan district scholar. He immediately began studying to become a xiucai scholar, from the province. He did not have much time for his wife, but I think she found comfort in our upstairs chamber. She was a young woman of good learning and home skills. I liked her very much. My daughter, a girl of sixteen well into her hair-pinning days, was betrothed to the son of a rice merchant in faraway Guilin. I might never see Jade again, but this alliance would further protect our ties to the salt business. The Lu family was wealthy, well respected, and without bad fortune. I was forty-two years old, and I had done my very best to forget about Snow Flower.

On a day late in fall in the fourth year of Emperor Tongzhi’s reign, Yonggang came into the upstairs room and whispered in my ear that someone wanted to see me. I asked her to show the guest upstairs, but Yonggang’s eyes went to my daughter-in-law and daughter, who were embroidering together, and shook her head no. This was either impertinence on Yonggang’s part or something more serious. Without a word to the others, I went downstairs. As I entered the main room, a young girl in worn clothes dropped to her knees and put her forehead to the floor. Beggars like this came to my door often, for I was known to be generous.

“Lady Lu, only you can help me,” the girl implored, as she shuffled her crumpled form toward me until her forehead rested on my lily feet.

I reached down and touched her shoulder. “Give me your bowl and I’ll fill it.”

“I have no beggar’s bowl and I don’t need food.”

“Then why are you here?”

The girl began to weep. I asked her to rise and when she didn’t I tapped her shoulder again. Next to me, Yonggang stared at the floor.

“Get up!” I ordered.

The girl lifted her head and looked up into my face. I would have recognized her anywhere. Snow Flower’s daughter looked exactly like her mother at that age. Her hair fought against the restriction of her pins and fell in loose tendrils about her face, which was as pale and clear as the spring moon she was named for. I wistfully remembered this girl before she was born. Through the mists of memory I saw Spring Moon as a beautiful baby, then during those terrible days and nights of our Taiping winter. Once this pretty little thing would have been my daughter’s laotong. Now here she was, her forehead dropping back to my feet, begging for my help.

“My mother is very sick. She will not last the winter. We can do nothing for her now except settle her fretful mind. Please come to her. She calls out to you. Only you can answer.”

Even five years earlier the depth of my pain would have still been so great that I might have sent the girl on her way, but I had learned a lot in my duties as Lady Lu. I could never forgive Snow Flower for all the sadness she had caused me, but for my own position in the county I had to show my face as a gracious lady. I told Spring Moon to go home and promised that I would arrive there shortly; then I arranged for a palanquin to take me to Jintian. Riding there, I buttressed myself against seeing Snow Flower and the butcher, their son, who I realized must have married in by now, and, of course, the sworn sisters.

The palanquin set me down before Snow Flower’s threshold. The place had not changed. A pile of wood rested against the side of the house. The platform with its embedded wok waited for fresh kill. I hesitated, taking it all in. The butcher’s form loomed in the dark doorway, and then he was before me—older, stringier, but the same in so many ways.

“I cannot bear to see her suffer” were the first words he spoke to me after eight years. He roughly wiped the dampness at his eyes with the back of his hand. “She gave me a son, who has helped me do better at my business. She gave me a good and useful daughter. She made my house more beautiful. She cared for my mother until she died. She did everything a wife should do, but I was cruel to her, Lady Lu. I see that now.” Then he brushed past me, adding, “She is better off in the company of women.” I watched him stalk toward the fields, the one place where a man can be alone with his emotions.

It is hard for me to think about this even after all these years. I thought I had erased Snow Flower from my memory and cut her from my heart. I had truly believed I would never forgive her for loving sworn sisters more than me, but the moment I saw Snow Flower on her bed, all those thoughts and emotions fell away. Time—life—had brutalized her. I stood there, an older woman, true, but my skin was still smooth from creams, powders, and nearly a decade protected from the sun, while my clothes spoke to the whole county about the person I was. In the bed across the room lay Snow Flower, an aged crone dressed in rags. Unlike her daughter, whose face had been immediately familiar to me, I would not have recognized Snow Flower if I had seen her on the street outside the Temple of Gupo.

And yes, the other women were there—Lotus, Willow, and Plum Blossom. As I suspected all those years ago, Snow Flower’s sworn sisters were the women who’d lived with us under the tree in the mountains. We did not exchange greetings.

As I approached the bed, Spring Moon rose and stepped aside. Snow Flower’s eyes were closed and her skin was deathly pale. I looked at her daughter, unsure of what to do. The girl nodded and I took Snow Flower’s cold hand in my own. She stirred without opening her eyes, then licked her cracked lips.

“I feel . . .” She shook her head as though trying to rid her mind of a thought.

I called her name softly, then gently squeezed her fingers.

My laotong‘s eyes blinked open and she tried to focus, at first not believing who was before her. “I felt your touch,” she murmured at last. “I knew it was you.” Her voice was weak, but when she spoke, the years of pain and horror fell away. Behind the ravages of disease, I saw and heard the little girl who invited me to become her laotong all those years ago.

“I heard you call for me,” I lied. “I came as fast as I could.”

“I was waiting.”

