by Lisa See
I felt sick. What had happened to the loyalists? Why didn’t Li Shu and Lin Yining, both professional women writers, correct him?
“Wives need to be literate,” Shen’s tutor said, and for a moment I felt better. “They need to understand the highest principles so they can teach them to their sons. But, sadly, it doesn’t always turn out that way.” He shook his head despairingly. “We let women read and then what happens? Do they aspire to noble thoughts? No. They read plays, operas, novels, and poetry. They read for entertainment, which can only impair contemplation.”
I was paralyzed by the brutality of these words. How could things have changed so dramatically in the nine years since I died? My father may not have let me venture outside the villa and my mother may not have liked me reading The Peony Pavilion, but these ideas were far more strident than what I’d grown up with.
“Then we can agree the mystery is solved,” Shen’s tutor concluded. “Wu Ren has accomplished something truly unique. He has opened a window for us on the meaning of and reasons for love. He is a great artist.”
“So sensitive,” one of the men said.
“Too sensitive,” Lin Yining added, with an audible touch of bitterness.
Through it all Ze said nothing. She acted polite and sincere. She kept her eyes cast down and her hands hidden in her sleeves. No one could have accused her of being anything less than a perfect wife.
Xu Shijun took the commentary away with him and published it. He included a preface he wrote about Ren, praising him for his insights about love, marriage, and longing. And then he promoted the commentary, traveling around the country and endorsing Ren as the author of this great work. In this way, my words, thoughts, and emotions became extremely popular among members of the literati, not only in Hangzhou but across China.
Ren refused to accept any accolades.
“I did nothing,” he said. “I owe everything to my wife and the girl who would have been my wife.”
Always he got the same response: “You are too modest, Master Wu.”
Despite his denials—perhaps because of his denials—he gained a solid reputation for what Ze and I had written. Editors sought him out to publish his poems. He was invited to gatherings of the literati. He traveled for weeks at a time as his name grew. He earned money, which made his mother and wife very happy. Eventually he learned to accept the compliments. When men said, “No woman could ever write anything this insightful,” he bowed his head and said nothing. And not one of the women who’d been at Shen’s home that day came to my defense. Clearly it was easier in these changing times not to speak out or celebrate another woman’s accomplishment.
I should have been proud of my poet’s success. In life, I might have done exactly the same as Ze, for a wife’s duty is to bring honor to her husband in every way possible. But I was not of the living world, and I felt the anger, disappointment, and disillusionment of a woman whose voice has been taken away from her. For all my efforts, I felt Ren hadn’t heard me at all. I was crushed.
Jealousy-Curing Soup
AFTER THE VISIT TO SHEN’S, ZE WENT HOME AND RETIRED to her bed. She refused to light the lamps. She didn’t speak. She turned down food even when it was brought to her. She stopped dressing and pinning her hair. After the things she’d done to me, I didn’t do anything to help her. When Ren finally returned from his travels, she still didn’t get up. They performed clouds and rain, but it was as though they’d gone back to the first days of their marriage, so disinterested was she. Ren tried to coax Ze from the room with promises of pleasant strolls in the garden or a meal with friends. Instead of accepting, she wrapped her arms around herself, shook her head no, and asked, “Am I your wife or your concubine?”
He stared at her propped up in the bed, her face blotchy, her skin sallow, her elbows and collarbones protruding from her seemingly fleshless body. “You’re my wife,” he answered. “Of course I love you.”
When she burst into tears, Ren did the only sensible thing a man could do. He sent for Doctor Zhao, who pronounced, “Your wife has had a relapse of her lovesickness.”
But Ze couldn’t be lovesick. She’d stopped eating, true, but she wasn’t a maiden. She wasn’t a virgin. She was an eighteen-year-old married woman.
“I’m not lovesick. I have no love in me!” Ze cried from the bed.
The two men regarded each other soberly and then looked back down at the bedridden woman.
“Husband, stay away from me. I’ve become an incubus, a vampire, an evil temptress. If you sleep with me, I’ll pierce your feet with an awl. I’ll suck the blood from your bones to feed the emptiness inside me.”
