by Lisa See
My cousins seemed to have a new attitude toward me. Broom, who’d orchestrated my confinement, used her chopsticks to put a few dumplings on my plate. Lotus poured my tea and handed me her bowl of congee, which she’d flavored with salted fish and scallions. My aunts came by the table, welcomed me back with smiling faces, and urged me to eat. But I didn’t take a single bite. I even ignored the sweet-bean paste dumplings that Shao delivered from my mother’s table.
When the meal ended, we moved to the Lotus-Blooming Hall. Little clusters formed: one group to embroider, another to paint and do calligraphy, yet another to read poetry. The concubines arrived and came to peck at me, present me with treats, and pinch my cheeks to bring in color. Only two of my grandfather’s concubines were still alive, and they were very old. Their face powder accentuated their wrinkles. Their hair ornaments did not make them look younger but only highlighted the white. Their waists were big, but their feet were still as tiny and beautiful as they were on those nights when my grandfather had eased his mind by holding the delicate morsels in his hand.
“You look more like your grandmother every day,” Grandfather’s favorite said.
“You are as kind and good-natured as she was,” the other added.
“Please join us for embroidery,” the favorite went on. “Or choose another activity. It would please us to keep you company in whatever activity you desire. We are a sisterhood in this room, after all. When we were hiding from the Manchus in Yangzhou, your grandmother was very clear on this point.”
“From the afterworld she looks to your future,” the lesser concubine said, in an obsequious tone. “We’ve been making offerings to her on your behalf.”
After so many weeks of solitude, the chatter and competitiveness—all hidden behind the activities of embroidery, calligraphy, and reading poetry—clearly revealed to me the shadow darkness of the women who lived in the Chen Family Villa. I felt tears gather from the exertion of trying to be a good daughter, of listening and protecting myself from their false concern, and of realizing that this was my life.
But I could not fight my mother.
I wanted to submerge myself in my feelings. I wanted to bury myself in thoughts of love. I had no way to get out of my marriage, but maybe I could escape from it in the same way I had here in my natal home, by reading, writing, and imagining. I wasn’t a man and could never compete with the writings of men. I had no desire to write an eight-legged essay, even if I could have taken the imperial exams. But I did have a certain kind of knowledge—all those things I had learned sitting on my father’s lap when I was a small girl and later when he gave me editions of the classics and volumes of poetry to study—that most girls didn’t, and I would use it to save myself. I wouldn’t write poetry about butterflies and flowers. I had to find something that would not only be meaningful to me but would sustain me for the rest of my life.
A thousand years ago, the poet Han Yun wrote, “All things not at peace will cry out.” He compared the human need to express feelings in writing to the natural force that impelled plants to rustle in the wind or metal to ring when struck. With that I realized what I would do. It was something I’d already worked on for years. With the outside world stripped away, I had spent my life looking inward and my emotions were finely tuned. My poet wanted to know my thoughts about the Seven Emotions; now I would find all those places in The Peony Pavilion that illustrated them. I would look inside myself and write not what the critics had observed or what my aunts discussed about these emotions but how I felt them myself. I would finish my project in time for my marriage, so I could go to Wu Ren’s home with something that would remind me forever of the three nights of love I’d spent with my poet. My project would be my salvation in the coming dark years. I might be locked in my husband’s home, but my mind would travel to the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, where I could meet my poet again and again without interruption or fear of being caught. My poet would never read it, but I could always imagine presenting it to him—me unclothed on his bed and naked in my heart and mind.
I stood up abruptly, scraping my chair against the floor. The sound caused the women and girls to stare at me. I saw the way their hate and jealousy hid behind pretty faces filled with false worry and concern.
“Tong,” my mother said, addressing me by my new name.
My head felt like ants were crawling inside it. I composed my face as best I could.
“Mama, may I go to Baba’s library?”
“He’s not there. He’s gone to the capital.”
The news shocked me. He had not been back to the capital since the Manchus took over.
“Even if he were here,” she went on, “I would say no. He’s a bad influence. He thinks a girl should know about Xiaoqing. Well, look what that kind of lesson has brought you.” She said this in front of every woman who lived in our compound. This is how great her scorn and contempt for me was. “The Cataclysm is over. We have to remember who we are: women who belong in our inner chambers, not wandering in the garden.”
“I only want to look up something,” I said. “Please, Mama, let me go. I’ll return shortly.”
“I’ll accompany you. Let me hold your arm.”
“Mama, I’m fine. Really. I’ll be right back.”
Nearly everything I said to my mother was a lie, but she let me go anyway.
I left the Lotus-Blooming Hall feeling light-headed and wandered through the corridors until I could step out and into the garden. It was the ninth month. The blossoms had faded, their pitiful petals fallen. The birds had left for warmer climates. With spring feelings so strong in me, it hurt to see this reminder of the frailty of youth, life, and beauty.
When I came to the edge of our pond, I sank to my knees so I might see my reflection on the glassy surface. Lovesickness had caused my face to grow thin and pale. My body looked less substantial, as if it could no longer bear the weight of my tunic. My gold bracelets hung loosely on my wrists. Even my jade hairpins seemed too heavy for the lightness of my frame. Would my poet recognize me if he saw me now?
