As I piled the broken branches against my bare chest, I felt every scrape, prick, and stab from the rough bark and sharply pointed twigs. Welcoming the punishment, I heaped the sticks high, carried them into the kitchen.
From inside the common room, I could hear my wife and sister-in-law over the loud pounding of my heart: Bo See was stammering an increasingly muddled explanation, Third Sister-in-law giggling ever harder. Long before day’s end, all four of our sisters-in-law and my brothers were laughing at us. Nor had they let up in the years since.
They were always joking that Bo See favored me while serving at meals. Then they’d twit me if I tried to defend her. They also teased whenever they saw us helping each other with a chore or if they caught me saving Bo See a slice of sweet fruit or bringing her a flower.
Our sisters-in-law once went so far as to ask Bo See, amidst titters, if the reason for our childlessness was because she drank from my rod. My brothers, no less bold, jovially advised me to stop weakening my seed through too frequent loveplay.
How Bo See and I envied women who openly lived together like husband and wife. These couples, as women, could express their affection for each other with the same impunity as good friends. No one raised so much as an eyebrow when they sat side-by-side, linked arms, or walked hand-in-hand in the streets, leaning into each other. Last year, one couple even decorated an altar to Gwoon Yum with love poems, then vowed before the Goddess, their kinfolk, and friends that they would never part.
Later, in the privacy of our sleeping room, Bo See and I had fed each other the couple’s sweet bridal cakes and dreamtalked of enjoying similar freedom ourselves. Now, bound and gagged in the bottom of my kidnappers’ boat, I vowed to Fook Sing Gung, the God of Luck, that if he helped restore me to my wife, I would be content with what we had, never again wish for more.
WHEN ACCOMPANYING BA or my brothers to market as a small boy, I could easily mark our journey by sounds and smells alone. Women’s chatter, the laughter and cries of children, the slap of clothes against rock would signify we were passing a village, and after I counted three, I’d listen for the waterwheel’s creak that marked the fork in the river. Then deliciously fragrant smoke from street vendors cooking over small clay stoves and the clash of cymbals, high-pitched fluting of pipes, and beating of gongs from street performers would herald our approach to town. Going home, the comforting aroma from the eucalyptus trees lining Strongworm’s riverbank would foretell our arrival.
Imprisoned beneath the planking of my kidnappers’ sampan, I realized that no matter how strong a smell managed to find its way through the cracks in the decking, the stink within would overpower it. And the dull throbbing in my head had long ago become a hammering that excluded all other sounds. I did, however, feel a series of jolts that suggested a poorly handled docking. Moments later, the board directly above my head rose into blinding light.
As I blinked, thick fingers dug into my arms and hauled me up. I didn’t need sight to know it was the two strongmen who held me fast. Squinting, I made out a lantern swinging from the wizened, long-robed kidnapper’s skeletal hand.
Suddenly, he lunged towards me, and in his lantern’s glow, I caught the glimmer of a knifeblade. Shrinking within, I let out a shriek that died in a horrible gurgle behind my wooden gag and swollen tongue.
His lips spread in a malicious leer; his eyes glittered like the knifepoint he was aiming at my throat. Bearing down until I jerked at its sharpness, he hissed, “Give us any—I repeat any trouble, and this will be your fate.”
“You don’t understand, my sister will ransom me!”
But it was I who did not understand. For although he had ripped the wooden gag from my mouth, I couldn’t utter anything louder or more articulate than strangled mewls. When he slashed the bindings from my wrists, my arms lacked any strength. Likewise, my feet and legs could not support me after they were freed.
Nor were we at a dock, as I had supposed, but alongside a vessel. I was forced to board by the strongmen lifting me from below while a pair above gripped my shoulders and arms, hoisted me over the side, and dragged me to an open hatch.
“Get below.”
“Be quick about it!”
Mindful of my kidnapper’s threat, I attempted to obey. But there was no lantern near, the moon in the night sky was young, and neither my eyes nor my benumbed feet could find a ladder.
The instant the strongmen released me, then, I fell. And the shock, the impact of ankles, knees, elbows, and skull hitting hardwood in quick succession was piercing.
