Daughter of the Bamboo Forest

by Sheng-Shih Lin;Julia Lin

  Little Jade stood there thinking hard. What was the seed and what was the fruit? What seeds were planted by my mother, by father? Does my mother ever think about me? Little Jade reached for her necklace, touching the pendant with the tips of her fingers. My mother wanted to protect me and watch me grow up. Father said so. She is out there, somewhere far away, with my younger sister. Even if I someday see my mother, will I be able to recognize her? Will she recognize me? Where is father? What if he doesn’t come back? Her thoughts stopped as she faced the bamboo forest in front of her.

  For the very first time, Little Jade was afraid to enter the bamboo forest. She knew that she would get lost among the bamboo shoots that had grown into slender trees since she was last there. There must be many more green bamboo snakes in the forest. Each bamboo branch would be occupied by a snake of matching color, waiting in the dark, its tongue darting like the thin red light at the tip of a burning incense stick. In the piles of rotted leaves, brown frogs with yellow stripes sang in one great throaty voice, while the black, shiny ear-shaped fungi listened. She was certain that if she went into the forest she would trip on the new shoots and lose her shoes. Her hair would become tangled in the poisonous spider’s web, and her cries would be drowned in the wind as the snakes ate her alive. Only the black ear fungus would hear her, but there was no one it could tell. There was no one to tell if she died. No one would ever find out. Little Jade was all by herself. The bamboo leaves were shrilling in the wind. There was no one to listen to her, to hold her hands. There was no one to comfort her, to braid her hair or to wipe clean her eyes and nose and the corners of her mouth.

  Little Jade didn’t know how long she had been standing there, but she finally stopped crying. She wiped her face with both sleeves. She rubbed her eyes with fingers still oily from the sweet red bean cake. She dug the tips of her shoes into the mossy ground, smearing the smooth green surface into dark shiny mud. She turned around and saw that the sun was high. The bright rays jabbed her eyes like needles. Her nose was stuffy and her face felt hot. Little Jade wanted to go back to her bed. She ran through the vegetable garden.

  As soon as Little Jade opened the back door, she heard unfamiliar voices in the family hall. Her heart leapt into her mouth as she walked toward the voices. Little Jade saw her father. He was kneeling next to the coffin, his face buried in his arms. He was crying. His new wife knelt next to him, talking to him in a low voice. She was wearing a turquoise gown. She offered the father her pink handkerchief. Her fingernails were narrow and long. They were painted dark red, the color of the strings of the dried red pepper hung by the kitchen door.

  No one noticed Little Jade, except the old nanny who went over to her and squatted down, facing her. She carefully picked off strands of hair that stuck to Little Jade’s cheeks and smoothed them behind her ears. Little Jade stood still, letting the old nanny fuss over her. She stared at her father who stood at the other side of the room. He was looking at her and so was his wife. Little Jade tried to smile at him. But he did not respond. The old nanny said, “Young Master and Mistress, why don’t you two go to your room and rest a while? You must be tired from the journey. I’ll take Little Jade to wash up.” The old nanny stood up, took Little Jade’s hand and walked out of the family hall. Little Jade turned around to get one last glimpse of her father, but he wasn’t looking at her any more.

  ***

  The honeymooners retired to their quarters. The servants took their luggage and placed it against the wall. An Ling and Silver Pearl occupied the West wing of the family compound. It was a connected suite of rooms along a sheltered corridor that faced the courtyard. An Ling took off his jacket and asked the maid to run a bath for him. Silver Pearl also demanded warm water to wash her face. It had been a long and dusty journey.

  Silver Pearl went into the bedroom and lay on the bed, facing the ceiling. She kicked off her shoes and let her toes stretch inside her silk stockings. She covered her face with her right hand. Five long red nails rested on her left cheek like bloody scratch marks. She closed her eyes, breathing in her own perfume. Tired, she lay perfectly still, nearly drifting off to sleep. The maid came in to inform her that the water was ready. She entered the bathroom, stood over the basin of steaming water, and splashed it on her face. She straightened up in front of the mirror, looking at her reflected image. Her skin was sallow and her lips were dry. She opened a jar of cream and spread it thickly over her face.