I stood again, lingering for a moment to see my reflection one last time, and then I retraced my steps until I was back in the corridor. I walked to the front gate. Over the last sixteen years I’d come here many times but had never stepped through it or been carried over the threshold. That would happen only on my wedding day. I ran my fingers along its surface. My father had once explained to me that we had a wind-fire gate. The side that faced the outside world was composed of solid wood. It protected us from all kinds of weather, but it also shielded us from ghosts and bandits by tricking them into believing that nothing of importance or interest resided on our side. The inside of the gate was sheathed in shaved stone to protect us from fire and give us extra fortification against whatever evils might try to penetrate our garden home. Touching those stone sheets was like touching the cold yin of the earth. From there I went to the ancestral hall, made obeisance to my grandmother, lit incense, and begged her to make me strong.
Finally, I went to my father’s library. When I stepped inside I could see that my father had been away for some time. I smelled no tobacco or incense floating on the air. The trays that held his summer ice had been removed, but no braziers had been brought in to heat the room against the autumn chill. More than anything, the energy of his mind was gone not only from this room but—I felt it now—from the compound. He was the most important person in the Chen Family Villa. How had I not noticed his absence, even alone in my room?
I went to the shelves and selected the best collections of poetry, history, myth, and religion I could find. I made three trips to my room to drop them off. I came back to the library and sat for a few minutes on the edge of Baba’s daybed to think if there was anything else I might want. I chose another three books from a stack in the corner, and then I left the library and made my way back to my room. I entered, and this time I closed the door of my own accord.
Jade Shattering
I SPENT THE NEXT MONTH PORIN
G OVER EACH OF THE twelve editions of The Peony Pavilion I’d collected and transcribing all the notes I’d ever written in those copies into the margins of Tang Xianzu’s original two-volume edition my future sister-in-law had sent me. Once I finished that, I gathered my father’s books around me and looked through them until, after another month, I’d identified all but three of the original authors of the pastiches in Volume One and most of those in Volume Two. I didn’t explain terms or allusions, comment on the music or performance, or try to compare The Peony Pavilion to other operas. I wrote in tiny characters, packing them tightly between the lines of the text.
I didn’t leave my room. I allowed Shao to wash and dress me, but I turned away from the food she brought. I wasn’t hungry; being light-headed seemed to make me think and write more clearly. When my aunts or cousins came to invite me to take a walk in the garden or join them for tea and dumplings in the Spring Pavilion, I graciously thanked them but said no. Not surprisingly, my attitude did not agree with my mother. I didn’t tell her what I was doing and she didn’t ask. “You cannot learn to be a good wife by hiding in your room with your father’s books,” she said. “Come to the Spring Pavilion. Have breakfast and listen to your aunts. Come for lunch and learn how to treat your husband’s concubines. Join us at dinner and perfect your conversation.”
Suddenly everyone wanted me to have a meal, but for years my mother had told me to beware of becoming chubby like Broom and to eat little so I would be slim at my wedding. But how can you eat anyway when you’re in love? Every girl has this experience. Every girl knows this is so. My heart was dreaming of my poet, my head was filled with this project that I was sure would protect me in my married loneliness, and my stomach? It was empty and I didn’t care.
I began to stay in bed. All day I read from the two volumes. All night I read by the flickering light of the oil lamp. The more I read, the more I began to think about the small links that Tang Xianzu had used to create a deeper whole. I pondered the key moments in the opera, the foreshadowing, the special motifs, and how every word and action illuminated the one thing I was obsessed with: love.
The plum tree, for example, was an arbor of life and love. It was the place where Liniang and Mengmei first met, where she would be buried, and where he would bring her back to life. In the very first scene, Mengmei changed his name because of a dream, becoming Dream of Plum. But the tree also evoked Liniang, for plum blossoms are delicate, ethereal, almost virginal in their beauty. When a girl falls into marriage, she exhales her beauty and loses forever her romantic image. She still has many obligations to fulfill—giving birth to sons, honoring her husband’s ancestors, becoming a chaste widow—but she has already begun her glide into death.
I pulled out my ink, ground it into the inkstone, added water, and then in my finest hand wrote my thoughts in the upper margin of Volume One:
Most of those who grieve over spring are especially moved by fallen blossoms, as I was when I last walked in our garden. Liniang sees the petals and understands that her youth and her beauty are fleeting. She doesn’t know that her life is frail too.
What had always captured my imagination about the opera was its portrayal of romantic love, which was so different from the arranged loveless marriages that I’d grown up with in the Chen Family Villa or the one I was going to. To me, qing was noble, the highest ambition a man or woman could have. Although my experience of it was limited to three nights under the light of the quarter moon, I believed it gave meaning to life.
Everything begins with love. For Liniang, it begins with her tour of the garden, then her dream, and it never ends.
Liniang’s ghost and Mengmei enjoyed clouds and rain. They were both so honest in their love for each other—as my poet and I were—that this was not some ugly thing between a concubine and a man.
Theirs is a purely divine love. Liniang always behaves like a lady.
