by Lisa See
I listened very hard as the woman addressed someone upstairs. Then my ears heard the impossible—Snow Flower’s voice speaking in its most stubborn and argumentative tone. Shocked, that’s how I felt, utterly shocked. But beyond this one familiar sound, the house itself was eerily quiet. And in that silence I sensed something lurking like an evil spirit from the afterworld. My whole body resisted this experience. My skin crawled in revulsion. I shivered in my water-green silk outfit, which I’d worn to impress Snow Flower’s parents but which offered no protection against the damp wind that blew through the window or the fear I felt to be in this strange, dark, smelly, scary place.
Snow Flower emerged at the top of the stairs. “Come up,” she called down to me.
I stood paralyzed, trying desperately to absorb what I was seeing. Something touched my sleeve and I started.
“I don’t think the master would want me to leave you here,” Yonggang said, her face a mask of worry.
“The master knows where I am,” I responded, without thinking.
“Lily.” Snow Flower’s voice had a quality of sad desperation to it I had never heard before.
Then a memory from just a few days ago flashed in my mind. My mother had told me that as a woman I couldn’t avoid ugliness and I had to be brave. “You have promised to be united for life,” she’d said. “Be the lady you were meant to be.” She hadn’t been talking about bed business with my husband. She’d been talking about this. Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for the person who was my husband. This was the true meaning of a laotong relationship.
I took a step and heard something like a whimper from Yonggang. I didn’t know what to do. I had never had a servant before. I patted her shoulder hesitatingly. “Go along.” I tried to sound like a mistress should, however that was. “I will be fine.”
“If you need to leave for any reason, just step outside and call for help,” Yonggang suggested, still concerned. “Everyone here knows Master and Lady Lu. People will take you back to your in-laws’ home.”
I reached out and took the basket from her hand. When she didn’t budge, I nodded at her to move along. She sighed in resignation, bowed quickly, backed herself to the threshold, turned, and left.
With my basket gripped firmly in my hand, I climbed the stairs. As I neared Snow Flower, I saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears. Like the servant woman, she was dressed in gray, ill-fitting, and badly repaired padded clothes. I stopped one stair below the landing.
“Nothing has changed,” I said. “We are old sames.”
She took my hand, helped me up the final step, and led me into the women’s chamber. I could see that it too had been lovely at one time. It was perhaps three times the size of the women’s chamber in my natal home. Instead of vertical bars on the lattice window, an intricately carved wooden screen covered the opening. Otherwise, the room was empty but for a spinning wheel and a bed. The beautiful woman I had seen downstairs, her hands folded neatly in her lap, perched gracefully on the edge of the bed. Her peasant clothes couldn’t disguise her breeding.
“Lily,” Snow Flower said, “this is my mother.”
I crossed the room, linked my hands together, and bowed to the woman who had brought my laotong into this world.
“You must forgive our circumstances,” Snow Flower’s mother said. “I can only offer you tea.” She rose. “You girls have much to talk over.” With that, she swayed out of the room with the sublime grace that comes from feet perfectly bound.
When I left my natal home four days ago, tears had poured down my face. I was sad, happy, and afraid all at the same time. But now, as I sat with Snow Flower on her bed, I saw on her cheeks tears of remorse, guilt, shame, and embarrassment. I longed to yell at her, Tell me! Instead, I waited for the truth, realizing that each word from Snow Flower’s lips would cause her to lose whatever face she had left.
“Long before you and I met,” Snow Flower said at last, “my family was one of the best in the county. You can see”—she gestured around her helplessly—“this once was glorious. We were very prosperous. My great-grandfather the scholar received many mou from the emperor.”
I listened, my mind spinning.
“When the emperor died, my great-grandfather fell out of favor, so he came home to retire. Life was good. When he died, his son, my grandfather, took over. My grandfather had many workers and many servants. He had three concubines, but they gave him only daughters. My grandmother finally bore a son and secured her place. They married in my mother for that son. People said she was like Hu Yuxiu, who was so talented and charming she had attracted an emperor. My father wasn’t an imperial scholar, but he was educated in the classics. People said of him that he would one day be the headman of Tongkou. Mama believed it. Others saw a different future. My grandparents recognized in my father the weakness of having been raised as the only son in a house with too many sisters and too many concubines, while my aunt suspected that he was cowardly and susceptible to vice.”
Snow Flower’s eyes were distant as she relived a past that no longer existed. “Two years after I was born, my grandparents died,” she continued. “My family had everything—stunning clothes, plentiful food, lots of servants. My father took me on trips; my mother took me to the Temple of Gupo. I saw and learned a lot as a girl. But my father had to take care of Grandfather’s three concubines and marry out his four sisters by blood and the five half sisters who had come from the concubines. He also had to provide work, food, and shelter for the field workers and the house servants. Marriages for his sisters and half sisters were arranged. My father tried to show everyone what a big man he was. Each bride-price was more extravagant than the last. He began to sell fields to the big landowner in the west of our province so he could pay for more silk or for another pig to be slaughtered as a bride-price. My mother—you saw her—she is beautiful on the outside but inside she is much like I was before I met you: pampered, sheltered, and ignorant about women’s work other than embroidery and nu shu. My father . . .” Snow Flower hesitated, then blurted out, “My father took to the pipe.”
