by Lisa See
I looked from pretty face to pretty face. Their sad expressions told me that they each had nearly identical stories.
“But I actually met Ren,” I said. “He touched me with a peony blossom.”
They looked at me in disbelief.
“All girls have dreams,” Yu Niang repeated.
“But Ren was real.” I pointed over the balustrade to the earthly realm below. “Look there. That’s him.”
A dozen girls—not one over the age of sixteen—looked over the edge and followed my finger to Ren’s home, where they saw him writing in his library.
“That’s a young man, but how do we know he’s the one you met?”
“How do we know you met him at all?”
In the afterworld, we are sometimes able to be transported back through the years to relive our experiences or see them through another’s eyes. This is one reason that the hells are so terrible. People are given the opportunity to relive their misdeeds forever. But now I relived very different kinds of memories so the lovesick maidens could see them. I carried the girls back to the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion, the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, and to my final visit as a spirit to Ren. They cried at the beauty and truth of my story, and below us a storm fell on Hangzhou.
“Only in death did Liniang prove her undying passion,” I said, as the girls wiped their eyes. “You’ll see. One day Ren and I will be married.”
“How is that going to happen?” the actress asked.
“How can the moon be scooped from the water’s surface, or flowers be plucked from the void?” I asked in return, quoting Mengmei. “The scholar didn’t know how he was going to bring Liniang back from the dead, but he did it. Ren will figure it out too.”
The girls were lovely and sweet, but they didn’t believe me.
“You may have met and talked to this man, but your lovesickness was just like ours,” Yu Niang said. “We all starved ourselves to death.”
“All you can hope is that your parents will publish your poems,” the salt merchant’s daughter offered helpfully. “In this way you may live again a little. That’s what happened to me.”
“And me too.”
The others chimed in that their families had also published their poetry.
“Most of our families don’t make offerings to us,” the merchant’s daughter confided, “but we receive some sustenance because our poems are in print. We don’t know why this happens, but it does.”
This was hardly good news. I’d hidden my poems in my father’s library and Ren’s mother now had Volume One hidden in one of her drawers. The girls shook their heads disconsolately when I told them this.
“Perhaps you should talk to Xiaoqing about these matters,” Yu Niang suggested. “She has more experience than we do. Maybe she can help you.”
“I would love to meet her,” I said eagerly. “I would appreciate her advice even more. Please bring her the next time you come.”
But they didn’t bring her. And the great Tang Xianzu didn’t come to visit either, although the lovesick maidens said the author was nearby.
So mostly I was alone.
IN LIFE, I’D been told many things about the afterworld; some were right, some were wrong. Most people call it the underworld, but I prefer to call it the afterworld, because it isn’t really under, although some parts are. Beyond the actual geography of the place, where I was seemed to be after—simply a continuation. Death doesn’t terminate our associations to our families, and the positions we held in life don’t change either. If you were a peasant in the earthly realm, you continued your work in the fields here; if you were once a landowner, a scholar, or a member of the literati, you spent your days reading, writing poetry, drinking tea, and burning incense. Women still had bound feet, were obedient, and focused their attention on their families; men still oversaw the outer realm by navigating through the infernal judges’ bureaus upon bureaus of darkness.
I continued to learn what I could and couldn’t do. I could float, drift, melt. Without Shao or Willow to help me, I learned to care for my feet with the spirit bindings my family had burned for my use in the afterworld. I could hear from a great distance, but I hated noise. I couldn’t turn sharp corners. And when I looked over the balustrade, I could see a lot, but I was unable to look beyond Hangzhou’s environs.
After I’d been on the Viewing Terrace for many months, an old woman came to visit. She introduced herself as my grandmother, but she didn’t look at all like the stern-faced woman in the ancestor portrait that hung in our ancestral hall.
“Waaa! Why do they make ancestors look like that?” she cackled. “I never looked so disapproving in life.”
Grandmother was still handsome. Her hair was pinned with ornaments made of gold, pearls, and jade. Her gown was of the lightest silk. Her lily feet were smaller even than my own. Her face was etched with fine lines but her skin was luminous. Her hands were covered in long water sleeves in the old style. She seemed delicate and ladylike, but when she sat down next to me and pressed against my thigh I felt surprising strength.
Over the next few weeks, she came to visit often but she never brought Grandfather and always evaded questions about him.
“He’s busy in another place,” she might say. Or, “He’s helping your father with a negotiation in the capital. People at court are devious and your father is out of practice.” Or, “He’s probably visiting one of his concubines…in her dreams. He likes to do that sometimes, because in their dreams the concubines are still young and beautiful, not the old hens they’ve become.”
I liked listening to her wicked comments about the concubines, because in life I’d always heard that she’d been kind and generous toward them. She’d been an exemplar of what a head wife should be, but here she liked to tease and banter.
“Stop looking at that man down there!” she snapped at me one day, several months after her first visit.
“How do you know who I’m looking at?”
She jabbed me with her elbow. “I’m an ancestor! I saw it all! Think about that, child.”
“But he’s my husband,” I offered lamely.
“You were never married,” she retorted. “You can be happy for that!”
