Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  The priest was a cripple. He arrived with his spirit compass, magic flag, and toolbox, and immediately noticed a powerful evil presence hanging over the studio. When he asked Madame Lu if he could enter, she hesitated. Her daughter was a woman of the world, after all; she had even lived in Japan. What if she saw this priest and threw a fit? Madame Lu told Baoshen to decide. His replied, “Since the man is here, let him try his luck.”

  The priest swung himself upstairs on his bad leg. Strangely, the studio fell as silent as a sleeping baby for the rest of the afternoon. After about four hours had passed, Madame Lu got desperate, and ordered Magpie to sneak upstairs to check on them (she no longer gave orders to Lilypad). Magpie crept carefully upstairs, then returned right away to report: “The priest is sitting at the table across from her, just talking and laughing.”

  This news only deepened Madame Lu’s suspicions. She looked at Baoshen, who looked back at her in confusion. “Extraordinary,” she exclaimed, “that she gets along with a priest!”

  The priest rocked his way downstairs around nightfall and hobbled out the door without saying a word. Madame Lu and Baoshen chased after him, expecting to find out what had transpired, but he merely smiled and kept walking, refusing the payment they had agreed on. As he crossed the outer threshold, he turned and left them with one final word: “Well . . . it looks like the great Qing empire is about out of time.”

  Tiger heard his words very clearly. In the past, anyone who said such a thing could expect the sword for himself and his whole family. For a lowly priest to say it so carelessly now must be a sign that the government really was on its way out.

  Madame Lu’s anxieties, however, were not misplaced. In fact, Xiumi’s situation was far more serious than she had anticipated.

  Two weeks passed before Xiumi emerged from her room. She showed up downstairs with an expensive-looking leather purse in one hand and a folded Western-style parasol she had bought in Japan under her elbow, and set off in the direction of the ferry. Two days later, she returned with two young guests, and from then on, the estate became her hotel, a constant stream of visitors coming and going. Baoshen eventually figured out what was happening and said privately to Madame Lu, “You said she was following in the old man’s footsteps, but it doesn’t look like that to me. In my opinion, she’s turned herself into a second Zhang Jiyuan. The dead man’s spirit never left us!”

  Fortunately, Little Thing was a clever, sensitive child, and could offer some comfort to Madame Lu through her fear and unease. She spent every day by the boy’s side, while Xiumi forgot about him completely. Madame Lu liked to hold him in her arms and talk to him, unconcerned whether he understood or not: “That first night your mother was home, I saw a new star twinkling in the west. I had hoped it was a good omen—didn’t expect it to mean disaster.”

  Xiumi left the estate roughly once a month, for anywhere between two and five days at a time, just as Zhang Jiyuan once did. Nobody knew where she went. But careful observation revealed to Baoshen that she always departed the day after the courier brought her mail.

  The courier, a young man of about twenty, had a gentle and civil disposition. He replied to Baoshen’s oblique queries with careful evasions, refusing to say more than he deemed necessary. “Someone must be sitting in the shadows and giving orders through the courier,” Baoshen analyzed for Madame Lu. But who could be giving the orders?

  By the end of that summer, a few villagers informed the family that Xiumi had been in close contact with gang members from Meicheng. Tiger had heard a few such names mentioned more and more in recent years, leaders like Xu Baoshan and Long Qingtang. They sold opium and salt on the black market, and even dared to raid government silk-merchant ships on the Yangtze River in broad daylight. How could Xiumi possibly be involved with such people? Madame Lu couldn’t bring herself to believe any of it at the time.

  One evening, during a heavy rainstorm, typhoon winds from the south rattled the windows and clawed the roof of the estate until the sound of shattering tiles could be heard. An urgent banging on the front door woke Tiger around midnight. He and his father still shared a bedroom in the eastern chambers. Tiger sat up in bed to find the lamp already lit and his father gone. Tiger crept out the bedroom door and into the front courtyard, where he saw Magpie holding a lantern, standing next to Madame Lu by the stairs underneath the eaves.