This was one way of getting out of doing clouds and rain, but I no longer had a desire to interfere.
“Perhaps your wife is afraid for her position,” Doctor Zhao reasoned. “Have you been unhappy with her?”
“Be careful,” Ze warned the doctor, “or the next time you fall asleep I’ll use a piece of silk to snap your neck.”
Doctor Zhao ignored the outburst. “Does Madame Wu criticize too freely? Even an offhand remark by a mother-in-law can make a young wife anxious and unsure.”
When Ren assured the doctor this wasn’t possible, he prescribed a diet of pig’s trotters to help restore Ze’s qi.
She was not about to eat something so lowly.
Next the doctor ordered the cook to make a soup of pig’s liver to help strengthen Ze’s corresponding organ. Soon he was trying every organ of the pig to fortify his patient. None of them worked.
“You were supposed to marry someone else,” the doctor said diffidently to Ren. “Perhaps she’s come back to claim her rightful place.”
Ren dismissed the idea. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
The doctor jutted his jaw and went back to listening to Ze’s pulses. He asked about her dreams, which she said were filled with vile demons and horrific sights.
“I see a woman with little flesh on her bones,” Ze recounted. “Her longing reaches out to me, wraps itself around my neck, and takes away my breath.”
“I have not been subtle enough in my diagnosis,” Doctor Zhao now admitted to Ren. “Your wife has a different kind of lovesickness from what I originally thought. She has a bad case of that most common of all feminine disorders: too much vinegar.”
This word sounded exactly the same as jealousy in our dialect.
“But she has no reason to be jealous,” Ren objected.
To which Ze pointed a thin finger at him. “You don’t love me.”
“What about your first wife?” Doctor Zhao circled back.
“Ze is my first wife.”
That stung. Could Ren have forgotten me so completely?
“Perhaps you forget that I took care of Chen Tong as she died,” the doctor reminded him. “Tradition would tell you that she was your first wife. Were your Eight Characters not matched? Were bride-price gifts not sent to her family home?”
“Your thinking is very old-fashioned,” Ren said disapprovingly. “This is not a ghost infestation. Ghosts only exist to scare children into obeying their parents, give young men an excuse to explain away bad behavior with low women, or make girls languish over something they can never have.”
How could he say these things? Had he forgotten how we’d talked about The Peony Pavilion? Had he forgotten Liniang was a ghost? If he didn’t believe in ghosts, how was he ever going to hear me? His words were so terrible and cruel that I decided he could only be saying them to comfort and reassure my sister-wife.
“Many wives go on hunger strikes because they’re jealous and ill-tempered,” the doctor suggested, trying a different approach. “They try to push their anger onto others by making them suffer with guilt and remorse.”
The doctor prescribed a bowl of jealousy-curing soup made from oriole broth. In one of the plays about Xiaoqing, this remedy had been used on the jealous wife. It had reduced the wife’s emotional disease by half but left her pockmarked.
“You would ruin me?” Z
e pushed away the soup. “What about my skin?”
The doctor put a hand on Ren’s arm and spoke loudly enough for Ze to hear. “Just remember that jealousy is one of the seven reasons for divorce.”
If I’d known more, I would have tried to do something. But if I’d known more, maybe I wouldn’t have died myself. So I stayed up in the rafters when the doctor tried to expel the excess fire from Ze’s belly with a less scarring remedy by flushing her bowels with a tonic of wild celery. Chamber pot after chamber pot was filled and taken away, but Ze didn’t regain her strength.
The diviner arrived next. I stayed out of his way as he brandished a sword wet with blood over Ze’s bed. I covered my ears when he shouted incantations. But no evil spirits haunted Ze, so his efforts produced no results.
Six weeks went by. Ze worsened. When she woke in the morning, she threw up. When she moved her head during the day, she threw up. When her mother-in-law came with clear soups, Ze turned her face away and threw up.
Madame Wu called for the doctor and the diviner to come together.
“We’ve had a lot of bother in our household over my daughter-in-law,” she said cryptically. “But perhaps what is happening is only natural. Maybe you should check her again and this time consider that she is a wife and my son is a husband.”
