by Larissa Lai
– 100 CELEBRATED CHINESE WOMEN
illustrated by Lu Yanguang,
translated by Kate Foster
She was accused of murdering her maid, and although her poet friends tried to save her, she was executed about 870.
– WOMEN POETS OF CHINA
translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung
Yu Hsuan-chi resumed the wild life at the Hsien-i-kuan, where she held open house for all elegant young scholars and officials, and had numerous amorous attachments. But as she grew older her popularity waned, and one after the other she lost her influential patrons. She got into financial difficulties and became involved in trouble with lower police-officials. Finally she was – probably wrongly – accused of having beaten a maid-servant to death, and was convicted and executed.
– SEXUAL LIFE IN ANCIENT CHINA
by R.H. Van Gulik
The Governor, flooded with letters from high-placed persons all over the Empire in favour of the poetess, was about to give a verdict of not guilty, when a young water-carrier from the Lake District came forward. He had been absent for several weeks, accompanying an uncle on a journey to the family graves. He had been the maid’s boy friend, and stated that she had often told him that her mistress importuned her, and beat her when she refused. The Governor’s doubts were strengthened by the f act that the maid had been found to be a virgin. He reasoned that if robbers had murdered the maid, they would certainly have raped her first.
– POETS AND MURDER (FICTION)
by Robert Van Gulik
THEY SAY my temple is haunted, but they say that about many things in this village. I heard a tune last evening as I leaned out a south-facing window. A wooden flute or an old man’s falsetto. No, a flute, definitely. A strange, sad little tune, all wind and minor keys. They say the Black Fox Shrine just on the other side of the bamboo grove has a new priestess. A young thing with pale skin and black hair. She has a corpse for a lover and sleeps with the foxes at night. Every other day she goes to the execution grounds and brings her lover a new skull for a head.
A sound comes across the courtyard again. Or is it a motion? Something smooth and cool, like water.
The police came again last night, calling for me, but I hid from them in the closet where the sutras are stored.
No, I am sure of it, a sound. A melody, frail and liquid, in a key you could call romantic or you could call eerie, depending on how you were listening. Outside the sun has melted and the courtyard is almost dark, but there is someone dancing out there, I’m sure of it. Is that a shadow I see moving? Only the quiver in the wind lets me know for sure.
In the village, a poor woman farted in the presence of a strange visitor. The next morning a bucket of dirty water she had left by her bed turned into a bucket of gold. In the village, a rich woman forced a fart in the presence of that same visitor. The bucket of water she left by her bed at night turned into a bucket of snakes which stung her to death. They say that foxes are taking over the village.
The sound takes me by the hand and we run into the courtyard, through the grove of bamboo. I imagine something furry against my legs. Little flashes of red fur running on either side of me. Through the grove and up a stony incline. In the dark, I cut my arms and legs on the sharp edges. There at last, just over the top of the hill, sits the black shape of a shrine, growing clearer as we approach. The foxes run in the front gates and I follow them. The lover is waiting for me with her toothy smile. A small skull today – a child’s, perhaps. At the rear of the back room, Lu Ch’iao leans against a wall, cuddling her foxes. She looks the same, only dirtier. There are faint circles under her eyes and her hair is loose and matted in places. Is that the same dress I saw her in before she disappeared? It is tattered and colourless. She smiles when she sees me, and I know she is alive.
“I was beginning to think you would never come,” she says. The shadows of the bamboo leaves outside come through a crumbling window and play across her face.
“You remember me, then,” I say, “so you’re not mad.”
“What is madness anyway?” she asks. For a moment, her eyes are all dull and unfocussed. Then they suddenly become clear and sharp. “I hear they say the same about you.”
“Really?” I ask. “All this time, I just thought they said I was evil.”
“Isn’t it the same thing?” she counters.
“Perhaps,” I say.
Her hands are bathwater, warm and almost liquid.
The memory of sex is never the same as when it is actually happening. Sometimes between the act and the memory there is a longing that builds up, quietly feeding on the soul, a longing almost like the longing for home, or the longing for death. The longing has its own tense beauty, all salmon and mauve and indigo, like the sunset, riding on the belly like the need to urinate, or at the base of the skull like a dream of falling. We return to the memory through different doors each time. We return to it in fragments, a flash of desire flooding through the chest, or moist breath travelling a jawbone. Here and there a moment of pain, sometimes intended, sometimes not – hipbone in the spine, a pinch, a bite, a scratch.…
I never knew humans could get rabies. The infection went straight to my heart, and my heart loosened from its anchor and fell into my body.
We used to be reluctant to admit we enjoyed the company of men. It was a living. But lately it has been more a question of spite, though I don’t know why they take to her, thin and dark as she is. Maybe they find a certain charm in decay. A casual observer would say we care for each other, although we amuse ourselves with men and quarrelling.
After our last fight we promised each other we would not let any male creature come between us again, but she knew the young scholar Jinren was mine, so I don’t know what she was thinking. She says she did not even open the door to him, but then I’d like to know about the muddy footprints twice the size of her feet leading away from the back of the temple. They are fresh. It doesn’t take a dog’s nose to figure that out.