In the pitch black hold, murmured warnings flitted like spirits.
“Move.”
“Get out of the way.”
“Hurry.”
I tried but could not. Hands fumbled against my pants, grabbed a leg, a corner of my jacket, a sleeve, a shoulder, then pulled me deeper into the darkness just as a body, tumbling through the hatch, slammed the deck with a jarring thud, a garbled grunt.
There were more whispered warnings. Sounds of shuffling, dragging. Sobs. Faint groans that were somehow all the more awful for being muted.
Another body toppled down.
No sooner did flesh and bone thump then a heavy grate clanged over the hatch. While it was yet reverberating, a metal bolt rasped. As it locked into place, the sobs intensified, and it seemed to me I heard Bo See’s cries as well as my own.
MY FATHER NAMED me Bo See, Precious Silk, because I was born in a cocoonlike caul. But my family called me Bo Bo, Doubly Precious.
When matchmakers began approaching my parents with offers, my father refused to give them a hearing, saying, “I believe our Bo Bo has a nonmarrying fate.” He even declared, “Once Bo Bo becomes a sworn spinster, I’ll give her the rights of a son. While living, she can remain at home. After she dies, her spirit tablet will be placed on the family altar to be honored by future generations.”
The rest of our family supported his proposal with an enthusiasm many a daughter would envy. Having become “Bo Bo” only after I had increased our profits, I understood my family’s affection was more for my ability to raise healthy silkworms than for me. Besides, I wanted a husband to share my bed so I could have babies that would grow in my belly and suckle at my breasts.
To my relief, my father could not force me to become a sworn spinster. Those vows, a lifelong commitment to independence, must be made of a girl’s free will. Unlike spinsters who can simply exchange baskets of peanut-candies, honey, and other sweets to signify their desire to live together as husband and wife, however, custom prevented me from arranging a marriage for myself. Nor could I compel my parents to find a husband for me.
Or could I?
THERE WERE TWO fortunetellers in our village, one blind and the other sighted. Each used a different method of augury: The blind man made careful calculations based on a person’s month, day, and hour of birth; the sighted one divined fates with the help of a little black bird that he carried around in a dainty bamboo cage.
These fortunetellers operated in opposite corners of the temple courtyard. The blind man, on hearing a client’s particulars, raised his gnarled fingers one by one, pursed his lips, and stroked his beard thoughtfully before issuing his pronouncements. The sighted man folded papers of obscure text that he tossed into the air and let fall helter-skelter. Then he pressed his already flat nose against the narrow bars of the bamboo cage and, directing his bird to show him his client’s fate, he unlatched the gate.
Inside the cage, the bird would hop off its perch, flutter its wings, and fly through the opening. Once out, it might flit from paper to paper, study several with its head cocked, or select one instantly. Always, though, the bird would stab its beak between the folds of a paper, fly to its master, and the fortuneteller, unfolding the paper, would smooth out the creases, read the few lines of text out loud, and divine their meaning for that particular client.
I gave this fortuneteller two folded papers which required no interpretation beyond their color: white for the purity o
f spinsters; wedding red. I also ensured the bird’s choice by hiding grain in the folds of the red.
After the fortuneteller decreed I had a marrying fate, my parents stopped turning away matchmakers. But my father set my bride price so high that had it not been for Moongirl’s generosity, I might yet be unwed and raising silkworms for his profit. Certainly I wouldn’t have known the happiness of lying with Ah Lung, and I thanked the God of Luck daily for my good fortune.
MY HEAD LEADEN as the patch of sky overhead, I strove to piece together what little I’d noticed during my transfer from the sampan.
The strongmen who’d hauled me on board had merely leaned over the side. So the main deck couldn’t be more than two or three feet above water. They’d taken maybe four strides to reach the hatch, which looked about two-and-a-half to three feet square. The gloom in the recesses of the hold made its size impossible to assess with any accuracy, but the muffled rumble of talk and fitful sobs within indicated the presence of many captives. So its length was likely several times its width, and its height had to be the same as the ladder I’d been unable to use last night: perhaps seven feet, at most eight.
