by Lisa See
She poured my tea, knelt before me, and looked up into my face, waiting for me to question her.
“Tell me what’s happened,” I said, expecting to hear that my mother had decided to release me or that she was going to let Willow stay in my room again.
“When Master Chen asked me to play the part of Spring Fragrance, I said yes, hoping that one of the men in the audience might see me, approach your father, and ask if he would sell me to another household,” she answered, her eyes bright with happiness. “The offer came last night and your father agreed. I’m to leave this afternoon.”
I felt like Willow had just slapped my face. Never in ten thousand years would I have guessed or imagined this.
“But you belong to me!”
“Actually, until yesterday I was your father’s property. Today, I belong to Master Quon.”
That she smiled when she said this unlocked a pocket of anger in me.
“You can’t leave. You can’t want to leave.”
When she didn’t answer, I knew she truly wanted to go. But how could this be? She was my maid and companion. I had never thought about where she’d come from or how she’d come to be my servant, but I’d always believed her to be mine. She was a part of my everyday life like the chamber pot. She was at my feet when I fell asleep; she was the first person I saw in the morning. She started the brazier before I opened my eyes and fetched hot water for bathing me. I had thought she would go with me to my husband’s home. She was supposed to care for me when I got pregnant and had sons. Since she was my age, I had expected her to be with me until I died.
“Every night after you fall asleep, I lie here on the floor and hide my tears in my handkerchief,” she confessed. “For years, I have hoped your father would sell me. If I’m lucky, my new owner will make me a concubine.” She paused, considered, and then added in a practical tone, “A second, third, or fourth concubine.”
That my servant had longings like this shocked me. She was far ahead of me in her thinking, in her desires. She had come from the world outside our garden—the world I was suddenly obsessed with—and I had never once asked her about it.
“How can you do this to me? Where is your gratitude?”
Her smile faded. Did she not answer because she didn’t want to or because she didn’t feel she owed it to me?
“I’m thankful your family took me in,” she admitted. She had a pretty face, but in that moment I saw how much she disliked me, how much she had probably disliked me for years. “Now I can have a different life than the one I was born to as a thin horse.”
I had heard the term before, but I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t fully understand what it meant.
“My family was from Yangzhou, where your grandmother died,” she went on. “Like so many families, mine suffered greatly. The old and ugly women were massacred along with the men. Women like my mother were sold like salted fish—in sacks, by weight. My mother’s new owner was an enterprising man. I was the fourth daughter to be sold. Since then I have been like a leaf in the wind.”
I listened.
“The thin-horse trader bound my feet and taught me to read, sing, embroider, and play the flute,” she continued. “In this way my life was not unlike yours, but in other ways it was very different. Those people grew girls on their land instead of crops.” She lowered her head and glanced at me furtively. “Spring came, autumn went. They could have kept me until I was old enough to sell into pleasure, but inflation and a glut on the market lowered prices. They had to unload some of the crop. One day, they dressed me in red, painted my face white, and took me to market. Your father examined my teeth; he held my feet in his hands; he patted my body.”
“He wouldn’t do that!”
“He did, and I was ashamed. He bought me for a few bolts of cloth. These last years I hoped that your father might take me as his fourth concubine and that I might bring him the son your mother and the others can’t give him.”
The thought curdled my stomach.
“Today I go to my third owner,” she said matter-of-factly. “Your father has sold me for pork and cash. It’s a good deal, and he’s happy.”
Sold for pork? I was to be married in exchange for bride-price gifts, which included pigs. Perhaps Willow and I were not so different after all. Neither of us had any say in our futures.
“I’m still young,” Willow said. “I may change hands again if I don’t bear a son or I stop making my master smile. The thin-horse trader taught me that buying a concubine adds to a man’s garden. Some trees bear fruit, some give shade, some give pleasure to the eye. I’m hopeful that I will not be weeded out and sold again.”
“You’re like Xiaoqing,” I said in wonder.
“I don’t have her beauty or talent, but I hope my future is better than hers and that in my next life I will not be born in Yangzhou.”
This was my first true understanding that my existence in our garden villa was not at all like that of girls in the outside world. Terrifying and horrible things happened out there. This had been kept a secret from me, and I was grateful but curious. My grandmother had been out there and now she was worshipped as a martyr. Willow had come from out there and her future was as set as my own: Make the man in her life happy, bear him sons, and excel in the Four Virtues.
“So I’m going,” Willow said abruptly, as she got up off her knees.
“Wait.” I stood, crossed to a cabinet, and opened a drawer. I fingered my jewelry and hair ornaments, looking for a piece that would be neither too ordinary nor too extravagant. I settled on a hairpin of blue kingfisher feathers shaped into a soaring phoenix, its tail flowing delicately behind it. I placed it in Willow’s hand.
“To wear when you meet your new owner.”
“Thank you,” she said, and with that she left the room.
Not two minutes later, Shao, my old wet nurse and our head amah, entered. “I will be taking care of you from now on.”
I could not have received worse news.
