by Janie Chang
So the insults people flung at me were true. I was the daughter of a whore.
Master Fong’s First Wife refused to let this new mistress live in the Central Residence with the rest of the family, so Master Fong put us in the Western Residence. A few months after we moved in, Master Fong and his younger brother had a violent argument.
“It was a blessing when their uncle in Manchuria wrote asking to adopt the boy,” Ping Mei said. “The younger brother left Dragon Springs Road that week. One less mouth to feed.”
“Do you know anything about my mother’s family?” I said.
She shrugged. “Your mother had a good upbringing, I’m sure of it. You could tell by her manners. And she could read and write a little.”
It was common enough for good families to fall into decline, to sell their daughters for a brief reprieve from complete destitution.
Anjuin emerged from the main house with a broom and began sweeping the veranda steps. I could see First Wife at the window, picking at her meal, looking out curiously from time to time. She was in a docile mood today and wouldn’t come out without first being encouraged.
“Have the Yangs found a servant for the madwoman?” Ping Mei asked.
“How do you know?” I said, astonished.
“Gossip. The servants around this neighborhood like to talk.” She coughed, a harsh, painful sound, and spat on the ground.
Anjuin finished sweeping and came to join us. “You can leave now,” she said to Ping Mei. “There’s nothing more for you here.”
“Let me rest my feet a bit longer,” Ping Mei said. She stretched out her legs and I saw her feet were bound. “It’s noon. Is there something to eat?”
Anjuin gave me a long look. “All right, wait here.”
Ping Mei continued to gaze around the courtyard. “When you were little,” she said, “didn’t you find your life strange, living here with no one but your mother?”
“I knew no other life, so I never wondered,” I said. “How did you come to Dragon Springs Road?”
Her husband had been a soldier in the Qing Imperial Army. He went to Peking to defend the city during the Boxer Rebellion and never returned. She presumed he had been killed.
“But it’s hard to say with soldiers,” she said. “He might’ve found some other woman.”
When her landlord threw her out, Ping Mei went to the marketplace. She heard the Fongs needed a housekeeper. It paid badly, but it was better than no pay at all.
“Then I left to work at the inn. But after this,” she said, touching her mangled cheek, “even brothels were reluctant to have me clean their rooms. Put the customers off.”
In a city hardened to the countless maimed and disfigured on its streets, her ravaged face elicited little sympathy. Ping Mei became the lowest kind of servant at the cheapest brothels in the Old City, scuttling around as invisibly as possible, mopping up when customers vomited or worse. She carried out chamber pots and washed soiled linens.
Anjuin returned and handed me two pork-and-vegetable baozhi and a small kettle of hot water. The look on her face told me she would not tolerate Ping Mei’s presence for long. She went back into the main house with baozhi for herself and First Wife.
I took one baozhi and gave the other to Ping Mei, who took the stuffed bun without thanks. When I poured her a bowl of hot water, she merely nodded. She chewed slowly, all the while gazing around the courtyard.
She leaned back on the step and peered at me with her good eye. “Tell your mistress I’m willing to look after the madwoman.”
“You? Live here?” I exclaimed. “They’d never agree. And I can’t ask. I’m nobody.”
“Your friend is a daughter of the house.” She gave me a crafty look. “Get her to help you. How desperate are they to save face? To make sure the madwoman stops waking up the neighborhood at night? That she never escapes?”
“No,” I said. “I have no obligation to do anything for you. You can leave now.”
Besides, what would Fox say when she came back?
Ping Mei leaned back against the steps and shook her finger. “You owe me. My face is ruined because I tried to help your mother.” Her rough voice softened, grew cajoling. “If I live here, I can tell you more about her, tell you what she was like.”
Ping Mei unfolded her blanket, and I saw she had a clean tunic rolled up inside. She proceeded to wash up using the hot water and a rag.
It’s all right, Fox said. She can stay.
IF FOX HADN’T returned, I wouldn’t have dared go against Anjuin’s wishes and approach Grandmother Yang.
