Dragon Springs Road

by Janie Chang

  The household went outside to enjoy the fireworks. Grandmother Yang had made sure we all had something new to wear and mine was a winter jacket that Anjuin had outgrown, made “new” with knot buttons and fresh cuffs to replace the worn ones. Master Yang greeted neighbors and replied with good-natured retorts to jokes about his hair.

  Fox joined the dragon dancers who were winding their way from house to house. Today she looked no more than fifteen; her face was painted white, her lips red as cherries, and there were bright ribbons woven into her pigtails. The turquoise blue satin of her trousers lifted as she ran, revealing brown leather button boots.

  “May the Year of the Pig bring prosperity to your family,” Master Yang said, bowing as he did every year to Master Shen, our elderly neighbor.

  Master Shen looked out at the festivities with his usual gloomy expression. “Heaven has not been kind this year to our emperor.”

  Coming from Master Shen, that’s almost treason, Fox whispered. She skipped past, a tambourine in her hand.

  In a country as large as ours, calamities are routine. There was always an earthquake somewhere, a flood, or a famine. The past year, however, had brought more than the usual disasters, culminating with an epidemic of rheumatic plague in Manchuria. These were signs that the emperor had lost heaven’s favor. But such opinions were best held close.

  At supper, Master Yang gave his usual speech to the household.

  “Dajuin has worked hard to find more customers for our cotton mill, and we will hire a new foreman. Our new tenants have been prompt with the rent. We can look forward to prosperity, if we’re careful.”

  I was old enough now that I’d become sensitive to the ebb and flow of fortunes at the Yangs. I paid more attention to the tidbits I overheard from servants and the Yangs about the cotton mill. Everything revolved around its success. When things went well there, Master Yang was jovial and talkative. There was more meat at meals, and evening gatherings in Grandmother Yang’s rooms were more convivial. When the mill had a bad month, Master Yang came home and went directly to his study, emerging only to eat supper.

  Of late the factory’s profits were barely sufficient to cover the monthly payments for Master Yang’s bank loan. His brothers in Ningpo wrote anxious letters, letters that grew more accusing as the months went by.

  First Wife fetched these letters from Master Yang’s study while he was at the mill and brought them to Grandmother Yang, who read them carefully before First Wife put them back in Master Yang’s desk. Then First Wife would seek out Mrs. Hao to bemoan her fate. Together the two women commiserated. They took no more notice of me than if I’d been a cobweb.

  “Cousin Hao, where would I be without a kinswoman to confide in?” First Wife sighed. “My family had such hopes when they betrothed me to Master Yang. At this rate, he will ruin the Yang clan.”

  “Now, now, it’s not that bad,” Mrs. Hao would say in her most soothing voice. “His brothers just worry because they can’t see for themselves what goes on at the mill. Young Master Dajuin is not yet twenty but he’s clever. Master Yang can rely on his son for good advice.”

  “My husband can’t even find a reliable foreman,” First Wife said.

  But everyone knew that her barren womb was the true cause of her discontent.

  FIRST WIFE HAD retreated into solitude. She didn’t bother tutoring Anjuin anymore. When this first happened, Anjuin had tried cajoling Grandmother Yang to let her attend school.

  “The emperor has built public schools for girls as well as boys,” Anjuin said. “There’s a middle school for girls not far from the marketplace. I’d like to go.”

  “You know how to use the abacus,” Grandmother Yang said. “You can read the newspaper. What more do you need to be a wife and mother? Anyway, when Third Wife has her next child, you’ll be too busy helping with the baby to go to school.”

  Anjuin left the room, her straight back betraying nothing of the disappointment on her face. I knew what she wanted because she’d told me often enough while looking through my schoolbooks. To know the difference between science and superstition. To look up at the stars and understand there was more than what folk stories could teach, to look into a magnified drop of water and see what resided within that tiny liquid world. To learn the history of other nations and understand how they had become so strong and China so scornfully weak.

  “Just to know, Jialing,” she said. “I don’t need to use that education for my livelihood, I realize that. But just to know.”

