(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter (28 page)

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.

Mother, Big Aunt, and Little Aunt clapped their hands over their ears, as if this was the only way to keep their senses from dribbling out. “The fates have turned against us!” Mother cried. “Could there be anything worse?” Little Uncle then cried and laughed and said indeed there was.

The buildings next to our family’s ink shop also began to burn, he said. The one on the east sold old scholar books, the one on the west was filled to the rafters with the works of master painters. In the middle of the orange-colored night, the shopkeepers dumped their goods into the ashy lane. Then the fire brigade arrived. Everyone joined in and tossed so many buckets of water into the air it looked like it was raining. And then it really did rain, shattering down hard, ruining the saved goods, but saving the rest of the district from being burned.

By the time Little Uncle finished telling us this, Mother, my aunts, and GaoLing had stopped wailing. They looked as though their bones and blood had drained out of the bottoms of their feet. I think they felt as I did when I finally understood that Precious Auntie was dead.

Mother was the first to regain her senses. “Take the silver ingots out of the root cellar,” she told us. “And whatever good jewelry you have, gather it up.”

“Why?” GaoLing wanted to know.

“Don’t be stupid. The other shopkeepers will make our family pay for the damages.” And then Mother pushed her. “Get up. Hurry.” She pulled a bracelet off GaoLing’s wrist. “Sew jewelry into the sleeves of your worst-looking jackets. Hollow out the hardest crab apples and put the gold inside those. Pile them in the cart and put more apples on top, rotten ones. Old Cook, see if the tenants have any wheelbarrows they can sell us, and don’t bargain too hard. Everyone put a bundle together, but don’t bother with trifles… .” I was amazed at how Mother’s mind flowed, as if she were accustomed to running two paces ahead of a flood.

The next day Father, Big Uncle, and their sons came home. They already looked like paupers with their unwashed faces, their smoky clothes. Big Aunt and Little Aunt went to them, jabbering:

“Will we lose the house?”

“Will we starve?”

“Do we really have to run away?”

The smaller children began to cry. Father was like a deaf mute. He sat in his elmwood chair, rubbing its arm, declaring it the finest thing he had ever owned and lost. That night, nobody ate. We did not gather in the courtyard for the evening breezes. GaoLing and I spent the night together, talking and crying, swearing loyalty to die together as sisters. We exchanged hairpins to seal our pledge. If she felt that Precious Auntie was to blame for our disasters, she did not say so as the others had continued to do. She did not blame my birth for bringing Precious Auntie into their lives. Instead, GaoLing told me that I should feel lucky that Precious Auntie had already died and would therefore not suffer the slow death of starvation and shame that awaited the rest of us. I agreed yet wished she were with me. But she was at the End of the World. Or was she really wandering the earth, seeking revenge?

The next day, a man came to our gate and handed Father a letter with seals. A complaint had been made about the fire and our family’s responsibility for the damages. The official said that as soon as the owners of the affected shops had tallied their losses, the figure would be given to the magistrate, and the magistrate would tell us how the debt should be settled. In the meantime, he said, our family should present the deed for our house and land. He warned us that he was posting a notice in the village about this matter, and thus people would know to report us if we tried to run away.

After the official left, we waited to hear from Father what we should do. He sagged into his elmwood chair. Then Mother announced, “We’re finished. There’s no changing fate. Today we’ll go to the market and tomorrow we’ll feast.”

Mother gave all of us more pocket money than we had held in our entire lives. She said we should each buy good things to eat, fruits and sweets, delicacies and fatty meats, whatever we had always denied ourselves but longed for. The Moon Festival was coming up, and so it was not unusual that we would be shopping like the rest of the crowd for the harvest meal.

