“This can’t wait until he gets back. I have to get him these papers.” I pulled a packet out of my shoulder bag. It actually contained my travel documents, but what did she know? “He needs them for his meeting in Xi’an. Did he tell you what hotel he’s staying in? I’ll phone him. Perhaps I could fax some of the material. You could help me do that, couldn’t you? I’d be very grateful.”
Bless her. She told me what I wanted to know. She offered to fax the documents if I brought them back later in the afternoon when Burton would have arrived in Xi’an. I didn’t, because later that afternoon I was on an Air China flight to Xi’an, heading for what was once the capital of the T’ang dynasty, and therefore quite possibly the home of Lingfei, original owner of the silver box. I was also heading for a big dustup with a slug. To say that I was annoyed with Burton would not come close to capturing my feelings, after all that garbage about how we had to find the box no matter which of us got it, how we had to work together. I was really ticked.
Five
I remember the exact moment when I decided that there was a distinct possibility that Lingfei was my long lost sister. After Wu Peng’s revelation, I spent as little time as possible visiting my family. The necessary obligations met, I sought no further opportunities to see them. My feelings about my family did not extend to Auntie Chang, who had been a most devoted and beloved servant, and a very distant cousin of my mother’s. A chance encounter with Auntie Chang as she was leaving a Buddhist temple after prayers provided the impetus. (My family is Buddhist, my mother devoutly so. Indeed my great-grandfather purchased an ordination certificate from a particularly grasping member of the imperial family of his day, one Princess Anle, for thirty thousand coppers in order to be exempt from taxes, as all priests are. He did not live in a monastery however, nor was he celibate, as his numerous offspring would attest. The current Son of Heaven revoked his exemption and put us back on the tax rolls, which upset my family, but rather impressed me now that I was old enough to understand it.)
Auntie Chang did enjoy a tipple or two, her favorite being Courtier’s Clear Ale of Toad Tumulus. It was an inferior brew, I knew from my sojourn at the palace, but Auntie Chang liked it, and I took her to a pub for a goblet or two. She drank. I ate dumplings. When she was feeling happy, I took the opportunity to ask about my sister.
“All I know,” Auntie Chang said, “is that your father was very angry with her when she stayed out all night. He guessed, and I knew, that there was a young man involved. Your sister had fallen in love with a member of the Gold Bird Guard, one posted to the station at one of the eastern gates. That is why she had no worries about staying out on the streets after the ward had closed. Your father had other plans for her. She was an accomplished musician, and he wished to enhance his status through her, persuading someone in the Imperial Palace to accept her. If the emperor liked her, then your family would rise in status. They might be invited to the palace, become a confidant of the most senior mandarins.”
“Is that what happened then? She is somewhere in the palace?”
“I do not know,” she replied. “I know only that she left with your father. He came back. She did not. That is what also happened to you. Unlike you, I have neither seen nor heard of her since. Your mother never mentions her at all, never utters her name. Nor will she permit others in the household to do so.”
It had never occurred to me until that moment that I should be searching for my sister where I myself labored, in the harem of the Son of Heaven. From there it was, I suppose, a fairly easy leap to suspicions about Lingfei. On every occasion that I saw her, I looked carefully at her features, searching for something that would tell me whether or not she was indeed Number One Sister. There were two difficulties. One was that she always wore makeup in my presence. The other was that I had not seen my sister in almost ten years. Indeed, I had been only five years of age when she left us. Her face was not clear to me, except perhaps in my dreams. I listened most carefully to Lingfei’s voice, but that told me nothing. Hers was the voice of a mature woman, not the young girl’s voice I recalled.
I had more and more opportunity to study her, however. After several months of doing errands for her, she asked me if I would write something for her, I thought it would be a letter to her family, perhaps, which would resolve my dilemma, but it was not. Instead I began writing what I soon realized was a very detailed formula for making artificial pearls. I gave no indication that I understood it, although I did try to memorize it, pearls being a rather valued commodity in the harem.
I was disappointed by her request, however. My sister had learned how to write just as I and my brothers had, so this seemed to indicate quite conclusively that Lingfei was not the woman I sought. I was desolate, until she told me that I had saved her many hours of writing, and allowed her to consult the notes resulting from her experiments. That could only mean that she could read, and I went forward with renewed hope. She asked me to come back two days hence.
From that day on, I spent at least one day a week with Lingfei, writing for her. I would sit cross-legged on one of her wooden couches with my writing table before me while she paced the room, stopping occasionally to consult her notes. Most of the formulas I wrote were for medicines, I decided, for the treatment of various ailments resulting from an excess of either yin or yang, caused by wind, cold, heat, damp, dry, and fire. She told me when I questioned her that she had been a Taoist nun before she caught the Emperor’s eye, and had studied with a master. These formulas that I was writing for her were based on her notes of that time, and the work she had done with the master, and also her observations from the treatment of the women in the harem. It was the first of several confidences that she shared with me.
Different city. Same routine. At least it was a really interesting place. Xi’an and its environs are considered by many to be the cradle of Chinese civilization, and justifiably so. With a history that stretches back at least four thousand years, and its status as capital of several Chinese dynasties, including that of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, it is a wonderful repository of art and culture. Best known worldwide as the home of the magnificent terra-cotta army of Qin Shi Huangdi, it is a city that seems to me to have managed the transition to the new economic reality better than Beijing, having preserved the old with the new to a much greater extent, as compared to the wholesale leveling of much of old Beijing. It is a walled city, although the urban area has expanded way beyond the walls.
Burton had chosen a hotel within the beautiful old city walls, a little east of the Bell Tower, which would have been the center of the ancient city, positioned where the main north-south and east-west axes meet. He headed out of his hotel around 9 AM when this part of town was just waking up. Once out the front door he stopped briefly to add a surgical mask to his attire, which already included a hat pulled down over his ears, a long scarf that was wound around his neck a couple of times, azure of course, and heavy jacket and gloves. It was cold, that’s for sure, and for once the surgical mask did not look entirely out of place. Xi’an’s air is unfortunately highly polluted, and even some Chinese wore masks.