Of that day, that was all I remembered. I didn't know how I came to be in my room, lying on the k'ang. When I awoke in the dark, I thought it was still the morning before. I sat up and shuddered, shaking off my nightmare.
Precious Auntie was not in the k'ang. Then I remembered she was an gry with me and had left to sleep elsewhere. I tried to fall back asleep, but now I could not lie still. I got up and stepped outside. The sky was thick with stars, no lamp burned in any room, and even the old rooster did not rustle in alarm. It was not morning but still night, and I wondered if I was dreamwalking. I made my way across the courtyard, toward the ink-making studio, thinking that Precious Auntie might be sleeping on a bench. And then I remembered more of the bad dream: black flies feasting on her neck, crawling along her shoulders like moving hair. I was scared to see what was inside the studio, but my shaking hands were already lighting the lamp.
The walls were clean. So was the floor. Precious Auntie was not there. I was relieved, and returned to bed.
When I woke up the next time, it was morning and GaoLing was on the edge of the k'ang. "No matter what," she said with a tearful face, "I promise to always treat you like a sister." Then she told me what had happened, and I listened as if I were still in a bad dream.
The day before, Mrs. Chang had come over with a letter from Precious Auntie clutched in her hand. It had arrived in the middle of the night. "What is the meaning of this?" the Chang woman wanted to know. The letter said that if I joined the Chang household, Precious Auntie would come to stay as a live-in ghost, haunting them forever. "Where is the woman who sent this?" Mrs. Chang demanded, slapping the letter. And when Mother told her that the nursemaid had just killed herself, the Chang wife left, scared out of her wits.
After that, Mother rushed over to the body, GaoLing said. Precious Auntie was still leaning on the wall in the studio. "This is how you repay me?" Mother cried. "I treated you like a sister. I treated your daughter like my own." And she kicked the body, again and again, for not saying thank you, sorry, I beg your pardon a thousand times. "Mother was crazy with anger," GaoLing said. "She told Precious Auntie's body, 'If you haunt us, I'll sell LuLing as a whore.'" After that, Mother ordered Old Cook to put the body in a pushcart and throw it over the cliff. "She's down there," GaoLing said, "your Precious Auntie is lying in the End of the World." When GaoLing left, I still did not understand everything she had said, and yet I knew. I found the pages Precious Auntie had written for me. I finished reading them. At last, I read her words. Your mother, your mother, I am your mother.
That day I went to the End of the World to look for her. As I slid down, branches and thorns tore at my skin. When I reached the bottom, I was feverish to find her. I heard the drumming of cicadas, the beating of vulture wings. I walked toward the thick brush, to where trees grew sideways just as they had fallen with the crumbling cliff. I saw moss, or was that her hair? I saw a nest high in the branches, or was that her body stuck on a limb? I came upon branches, or were those her bones, already scattered by wolves?
I turned and went the other direction, following the turns of the cliff's wall. I glimpsed tatters of cloth-her clothes? I saw crows carrying shreds-pieces of her flesh? I came to a wasteland with rocky mounds, ten thousand pieces of her skull and bones. Everywhere I looked, it was as if I were seeing her, torn and smashed. I had done this. I was remembering the curse of her family, my family, the dragon bones that had not been returned to their burial place. Chang, that terrible man, he wanted me to marry his son only so I would tell him where to find more of those bones. How could I be so stupid not to have realized this before?
I searched for her until dusk. By then, my eyes were swollen with dust and tears. I never found her. And as I climbed back up, I was a girl who had lost part of herself in the End of the World.
For five days I could not move. I could not eat. I could not even cry. I lay in the lonely k'ang and felt only the air leaving my chest. When I thought I had nothing left, my body still continued to be sucked of breath. At times I could not believe what had happened. I refused to believe it. I thought hard to make Precious Auntie appear, to hear her footsteps, see her face. And when I did see her face, it was in dreams and she was angry. She said that a curse now followed me and I would never find peace. I was doomed to be unhappy. On the sixth day, I began to cry and did not stop from morning until night. When I had no more feeling left, I rose from my bed and went back to my life.
No more mention was ever made of my going to live with the Changs. The marriage contract had been canceled, and Mother no longer pretended I was her daughter. I did not know where I belonged in that family anymore, and sometimes when Mother was displeased with me, she threatened to sell me as a slave girl to the tubercular old sheepherder. No one spoke of Precious Auntie, either once living or now dead. And though my aunts had always known I was her bastard daughter, they did not pity me as her grieving child. When I could not stop myself from crying, they turned their faces, suddenly busy with their eyes and hands.
Only GaoLing talked to me, shyly. "Are you hungry yet? If you don't want that dumpling, I'll eat it." And I remember this: Often, when I lay on my k'ang, she came to me and called me Big Sister. She stroked my hand.
Two weeks after Precious Auntie killed herself, a figure ran through our gate, looking like a beggar chased by the devil. It was Little Uncle from Peking. His clothes and the hollows of his eyes were full of soot. When he opened his mouth, choking cries came out. "What's wrong? What's wrong?" I heard Mother shout as I climbed out of the root cellar. The others stumbled out of the ink-making studio. Some of the tenants rushed over as well, trailed by crawling babies and noisy dogs.
"Gone," Little Uncle said. His teeth chattered as if he were cold. "Everything's burnt up. We're finished."
"Burnt?" Mother cried. "What are you saying?"
Little Uncle collapsed onto a bench, his face bunched into knots. "The shop on the lane, the sleeping quarters in back, everything gone to cinders." GaoLing clasped my arm.
Bit by bit, Mother and the aunts pulled the story out of him. Last night, he said, Precious Auntie came to Father. Her hair was unbound, dripping tears and black blood, and Father instantly knew she was a ghost and not an ordinary dream.
"Liu Jin Sen," Precious Auntie had called. "Did you value camphor wood more than my life? Then let the wood burn as I do now."
Father swung out his arm to chase her away and knocked over the oil lamp, which was not in his dream but on a table next to his cot. When Big Uncle heard the crash, he sat up and lit a match to see what had spilled onto the floor. Just then, Little Uncle said, Precious Auntie knocked the match out of his fingertips. Up burst a fountain of flames. Big Uncle shouted to Little Uncle to help him douse the fire. By Precious Auntie's trickery, Little Uncle said, he poured out a jar of pai gar wine instead of the pot of cold tea. The fire jumped higher. Father and the two uncles rousted their sons from the next room; then all the men of our family stood in the courtyard, where they watched the flames eat up the bedding, the banners, the walls. The more the fire ate, the hungrier it became. It crept to the ink shop to hunt for more food. It devoured the scrolls of famous scholars who had used our ink. It licked the silk-wrapped boxes holding the most expensive inksticks. And when the resin of those sticks leaked out, it roared with joy, its appetite increased. Within the hour, our family's fortunes wafted up to the gods as incense, ashes, and poisonous smoke.