  When I came home from school, I washed up dishes in the kitchen as always and swept the brick floor. The difference now was that Anjuin kept me company in the kitchen. While I cleaned, I told her about my day at school. She listened to every detail and never seemed bored. She even listened to me recite the cleanliness rules.

  Wash your hands after using the chamber pot or latrine. Diseases are passed along by dirty hands.

  Kitchen floors must be swept and washed down every day. Spilled food attracts vermin.

  When there is food or cut fruit in a dish, you should always cover it up. Flies spread disease.

  Then together, we studied at the kitchen table. She sat beside me while I did my homework. She wrote out the same assignments, inscribing her answers conscientiously on paper retrieved from her father’s study. At school I took care to note the correct answers on my own papers so that Anjuin could check her work.

  “You’ll be a very well-educated young woman,” she said, turning the pages of my notebook. It was the weekend, a quiet afternoon. Kejuin had been ordered to accompany Grandmother Yang on her visit to the temple.

  There was no envy at all in Anjuin’s voice, but her words gave me pause. How could it be that I, a mere bond servant, could go to school but not her, a daughter of the house? That I was the one who sat in a classroom, being given a modern education? I was even learning English.

  She was twice as clever as I could ever hope to be, as capable as her older brother, Dajuin. Master Yang often said so, joking that if she had been a boy, she and Dajuin would be running the mill and he could enjoy life while his sons made a profit.

  How could I tell her there were days when I hated the privilege she yearned for?

  Instead I picked up the water bucket and a bamboo ladle. “Let’s go look at my flowers.”

  I had planted Anna’s seeds in the garden behind the main house. Anjuin and I knelt down to peer at them.

  “Look!” she said, pointing. “You can barely see them, but they’re sprouting little leaves.”

  We ladled water as gently as we could over the seedlings. I wished I could’ve planted them in the Western Residence, but Anjuin was so interested in the foreign flowers I had felt obliged to plant them here. And I didn’t want anyone to know about the secret door.

  “I DON’T LIKE school very much,” I said to Fox. Little Ning’s contempt, the pinches and shoves, the hisses whenever I walked too close to a group of girls.

  At home, Kejuin’s schoolwork was getting harder, and it kept him too busy to bully me. Lao-er had long since lost interest in mocking me. Ah-Jien’s slaps came my way less often now that I understood how to do my chores. It was easy enough to sidestep First Wife and her sour looks. But at school there was no avoiding my classmates.

  “Get away! Think you’re as good as us, do you?” I’d flinched the first time I heard this, even though Grace was with me and tucked her arm comfortingly in mine. Such insults were the least of a litany of small cruelties.

  The first of these happened the day I won a small prize for reading out loud, and the teacher gave me a new pencil, red instead of the usual yellow. Returning to my desk I’d been speechless with delight, as much for the attention as for the prize.

  “Eh, Jialing,” said Little Ning, to my left. “Nice reading.”

  Pleased, I turned my head to smile in response. How could I breathe on this spark of friendship, bring it to a cautious flame? An ember of hope warmed my heart. Turning back to my desk, I saw my prize pen
cil was missing. I looked on the floor beside me, pushed back my chair to look under the desk, searching on the ground until snickers burst out all around. Little Ning’s words had been a distraction while another girl stole my prize.

  But I didn’t tell Anjuin any of this. I avoided telling her how I was shunned by all except the other hun xue girls. The insults I endured jabbed at me, but they hurt again each time the memories surfaced. If they could hurt so much when contained in my mind, then surely giving voice to them would hurt even more.

  Fox’s tail switched from side to side. You know that Anjuin would give anything to attend school.

  “If she did, no one would call her zazhong,” I said. “No one would make her sit with other zazhong.”

  She ignored my sullen expression. Grandmother Yang isn’t obliged to keep you forever. What will you do when you’ve finished school?

  “Anjuin will get married, and I’ll go live with her. I’ll be her maid. It’s what we decided years ago.”

