I reached the Qian family home. Although they were poor, they had good hearts; their offerings were modest, but the quality was better than anything I’d eaten so far. Once I was sated, I drifted closer to the house, wanting to rest before my journey back to the city, enjoying the sensation of being full, and wishing to connect for just a few moments to people who were closely tied to my natal family.
But during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, wooden screens covered the Qians’ windows and the doors were locked from the inside. I smelled rice cooking. Lantern light leaked from under the doorjamb. I heard the low murmur of voices. I listened very hard, and then the sound of Madame Qian’s voice coalesced. “Since I stopped gathering kingfisher feathers along the emerald river, I have kept to my poor and humble abode, just chanting my poems.” I knew this poem well, and it made me sad and homesick. But what was I to do? I was alone, deprived of my family, companionship, and the gift of words and art. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed. From inside the house I heard the scraping of chairs and sounds of consternation. These ( 1 6 5 )
people had comforted me, and now I’d terrified them with my netherworld cries.
wh e n th e f e st ival was over and I returned to Ren and Ze’s bedchamber, I was fortified, strong, and unexpectedly focused. Being full for the first time since long before I died brought back a different hunger, the one I had once reserved for my project about The Peony Pavilion. What if I could add to what I’d written in the margins and turn it into a self-portrait that Ren would recognize as symbolizing everything I held inside of me?
Didn’t Liniang’s self-portrait and my writings harbor our souls?
Suddenly, I was as selfish as my sister-wife. I’d educated Ze about The Peony Pavilion. I’d touched her thoughts enough so that she’d written on those slips of paper and hidden them in our bedchamber. Now she had to do something for me.
I began to keep Ze in the bedchamber by day, preferring that she stay with me rather than join her husband and mother-in-law in the eating hall for breakfast or lunch. I did not love light, so I forced her to keep the doors closed and the windows covered. During the summer, the room stayed cool, the way I liked it. In fall, quilts were brought in. In winter, Ze took to wearing padded jackets or jackets lined with fur. The New Year came, followed by spring. In the fourth month, the flowers opened their faces to the sun, but inside we found companionship in our shared darkness that refused to warm even by day.
I made Ze reread what I’d written in Volume One. Then I sent her to Ren’s library to find the sources for the three pastiches I hadn’t found before I died. I helped her pick up her brush and write these answers and my thoughts about them on the pages right next to my other writing. If I could make Ze play the flute with my husband, how hard was making her pick up a brush and write? Nothing. Easy.
But I was not remotely satisfied. I desperately needed Volume Two, which begins with Mengmei and Liniang’s ghost swearing eternal love.
Then he dots her ancestor tablet, exhumes her body, and resurrects her. If I could make Ze write down my thoughts and make her give them to Ren to read, wouldn’t he be inspired to follow Mengmei’s example?
At night, in Ze’s dreams, we met by her favorite pond and I said to her,
“You need Volume Two. You must get it.” For weeks I was like a cockatoo, repeating these lines again and again. But Ze was a wife. She could no ( 1 6 6 )
more go out to find this volume than I could have if I’d been alive. She had to rely on her wiles, her charm, and her husband’s love to bring it into our home. Ze had my help, but she also had her own abilities. She could be stubborn, petty, and spoiled. Our husband responded beautifully.
“I long to read Volume Two of The Peony Pavilion, ” she might say, as she poured him a cup of tea. “I saw the opera long ago and now I would love to read the great writer’s words and discuss them with you.” As Ren sipped the hot liquid, she would look into his eyes, run her fingers along his sleeve, and add, “Sometimes I don’t understand what the writer meant with his metaphors and allusions. You are such a fine poet. Maybe you could tell me.”
Or at night, in bed, with Ren lying between us and the quilts piled high to keep them warm, she might whisper in his ear, “I think of my sister-wife each day. The missing second half of the opera is a vivid reminder to me that Same is gone. Surely you miss her too. If only we could bring her back to us.” And then her tongue would dart from her lips and tease his earlobe until other things began to happen.
I grew bolder. By summer I began to leave the bedchamber by placing my hands on Ze’s shoulders and letting her pull me from room to room.
Drifting this way, I didn’t have to worry about corners. I was merely a breath of air that trailed behind my sister-wife. When we arrived in the eating hall for dinner, Madame Wu would put away her fan, call to the servants to close the doors against the sudden chill, and order coal to be lit in the brazier even though these were the hottest months.
“Your lips are growing thin again,” Madame Wu said to Ze one evening.
Such a common mother-in-law complaint, since everyone knows that thin lips show a thinness of personality and this thinness can translate to a thinness of the womb. The unspoken message: Where is my grandson? So typical, so old-fashioned.
Under the table Ren took Ze’s hand. A look of concern came over his face.
“And your hand is cold. Wife, it’s summer. Come outside with me tomorrow. We’ll sit by the pond, look at the flowers and butterflies, and let the sun warm your skin.”
“These days, it is my fate to despise blossoms,” Ze murmured, “while butterflies remind me of dead souls. When I see water, I think only of drowning.”
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“I think,” my mother-in-law observed caustically, “that the sun will not help her either. She brings coldness with her wherever she goes. We should not wish the sun to run from her as well.”
Tears welled in Ze’s eyes. “I should return to my room. I have reading to do.”
Madame Wu pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders.
“Perhaps that is best. I will send a doctor tomorrow to make a diagnosis.”
Ze squeezed her thighs together. “That won’t be necessary.”
“How will you bring a son if . . . ?”
A son? Ze was worth more to me than her ability to give a son! She was helping me. We did not need a son.
But this was not Doctor Zhao’s concern when he came to visit us. I’d not seen him since I died, and I can’t say I was happy to see him again.
He took the usual pulses, looked at Ze’s tongue, took Ren outside, and pronounced, “I have seen this many times before. Your wife has stopped eating and she spends hours alone brooding in darkness. Master Wu, I can draw only one conclusion: Your wife is lovesick.”
“What can I do?” Ren asked in alarm.
The doctor and Ren sat on a bench in the garden.
“Usually a night alone with her husband will cure a wife’s lovesickness,” the doctor said. “Has she been unwilling to perform clouds and rain? Is this why she has not yet conceived? You’ve been married for well over a year now.”
I was incensed that the doctor would even suggest this. I wished I had the abilities of a vengeful ghost, for I would have made the doctor pay for those accusations.
“I could not ask for a better wife in this regard,” Ren said.
“Have you”—and here the doctor hesitated before going on—“been giving her your vital essence? A woman must take this internally to maintain good health. You cannot just spend it between the scented softness of her bound feet.”