“I have no lessons today,” I reminded him shyly.
Had he forgotten my birthday was tomorrow? Usually birthdays were not celebrated until someone reached the age of fifty, but hadn’t he mounted the opera for me because he loved me and I was precious to him?
He smiled indulgently. “Of course, of course.” Then he turned serious. “Too much female gossip in the women’s chambers?”
I shook my head.
“Then you have come to tell me that you won one of those contests your mother has organized.”
“Oh, Ba.” I sighed in resignation. He knew I didn’t excel at those things.
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“You are so old now I can’t even tease you anymore.” He slapped his thigh and laughed. “Sixteen tomorrow. Have you failed to remember this special day?”
I smiled back at him. “You’ve given me the best present.”
He cocked his head in question. He had to be teasing me again and I played along.
“I suppose you staged the opera for someone else,” I suggested.
Baba had encouraged my impertinence over the years, but today he didn’t respond with something swift and clever. Instead, he said, “Yes, yes, yes, ” as if with each word he considered his answer anew. “Of course. That was it.”
He pulled himself up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. After he stood, he took a moment to adjust his clothes, which were modeled on Manchu riding gear—trousers and a fitted tunic that buttoned at the neck.
“But I have another present for you. One I think you’ll like even more.”
He went to a camphor-wood chest, opened it, and pulled out something wrapped in purple silk woven in a pattern of willows. When he handed it to me, I knew it was a book. I hoped it was the volume of The Peony Pavilion that the great author Tang Xianzu had published himself. I slowly untied and then unfolded the silk. It was an edition of The Peony Pavilion I did not yet have, but not the one I wished for. Still, I clutched it to my chest, relishing how special it was. Without my father’s help, I would not have been able to pursue my passion, no matter how resource-ful I was.
“Ba, you’re too good to me.”
“Open it,” he urged.
I loved books. I loved the weight of them in my hands. I loved the smell of the ink and the feel of the rice paper.
“Don’t fold over the edges of the page to mark your place,” my father reminded me. “Don’t scratch at the written characters with your fingernails. Don’t wet your finger with your tongue before turning the pages.
And never use a book as a pillow.”
How many times had he warned me of these things?
“I won’t, Baba,” I promised.
My eyes rested on the narrator’s opening lines. Last night I had heard the actor who played him speak of how three incarnations had led Liniang and Mengmei to the Peony Pavilion.
I took the volume to my father, pointed to the passage, and asked,
“Baba, where does this come from? Was it something Tang Xianzu in-
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vented or is it one of the things he borrowed from another poem or story?”
My father smiled, pleased as usual with my curiosity. “Look on the third shelf on that wall. Find the oldest book and you’ll get your answer.”
I put my new copy of The Peony Pavilion on the daybed and did as my father suggested. I took the book back to the bed and leafed through the pages until I found the original source for the three incarnations. It seemed that in the Tang dynasty a girl loved a monk. It took three separate lifetimes for them to attain perfect circumstances and perfect love. I pondered that. Could love be strong enough to outlast death not once but three times?
I picked up The Peony Pavilion again and slowly turned the pages. I wanted to find Mengmei and relive meeting my stranger last night. I came to Mengmei’s entrance:
I have inherited fragrance of classic books. Drilling the wall for light, hair tied to a beam in fear of drowsing, I wrest from nature excellence in letters. . . .
“What are you reading now?” Baba asked.
Caught! Blood rushed to my cheeks.
“I . . . I . . .”
“There are things in the story a girl like you might not understand. You could discuss them with your mother—”
I blushed an even deeper red. “It’s nothing like that,” I stammered, and then I read him the lines, which on their own seemed perfectly innocent.
“Ah, so you want to know the source for this too.” When I nodded, he got up, went to one of the shelves, pulled down a book, and brought it to the bed. “This records the deeds of famous scholars. Do you want me to help you?”
“I can do it, Baba.”
“I know you can,” he said, and handed me the volume.
Aware of my father’s eyes watching me, I leafed through the book until I came to an entry about Kuang Heng, a scholar so poor he couldn’t afford oil for his lamp. He drilled a hole in the wall so he might borrow his neighbor’s light.
“In a few more pages”—Baba urged me on—“you’ll find the reference to Sun Jing, who tied his hair to a beam, so fearful was he of falling asleep at his studies.”
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I nodded soberly, wondering if the young man I’d met was as diligent as those men of antiquity.
“If you’d been a son,” Baba went on, “you would have made an excellent imperial scholar, perhaps the best our family has ever seen.”
He meant it as a compliment and I took it that way, but I heard regret in his voice too. I was not a son and never would be.
“If you’re going to be here,” he added hurriedly, perhaps aware of his lapse, “then you should help me.”
We went back to his desk and sat down. He carefully arranged his clothes around him and then adjusted his queue so that it hung straight down his back. He ran his fingers over his shaved forehead—a habit, like wearing Manchu styles, that reminded him of his choice to protect our family—and then he opened a drawer and pulled out several strings of silver cash pieces.
He pushed a string across the desk and said, “I need to send funds to the countryside. Help me count them out.”
We owned thousands of mou planted with mulberry trees. In the Gudang area, not far from here, whole villages relied on our family for their livelihood. Baba cared for the people who raised the trees, harvested the leaves, fed and nurtured the silkworms, pulled the floss from the cocoons, spun thread, and, of course, made cloth. He told me what was required for each enterprise, and I began putting together the proper amounts.
“You don’t seem like yourself today,” my father said. “What troubles you?”
I couldn’t tell him about the young man I’d met or that I was worrying about whether or not I should meet him again in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion, but if Baba could help me understand my grandmother and the choices she’d made, then maybe I’d know what to do tonight.
“I’ve been thinking about Grandmother Chen. Was she so very brave?
Did she have any moments when she was unsure?”
“We’ve studied this history—”
“The history, yes, but not about Grandmother. What was she like?”
My father knew me very well, and unlike most daughters I knew him very well too. Over the years I’d learned to recognize certain expressions: the way he raised his eyebrows in surprise when I asked about this or that woman poet, the grimace he made when he quizzed me on history and I answered incorrectly, the thoughtful way he pulled on his chin when I asked him a question about The Peony Pavilion for which he ( 2 7 )