The doctor looked at Ze’s tongue. He peered into her eyes. He listened yet again to the various pulses in her wrist. The diviner moved a limp orchid from one table to another. He consulted Ze’s and Ren’s horoscopes. He wrote a question on a piece of paper, burned it in a censer so the words would travel to Heaven, and consulted the ashes to receive his answer. Then the two men bent their heads together to confer and refine their diagnosis.
“Mother is very wise,” Doctor Zhao declared at last. “Women are always the first to recognize the symptoms. Your daughter-in-law has the best type of lovesickness: She’s pregnant.”
After so many weeks of this and that diagnosis I didn’t believe it, but I was intrigued. Could it be true? Despite the presence of the others in the room, I dropped onto Ze’s bed. I sat astride her and peered into her belly. I saw the tiny speck of life, a soul waiting to be reborn. I should have spotted it earlier, but I was young and unknowing about these things. It was a son.
“It’s not mine!” Ze shrieked. “Get it out!”
Doctor Zhao and the diviner laughed good-naturedly.
“We hear this often from young wives,” Doctor Zhao said. “Madame Wu, please show her the confidential women’s book again and explain what has happened. Mistress Ze, rest, avoid gossip, and eat the proper foods. Stay away from water chestnuts, musk deer, lamb, and rabbit meat.”
“And make sure you wear a daylily pinned to your waist,” the diviner added. “It will help relieve the pains of childbirth and ensure the birth of a healthy son.”
With much jubilation, Ren, his mother, and the servants discussed the possibilities. “A son is best,” Ren said, “but I would welcome a daughter.” This was the kind of man he was. This is why I loved him still.
But Ze was not happy about the baby, and her condition did not improve. She had no opportunity to encounter a musk deer, and the cook completely banned rabbit meat and lamb from the household, but Ze sneaked into the kitchen late at night to nibble on water chestnuts. She crumpled the flower at her waist and threw it on the floor. She refused to feed the child growing inside her. She stayed up late writing that the baby was not hers on pieces of paper. Every time she saw her husband, she wailed, “You don’t love me!” And when she wasn’t crying, accusing, or turning away food, she was throwing up. Soon enough we could all see pink pieces of stomach lining in the bowls the servants took away from the room. Everyone understood the seriousness of the situation. No one wants a loved one to die, but for a woman to die pregnant or in childbirth consigned her to a terrible fate: deportation to the Blood-Gathering Lake.
The Autumn Moon Festival came and went. Ze stopped taking in even water. Mirrors and a sieve were hung in the room. Fortunately, neither of these things was pointed up to where I kept my vigil.
“Nothing is wrong with her,” Commissioner Tan announced, when he came to visit. “She doesn’t want a baby in her womb because she has nothing in her heart.”
“She’s your daughter,” Ren reminded the man, “and she’s my wife.”
The commissioner was unimpressed and left with advice and a warning: “When the baby comes, keep it away from her. That will be safest. Ze does not like to see eyes on anyone but herself.”
Ze had no peace. She seemed terrified by day—shivering, crying, hiding her eyes. The nights gave her no respite. She tossed from side to side, cried out, and woke up in pools of sweat. The diviner made a special altar of peach wood and set incense and candles on it. He wrote a charm, burned it, and then mixed the ashes with water from a spring. With his sword in his right hand and the cup of watery ashes in his left, he prayed: “Purge this dwelling of all evil lurking here.” He dipped a sprig of willow in the cup and sprinkled it to the four compass points. To reinforce the spell, he filled his mouth with the ashy water and spurted it onto the wall above Ze’s bed. “Cleanse this woman’s mind of the spirits of darkness.”
But her nightmares did not cease and the effects grew worse. Dreams were something I knew about and I thought I could help, but when I went abroad with Ze in this way I found nothing frightening or unusual. She wasn’t being hunted or harmed in her dreams at all, which mystified me greatly.