Her face contorted in anguish. Her other hand clutched her stomach and she pulled up her legs reflexively. Snow Flower’s daughter wordlessly dipped a cloth into a bowl of water, wrung it out, and handed it to me. I took it and wiped away the sweat that had collected on Snow Flower’s forehead during the spasm.

Through her agony she spoke. “I’m sorry for everything, but you should know I never wavered in my love for you.”

As I accepted her apology, another spasm hit, this one worse than the first. Her eyes shut against the pain, and she did not speak again. I refreshed the cloth and put it back on her forehead; then I once again took her hand and sat with her until the sun went down. By that time, the other women had left and Spring Moon had gone downstairs to make dinner. Alone with Snow Flower, I pulled back her quilt. Her disease had eaten the flesh around her bones and fed it to a tumor that had grown to the size of a baby inside her belly.

Even now I can’t explain my emotions. I had been hurt and angry for so long. I thought I would never forgive Snow Flower, but instead of dwelling on that my mind tumbled with the realization that my laotong‘s womb had betrayed her again and that the tumor inside her must have been growing for many years. I had a duty to care. . . .

No! That’s not it. The whole time I was hurt it was because I still loved Snow Flower. She was the only one ever who saw my weaknesses and loved me in spite of them. And I had loved her even when I hated her most.

I tucked the quilt back around her and began plotting. I had to get a proper doctor. Snow Flower should eat, and we needed a diviner. I wanted her to fight as I would fight. You see, I still didn’t understand that you cannot control the manifestations of love, nor can you change another person’s destiny.

I lifted Snow Flower’s cold hand to my lips; then I went downstairs. The butcher slouched at the table. Snow Flower’s son, a grown man now, stood next to his sister. They looked at me with expressions that came directly from their mother—proud, enduring, long-suffering, beseeching.

“I’m going home now,” I announced. Snow Flower’s son’s face crumpled in disappointment, but I held up my hand placatingly. “I will be back tomorrow. Please arrange a place for me to sleep. I will not leave this place until . . .” I couldn’t go on.

I thought that once I settled in we would win this battle, but two weeks were all we had. Two weeks out of what would turn out to be my eighty years to show Snow Flower all the love I felt for her. Not once did I leave that room. Whatever went into my body, Snow Flower’s daughter brought. Whatever went out of my body, Snow Flower’s daughter took away. Every day I washed Snow Flower, then used the same water to wash myself. A shared bowl of water many years before was how I knew Snow Flower loved me. Now I hoped she would see my actions, remember the past, and know that nothing had changed.

At night, after the others left, I moved from the cot the family had prepared for me and into the bed next to Snow Flower. I wrapped my arms around her, trying to bring warmth to her shriveled form and alleviate the torment that so wracked her body that she whimpered even in her dreams. Each night I fell asleep wishing my hands were sponges that would absorb the growth in her belly. Each morning I woke to find her hand upon my cheek, her hollowed eyes staring at me.

For many years, Jintian’s doctor had attended to Snow Flower. Now I sent for my own. He took one look and shook his head.

“Lady Lu, a cure is not possible,” he said. “All you can do now is wait for the onset of death. You can see it already in the purple tint of her flesh just above her bindings. First, her ankles; then her legs will come next, swelling and turning the skin purple as her life force slows. Soon, I suspect, her breathing will change. You’ll recognize it. An inhale, an exhale, then nothing. Just when you think she is gone she will take another breath. Do not cry, Lady Lu. At that time the end will be very near, and she will not even be aware of her pain.”

The doctor left packets of herbs for us to brew into a medicinal tea; I paid him and vowed I would never use him again. After he left, Lotus, the eldest of the sworn sisters, tried to comfort me. “Snow Flower’s husband brought in many doctors, but one doctor, two doctors, three doctors could do nothing for her now.”

The old fury threatened to rise up in me, but I saw the sympathy and compassion in Lotus’s face, not just for Snow Flower but for me as well.

I remembered that bitter was the most yin of flavors. It caused contractions, reduced fevers, and calmed the heart and spirit. Convinced that bitter melon was something that would stall Snow Flower’s disease, I called upon her sworn sisters to help by making sauteed bitter melon with black bean sauce and bitter melon soup. The three women did as I asked. I sat on Snow Flower’s bed and fed her spoonful after spoonful. At first she ate without arguing. Then she clamped her mouth shut and looked away from me as though I weren’t there.

The middle sworn sister pulled me aside. At the top of the stairs, Willow took the bowl from my hands, and whispered, “It’s too late for this. She doesn’t want to eat. You must try to let her go.” Willow patted my face kindly. Later that day, she would be the one who cleaned up Snow Flower’s bitter-melon vomit.

My next and final plan was to bring in the diviner. He came into the room and announced, “A ghost has attached itself to your friend’s body. Do not worry. Together we will drive it from this room and she will be cured. Miss Snow Flower,” he said, bending over the bed, “here are some words for you to chant.” Then to the rest of us, he ordered, “Kneel and pray.”