  The courtyard door had been flung wide open, and Xiumi stood in the skywell, wet from head to toe. Four or five men stood with her around three large wooden crates that looked like coffins. One of the men, still panting from exertion, motioned to Baoshen and said, “Go get a couple of shovels.” Baoshen brought them two iron shovels and, wiping the rainwater from his eyes, asked Xiumi, “What’s in the crates?”

  “Dead people,” Xiumi replied with a smile, as she tucked her hair behind her ear.

  She and the others took the shovels and left. The rain continued unabated.

  Baoshen circled the crates many times, trying to peer between the boards, and finally called Magpie to bring the lantern closer. Magpie was far too frightened to move, and so Baoshen retrieved the lantern himself. Tiger watched his father crawl on top of the crates, lantern in hand, and look inside, moving his head at different angles. Finally he stood up and walked resolutely toward Tiger. His teeth chattered vigorously; his lips and hands trembled; a steady stream of foul language poured out of his mouth. Tiger couldn’t recall hearing his naive, sincere, earnest father ever utter a curse, but the terror of this particular shock brought out all his stored-up profanities in a single rush.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck . . . Motherfucker! They aren’t fucking dead bodies, they’re goddamn fucked-up motherfucking guns!”

  Madame Lu felt she could not endure it any longer. She had to put an end to her daughter’s idiocy, saying, “Guns aren’t something you fool around with.” Her first priority was to talk to someone experienced, who knew Xiumi. After long consideration, the person she settled on was Xiumi’s old teacher, Ding Shuze. Coincidentally, before she paid him a call he showed up at her door.

  Ding Shuze had gotten old; his hair and beard had whitened, and he wheezed when he spoke. He tottered into the estate, leaning on his wife for support, and demanded to see Xiumi.

  Madame Lu hurried over and said in a low voice, “Mr. Ding, this strange daughter of mine isn’t the girl she once was. Her temperament has changed for the worse . . .”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine . . .” Ding Shuze replied. “Just bring her down and I’ll talk to her.”

  Madame Lu thought for a moment, then cautioned him again: “You know, my daughter has been back for a while now, and I’ve barely seen her myself. She . . . doesn’t recognize people anymore.”

  Ding Shuze rapped the bricks on the floor with his cane with visible impatience. “That’s not a problem. I’m the one who taught her to read, remember? You just go get her.”

  “That’s right,” added Zhao Xiaofeng. “She might be able to ignore other people, but she can’t ignore her old teacher. Go tell her to come down.”

  Mother looked over to Baoshen for assurance; Baoshen looked at his feet and said nothing. As Mother wavered, Xiumi walked downstairs. She had pinned her hair up in a high bun, held in place with a black silk veil. She still looked half-asleep. A middle-aged man in a scholar’s robe accompanied her, carrying an old oilcloth umbrella. The two entered the front courtyard, chatting enthusiastically as they walked, passing Ding Shuze and the others without so much as a glance in their direction.

  It was too embarrassing for Ding Shuze. His lips snarled in anger, then he smiled and let out an empty laugh, mumbling to Madame Lu, “Seems she . . . doesn’t recognize me . . .” His wife, always the quicker of the two, rushed forward and grabbed Xiumi by the sleeve.

  “Excuse me! What do you think you’re doing?” Xiumi turned and asked sharply.

  Ding Shuze, still blushing, took a few steps toward he
r and inquired, “Xiuxiu . . . do you still remember this old man?”

  Xiumi replied with a sideways glance and a half smile, “Why wouldn’t I remember you? You’re Mr. Ding.”

  She turned back to the stranger and the two continued on.

  Ding Shuze’s mouth fell open; he was too stunned and humiliated to speak. When the pair reached a fair distance, he shook his head and murmured to himself, “Unbelievable, unbelievable . . . such a pity, such a pity, and such a disgrace! So she did recognize me after all, and yet she won’t speak to me. By what right . . . ?” Madame Lu and Baoshen tried their best to comfort him with flattery, leading the old couple into the living room for tea, but Ding Shuze wouldn’t have any of it, and said they’d be leaving.

  “I can’t think . . . I can’t think . . .” he growled as he waved them off. “If she doesn’t want to treat me like her teacher, then I have no choice but to pretend she never existed.”

