by Janie Chang
Noble Uncle watched all this while another man, seated at a small table and chair, made notes on a list. I looked down on the seated man, his black skullcap, his queue oiled and shining. When the handbarrows had made their last trip, he ran one finger slowly down the list and, with his other hand, clicked away at an abacus.
Then he opened a small metal box and counted out several stacks of coins, silver and gold. Noble Uncle scooped the coins into a cloth bag. With a nod, the other man tucked abacus, box, and account book under his arm and went outside to a waiting sedan chair.
There was still quite a lot to see, so I stayed at the wall. Led by the sedan chair, the oxcart and handbarrows made their way slowly out of Dragon Springs Road. The neighbors were all outside their gates, watching the sad procession. Some even followed to get a closer look at the contents.
“I remember that inlaid table,” an elderly man said, “from when Old Master Fong was alive. We used to have a pipe and a pot of tea together. It was part of his wife’s dowry, carved by a very famous craftsman.”
“Was that Ming the Pawnbroker in the sedan chair?” his companion asked.
“No, Old Ming died in the summer. Cholera. That’s his second eldest. Just as venal.”
THE NEXT MORNING, the smell of steamed bread woke me and I sat up. Mama was stuffing clothes into a canvas sack. When she saw me, she smiled and gestured to the table by the window.
“The soy milk vendor came around this morning. Drink while it’s hot,” she said. “And we have sweet bean paste buns.”
The soy milk was slightly sweetened and there was a strange taste to it. I looked at her inquiringly.
“Juice of the poppy,” she said. “So you can sleep a little more after breakfast. There’s lots of food. You have a whole packet of sticky rice in lotus leaf, the kind you like with chicken and a salted duck egg in the middle. The last of the persimmons are on the platter. Now, remember what I said about the food?”
I nodded. “Not to eat it all at once.”
Then we went to the Fox altar.
When we returned, my mother held out the emerald-green trousers and tunic. “Your new winter clothes are ready.” She buttoned me into the tunic and stepped back to look at me.
“Remember what Mama said last night?” Her voice was light and careless, but it trembled slightly.
“Yes. You’re going away with the Fongs for a little while.” I was back at the table, my attention on the sweet bean paste inside the steamed bun, warm and flavored with honey. “And you’ll come back in two days to get me, and we’ll go join them. I must be very quiet and stay here. I won’t leave the Western Residence.”
When I finished the bun, she carried me back to bed. “It’s still early, Ling-ling. Sleep some more. I must go now. It’s only for two days.”
She leaned over to tuck the quilt around me. I could smell the sandalwood combs in her hair. My belly warm and full with soy milk, my eyes drowsy, I watched her tighten the drawstring around the canvas sack. She wrapped the bag in a length of blue flowered cotton cloth. She carried it in her arms, holding it against her chest as though it were a child. Then with swaying, graceful steps, she left the room. She didn’t look back.
I was sure she would return as usual.
CHAPTER 3
In my new life with the Yangs, I struggled out of bed each morning when daylight was just a pale shimmer on the horizon to draw water for Mrs. Hao’s kitchen barrel. Fortunately, like the Western Residence, the Central Residence had its own well. As I trudged back and forth with the heavy wooden bucket, I would see Master Yang and his sons hurry to the family shrine where they burned incense to their ancestors. Dajuin, who was sixteen and treated as an adult, would then leave for work with Master Yang, while Kejuin, who was my age, would return to bed, carried in his amah’s arms.
Shortly after Master Yang and Dajuin left for the factory, the household would come alive. Voices rang out: Mrs. Hao shouting at me to carry a kettle of hot water to Grandmother Yang, Lao-er, the gatekeeper, calling out to the night soil collector. After the quiet of the Western Residence, all this activity was a confusing bustle.
The other servants were paid wages, food, and lodgings, but I was a bond servant. The Yangs weren’t obliged to do any more than provide a roof over my head and enough food to keep me from starving. Mrs. Hao often reminded me of this. Until I could buy my freedom, the Yangs owned me.
