Madame Wang and Madame Gao always fought over territory. As the go-between for people in Puwei, Madame Gao had negotiated a good marriage for Elder Sister and had found a suitable girl from another village for Elder Brother. She had expected to do the same for Beautiful Moon and me. But Madame Wang—with her ideas about my fate—had changed not only my course and that of Beautiful Moon but Madame Gao’s as well. Those moneys would no longer go into her purse. As they say, a miserly woman always nurses revenge.
Madame Gao traveled to Tongkou to suggest her services to Snow Flower’s family. It didn’t take long before word of this reached Madame Wang. While the disagreement had nothing to do with us, the confrontation took place in our house when Madame Wang came to pick up Snow Flower and found Madame Gao eating pumpkin seeds and discussing the logistics of Elder Sister’s Delivering the Date ceremony in the main room with Baba. Nothing was said in front of him. Neither woman was that unrefined. Madame Gao could have avoided the quarrel altogether if she’d simply left when her business was done. Instead, she walked upstairs, plopped down on a chair, and began bragging about her matchmaking expertise. She was like a finger poking at a boil. Finally, Madame Wang couldn’t take any more.
“Only a she-dog in heat would be demented enough to come to my village and try to steal one of my little nieces,” Madame Wang snapped.
“Tongkou is not your village, Old Auntie,” Madame Gao answered smoothly. “If it is your village to master, why do you come sniffing around Puwei? By your reckoning, Lily and Beautiful Moon should be mine. But do I cry waa-waa like a baby over this?”
“I’ll make fine matches for those girls. I will for Snow Flower too. You couldn’t do better.”
“Don’t be so sure. You did not do so well for her elder sister. I’m better suited, given Snow Flower’s circumstances.”
Did I mention that Snow Flower was in the room hearing these words, being talked about as if she and her sister were bags of inferior rice being haggled over by unscrupulous merchants? She had been standing by Madame Wang, waiting to go home. In her hands she held a piece of cloth she had embroidered. She twisted it in her fingers, stretching the threads. She didn’t look up, but I could see that her face and ears had turned bright red. At this point, the argument could have escalated. Instead, Madame Wang reached out a veined hand and placed it gently on the small of Snow Flower’s back. Until that time I hadn’t known that Madame Wang was capable of either pity or backing down.
“I do not speak to gutter women,” she rasped. “Come, Snow Flower. We have a long journey home.”
We would have put this episode from our minds, except that those two matchmakers were at each other’s throats from then on. When Madame Gao heard that Madame Wang’s palanquin had arrived in Puwei, she’d dress in her overly bright clothes, rouge her cheeks, and come nosing around our house like a—well, like a she-dog in heat.
BY THE TIME Snow Flower and I turned eleven, our feet had completely healed. Mine were strong and noticeably perfect at just seven centimeters long. Snow Flower’s feet were slightly larger, while Beautiful Moon’s feet were larger still but exquisitely shaped. This, along with Beautiful Moon’s good house learning, had made her very marriageable. With our footbinding behind us, Madame Wang negotiated the Contracting a Kin phase for all three of our marriages. Our eight characters were matched with our future husbands’ and engagement dates selected.
Just as Madame Wang predicted, the perfection of my golden lilies led me to a fortuitous betrothal. She arranged for me to be married into the best Lu family in Tongkou. My husband’s uncle was a jinshi scholar, who had received much land from the emperor as an enfeoffment. Uncle Lu, as he was called, was childless. He lived in the capital and relied on his brother to oversee his holdings. Since my father-in-law served as headman of the village—renting tracts to farmers and collecting rents—everyone assumed my husband would become the future headman. Beautiful Moon was going to marry into a lesser Lu family nearby. Her betrothed was the son of a farmer who worked four times as many mou as Baba and Uncle. To us, this seemed prosperous, but it was still far, far less than what my future father-in-law controlled on his brother’s behalf.
“Beautiful Moon, Lily,” Madame Wang said, “you two are as close as sisters. Now you will be like my sister and me. We both married into Tongkou. Though we have both suffered misfortune, we are lucky to have spent our whole lives together.” And truly, Beautiful Moon and I were grateful that we would continue to share everything, from our rice-and-salt days as wives and mothers to sitting quietly as widows.
Snow Flower had to marry out of Tongkou, but she would be close by in Jintian—Open Field Village. Madame Wang guaranteed that Beautiful Moon and I would be able to see Jintian and possibly even Snow Flower’s window from our new lattice windows. We didn’t hear much about the family Snow Flower was marrying into, except that her betrothed was born in the year of the rooster. This concerned us, because everyone knows this is not an ideal match, since the rooster wants to sit on the horse’s back.
“Don’t worry, girls,” Madame Wang assured us. “The diviner has studied the elements of water, fire, metal, earth, and wood. I promise this is not a case where water and fire will have to live together. Everything will be fine,” she said, and we believed her.
Our grooms’ families delivered the first gifts of money, candy, and meat. Aunt and Uncle received a leg of pork, while Mama and Baba received an entire roasted pig, which was cut up and sent to our relatives in Puwei as gifts. Our parents reciprocated with gifts to the grooms’ families of eggs and rice to symbolize our fertility. Then we waited for the second stage to begin, when our future in-laws would Deliver the Date for our weddings.
Imagine how happy we were. Our futures were settled. Our new families were higher than our own. We were still young enough to believe that our kind hearts would win over any difficulties with our mothers-in-law. We were busy with our handiwork. But most of all we were glad to be in each other’s company.
Aunt continued to teach us nu shu, but we also learned from Snow Flower, who brought new characters with her every time she visited. Some she got from sneaking peeks at her brother’s studies, since many nu shu characters are only italicized versions of men’s characters, but others came from Snow Flower’s mother, who was extremely well versed in our women’s secret writing. We spent hours practicing them, tracing the strokes with our fingers on each other’s palms. Always Aunt cautioned us to be careful with our words, since by using phonetic characters, as opposed to the pictographic characters of men’s writing, our meanings could become lost or confused.
“Every word must be placed in context,” she reminded us each day at the end of our lesson. “Much tragedy could result from a wrong reading.” With that admonition expressed, Aunt then rewarded us with the romantic story of the local woman who invented our secret writing.