  Fox leaped on the garden seat and cocked her head. The only thing you can count on is that the gods make other plans. Go to school. You don’t have teeth or claws, so you’ll have to rely on your wits. Knowledge sharpens your wits.

  She was only saying what I already knew. I couldn’t avoid school. Not when Miss Morris was paying the Yangs. Not when Anjuin depended on me to pass on my lessons to her.

  CHAPTER 9

  In time I stopped gawking at the three tall American teachers who taught us English. We called them “the Miss Sons” because of their names: Miss Wilson, Miss Johnson, Miss Mason. They weren’t married, nor did they seem to be in a hurry to find husbands. They praised my quickness in learning English and said my accent was very good, but I never felt totally comfortable in their presence. I felt, or perhaps I imagined, both pity and condemnation in their eyes.

  Fox was bemused by the American schoolteachers. We watched them from the stack of old furniture. A trio of peddlers had set up shop just inside the entrance of Dragon Springs Road. A barber, a letter writer, and a food vendor. The delicious fragrance of green onion pancakes heating on a griddle filled the street. Some of the Chinese schoolteachers were outside, their gestures persuasive, trying to get one of the Miss Sons to try one.

  I watch the foreign schoolteachers in the Eastern Residence, practicing their Chinese in those funny tones, Fox said. They’re so earnest, so eager to improve China. Are we in such dire need of improvement? What does wise Young Master Dajuin say?

  “He says our government is one big bundle of woe,” I said. “They can’t agree on how to do things. Something about factions.”

  I suppose I should read the newspapers, she said.

  “I didn’t know Foxes could read,” I said.

  Her shrewd eyes closed in mirth. Of course we can. Why do you suppose there are so many stories about Fox spirits marrying young scholars? I’ve been told my calligraphy is quite good.

  Out on Dragon Springs Road, the hot onion pancakes were done and the vendor handed one over to Teacher Lin.

  “Miss Mason doesn’t like living here,” I said, watching the foreign teacher shake her head at the onion pancake, “because she thinks it’s dirty. She worries about clean water and boils everything.”

  At school we followed a myriad of rules about cleanliness. When we helped with the orphanage’s toddlers, we set the children down on little seats placed over chamber pots instead of taking them out to the street, where we could simply hold them over the drains. We weren’t allowed to spit indoors. Before the mission school, I’d never seen a faucet with running water. There was a large sign by the latrine sink to wash our hands with soap before meals and after using the latrine.

  You don’t need to worry about clean water here, Fox said. Your wells are fed by an underground spring. It’s a gift from the first and most powerful Fox spirit who lived here.

  I thought this over. “Then why isn’t the road called ‘Fox Springs Road’?”

  In the beginning it was called “Fox Springs Road,” she said. But the humans who lived here forgot about the Fox who gave them the spring. They decided “Fox” wasn’t grand enough and renamed the street.

  She sniffed. Dragons and phoenixes. It’s always dragons and phoenixes, even though all they do is fly around looking superior. I’ve never met one who bothered doing anything useful. I believe one should always broaden one’s horizons. Speaking of which, do you think I should learn English? Would it be useful?

  I considered this. “Our teachers say English is important. I can teach you. They say my accent is very good.”

  At the mission school, the teachers taught in both Chinese and English. Kejuin sneered when he found out I was learning English. Proof, he said, that I belonged with foreigners. Anjuin said he was just jealous, but it was a worry. Would a foreign language make me even more of an outsider?

  Put newspapers on the altar from now on, Fox said. English newspapers too, if you can get them. No more incense. It bothers my nose, actually. We Foxes have very sensitive noses.

  In time, I also learned more about my new friends. Or at least, I learned more about Grace and Mary. Leah walked away if pressed.

  Grace was open and talkative, the most confident of the three. But then, Grace had a mother and a future. Her father was British. He worked on a riverboat that carried goods up and down the Yangtze. He sent money each month on the condition that Grace went to school. Once she graduated, Grace would help her mother at the food stall. There were many such stalls on the river, all serving cheap meals to workmen and sailors.