Because of the holiday, it was a bigger market day, with a temple fair, jugglers and acrobats, vendors of lanterns and toys, and more than the usual numbers of tricksters and hucksters. As we pushed through the hordes, GaoLing and I clung to each other’s hands. We saw crying lost children and rough-looking men who stared at us openly. Precious Auntie had constantly warned me of hooligans from the big cities who stole stupid country girls and sold them as slaves. We stopped at a stall selling mooncakes. They were stale. We turned up our noses at pork that was gray. We looked into jars of fresh bean curd, but the squares were gooey and stunk. We had money, we had permission to buy what we wanted, yet nothing looked good, everything seemed spoiled. We wandered about in the thick crowd, pressed one to the other like bricks.

And then we found ourselves in Beggars Lane, a place I had never been. There we saw one pitiful sight after another: A shaved head and a limbless body that rocked on its back like a tortoise on its shell. A boneless boy whose legs were wrapped around his neck. A dwarf with long needles poked through his cheeks, belly, and thighs. The beggars had the same laments: “Please, little miss, I beg you, big brother, have pity on us. Give us money, and in your next life you won’t have to suffer like us.”

Some passing boys laughed, most other people turned away their eyes, and a few old grannies, soon bound for the next world, threw down coins. GaoLing clawed at my arm and whispered: “Is that what we’re destined to become?” As we turned to leave, we bumped into a wretch. She was a girl, no older than we were, dressed in shredded rags, strips tied onto strips, so that she looked as if she were wearing an ancient warrior’s costume. Where the orbs of her eyes should have been, there were two sunken puckers. She began to chant: “My eyes saw too much, so I plucked them out. Now that I can’t see, the unseen come to me.”

She shook an empty bowl in front of us. “A ghost is now waiting to speak to you.”

“What ghost?” I asked right away.

“Someone who was like a mother to you,” the girl answered just as fast.

GaoLing gasped. “How did she know Precious Auntie was your mother?” she whispered to me. And then she said to the girl, “Tell us what she says.”

The blind girl held up her empty bowl again and shook it. GaoLing threw in a coin. The girl tipped the bowl and said, “Your generosity does not weigh much.”

“Show us what you can do first,” GaoLing said.

The girl crouched on the ground. From one tattered sleeve she pulled out a sack, then untied it and poured its contents on the ground. It was limestone silt. From her other sleeve she removed a long, slender stick. With the flat length of the stick, she smoothed the silt until its surface was as flat as a mirror. She pointed the stick’s sharp end to the ground, and with her sightless eyes aimed toward heaven, she began to write. We crouched next to her. How did a beggar girl learn to do this? This was no ordinary trick. Her hand was steady, the writing was smooth, just like a skilled calligrapher’s. I read the first line.

A dog howls, the moon rises,
it said. “Doggie! That was her nickname for me,” I told the girl. She smoothed the silt and wrote more:
In darkness, the stars pierce forever.
Shooting stars, that was in the poem Baby Uncle wrote for her. Another sweep, another line:
A rooster crows, the sun rises,
Precious Auntie had been a Rooster. And then the girl write the last line:
In daylight, it’s as if the stars never existed.
I felt sad, but did not know why.

The girl smoothed the dirt once more and said, “The ghost has no more to say to you.”

“That’s it?” GaoLing complained. “Those words make no sense.”

But I thanked the girl and put all the coins from my pocket into her bowl. As we walked home, GaoLing asked me why I had given the money for nonsense about a dog and a rooster. At first I could not answer her. I kept repeating the lines in my head so I would not forget them. Each time I did, I grew to understand what the message was and I became more miserable. “Precious Auntie said I was the dog who betrayed her,” I told GaoLing at last. “The moon was the night I said I would leave her for the Changs. The stars piercing forever, that is her saying this is a lasting wound she can never forgive. By time the rooster crowed, she was gone. And until she was dead, I never knew she was my mother, as if she had never existed.”

GaoLing said, “That is one meaning. There are others.”

“What, then?” I asked. But she could not think of anything else to say.

When we returned home, Mother and Father, as well as our aunts and uncles, were bunched in the courtyard, talking in excited voices. Father was relating how he had met an old Taoist priest at the market, a remarkable and strange man. As he passed by, the priest had called out to him: “Sir, you look as if a ghost is plaguing your house.”