  Holding a hairbrush in her hand, Silver Pearl returned to the bedroom and saw her husband smoking a cigarette. He was listening to music from a hand-cranked phonograph machine, another purchase from the city.

  A single lamp illuminated half the bedroom. Dim yellow light caressed the bed, a watercolor landscape scroll hung on the wall, an ashtray on the night table. A pair of man’s leather slippers was placed beside the bed. An Ling sunk into the sofa, arms folded across his chest, his eyes half closed, listening to a woman’s low and throaty crooning:

  “Cannot forget, cannot forget you

  Cannot forget your mistakes

  Cannot forget the things you did

  Cannot forget the walks in the rain

  Cannot forget the embraces in the wind…”

  His eyelashes fluttered briefly and his brows knitted more tightly, but otherwise he sat motionless. The smoke of the cigarette was rising and rising, curling upward to heaven, but there were no prayers—there was nothing to tell.

  “Forgotten, forgotten

  the wind chime is telling me

  to forget, forget...you...”

  Who was he thinking of, Silver Pearl wondered as she watched the red spark fall from the tip of his cigarette, turned to gray ash.

  “An Ling.”

  Silver Pearl looked at her husband and called his name. He did not move. She let out a deep and lingering sigh. She was annoyed, but tried to suppress her irritation.

  “Why don’t you answer me?” she asked. “You’ve been lying there like a piece of wood. Why don’t you take a bath to wash off the dust? You will feel better.” She softened her voice. “An Ling, don’t be so quiet. You can tell me what’s on your mind. Are you thinking about your mother? You mustn’t. What happened, happened. You can’t change anything. An Ling, we must go on with our...”

  “Will you stop?”

  “Have I said something wrong? You shouldn’t keep things inside. Why don’t you talk to me?” An Ling opened his eyes. His brows were still knitted together. Even under the bright kerosene lamp, his face was dark—as if it was burning with a black fire from within. Silver Pearl fell silent immediately and sat in front of the vanity table. She massaged her cold-cream covered face with the tips of her fingers—something she had learned from a beauty salon in the city. When she was done, she wiped her fingers clean, picked up a pack of cigarettes, and lit one with a slim silver lighter.

  “An Ling, do you want another cigarette?”

  An Ling turned toward his wife and saw the reflection of her face in the mirror. It was covered in grease. He hesitated, and then said, “I’ll get my own.” He took a pipe and a silver box from a drawer, and scooped up some black paste into his pipe with a small silver spoon. Silver Pearl smiled and put her cigarette into the ashtray. She helped him to shape the black opium paste into small lumps, getting the opium lamp ready for him. The air soon became potent with the mixed scents of opium and cigarette smoke. This was the only time she could be helpful to him. He handed her his pipe and nodded, and she took in the sweet smelling smoke. It felt better than the smoke of a cigarette.

  In the haze of the opium smoke, images appeared to An Ling and disappeared in the air, distorted, changing. There was vast sunshine from another time. Someone was weeping under a quilt. And Mother, Mother’s hand approaching. In this vision, her face was sad, and her hair had the scent and warmth of his favorite pillow. As An Ling reached out to the image of his mother, her face changed, then disappeared, and the season changed. He murmured something to himself, and his arms encircled Silv
er Pearl’s waist pulling her closer to him.

  The man and the woman entangled in separate dreams. The night before his mother’s burial, the son wrestled with his past and future. The heaving of bodies could be heard from the family hall. The dead woman lay undisturbed in the coffin. Beside her, two monks chanted in unison, like a river flowing, never-ending and unhurried. Night grew deeper and the chanting went on, oblivious to the stifled groans from the bedroom.

  ***

  Funeral music came out of woodwind instruments. It sounded like the high-pitched wailing of a woman. Every now and then the gong rang solemnly, reaching the outer corners of the house, and startling the animals in the barn. The sun was bright. Little Jade could see a small band of musicians, dressed in white, performing in the front yard.