So that is why she wouldn’t come to the princess’s funeral with me. It must have been something important to miss an event like that. The emperor’s favourite daughter, Princess Tongchang, had just died. He spared no expense to express the depth of his mourning. The funeral was magnificent. There was a procession fifteen kilometres long, with forty camels just to carry food and drink for the coffin-bearers. They didn’t burn paper houses, boats, and clothes, but ones made of real silk studded with gold and precious stones. Many people risked immolation to cart away the hot ashes riddled with treasures.
Perhaps that is why she didn’t come to the execution of the princess’s thirty lazy doctors, either. Lazy or evil, for poisoning her. That’s the rumour. Although I’m not sure why so many clever men would devise such a feeble plot. They should have known it would only bring them to a sorry end. So the emperor weeps blood one week and hot jewels the next. How wonderful, to be able to express such grief!
The emperor has his problems and I have mine. I try to talk to her and she admits to letting Jinren in but says she didn’t talk to him, only gave him a cup of tea and asked him to wait. I don’t believe her. Her eyes are as innocent as the sky, but I know better. I told her so and she started to sing. She hates singing so I know it was just to annoy me. She sang in that opera voice I taught her when we were young. She knows she can sing better than me and she likes to keep me on the edge about it, meting out her voice like it is something to be conserved and measured.
Where is she? Gone to play with her foxes again? That headless doll of hers gives me the creeps. Jinren says he saw her at the execution ground yesterday collecting skulls. What does she need so many skulls for?
Was it wrong of me to beat her? I didn’t mean to, or maybe I did, but I didn’t think I was beating her very hard. Then all of a sudden there was all this blood and she fell down. I thought she was just being dramatic, so I left her there and went back to the funeral ground to see if there were any ashes left. When I came back she was still
there, in the same position I had left her.
“Do you think Ming will come see me today?” Artemis stared at her reflection in the mirror. It is dull, faded like a photograph that has been lying out in the sun for too long.
“I don’t think so,” the Fox whispered tenderly into her ear, have stolen unnoticed into the bathroom.
She took a last glance. Her hair was a mess. She couldn’t remember the last time she had brushed it. Her skin had a yellowish tint that could almost but not quite be a suntan, she thought.
“Ming is dead,” said the Fox, her face growing serious. She guided Artemis by the waist back into the bedroom, where they had been sitting or lying for weeks, writing poems and playing chess. She sat down among the tangled sweaty sheets at the foot of the bed. The Fox sat at the head, by the night table.
“Ming is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean she won’t come see me?”
“Not necessarily.”
With a firm swipe of the hand, the Fox pushed half a dozen empty bottles of Johnny Walker Red onto the floor, and, smiling, produced a fresh one from the depths of her skirts.
“Where did you get that?”
“Bought it.”
“With what money?”
“From the envelope in the kitchen drawer.”
“That was rent money.” Artemis didn’t say this angrily but with the sort of resignation that comes from Taoist philosophy at its worst. Resist nothing. Let happen what will. Time was running out on her apartment. The new owners would take possession in less than a month.
The Fox poured scotch into glasses freshly but not thoroughly rinsed, so that the dried yellowish scum of last week’s drinks lingered at the bottom and floated up through the drink in brown flakes.
Artemis took a sip and crinkled her nose. “It stinks in here.”
“More poems,” said the Fox. “I’ll clean up tomorrow.”
They could blame it on the kidneys, the starting point for the well of memory. She has a lot to remember, how it began, whom she placed trust in, and for what reasons. Memory is a sneaky thing, so easily coloured by emotions, by illusions of beauty and power.
I come to her daily now. In fact, I never leave. She likes me here. She needs me to keep her company, to bring her whiskey and write her poems and play chess.
We write poems to the Poetess, trying to dream through what nobody’s records could tell us. Poems that turn into tales that fall back on themselves the way night falls into day.
She can’t take care of herself. She moans in her sleep. The name was not enough to hold her. They didn’t fill her quiver with arrows before setting her loose and hungry into the world. The name was not nearly enough. It was just a thin covering, a disguise to get her through a few doors. It didn’t weigh enough. No more than a small bag of coins, not even enough for a ghost to buy her way down the river. A name must carry you into the past and the future. It needs roots to tap the water deep below the surface of the earth, to prevent the soul from being swept away by any old tide that happens to wash in.
At least I am here. She clings to me in the night, she aches for my hands to soothe her, my poems to whisper her under the dark. That is what I can do, so that is what I do. I wait with her. I try to comb her hair, but she complains loudly that it hurts her scalp, and so I just stroke her head and wait. Her breath is hot. If I were to return to my original form, she would singe my coat off with it, so I don’t. I stay in the Poetess’s body. But we are both getting dirty. The place smells like a den. I don’t mind it so much, having been born into such a place, but it bothers her and yet she refuses to wash. The place grows greyer. She subsists on a diet of scotch and cigarettes. I haven’t seen food pass her lips in weeks. She is growing yellower and yet somehow she continues to hang on, tenaciously. Perhaps there is more to that name than I thought.
