importance. He carried himself with far greater assurance than he had when I’d been a daughter in the household.
My mother seemed far less secure. Mourning had caused her to age.
Her hair was now streaked with white and her shoulders seemed thin and brittle.
“Your mother still cares for you,” Grandmother said. “This year she will break with tradition. She’s a very brave woman.”
I couldn’t imagine my mother doing anything that strayed from the Four Virtues and Three Obediences.
“You left her childless,” Grandmother went on. “Her heart fills with grief whenever she sees a book of poetry or catches the scent of peonies.
These things remind her of you and are a heavy burden on her heart.”
I didn’t want to hear this. What good would it do me? But my grandmother didn’t often attend to my feelings.
“I wish you’d known your mother when she first married into our family,” Grandmother continued. “She was just seventeen. She’d been highly educated and her womanly skills were flawless. It’s a mother-in-law’s duty, obligation, and reward to complain about her daughter-in-law, but your mother did not allow me this gift. I didn’t mind. I had a house full of sons. I was happy to have her company. I came to look at her not as a daughter-in-law but as a friend. You can’t imagine the places we went and the things we did.”
“Mama doesn’t go out,” I reminded her.
“She did in those days,” she countered. “In the years leading up to the fall of the Ming emperor, your mother and I questioned the true nature of a woman’s calling. Was it the traditional womanly arts that she so excelled at or was it her adventurousness, her curiosity, and her beautiful mind?
Your mother, not your father, was the first to take an interest in the women poets. Did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“She felt it was the responsibility of women to collect, edit, antholo-gize, and critique the work of others like ourselves,” Grandmother continued. “We traveled many places in search of books and experience.”
This seemed far-fetched. “How did the two of you go? Did you walk?”
I asked, trying to make her stop her exaggerations.
“We practiced walking in our rooms and in the corridors in the villa,”
she answered, smiling at the memory. “We toughened our golden lilies so they wouldn’t hurt, and what pain we still experienced was soothed by the ( 1 2 9 )
pleasures of what we saw and did. We found men who were so proud of the women in their families that they published their writings to memori-alize the domestic bliss in their households, establish the family’s sophistication, and honor their wives and mothers. Like you, your mother stored in her heart all the plunder of her readings, but she was modest in her own writing. She refused to use ink and paper, preferring instead to mix powder with water and then write on leaves. She wanted to leave behind no trace of herself.”
Below us, New Year’s Day arrived. In our ancestral hall, my parents laid out trays of meats, fruits, and vegetables, and I watched as my grandmother’s flesh began to fill out. After the ceremony, Mama took three small rice balls, went to my old room, and left them on the windowsill.
For the first time in seven years I was fed. Just three rice balls and I was strengthened.
Grandmother looked at me and nodded knowingly. “I told you she still loves you.”
“But why now?”
Grandmother ignored my question and continued her earlier topic with renewed fervor. “Your mother and I went to poetry parties held under the full moon; we traveled to see jasmine and plum blossoms in bloom; we went to the mountains and made rubbings of stone stelae at Buddhist retreats. We rented pleasure boats and journeyed on West Lake and along the Grand Canal. We met women artists who supported their families with their paintings. We dined with professional women archers and celebrated with other gentry women. We played instruments, drank late into the night, and wrote poetry. We had fun, your mother and I.”
When I shook my head in disbelief, Grandmother observed, “You’re not the first girl not to know her mother’s true nature.” She seemed pleased that she’d surprised me, but her pleasure was brief. “Like so many women in those days, we enjoyed the outer realm, but we knew nothing about it. We employed our calligraphy brushes and had our parties. We laughed and sang. We didn’t pay attention to the Manchus’ southward trek.”
“But Baba and Grandfather knew what was coming,” I cut in.
Grandmother tightened her arms over her chest. “Look at your father now. What do you think?”
I hesitated. I’d come to regard my father as someone without loyalty, either to our Ming emperor or to his only child. His lack of deep feelings for me still hurt, but my emotions hadn’t kept me from observing him.
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No, not at all. Some perverse place inside me wanted to see him. Watching Baba was like picking at a sore. I turned to look for him now.
In these past few years, my abilities had expanded and I could now see beyond Hangzhou. As part of my father’s New Year’s duties, he ventured into the countryside to visit his lands. Not only had I read the Speed the Plough scene in The Peony Pavilion, I had seen it performed in our family garden. What I saw now was a visual echo. The farmers, fishermen, and silk laborers brought him dishes prepared by the best cooks in each village.
Acrobats tumbled. Musicians played. Big-footed peasant girls danced and sang. My father praised his workers and ordered them to provide good harvests of crops, fish, and silk in the coming year.
Even though I’d become disillusioned by my father, I still hoped to discover I was wrong and that he was a benevolent man. After all, I’d heard about our lands and these workers for years. But what I saw was extreme poverty. The men were thin and wiry from their labors. The women had been used up from a lifetime of hauling water, having babies, keeping house, spinning silk, and making clothes, shoes, and meals. The children were small for their ages and dressed in clothes handed down by older brothers and sisters. Many of them also worked; the boys were in the fields while their sisters used their unprotected fingers to unravel silk cocoons in boiling water. For these people, the only purpose in life was to provide for my father and those who lived in the Chen Family Villa.
My father stopped at the house of the headman of Gudang Village. The husband was a Qian, as were all the people who lived in the village. His wife was unlike the other women. She had bound feet and carried herself as though she were once from the gentry class. Her words showed refinement and she did not cower before my father. She held a baby in her arms.
My father tweaked one of the infant’s pigtails, and said, “This one is very pretty.”
Madame Qian stepped back, out of my father’s reach.
“Baby Yi is a girl—another worthless branch on the family tree,” her husband said.
“Four daughters,” my father said sympathetically. “And now this fifth one. You are unlucky.”
I hated to hear those words spoken so bluntly, but were they worse than what I’d experienced? My father had spoken to me with a smiling face but to him, it seemed, I too had been just a worthless branch on the family tree.
Feeling bereaved, I looked at Grandmother.
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“No,” I said, “I don’t think he would pay attention to anything beyond his own enterprises.”
She nodded sadly. “This is how it was with your grandfather too.”
Although Grandmother had been visiting me for years, I’d been careful not to ask certain questions. Partly I’d been afraid of her unpredictable moods, partly I hadn’t wanted to appear unfilial, and partly I didn’t want to know the answers. But I’d held on to my blindness for too long. I took a deep breath and let my questions flow, fearing I might not survive her truths, whatever they were.