  Everyone was wearing a hooded mourning robe of white hemp. They stood in the family hall watching two men lower the lid onto the coffin and sealing it with long shining nails. The room was embarrassingly quiet. There were dark circles under Little Jade’s father’s eyes. He had not talked to his daughter, and he still avoided looking at her.

  “Gong! Gong! Gong!” The loud music and sound of hammering frightened Little Jade. Panicked, she began to cry. Everyone in the room turned to look at her. The old nanny took out her handkerchief and wiped Little Jade’s eyes. She too sobbed uncontrollably, her thin white hair loosened from her bun. She said, “Cry, Little Jade. Your grandmother is dead. Your poor grandmother, not even her own son sheds a tear for her.” She turned to An Ling and addressed him in a hoarse cry. “Where is your heart? You can’t even cry for your mother? Aren’t you ashamed? I should have hired mourners to cry at your mother’s funeral.”

  Soon the family hall was filled with the sound of An Ling’s weeping. It was a cleansing sound. The spirit of the dead rose from the coffin and drifted out of the house of Su, satisfied. She was heading toward the glorious west, riding on the incense smoke toward the bright light of heaven. There, she would be rewarded for all her chanting and suffering of her life past. The grandmother was buried on a sunny hillside. That night the sky was full of bright autumn stars.

  Chapter 7: Silver Pearl's Homecoming 1942

  An Ling suggested that she take Little Jade to stay with her parents while he went to collect rent money from the tenant farmers. Silver Pearl jumped at the chance to go home. Returning to her childhood home would be glorious, Silver Pearl thought. She would go back to her village as a rich man’s wife, a lady from the big house.

  Silver Pearl was carrying An Ling’s baby. It was too dangerous for a young pregnant woman and a child to stay in a big house without men, An Ling said—especially since bandits roamed all over the countryside these days. They would take just a bodyguard and a maid with them this time. The rest of the servants could choose to stay at the big house until their return or go back to their own homes.

  An Ling was thinking that this would be the first time he had looked after his inheritance since the death of his grandfather. He had finally picked up the burden of providing for his family.

  Silver Pearl was thinking about wearing her patent leather high-heeled shoes in her village. They would make her waist sway like a willow branch when she walked, as if she had bound feet. She would wear her leopard fur coat, a luscious golden fur with thick black dots. She could still fit into one of the gowns despite her larger waistline, thanks to an alteration that was made hastily by a tailor in the city. People would gather to watch as she disembarked from the horse-drawn wagon in front of her parents’ modest house. They would whisper to each other, “Who is this elegant city lady? What is she doing in our humble village?” They would not be able to recognize her with her new hair and her new clothes.

  She was returning home to her parents and to her father’s tofu shop where Silver Pearl grew up eating soft tofu and drinking soymilk. Her mother’s breasts had been dry after she gave birth. Silver Pearl’s father fed her by dipping a corner of a clean cotton handkerchief in soymilk for her to suck on. Her father said that Silver Pearl’s fine skin came from being a tofu man’s daughter. Silver Pearl thought that she had inherited her lovely skin from her mother.

  She had grown up in the tofu shop, helping out in the dark back room with the familiar smell of soybeans, seeing her father smiling and bowing to the customers, wearing cotton and never silk. Her younger brother was always tied to her back so her parents could work. It had never occurred to Silver Pearl that there was a way to live other than being the daughter of her parents in a tofu shop.

  Each day her mother had worked the counter while her father made deliveries. In the evenings, both parents worked in the backroom to make new batches of tofu for the next day. The shop sold a variety of tofu: dried brown squares for stir-frying; tofu skins the size of a a chopping board for making vegetarian rolls for Buddhists, and left over pieces that they shredded into tofu strings to be sold cheaply and by the handful next to the counter. Squares of tofu of different degrees of firmness were covered with cheesecloth and stacked high on wooden trays. A big bucket of steaming tofu pudding was scooped with a shallow ladle into customers’ bowls and topped off with ginger-flavored syrup and a sprinkle of crushed peanuts.