MY MOTHER HAD plans for me, and Shao, who now lived in my room, had to make sure they were fulfilled. “Tong—Same—you will prepare for your wedding, nothing else,” Shao announced, and she meant it.
Hearing my new name, I had an inward shiver of despair. My place in the world was set by label and designation; through my name I was already changing from a daughter into a wife and daughter-in-law.
For the next seven weeks, Shao brought my meals, but my stomach had become an abyss of anguish and I ignored the food or stubbornly pushed it away. As time passed, my body changed. My skirts started to hang on my hips instead of my waist, and my tunics swung loose and free.
My mother never visited.
“She’s disappointed in you,” Shao reminded me every day. “How could you have come from her body? I tell her a bad daughter is a typical daughter.”
I was book-smart but no match for my mother. Her job was to control me and see me married out to a good family. Although she still did not want to see my face, she sent emissaries. Every morning, Third Aunt arrived just before dawn to teach me to embroider properly.
“No more sloppy or clumsy stitches allowed,” she said, her voice tinkling like white carnelian. If I made a mistake, she made me pull out the stitches and start again. With no distractions and Third Aunt’s exacting instruction, I learned. And with every stitch, I ached for my poet.
As soon as she swept out of the room, Shao let in Second Aunt, who drilled me on my zither. Despite her indulgent reputation, she was very strict with me. If I erred in my plucking, she struck my fingers with a stalk of green bamboo. My zither playing improved surprisingly quickly, becoming clear and limpid. I imagined each note floating out the window and traveling across the lake to my poet’s home, where the music would make him think of me as I was thinking of him.
In the late afternoons, as the colors of evening began to appear in the west, Fourth Aunt, widowed and childless, came to teach me the purpose of clouds and rain.
“A woman’s great
est strength is to give birth to sons,” Fourth Aunt instructed. “It gives a woman power and it can take it away. If you give your husband a son, you might keep him from entering the pleasure quarters on the lake or bringing in concubines. Remember, a woman’s purity grows through seclusion. This is why you’re in here.”
I listened hard to what she said, but she told me nothing about what to expect on my wedding night or how I could participate in clouds and rain with someone I didn’t love, like, or know. I relentlessly conjured the hours leading up to it: my mother, aunts, and cousins washing and dressing me in my wedding clothes; the five grains, the piece of pork, and the pig heart they’d hide in the underskirt I’d wear next to my skin; the tears shed by everyone as I was led outside to the palanquin; stepping over the Wu family threshold and letting that underskirt with its hidden treasures drop to the floor to ensure the fast and easy births of sons; and finally being led into the wedding chamber. These thoughts, which had once filled me with happy expectation, now made me want to run away. That I had no way to escape my fate made me feel even worse.
After dinner, Fifth Aunt took time from the nightly gathering in the women’s chambers to improve my calligraphy. “Writing is a creation of the outer world of men,” she said. “It is by its nature a public act—something that we, as women, should avoid—but you need to learn it so that one day you can help your son with his studies.”
We worked through sheet after sheet of paper, copying poems from the Book of Songs, doing drills from Pictures of Battle Formations of the Brush, and limning lessons from the Women’s Four-Character Classic until my fingers were stained with ink.
Apart from perfecting my brushstrokes, Fifth Aunt’s lessons were pure and simple: “The best you can do is take the ancients as your teachers. Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts, or emotions. Make yourself presentable, speak gently but don’t say anything, wash yourself diligently and frequently, and keep a harmonious mind. In this way you will wear your virtue on your face.”
I dutifully obeyed, but each stroke of my brush was a caress I gave my poet. Each swish of my brush was my fingers on his skin. Each character completed was a gift to the man who had so invaded my thoughts.
Every moment of the day and night that one of my aunts wasn’t in my room I still had Shao. Like Willow, she slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. She was there when I woke up, there when I used the chamber pot, there when I did my lessons, there when I went to sleep. I was there for her too, listening to her snoring and farting, smelling her breath and what left her body and went into the chamber pot, watching her scratch her rump or clean her feet. No matter what she did, she was unrelenting in what spewed from her mouth.
“A woman—and your mother has recognized this in you—becomes unruly through knowledge,” she told me, contradicting my aunts’ teachings. “In your mind you go too far beyond the inner chambers. It’s dangerous out there; your mother needs you to understand that. Forget what you’ve learned. Instructions from Mother Wen tells us that a girl should know only a few written characters, like firewood, rice, fish, and meat. These words will help you run a household. Anything more is perilous.”
Just as door after door was closing me in, my heart was opening wider and wider. A dream visit to the Peony Pavilion had given Liniang a case of lovesickness. Visits to pavilions in the Chen Family Villa had given me my lovesickness. I had no control over my activities—how I dressed or my future life with this Wu Ren—but my emotions remained untrammeled and free. I’ve come to believe that part of lovesickness comes from this conflict between control and desire. In love we have no control. Our hearts and minds are tormented, teased, enticed, and delighted by the overwhelming strength of emotions that make us try to forget the real world. But that world does exist, so as women we have to think about how to make our husbands happy by being good wives, bearing sons, running our households well, and being pretty so they don’t become distracted from their daily activities or loiter with concubines. We are not born with these abilities. They must be instilled in us by other women. Through lessons, aphorisms, and acquired skills we are molded…and controlled.
