Inheritance (3 page)

He was a strong man, with ruddy cheeks and muscled shoulders, whose vitality stood out in each gesture. He saw that she was looking. He revealed a line of strong, white teeth. Then he produced a long reed flute and raised it to his mouth. His generous lips puckered around the flute. A cascade of small, bright notes flew out, not put together in the way of any tune that Hu Mudan could recognize. The chickens strutted toward him and gathered at his feet.

For a moment Hu Mudan stood captivated by the gathering birds, by the chicken man’s music, by his quick, long-fingered hands. But when he stopped and smiled at her, she remembered the family. Since Chanyi’s death, she had been like a nun, watching over her two charges, afraid to let them out of her sight. She had no money to buy chickens and no energy to deal with his entreaties. She turned and walked away, considering it ended.

Now as she peered between the doors, she realized that he had found her house. He stood outside the doors, bashfully, his hands hidden inside his coat. She felt herself redden with this flattering surprise. She knew that he could see her peering through the hole. Slowly he brought out his hands and held up an offering: a plump brown cochin hen, with pretty black spots and a little green hood tied over her eyes to prevent her from fussing.

Hu Mudan cracked open the doors.

She first defended herself. She pointed out that she was in charge of the two daughters since her master had lost his wife. As their caregiver, she should uphold the good values of the household. When he rebutted her with rumors—that her late mistress had killed herself and her master was a hopeless gambler—Hu Mudan said the stories were false. She placed value in the old ideal of xingyi: faithfulness and loyalty. Cheerfully, he heard her out. He replied that this was the kind of word the emperors had once used to control naïve and hopeful people. Meeting his eyes, she felt a sudden pounding in her chest, as if a stranger had spoken her childhood name.

For years she had sealed herself away from the delight of touch. And now, when she had forgotten herself in sorrow and worry, it came knocking at her door. Here was pleasure, as troubling and undeniable as the scent of summer. She had raised my mother and aunt with care, remembering what Chanyi would have wanted. But she suspected that dear, lost Chanyi, who had been her friend, would not have minded this one man.

“Go to the pump and wash,” she said. “Then come around to the kitchen door.”

She closed the door and leaned against it with the hen under her arm, her brown face blank in the sun.

If it hadn’t been for the weather, so fragrant and so warm; if she hadn’t stopped to listen to his bird-charming music; if he hadn’t tied that little green scarf over the hen, would Hu Mudan have left the house untended and brought upon us the story that would define our lives? I wonder if there was anything she could have done to protect us from the fate that had been knocking, waiting for this small, unguarded moment to enter.

Hu Mudan and the chicken peddler entered her small room behind the pantry. It was swept absolutely clean. The shelf held only her straw hat and a glass jar with holes punched in the lid, where Yinan’s pet silkworms were growing fat upon the leaves from the mulberry tree. The two of them lay down together. The man looked into her with his strange eyes and gently touched her face. Hu Mudan felt her skin pull tight and her face began to glow, felt all of her—her fingertips, her nostrils, her pupils sensing light—grow charged with pleasure. She took a deep breath; she was acutely aware of the scent of the man, and her own scent rising to meet his. Very close to her face, he smiled. She smiled into his eyes, the wet color of earth on the bottom of a pond. She did not hear her master’s evening guests entering the gate, did not hear them greeting him in their bright, expectant voices.

Later, in the courtyard, Junan called her name. “Hu Mudan?” She raised her voice. “Hu Mudan!” But Hu Mudan didn’t hear a thing.

AT SEVENTEEN, JUNAN LET VERY LITTLE ESCAPE HER NOTICE.
She had seen the skimpy meals and had caught on to the way the pretty maid, Weiwei, eyed with anticipation what she and her sister left in the serving dishes. She had noted that the doorman wandered off. Of all these troubling changes, the most disturbing was the way her father had faded to a kind of daylight sleep, with his energies held back, waiting for the games, when he would leave the house for days or stay holed up in the front room with his friends.

He had big plans, her father did: only a few nights of lucky tiles must come his way, and he would realize them. He would finance an expansion to the north, using the Grand Canal to send cotton to a lucrative new market. She had overheard him describing this expansion to his cousin Baoding—omitting, of course, the necessity of the lucky tiles. But she knew the tiles’ significance. She was his daughter and she understood, even approved of, his big plans. What made Junan uncomfortable were his plans for her. He had none. That is, she knew that when the subject of her marriage grew unavoidable, he would send her to the household of his friend and neighbor, Chen, as a suitable bride for young Chen Da-Huan.

There was nothing in Chen Da-Huan that Junan could object to. He was a quiet boy, idealistic and round-shouldered, who, whenever she saw him, looked right past her and into his vision for China’s future. He would wave his soft hands and speak about the perils of imperialism, set forth his belief that China must be freed from the oppression of all foreigners and returned to the glory of her past. He had such idealism because his family was rich, far removed from the worrying about the yuan that could be made through dealing with foreigners.

Perhaps young Chen Da-Huan would be a decent husband. And yet, whenever she spoke to him, she could not shake the sense that Chanyi would have been saddened by the match. Her mother had never mentioned the subject, and yet she knew this. Whenever Junan considered marrying him, her lips pressed tight against the thought.

Junan approached her father’s office with her lips set in a line. She could hear the scraping, banging sounds of men bringing more chairs into the adjacent room. The lights were on, and Junan saw her father gesture to the errand boy. As she stood listening and watching, the sound of moving furniture grew so loud her bones hurt, so loud it seemed the house would rattle apart.

