by Lisa See
“Today when I saw what was happening,” Grandmother went on earnestly, “everything became clear. You must go back to your rightful place.”
“I don’t think I can,” I said, but inside my mind began to spin with the possibilities of how I would seek revenge on the girl dressed in red, sitting in seclusion, waiting to go to her husband.
“Think, child, think. You’re a hungry ghost. Now that you know what you are, you’re free to roam wherever you want.”
“But I’m stuck—”
“You can’t go forward and you can’t go back, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go down. You could have returned at any time, but I interceded with the judges. I selfishly wanted you to stay here with me.” She tossed her head defiantly. “With men there’s always a bureaucracy, and it’s no different here. I bribed them with some of the offerings I received at New Year.”
“Will I ever meet them? Will I ever have a chance to plead my case?”
“Only when your ancestor tablet is dotted. Otherwise”—she gestured below—“that’s where you belong.”
She was right…again. As a hungry ghost, I should have been roaming in the earthly realm these last seven years.
My mind at that moment was so twisted between my desire to harm the girl and the realization that I should have been roaming all this time that for a second I didn’t comprehend what she was saying. I took my eyes away from the girl in red and looked at Grandmother.
“Are you saying I could also get my tablet dotted?”
Grandmother leaned forward and took my hands in hers. “You should hope for that to happen, because then you’ll come back here and become an ancestor. But you won’t be able to make it happen. You’ll have a lot of tricks that you can use with people in the earthly realm to get them to do what you want them to do, but you will be powerless when it comes to your tablet. Remember all the ghost stories you heard as a little girl? There are a lot of different ways people become ghosts, but if all those creatures who didn’t have their tablets dotted could force humans to complete this task, there wouldn’t be very many ghost stories, would there?”
I nodded, taking it all in, thinking first I would ruin the wedding, then I would make Ren remember me, then I would make him to go my father’s house and dot my tablet, then we would have a ghost marriage, and then…I shook my head. Vengeance and confusion were so clouding my mind that I wasn’t thinking clearly. In reality, I’d heard a lot of ghost stories, as Grandmother said, and the happy endings only came when those creatures were wounded, maimed, and destroyed.
“Won’t it be dangerous?” I asked. “Mama used to tell me that she would cut any evil spirits that visited me with scissors and that if I wore charms I’d be safe when I walked in the garden. What about ferns and mirrors?”
Grandmother laughed once more, and it was no less extraordinary than the first time.
“A fern will not protect the living from someone such as you. And mirrors?” She snorted at their relative insignificance. “They can hurt you if you get too close, but they won’t destroy you.” She stood and kissed me. “You won’t be able to come back until you’ve settled things in the earthly realm. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Rely on the lessons you learned when you were alive.” She began to drift away from me. “Use common sense and be wary. I’ll watch out for you from here and protect you as best I can.”
And then she was gone.
I looked down at the Wu household. Madame Wu was walking to her inner chamber, where I was sure she would retrieve the confidential book to give to her future daughter-in-law.
I took one last look around the terrace, and then I lifted myself up and over the balustrade and dropped down into the main courtyard of the Wu compound. I went straight to Ren’s room. I spotted him by the window, staring at a stand of bamboo as it swayed in the breeze. I was sure he would turn to me, but he didn’t. I swirled around him so that I floated just before the bamboo. The light played on his high cheekbones. The ends of his black hair hung over his collar. His hands rested on the windowsill. His fingers were long and tapered, perfect for holding a calligraphy brush. His eyes—as black and limpid as the waters of our West Lake—stared out the window with an expression I couldn’t read. I was right before him, but he didn’t see me; he didn’t even sense me.
A band began to play. This meant Ren would soon meet his bride. If I was going to stop this, I had to try someone else. I went quickly to the bridal chamber. The girl sat on her wedding chair, the mirror held securely in her lap. Even alone, she hadn’t pushed aside her veil. She was dutiful and obedient, this one. She was also strong. I don’t know how to explain it, but in her absolute stillness I felt her fighting against me—me personally—as though she knew I’d be here.
