She shivered and automatically picked up the brush.
On two blank pages at the front of the opera, I helped Ze compose an essay explaining how the commentary had come to be written, leaving out anything that would seem strange or improbable in the earthly realm.
There had once been a lovesick girl who loved The Peony Pavilion. This girl, Chen Tong, was betrothed to the poet Wu Ren, and at night she wrote her thoughts about love in the margins of the opera. After she died, Wu Ren married another girl. This second wife came upon the copy of the opera with her predecessor’s gentle words. She was compelled to finish what her sister-wife had started, but she didn’t have the second part of the opera. When her husband came home with a text of the entire opera, she got drunk with happiness. After that, whenever Wu Ren and Tan Ze passed time appreciating flowers, he teased her about the time she drank too much, fell asleep, and slept all one day and into the next. Tan Ze was diligent and thoughtful. She completed the commentary and decided to offer it to those who embrace the ideals of qing.
It was a simple explanation, pure and mostly true. Now all I needed was for Ren to read it.
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i was s o accustomed to having Ze obey me that I didn’t pay attention when, after Ren left the house to meet friends at a lakeshore teahouse, she pulled out my original copy of Volume One. I didn’t give a moment’s thought when she took it outside. I believed she was going to reread my words and think about everything I’d taught her about love. I wasn’t even concerned when she crossed the zigzag bridge that led across the water to the summer pavilion in the middle of the Wu family’s pond. Under no circumstances could I navigate the sharp corners of the bridge. Still, I heard no alarms. I sat on a jardinière near the edge of the pond, under the plum tree that refused to leaf, bloom, or bear fruit, and prepared myself to enjoy the serenity of the scene. It was the fifth month in the eleventh year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, and I thought how tranquil the late-spring day was, with Ze—a pretty if thin-lipped young wife—enjoying the lotus blooms on the pond’s placid surface.
But when she pulled out a candle from her sleeve and lit it outside in daylight, I jumped to my feet. I paced back and forth anxiously, and the air around me swirled in response. I watched in absolute horror as she tore a page out of Volume One and slowly and deliberately placed it in the flame. Ze smiled as the paper crinkled into blackness. When she could hold it no longer, she dropped the tiny shred that remained over the railing. The last of the paper trailed down, burning into nothing before hitting the water.
She tore out another three pages from the book. Again she set them on fire and dropped them over the edge of the pavilion. I tried to run to the bridge, but my bound feet were useless. I fell, scraping my chin and hands.
I scrambled back to my feet and hurried to the zigzag bridge. I stepped onto it, made my way to the first turn, and stopped cold. I couldn’t walk wide around this corner. Zigzag bridges were designed this way as a barrier to spirits like me.
“Stop!” I screamed. For a moment the whole world shivered. The carp stilled in the pond, the birds went quiet, and flowers lost their petals. But Ze didn’t even look up. She methodically tore out another few pages and burned them.
I ran, tripping, scrambling, flailing, back to the shore. I shouted across the pond, sending waves against the zigzag bridge and the pavilion, spinning the air in hopes of blowing out the candle. But Ze was wily. She took ( 1 7 6 )
the candle from the ledge and sank to her knees on the pavilion floor where she’d be sheltered from the breezes and gusts I sent her way. Once she was settled, a new even crueler idea seized her mind. She tore out all the pages from the book, crumpled them, and put them into a pile. She tipped the candle, and then hesitated for a moment, letting the wax drip down onto the wadded sheets. She glanced around, her eyes furtively scanning the shore and the surrounding halls to make sure no one was looking, and then she touched the flame to the paper.
So often we hear about this or that Manuscript Saved from Burning.
This wasn’t an accident or even a momentary loss of faith in the quality of the writing. This was a deliberate act committed against me by the woman I’d come to see as my sister-wife. I wailed in agony, as though I’d been set on fire myself, but she didn’t care. I whirled my body and thrashed my arms until spring leaves fluttered down around us like snow. But this was the worst thing I could have done; the frenzied air fed the flames. If I’d been on the pavilion, I would have swallowed the smoke, sucking in all my words. But I wasn’t there. I was on the shore, on my knees, sobbing with the knowledge that the writing that had come from my own hand and been stained by my tears had disappeared into ash, smoke, nothing.
Ze waited on the pavilion until the ashes grew cold and then she brushed them into the pond. She came back across the bridge not with worry or remorse in her heart but with a quickness to her step that made me apprehensive. I followed her back to the bedchamber. She opened the copy of The Peony Pavilion into which she’d transcribed my comments and added her own. With every page she turned, I trembled with fear. Would she destroy this too? She thumbed back to the first two pages that explained the “true” authorship of the commentary. In a movement as sharp, brutal, and quick as the stabbing of a knife, she ripped out those pages.
This was worse than when my mother had burned my books. Soon there’d be nothing left of me on earth beyond an undotted ancestor tablet lost in a storage room. Ren would never hear me, and I would be completely forgotten.
Then Ze took the two ripped pages and hid them in the folds of another book.
“For safekeeping,” she said to herself.
With that, I was saved. That is what I felt: saved.
But I was physically and spiritually wounded. In the time it took Ze to perform her wickedness, I became almost nothing. I crawled out of the ( 1 7 7 )
room. Hand over hand I pulled myself along the covered corridor. When I felt I could go no farther, I dropped over the edge, made myself very small, and slipped under the foundation.
I skittered out two months later to find nourishment during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. There was no roaming for me, no visit to my old home, no trek out to the countryside to see my father’s lands and sample the Qian family’s offerings. I had only the energy to uncoil myself from my hiding place, slither down to the pond, and eat the pellets the gardener dropped in the water for the carp. Then I scuttled back up the bank and once again hid myself in the dank darkness.
How was it that I—who’d been born into privilege, who’d been educated, who was pretty and clever—had had so many bad things happen?
Was I paying for misdeeds committed in a former life? Did I go through these things to amuse the gods and goddesses? Or was it merely my fate as a woman to suffer? During the following months, I found no answers, but I began to regain my strength, find my resolve, and once again remember that I, like all women and girls, wanted—needed—to be heard.
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The Good Wife
anothe r five months passe d. one day i heard people scurrying back and forth on the corridor above me: rushing to meet guests, calling out propitious greetings, and bearing fragrant offerings on trays and platters to celebrate the New Year. The clang of cymbals and the burst of firecrackers brought me back out into the daylight. My eyes burned from the harshness of the bright rays. My limbs were stiff from being folded for so many months. My clothes? They were too pathetic even to consider.
Ren’s brother and wife returned from Shanxi province for the festivities. Ren’s sister-in-law had sent me Tang Xianzu’s edition of The Peony Pavilion all those years ago. I hadn’t lived long enough to meet her. Now here she was, small and graceful. Her daughter, Shen—just sixteen and already married to a landowner in Hangzhou—came to visit too. Their gowns were exquisitely embroidered and personalized with scenes from antiquity to show mother and daughter’s individuality and sensitivity.