She talked about the days leading up to the Cataclysm and what happened when it arrived, and it all matched what my grandmother had told me. Mama stopped when they reached the girls’ lookout pavilion and she had gathered all the jewels and silver from the other women.
“We’d been so happy to be out,” Mama said, “but we didn’t understand that there is a big difference between choosing to leave our inner chambers and being forced out. We are told many things about how we should behave and what we should do: that we should have sons, that we should sacrifice ourselves for our husbands and sons, that it is better to die than bring shame on our families. I believed all that. I still do.”
She seemed relieved that she was finally able to talk about this, but she still hadn’t revealed what I wanted to know.
“What happened after you left the pavilion?” I asked gently. I took her hand and squeezed it. “No matter what you say or what you did, I’ll love you still. You’re my mama. I’ll always love you.”
She stared out across the lake to where it faded into mist and darkness.
“You were never married,” she said at last, “so you don’t know about clouds and rain. It was beautiful with your father—the building of the clouds, the rain that fell, the way we were together like one spirit, not two.”
I knew more about clouds and rain than I would ever tell my mother, but I didn’t quite understand what she was talking about.
“What the soldiers did to me was not clouds and rain,” she said. “It was brutal, pointless, and unfulfilling even for them. Did you know I was ( 2 1 4 )
pregnant then? You couldn’t know. I never told anyone except your father.
I was in my fifth month. The baby didn’t show beneath my tunic and skirts. Your father and I thought we’d take this one last trip before my confinement. On our last night in Yangzhou we were to tell your grandparents. That never happened.”
“Because the Manchus came.”
“They wanted to destroy everything that was precious to me. When they took your father and grandfather, I knew what my duty was.”
“Duty? What did you owe them?” I asked, remembering my grandmother’s bitterness.
She looked at me in surprise. “I loved them.”
My mind scrambled to shift with hers. She raised her chin in an offhand manner.
“The soldiers took the jewels and then they took me. I was raped many times by many men, but that wasn’t enough for them. They beat me with the sides of their swords until my skin split open. They kicked me in the stomach, taking care not to mar my face.”
As she spoke, the mists gathering on the lake turned to drizzle and finally to rain. Grandmother had to be listening on the Viewing Terrace.
“It felt like a thousand demons driving me toward death, but I swallowed my sorrow and hid my tears. When I began to bleed from inside, they stepped back and watched me crab-crawl away from them into the grass. After that, they left me alone. The agony was so great it overpowered my hatred and fear. When my son spilled out of me, three of the men who’d put their organs inside me came forward. One cut the cord and took away my baby. Another lifted my body during the contractions to expel the placenta. And the last held my hand and murmured in his gruff barbarian dialect. Why didn’t they just kill me? They’d killed so many already, what was one more woman?”
All this had happened on the last night of the Cataclysm, when men suddenly began to remember who they were. The soldiers burned some cotton and human bone together and used the ashes to treat my mother’s wounds. Then they dressed her in a clean gown of raw silk and found cloth in the piles of looted goods to pack between her legs. But they were not so pure of heart.
“I thought they’d remembered their own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. But no, they were thinking of me as a prize.” The locks in Mama’s clothes rattled as she handled them anxiously. “They argued about which of them would take possession of me. One wanted to sell me ( 2 1 5 )
into prostitution. One wanted to keep me in his household as a slave. The last one wanted me for a concubine. ‘She’s not repulsive,’ the man who wanted to sell me said. ‘I’ll pay you twenty ounces of silver if you let me keep her.’ ‘I won’t let her go for less than thirty,’ barked the one who wanted me as a slave. ‘She looks like she was born for singing and dancing, not weaving and spinning,’ the first man reasoned. And it went on that way. I was only nineteen, and after everything that happened and everything that was still to happen this was my darkest moment. How was selling me as the bride of ten thousand men so very different from the general trade in women as wives, concubines, or servants? Was selling me or bartering me any different from dealing in salt? Yes, because as a woman I had even less value than salt.”
The next morning, a high-ranking Manchu general dressed in red with a rapier at his waist arrived with a Manchu woman with big feet, her hair drawn back in a bun and a flower clipped to one temple. The two of them were scouts for a Manchu prince. They took Mama away from the soldiers, back to the compound where she’d been held the night before with her mother-in-law, the concubines, and all the other women who’d been separated from their families.
“After four days of rain and killing,” Mama remembered, “the sun came out and cooked the city. The stench of corpses was staggering, but above us the sky blurred blue into forever. I waited my turn to be examined. All around me, women cried. Why hadn’t we killed ourselves? Because we had no rope, no knives, no cliffs. Then I was brought before that same Manchu woman. She checked my hair, arms, palms, and fingers.
She felt my breasts through my clothes and prodded my swollen belly. She lifted my skirts and looked at my lily feet, which said everything about who I was as a woman. ‘I see where your talent lies,’ she said disdainfully.
‘You will do.’ How could a woman do this to another woman? I was led away yet again and placed alone inside a room.”
Mama thought this might be her chance to kill herself, but she found nothing she could use to cut her throat. She was on the first floor, so she couldn’t throw herself from the window. She didn’t expect to find rope, but she did have her gown. She sat down and tore at her hem. She made several long strips of cloth which she tied together.
“Finally I was ready, but I had one thing I still needed to do. I found a piece of charcoal by the brazier, picked it up and tested it on the wall, and then I started to write.”
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When my mother began to recite what she’d written, I was struck through the heart.
“The trees are bare.
In the distance, the honks of mourning geese.
If only my tears of blood could dye red the blossoms of the plum tree.
But I will never make it to spring. . . .”
I joined in for the last two lines.
“My heart is empty and my life has no value anymore.
Each moment a thousand tears.”
Grandmother had told me my mother was a fine poet. I hadn’t known she was the most famous poet of all—the one who’d left this tragic poem on the wall. I looked at my mother in wonder. Her poem had opened the gateway to the kind of immortality that Xiaoqing, Tang Xianzu, and other great poets had achieved. No wonder Baba had allowed Mama to take my ancestor tablet. She was a woman of great distinction and I would have been lucky—honored—to have her perform the dotting. So many mistakes, so many misunderstandings.
“I didn’t know when I wrote those words that I would live or that other travelers, mostly men, would chance upon them, copy them down, publish them, distribute them,” Mama said. “I never wanted to be recognized for them; I never wanted to be branded a fame-seeker. Oh, Peony, when I heard you recite the poem that day in the Lotus-Blooming Hall, I could hardly breathe. You were my sole small vein of life’s blood—my only child—and I thought you knew, because you and I, as mother and daughter, were so closely tied. I thought you were ashamed of me.”