The interview was a short one. In a clean tunic, Ping Mei made her case. She had been a servant for the Fongs and was now fallen on hard times. A poor woman, already so unlucky she hardly cared if she had to live in an unlucky home. Grandmother Yang agreed to try her out for a week. It also helped that Ping Mei asked for very little pay, only her food and a few coppers each week.
“After all, she used to work for the Fongs,” Grandmother Yang said. “She must be somewhat reliable.”
As far as the Yangs were concerned, Ping Mei had simply come back to her old employer’s home to see whether the current owners needed a servant. Dajuin was the only one who knew how she had been found and my role in finding her; he had agreed not to say anything.
I couldn’t believe that First Wife didn’t protest Ping Mei moving in with her, that she was willing to ignore the woman’s disfigured features and coarse voice.
But that night, First Wife was miraculously quiet.
“WAS IT YOU, Fox?” I asked, when she paid me a visit in my dreams.
Without Fox’s influence, there was no way that Grandmother Yang would’ve allowed Ping Mei into the household. Nor would First Wife ever have agreed to someone like Ping Mei as her maid. Perhaps it was Fox who had given First Wife a night of quiet slumber.
It was midnight in the Western Residence. From the shelter of the erfang, Fox and I watched a light spring rain fall. Her fur was meticulously groomed as usual and she cocked her head at me with the same familiar insouciance.
Grandmother Yang was desperate. It’s wasn’t difficult giving things a nudge.
“I was so sure you would be unhappy to find First Wife living here. And now Ping Mei.”
I don’t understand everything, she said, but I believe this place attracts the broken. The influence of the first Fox spirit who lived here in ancient times is still strong. I acknowledged this when I made my home here, and I respect it.
I could hold back no longer. “Where have you been? It’s been nearly two years, not six months!”
That’s not so bad, she said, rubbing her ears with one neat paw. Sometimes I’ve been off by a decade.
I burst into tears. Almost immediately I felt an arm around my shoulders, and I buried my face against her shoulder. The soft cotton of her robes smelled like wild thyme. Fox’s voice murmured to me, soothing as rainfall. Gradually my sobs abated into hiccups.
The skies cleared and we sat on the veranda railings side by side. The constellations were veiled by the thinnest of clouds and Fox pointed them out to me: the Winnowing Basket, the Oxherd, the Weaving Girl, and the Jade Well.
“Did you find other Foxes?” I said, remembering why she had gone away.
Yes. But not the sort I was looking for, she said. She sounded sad. My first destination wasn’t far from Shanghai. I went to a town called Pinghu, where a man named Zhang walked through a Door and became an immortal.
She had visited Pinghu two hundred years ago when news of the incident was still fresh but had found no trace of a Door. This time she had gone to sniff out other Foxes, but all she found were ordinary foxes. She had enjoyed a brief period of wildness with them and continued on her way.
In Xian, a city that had been China’s capital in ancient times, she saw a Fox. He was in the shape of an elderly scholar, on an early morning stroll beside the Big Goose Pagoda. The old man took one look at Fox and hurried away. Fox didn’t follow.
&nb
sp; In the city of Yangchow she found a female Fox living comfortably in the ruins of an abandoned house beside the home of a family called Wei. The women of the Wei family were Buddhist but had the good sense to respect Fox spirits. They made regular offerings of dried fruit and eggs at a Fox altar just behind the ruins of the house.
I learned from her, she said, that over the past several decades, most of our kind moved away from farms, away from river plains and cities, away from humans and their endless wars. This Fox stayed in Yangchow because she had become fond of the Weis’ middle daughter.
The Yangchow Fox often took human form to visit her friend. The two would stroll around the courtyard chatting like the neighbors they had become. However, the Wei daughter had died recently and the Yangchow Fox would be leaving. Perhaps for Gansu Province in the west or Manchuria in the northeast. Perhaps the island of Taiwan, reputed to be a wild and uncivilized place with no native foxes.
“Two years,” I said, “and you found just that one Fox?”