“Happy? Ren and I were fated to be together.”
My grandmother snorted. “The idea is ridiculous. You weren’t fated to be together. You simply had a marriage arranged by your father, like every other girl. There’s nothing special in that. And in case you’ve forgotten, you’re here.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “Baba’s going to arrange a ghost marriage for me.”
“You should consider more carefully what you see below.”
“You’re testing me. I understand—”
“No, your father has other plans.”
“I can’t see Baba when he’s in the capital, but what does it matter anyway? Even if he doesn’t arrange a ghost marriage, I’ll wait for Ren. That’s why I’m stuck here, don’t you think?”
She ignored my question.
“Do you think this man will wait for you?” Her face crinkled as though she had opened a jar of stinky tofu. She was my grandmother—a cherished ancestor!—so I couldn’t contradict her. “Don’t worry so much about him,” she said, patting my face through the water sleeve that covered her hand. “You were a good granddaughter. I appreciated the fruit you brought me all those years.”
“Then why didn’t you help me?”
“I had nothing against you.”
It was a strange comment, but often she said things I didn’t understand.
“Now pay attention,” Grandmother ordered. “You need to think about why you’re stuck here.”
ALL THROUGH THIS time, important dates came and went. My parents forgot to include me in their New Year’s offerings, which were just days after my death. On the thirteenth day of the first month after the New Year, they were supposed to place a lighted lamp at my tomb. At Spring Festival, they should have cleaned my grave, exploded firecrackers, and burned sp
irit money for me to use in the afterworld. On the first day of the tenth month, the official start of winter, they should have burned padded jackets, woolen caps, and fur-lined boots all made of paper to keep me warm. Throughout the year, my family should have been making offerings to me of cooked rice, wine, plates of meat, and spirit money on the first and fifteenth of every moon. All these offerings had to be presented to my dotted ancestor tablet for me to receive them in the afterworld. But when Shao didn’t bring it out of its hiding place and no one asked for it, I concluded that everyone was still too upset by my absence to look at my ancestor tablet.
Then, during the Festival of the Bitter Moon, which occurs during the darkest, cruelest days of winter, I discovered something that shattered me. Just before the first anniversary of my death, my father returned home for a visit and my mother prepared special Bitter-Moon porridge with various grains, nuts, and fruits, flavored with four different kinds of sugar. My family gathered in the ancestral hall and offered the porridge to Grandmother and others in the family. Once again, my ancestor tablet wasn’t brought out of its hiding place in the storage room and I didn’t receive an offering. I knew I hadn’t been “forgotten” Mama cried bitter tears for me every night. This neglect meant something far worse.
Grandmother, who must have been somewhere eating her porridge with Grandfather, saw what happened and came to me. She was a plain speaker, but I didn’t want to hear or accept what she had to say.
“Your parents will never worship you,” she explained. “It goes against nature for a parent to worship a child. If you’d been a son, your father would have beaten your coffin to punish you for being so unfilial as to die before him, but eventually he would have relented and seen that you were provided for. But you’re a girl—unmarried at that. Your family will never make offerings to you.”
“Because my tablet isn’t dotted?”
Grandmother snorted. “No, because you died unmarried. Your parents raised you for your husband’s family. You belong to them. You are not considered a Chen. And even if your tablet were dotted, it would be kept out of sight behind a door, in a drawer, or in a special temple, which is what happened to those girls who visit you.”
I’d never heard any of this before, and for a moment I believed Grandmother. But then I shook her bad thoughts out of my head.
“You’re wrong.”
“Because no one told you before you died that this would happen? Ha! If your mother and father put your tablet on the family altar, they would risk punishment from the other ancestors.” She held up a hand. “Not from me, but there are others here who hold to the traditional ways. No one wants to see such an ugly thing on the family altar.”
“My parents love me,” I insisted. “A mother who didn’t love her daughter wouldn’t have burned her books to try to keep her alive.”
“This is true,” Grandmother agreed. “She didn’t want to do it, but the doctor hoped it would spark anger in you so strong that you’d be shaken from your path.”
“And Baba wouldn’t have mounted the opera for my birthday if he hadn’t loved me like a precious pearl.”
Even as the words left my mouth I felt they were wrong.
“The opera wasn’t for you,” Grandmother said. “It was for Commissioner Tan. Your father was lobbying for his appointment.”
“But Commissioner Tan disapproves of the opera.”
“So he’s a hypocrite. Men in power often are.”
Was she suggesting my father was a hypocrite too?
“Political loyalty is a natural extension of personal loyalty,” Grandmother went on. “I’m afraid your father—my son—has neither.”
She said nothing more, but the expression on her face caused me to look back—to finally see—and understand what I’d ignored in life.
My father was not a Ming loyalist or the man of integrity I’d always believed him to be, but from my perspective this was minor. In life, I’d known my father regretted I was a girl. Despite that, in my heart I’d believed, truly believed, that he cherished, adored, and loved me, but the fact of my tablet and all it implied—that I was an unmarried girl being raised for another family—had proved otherwise. With no one to care for me through my tablet in the earthly realm, my soul was in terrible trouble. I was like a torn-off remnant of silk. That I’d been abandoned—orphaned—in this way provided one explanation for why I was stuck on the Viewing Terrace.