“Where is Hu Mudan?” she asked. But in the kitchen they didn’t know. Perhaps she had run out on an errand.

Junan decided to sit near the door and wait. She knew she shouldn’t be seeking Hu Mudan as if the housekeeper were a blood relative, but no one noticed. She sat on the stool where the cook sometimes snapped the beans. The dusk thickened in the courtyard. From somewhere in the house came the faint sound of a flute. Then she heard the slap of the white tablecloth and the spilling of the little bone chips, followed by a brief silence and the click of tiles, broken by shouts and laughter.

It was almost dark when Junan heard a knock. Could it be Hu Mudan? She slid off her stool and went to open the door.

In front of her stood two young men. One wore a faded tunic and the other an Army uniform short in the sleeves. They were too young and poor to be her father’s friends and yet she recognized, in the expression of the taller one, a familiar aura of anticipation. Parasite, she thought. She noticed something careless in his face and did not like it. He was handsome. The other was younger, tight-lipped and angular, with bad posture and little round eyeglasses.

“We are here for Wang Daming,” said the handsome one. He had a country accent. “Will you let us in?”

“No,” she said.

“Ah, come on,” he said lightheartedly. “We won’t eat you up.” He glanced over her shoulder. They all could hear the men plainly, laughing in the office.

“Let’s go, Li Ang,” said the younger one. “She doesn’t want us here.”

“Let me handle this,” said Li Ang.

“I’m leaving,” said the other.

Li Ang set his jaw. In that moment Junan understood the visitors were brothers. Li Ang did not turn around. “You go home and read,” he said, and shrugged. “In the morning, you’ll see how much you’ve missed.”

The younger brother vanished into the dusk.

Li Ang remained, expectantly. Junan thought of closing the doors in his face, but she did not. He took her silence as encouragement. “Well?” he asked.

She raised her eyes up briefly to his face and then down.

Although she had only flicked her eyelids, although she had barely glanced at him in the thickening dusk, she had taken him in as completely as a breath. She saw a young man, really a boy, dressed in a handed-down second lieutenant’s uniform but with no hat, revealing stand-up hair and features stained from the outdoors. He was only a little older than she, long-legged and not quite grown. She sensed that he was hungry. She could also sense in him the effect she had on people, one of widening distance. She could already feel a vague hostility toward herself, a cool, pretty girl, indifferent to handsome strangers. This did not trouble her. She held herself as carefully as if her spine had been painted with a brushstroke, and traced her finger in a circle on the doorframe.

He took refuge in the personal. “Is Wang Daming your baba?” His voice was deep and surprisingly rich; his smallest phrases hinted melody. Such a voice could summon even a woman bent on coldness. She lifted up her gaze to him. His eyes were bright, remote. He stepped closer to her, close enough to touch her.

Junan watched him through her eyelashes. “My father’s busy. You can’t come in.”

“I am here to play paigao, not to obey you.” He smiled. What made him do this? How did he know, immediately, that teasing was the one thing that she could not bear?

It was something gentle in his voice that broke her control. She reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “I didn’t say you could!”

They stared at one another. Her arm was long, her grip fierce. If he pulled away she would rip a piece out of his only uniform. Surely he must have been alarmed, faced with such fierce passion in a strange girl. Certainly he must have seen and been warned. How could he not have been aware of it? But he was not. He merely smiled again and waited for things to change. A long moment passed. Eventually he saw what he was waiting for, a softening of the brow, a yielding of the mouth. Her shoulders dropped. His smile had done its work. She did not invite him, did not lead him, but she allowed him to pass, to enter the room where the players had gathered.

LI ANG HAD
A CONSTELLATION OF SCARS ON HIS BACK, CLUSTERED
from his left shoulder blade down to the center of his spine. He was a dark young man, and the wounds had healed to lavender. When he was overheated or emotional, he flushed all over his skin, and the scars shone pale along his back, as marbled as burned flesh.

He had been wounded in Shanghai during a Japanese provocation. As an errand boy, a volunteer, he’d spied a grenade aimed for the young Corporal Sun Li-jen and had pushed the corporal out of the way. Shrapnel had torn Li Ang’s shoulder; a few pieces lodged near his spine. But Sun had escaped, and in order to show his gratitude, the corporal had sponsored Li Ang in military school.

Now that Li Ang was commissioned, he felt proud of his scars. He often turned his shoulder to the mirror, craning to see them on his smooth dark back. His father had been a small farmer, virtually a peasant, but he, the son, had now been marked and chosen for a nobler path. He had bought this future with only a small sacrifice of flesh. He didn’t worry for his body. Indeed, there were times when he felt puzzled by his body. Did it belong to him, or did it exist apart from him like the flickering images projected in a movie theater? This dappled shoulder—had it stood in between the corporal and the enemy? Was it truly marked with scars? Or did it still exist somewhere he didn’t know, untouched, as if none of this had happened? Typically he put such thoughts out of his mind. They were as useless as the memories of his mother and father, who had died when he was ten. They were only echoes in his mind, shapes that lingered on the edge of sleep. The gentle sound of her voice, the depth of her soft-lidded eyes. His hand on the bottle of sorghum liquor, fingernails bitten down. Li Ang tried not to think of them, for they were gone.