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Jealousy-Curing Soup
a f te r th e v i s i t to sh e n ’s , z e we nt h om e and re -
tired to her bed. She refused to light the lamps. She didn’t speak. She turned down food even when it was brought to her.
She stopped dressing and pinning her hair. After the things she’d done to me, I didn’t do anything to help her. When Ren finally returned from his travels, she still didn’t get up. They performed clouds and rain, but it was as though they’d gone back to the first days of their marriage, so disinterested was she. Ren tried to coax Ze from the room with promises of pleasant strolls in the garden or a meal with friends. Instead of accepting, she wrapped her arms around herself, shook her head no, and asked, “Am I your wife or your concubine?”
He stared at her propped up in the bed, her face blotchy, her skin sal-low, her elbows and collarbones protruding from her seemingly fleshless body. “You’re my wife,” he answered. “Of course I love you.”
When she burst into tears, Ren did the only sensible thing a man could do. He sent for Doctor Zhao, who pronounced, “Your wife has had a re-lapse of her lovesickness.”
But Ze couldn’t be lovesick. She’d stopped eating, true, but she wasn’t a maiden. She wasn’t a virgin. She was an eighteen-year-old married woman.
“I’m not lovesick. I have no love in me!” Ze cried from the bed.
The two men regarded each other soberly and then looked back down at the bedridden woman.
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“Husband, stay away from me. I’ve become an incubus, a vampire, an evil temptress. If you sleep with me, I’ll pierce your feet with an awl. I’ll suck the blood from your bones to feed the emptiness inside me.”
This was one way of getting out of doing clouds and rain, but I no longer had a desire to interfere.
“Perhaps your wife is afraid for her position,” Doctor Zhao reasoned.
“Have you been unhappy with her?”
“Be careful,” Ze warned the doctor, “or the next time you fall asleep I’ll use a piece of silk to snap your neck.”
Doctor Zhao ignored the outburst. “Does Madame Wu criticize too freely? Even an offhand remark by a mother-in-law can make a young wife anxious and unsure.”
When Ren assured the doctor this wasn’t possible, he prescribed a diet of pig’s trotters to help restore Ze’s qi.
She was not about to eat something so lowly.
Next the doctor ordered the cook to make a soup of pig’s liver to help strengthen Ze’s corresponding organ. Soon he was trying every organ of the pig to fortify his patient. None of them worked.
“You were supposed to marry someone else,” the doctor said diffi-dently to Ren. “Perhaps she’s come back to claim her rightful place.”
Ren dismissed the idea. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
The doctor jutted his jaw and went back to listening to Ze’s pulses. He asked about her dreams, which she said were filled with vile demons and horrific sights.
“I see a woman with little flesh on her bones,” Ze recounted. “Her longing reaches out to me, wraps itself around my neck, and takes away my breath.”
“I have not been subtle enough in my diagnosis,” Doctor Zhao now admitted to Ren. “Your wife has a different kind of lovesickness from what I originally thought. She has a bad case of that most common of all feminine disorders: too much vinegar.”
This word sounded exactly the same as jealousy in our dialect.
“But she has no reason to be jealous,” Ren objected.
To which Ze pointed a thin finger at him. “You don’t love me.”
“What about your first wife?” Doctor Zhao circled back.
“Ze is my first wife.”
That stung. Could Ren have forgotten me so completely?
“Perhaps you forget that I took care of Chen Tong as she died,” the doctor reminded him. “Tradition would tell you that she was your first ( 1 8 8 )
wife. Were your Eight Characters not matched? Were bride-price gifts not sent to her family home?”
“Your thinking is very old-fashioned,” Ren said disapprovingly. “This is not a ghost infestation. Ghosts only exist to scare children into obeying their parents, give young men an excuse to explain away bad behavior with low women, or make girls languish over something they can never have.”
How could he say these things? Had he forgotten how we’d talked about The Peony Pavilion? Had he forgotten Liniang was a ghost? If he didn’t believe in ghosts, how was he ever going to hear me? His words were so terrible and cruel that I decided he could only be saying them to comfort and reassure my sister-wife.
“Many wives go on hunger strikes because they’re jealous and ill-tempered,” the doctor suggested, trying a different approach. “They try to push their anger onto others by making them suffer with guilt and remorse.”
The doctor prescribed a bowl of jealousy-curing soup made from oriole broth. In one of the plays about Xiaoqing, this remedy had been used on the jealous wife. It had reduced the wife’s emotional disease by half but left her pockmarked.
“You would ruin me?” Ze pushed away the soup. “What about my skin?”
The doctor put a hand on Ren’s arm and spoke loudly enough for Ze to hear. “Just remember that jealousy is one of the seven reasons for divorce.”
If I’d known more, I would have tried to do something. But if I’d known more, maybe I wouldn’t have died myself. So I stayed up in the rafters when the doctor tried to expel the excess fire from Ze’s belly with a less scarring remedy by flushing her bowels with a tonic of wild celery.
Chamber pot after chamber pot was filled and taken away, but Ze didn’t regain her strength.
The diviner arrived next. I stayed out of his way as he brandished a sword wet with blood over Ze’s bed. I covered my ears when he shouted incantations. But no evil spirits haunted Ze, so his efforts produced no results.
Six weeks went by. Ze worsened. When she woke in the morning, she threw up. When she moved her head during the day, she threw up. When her mother-in-law came with clear soups, Ze turned her face away and threw up.
Madame Wu called for the doctor and the diviner to come together.
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“We’ve had a lot of bother in our household over my daughter-in-law,”
she said cryptically. “But perhaps what is happening is only natural. Maybe you should check her again and this time consider that she is a wife and my son is a husband.”
The doctor looked at Ze’s tongue. He peered into her eyes. He listened yet again to the various pulses in her wrist. The diviner moved a limp orchid from one table to another. He consulted Ze’s and Ren’s horoscopes.
He wrote a question on a piece of paper, burned it in a censer so the words would travel to Heaven, and consulted the ashes to receive his answer.
Then the two men bent their heads together to confer and refine their diagnosis.
“Mother is very wise,” Doctor Zhao declared at last. “Women are always the first to recognize the symptoms. Your daughter-in-law has the best type of lovesickness: She’s pregnant.”
After so many weeks of this and that diagnosis I didn’t believe it, but I was intrigued. Could it be true? Despite the presence of the others in the room, I dropped onto Ze’s bed. I sat astride her and peered into her belly.
I saw the tiny speck of life, a soul waiting to be reborn. I should have spotted it earlier, but I was young and unknowing about these things. It was a son.
“It’s not mine!” Ze shrieked. “Get it out!”
Doctor Zhao and the diviner laughed good-naturedly.
“We hear this often from young wives,” Doctor Zhao said. “Madame Wu, please show her the confidential women’s book again and explain what has happened. Mistress Ze, rest, avoid gossip, and eat the proper foods. Stay away from water chestnuts, musk deer, lamb, and rabbit meat.”