So Spring Moon, Madame Wang—yes, the old matchmaker was there through most of it—the three sworn sisters, and I dropped to our knees around the bed and began praying and singing to the Goddess of Mercy, while Snow Flower’s voice weakly repeated her lines. Once the diviner saw us busy with our tasks, he took a piece of paper from his pocket, wrote some incantations on it, set it on fire, and ran back and forth across the room, trying to drive away the hungry ghost. Next he used a sword to slice through the smoke: swish, swish, swish. “Ghost out! Ghost out! Ghost out!”

But this did not help. I paid the diviner and from Snow Flower’s lattice window watched as he got into his pony-drawn cart and trotted off down the road. I vowed that from here on I would use diviners only to find propitious dates.

Plum Blossom, the third and youngest of the sworn sisters, came to stand next to me. “Snow Flower is doing everything you ask of her. But I hope you see, Lady Lu, that she only does these things for you. This torment has gone on too long. If she were a dog, would you keep her suffering so?”

Pain exists at many levels: the physical agony that Snow Flower endured, the sorrow at seeing her suffer and believing that I couldn’t bear another moment, the torturous regret I felt for the things I had said to her eight years ago—and to what purpose? To be respected by the women of my village? To hurt Snow Flower as she had hurt me? Or had it come down to my pride—that if she wouldn’t be with me, she shouldn’t be with anyone? I’d been wrong on every count, including the last one, because during those long days I saw the solace that the other women brought to Snow Flower. They had not come to her just at this final moment as I had; they had watched over her for many years. Their generosity—in the form of little bags of rice, cut vegetables, and gathered firewood—had kept her alive. Now they came every day, neglecting their duties at home. They did not crowd in on our special relationship. Instead, they hovered like benign spirits, praying, continuing to light fires to scare away ghosts eager for Snow Flower, but always leaving us to ourselves.

I must have slept, but I don’t remember it. When I wasn’t attending to Snow Flower, I was making burial shoes for her. I chose colors I knew she would love. I threaded my needle and embroidered one shoe with a lotus blossom for continual and a ladder for climbing to suggest that Snow Flower was on a continual climb to heaven. On the other, I embroidered tiny deer and curly-winged bats, symbols that meant long life—the same ones that you see on wedding garments and hang as celebratory notices at birthdays—to let Snow Flower know that, even after her death, her blood would continue through her son and her daughter.

Snow Flower deteriorated. When I had first arrived and washed and rewrapped her feet, I saw that her curled toes had already turned dark purple. As the doctor said it would, that horrible death color crept up to her calves. I tried to make Snow Flower fight the disease. In the early days I begged her to call on her horse nature to kick away those spirits who wanted to claim her. Now, I knew, all that was left was to ease her way to the afterworld as best we could.

Yonggang saw all this when she came to see me each morning, bringing fresh eggs, clean clothes, and messages from my husband. She had been obedient and loyal to me for many years, but at this time I discovered that she had once broken faith with me in a way for which I will be forever grateful. Three days before Snow Flower died, Yonggang arrived for one of her early morning visits, knelt before me, and laid a basket at my feet.

“I saw you, Lady, many years ago,” she said, her voice cracking in fear. “I knew you couldn’t mean what you were doing.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about or why she had chosen this moment to confess. Then she pulled the cloth from the top of the basket, reached in, and took out letters, handkerchiefs, embroideries, and Snow Flower and my secret fan. These were things I’d looked for when I was burning our past, but this servant had risked being thrown into the street to save them, during those days of Cutting a Disease from My Heart, and then kept them protected all these years.

Seeing this, Spring Moon and the sworn sisters scurried around the room, digging into Snow Flower’s embroidery basket, rifling through drawers, and reaching under the bed to find secret hiding places. Soon I had before me all the letters I had ever written Snow Flower and everything I had ever made for her. In the end, everything—except what I had once destroyed—was there.

For the last days of Snow Flower’s life, I took us on a journey through our lives together. We had both memorized so much that we could recite whole passages, but she weakened quickly and spent the rest of the time just holding my hand and listening.

At night, in bed together under the lattice window, the moonlight bathing us, we were transported back to our hair-pinning days. I wrote nu shu characters on her palm. The bed is lit by moonlight. . . .

“What did I write?” I asked. “Tell me the characters.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I can’t tell. . . .”

So I recited the poem and watched as tears dripped from the edges of Snow Flower’s eyes, ran down her temples, and lost themselves in her ears.

During the last conversation we had, she asked, “Could you do one thing for me?”

“Anything,” I said, and I meant it.

“Please be an aunt to my children.”

I promised that I would.

Nothing helped or relieved Snow Flower’s suffering. In the final hours, I read her our contract, reminding her how we had gone to the Temple of Gupo and bought the red paper, sat down together, and composed the words. I read again the letters we had sent each other. I read happy parts from our fan. I hummed old melodies from our childhood. I told her how much I loved her and said I hoped she would be waiting for me in the afterworld. I talked her all the way to the edge of the sky, not wanting her to go yet yearning to release her into the clouds.

Snow Flower’s skin went from ghostly white to golden. A lifetime of worries melted from her face. The sworn sisters, Spring Moon, Madame Wang, and I listened to Snow Flower’s breathing: an inhale, an exhale, then nothing. Seconds passed; then an inhale, an exhale, then nothing. More excruciating seconds, then an inhale, an exhale, then nothing. The whole time I kept my hand on Snow Flower’s cheek, as she had done for me throughout our entire lives together, letting her know that her laotong was there until that final inhale, exhale, and then truly nothing.