The first snows came and the doctor visited yet again. “This is not a good child your wife carries,” he told Ren. “He is hanging on to your wife’s intestines and won’t let go. If you give me permission, I’ll use acupuncture to get rid of it.”
On the surface, this seemed like a logical explanation and a practical solution, but I could see the baby. He was not an evil spirit; he was just trying to survive.
“What if it’s a son?” Ren asked.
The doctor wavered. When he saw Ze’s writing scraps scattered about the room, he said sadly, “Every day I see it and I don’t know what to do. Literacy is a grave threat to the female sex. Too often I’ve seen the health and happiness of young women fade because they will not give up their brush and ink. I’m afraid”—and here he put a comforting hand on Ren’s arm—“that we will look back and blame the lovesickness caused by writing for your wife’s death.”
I thought, not for the first time, that Doctor Zhao knew very little about women or love.
AT THIS MOST grim moment, as the Wu household settled in for the deathwatch, my adopted brother arrived. Bao’s appearance shocked us all, for we were all so focused on someone who was literally wasting away while he was abundantly fat. In his pudgy fingers he held the poems I’d written when I was dying and hidden in the book on dam building in my father’s library. How had Bao found them? Looking at his soft white hands, he did not seem the type to be commissioning or designing a dam. His little eyes seemed too narrow and close together to find joy in reading out of intellectual curiosity, let alone pleasure. Something else had caused him to open that particular volume.
When he demanded money for my simple poems and I saw that this was no gift from one brother-in-law to another, I understood that things could not be well in the Chen Family Villa. I suppose I expected this. They couldn’t ignore my death and not expect some consequences. Bao had to be dismantling the library and had come across the poems. But where was my father? He’d sell his concubines before selling his library. Was he ailing? Had he died? Wouldn’t I have heard something if he had? Should I rush back to my natal home?
But this was my home now. Ren was my husband and Ze was my sister-wife. She was sick, right here, right now. Oh, yes, I’d been angry with her at times. I’d even hated her on occasion. But I would be at her side when she died. I would welcome her to the afterworld and thank her for being my sister-wife.
Ren paid my adopted brother. Things were so bad with Ze that he didn’t even look at the poems. He selected a book from his
library, tucked the papers inside, placed the volume back on the shelf, and returned to the bedchamber.
We went back to waiting. Madame Wu brought tea and snacks for her son, which he left mostly untouched. Commissioner Tan and his wife came again to see their daughter. Their harshness faded as they realized Ze was actually dying.
“Tell us what the matter is,” Madame Tan begged her daughter.
Ze’s body relaxed and color flushed her cheeks when she heard her mother’s voice.
Encouraged, Madame Tan tried again. “We can take you away from here. Come home and sleep in your own bed. You’ll feel better with us.”
At these words, Ze stiffened. She pursed her lips and looked away. Seeing this, tears streamed down Madame Tan’s face.
The commissioner stared at his intractable daughter.
“You’ve been stubborn forever,” he observed, “but I always go back to the night we saw The Peony Pavilion as the moment your emotions congealed to stone. Since that time, you’ve never listened to a single warning or piece of advice I’ve given you. Now you pay the price. We will remember you in our offerings.”
As Madame Wu showed the Tans back to their palanquins, the sick girl moaned the ailments she would not tell her parents. “I feel a floating numbness. My hands and feet will not move. My eyes are too dry for tears. My spirit is frozen by the cold.”
Every few minutes she opened her eyes, stared up at the ceiling, shivered, and closed them again. All the while, Ren held her hand and spoke softly to her.
Later that night when all was darkness and I had no fear of reflection from the mirrors, I let myself down into the room. I blew open the curtains so that moonlight illuminated the bedchamber. Ren slept in a chair. I touched his hair and felt him shiver. I sat with my sister-wife and felt the cold piercing her bones. Everyone else in the household was wandering in their dreams, so I stayed at Ze’s side to protect and comfort her. I placed my hand over her heart. I felt it slow, skip beats, race, and slow again. Just as darkness began to give way to pink, the air in the room shifted. Tan Ze’s bones crumbled, her soul dissolved, and just like that she was flying across the sky.