With scolding and slaps, Ah-Jien, the house servant, taught me what to do. Each morning, I replaced Grandmother Yang’s chamber pot with a clean one, then ran to the outhouse to empty the used one before the night soil collector came in. I kept her rooms swept and dusted. Whenever her teapot grew cold, I ran to the kitchen to refill a kettle with hot water.
While Grandmother Yang took her daily naps, I would join Anjuin, who helped in the kitchen almost every day. Mrs. Hao instructed her on cooking, making preserves, and brewing medicinal infusions. This was part of Anjuin’s training, for she was recently betrothed and the Yangs would lose face if she entered her husband’s home unable to manage a kitchen or run a household.
ON MY FIRST night I had slept on a folding cot in the kitchen. When Anjuin heard me crying for my mother, she brought me to her room and I fell asleep pressed against her back, comforted by the soft regular sighs of her breathing. The next day, she had Lao-er set up the cot in her room.
“What will happen to me when you get married?” I asked.
I was seated in front of her dresser mirror, and she stood behind the chair, braiding my hair. It was the day after Grandmother Yang confirmed the news of Anjuin’s betrothal, to the third son of a family named Chen, also from a merchant clan in Ningpo. The groom was several years younger, so the wedding was to be held in eight years’ time, when he was eighteen and Anjuin twenty-one.
She paused to tie a ribbon to the end of my pigtail. “You might be working for another family by then. You might even be married by then.”
I shook my head. “Mrs. Hao says no one will ever marry me.”
“I’ve an idea,” Anjuin said. “When I get married, I’ll ask Grandmother to make you part of my dowry. You can come with me as my bond servant.”
Reassured, I nodded. I wanted to offer her something in return, but all I had was my secret that the Western Residence was home to a Fox spirit. But before I could open my mouth, a small, wordless rebuke in my mind, like a tug on my pigtails, made me pause. Then any compulsion to talk about Fox slipped away. Next day the memory returned, of the desire to tell Anjuin about Fox, of how it had wavered in my mind and then extinguished like a weak candle flame. That was when I first became truly aware of Fox’s influence.
ALTHOUGH I WAS allowed to sleep in Anjuin’s room, there was no question that I would eat in the kitchen with the other servants. Amah Wu, the nanny, was allowed at the family table only because she helped feed Kejuin. Lao-er leered at me, and Ah-Jien, the house servant, openly despised me, but at least in Mrs. Hao’s domain I was safe from their slaps and pinches. Ah-Jien refused to have me at the same table so Mrs. Hao ladled my meals into a big bowl and sat me on a stool in the corner. I listened to them gossip while I ate.
Their favorite topic was the Yang family. They pooled every tidbit gleaned during the day to exchange over supper. On the verge of prosperity, still careful with his money, Master Yang had moved from Ningpo to the outskirts of Shanghai to build a cotton-weaving mill. His younger brothers were still in Ningpo, running the family’s chain of dry goods stores. Master Yang bustled between Dragon Springs Road and his mill in the factory district of Chapei. He smiled frequently, and his every stride bristled with confidence.
“The poor depend on the rich and the rich depend on heaven,” said Lao-er. “Let’s hope the gods favor Master Yang and his mill or we’ll all be begging on the streets.”
“The Old Mistress doesn’t trust his judgment,” Mrs. Hao said. “He was so proud of the bargain he got with this estate he wouldn’t listen to the Old Mistress’s fortune-teller. The fortune-tell
er warned of hard times if the master came to Shanghai.”
Mrs. Hao was a widow and slept in a room beside the kitchen. She held an unusually prominent position among the servants because she was a distant cousin to First Wife. Mrs. Hao generally had the last word.
First Wife was childless and spent most of her time embroidering a huge altar cloth. She was a woman of some education, tasked with tutoring Anjuin. She was moody and the lesson schedule erratic.
Master Yang’s Second Wife had died many years ago. She had borne him two children, Dajuin and then Anjuin, before dying in childbirth.
Third Wife was lazy and amiable. Kejuin was her son. She spent her time gossiping with the house servants. Her round belly meant there would be another child soon to keep Amah Wu even busier. She was also the first to read the newspapers after Master Yang and Dajuin finished with them.
