"What a disaster!" Old Widow Lau muttered as she flung about all the clothing I had brought. "Pity the family that takes in this stupid girl for a daughter-in-law." She hurried to her trunks to search among the slim dresses of her youth. At last she settled on a dress borrowed from one of her daughters-in-law, a lightweight chipao that was not too old-fashioned. It had a high collar, short sleeves, and was woven in the colors of summer foliage, lilac for the body and leafy green for the trim and frog clasps. Old Widow Lau then undid my messy braids and dragged a wet comb through my hair.
At noon she announced we were leaving for the ink shop. She informed her servant we would not eat our lunch at home. She was certain her cousin the inkmaker was preparing a special meal at his place. "If the other family is also there," she warned me, "eat a little of each dish to show you are not picky, but don't be greedy. Let others be served first and act like you are the least important."
Lantern Market Street was not far from the Pottery-Glazing District, perhaps a thirty-minute rickshaw ride. But Old Widow Lau was afraid we might accidentally miss our accidental meeting if we did not allow for a few extra minutes to ensure that we arrived on time. "After all," she fretted aloud, "what if the rickshaw driver is old and lame? What if it begins to rain?"
Sometime after the noon hour, I found myself standing before our family's ink shop, anxious to see Father. Old Widow Lau was paying the rickshaw driver-or rather, arguing with him that he should not charge us so much for an extra passenger since I was still a small child. "Small child?" the driver said with a huff. "Where are your eyes, old woman?" I stared at the lap of the lilac dress I had borrowed, patted the neatly knotted bun at the back of my head. I was embarrassed but also proud that the driver thought I was a grown-up woman.
Almost every door on the street led to a shop, and flanking each door were red banners with good-luck couplets. The couplet by our family's shop was particularly fine. It had been written in a cursive style, the one Precious Auntie was teaching me to copy. The manner was more like a painting than writing, very expressive, running down like cloud-swept branches. You could tell that whoever had written this was an artist, cultured and deserving of respect. Reluctantly, I admitted to myself that this calligraphy must have been Precious Auntie's.
At last, Old Widow Lau was done haggling with the driver and we stepped inside Father's shop. It was north-facing, quite dim inside, and perhaps this was why Father did not see us at first. He was busy with a customer, a man who was distinguished-looking, like the scholars of two decades before. The two men were bent over a glass case, discussing the different qualities of inksticks. Big Uncle welcomed us and invited us to be seated. From his formal tone, I knew he did not recognize who we were. So I called his name in a shy voice. And he squinted at me, then laughed and announced our arrival to Little Uncle, who apologized many times for not rushing over sooner to greet us. They rushed us to be seated at one of two tea tables for customers. Old Widow Lau refused their invitation three times, exclaiming that my father and uncles must be too busy for visitors. She made weak efforts to leave. On the fourth insistence, we finally sat. Then Little Uncle brought us hot tea and sweet oranges, as well as bamboo latticework fans with which to cool ourselves.
I tried to notice everything so I could later tell GaoLing what I had seen, and tease out her envy. The floors of the shop were of dark wood, polished and clean, no dirty footprints, even though this was during the dustiest part of the summer. And along the walls were display cases made of wood and glass. The glass was very shiny and not one pane was broken. Within those glass cases were our silk-wrapped boxes, all our hard work. They looked so much nicer than they had in the ink-making studio at Immortal Heart village.
I saw that Father had opened several of the boxes. He set sticks and cakes and other shapes on a silk cloth covering a glass case that served as a table on which he and the customer leaned. First he pointed to a stick with a top shaped like a fairy boat and said with graceful importance, "Your writing will flow as smoothly as a keel cutting through a glassy lake." He picked up a bird shape: "Your mind will soar into the clouds of higher thought." He waved toward a row of ink cakes embellished with designs of peonies and bamboo: "Your ledgers will blossom into abundance while bamboo surrounds your quiet mind."
As he said this, Precious Auntie came back into my mind. I was remembering how she taught me that everything, even ink, had a purpose and a meaning: Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my mind?
I remembered this, and yet that day in the ink shop, I listened to what Father was saying, and his words became far more important than anything Precious Auntie had thought. "Look here," Father said to his cus tomer, and I looked. He held up an inkstick and rotated it in the light. "See? It's the right hue, purple-black, not brown or gray like the cheap brands you might find down the street. And listen to this." And I heard a sound as clean and pure as a small silver bell. "The high-pitched tone tells you that the soot is very fine, as smooth as the sliding banks of old rivers. And the scent-can you smell the balance of strength and delicacy, the musical notes of the ink's perfume? Expensive, and everyone who sees you using it will know that it was well worth the high price."
I was very proud to hear Father speak of our family's ink this way. I sniffed the hot air. The smell of spices and camphor was very strong.
"This soot," Father continued, "is far better than Anhui pine. We make it from a kind of tree so rare that it's now forbidden to chop it down. Luckily, we have a supply felled by lightning, blessed by the gods." Father asked the customer if he had heard about the ancient human skullcap recently unearthed from the quarry at Dragon Bone Hill. The old scholar nodded. "Well, we're from the village one hill over," Father explained. "And the trees in our village are said to be more than a million years old! How do we know? Think about it. When those million-year-old folks roamed the earth around Dragon Bone Hill, didn't they need trees to sit under? Trees for shade? Trees to make fires? Trees to build stools and tables and beds? Aha, am I right? Well then, we, the people from the village next to Dragon Bone Hill, supplied that need. And now we 're the ones who own the remains of those ancestral trees. We call them Immortal Heart wood."
Father motioned to the shelves. "Now, look here, on this shelf there's only a pinch per stick, so the cost is less. In this row, two pinches. And in this case, it is almost entirely the soot of Immortal Tree wood. The ink draws easily into the brush, like nectar into a butterfly's nostril."
In the end, the customer bought several of the most expensive sticks and left the shop. I wanted to clap, as if I had just seen a play for the gods. And then Father was coming toward us, toward me. I rose from the chair with a leaping heart. I had not seen him since Great-Granny's funeral more than three months before. I wondered if he would say anything about my more grown-up appearance.
"What! Is it already five o'clock in the evening?" he asked.
This caused Old Widow Lau to jump up and cry, "We're too early! We should leave and come back later!"
That was how I learned what time we were supposed to come, five o'clock, not one. Old Widow Lau was so upset by this open announcement of her mistake that my father had to insist five times that she be seated again. And then my uncles brought more tea and more oranges, but still everything was awkward.