My cell is cold and at night I have to fight with the rats for enough space on the stone floor to sleep. I would have starved to death by now if not for one of my students, the daughter of an Arabic salt trader with a gift for poems on the topic of loneliness. She brings me steamed bread, roast meat, and pomegranates, which are in season now There is her and there is a woman I’ve never met before, extremely ugly, with a mischievous light behind her eyes. She brings me chicken and the most up-to-date news she can garner concerning the status of my case. My trial is to be postponed again because of the possibility of another witness who heard Lu Ch’iao and I fighting the night before she died. She says a number of scholars from all over the kingdom have pleaded with the judge in my favour, but that he is determined to find me guilty and is just waiting to find the right evidence. Which he almost certainly will, she says mournfully, whether it is true or not. They always find their evidence when they need it.
I am past caring. Outside my tiny window I can see stars at night, six of them that move through the tiny rectangle over the course of the dark hours and vanish by morning. I ask the salt trader’s daughter to bring me a candle, paper, ink, and a brush so that I can write while I am here. This she does faithfully every week and takes my finished poems with her, in order that I may have a trace of life in the outside world. She says she hears people discussing them in the teahouses, and that is a comfort to me, although I am quite aware of the possibility that she tells me this precisely for that reason and not because it is true.
The ugly woman wants to know from my own mouth whether or not I am guilty, but I don’t trust her. She says if I tell her, she will bribe the guards and help me escape, but I turn her down. She continues to bring me chicken and sometimes clean clothes or a bottle of wine.
It is raining the day she comes to see me for the last time. She tells me the judge has found his witnesses, the eldest daughter of a local butcher and the Official of Interior Taxation, formerly in charge of expunging foreign religions from the land. The butcher’s daughter claimed to have heard Lu Ch’iao and I fighting as she cut around the outer walls of the temple the night before Lu Ch’iao died. The official said he had seen me burying a body beneath a cherry tree in the garden in the wee hours of the following morning. My trial has date has been set, and I have no doubt about the outcome.
I am scared. I am scared we will be discovered. The place reeks now. No longer of dirt, but of death, lingering patiently in the air, waiting for the perfect moment to swoop down, or perhaps simply settle like ashes after a fire.
I am scared because these are classic symptoms of a fox’s haunting. The victim pale and thin with eyes that blaze and hair too lush and thick to be human. It was never my intention to haunt like this. I came for the warmth, for the breath. I came as a friend, to comfort. I never expected her to place all her hopes and desires in me, to rail at me as she sometimes does in her sleep, lashing out with nails and teeth as sharp as the claws and fangs of something feral.
I am scared for her. I am scared for myself. I am scared of the men with the charms and poisoned liquor.
The newspapers insisted it was drugs. It was the only way they could explain the tattoos. They devised an extensive map of meaning that led to high-flying Triad members based in New York. A local television station ran a two-hour special on Asian gangs in large North American cities. For them, Ming’s change of name and appearance was a wilful attempt at deceit, to hide illicit activity. Her friends are not so sure. The drugs they found in her bloodstream were prescription, but that explained nothing. Although the dull silver Smith & Wesson 3913 Lady smith was found in her stiffly clutched fingers, many police and friends speculated that someone else had placed it there. She may well have been capable of killing herself, but surely she could not have buried herself too.
The ceremony was Claude’s idea. None of them knew what they were supposed to do, what their ancestors might have done on a similar occasion.
She bought a lot of white candles, joss sticks, some oranges, and a steamed chicken. She called everyone, even Diane, and talked them into coming. The only one Claude couldn’t reach was Artem
is, who did not answer her phone. She drove by on the day of the ceremony and rattled the door until a thin, straggly-haired woman opened it. The place was a mess, as though a hurricane had hit it, or, as was more likely the case, as though Artemis had not cleaned up since Diane’s little rampage. She stood in the doorway and stared at Claude.
“What happened to you?” Claude asked.
‘I’m sick. Leave me alone.”
The house reeked of stale tobacco and spilled liquor.
“Come on. Everyone went a little crazy after the murder, but things don’t need to get this bad.” She pushed her way into the apartment. “We’re going to do a little ceremony at Ming’s death site. I think you should come. I’ll wait for you to take a bath. Do you have any clean clothes?”
“You want me to get into a car with Diane and Rachel and yourself? Fucking no way.”
“I rented a van so no one has to sit too close to anyone they don’t want to. Go on. People are waiting.” She pushed her with a gentle, encouraging hand.
In the van, with all of them there, you could almost feel Ming among them, some new scheme on her lips, the tattoo-dragon on her arm winking.
Rachel sat on the floor beside Claude, in the gap between the two front seats. Her hand lay on Claude’s thigh, burning. Diane slouched at the back, her discomfort nearly audible. She pulled a little cast-iron monkey out of her pocket, one that she had recently taken to carrying wherever she went. She turned it round and round in her hands. It grew warm with their heat. The little metal eyes twinkled with sympathy. Artemis sat somewhere in the middle, wrapped in her own arms, rocking herself, not really thinking about who was in the van with her at all. Eden, whom Claude had tracked down through an address on the back of one of Ming’s photos, sat beside her, feeling large and clumsy and out of place. Claude kept her eye on the road and said nothing.