  Every night, Silver Pearl had fallen asleep with the smell of fermented soybean that soured the air. People called her father the Tofu Man. He was always happy and her mother never complained. But her mother’s once-beautiful hands became rough, and the skin on her fingertips split open into many small red slits in the wintertime. Silver Pearl remembered one day when her mother had finished working, and she was soaking her hands in a bucket of hot water. She had closed her eyes with such satisfaction that the corners of her mouth and eyes relaxed. Afterwards, she carefully wiped off the water with her blue apron and rubbed soybean oil on her hands. It was then that her mother told Silver Pearl that her father was not really her father, and about how she had met and married him.

  She had been a maid in a rich man’s house. She used to buy tofu when Silver Pearl’s father wheeled his cart by the back door of the mansion. When the young master made her pregnant, the mistress of the house gave her some money and sent her away. She ran into the tofu man in the market place, where she was wandering around with nowhere to go. He took her home and made her his wife, and Silver Pearl was born seven months later. She had had another child with the tofu man. The son had died in infancy. With the money she was given by the mistress of the big house, she helped the tofu man set up a shop in the center of the village. He no longer had to push the wheelbarrow cart.

  Silver Pearl remembered her mother telling her, “You are not a tofu man’s daughter. In your blood there is the fragrance of books and the nobility of a learned man. There is another life: a rich man’s life. I have lived inside such a man’s house. A house filled with mahogany furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were winding roads that weaved through many gardens, a garden for each court, and a carving of eight gods on a boat made of an entire tusk of ivory. There was a board game made of black and white jade pieces, a porcelain tea set trimmed with gold, and the library filled with different musical instruments. Out of the ancient harps flew winding melody. The master, your real father, used to teach me to sing poems. I used to sing this song for him:

  “When the moon lit up the empty sea,

  Mermaids’ tears turned into pearls.

  When the sun warmed the Blue Acre Mountain,

  Smoke steamed from the rocks of jade.

  Such feelings should be remembered for the days to come,

  Yet even then it was already in vain.”

  Silver Pearl remembered that her mother sang in a sweet low voice, and her face flushed with memories. Silver Pearl knew the reason she had been given her name: to signify that she is a pearl of a girl and her mother’s only precious jewel.

  Listening to her mother, Silver Pearl closed her eyes, imagining herself a real princess lost in the chaos of changing dynasties. She imagined that in her veins flowed imperial royal blood from the previou
s dynasty. She smiled when imagining a shining pearl covered with dust in the back room of the tofu shop. Silver Pearl was unwilling to be poor all her life. She did not want to live the fate of a tofu man’s daughter.

  When Silver Pearl was ten, her mother took her to a fortune-teller in the market place. Silver Pearl held her baby brother while her mother haggled with the farmers over the prices of vegetables. Then her mother noticed a small banner of yellow fabric with three large black characters written on it: “Iron-Mouth Wu.” An old man in a dirty, faded blue gown, with a waxy yellow face and the beard of a mountain goat, was sitting on a bench, reading a book with a torn cover. Silver Pearl’s mother went over and bowed, and said, “Mr. Fortune teller, Sir, please tell me my daughter’s fortune.”

  The fortune-teller lifted his head slowly. “A girl? You want to know your daughter’s fortune? How about the fortune of your son?” Silver Pearl remembered traces of red in his turgid eyes.

  Her mother put her basket of food on the ground, and picked up her son from Silver Pearl’s arms, patting his back. “No, Sir, I want to know my daughter’s fortune.”

  “Very well. Little girl, come closer so I can look at you carefully.”

  Silver Pearl peered at the fortuneteller distrustfully. Her mother freed one of her hands and pushed her toward the fortuneteller, saying, “Don’t be shy. Let Mr. Fortuneteller take a good look at you.”

  “Her eyebrows are like willow leaves, her forehead open and high. Her eyes move fast like poured mercury. Her nose is straight and her nostrils hidden. Her lips open a gap, not too bad. Her ears are close to her head, a sign of modesty. She doesn’t look like she’s from a poor family.”