“Why don’t you ever bring Grandfather to visit me? Is it because I’m a girl?” I asked, remembering that as a small child he hadn’t cared very much for me.
“He’s in one of the hells,” she answered, in her usual brusque way.
I took this to be her customary wifely rancor. “And my uncles? Why do they not come?”
“They died away from home,” she said, and this time her voice held no edge, only sorrow. “They have no one to clean their graves. They roam the earth as hungry ghosts.”
I shrank into myself. “Hungry ghosts are horrible, disgusting creatures,” I said. “How could we have them in our family?”
“Are you finally asking this question?”
Her impatience was obvious, and I drew farther away. Would she have been this way in the earthly realm, treating me as the insignificant girl I was? Or would she have indulged me with sesame sweets and little treasures from her dowry?
“Peony,” she went on, “I love you. I hope you know that. I listened to you in life. I tried to help you. But these last seven years have left me wondering. Are you only a lovesick maiden, or is there something more inside you?”
I bit my lip and turned away. I’d been right to keep a respectful distance. My mother and grandmother may have been friends, but it seemed my grandmother also saw me as nothing more than a worthless branch on our family tree.
“I’m glad you’re here on the Viewing Terrace,” she continued. “For years I’ve come here to look over the balustrade for my sons. For these last seven years, I’ve had you at my side. They’re down there somewhere”—
she gestured with her long water sleeves to the land below us—“wandering as hungry ghosts. In twenty-seven years, I haven’t found them.”
“What happened to them?”
( 1 3 2 )
“They died in the Cataclysm.”
“Baba told me.”
“He didn’t tell you the truth.” Her eyes narrowed and she crossed her water sleeves over her chest. I waited. Grandmother said, “You won’t like the story.”
I didn’t say anything, and for a long time neither of us spoke.
“On the day you and I first met here,” she began, “you said that I wasn’t like my portrait. The truth is, I wasn’t at all like what you’ve been told.
I wasn’t tolerant of my husband’s concubines. I hated them. And I didn’t commit suicide.”
She gave me a sideways look, but I kept my face impassive and untroubled.
“You have to understand, Peony, that the end of the Ming dynasty was terrible and wonderful at the same time. Society was collapsing, the government was corrupt, money was everywhere, and no one was paying attention to women, so your mother and I went out and did things. As I told you, we met other wives and mothers: women who managed their families’ estates and businesses, teachers, editors, and even some courtesans.
We were brought together by a failing world and found companionship.
We forgot about our embroidery and our chores. We filled our minds with beautiful words and images. In this way we shared our sorrows and joys, our tragedies and triumphs, with other women across great distances and time. Our reading and writing allowed us to form a world of our own that was very much against what our fathers, husbands, and sons wanted.
Some men—like your father and grandfather—were attracted to this change. So when your grandfather got his official posting in Yangzhou, I went with him. We lived in a lovely compound, not as grand as our family home in Hangzhou but spacious and with plenty of courtyards. Your mother often came to visit. Oh, did we have adventures!
“For one of those visits, your mother and father came together. They arrived on the twentieth day of the fourth month. We had four lovely days together, feasting, drinking, laughing. None of us—not even your father or grandfather—gave any thought to the outer world. Then, on the twenty-fifth day, Manchu troops entered the city. In five days, they killed over eighty thousand people.”
As Grandmother told her story, I began to experience it as though I’d been at her side. I heard the clang of swords and spears, the clatter of shield against shield and helmet against helmet, the pounding of horses’
hooves on cobblestones, and the screams of terrified residents as they ( 1 3 3 )
sought safety when there was none. I smelled smoke as houses and other buildings were set on fire. And I began to smell blood.
“Everyone panicked,” Grandmother remembered. “Families climbed onto roofs, but the tiles crumbled and people fell to their deaths. Some hid in wells, only to drown. Others tried to surrender, but that was a serious miscalculation; men lost their heads and women were raped to death.
Your grandfather was an official. He should have tried to help the people.
Instead, he ordered our servants to give us their coarsest clothes. We changed into them and then the concubines, our sons, your parents, and your grandfather and I went to a small outbuilding to hide. My husband gave us women silver and gems to sew into our garments, while the men tucked pieces of gold into their topknots, shoes, and waistbands. On the first night, we hid in the dark, listening as people were killed. The cries of those who were not blessed with a quick death, but suffered for hours as their blood ran out of them, were pitiful.
“On the second night, when the Manchus slaughtered our servants in the main courtyard, my husband reminded me and his concubines that we were to safeguard our chastity with our lives and that all women should be prepared to make sacrifices for their husbands and sons. The concubines were still concerned with the fate of their gowns, powders, jewels, and ornaments, but your mother and I did not need to hear this admonition. We knew our duty. We were prepared to do the correct thing.”
Grandmother paused for a moment and then continued. “The Manchu soldiers looted the compound. Knowing they would eventually come to the outbuilding, my husband ordered us onto the roof, a tactic that had already proved fatal to many families. But we all obeyed. We spent the night in the pouring rain. When dawn broke, the soldiers saw us huddled together on the roof. When we refused to come down, the soldiers set fire to the building. We scrambled quickly back to the ground.
“Once our feet touched the earth,” Grandmother went on, “they should have killed us, but they didn’t. For this we can thank the concubines. Their hair had fallen loose. They weren’t accustomed to such rough clothes, so they’d loosened them. Like all of us, they were soaked, and the weight of the water pulled their garments away from their breasts. This, in addition to the pretty tears on their eyelashes, made them so alluring that the soldiers decided to keep us alive. The men were herded to an adjacent courtyard. The soldiers used rope to bind us women together around our necks, as if we were a string of fish, and then they led us into the street. Babies lay on the ground everywhere. Our golden lilies, which your mother ( 1 3 4 )
and I had tried so hard to strengthen, slipped in the blood and smashed organs of those who’d been trampled to death. We walked next to a canal filled with the floating dead. We passed mountains of silks and satins that had been looted. We reached another compound. When we walked in, we saw perhaps a hundred naked women, wet, muddy, crying. We watched men pull women out of that quivering mass and do things to them—in the open air, in front of everyone, with no regard to propriety.”
I listened in horror. I felt terrible shame as my mother, my grandmother, and the concubines were told to strip and the rain pelted their naked bodies. I stayed by my mother’s side as she took the lead and wormed her way safely into the center of the crowd, all the while attached by the rope around her neck to her mother-in-law and the concubines. I saw that women in these circumstances no longer lived in the human world. Mud and excrement were everywhere, and my mother used them to smear the faces and bodies of the women in our family. All day they held on to one another, always shifting to the center as women from the edges were grabbed, raped, and killed.