  “My father wants me to learn English,” she said, “so that he can talk to us. My mother says if I can chat to foreign sailors, it will bring her more business and she won’t have to sell me to a brothel.”

  She said “brothel” so casually, with none of the hushed and outraged tones that accompanied the word when pronounced by First Wife.

  “Have you ever met your father?” I asked.

  “Only a few times when I was small, so I don’t remember him.”

  Sometimes when I climbed into the donkey cart to go home at the end of the day, I would see Grace just inside the school gates, peering up the street. Once, just once, when Teacher Lin forgot her books and we waited for her to get them, I saw a rickshaw pull up and Grace run up to meet it. A plump woman got off and kneeled to enfold Grace in her embrace, then swung her onto the rickshaw. I watched the two of them as the rickshaw went past, their smiles mirrored in each other’s faces, reflections of pure joy.

  Unbidden, an image came to mind. My mother, kneeling down with arms outstretched, her face lit up with the same smile. She had loved me. Why had she abandoned me?

  Grace’s father hadn’t abandoned her mother. He had acknowledged Grace as his daughter, had even given her mother money to leave the brothel and open a food stall. Did my foreign father know about me? Did he even know he had a child?

  “What about you, Jialing?” Grace’s voice broke into my thoughts. “How did Miss Morris pick you to come here?”

  I told them about Maiyu, how she had made me work every afternoon until the skin on my hands cracked. How Miss Morris had seen me hauling water and negotiated with Grandmother Yang.

  “So much hard work,” I said. “And then I’d have to go back and do more cleaning at the Yangs’.”

  There was silence, and then Grace burst into laughter. “Oh, Jialing, you don’t know how silly that sounds, your idea of hard work. Mary, show her your hands.”

  Mary held her hands out to me, skin covered in lumpy scars. Many of the orphans wore uniforms that were too large for them, clothing to grow into. I always thought Mary didn’t bother rolling up her sleeves because she didn’t mind them being too long. Now I realized she hid her hands on purpose.

  “From my days at the silk factory,” she said, with a grimace. “They made me dip my hands in hot water.”

  Until Mary was eight, she had lived with a woman she called Auntie. Auntie’s husband was a gambler and opium sot. One
day, he dragged Mary and Auntie to a silk thread factory in Chapei and bonded them to pay his debts.

  The air in the factory stank; the smell came from the floor, which was puddled with the carcasses of silkworms rotting into slimy messes. Mary and the other children stood over vats of boiling water filled with silk cocoons.

  “They told us children have more sensitive hands,” she said, “so we can tell more quickly when a cocoon is ready to unwind. We had to plunge our hands into the water to test the cocoons.”

  If they hesitated, the foreman’s bamboo cane whipped their calves, drawing blood. An open cut meant infection and possibly death.

  After fourteen hours at the factory each day, they returned home to make supper for Auntie’s husband and sleep a few scant hours before going to work again. Auntie had been pregnant when her husband bonded them. A few months into this punishing life, Auntie went into labor while at the factory. The foreman gave Mary permission to help but said they’d both have to make up for lost time the next day.

  “Auntie gave birth behind the silk thread factory,” she said. “It was a girl. She pushed the baby’s face into the mud, and when it was dead, I put it in the garbage pit. Then she got up and we went back to work.”

  “Why didn’t Auntie take the baby to an orphanage?” I asked, aghast.

  Mary regarded me, mild astonishment on her face. “We couldn’t afford more time away from work. Auntie said that we should pray for the baby to be reincarnated into a better life.”

  But the next day, Auntie collapsed and couldn’t go to the factory. The neighbors shamed Auntie’s husband into taking her to the foreign hospital nearby. He left his wife on the steps and hurried away. That was where Miss Morris found Mary, watching her only protector die. That was all Mary would say about her past.

  IT WAS MY turn to clean the blackboards and tidy the classroom. Teacher Lin and I had both finished lunch early and she was at her desk correcting papers. I swept the floor, unable to stop thinking about Mary’s dead auntie.