I could not have received worse news.
my moth e r had plans for me, and Shao, who now lived in my room, had to make sure they were fulfilled. “Tong—Same—you will prepare for your wedding, nothing else,” Shao announced, and she meant it.
Hearing my new name, I had an inward shiver of despair. My place in the world was set by label and designation; through my name I was already changing from a daughter into a wife and daughter-in-law.
For the next seven weeks, Shao brought my meals, but my stomach had become an abyss of anguish and I ignored the food or stubbornly pushed it away. As time passed, my body changed. My skirts started to hang on my hips instead of my waist, and my tunics swung loose and free.
My mother never visited.
“She’s disappointed in you,” Shao reminded me every day. “How could you have come from her body? I tell her a bad daughter is a typical daughter.”
I was book-smart but no match for my mother. Her job was to control me and see me married out to a good family. Although she still did not ( 7 0 )
want to see my face, she sent emissaries. Every morning, Third Aunt arrived just before dawn to teach me to embroider properly.
“No more sloppy or clumsy stitches allowed,” she said, her voice tinkling like white carnelian. If I made a mistake, she made me pull out the stitches and start again. With no distractions and Third Aunt’s exacting instruction, I learned. And with every stitch, I ached for my poet.
As soon as she swept out of the room, Shao let in Second Aunt, who drilled me on my zither. Despite her indulgent reputation, she was very strict with me. If I erred in my plucking, she struck my fingers with a stalk of green bamboo. My zither playing improved surprisingly quickly, becoming clear and limpid. I imagined each note floating out the window and traveling across the lake to my poet’s home, where the music would make him think of me as I was thinking of him.
In the late afternoons, as the colors of evening began to appear in the west, Fourth Aunt, widowed and childless, came to teach me the purpose of clouds and rain.
“A woman’s greatest strength is to give birth to sons,” Fourth Aunt instructed. “It gives a woman power and it can take it away. If you give your husband a son, you might keep him from entering the pleasure quarters on the lake or bringing in concubines. Remember, a woman’s purity grows through seclusion. This is why you’re in here.”
I listened hard to what she said, but she told me nothing about what to expect on my wedding night or how I could participate in clouds and rain with someone I didn’t love, like, or know. I relentlessly conjured the hours leading up to it: my mother, aunts, and cousins washing and dressing me in my wedding clothes; the five grains, the piece of pork, and the pig heart they’d hide in the underskirt I’d wear next to my skin; the tears shed by everyone as I was led outside to the palanquin; stepping over the Wu family threshold and letting that underskirt with its hidden treasures drop to the floor to ensure the fast and easy births of sons; and finally being led into the wedding chamber. These thoughts, which had once filled me with happy expectation, now made me want to run away. That I had no way to escape my fate made me feel even worse.
After dinner, Fifth Aunt took time from the nightly gathering in the women’s chambers to improve my calligraphy. “Writing is a creation of the outer world of men,” she said. “It is by its nature a public act—something that we, as women, should avoid—but you need to learn it so that one day you can help your son with his studies.”
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We worked through sheet after sheet of paper, copying poems from the Book of Songs, doing drills from Pictures of Battle Formations of the Brush, and limning lessons from the Women’s Four-Character Classic until my fingers were stained with ink.
Apart from perfecting my brushstrokes, Fifth Aunt’s lessons were pure and simple: “The best you can do is take the ancients as your teachers. Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts, or emotions. Make yourself presentable, speak gently but don’t say anything, wash yourself diligently and frequently, and keep a harmonious mind. In this way you will wear your virtue on your face.”
I dutifully obeyed, but each stroke of my brush was a caress I gave my poet. Each swish of my brush was my fingers on his skin. Each character completed was a gift to the man who had so invaded my thoughts.
Every moment of the day and night that one of my aunts wasn’t in my room I still had Shao. Like Willow, she slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. She was there when I woke up, there when I used the chamber pot, there when I did my lessons, there when I went to sleep. I was there for her too, listening to her snoring and farting, smelling her breath and what left her body and went into the chamber pot, watching her scratch her rump or clean her feet. No matter what she did, she was unrelenting in what spewed from her mouth.
“A woman—and your mother has recognized this in you—becomes unruly through knowledge,” she told me, contradicting my aunts’ teach-ings. “In your mind you go too far beyond the inner chambers. It’s dangerous out there; your mother needs you to understand that. Forget what you’ve learned. Instructions from Mother Wen tells us that a girl should know only a few written characters, like firewood, rice, fish, and meat. These words will help you run a household. Anything more is perilous.”
Just as door after door was closing me in, my heart was opening wider and wider. A dream visit to the Peony Pavilion had given Liniang a case of lovesickness. Visits to pavilions in the Chen Family Villa had given me my lovesickness. I had no control over my activities—how I dressed or my future life with this Wu Ren—but my emotions remained untrammeled and free. I’ve come to believe that part of lovesickness comes from this conflict between control and desire. In love we have no control. Our hearts and minds are tormented, teased, enticed, and delighted by the overwhelming strength of emotions that make us try to forget the real world. But that world does exist, so as women we have to think about how to make our ( 7 2 )
husbands happy by being good wives, bearing sons, running our households well, and being pretty so they don’t become distracted from their daily activities or loiter with concubines. We are not born with these abilities. They must be instilled in us by other women. Through lessons, aphorisms, and acquired skills we are molded . . . and controlled.
My mother controlled me through her instructions even as she refused to see me. My aunts controlled me through their lessons. My future mother-in-law would control me after marriage. Together, these women—from the time I was born until the day I died—would control every single minute of my life.
Yet for every effort at control, I was spinning away. At every moment, my poet invaded my thoughts—during every stitch, every strum, every didactic lesson. He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him. Each time petal-scented air came through my window, my emotions were thrown into turmoil. Did he long for a traditional wife or a new wife, like the one he talked about the night we met in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion? Would his future wife give him what he wanted? And what about me? What would happen to me now?
At night, as moonlight sent scattered shadows of bamboo leaves across my silk bedding, I dwelled in these dark thoughts. Sometimes I would get up, step over Shao, and go to the drawer where I kept the sprig of willow my poet had given me on our last night together. As the weeks went by, leaf after leaf fell away and crumbled to nothing, until all that was left was the twig. My little speck of a heart was soaked through with sadness.