Surely a vessel this slender and shallow was meant for rivers rather than oceans. Then it couldn’t be a devil-ship, could it?
From the talk of the men within earshot, I knew the boat had been negotiating narrow channels and streams for days, picking up captives from isolated spots where there were no human sounds except their own. And during the night, the boat had dashed one way, then swung round to the sound of sails flapping, cracking taut, only to turn again after another glide, indicating we were still in the network of rivers that webbed the Pearl River Delta.
Since those pursuing the gentry’s rewards for the capture of man-stealers were probably in these rivers, too, I’d prayed that the Goddess Gwoon Yum in her boat of mercy would guide these reward-seekers to save us. But for some time now the boat had not veered at all, and I feared we’d come to open sea and were beyond rescue.
If any of the men around me noted this change, they did not reveal it. Probably the two sharp-boned captives from the sampan couldn’t yet speak any more than I, and with at least as many lumps and bruises as myself, they seemed absorbed in their discomfort, awkwardly shifting positions with throaty groans.
A young master wearing silk was huddled by the ladder, as he had been since daybreak. His eyes, swollen red, were leaking tears, and he was opening and shutting his bloodless lips like a hooked fish.
The air even slightly away from the grated hatch was thick and heavy, but the glare directly under it was fierce despite the sunless sky. Incredibly, the young master had a servant, an elderly man with stooped shoulders, who was hovering over him with a borrowed straw hat, waving it up and down, creating both shade and breeze—doubtless easing the smells of vomit, shit, and piss as well.
On the other side of the ladder squatted three gamblers and a morose man with wisps of gray hair sprouting from his chin. Earlier, these gamblers—Sleepy, Toothless, and Big Belly—had boasted to the morose graybeard that they could sniff out cardsharks. Now they were explaining how they’d come to follow a man-stealer onto a large hulk fitted up as a gambling hall.
“He was dressed as poorly as us,” Toothless said.
“None of us had seen him before.” Sleepy’s eyelids drooped. Bracing his elbows on his knees, he supported his head with his hands and dragged out each word more slowly than the last. “We were strangers to each other, too.”
“You know how it is,” Big Belly cut in. “This man was offering three times the amount staked to whoever guessed the right number of seeds in the orange he held, and there was a big crowd around him. That’s what caught my eye.
“Then the man offered me the orange to examine, and I couldn’t pass up the chance for a big win. I’d been listening to everybody place their bets, see, and soon as I held that orange in my hands, I knew they’d guessed wrong. How? Because it was loose-skinned, and from my experience the looser the skin, the greater the number of seeds!”
Toothless snorted; Sleepy wheezed.
Big Belly slapped his oddly puny chest. “I won, didn’t I?”
“If you call this winning, yeah,” Sleepy drawled.
Toothless guffawed.
“Alright. Alright.” Big Belly cracked his knuckles as though he wished they were the heads of those who mocked him. “So I believed that snake when he said he knew a place where I could double my winnings. But the two of you begged to come along.”
Sleepy hung his head. Toothless mumbled something in a bitter tone. The morose graybeard sighed heavily. Because the gamblers’ foolishness reminded him of his own? Or because our fates as piglets were sealed?
EVEN GIRLS WITH nonmarrying fates must follow the proper order of eldest to youngest in all things. So Moongirl, younger than my husband by almost an hour, had to wait until the autumn after Ah Lung and I married to make her vows of spinsterhood.
By custom, girls make these vows before Seh Gung, the Community Grandfather, whose altar is never in a temple but out in the open at the edge of a village. And because vows of spinsterhood include a commitment to lives of purity, girls making them scrub their faces and wear plain cotton jackets and pants instead of making themselves attractive like brides with powder, elaborate headdresses, and embroidered silks; the ceremony is held at first light when no man is yet abroad; only sworn spinsters and girls like themselves can attend.
Before my marriage, I’d witnessed two friends, Ah Gum and Ah Lan, make their vows. There’d been such a thick mist that the palms behind Seh Gung’s stone altar had barely been visible, and our every breath had steamed in the chill. Shivering, I’d burrowed deeper into the huddle of witnesses while Ah Gum and Ah Lan, bustling between baskets and altar, unpacked, placed a small statue of the Goddess Gwoon Yum on Seh Gung’s altar, and arranged offerings of wine, rice, and fruit. Then they set out candles and incense and lit them.
