“The pheasant squawks and the sound carries far,” she began. The women in the room turned to her upon hearing the familiar opening for this traditional type of communication. Then Snow Flower began to sing in that same ta dum, ta dum, ta dum rhythm I had been hearing for months. “For five days I burned incense and prayed to find the courage to come here. For three days I boiled fragrant water to cleanse my skin and my clothing so I would be presentable to my old friends. I have put my soul into my song. As a girl, I was prized as a daughter, but everyone here knows how hard my life has been. I lost my natal home. I lost my natal family. The women in my family have been unlucky for two generations. My husband is not kind. My mother-in-law is cruel. I have been pregnant seven times, but only three babies breathed the air of this world. Now only a son and a daughter live. It seems I am cursed by fate. I must have done bad deeds in a former life. I am seen as less than others.”
The bride’s sworn sisters wept in sympathy as they were supposed to. Their mothers listened attentively—oohing and aahing over the sad parts, shaking their heads at the inevitability of a woman’s fate, and admiring the way that Snow Flower drew upon our language of misery.
“I had but one happiness in my life, my laotong,” Snow Flower went on—ta dum, ta dum, ta dum. “In our contract we wrote there would never be a harsh word between us, and for twenty-seven years this was so. We always spoke true words. We were like long vines, reaching out to each other, forever entwined. But when I told her of my sadness, she had no patience. When she saw how poor I was in spirit, she reminded me that men farm and women weave, that industriousness brings no hunger, believing I could change my destiny. But how can there be a world without the poor and ill-fated?”
I watched the women in the room cry for her. I was beyond stunned.
“Why have you turned away from me?” she sang out, her voice high and beautiful. “You and I are laotong—together in our souls even when we couldn’t be together in our daily lives.” Abruptly she brought in a new subject. “And why have you hurt my daughter? Spring Moon is too young to understand why, and you will not say. I did not expect you to have a malicious heart. I beg you to remember that once our good feeling was as deep as the sea. Do not make a third generation of women suffer.”
At this last bit, the air in the room changed as the others took in this final injustice. Life was hard enough for girls without my making it harder for someone far weaker than myself.
I drew myself up. I was Lady Lu, the woman with the greatest respect in the county, and I should have risen above this. Instead, I listened to that inner music that had been pounding in my head and heart for months now.
“The pheasant squawks and the sound carries far,” I said, as a Letter of Vituperation began to form in my mind. I still wanted to be reasonable, so I addressed Snow Flower’s last and most unfair accusation first. I looked from woman to woman as I sang. “Our two girls cannot be laotong. They are not the same in any way. Your old neighbor wants something for her daughter, but I won’t break the taboo. In saying no, I have done what any mother would do.”
Then, “All the women in this room know hardship. As girls, we are raised as useless branches. We may love our families, but we are not with them for long. We marry out into villages we do not know, into families we do not know, to men we do not know. We work endlessly, and if we complain we lose what little respect our in-laws have for us. We bear children; sometimes they die, sometimes we die. When our husbands tire of us, they take in concubines. We have all faced adversity—crops that don’t come in, winters that are too cold, planting seasons with no rain. None of this is so special, but this woman seeks special attention for her woes.”
I turned to Snow Flower. Tears stung my eyes as I sang to her, and I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. “You and I were matched as a pair of mandarin ducks. I always remained true, but you’ve shunned me to embrace sworn sisters. A girl sends a fan to one girl, not writing new ones to many. A good horse does not have two saddles; a good woman is not unfaithful to her laotong. Perhaps your perfidy is why your husband, your mother-in-law, your children, and, yes, the betrayed old same before you, do not cherish you as they might. You shame us all with your girlish fancies. If my husband came home today with a concubine, I would be thrown from my bed, neglected, dismissed from his attentions. I—as all the women here—would have to accept it. But . . . from . . . you . . .”
My throat closed in on itself and the tears I’d been holding back escaped from my eyes. For a moment I thought I couldn’t go on. I shifted away from my own pain and tried to bring this back to something all the women in the room would understand. “We might expect this loss of affection from our husbands—they have a right, and we are only women—but to endure this from another woman, who by her very sex has experienced much cruelty just by living, is merciless.”
I went on, reminding my neighbors of my status, of my husband who had brought salt to the village, and of the way he had made sure that all of the people of Tongkou were transported to safety during the rebellion.
“My doorstep is clean,” I declared, then turned to Snow Flower. “But what about yours?”
At that moment, an untapped spring of anger came bubbling to the surface, and not one woman in that room stopped me from expressing it. The words I used came from such a dark and bitter place that I felt as though I’d been sliced open with a knife. I knew everything about Snow Flower, and I proceeded to use it against her under the guise of social correctness and the strength of my being Lady Lu. I humiliated her in front of the other women, revealing every weakness. I held nothing back, because I had lost all control. Unbidden, a long-ago memory came to me of my younger sister’s leg flailing and her loose bindings twirling around her. With each invective I threw out, I felt as though my bindings had come loose and I was finally free to say what I really thought. It took me many years to realize that my perceptions at this time were completely wrong. The bindings weren’t flying through the air and slapping at my laotong. Rather, they were whirling tighter and tighter around me, trying to squeeze away the deep-heart love I’d longed for my entire life.
“This woman who was your neighbor took with her a dowry that was made from her mother’s dowry, so that when that poor woman went out onto the street she had no quilts or clothes to keep her warm,” I proclaimed. “This woman who was your neighbor does not keep a clean house. Her husband carries on a polluted business, killing pigs on a platform outside her front door. This woman who was your neighbor had many talents, but she squandered them, refusing to teach the women in her husband’s household our secret language. This woman who was your neighbor lied about her circumstances as a girl in her daughter days, lied as a young woman in her hair-pinning days, and continues to lie as a wife and mother in her rice-and-salt days. She has lied not only to all of you but to her laotong as well.”
I paused, gauging the women’s faces around me. “How does she spend her time? I’ll tell you how! Her lust! Animals go into heat seasonally, but this woman is always in heat. Her rutting causes the whole household to go silent. When we were in the mountains running from the rebels”—I rocked forward and the others leaned toward me—”she did bed business with her husband rather than be with me—her laotong. She says she must have done bad deeds in a former life, but I, as Lady Lu, tell you that her bad deeds in this life made her fate.”