I hurried to Madame Wu’s bedchamber. She was on her knees before an altar. She lit incense, prayed wordlessly to herself, and then put her forehead to the ground. Her actions didn’t frighten me or drive me away. Instead, I was filled with resolve and a kind of peace I hadn’t felt in years. Madame Wu rose and crossed to a cabinet. She slid open a drawer. Inside, two books nestled in silk: to the right, her confidential book on marriage; to the left, Volume One of The Peony Pavilion. Her hands reached down and touched the confidential book.
“No!” I screamed. If I couldn’t stop the wedding, at least Ren and his wife’s first night together would be miserable.
Madame Wu’s hands drew back as though the book were in flames. She tentatively reached down again.
I whispered this time: “No, no, no.”
It was all so sudden—that I was here, that the marriage would happen in minutes—that I acted without thinking about the consequences.
“Take the other one,” I whispered impulsively. “Take it. Take it!”
Madame Wu stepped away from the open drawer and looked around the room.
“Take it! Take it!”
Seeing nothing, she adjusted a pin in her hair and then, in the most indifferent way possible, picked up my book as though it were the one she’d come for and carried it out through the courtyards to the bridal chamber.
“Daughter,” she said to the seated girl, “this helped me on my wedding night. I’m sure it will help you too.”
“Thank you, Mother,” the bride said.
Something about the girl’s voice chilled me, but I shrugged it off, believing I was finding my powers and that my revenge would come soon.
Madame Wu backed out of the room. The girl stared at the cover of the book where I’d painted my favorite scene from The Peony Pavilion. It was The Interrupted Dream, where Du Liniang meets the scholar and they become lovers. This scene had to be a common one used to decorate women’s confidential books, for the girl didn’t seem distressed or surprised by the subject.
Now that The Peony Pavilion was in her hands, I realized I’d acted rashly when I told Madame Wu to take it. I didn’t want this girl to read my private thoughts, but then a plan slowly began to form in my mind. Maybe I could use my written words to scare this bride away from her marriage. As I’d done with Madame Wu, I began whispering.
“Open it and see who’s here with you. Open it and run away. Open it and admit you can never do what you need to do to be a wife.”
But she wouldn’t open the book. I raised my voice and repeated my orders, but she sat as still as a vase on a nightstand. Even if I’d done nothing, she hadn’t planned on opening the confidential wedding book. Putting my destructive desires aside, what kind of wife did she think she’d be if she didn’t read the instructions for her wedding night?
I perched on a carved chair across the room from the girl. She didn’t move, sigh, cry, or pray. She didn’t push aside her veil to look around the room. With her sitting so quietly, I could see that she’d obviously followed all the rituals for a girl of good breeding and great wealth. Her tunic was of bright red silk, and the embroidery on it was so exquisite that I was sure she’d done none of it herself.
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��Open the book,” I tried again. “Open it and run away.”
When nothing happened, I got up, crossed the room, and knelt before her. Our faces were just inches apart, separated only by her opaque red veil. “If you stay, you will not be happy.”
A tiny tremor rippled through her body.
“Go now,” I whispered.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, but other than this she did not move. I went back to my chair. I was as ineffectual with this girl as I’d been with Ren.
I heard the band outside the door. Someone came into the room. The bride took the book from her lap, set it on the table, and left to meet her future husband.
DURING THE WEDDING ceremony and the celebrations that followed, I tried to intervene in many ways. Always I was unsuccessful. I’d been so sure that Ren and I were meant to be together. How could fate be so cruel and so wrong?