SO MUCH OF what happened reminded me of the didactic story that Aunt used to chant about the girl who had three brothers. I now understand that we learned those songs and stories not just to teach us how to behave but because we would be living out variations of them over and over again throughout our lives.

Snow Flower was carried down to the main room. I washed her and dressed her in her eternity clothes—all of them ragged and faded, but in patterns I remembered from our childhood. The oldest sworn sister combed Snow Flower’s hair. The middle sworn sister patted Snow Flower’s face with powder and painted her lips. The youngest sworn sister decorated her hair with flowers. Snow Flower’s body was placed in a coffin. A small band came to play mourning music as we sat next to her in the main room. The oldest sworn sister had enough money to buy incense to burn. The middle sworn sister had enough money to buy paper to burn. The youngest sworn sister had no money for incense or paper, but she did a very good job crying.

Three days later, the butcher, his son, and the husbands and sons of the sworn sisters carried the coffin to the grave site. They walked very fast, as if they were flying across the ground. I took almost all of Snow Flower’s nu shu writing, including much of what I had sent her, and burned it so she would have our words in the afterworld.

We returned to the butcher’s house. Spring Moon made tea, while the three sworn sisters and I went upstairs to clean away all signs of death.

It was through them that I learned of my greatest shame. They told me that Snow Flower was not their sworn sister. I didn’t believe it. They tried to convince me otherwise.

“But the fan?” I cried out in frustration. “She wrote that she was joining you.”

“No,” Lotus corrected. “She wrote that she didn’t want you to worry about her anymore, that she had friends here to console her.”

They asked if they could see the words for themselves. Snow Flower, I learned, had taught these women how to read nu shu. Now they crowded over the fan like a gaggle of hens, exclaiming and pointing out to one another hallmarks that Snow Flower had told them about over the years. But when they came to the last entry, they turned serious.

“Look,” Lotus said, pointing to the characters. “There is nothing here about her becoming our sworn sister.”

I snatched the fan away and took it to a corner where I could examine it myself. I have too many troubles, Snow Flower had written. I cannot be what you wish. You won’t have to listen to my complaints anymore. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me as I am—

“You see, Lady Lu?” Lotus said to me from across the room. “Snow Flower wanted us to listen to her. In exchange she taught us the secret language. She was our teacher, and we respected and loved her for that. But she didn’t love us, she loved you. She wanted that love returned, unburdened by your pity and your impatience.”

That I had been shallow, stubborn, and selfish did not alter the gravity and stupidity of what I had done. I had made the greatest mistake for a woman literate in nu shu: I had not considered texture, context, and shades of meaning. More than that, my belief in my own self-importance had made me forget what I had learned on the first day I’d met Snow Flower: She was always more subtle and sophisticated in her words than this mere second daughter of a common farmer. For eight years, Snow Flower had suffered because of my blindness and ignorance. For the rest of my life—which has been nearly as many years as Snow Flower was when she died—I have lived with the regret.

But they were not done with me.

“She tried to please you in every way,” Lotus said, “even by doing bed business with her husband too soon after giving birth.”

“That’s not true!”

“Every time she lost a baby, you offered no more sympathy than her husband or mother-in-law,” Willow went on. “You always said that her only worth was from giving birth to sons, and she believed you. You told her to try again, and she obeyed.”

“This is what we are supposed to say,” I answered indignantly. “This is how we women give comfort—”

“But do you think those words were a consolation when she had lost another baby?”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t hear—”

“Try again! Try again! Try again!” Plum Blossom taunted. “Can you deny you said these things?”

I couldn’t.

“You demanded that she follow your advice on this and many other things,” Lotus picked up. “Then when she did, you criticized her—”

“You’re changing my meaning.”

“Are we?” Willow asked. “She talked about you all the time. She never said a bad word against you, but we heard the truth of what happened.”

“She loved you as a laotong should for everything that you were and everything you were not,” Plum Blossom concluded. “But you had too much man-thinking in you. You loved her as a man would, valuing her only for following men’s rules.”

Finished with one cycle, Lotus began another.

“Do you remember when we were in the mountains and she lost the baby?” she asked, in a tone that made me dread what was coming.

“Of course I remember.”

“She was already sick.”

“That’s not possible. The butcher—”

“Maybe her husband brought it on that day,” Willow admitted. “But the blood that burst from her body was black, stagnant, dying, and none of us saw a baby in that mess.”

Again, Plum Blossom finished. “We were here with her for many years, and this thing happened several more times. She was already quite sick when you sang your Letter of Vituperation.”

I hadn’t been able to argue successfully with them before. How could I argue this point now? The tumor had to have been growing for a very long time. Other things from back then fell into place: Snow Flower’s loss of appetite, her skin going so pale, and her loss of energy at the very moment when I was nagging her to eat better, pinch her cheeks to lure in more color, and do all of her expected chores to bring harmony to her husband’s home. And then I remembered that just two weeks back when I’d first arrived in this house, she’d apologized. I hadn’t done the same—not even when she was in her worst pain, not even when her death was imminent, not even when I was smugly telling myself I still loved her. Her heart had always been pure, but mine had been as shriveled, hard, and dry as an old walnut.