I remembered back to the day that Madame Gao had made such a nuisance of herself talking about Snow Flower’s family. She’d mentioned gambling and concubines but also that Snow Flower’s father had taken to the pipe. I was nine years old. I had thought he smoked too much tobacco. Now I realized not only that Snow Flower’s father had fallen victim to the opium pipe, but that everyone in the upstairs women’s chamber that day, except for me, had known exactly what Madame Gao was talking about. My mother knew, my aunt knew, Madame Wang knew. They had all known, yet every one of them had agreed that this common knowledge should not be shared with me.
“Is your father still alive?” I asked tentatively. Surely she would have told me if he’d died, but then again—given all her other lies—maybe not.
She nodded but offered nothing more.
“Is he downstairs?” I asked, thinking of the strange and disgusting smell that had pervaded the main room.
Her features went very still; then she lifted her eyebrows. I took this to mean yes.
“The turning point came with the famine,” Snow Flower resumed. “Do you remember that? We hadn’t met yet, but there was a particularly bad crop followed by a very cruel winter.”
How could I forget? The best we’d eaten was rice gruel flavored with dried turnips. Mama was frugal, Baba and Uncle barely ate, and we had survived.
“My father was not prepared,” Snow Flower admitted. “He smoked his pipe and forgot about us. One day my grandfather’s concubines left. Maybe they went back to their natal homes. Maybe they died in the snow. No one knows. By the time spring arrived, only my parents, my two brothers, my two sisters, and I lived in the house. On the surface we still had our elegant life, but in actuality the debt collectors were beginning to visit us regularly. My father sold off more fields. Finally, we had only the house. By then he cared more for his pipe tha
n he did for us. Before he would pawn the furniture—oh, Lily, you can’t imagine how pretty everything was—he thought he would sell me.”
“Not as a servant!”
“Worse. As a little daughter-in-law.”
This had always been the most horrible thing I could imagine: not having your feet bound, being raised by strangers who had to be of such low morals that they didn’t want a proper daughter-in-law, being treated lower than a servant. And now that I was married I understood the most terrible aspect of this life. You might be nothing but a bit of bed business for any male who lived in the household.
“We were saved by my mother’s sister,” Snow Flower said. “After you and I became laotong, she arranged a so-so match for my elder sister. She does not come here anymore. Later my aunt sent my elder brother to apprentice in Shangjiangxu. Today my younger brother works in the fields for your husband’s family. My younger sister died, as you know—”
But I didn’t care about people I had never met and had only heard lies about. “What happened to you?”
“My aunt changed my future with scissors, cloth, and alum. My father objected, but you know Auntie Wang. Who’s going to say no to her once she’s made a decision?”
“Auntie Wang?” My mind reeled. “You mean our Auntie Wang, the matchmaker?”
“She is my mother’s sister.”
I pressed my fingers to my temples. The very first day I met Snow Flower and we went to the Temple of Gupo, she had addressed the matchmaker as Auntie. I thought she’d done this out of courtesy and respect, and from then on I’d also used the honorific when I spoke to Madame Wang. I felt stupid and foolish.
“You never told me,” I said.
“About Auntie Wang? That was the one thing I thought you knew.”
The one thing I thought you knew. I tried to absorb those words.
“Auntie Wang saw right through my father,” Snow Flower went on. “She understood he was weak. She looked at me too. She read in my face that I did not like to obey, that I didn’t pay attention, that I was hopeless in the arts of home care, but that my mother could teach me embroidery, how to dress, how to act in front of a man, our secret writing. Auntie is only a woman, but as a matchmaker she is also business-minded. She saw where things were headed for our family and for me. She began looking for a laotong match, hoping it would send a good message through the countryside that I was educated, loyal, obedient—”
“And marriageable,” I concluded. This was true for me as well.
“She searched the county, traveling far outside her usual matchmaking territory until she heard about you from the diviner. Once she met you, she decided to hitch my fate to yours.”
“I don’t understand.”
Snow Flower smiled ruefully. “You were headed up and I was going down. When you and I first met, I didn’t know anything. I was supposed to learn from you.”
“But you’re the one who taught me. Your embroidery has always been better than mine. And you knew the secret writing so well. You trained me to live in a home with a high threshold—”
“And you taught me how to haul water, wash clothes, cook, and clean the house. I have tried to teach my mother, but she sees things only as they were.”
I had sensed already that Snow Flower’s mother held on to a past that no longer existed, but having just heard Snow Flower tell her family story, I think my laotong also saw things through the happy veil of memory. Knowing her for all those years, I knew she believed in the idea that the women’s inner realm should be beautiful and without worry. Perhaps she thought things would somehow go back to the way they once were.
“From you I learned what I needed to know for my new life,” Snow Flower said, “except that I have never been able to clean as well as you.”