After the banquet, Ren and his wife were escorted back to the bridal chamber. Red candles nearly a meter long burned, filling the room with a golden glow. If they burned all night, that would be seen as an auspicious sign. The trickling down of the wax was like the shedding of a bride’s tears on her first night alone with her husband. If one of the candles went out—even by accident—it would be an omen of a premature death for one or both parties. The band and the party were raucous and loud. Each crash of the cymbals terrified me. Each beat of the drum pounded fear into me. Bands played noisily at weddings and funerals to scare away bad spirits, but I wasn’t a bad spirit. I was a heartbroken girl, deprived of my destiny. I stayed at Ren’s side until the firecrackers were lit. The rattling pops tossed me from side to side. It was more than I could bear and I floated up and away from him.
From a safe distance, I saw my poet raise his hands to his wife’s headdress and veil, take out the pins that held them in place, and lift the covering from her head.
Tan Ze!
I was doubly incensed. On the first night of the opera all those years ago, she’d said she wanted her father to make inquiries about Ren. Now she’d gotten what she wanted. How I would make her suffer! My spirit would haunt her. I’d fill her worldly days with misery. I’d felt much pain and wretchedness these past years, but seeing Ze—her perfect white breasts now bared—filled me with excruciating agony and raging despair. How could Ren’s mother have chosen Tan Ze? I didn’t know why she’d done it, but the result was that out of all the women in Hangzhou, my home country of China, and the world, she’d arranged for her son to marry the one person who would hurt me the most. Was this why Ze had been so still when she was waiting in the bridal chamber? Had she put up hard defenses around herself, knowing I’d be there? The Book of Female Filial Piety calls jealousy the sickest of all the ancestral emotions, and I was sinking in it.
Ren untied the knots at Ze’s waist. Her silk skirt slipped through the fingers I’d so admired, that I’d so longed to touch me when we were alone in the garden. Tormented, I pulled at my hair. I tore at my clothes. I cried, terrified that I would miss this, ashamed that I had to see it. No mists formed over the lake and no rains fell. The musicians in the courtyard didn’t have to cover their instruments and run for cover. The guests didn’t stop laughing or telling jokes. My tears had nowhere to fall but on my tunic.
Earlier I’d wished for quiet so I could return to Ren’s side. But this silence was worse, because it heightened and accelerated what was happening in the bridal chamber. If I’d been in Ze’s place, I would have unbuttoned the frogs that held Ren’s tunic closed. I would have used my hands to push away the fabric from his chest, I would have let my lips linger on his smooth skin—but Ze did none of these things. She stood there as passively as she had when she should have been reading the confidential book. I looked into her eyes and saw no emotions there. A realization came to me in a way that perhaps only those who reside in the afterworld can understand. She’d wanted Ren, but she didn’t love him. She had thought she was cleverer and prettier than I, and that she deserved him more. She had won: She was sixteen and alive, and she’d taken what was supposed to be mine. But now that she had Ren, she didn’t know what to do with him. I don’t think she even wanted him anymore.
I made myself watch as they got in bed. He took one of her hands and brought it under the quilt so she might touch him, but she pulled away. He tried to kiss her, but she turned her face so that his lips fell on her jaw. He rolled onto her. Ze was either too afraid or too unknowledgeable to feel anything herself or give him pleasure. This should have made me want to do even more evil to her, but another feeling began to creep into my heart. I felt sorry for Ren. He deserved more than this.
Ren’s face tightened at the moment of release. For a moment, he stayed on his elbows, trying to read Ze’s features, but they were as bland and pale as slivers of bean curd. Without a word, he got off her. When she turned on her side away from him, his face settled into that same expression I’d seen just before the marriage ceremony, when he gazed out the window at the stand of bamboo. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized that look before, because it was one that I’d worn for years. He felt the same loneliness and sense of detachment from family and life that I felt.
I shifted my attention back to Ze. I still hated her, but what if I could use her like a puppet to reach Ren and make him happy? As a ghost, I could use my abilities to inhabit Ze and turn her into a perfect wife. If I worked hard enough, he would feel me in her body, recognize me in her caresses, and come to realize that I loved him still.