I sometimes think about those sworn sisters—all dead now, of course. They had to be careful in what they said to me, because I was Lady Lu. But they were not going to let me walk away from that house without knowing the truth.

I went home and retired to my upstairs chamber with the fan and a few saved letters. I ground ink until it was as black as the night sky. I opened the fan, dipped my brush into the ink, and made what I thought would be my final entry.

You who always knew my heart now fly above the clouds in the warmth of the sun. I hope one day we will soar together. I would have many years to consider those lines and do what I could to change all the harm I had caused to the person I loved most in the world.

Sitting Quietly

Regret

I AM NOW TOO OLD TO USE MY HANDS TO COOK, WEAVE, OR embroider, and looking at them I see the spots brought by living too many years, whether you work outside under the sun or are sheltered your whole life in the women’s chamber. My skin is so thin that pools of blood collect just under the surface where I bump into things or things bump into me. My hands are tired from grinding ink against the inkstone, my knuckles swollen from holding my brush. Two flies sit on my thumb, but I’m too weary to shoo them away. My eyes—the watery eyes of a very old lady—have been watering too much these past days. My hair—gray and thin—has fallen from the pins that should hold it in place beneath my headdress. When visitors come, they try not to look at me. I try not to look at them either. I have lived too long.

After Snow Flower died, I still had half of my life ahead of me. My rice-and-salt days were not over, but in my heart I began my years of sitting quietly. For most women, this begins with their husband’s death. For me, it began with Snow Flower’s death. I was “the one who has not died,” but things kept me from being completely still or quiet. My husband and family needed me to be a wife and mother. My community needed me to be Lady Lu. And then there were Snow Flower’s children, whom I needed—so that I could make amends to my laotong. But it’s hard to be truly generous and behave in a forthright manner when you don’t know how.

The first thing I did in the months immediately following Snow Flower’s death was to take her place in all her daughter’s wedding traditions and ceremonies. Spring Moon seemed resigned to the prospect of marriage, sad to be leaving home, uncertain—having seen the way her father treated her mother—about what lay in store for her. I told myself these were the kinds of things all girls worry about. But on her wedding night, after her new husband fell asleep, Spring Moon committed suicide by throwing herself in the village well.

“That girl not only polluted her new family but the entire village’s drinking water,” gossips whispered. “She was just like her mother. Remember that Letter of Vituperation?” That I had composed the letter that had ruined Snow Flower’s reputation raked across my conscience, so I hushed this talk whenever I heard it. Through my words, I became known as someone who was forgiving and charitable to the unclean, but I knew that in my first attempt to make things right with Snow Flower I had failed miserably. The day I wrote that girl’s death onto the fan was one of the worst of my life.

I next focused my efforts on Snow Flower’s son. Despite the lowest of circumstances and no support from his father, he had picked up a bit of men’s writing and was good at numbers. Nevertheless, he worked at his father’s side and had no more joy in his life than he had when he was younger. I met his wife, who still lived with her natal family. This time a good choice had been made. The girl became pregnant, but the thought that she would be falling into the butcher’s house pained me. Although it is not my way to interfere with the outer realm of men, I prevailed upon my husband—who had not only inherited Uncle Lu’s vast holdings but had added to them from the salt business profits and now had fields that stretched all way to Jintian—to find something for this young man to do besides slaughter pigs. He hired Snow Flower’s son to collect rents from the farmers and gave him a house with its own kitchen garden. Eventually the butcher retired, moved in with his son, and began doting on his grandson, who brought big joy to that home. The young man and his family were happy, but I knew that I still had not done enough to earn my way back to Snow Flower.

AT AGE FIFTY, when my monthly bleeding stopped, my life changed again. I experienced a shift from waiting on others to having others wait on me, though I certainly watched what they did and corrected them for anything not done to my satisfaction. But as I said, in my heart I was already sitting quietly. I became a vegetarian and abstained from such warm foods as garlic and wine. I contemplated religious sutras, practiced cleansing rituals, and hoped to renounce the polluting aspects of bed business. Although I had conspired my entire married life for my husband never to bring in a concubine, I looked at him and felt sympathy for him. He deserved the rewards of a lifetime of hard work. I did not wait for him to act—perhaps he never would have—but took it upon myself to find and bring into our home not one but three concubines to entertain him. By choosing them myself, I was able to prevent many of the jealousies and petty disagreements that usually arrive with pretty young women. I did not mind when they gave birth. And, in truth, my husband’s esteem grew in the village. He had proved that he could not only afford the women but that his chi was stronger than any man’s in the county.

My relationship with my husband turned into one of great companionship. He often came to the women’s chamber to drink tea and talk with me. The solace that he found in the quiet of the inner realm caused his worries about the chaos, instability, and corruption of the outer realm to melt away. We were more content together at this time than perhaps at any other in our entire lives. We had planted a garden, and it bloomed around us in so many ways. All of our sons married in. All of their wives proved to be fertile. Our home was merry with the sounds of grandchildren. We loved them, but there was one child not of my blood who interested me most of all. I wanted her near me.

