“I don’t know that this color is good for your skin,” Lotus, Third Aunt’s eldest daughter, added sweetly. “I’m sure this is a sorry thing for our jade maiden to hear.”
I kept a smile on my face, but their words hurt. My father always said I was a jade maiden and my future husband was a golden boy, which implied that the families were of comparable wealth and status. I shouldn’t have, but I found myself wondering about the young man I’d met last night and if my father would have found him satisfactory.
“But then,” Lotus went on sympathetically, “I hear the golden boy is a bit tarnished. Is this not so, Peony?”
Whenever she said things like this, I fought back, and I had to do it now or appear weak. I pushed my stranger from my mind.
“If my husband had been born in a different time, he would have become an imperial scholar like his father, but this is not a good course to sail these days. Still, Baba says Ren was precocious from the time he was a boy,” I boasted, trying to sound convincing. “He will make a wonderful husband.”
“Our cousin should hope for a strong husband,” Broom confided to Lotus. “Her father-in-law is dead and the Wu boy is only a second son, so her mother-in-law will have great power over her.”
( 2 1 )
This was too mean.
“My husband’s father died in the Cataclysm,” I objected. “My mother-in-law has been an honorable widow.”
I waited for what the girls would say next, since they seemed very informed. With the Wu patriarch dead, had the family fallen on hard times?
My father had provided a sizable dowry for me that included fields, silk-weaving enterprises, stock animals, and more than the usual amount of cash, silk, and food, but a marriage where the wife had too much money was never happy. Too often the husbands became henpecked and the subject of much banter, while the wives were known for their cruel ways, biting tongues, and heartless jealousy. Was this the future my father intended for me? Why couldn’t I fall in love like Liniang?
“Just don’t go braying to the heavens about your perfect match,”
Broom concluded smugly, “when the whole compound knows otherwise.”
I sighed. “Please, have another dumpling,” I said, pushing the platter toward her.
Broom sneaked a peek toward the mothers’ table and then with her chopsticks lifted a dumpling and popped it whole into her mouth. My other two cousins stared at me with evil in their eyes, but I couldn’t do much about it. They embroidered together, ate lunch together, and talked behind my back together. But I had little ways of fighting back, even if they were petty. I was known to do wicked things, like show off my pretty clothes, hairpins, and jewelry. I was immature, but I only acted mischievously to protect myself and my feelings. I didn’t understand that my cousins and I were trapped like good-luck crickets in bamboo-and-lacquer cages.
I spent the rest of breakfast in silence, with the others ignoring me with all the conviction that only unmarried girls can muster and with me believing I was immune to their wicked thoughts. But of course I wasn’t, and I was suddenly overcome by my inadequacies. In some ways I was even more of a disappointment than Broom. I was born in the seventh month four years after the Cataclysm, when all four weeks are set aside for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts—not a propitious time. I was a girl, a calamity for any family but particularly for one like ours, which had sustained great losses during the Cataclysm. As the eldest brother, my father was expected to have a son who one day would become the head of our family, perform rites in the ancestral hall, and make offerings to our long-dead relatives so they would continue to bring us good luck and fortune; ( 2 2 )
instead, he was burdened by a single useless daughter. Maybe my cousins were right and he’d matched me to someone insignificant as punishment.
I looked across the table and saw Broom whisper in Lotus’s ear. They glanced at me and then covered their mouths to hide their smirks. Instantly my doubts evaporated, and I inwardly thanked my cousins. I had a secret so big they would fly apart from jealousy and envy if they knew.
After breakfast, we moved to the Lotus-Blooming Hall, where my mother announced a zither contest for the unmarried girls. When my turn came, I sat on the raised dais in front of the group just as the others had done, but I was a terrible zither player and I kept losing my fingers on the strings as I thought of the young man I’d met last night. As soon as I finished, my mother dismissed me, suggesting I take a stroll in the garden.
Released from the women’s chambers! I hurried along the corridor to my father’s library. Baba was the Chen family’s ninth generation of imperial scholars of the jinshi level, the highest attainable. He had been a Vice Commissioner of Silk during Ming times, but with the chaos—and disenchanted with the thought of serving the new emperor—he’d come home.
He’d taken up gentlemanly pursuits: writing poetry, playing chess, tasting tea, burning incense, and now producing and directing operas. In many ways, he—like so many men these days—had adopted our women’s phi-losophy of turning inward. Nothing made him happier than to unroll a scroll while being enveloped in a cloud of incense or sip tea while playing a game of chess with his favorite concubine.
Baba was still a Ming loyalist, yet he was bound by the rules of humanity; he refused to work in the new government, but he still had to shave his forehead and wear a queue to show his subservience to the Qing emperor.
He explained his capitulation this way: “Men are not like women. We go into the outer realm where we are seen. I had to do as the Manchus ordered or risk decapitation. If I had died, how would our family, our home, our land, and all the people who work for us have survived? We’ve suffered so much already.”
I stepped into my father’s library. A servant stood by the door, ready to attend to Baba’s needs. On the walls to my left and right were marble
“paintings”—slices of marble that revealed hidden landscapes of cloud-covered mountains against a murky sky. The room, even with the windows open, was redolent of the four jewels of the scholar’s study: paper, ink, brushes, and the earthiness of the inkstone. Nine generations of scholars had built this library, and printed books were everywhere—on the desk, the floor, the shelves. My father had added his mark to the col-
( 2 3 )
lection by amassing hundreds of works written by women during the Ming dynasty and well over a thousand books written by women since the Cataclysm. He said that these days men had to find talent in unusual places.
This morning Baba was not at his desk. Instead, he lounged on a wooden bed with a rattan bottom, watching mist rise off the lake. Beneath the bed I saw twin trays, each with large blocks of ice on them. He indulged his sensitivity to heat by having our servants dig up preserved ice from underground and use it to cool his daybed. On the wall above him hung a couplet, which read:
Do not care about fame. Be modest.
In this way you will be found by others to be special.
“Peony,” he said, and waved me over to him. “Come and sit.”
I crossed the room, swinging close to the windows so I could look out over the lake to Solitary Island and beyond. I wasn’t supposed to see outside our walls, but today my father wordlessly permitted me this treat. I sat down in one of the chairs that had been placed before his desk for those who came to ask favors.
“Have you come to escape your teacher again today?” he asked.
Over the years, my family had provided me with wonderful teachers—
all women—but from the time I was four, my father had let me sit in his lap so he could personally teach me to read, understand, and criticize. He taught me that life imitates art. Through reading, he told me, I could enter worlds different from my own. In picking up the brush to write, I could exercise my intellect and imagination. I considered him my best teacher.