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.”
( 1 2 1 )
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?”
( 1 2 2 )
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.”
al l th rou g h th i s 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 spirit 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.
( 1 2 3 )
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.”