In a little house in Jintian, the rent collector’s wife had given birth to a girl. I wanted that child—Snow Flower’s granddaughter—to become my eldest grandson’s wife. Age six is not too early for Contracting a Kin, if both families want to seal a betrothal for a prized couple, if the groom’s family is willing to begin delivering bride-price gifts, and if the bride’s family is poor enough to need them. I felt that we met all the conditions, and my husband—after thirty-two years of marriage, during which I had never caused him to be embarrassed or ashamed of me—was generous enough to grant me this request.

I sent for Madame Wang just as the girl’s feet were about to be bound. The old woman was escorted into the main room by two big-footed girls, which told me that even though other matchmakers now had more business, she had put away enough money to live well. Still, the years had not been kind to Madame Wang. Her face had wizened. Her eyes were white with blindness. She was toothless. She had very little hair. Her body had shrunk as her back hunched. She was so frail and deformed she could barely walk on her lily feet. I knew then that I didn’t want to live so long, yet here I am.

I offered tea and sweetmeats. We made small talk. I believed she didn’t remember who I was. I thought I could use this to my advantage. We chatted some more, then I came to the point.

“I’m looking for a good match for my grandson.”

“Shouldn’t I be speaking to the boy’s father?” Madame Wang asked.

“He is away and requested that I negotiate on his behalf.”

The old woman closed her eyes as she thought about this. Either that or she drifted off to sleep.

“I hear there is a good prospect in Jintian,” I went on loudly. “She is the daughter of the rent collector.”

What Madame Wang said next told me that she knew exactly who I was.

“Why not bring in the girl as a little daughter-in-law?” she asked. “Your threshold is very high. I’m sure your son and daughter-in-law would be happy with that arrangement.”

Actually, they were quite displeased with what I was doing. But what could they do? My son was a scholar. He had just passed the next level of the imperial examinations to become a juren at the very young age of thirty. Either his head was in the clouds or he was traveling the countryside. He rarely came home, and when he did it was with outlandish stories of what he’d seen: tall, grotesque foreigners with red beards, who had wives with waists so constricted that they couldn’t breathe and huge feet that flipflopped like just-caught fish. These tales aside, my son was filial and did what his father wanted, while my daughter-in-law had to obey me. Nevertheless, she had removed herself from these discussions entirely and retired to her room to weep.

“I’m not looking for a big-footed girl,” I said. “I want to marry in a girl who has the most perfect feet in the county.”

“This child has not begun that process. There are no guarantees—”

“But you have seen these feet, am I correct, Madame Wang? You are a good judge. What do you think the result will be?”

“The child’s mother may not know how to do a good job—”

“Then I will see to it myself.”

“You can’t bring the girl into this house if you intend a marriage,” Madame Wang said querulously. “It would be improper for your grandson to see his future wife.”

She had not changed, but then neither had I.

“You are right, Madame. I will visit the girl’s home.”

“That is hardly appropriate—”

“I will be visiting often. I have many things to teach her.” I watched Madame Wang mull that over. Then I leaned forward and covered the old woman’s hand with my own. “I believe, Auntie, that the girl’s grandmother would have approved.”

Tears welled in the matchmaker’s eyes.

“This girl will need to learn the womanly arts,” I continued hurriedly. “She will need to travel—not so far as to give her ambitions outside the women’s realm, but I think you would agree that she should visit the Temple of Gupo every year. They tell me there once was a man who made a special taro treat. I hear his grandson continues the legacy.”

I persisted in the negotiation, and Snow Flower’s granddaughter came under my protection. I personally bound her feet. I showed her all the mother love I could possibly give as I made her walk back and forth across the upstairs chamber of her natal home. Peony’s feet came to be perfect golden lilies, identical in size to my own. During the long months that Peony’s bones set, I visited her nearly every day. Her parents loved her very much, but her father tried not to think about the past and her mother did not know it. So I talked to the girl, weaving stories about her grandmother and her laotong, about writing and singing, about friendship and hardship.

“Your grandmother was born of an educated family,” I told her. “You will learn what she taught me—needlework, dignity, and, most important, our secret women’s writing.”

Peony was diligent in her studies, but one day she said to me, “My writing is crude. I hope you will be forgiving of me and it.”

She was Snow Flower’s granddaughter, but how could I not see myself in her too?

I SOMETIMES WONDER which was worse, watching Snow Flower or my husband die. Both suffered greatly. Only one had a funeral procession in which three sons went on their knees all the way to the grave site. I was fifty-seven when my husband went to the afterworld, too old for my sons to think about having me marry out again or even worry about whether or not I would be a chaste widow. I was chaste. I had been for many years, only now I was doubly a widow. I have not written much about my husband in these pages. All of that is in my official autobiography. But I will say this: He gave me reasons to continue day after day. I had to make sure his meals were provided. I had to think of clever things to amuse him. With him gone, I ate less and less. I no longer cared to be an exemplar of womanhood in the county. Days drifted into weeks. I forgot about time. I ignored the cycles of the seasons. Years folded into decades.