My mother controlled me through her instructions even as she refused to see me. My aunts controlled me through their lessons. My future mother-in-law would control me after marriage. Together, these women—from the time I was born until the day I died—would control every single minute of my life.
Yet for every effort at control, I was spinning away. At every moment, my poet invaded my thoughts—during every stitch, every strum, every didactic lesson. He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I daydreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him. Each time petal-scented air came through my window, my emotions were thrown into turmoil. Did he long for a traditional wife or a new wife, like the one he talked about the night we met in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion? Would his future wife give him what he wanted? And what about me? What would happen to me now?
At night, as moonlight sent scattered shadows of bamboo leaves across my silk bedding, I dwelled in these dark thoughts. Sometimes I would get up, step over Shao, and go to the drawer where I kept the sprig of willow my poet had given me on our last night together. As the weeks went by, leaf after leaf fell away and crumbled to nothing, until all that was left was the twig. My little speck of a heart was soaked through with sadness.
Over time I improved on the zither, memorized rules, and worked on my embroidery. Two months into my seclusion, Third Aunt announced, “You are ready to make shoes for your mother-in-law.”
Every bride does this as a sign of respect, but for years I’d dreaded this task, knowing my needlework would instantly reveal my flaws. Now I dreaded it even more. While I would no longer embarrass myself or bring shame on my family through my stitches, I had no feelings for this woman and felt no need to impress her. I tried to imagine she was my poet’s mother. What else could I do to protect myself from the hopelessness I felt? My mother-in-law’s name was the same as mine—Peony—so I incorporated that flower, the hardest of all to paint or stitch, into my design. I spent hours on each petal and leaf until after a month the shoes were completed. I held the pair in my hand and showed them to Third Aunt.
“They are perfect,” she said, and she meant it. I may not have woven in strands of my hair or made them as airy as she would have, but by any other standard they were splendid. “You may wrap them.”
ON THE NINTH day of the ninth month, when we commemorate Lady Purple, who was treated so badly by her mother-in-law that she hanged herself in the privy she was required to clean each day, the door to my room opened and my mother entered. I bowed deeply to show my respect, and then I stood still, my hands clasped before me, my eyes cast down.
“Waaa! You look…!” The surprise in Mama’s voice caused me to glance up. She must have still been angry with me, because her face was disturbed. But she had perfected the art of hiding her feelings, and her features quickly settled. “Your final bride-price gifts have arrived. You might like to see them before they’re put away. But I expect you to—”
“Don’t worry, Mama. I’ve changed.”
“I see that,” she said, but again I did not detect pleasure in her tone. Rather, I heard concern. “Come. Take a look. Then I want you to join us for breakfast.”
As I left my room, a single thread held together my emotions—loneliness, despair, and my unwavering love for my poet. I had learned to vent my sorrows through sighs.
I followed my mother at a respectful distance to the Sitting-Down Hall. My bride-price gifts had been brought to our home in lacquer-framed boxes that looked like glass coffins. My family had received the usual items: silks and satins, gold and jewelry, porcelains and ceramics, cakes and dumplings, jars of wine and roast pork. Some of these things were for me; most were for my father’s coffers. Ample gifts of cash were for my uncles. This was physical proof that my marriage was going to happen—and soon.
I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep from crying. Once my emotions were under control, I planted a placid smile on my face. I was out of my room at last and my mother would be watching for any lapse in the proprieties. I had to be wary.
My eyes fell on a package wrapped in red silk. I glanced at my mother, and she nodded to let me know I could open it. I peeled back the soft folds. Inside was a two-volume set of The Peony Pavilion. It was the only edition I didn’t already own, the one from Tang Xianzu’s private press. I opened the note that came with the set. Dear Same, I look forward to staying up late with you, drinking tea, and talking about the opera. It was signed by my future husband’s sister-in-law, who already lived in the Wu household. The bride-price payments were fine, but this gift told me that there was at least one person in the Wu family’s women’s chambers with whom I might find companionship.
“May I keep this?” I asked my mother.
Her brow furrowed and I thought she would say no.
“Take it to your room and then come straight away to the Spring Pavilion. You need to eat.”
I clutched the volumes to my chest, walked slowly back to my room, and set them on my bed. Then, following my mother’s orders, I went to the Spring Pavilion.
I’d been locked away for two months, and I looked at the room and everyone in it with new eyes. The usual tensions bubbled among my aunts, my cousins, my mother, and those women and girls who were unseen in the morning—the concubines and their daughters. But because I’d been away I saw and felt an undercurrent that I’d never fully noticed before. Every woman is expected to be pregnant at least ten times during her lifetime. The women in the Chen Family Villa had trouble getting pregnant, and when they did they seemed incapable of dropping a son. This lack of sons weighed on everyone. The concubines were supposed to rescue our dying family line, but even though we fed, clothed, and housed them, none of them had birthed a boy either. They may not have been allowed physically to join us for breakfast, but they were with us nonetheless.