Anjuin’s eldest brother, Dajuin, was sixteen years old, an adult in my eyes. Anjuin adored him and because he read the newspapers every day, she did too, struggling to learn new words with the help of a dictionary. Whenever he discussed the latest news with his father, she listened with great attention, but never joined in. In front of Master Yang, Dajuin said very little about the imperial government, but when he was with Anjuin, he was open about his contempt for the corrupt regime. Whenever she asked him about some article in the newspaper, he always took her questions seriously. I would see them through the window of his study, their heads close together, Dajuin explaining, Anjuin listening.
Dajuin paid no attention to me, just a nod of the head now and then to acknowledge my presence if we passed each other in the courtyard. This couldn’t be said for Kejuin, who was my age, a much-indulged youngest son. Kejuin pulled at my pigtails and taunted me with cries of zazhong, foreign devil, big nose.
As a bond servant, I could buy my freedom eventually. Grandmother Yang was strict but fair, taking every care to smooth her entry into the next life through scrupulous honesty in this one. Master Yang had drawn up a contract and set a price. The gold coins from my mother were noted on the contract, partial payment for my bond.
I could talk to Anjuin and sometimes Mrs. Hao but turned tongue-tied in front of others. I’d never had to speak with anyone but my mother before. I replied to questions with a mumbled yes or no. If not for Anjuin’s assurances that I was merely shy, the Yangs would’ve given up on me as dim-witted.
“She’s pretty enough,” I once overheard Grandmother Yang remark, “and obedient enough. But what a standoffish child she is.”
“As though waiting for a slap even after you’ve said something kind to her,” Third Wife agreed.
Not a slap. The other servants slapped me enough that I no longer cried out, for that only encouraged them to hit me again. What I waited for was betrayal. For if my own mother could abandon me, what could I count on from the Yangs? Even Anjuin.
GRANDMOTHER YANG TOOK a nap every day. During those few hours, I was free to do as I pleased. More often than not this meant slipping into the Western Residence to visit Fox. She wasn’t always there, but when she was, we liked to stand side by side atop the stack of furniture in the front courtyard. When she was in her Fox shape, she would stand on hind legs, paws pressed against the top of the wall. I knew, however, that if anyone looked up, they would see only my face.
When I was outside the Western Residence, the list of questions I wanted to ask Fox were endless. When did we come to Dragon Springs Road? Where did we live before? Who was my father? How were we related to Noble Uncle? Sometimes she answered my queries, but more often she simply made me forget what I wanted to ask. In her presence, unwanted questions vanished like raindrops in a puddle.
“Why doesn’t anyone ever come into the Western Residence except for me?”
Her muzzle wrinkled up in what looked like a smirk. This courtyard has been my home for three hundred years, she said. I see no reason to share it with others.
“But my mother and I lived here,” I said, admiring her lovely paws, their velvetlike black fur.
Your mother made a Fox altar. She burned incense. She showed respect, so I let you stay. The paws blurred and became hands, dainty and smooth skinned, and then it was Fox in her human shape balanced delicately on the chair beside me.
“It wasn’t a very grand altar,” I said, thinking of the Buddhist temple I’d been to with Grandmother Yang. That had been my first outing from the estate. Grandmother Yang had made me burn incense in thanks to the Buddha and there she had made her vow to care for me as her act of benevolence. Our little altar was humble compared to ones that stood before the huge gilded statues.
Foxes don’t need much of an altar. She wrinkled her nose at me in a Fox smile. A corner in a farmhouse, a box turned on its end, even just a niche dug out from the side of a haystack. Our supplicants are the poor and disadvantaged. Some need to keep their prayers secret. Why burden them with the need to build costly temples?
“Tell me about the others who lived in the Western Residence, from before,” I said.
There was a time, oh, at least three hundred years ago, when bandits threatened the area. The family who owned this land built a high wall to enclose their home. There was a son and a daughter. They were my good friends.