The problem with living so long is that you see too many people pass before you. I outlived nearly everyone—my parents, my aunt and uncle, my siblings, Madame Wang, my husband, my daughter, two of my sons, all of my daughters-in-law, even Yonggang. My eldest son became a gongsheng and then a jinshi scholar. The emperor himself read his eight-legged essay. As a court official, my son is away most of the time, but he has secured the Lu family’s position for generations to come. He is filial, and I know he will never forget his duties. He has even bought a coffin—big and lacquered—for me to rest in after I die. His name—along with those of his great-uncle Lu and Snow Flower’s great-grandfather—hangs in proud men’s characters in Tongkou’s ancestral temple. Those three names will be there until the building crumbles.

Peony is now thirty-seven, six years older than I was when I became Lady Lu. As the wife of my eldest grandson, she will become the new Lady Lu when I die. She has two sons, three daughters, and may yet have more children. Her eldest son married in a girl from another village. She recently gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. In their faces I see Snow Flower, but I also see myself. As girls we are told that we are useless branches, because we will not carry on our natal family names but only the names of the families we marry out to, if we are lucky enough to bear sons. In this way, a woman belongs to her husband’s family forever, whether she is alive or dead. All of this is true, and yet these days my contentment comes from knowing that Snow Flower’s and my blood will soon rule the house of Lu.

I have always believed the old saying that cautions, “A woman without knowledge is better than a woman with an education.” My entire life I tried to shut my ears to what happened in the outside realm and I didn’t aspire to learn men’s writing, but I did learn women’s ways, stories, and nu shu. Years ago, when I was in Jintian teaching Peony and her sworn sisters the strokes that make up our secret code, many women asked if I would copy down their autobiographies. I could not say no. Of course, I charged them a fee—three eggs and a piece of cash. I didn’t need the eggs or the money, but I was Lady Lu and they needed to respect my position. But it went beyond that. I wanted them to place a value on their lives, which for the most part were dismal. They were from poor and ungrateful families, who married them out at tender ages. They suffered the heartache of separation from their parents, the loss of children, and the indignities of having the lowest position in their in-laws’ homes, and far too many of them had husbands who beat them. I know a lot about women and their suffering, but I still know almost nothing about men. If a man does not value his wife upon marriage, why would he treasure her after? If he sees his wife as no better than a chicken who can provide an endless supply of eggs or a water buffalo who can bear an endless amount of weight upon its shoulders, why would he value her any more than those animals? He might appreciate her even less, since she is not as brave, strong, tolerant, or able to scavenge on her own.

Having heard so many stories, I thought of my own. For forty years, the past only aroused regret in me. Only one person ever truly mattered to me, but I was worse to her than the worst husband. After Snow Flower asked me to be an aunt to her children, she said—and these were the last words she ever spoke to me—”Though I was not as good as you, I believe that heavenly spirits joined us. We will be together forever.” So many times I’ve thought back on that. Was she speaking the truth? What if the afterworld has no sympathy? But if the dead continue to have the needs and desires of the living, then I’m reaching out to Snow Flower and the others who witnessed it all. Please hear my words. Please forgive me.

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

ONE DAY IN THE 1960S, AN OLD WOMAN FAINTED IN A RURAL Chinese train station. When the police searched her belongings in an effort to identify her, they came across papers with what looked to be a secret code written on them. This being the height of the Cultural Revolution, the woman was arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy. The scholars who came to decipher the code realized almost at once that this was not something related to international intrigue. Rather, it was a written language used solely by women and it had been kept a “secret” from men for a thousand years. Those scholars were promptly sent to labor camp.

I first came across a brief mention of nu shu when I wrote a review of Wang Ping’s Aching for Beauty for the Los Angeles Times. I became intrigued and then obsessed with nu shu and the culture that rose up around it. I discovered that few nu shu documents—whether letters, stories, weavings, or embroideries—have survived, since most were burned at grave sites for metaphysical and practical reasons. In the 1930s, Japanese soldiers destroyed many pieces that had been kept as family heirlooms. During the Cultural Revolution, the zealous Red Guard burned even more texts, then banned the local women from attending religious festivals or making the annual pilgrimage to the Temple of Gupo. In the following years, the Public Security Bureau’s scrutiny further diminished interest in learning or preserving the language. During the last half of the twentieth century, nu shu nearly became extinct, as the primary reasons that women used it disappeared.

After I chatted about nu shu in an e-mail with Michelle Yang, a fan of my work, she very sweetly took it upon herself to look up and then forward to me what she found on the Internet about the subject. That was enough for me to begin to plan a trip to Jiangyong (previously called Yongming) County, where I went in the fall of 2002, with the help of the brilliant and prudent planning of Paul Moore of Crown Travel. When I arrived, I was told I was only the second foreigner to go there, although I knew of a couple of others who had apparently flown under the radar. I can honestly say that this area is still as remote as ever. For this reason, I must thank Mr. Li, who not only was a great driver (which is hard to find in China) but who also proved to be very patient when his car got stuck in one muddy track after another as we traveled from village to village. I was extremely lucky to have Chen Yi Zhong as my interpreter. His friendly manner, eagerness to walk unannounced into houses, subtlety with the local dialect, familiarity with classical Chinese and history, and enthusiastic interest in nu shu—something that he had not known existed—helped make my journey especially fruitful. He translated conversations in alleys and kitchens, as well as nu shu stories that had been collected by the nu shu museum. (Let me now offer my appreciation to the director of that museum, who most generously opened display cases and let me peruse the collection.) I have relied on Chen’s colloquial translation of many things, including the Tang dynasty poem that Lily and Snow Flower wrote on each other’s bodies. Since this region is still closed to foreigners, it was necessary to travel in the company of a county official, also named Chen. He opened many doors, and his relationship with his bright, beautiful, and cherished daughter showed me more than any article or speech how the status of little girls has changed in China.