She shook her head. I found other Foxes. But they were the sort who wanted to remain Foxes. None of them were working to attain enlightenment. Perhaps by now all the Foxes who wanted to become human or xian have succeeded. Perhaps only the most ordinary Fox spirits like me remain.
“What does that mean for you?” I said.
It means there aren’t any Foxes left who can offer guidance on how to become xian even if I possessed the right qualities, she sighed. There’s no way I can enter the land of immortals now except through a Door.
“What about when Anna went through the Door?” I asked. “Why didn’t the gods let you through then?”
There was a haunted look in her eyes, and then she looked away. She took my hand. The scent of wild thyme drifted in the air.
Let me show you the places where I traveled this time, she said.
. . . karst peaks loom through the morning drizzle, their sides rising up sheer and straight from the river valley, rank upon rank. I’m Fox in human form, a young woman disguised as a man. I’m lounging on a raft in the river, looking up at the peaks. I wear a rain cape made from layers of palm-tree leaves and a wide-brimmed hat of woven bamboo. A river dolphin swims near, unseen by the raft man. I trail a hand in the water and it nudges me, recognizing a kindred spirit. The raft man poles us toward a village where I will continue my journey. A rooster crows and I lick my lips . . .
. . . unnoticed, I follow behind the camels. We travel by night when it’s cool. The concave slipface of the sand dune curves beside us, so huge a formation that it has been alongside the caravan for hours. There are no Foxes in the desert, but I’ve seen shy antelopes and tiny hopping jerboas. The leader of the caravan runs ahead to the low crest at the end of the dune and shouts in excitement. When we catch up, he is already running downhill, to a pagoda surrounded by guesthouses, a habitat of humans at the edge of an oasis, a blue crescent of water that captures the reflection of the silver crescent overhead. To have such trees and greenery amid an ocean of sand is so improbable Fox hopes to find other enchantments here. But the oasis is all there is . . .
I woke up, my mind filled with vast landscapes, visions of China beyond my own constrained world, wilderness and beauty beyond imagining.
PING MEI HAD forced her way into our lives, but the strange woman was so discreet and looked after First Wife so attentively that after a while the household stopped worrying about her presence. If not for her occasional appearances in the kitchen, Ping Mei might’ve been invisible.
Once a week, she limped out to the shops on Chung San Road to buy tobacco and small treats for herself. I knew from the herbalist that she also bought a tincture of opium. Sometimes she hobbled into the kitchen to refill the tea canister or the oil jar. Mrs. Hao was openly curious, but Ping Mei said very little to her. She did, however, sometimes sit at the end of the kitchen table to help string beans or clean fish, as though hungry for companionship but reluctant to get drawn in too far.
“Have you spoken to any of the neighbors’ servants?” I asked. “Do they remember you?”
She shook her head. “Hardly knew them back then anyway. And the old families are gone now, aren’t they?”
It was true. The other houses up and down Dragon Springs Road no longer belonged to the same families who had lived there when the Yangs first arrived. Some had been auctioned off to pay debts, others had been sold by surviving family members after the cholera outbreak. The Shens’ son had not wanted to keep his childhood home.
ON THE PRETEXT of looking in on First Wife, I visited the Western Residence every few days to talk to Ping Mei. Each time I hoped she would remember something else about my mother. I never stayed long, just enough to gauge whether she was in the mood to talk.
Anjuin didn’t approve of Ping Mei. She thought I should stay away from the Western Residence.
“You’re disappointed and angry that your mother left you behind,” she said. “But she’s dead now, and Ping Mei can’t give you answers about your family or why your mother didn’t come get you as soon as she was rid of Noble Uncle.”
Yet I couldn’t stay away even though I felt uneasy in the woman’s presence. It was the way her one good eye looked at me with such intensity. Perhaps one eye had to do the work of two. I avoided looking directly at her face, the pitted, scarred features, the toothless gums.
Whenever I prodded her to tell me what she remembered, she would snort. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
All the same, every so often she would drop a tidbit in my lap.
