I was at a moment of supreme confusion, and I believe it set the stage for what happened later. I didn’t know my mind. I didn’t see or understand what was important. I was just a stupid girl who thought she knew something because she was married. I didn’t know how to resolve any of these things, so I buried them deep, deep, deep inside of me. But my feelings didn’t—couldn’t—disappear. It was as though I’d swallowed the meat of a diseased pig and it slowly began to spoil my insides.
I HAD NOT yet become the Lady Lu who is respected today for her graciousness, compassion, and strength. Still, from the moment I walked into Snow Flower’s house, I felt something new inside me. Think again of that diseased piece of pork, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. I had to pretend I wasn’t sick or infected, so I used my will to good purpose. I wanted to bring honor to my husband’s family by being charitable and kind to people in the lowest of circumstances. Of course, I did not know how to do that, because these things were not natural to me.
Snow Flower was getting married in a month, so I helped her and her mother clean the house. I wanted it to be presentable to the groom’s party, but no one could deal with the foul odors that permeated the rooms. The sick sweetness came from the opium that Snow Flower’s father smoked. And the other rankness, as you have probably guessed, came from his impacted bowels. No incense, no burning of vinegar, no opening of windows even in those cool months could disguise the filthiness of that man and his habits.
I saw the routine of that household, in which two women lived in fear of the man who resided in a room on the ground floor. I experienced their hushed voices and the way they cowered reflexively when he called for them. And I saw the man himself, lying there in his stink and mess. Even in poverty, he was as petulant and quick to anger as a spoiled child. There may have been a time when he’d lashed out physically at his wife and daughter, but now he was just a drug-dazed creature who was better left alone with his vice.
I tried not to let my emotions show. Enough tears had poured in that house without mine being added. I asked to see Snow Flower’s bride-price gifts. In my mind I thought: Maybe this butcher family won’t be so bad after all. I had seen the silk pieces Snow Flower worked on. These people must be relatively prosperous, even if they were spiritually polluted.
Snow Flower opened a wooden chest and carefully laid out everything she had made on the bed. I saw the sky-blue silk shoes with the cloud pattern she had finished the day Beautiful Moon died. I saw a jacket that used some of that same silk on the front panel; then, in a neat row, Snow Flower propped five pairs of shoes of different sizes in the same fabric but embroidered with additional designs. This all looked familiar to me, and suddenly I understood why. These things had been fashioned from the jacket Snow Flower had worn on the first day we met.
My hands traveled over other items in her dowry. Here was the lavender-and-white material that had made up Snow Flower’s traveling outfit when she was nine, now recut and reshaped into vests and shoes. Here was my favorite indigo-and-white cotton weaving that had been slit into panels and strips to be incorporated into jackets, headdresses, belts, and decorations on quilts. Snow Flower’s actual bride-price gifts were minimal, but she’d taken pieces from her own clothes to create a unique dowry.
“You will make a remarkable wife,” I said, truly awed by what she had accomplished.
For the first time, Snow Flower laughed. I had always loved that sound, so high, so alluring. I joined in, because all of this was . . . beyond—beyond anything I could have imagined, beyond what was fair or right in the universe. Snow Flower’s situation and what she’d done with it was horrible and tragic and funny and amazing all at the same time.
“Your things—”
“Not even mine to begin with,” Snow Flower answered, as she gulped for air. “My mother recut her dowry clothes to make my outfits when I visited you. Now they are recut again for my husband and my in-laws.”
Of course! This had to be the case, because now I could remember thinking that a certain pattern seemed too sophisticated for a girl so young, or cutting loose threads from a cuff when Snow Flower wasn’t looking. I was stupider than a chicken in a rainstorm. Blood rushed to my face. I clasped my hands over my cheeks and laughed even harder.
“Do you think my mother-in-law will notice?” Snow Flower asked.
“If I was too blind to notice, then . . .” but I couldn’t finish because it was all too funny.
Perhaps it is a joke that only girls and women can understand. We are seen as completely useless. Even if our natal families love us, we are a burden to them. We marry into new families, go to our husbands sight unseen, do bed business with them as total strangers, and submit to the demands of our mothers-in-law. If we are lucky, we have sons and secure our positions in our husbands’ homes. If not, we are faced with the scorn of our mothers-in-law, the ridicule of our husbands’ concubines, and the disappointed faces of our daughters. We use a woman’s wiles—of which at seventeen we girls know almost nothing—but beyond this there is little we can do to change our fate. We live at the whim and pleasure of others, which is why what Snow Flower and her mother had done was so beyond. They had taken cloth that had once been sent from Snow Flower’s family to Snow Flower’s mother as a bride-price gift, been shaped into the dowry of a fine maiden, been reshaped again into clothes for a beautiful daughter, and now restructured another time to announce the qualities of a young woman marrying into the house of a polluted butcher. All of it was women’s work—the very work that men think is merely decorative—and it was being used to change the lives of the women themselves.
But so much more was needed. Snow Flower had to go to her new home with enough clothes to wear her entire lifetime. Right now, she had very little. My mind raced with things we could do in the month we had left.
When Madame Wang arrived for Snow Flower’s Sitting and Singing in the Upstairs Chamber, I took her aside and begged her to go to my natal home. “There are things I need. . . .”
That woman had been critical of me for so long. She had also lied—not to my family but to me. I had never cared for her and now I liked her even less for her duplicity, but she did exactly as she was told. (I now outranked her, after all.) She returned from my home several hours later with a basket of my wedding dumplings, some of the sliced pork my in-laws had sent, fresh vegetables from our garden, and another basket filled with cloth that I had planned to cut when I returned home. To see Snow Flower’s mother eat that meat was something I’ll never forget. She had been raised to be a fine lady and, as hungry as she was, she did not tear into the food as someone in my family might. She used her chopsticks to pull apart slivers of the pork and lift them delicately to her lips. Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.
I was not done with Madame Wang. “We will need girls for Sitting and Singing,” I said. “Can you bring Snow Flower’s elder sister?”