Together, Messieurs Li, Chen, and Chen took me by car, pony-pulled cart, sampan, and foot to see and do everything I wanted. We went to Tong Shan Li Village to meet Yang Huanyi, who was then age ninety-six and the oldest living nu shu writer. Her feet had been bound when she was a girl and she told me about that experience, as well as her wedding ceremonies and festivities. (Although anti-footbinding activities began in the late nineteenth century, the practice lingered in rural areas well into the twentieth. Only in 1951, when Mao Zedong’s armies finally liberated Jiangyong County, did the practice end in the nu shu region.)

Recently, the People’s Republic of China reversed its previous stance and now considers nu shu to be an important element of the Chinese people’s revolutionary struggle against oppression. To that end, the government is making an effort to keep the language alive by opening a nu shu school in Puwei. It was there that I met and interviewed Hu Mei Yue, the new teacher, and her family. She shared with me tales about her grandmothers and how they taught her nu shu.

Even today, the village of Tongkou is an extraordinary place. The architecture, paintings on the houses, and what remains of the ancestral temple all attest to the high quality of life that was once enjoyed by the people who lived there. Interestingly, although today the village is poor and remote by any measure, the temple lists four men from this area who became imperial scholars of the highest rank during the reign of Emperor Daoguang. Beyond what I learned in the public buildings, I would like to thank the many people of Tongkou who let me wander freely in their homes and answered endless questions. I’m also grateful to the people of Qianjiadong—believed to be the Thousand Family Village of Yao lore rediscovered by Chinese scholars in the 1980s—who also treated me as an honored guest.

On my first day back home, I sent an e-mail to Cathy Silber, a professor at Williams College, who in 1988 did field research on nu shu for her dissertation, to say how impressed I was that she had lived for six months in such an isolated and physically uncomfortable area. Since then, we have spoken by phone and through e-mail about nu shu, the lives of the women writers, and Tongkou. I was also helped tremendously by Hui Dawn Li, who answered countless questions about ceremonies, language, and domestic life. I am immensely grateful for their knowledge, openness, and enthusiasm.

I am deeply indebted to the works of several other scholars and journalists who have written about nu shu: William Chiang, Henry Chu, Hu Xiaoshen, Lin-lee Lee, Fei-wen Liu, Liu Shouhua, Anne McLaren, Orie Endo, Norman Smith, Wei Liming, and Liming Zhao. Nu shu relies heavily on standard phrases and images—such as “the phoenix squawks,” “a pair of mandarin ducks,” or “the heavenly spirits matched the two of us”—and I, in turn, have relied on the translations of those listed above. However, since this is a novel, I did not use the customary pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic rhyming scheme used in nu shu letters, songs, and stories.

For information on China, the Yao people, Chinese women, and footbinding, I would like to acknowledge the work of Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Benjamin A. Elman, Susan Greenhalgh, Beverley Jackson, Dorothy Ko, Ralph A. Litzinger, and Susan Mann. Finally, Yue-qing Yang’s evocative documentary, Nu-shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China, helped me to understand that many women in Jiangyong County are still living with the fallout of arranged, loveless marriages. All these people have their own well-established opinions and conclusions, but please remember Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a work of fiction. It doesn’t purport to tell everything about nu shu or explain all its nuances. Rather, it is a story that has been filtered through my heart, my experience, and my research. Put another way, all mistakes are my own.

Bob Loomis, my editor at Random House, once again showed himself to be patient, insightful, and thorough. Benjamin Dreyer, copy editor extraordinaire, offered some early and very good advice for which I am greatly obliged. Thank you to production editor Vincent La Scala, who shepherded the novel, and Janet Baker, who carefully read the manuscript. None of my work would see the light of day if it weren’t for my agent, Sandy Dijkstra. Her faith in me has been unwavering, while everyone in her office has been wonderful to work with, especially Babette Sparr, who handles my foreign rights and was the first person to read the manuscript.

My husband, Richard Kendall, gave me the courage to keep moving forward. This time around he also had to field questions from numerous people who, while I was away, kept asking him, “You let her go there by herself?” He had not thought twice about letting me follow my heart. My sons, Christopher and Alexander, who were physically apart from me during the writing of this book, continued to be as inspired and inspiring as a mother could ever wish for.

A final thank-you goes out to Leslee Leong, Pam Maloney, Amelia Saltsman, Wendy Strick, and Alicia Tamayac—all of whom took very good care of me when I was housebound with a serious concussion and drove me around Los Angeles to doctors’ appointments and on other errands during the three months I couldn’t drive. They are a living example of a sworn sisterhood and I truly could not have finished Snow Flower without them.