  “Exactly. Why should we waste the effort?” Zhao Xiaofeng egged him on. “We’re leaving. No need for us to come back.”

  Filled with disgust, they swore they would never darken the Lu family’s threshold again, an oath obviously sworn in aggravated haste—as during the next three days, Ding Shuze showed up at the estate seven or eight times.

  “Just like a sleepwalker,” Ding Shuze said, after recovering his usual affected composure. “There’s a pale light in her eyes that makes you shiver every time she flashes them at you. She’s the spitting image of her father before he went crazy, if you want my opinion. Either her soul has left her body, or she’s been possessed. Either way, she’s mad.”

  “Yes, definitely crazy, no doubt,” Zhao Xiaofeng chimed in with absolute certainty.

  “To think that her old man, all those years ago, should be so shortsighted as to lose his job and be sent home, then had no sense to cultivate his mind and take care of his body properly as he aged, instead dabbling in books about utopian delusions until he drowned in it and insanity overtook him. It’s as pitiable as it is laughable. Now, as the state falls into disarray, rebellion stirs everywhere; disaster lurks around every corner, in every difficult act at every moment, and morality vanishes. Dispassionate heaven has freed the madmen from their cages—”

  “Let’s just put aside her sanity for a moment,” Madame Lu interrupted. “We need to think of some way to stop her from carrying on like this.”

  Her admonition quieted Ding Shuze immediately. The four of them sat in an awkward silence punctuated only by aggrieved sighs. Finally, Ding Shuze said, “No need to act too hastily. Let’s see what kind of a fuss she makes first. If things reach a point of no return, there’s still an easy way out . . .”

  “And by that, Mr. Ding, you mean . . .” Madame Lu looked blankly at him.

  “Spend some money to hire a few hands from out of town to strangle her.”

  •

  Xiumi really did raise no small amount of trouble in the village. The band of followers around her grew larger the longer she stayed in Puji. Aside from Lilypad (Madame Lu: “That whore has become a full-time first lieutenant for her”), the group now included the ferryman Tan Si, the potter’s assistant Xu Fu, the blacksmith brothers Wang Qidan and Wang Badan, Baldy, Yellowtooth, Sun Waizui, Walnuts Yang, the widow Ms. Ding, and the midwife Chen Sanjie (Magpie: “All the shady characters”). Beggars, strangers who drifted among Meicheng, Qinggang, and Changzhou also filled their numbers, until Xiumi had amassed a decent army. The problem had expanded faster than Ding Shuze could have predicted. He observed on more than one occasion, “If it keeps up like this, she’ll strangle all of us before we ever get close to her.”

  The group started a “Foot-Freeing Society,” and went door-to-door demanding everyone’s fealty to their new directive. Madame Lu didn’t know what “foot freeing” meant, so she asked Magpie. Magpie replied, “It means not letting girls bind their feet.”

  “Why wouldn’t they let girls bind their feet?” Madame Lu replied, confused.

  “That way you can run faster,” Magpie said.

  “You arrived with big feet anyway, so there’s nothing for you to worry about,” Madame Lu said with a grin. “Now, what do they mean by ‘independent marriage’?”

  “That’s marrying whomever you want,” Magpie explained, “without needing your parents’ approval.”

  “Without even a matchmaker?”

  “No matchmaker either.”

  “But how can you get married without a matchmaker?” Madame Lu’s confusion deepened.

  “Oh, you know. It’s like, like . . .” Magpie reddened to the ears. “Like Walnuts Yang and Ms. Ding doing it . . .”

  “What happened with Yang Zhonggui and Ms. Ding?”

  “Walnuts took a liking to Ms. Ding, so he tied up his bedroll and moved into her house, and they just . . . got together.”

  A “Puji Self-Governance Board” appeared soon after the Foot-Freeing Society. Black Dragon Temple was completely renovated, its walls reinforced and plastered, timber beams and roof tiles replaced. Two new side wings were added. Xiumi and Lilypad moved in permanently. There, they set up a nursery, a library, a medical clinic, and a nursing home. Xiumi and her subordinates held all-day meetings in the temple. She had drawn up a vast reform plan that included irrigation ditches to route water to the fields directly from the Yangtze River, a cafeteria, so that the entire village could eat together, and an array of other infrastructure developments, including a funeral home and a jail.

