Your sisters will do physical labor their entire lives. I can only guess at the pain in their hearts, but I can do nothing for them.”
She bowed her head. Tears of shame dripped from her eyes and stained her plain cotton skirt. I couldn’t swallow any more sorrow. I slunk out of the house and away from the farm, embarrassed for my weakness and afraid of the harm I might do this family even unwittingly, when they were so miserable already.
Exile . . .
I sat down by the side of the road. Where could I go? For the first time in years I thought of my old servant, Willow, but there was no way for me to find her. Even if I could, what could she do for me? I had thought her a friend, but in our last conversation together I’d seen that she’d never felt the same about me. I hadn’t had a single friend in life, and in death I’d hoped to be included in the circle of lovesick maidens. I’d tried to be a good sister-wife to Ze, and I’d failed there. My coming here was a mistake too. I was not part of the Qians nor were they a part of me. Maybe I’d been in exile my whole life . . . and death.
I had to find somewhere to live where I’d be assured I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I returned to Hangzhou. For several days, I scouted along the lakeshore, but too many other spirits already inhabited the caves or had found comfort behind rocks or nestled in the roots of trees. I wandered aimlessly. When I came to the Xiling Bridge, I crossed over it and onto Solitary Island, where Xiaoqing had been banished long ago to keep her safe from a jealous wife. It was quiet and remote, a perfect place for me to languish in my sorrow and regret. I searched until I found Xiaoqing’s tomb, hidden between the lake and the small pond where she’d contemplated her frail reflection. I curled in the tomb’s doorway, listened to the orioles sing to one another in the canopy of trees above me, and brooded about what I’d done to an innocent wife.
ove r th e ne xt two years, however, I was rarely alone. Almost daily, women and girls left their chambers and came to Xiaoqing’s tomb to con-secrate the spot with wine, read poems, and talk about love, sadness, and regret. It seemed I was just one of hundreds of women and young girls who suffered for love, who thought about love, who desired love. They weren’t as deeply affected as the lovesick maidens—like Xiaoqing or me—
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who’d died from too much qing, but they longed to be. They each wanted the love of a man or fretted about the love of a man.
Then one day the members of the Banana Garden Five came to the tomb to pay their respects. By every measure, they were famous. These five women liked to gather together, go on excursions, and write poetry.
They didn’t burn their manuscripts out of self-doubt or humility. They were published—not by their families as mementos but by commercial publishers who sold their works throughout the country.
For the first time in two years, curiosity drove me from the security of Xiaoqing’s tomb. I followed the women as they strolled Solitary Island’s tree-lined pathways, visited the temples, and sat together in a pavilion to sip tea and eat sunflower seeds. When they boarded their pleasure boat, I joined them, sitting on the deck as it sliced through the water. They laughed and drank wine. They engaged in games, challenging one another to compose poems under the open sky in broad daylight. When their outing was over and they went back to their homes, I stayed with the boat.
The next time they gathered to meet on the lake, I was there, cheating my punishment, ready to go anywhere they wanted.
As a living girl, I’d longed to travel and go on excursions. When I first died, I’d roamed blindly. Now I spent lazy days sitting on the edge of the pleasure boat, listening and learning as we drifted past villas, inns, restaurants, and singsong houses. It seemed the whole world came to my home city. I heard different dialects and saw all manner of people: merchants who paraded their wealth; artists who were immediately recognizable by their brushes, inks, and rolls of silk and paper; and farmers, butchers, and fishermen who came to sell their wares. Everyone wanted either to sell or to buy something: Courtesans with tiny feet and lilting voices sold their private parts to visiting shipbuilders, professional women artists sold their paintings and poems to discriminating collectors, women archers sold their skills as entertainment to salt purveyors, and artisans sold scissors and umbrellas to the wives and daughters of fine families who’d come to my beautiful town for leisure, amusement, and, most of all, fun. West Lake was where legend, myths, and everyday life met, where the natural beauty and quiet of bamboo groves and towering camphor trees smacked up against noisy civilization, where men from the outer realm and women released from the inner realm conversed without a gate, a wall, a screen, or a veil to separate them.
On warm days, many pleasure boats—brightly painted with embroi-
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dered tents on their decks—plied the waters. I saw women lavishly dressed in silk gauze gowns with long trains, gold and jade earrings, and kingfisher-feather headdresses. They stared at us. The women on my boat were not of low repute, new money, or too much money. They were from the gentry, like my mother and aunts. They were great ladies, who shared paper, brushes, and ink. They were modest in what they wore and how they dressed their hair. They inhaled and exhaled words, which floated on the air like willow floss.
The philosophers tell us to detach from the worldly. I couldn’t fix all the wrongs I had done, but the Banana Garden Five helped me to understand that all the longing I felt and all the suffering I’d experienced had ultimately released me from everything material and mundane. But while I was relieved of my burdens, a kind of desperation tinged the Banana Garden Five’s activities. The Manchus had disbanded most men’s poetry clubs, but they hadn’t found the women’s groups yet.
“We’ve got to keep meeting,” Gu Yurei, niece of the brilliant Gu Ruopu, said urgently one day as she poured tea for the others.
“We remain loyalists, but to the Manchus we’re insignificant,” Lin Yining responded, unconcerned. “We’re only women. We can’t bring down the government.”
“But, Sister, we are a worry,” Gu Yurei insisted. “My aunt used to say that the freedom of women writers had more to do with the freedom of their thoughts than the physical location of their bodies.”
“And she inspired all of us,” Lin Yining agreed, gesturing to the others around her, who were unlike the women in my family—who followed the lead dog with smiling faces because they had to—and unlike the lovesick maidens, who’d been brought together by obsession followed by early death. The members of the Banana Garden Five had come together by choice. They didn’t write about butterflies and flowers—those things they could see in their gardens. They wrote about literature, art, politics, and what they saw and did on the outside. Through their written words, they encouraged their husbands and sons to persevere under the new regime.
They bravely explored deep emotions, even when they were grim: the loneliness of a fisherman on a lake, the melancholy of a mother separated from her daughter, the despair of a girl living on the street. They had formed a sisterhood of friendship and writing, and then they built an intellectual and emotional community of women throughout the country through reading. In looking for solace, dignity, and recognition, they ( 2 0 6 )
brought their quest to other women who still lived behind locked gates or were being pushed back inside by the Manchus.
“Why should having children and tending to our homes keep us from thinking about public affairs and the future of our country?” Lin Yining continued. “Marrying and having sons are not a woman’s only way to have dignity.”
“You say this because you wish you were a man,” Gu Yurei teased.
“I was educated by my mother, so how could I wish this?” Yining countered, her fingers trailing in the water, sending quiet ripples across the lake. “And I’m a wife and mother myself. But if I’d been a man, I would have greater success.”