Snow Flower sat across from me, tears running down her cheeks, but I was so desolate and confused that I could show only my anger.
“We wrote a contract as girls,” I concluded. “You made a promise, which you broke.”
Snow Flower took a deep quivering breath. “You once asked that I always tell you the truth, but when I tell it to you, you misunderstand or you don’t like what you hear. I have found women in my village who do not look down on me. They do not criticize me. They do not expect me to be someone I am not.”
Every word she spoke reinforced everything I had suspected.
“They do not humiliate me in front of others,” Snow Flower went on. “I have embroidered with them, and we console one another when we are troubled. They do not pity me. They visit me when I have not been well. . . . I am lonely and alone. I need women to comfort me every day, not just at the times of your choosing. I need women who can hear me as I am and not how they remember me or wish me to be. I feel like a bird flying alone. I cannot find my mate. . . .”
Her soft words and gentle excuses were just what I was afraid of. I closed my eyes, trying to block my feelings. To protect myself I had to hold on to this grievance as I had with my mother. When I opened my eyes, Snow Flower had lifted herself to her feet and was delicately swaying toward the stairs. When Madame Wang did not follow her, I felt a pang of sympathy. Even her own aunt, the only one among us who made a living and survived on her wits, would not offer solace.
As Snow Flower disappeared step-by-step down the stairs, I promised myself I would never see her again.
WHEN I LOOK back on that day, I know that I failed terribly in my duties and obligations as a woman. What she had done was unforgivable, but what I said was despicable. I had let my anger, hurt, and ultimately my desire for revenge take control of my actions. Ironically, the very things that embarrassed me and that I later felt much regret over completed my passage to becoming Lady Lu. My neighbors had seen me be brave when my husband was away in Guilin. They knew how I’d cared for my mother-in-law during the epidemic and shown proper filial piety at my in-laws’ funerals. After I survived the winter in the mountains, they’d watched as I’d sent teachers to outlying villages, attended ceremonies in nearly every home in Tongkou, and generally acquitted myself well as the wife of the headman. But on that day, I truly earned the respect that came with being Lady Lu by doing what all women are supposed to do for our country but can rarely accomplish. A woman must set an example of decorum and right thinking in the inside realm. If she is successful, these things will travel from her door to the next, making not only women and children behave properly but inspiring our men to make the outside realm as safe and settled as possible so the emperor can look out from his throne and see peace. I did all that in the most public way possible by showing my neighbors that Snow Flower was a low and base woman who should not be a part of our lives. I had succeeded even as I destroyed my laotong.
My Song of Vituperation became known. It was recorded on handkerchiefs and fans. It was taught to girls as a didactic lesson and sung during the month of wedding festivities to warn brides of life’s pitfalls. In this way, Snow Flower’s disgrace spread throughout the county. As for me, all that had happened crippled me. What was the point of being Lady Lu if I didn’t have love in my life?
Into the Clouds
EIGHT YEARS PASSED. DURING THAT TIME, EMPEROR XIANFENG died, Emperor Tongzhi assumed power, and the Taiping Rebellion ended somewhere in a distant province. My first son married in and his wife got pregnant, fell into our home, and had a son—the first of many precious grandsons. My son also passed his exams to become a shengyuan district scholar. He immediately began studying to become a xiucai scholar, from the province. He did not have much time for his wife, but I think she found comfort in our upstairs chamber. She was a young woman of good learning and home skills. I liked her very much. My daughter, a girl of sixteen well into her hair-pinning days, was betrothed to the son of a rice merchant in faraway Guilin. I might never see Jade again, but this alliance would further protect our ties to the salt business. The Lu family was wealthy, well respected, and without bad fortune. I was forty-two years old, and I had done my very best to forget about Snow Flower.
On a day late in fall in the fourth year of Emperor Tongzhi’s reign, Yonggang came into the upstairs room and whispered in my ear that someone wanted to see me. I asked her to show the guest upstairs, but Yonggang’s eyes went to my daughter-in-law and daughter, who were embroidering together, and shook her head no. This was either impertinence on Yonggang’s part or something more serious. Without a word to the others, I went downstairs. As I entered the main room, a young girl in worn clothes dropped to her knees and put her forehead to the floor. Beggars like this came to my door often, for I was known to be generous.
“Lady Lu, only you can help me,” the girl implored, as she shuffled her crumpled form toward me until her forehead rested on my lily feet.
I reached down and touched her shoulder. “Give me your bowl and I’ll fill it.”
“I have no beggar’s bowl and I don’t need food.”
“Then why are you here?”
The girl began to weep. I asked her to rise and when she didn’t I tapped her shoulder again. Next to me, Yonggang stared at the floor.
“Get up!” I ordered.
The girl lifted her head and looked up into my face. I would have recognized her anywhere. Snow Flower’s daughter looked exactly like her mother at that age. Her hair fought against the restriction of her pins and fell in loose tendrils about her face, which was as pale and clear as the spring moon she was named for. I wistfully remembered this girl before she was born. Through the mists of memory I saw Spring Moon as a beautiful baby, then during those terrible days and nights of our Taiping winter. Once this pretty little thing would have been my daughter’s laotong. Now here she was, her forehead dropping back to my feet, begging for my help.
“My mother is very sick. She will not last the winter. We can do nothing for her now except settle her fretful mind. Please come to her. She calls out to you. Only you can answer.”
Even five years earlier the depth of my pain would have still been so great that I might have sent the girl on her way, but I had learned a lot in my duties as Lady Lu. I could never forgive Snow Flower for all the sadness she had caused me, but for my own position in the county I had to show my face as a gracious lady. I told Spring Moon to go home and promised that I would arrive there shortly; then I arranged for a palanquin to take me to Jintian. Riding there, I buttressed myself against seeing Snow Flower and the butcher, their son, who I realized must have married in by now, and, of course, the sworn sisters.
The palanquin set me down before Snow Flower’s threshold. The place had not changed. A pile of wood rested against the side of the house. The platform with its embedded wok waited for fresh kill. I hesitated, taking it all in. The butcher’s form loomed in the dark doorway, and then he was before me—older, stringier, but the same in so many ways.
“I cannot bear to see her suffer” were the first words he spoke to me after eight years. He roughly wiped the dampness at his eyes with the back of his hand. “She gave me a son, who has helped me do better at my business. She gave me a good and useful daughter. She made my house more beautiful. She cared for my mother until she died. She did everything a wife should do, but I was cruel to her, Lady Lu. I see that now.” Then he brushed past me, adding, “She is better off in the company of women.” I watched him stalk toward the fields, the one place where a man can be alone with his emotions.