“But Commissioner Tan disapproves of the opera.”
“So he’s a hypocrite. Men in power often are.”
Was she suggesting my father was a hypocrite too?
“Political loyalty is a natural extension of personal loyalty,” Grandmother went on. “I’m afraid your father—my son—has neither.”
( 1 2 4 )
She said nothing more, but the expression on her face caused me to look back—to finally see—and understand what I’d ignored in life.
My father was not a Ming loyalist or the man of integrity I’d always believed him to be, but from my perspective this was minor. In life, I’d known my father regretted I was a girl. Despite that, in my heart I’d believed, truly believed, that he cherished, adored, and loved me, but the fact of my tablet and all it implied—that I was an unmarried girl being raised for another family—had proved otherwise. With no one to care for me through my tablet in the earthly realm, my soul was in terrible trouble.
I was like a torn-off remnant of silk. That I’d been abandoned—
orphaned—in this way provided one explanation for why I was stuck on the Viewing Terrace.
“What’s going to happen to me?” I cried. Only a year had passed, and already my gown had faded and I’d grown thinner.
“Your parents could send your tablet to a maiden’s temple, but this is a distasteful idea, since those places house not only the tablets of unmarried daughters but those of concubines and prostitutes as well.” Grandmother drifted across the terrace and sat down next to me. “A ghost marriage would remove the ugly thing from the Chen Family Villa—”
“I could still marry Ren. My tablet would be used in the ceremony.
Everyone would see my missing dot,” I said hopefully. “It would be dotted, and from then on my tablet would be worshipped on the Wu family altar.”
“But your father hasn’t arranged that. Think, Peony, think. I’ve been telling you to look, really look. What have you seen? What do you see right now?”
Time is strange here: sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Now it was days later, and another succession of young men visited my father.
“Baba has appointments. He’s an important man.”
“Don’t you listen, child?”
Business belonged to the outer realm. I’d deliberately not listened to my father’s conversations, but I did now. He was interviewing those young men. Instantly I was terrified that he was trying to arrange a ghost marriage for me to someone other than Ren.
“Will you be loyal and filial?” he inquired of one young man after another. “Will you sweep our graves at New Year and make offerings in our ancestral hall every day? And I need grandsons. Can you give me grandsons to care for us after you’re gone?”
( 1 2 5 )
Hearing these questions, Baba’s intention became clear. He was going to adopt one of those young men. My father couldn’t have sons—an embarrassment for any man and a disaster when it came to ancestor worship.
Adopting one for purposes of filial piety was common enough and Baba could afford it, but I was being replaced in his heart completely!
“Your father did a lot for you,” Grandmother said. “I saw how solici-tous he was of you—teaching you to read, write, and question. But you weren’t a son, and he needed one.”
My father had shown me devotion, love, and many kindnesses over the years, but I now saw that my being a girl had diminished me in his affec-tions. I cried and Grandmother held me.
Barely able to accept any of this, I looked down to Ren’s home, hoping his family might have offered me porridge. Naturally, they hadn’t. Ren stood beneath an awning in the pouring rain, relacquering in cinnabar red the front gate to his family compound as a symbol of the rebirth of the coming New Year, while in my father’s library a young man with small eyes signed a contract of adoption. My father patted the young man on the back and said, “Bao, my son, I should have done this many years ago.”
( 1 2 6 )
The Cataclysm
i t i s sa i d that death i s eve r f ol lowe d by l i f e and the end is always a new beginning. Clearly that is not how it was for me. Before I knew it, a river of seven years rolled past.
Holidays and feast days—especially the New Year—were particularly hard for me. I had been thin when I died, and without offerings I became frailer and more translucent with each passing year until now I was little more than a wraith. The single gown I’d worn here was faded and frayed. I’d become a pathetic creature, always hovering by the balustrade, unable to leave the Viewing Terrace.
The lovesick maidens came to visit for New Year, knowing how sad I would be. I enjoyed their company, because—unlike in the Chen Family Villa—we had no petty jealousies between us. After all this time, they finally brought Xiaoqing. She was exquisite. Her forehead was high, her eyebrows were painted, her hair was festooned with ornaments, and her lips were soft and pliant. She wore a gown of the old style—elegant, flowing, decorated with flowers—and her feet were so tiny that she appeared weightless as she swayed delicately onto the terrace. She was too beautiful ever to have been a wife, and I could see why so many men had been entranced by her.
“I titled the poems I left behind Manuscripts Saved from Burning, ” Xiaoqing said, in a voice that sounded as melodious as wind chimes, “but what’s extraordinary in that? The men who write about us call us lovesick.
They say we are the sickly sex, always suffering from blood loss and body ( 1 2 7 )
depletion. The result, they conclude, is that our fates must match those of our writings. They don’t understand that fires aren’t always an accident.
Too often women—and I count myself among them—doubt their words and skill, so they decide to burn their work. This is why so many collections have the exact same title.”
Xiaoqing regarded me, waiting for me to say something. The other lovesick maidens also looked at me expectantly, urging me with their kind eyes to be clever.
“Our writings don’t always pass away like a spring dream,” I said.
“Some remain in the earthly realm where people weep over them.”
“May they do so for ten thousand years,” the salt merchant’s daughter added.
Xiaoqing looked at us benignly. “Ten thousand years,” she repeated.
She shivered and the air around her trembled in response. “Don’t be so sure. They’re beginning to forget about us already. When that happens . . .” She stood. Her gown billowed around her. She nodded to each of us, then drifted away.
The lovesick maidens left when Grandmother arrived, but what comfort could that old woman offer me? “There is no such thing as love,” she liked to say, “only obligation and responsibility.” Her words about her husband were always bound by duty, not love or even affection.
Forlorn and disconsolate, I listened to Grandmother—she talked about nothing in particular—and watched the New Year’s preparations in Ren’s home. He paid his family’s debts; his mother swept and cleaned; servants prepared special foods; and the picture of Kitchen God, which hung above the stove, was burned and sent here to report on the good and bad deeds of the family. No thought was given to me.
Reluctantly, I turned my eyes to my natal family home. My father had returned from his posting in the capital to perform his filial duties. Bao, my brother of seven years, had married in. Disappointingly, his wife had only succeeded in birthing three stillborn sons. Whether it was from this failure or from a general weakness of character, Bao had taken to spending most of his time with pleasure women along the shores of West Lake. My father didn’t seem perturbed by this, as he and my mother went to the family graveyard on New Year’s Eve to invite the ancestors home for the holiday.
Baba wore his mandarin robes with great dignity. The elaborately embroidered emblem on his chest told anyone who saw him of his rank and ( 1 2 8 )