As I wrote this, I thought of myself on the last night in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion.
I wrote about dreams—Liniang’s, Mengmei’s, and my own. I also thought about Liniang’s self-portrait and compared it to what I was doing with my project. In the upper margin, I wrote in my finest hand:
A painting is form without shadow or reflection, just as a dream is shadow or reflection without form. A painting is like a shadow without a frame. It is even more of an illusion than a dream.
Shadows, dreams, reflections in mirrors and ponds, even memories were insubstantial and fleeting, but were they any less real? They weren’t to me. I dipped my brush in the ink, smoothed off the excess, and wrote:
Du Liniang sought pleasure in a dream; Liu Mengmei sought a mate in a painting. If you don’t consider such things illusion, then illusion will become real.
I worked so hard and ate so little that I began to doubt I had ever met a stranger in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion for two nights. Had the poet and I actually left the Moon-Viewing Pavilion to walk along the lakeshore? Was all that a dream or real? It had to be real, and very shortly I would be sent into a marriage with someone I did not love.
When Liniang goes to the library, she passes by a window and wants to fly out to meet her lover. Naturally, she is too afraid to do so.
Tears came to my eyes, rolled down my cheeks, and fell onto the paper as I wrote this.
Visions of love consumed me. What little appetite that had survived my first confinement left me completely. Xiaoqing used to drink half a cup of pear juice each day; I took only a few sips. Not eating stopped being about maintaining control over my life. It even stopped being about my poet and the tumultuous feelings of love and longing I felt were consuming me. One of the sages once wrote: Only when you are suffering in extremity will the poetry you write be any good. Gu Ruopu, the great woman poet, responded to this when she commented: Officials and scholars will engrave their very flesh and carve into bone, turning white-haired and using up their lives contriving to produce dark and melancholy lines.
I traveled to a place deep within myself where everything worldly was stripped away and I felt only emotion: love, regret, longing, hope. I sat propped up in bed, wearing my favorite gown with the pair of mandarin ducks flying above flowers and butterflies, and allowed my mind to travel to the Peony Pavilion. Had Liniang’s dreams compromised her chastity? Had my dreams—my wandering in our family garden—compromised my own? Was I no longer pure because I’d met a stranger and let him touch me with the petals of a peony?
WHILE I FEVERISHLY wrote, wedding preparations swirled around me. One day a seamstress put me into my wedding costume and then took it away to make it smaller. Another day Mama arrived with my aunts. I was in bed, my books spread about me on the silk coverlet. They had smiles on their faces, but they weren’t happy.
“Your father has sent word from the capital,” Mama said, in her melodious voice. “He’s going back into service for the emperor as soon as you are married.”
“Have the Manchus left?” I asked. Had I missed a dynastic change during my confinement?
“No, your father will be serving the Qing emperor.”
“But Baba is a loyalist. How can he—”
“You should eat.” Mama cut me off. “Wash your hair, put on powder, and be prepared to greet him when he returns, as a proper daughter should. He has brought great honor to our family. You need to show him respect. Now get up!”
But I didn’t.
My mother left the room, but my aunts stayed. They tried to get me out of bed and make me stand, but I was as slippery and formless as an eel in their hands. My thoughts were just as elusive. How could my father serve the emperor when he was a loyalist? Would my mother leave the compound and follow him to the capital, as she once had to Yangzhou?
The next day, Mama brought the family diviner to discuss how to bring more color to my cheeks before my wedding.
“Do you have spring tea from Longjing?” he asked. “Brew it with ginger to improve her stomach and build her strength.”
I tried the tea, but it didn’t
help. A light wind would have kept me from walking. Even my bed dress seemed heavy on me.
He gave me ten sour apricots—the common prescription for young women whose thoughts are considered a little overripe—but my mind did not go in the prescribed direction. Instead, I thought about being married to my poet and the salted plums I would eat when I got pregnant with our first son, knowing they would help me with morning sickness.
The diviner returned to sprinkle pig’s blood on my bed in an attempt to exorcise the spirits he was convinced hovered there. When he was done, he said, “If you start eating again, on your wedding day your skin and hair will exceed all earthly models of beauty.”
But I wasn’t interested in marrying Wu Ren and I certainly didn’t care to eat as a way to make him happier on our wedding day. It barely mattered anyway. My future was set and I had already done everything I needed to do to prepare for my wedding. I had perfected my embroidery. I could now play the zither. Every day Shao dressed me in tunics embroidered with flowers and butterflies or two birds in flight as an outward expression of the love and happiness I was supposedly feeling for my coming life in my husband’s home. I just didn’t eat, not even fruit; rarely anything beyond a few sips of juice. I fed myself by ingesting mystic breath, by thinking of love, by remembering my adventure with my poet outside the garden walls.
The diviner left instructions to keep the door to the hall closed at all times, to prevent any malevolent spirits from entering, and to readjust the stove in the kitchen and shift the direction of my bed to take advantage of more favorable aspects of feng shui. Mama and the servants made sure these things were done, but I didn’t feel any different. The moment they left the room, I went back to my writing. You cannot cure a longing heart by changing the direction of the bed.