Ze’s eyes were tightly shut. I could see she longed for sleep, believing it would provide an escape from…what? Her husband, physical pleasure, her mother-in-law, her wifely duties, me? If she was truly frightened of me, sleep was a terrible mistake. I might not have been able to reach her yet in the earthly realm—perhaps she wore an amulet or had received a blessing I was unaware of, or maybe the stubborn selfishness she’d shown when I was alive was really only a hardness of personality that kept her emotions, softness, and vulnerability at bay—but in the world of dreams she’d have no defenses against me.
AS SOON AS Ze drifted off to sleep, her soul left her body and began to roam abroad. I trailed at a safe distance behind her, seeing where she would go, trying to decipher her intentions. I’d be lying if I didn’t say a part of me still longed for revenge, and I thought of all the ways I could attack her in her dreams when she was most vulnerable. Maybe I could become a barber ghost. In life, we all fear visits from these demons, who come in the night and shave portions of a person’s head when he or she is defenseless. The hair never grows back on those spots, which remain bald and shining, reminders of the touch of death. We also fear traveling very far in our dreams, knowing that the farther we are from home the easier it is to become disoriented and lost. It wouldn’t take much for me to scare Ze into the woods, where I could make sure she never escaped from the dank darkness.
But I did none of these things. Instead, I waited on the periphery of her vision, hiding behind a pillar in the temple she visited, concealing myself in the depths of the pond into which she gazed, and lurking in the shadows when she returned to her new bedchamber, which she freely explored now that she was in the mistaken safety of her dream. She looked out the window and saw a nightingale perched on a camphor tree and a lotus in bloom. She picked up the mirror her mother-in-law had given her and smiled at her reflection, which was much prettier than what she saw by day. She sat on the edge of the bed, her back to her sleeping husband. Even in her dream she would not look at him or touch him. Then I saw what she was staring at. Her eyes were on The Peony Pavilion, which was on the table.
I fought my desire to step out from the shadows that hid me in Ze’s dream, guessing that a little prudence now would serve me well in the long run. My mind raced. What could I do to catch her attention but not frighten her too much? The lightest, most innocent thing I could think of was air. In my hiding place, I stayed as still as possible, and then softly let out a small breath that I sent in Ze’s direction. As quiet and ge
ntle as it was, it had the power to cross the room and brush against her cheek. Her fingers rose to the place where my breath had kissed her skin. In the darkness, I smiled. I had made contact, but in doing so I had learned just how cautiously I needed to proceed.
I mouthed words. “Go home. Wake up. Pick up the book. You will know the right page to read.” No sound came out, only breath, which once again traveled across the room to Ze. Her body trembled as the words wafted about her.
Back in the earthly realm, Ze tossed from side to side, woke up, and then sat up abruptly. Her face shone with a thin sheen of sweat and her naked body shivered uncontrollably. She seemed unsure of where she was, and her eyes searched the darkness until they came to rest on her husband. Instinctively, it seemed to me, she drew back in surprise and alarm. For a moment she remained absolutely still, afraid perhaps that he might waken. Then, as quietly and slowly as possible, she slipped out of the bed. Her bound feet seemed too tiny to hold her upright, and the pale flesh that rose from her red wedding slippers shook with the effort of standing. She went to where her wedding clothes lay in a rumpled heap on the floor, picked up her tunic, put it on, and then wrapped her arms around herself as if to hide her nakedness even more.
On unsteady legs, she crossed to the table, sat down, and pulled one of the wedding candles closer. She stared at the cover of The Peony Pavilion, possibly thinking of her own interrupted dream. She opened the book and flipped through the pages. She came to the page I intended, smoothed the paper with her delicate fingers, glanced one more time back at Ren, and then whispered the words I’d written under her breath.
“Liniang and the scholar’s love is divine, not carnal. But this does not—and should not—stop them from experiencing carnal pleasure. In the bedchamber, Liniang knows how to behave like a lady by bringing desire, amusement, enjoyment, and satisfaction to her lover. This is perfectly fitting for a respectable woman.” How I had known that, as an unmarried girl, I couldn’t say, but these were my words and thoughts and I believed them now more than ever.