Unlike brides who have someone else transform their girlish bangs and braids into womanly buns, girls who become spinsters ceremonially comb up their hair themselves to signify their independence. For days, I’d watched Ah Lan and Ah Gum practice. Now, as waxy, fragrant smoke from the candles and incense wafted up to Heaven, they each nimbly unfastened their braids, letting loose ribbons of black hair that shone in the flames’ glow.
Three times they ran their combs from scalp to waist and, in voices smooth and strong as each stroke, asked for Heaven’s blessings: “First comb, comb to the end. Second comb, may my brother enjoy bountiful wealth and many children. Third comb, may my parents and friends enjoy wealth, happiness, and long life.”
Then, dipping their fingers into a jar of sticky pow fa, they applied just the right amount to hold together their hair for braiding, weaving, and pinning. The final strands and pins in place, they vowed to remain unmarried and pure, sought the blessings and protection of Seh Gung and Gwoon Yum, turned to receive our congratulations. Afterward, we celebrated at a banquet that was paid for by their families and included relatives and neighbors as well as friends.
The dishes served at such banquets are not costly. But Moongirl’s parents, having spent the last of her savings on a wedding banquet for Ah Lung and myself, could not even purchase the long buns that families pass out as invitations. And although Moongirl, in the silk season just past, had earned enough as a reeler to pay for a banquet, she had other plans for her money.
I WAS WAKENED by a sense of movement and mutterings in the hold, shouts from above. Rubbing away the sleep crusting my eyes, I peered up at the hatch. The grating was gone, and against a star-studded sky was a face too shadowed to make out, a narrow, swift-moving blur that vanished with the unmistakable thwack of a cane, another harsh shout: “Up on deck!”
Around me, the activity intensified, stirring up particular odors from the general stench. The air scraped my parched throat like sand, and I became aware of the furriness of my tongue, still tender and somewhat swollen, the bitter aftertast
e of yesterday’s rice flavored with shrimp paste. I realized the boat was at anchor.
“Fai-dee-ah, hurry!”
Someone started up the ladder. Others stumbled after him. Frightened by what awaited us above as well as stiff and sore, I dragged myself upright but made no move to follow.
From somewhere beyond the boat came a plaintive call, “Ah Jai, son! Ah Jai!”
Crying, “Ba,” Young Master dashed up the ladder.
More swiftly than I’d thought possible, his elderly servant likewise disappeared through the hatch, setting off a rush for the ladder, a buzz of speculation. How had Young Master’s father found him? Was he a man of sufficient generosity and influence to secure freedom for the rest of us, too?
Shoved deep into the hold, I could no longer hear anything except tramping feet, and I fretted that Young Master’s father would only save those he could see, that he and those he rescued would be long gone before I reached the deck. I berated myself for having hung back, I wondered whether we were someplace where Moongirl might also know to come and ransom me. Certainly we couldn’t be in a foreign land, not this fast, could we?
Finally able to throw myself onto the ladder behind Big Belly, I seized what felt like a rung.
“Wai!” Big Belly protested.
Recognizing my mistake, I released his sandaled feet, fumbled for the sides of the ladder, made my ascent.
As my head poked through the hatch, fresh salt air swirled over me, cleansing. Another two steps and the stuffy heat of the hold gave way to pre-dawn cool, making me shiver; I was struck blind by a blaze of lanterns.
Desperate to adjust my eyes so I could find Young Master and his father, I halted and blinked.
A hand whipped out, snatched my queue, hauled me up the ladder’s final rungs. “Didn’t I say hurry?”
At the hot spikes of pain shooting through my skull and neck, I howled, earning a stinging cuff to my ear that would have knocked me over were it not for the strongman’s grip on my queue. Deafened, I staggered, hoping Young Master and his father would appear in the flashes of captives, masts, Sleepy slouching through the hatch onto the deck. . . .
God of Luck Page 2