That when my mother first arrived at Dragon Springs Road, she had tried ingratiating herself with the Fong women. She embroidered pieces of satin as gifts to the daughters for making lotus slippers. The Fong girls had cried when Master Fong’s First Wife threw the pieces of satin into the stove.
That when Master Fong took jewelry away from his eldest daughter to give my mother, she had sent it back when she learned who owned it.
That when my mother practiced on her liuqin, the notes carried over the wall and everyone would pause to listen, even Master Fong’s resentful wives. They had no other music.
“They weren’t bad, those women,” Ping Mei said. “But they lived in despair. Master Fong had no thought for anything but his own pleasures.”
Fox, who must have known all this, merely sat beneath the hydrangea shrubs and listened. I knew it was useless asking why she’d never told me anything about my mother, any of the incidents Ping Mei now recounted to me.
PING MEI CAME into the kitchen one day when Anjuin was there.
“She needs something to do,” Ping Mei croaked. She was obviously addressing Anjuin, not me or Mrs. Hao. “First Wife can only read and sit for so long. It’s not as though I have much to say to her.”
“What do you suggest?” Anjuin said. “We don’t dare ask her to embroider. That’s where all this insanity began.”
“Ask her to make shoes,” Ping Mei replied promptly. “It’s useful, and it will keep her busy. Just ask her to make plain black everyday cloth shoes for the family. No need for embroidery. What they don’t need, you can sell at the shop.”
“An excellent idea!” Mrs. Hao exclaimed, then glanced at Anjuin.
“I’ll speak to my grandmother,” Anjuin said. She gave Ping Mei a nod before leaving the kitchen.
I like a harmonious home, Fox said that night. We don’t want Ping Mei to cause friction between you and Anjuin.
Life had been much easier since Fox’s return. Who knew what dream world now filled First Wife’s days, but she seemed content to drift disconnected from the rest of the Yang household. When Master Yang paid her a visit, she no longer fussed over him but smiled vaguely, as if he were a brother or cousin.
Fox seemed sadder after her long journey, but more settled as well. Sometimes we sat on the roof of the main house while First Wife and Ping Mei slept in the rooms below. Fox liked sitting on the roof, especially when she was in the mood for gossip.
The foreign teachers are s
tarting to complain. They think Maiyu is stealing from them.
“More than usual?” I asked.
One way or another, all servants stole from their masters or found ways to profit from their employment. There was so little to go around and so many mouths to feed. Even the most honest man had to find ways to coax a little more advantage out of his situation. Take a commission from vendors. Get a better price for the master and keep the difference. Best of all, place a relative in a job and expand opportunities for the family.
Ah-Jien, the house servant, never bought needles, thread, or hairpins; she simply helped herself while cleaning rooms. Mrs. Hao bargained fiercely at the market for better prices and pocketed the savings. The rice store paid her so that she wouldn’t go to another shop for the Yang’s monthly rice purchase. Lao-er always hired his own nephews to help with garden cleanup every spring. The clerk at the newspaper who’d tried to cheat me was no more than a bit player in this ongoing endeavor.
Between Grandmother Yang and Anjuin, the Yang servants could only manage small liberties, the kind a wise employer was willing to overlook. Anjuin was extremely vigilant.
Maiyu steals tins of foreign food and sells them at the market before the teachers get back from school.
“They won’t accuse her without proof,” I said. “It’s their way.”
Master Yang’s mill is doing very well, Fox continued. Too well. He’s had to increase the protection money he pays to the Green Gang.
“Wasn’t it the Red Gang?” I said. Every Shanghai business paid a “tax” to local gangs.
The Greens have a clever and ruthless leader, she said. They’re in the ascendant now.
Before I could ask how she knew about gangs, I found myself down in the courtyard standing in front of the white hydrangeas. Fox pushed her muzzle into a patch of clove pinks growing beside the shrubs and sniffed. These foreign flowers smell very pretty. But they’re all color, no structure. They don’t really fit in a Chinese garden.