Her voice grew slower, dreamier. But it was a terrible time, when gangs of bandits roved the countryside. The family’s tenant farmers would come inside the walls for safety and to help defend the property.
The walls protected houses and stables, vegetable gardens and chicken coops. Farmers would herd families and livestock through the huge gates. They camped in the middle of the enclosure, a wide strip of empty ground bordered by the landlord’s houses and gardens, and hid from the lawlessness outside. Generations later, when the bandits were gone and Shanghai had spread so far inland that homes and shops sprouted in fields where mustard greens used to grow, the landlord’s family fell into poverty. They had to sell off their houses and land. The gates were removed and the walls torn down, the empty stretch of ground where tenant farmers had camped paved over to become Dragon Springs Road.
I craned my neck to look at the tall brick piers that still guarded the entrance to Dragon Springs Road. Their bulk hinted at the size of the huge gates that once hung from massive hinges. Beyond them I could see Chung San Road, the donkey carts hurrying by, vendors toting their wares from shoulder poles, pedestrians ambling along.
In those days, if I didn’t like the humans who lived here, I just ignored them, Fox continued. Or I would go away and live somewhere else for a while. The worst humans are the ones who harass you with prayers and offerings, always wanting you to make them wealthy.
“But isn’t that what Foxes do?” I asked. “When they become friends with humans, they bring gold and treasure.”
Such wealth, unless it’s buried and unclaimed, always belongs to someone. I’m not the kind of Fox who steals, though it would be easy enough. Her eyes glowed green and her hips gave a twitch that would’ve made her tail slash back and forth had she been in her Fox shape.
“Why aren’t you always here when I come?” I said. “Where do you go?”
Fox stepped down from the wall and held her arms up. She lifted me down to the ground. Out to where there are fields and trees. Into the hills. To the river. To the grasslands. The places where Foxes like to go.
ONCE BOUNDED BY the walls of the Western Residence, my world now expanded to the small realm that was Dragon Springs Road and just beyond. In this I was luckier than Anjuin. She was a daughter of the house, but I was only a servant. Thus I was the one who skipped behind Mrs. Hao, following the cook to market in the morning and returning some hours later, lugging a string bag of mushrooms or spinach leaves while Mrs. Hao carried a basket of turnips or a pail of live shrimp.
In the market square, most of the stalls were no more than wooden frames covered with straw matting to keep the sun off. The vegetable vendors sold only what they could tote on their shoulder poles, deep baskets the size of small barrels swinging
from the ends, filled with bundles of miniature cabbages that seemed carved from pale jade or long purple eggplants. The fishmongers sheltered their handbarrows beneath straw awnings, spreading silvery fish on beds of wet seaweed and splashing water into pails where river shrimp waved wispy feelers. Surrounding the market square were shops whose owners lived above. The rice merchant, a teahouse, the herbalist. The spice merchant who measured out bags of star anise and dried red chilies.
In the shade beside the basket vendor’s stall, the blind storyteller chanted his repertoire of tales. Although I could never stand beside him long enough to hear a complete story, after some months I was able to piece them together from the bits and snatches I overheard as I followed Mrs. Hao from stall to stall and shop to shop.
On these walks, the cook never failed to remind me of my debt to the Yangs. She recounted stories of other bond servants she had known, worked to exhaustion and an early death.
“How you’re treated depends on the family,” she said. “In kind homes, the matriarch will even find husbands for favored bond servants. But it’s rare, very rare. Just count yourself fortunate that the Yangs are decent folk.”
She left unspoken the certainty that I shouldn’t count myself a favored bond servant. I was a tainted creature. I was zazhong. I walked unmolested in the marketplace only because I trailed in the shadow of her protection. Once a barrow pusher outside the rice shop leered at me and said something, words I didn’t understand.
Mrs. Hao swung around to face him, her voice louder than I’d ever heard. “This little girl is bond servant to Old Mistress Yang. Are you implying my mistress runs a brothel?”
The shopkeeper rushed out and beat the barrow pusher about the head with a feather duster. “Wah, wah, you stupid ox. How dare you speak so rudely to my customers! Finish stacking those rice sacks and get on your way.”