“What’s going to happen to me?” I cried. Only a year had passed, and already my gown had faded and I’d grown thinner.
“Your parents could send your tablet to a maiden’s temple, but this is a distasteful idea, since those places house not only the tablets of unmarried daughters but those of concubines and prostitutes as well.” Grandmother drifted across the terrace and sat down next to me. “A ghost marriage would remove the ugly thing from the Chen Family Villa—”
“I could still marry Ren. My tablet would be used in the ceremony. Everyone would see my missing dot,” I said hopefully. “It would be dotted, and from then on my tablet would be worshipped on the Wu family altar.”
“But your father hasn’t arranged that. Think, Peony, think. I’ve been telling you to look, really look. What have you seen? What do you see right now?”
Time is strange here: sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Now it was days later, and another succession of young men visited my father.
“Baba has appointments. He’s an important man.”
“Don’t you listen, child?”
Business belonged to the outer realm. I’d deliberately not listened to my father’s conversations, but I did now. He was interviewing those young men. Instantly I was terrified that he was trying to arrange a ghost marriage for me to someone other than Ren.
“Will you be loyal and filial?” he inquired of one young man after another. “Will you sweep our graves at New Year and make offerings in our ancestral hall every day? And I need grandsons. Can you give me grandsons to care for us after you’re gone?”
Hearing these questions, Baba’s intention became clear. He was going to adopt one of those young men. My father couldn’t have sons—an embarrassment for any man and a disaster when it came to ancestor worship. Adopting one for purposes of filial piety was common enough and Baba could afford it, but I was being replaced in his heart completely!
“Your father did a lot for you,” Grandmother said. “I saw how solicitous he was of you—teaching you to read, write, and question. But you weren’t a son, and he needed one.”
My father had shown me devotion, love, and many kindnesses over the years, but I now saw that my being a girl had diminished me in his affections. I cried and Grandmother held me.
Barely able to accept any of this, I looked down to Ren’s home, hoping his family might have offered me porridge. Naturally, they hadn’t. Ren stood beneath an awning in the pouring rain, relacquering in cinnabar red the front gate to his family compound as a symbol of the rebirth of the coming New Year, while in my father’s library a young man with small eyes signed a contract of adoption. My father patted the young man on the back and said, “Bao, my son, I should have done this many years ago.”
The Cataclysm
IT IS SAID THAT DEATH IS EVER FOLLOWED BY LIFE AND the end is always a new beginning. Clearly that is not how it was for me. Before I knew it, a river of seven years rolled past. Holidays and feast days—especially the New Year—were particularly hard for me. I had been thin when I died, and without offerings I became frailer and more translucent with each passing year until now I was little more than a wraith. The single gown I’d worn here was faded and frayed. I’d become a pathetic creature, always hovering by the balustrade, unable to leave the Viewing Terrace.
The lovesick maidens came to visit for New Year, knowing how sad I would be. I enjoyed their company, because—unlike in the Chen Family Villa—we had no petty jealousies between us. After all this time, they finally brought Xiaoqing. She was exquisite. Her forehead was high, her eyebrows were painted,
her hair was festooned with ornaments, and her lips were soft and pliant. She wore a gown of the old style—elegant, flowing, decorated with flowers—and her feet were so tiny that she appeared weightless as she swayed delicately onto the terrace. She was too beautiful ever to have been a wife, and I could see why so many men had been entranced by her.
“I titled the poems I left behind Manuscripts Saved from Burning,” Xiaoqing said, in a voice that sounded as melodious as wind chimes, “but what’s extraordinary in that? The men who write about us call us lovesick. They say we are the sickly sex, always suffering from blood loss and body depletion. The result, they conclude, is that our fates must match those of our writings. They don’t understand that fires aren’t always an accident. Too often women—and I count myself among them—doubt their words and skill, so they decide to burn their work. This is why so many collections have the exact same title.”
Xiaoqing regarded me, waiting for me to say something. The other lovesick maidens also looked at me expectantly, urging me with their kind eyes to be clever.
“Our writings don’t always pass away like a spring dream,” I said. “Some remain in the earthly realm where people weep over them.”
“May they do so for ten thousand years,” the salt merchant’s daughter added.
Xiaoqing looked at us benignly. “Ten thousand years,” she repeated. She shivered and the air around her trembled in response. “Don’t be so sure. They’re beginning to forget about us already. When that happens…” She stood. Her gown billowed around her. She nodded to each of us, then drifted away.
The lovesick maidens left when Grandmother arrived, but what comfort could that old woman offer me? “There is no such thing as love,” she liked to say, “only obligation and responsibility.” Her words about her husband were always bound by duty, not love or even affection.
Forlorn and disconsolate, I listened to Grandmother—she talked about nothing in particular—and watched the New Year’s preparations in Ren’s home. He paid his family’s debts; his mother swept and cleaned; servants prepared special foods; and the picture of Kitchen God, which hung above the stove, was burned and sent here to report on the good and bad deeds of the family. No thought was given to me.