  Yet the good and simple residents of Puji rarely visited the temple. With the exception of Xiumi’s own son, the nameless Little Thing, few local children were sent to the nursery. Eventually, even Little Thing was spirited back to the Lu estate by a servant acting on Madame Lu’s orders. The residents of the nursing home mostly consisted of old drifters or abandoned elders from neighboring villages. The clinic was little more than a sign on a door. Xiumi had hired a doctor who had studied in Japan and could allegedly cure illnesses without even taking your pulse, but sick villagers still consulted Dr. Tang; others preferred to lie in bed and wait to die rather than try the new cures advertised at the Self-Governance Board. The irrigation project began with Xiumi’s order to dig a hole in the great river’s embankment with the intention of guiding water into the fields below. The massive inflow of water, however, nearly ripped the embankment apart, and the whole village almost flooded in one disastrous instant.

  As time passed, money became an issue.

  When Xiumi produced a list of necessary expenses and sent people door-to-door asking for contributions, the wealthy families in the area suddenly disappeared. The Wang brothers managed to find a silk merchant—they hung him in the cowshed and beat on him for a night, then sent him home naked.

  Gradually, Xiumi changed into a different person. She became noticeably thinner, and dark circles formed under her listless eyes. She grew tired and rarely spoke, until rumors spread that she had caught some sickness. She spent her days locked in the top floor of the garan, the main temple building, in a room with windows covered with black silk because she disliked sunlight. She had trouble sleeping, and neither ate much nor bothered with her appearance. She often fell into a daze, staring out in space, and she saw no one save Lilypad and a few select others. It seemed like she was punishing herself for something.

  A night watchman visited the Lu estate to report that he often saw a figure wandering among the trees by the temple at night, sometimes staying out until dawn. He knew it to be Xiumi, but didn’t dare get close. “Because what if . . . what if she . . .”

  Madame Lu knew what he wanted to say. By that time, everyone in the village believed Xiumi to be a madwoman. Locals who saw her on the road openly treated her like one, skirting as far around her as they could. But the night watchman’s visit pushed Madame Lu to a grave decision: she would go to the temple directly to have a long, serious talk with her daughter.

  Under cove
r of night, she went alone with a full basket of eggs to the garan. But no matter what she said, or how intensely she pleaded, Xiumi refused to speak. Finally, as tears streamed from her eyes, Madame Lu said, “Mama knows you need money. I can tear down the house and sell the land; I can give you all the money we have, but you must tell me clearly what it is you’re doing. Where are these strange ideas coming from?”

  Xiumi finally opened her mouth. “I’m not doing anything, just having fun!” she replied with a mirthless laugh.

  Her response sent her mother wailing. She twisted her clothes, tore her hair, and slapped the bricks on the floor with both hands, crying, “Oh, my daughter! You really have lost your mind!”

  •

  Shortly afterward, Xiumi threw out all her grand designs. She no longer sent people around demanding that village girls unbind their feet, called no more meetings, and halted any further progress on the irrigation plan. She ordered someone to take the Self-Governance Board sign down and cut it up for firewood, and had it replaced with another sign: PUJI ACADEMY.

  This delighted the local gentry to no end. They saw it as a good omen, a sign that Xiumi was returning to a life of moral rectitude; they started to praise her, saying, “She’s finally started an honest career, establishing a school to enrich the younger generation—a real blessing!”

  Madame Lu also thought it evidence of Xiumi’s improving health. But Ding Shuze wasn’t convinced. He told her bluntly, “If she’s really getting better, you can paste my name under the hole in the outhouse. She’s not starting a school, she’s just changing her approach. It’s nothing more than a new look to fool people—the worst is yet to come, mark my words! Besides, what qualifications does she have to start a school? A stubborn, empty-headed little girl calling herself a principal—it’s ridiculous!”