True, she had never been good at it. I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realized it was easier for her mind to glide through the air far above the clouds than to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes.
“But your house is much larger and harder to clean than mine, and you were just a girl in your hair-pinning years,” I argued stupidly, trying to make her feel better. “You had—”
“A mother who could not help me, a father who was an opium addict, and brothers and sisters who left one by one.”
“But you’re marrying—”
Suddenly I recalled that last day when Madame Gao had come into the upstairs chamber and I witnessed her final argument with Madame Wang. What had she said about Snow Flower’s betrothal? I tried to remember what I knew about the arrangement, but Snow Flower rarely if ever talked about her future husband; she rarely if ever showed us any of her bride-price gifts. We had seen bits and pieces of cotton and silk that she was working on, true, but she always said these were everyday projects like shoes for herself. Nothing fancy.
A frightening thought began to formulate in my mind. Snow Flower had to be marrying out into a very low family. The question was, just how low?
Snow Flower seemed to read my thoughts. “Auntie did the best she could for me. I’m not marrying a farmer.”
That hurt a little, since my father was a farmer.
“He’s a merchant then?” A merchant would have a dishonorable profession, but he might be able to restore some of Snow Flower’s lost circumstances.
“I will be marrying out to nearby Jintian Village, just as Auntie Wang said, but my husband’s family”—again she hesitated—“they are butchers.”
Waaa! This was the worst marriage possible! Snow Flower’s new husband would have some money, but what he did was unclean and disgusting. In my mind I replayed everything from the last month as we’d prepared for my wedding. In particular I recalled how Madame Wang had stayed at Snow Flower’s side, offering comfort, quietly cajoling. Then I remembered the matchmaker telling “The Tale of Wife Wang.” With deep shame I saw that the story had not been meant for me at all but for Snow Flower.
I didn’t know what to say. I had heard the truth in snippets, ever since I was nine, but had chosen not to believe or acknowledge it. Now I thought, Isn’t it my duty to make my laotong happy? Make her forget these troubles? Make her believe that everything will be fine?
I put my arms around her. “At least you will never go hungry,” I said, although I turned out to be wrong about that. “There are worse things that can happen to a woman,” I said, but I couldn’t think what they could be.
She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed. A moment later, she roughly pushed me away. Her eyes were wet with tears, but I saw not sadness in them but wild ferocity.
“Don’t pity me! I don’t want it!”
Pity had not entered my mind. I felt sick with confusion and sadness. Her letter to me had ruined my enjoyment of my wedding. Her not showing up for the reading of my third-day wedding books had deeply wounded me. And now this. Under all my turmoil simmered the feeling that Snow Flower had betrayed me. For all our nights together, why hadn’t she told me the truth? Was it that she honestly didn’t believe what her fate was to be? That because in her mind she was always flying away, she thought this would happen in real life too? Did she truly believe that our feet would leave the ground and our hearts would actually soar with the birds? Or was she just trying to save face by keeping her many secrets, believing this day would never come?
Maybe I should have been angry at Snow Flower for lying to me, but that’s not what I felt. I had believed I had been plucked for a special future, which made me too self-centered to see what was directly in front of me. Wasn’t it my lack as a friend—as a laotong—that had prevented me from asking Snow Flower the right questions about her past and her future?
I was only seventeen. I had spent the last ten years almost entirely in the upstairs chamber surrounded by women who saw a specific future for me. The same could be said for the men downstairs. But when I thought about all of them—Mama, Aunt, Baba, Uncle, Madame Gao, Madame Wang, even Snow Flower—the only one
I could really blame was my mother. Madame Wang may have duped her in the beginning, but she had eventually learned the truth and decided not to tell me. How I felt about my mother twisted and warped with the realization that her occasional signs of affection, which I now saw as part of her greater lies of omission, had simply been a way to keep me on course to the good marriage that would benefit my entire natal family.
I was at a moment of supreme confusion, and I believe it set the stage for what happened later. I didn’t know my mind. I didn’t see or understand what was important. I was just a stupid girl who thought she knew something because she was married. I didn’t know how to resolve any of these things, so I buried them deep, deep, deep inside of me. But my feelings didn’t—couldn’t—disappear. It was as though I’d swallowed the meat of a diseased pig and it slowly began to spoil my insides.
I HAD NOT
yet become the Lady Lu who is respected today for her graciousness, compassion, and strength. Still, from the moment I walked into Snow Flower’s house, I felt something new inside me. Think again of that diseased piece of pork, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. I had to pretend I wasn’t sick or infected, so I used my will to good purpose. I wanted to bring honor to my husband’s family by being charitable and kind to people in the lowest of circumstances. Of course, I did not know how to do that, because these things were not natural to me.
Snow Flower was getting married in a month, so I helped her and her mother clean the house. I wanted it to be presentable to the groom’s party, but no one could deal with the foul odors that permeated the rooms. The sick sweetness came from the opium that Snow Flower’s father smoked. And the other rankness, as you have probably guessed, came from his impacted bowels. No incense, no burning of vinegar, no opening of windows even in those cool months could disguise the filthiness of that man and his habits.