Peony in Love (9 page)

I was light-headed enough with my own private happiness to believe she wanted to help me. Whatever hidden strength had surfaced when I allowed myself to go over the balustrade of our Moon-Viewing Pavilion had retreated to a hidden corner deep inside me, because I didn’t break away from Broom and sit down on my cushion at the back of the audience but allowed myself to be led—helplessly, stupidly, but with the ridiculous invincibility that came with the bliss I felt—through the seated women, right past my mother, and on to the front row of cushions, where I was squeezed in between little Ze and my cousin. And because I was seated next to Ze, I found myself once more before the crack in the screen that allowed me to peek out to the stage.

I looked across the sea of black-haired men until I found my poet, sitting next to my father. After a few minutes, I forced myself to look away from him and to the stage, where the emperor tried to bring the two factions together. Proclamations were read; honors bestowed. There was great rejoicing for the two young lovers—a truly happy ending—and yet nothing had been or would ever be reconciled between Prefect Du and his daughter.

The men on the other side of the screen jumped to their feet with applause and whoops of appreciation. The women on our side nodded at the truth of this ending.

As he had on the first night, my father took the stage. He thanked everyone for coming to our meager home for our inadequate production. He thanked the visiting actors and those on our household staff who’d been pulled from their regular duties for the performance.

“This is a night of love and destiny,” he said. “We have seen how Liniang and Mengmei’s story has ended. And we know how the story of the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd will end later tonight. Now let us have a preview of another love story.”

Waaa!
He was going to announce something about my marriage. My poet put his head down. He didn’t want to hear this either.

“Many of you know that I’m fortunate to have as my future son-in-law a good friend,” Baba said. “I have known Wu Ren for so long, he is like a son to me.”

As my father lifted his arm to point out the man I was to marry, I closed my eyes. Three days ago, I would have followed his gesture to get a glimpse of my future husband, but right now I couldn’t abandon the tender emotions swimming inside me. I wanted to hold on to them a little longer.

“I’m lucky Ren has such a love of words,” my father went on. “I’m not so lucky when he beats me in chess.”

The men laughed appreciatively as they were meant to. On our side of the screen, there was silence. I felt stares of disapproval and disdain from the women behind me driving into my back like daggers. I opened my eyes, peered to my right, and saw Ze staring through the crack in the screen, her mouth set in an alarmed
oh.
Then Ze quickly averted her gaze. My husband had to be really ugly, hideous.

“Many of you are guests tonight and have not met my daughter,” my father continued, “but I also have my whole family here and they’ve known Peony for her entire life.” He addressed my future husband, confiding in front of everyone, “I have no doubt she will be a good wife to you…except for one thing. Her name is not suitable. Your mother’s name is also Peony.”

My father looked out across the audience of men, but he spoke to us behind the screen. “From now on, we will call my daughter Tong—
Same
—for she is the same as your mother, my young friend.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Baba had just changed my name forever and ever. I was now Tong—a common
Same
—because of my mother-in-law, someone I had yet to meet but who would have control over me until the day she died. My father had done this without asking me, without even warning me. My poet was right. Three beautiful nights would have to sustain me for a lifetime. But this night was not over, and I refused to sink into despair just yet.

“Let this be a night of celebration,” my father announced. He signaled toward the screen where we women sat. Servants came to escort us back to the Lotus-Blooming Hall. I leaned on Willow’s arm for support and was prepared to let her guide me back to the women’s chambers, when my mother came to my side.

“It seems you are a chosen one tonight,” she said, but the graciousness of her words could not hide the disappointment in her voice. “Willow, allow me to take my daughter back to her room.” Willow let go of me and my mother took my arm in hers. How she managed to look so beautiful and delicate when her fingers were digging into my flesh through my silk tunic, I don’t know. The others parted, and let the head woman of the Chen Family Villa lead her one and only child back to the Lotus-Blooming Hall. The others trailed behind us, quiet as scarves floating on the wind. They didn’t know what I’d done, but clearly I’d been somewhere I shouldn’t have been because they could all see that my feet—those most private of a woman’s parts—were soiled.

I don’t know what caused me to look back, but I did. Little Ze was walking with Broom. My cousin had a trace of smugness and triumph at the corners of her mouth, but Ze was still too young and unsophisticated to hide her emotions. Her face was red, her jaw clenched, her whole body rigid with anger. I didn’t know why.

We reached the Lotus-Blooming Hall. My mother paused for a moment to tell the others to enjoy themselves; she would return in a few minutes. Then, without another word, she took me to my room in the Unmarried Girls’ Hall, opened the door, and gently pushed me inside. After she closed the door, I heard something I’d never heard before. It sounded like metal scraping. Only when I tried to open the door again to see what it was did I realize that for the first time my mother had used one of her locks to confine me.

That Mama was angry with me didn’t change the words my poet had spoken in my ear, nor did they alter the feeling that still lingered on my flesh from where he had touched me with the peony. I brought out the willow sprig he’d given me and used it to caress my cheek. Then I put it in a drawer. I undressed my wet feet and wrapped them again in clean bindings. From my window, I did not see the celestial bridge that was supposed to unite the Weaving Maid and the Cowherd, but I did still smell the fragrance of wild roses in my hair and on my skin.

Closing Doors, Opening Heart

MAMA NEVER AGAIN MENTIONED THE WETNESS AND DIRT
on my shoes, skirt, and leggings. A servant took those things away, they were never brought back, and I continued to be locked in my room. During the long weeks of my confinement, I would begin to question everything. But at first I was just a sad girl locked in her room with no one to talk to. Even Willow was barred, except to bring me meals and fresh water for washing.

I spent hours at my window, but my view was limited to a small patch of sky above and the courtyard below. I leafed through my copies of
The Peony Pavilion.
I sought out the scene of The Interrupted Dream, trying to decipher what Liniang and Mengmei were doing together in the grotto. At every moment, I thought about my stranger. The feelings that filled my chest dampened my appetite and emptied my head. I constantly brooded about how I would continue to hold on to my emotions once I got out of this room.

One morning, a week into my confinement, Willow opened the door, padded quietly across the floor, and set down a tray with tea and a bowl of
congee
for breakfast. I missed her company and the way she cared for me—brushing my hair, washing and wrapping my feet, keeping the air between us lively with conversation. These past days, she’d been very quiet when she brought my meals, but now she smiled in a way I’d never seen before.

She poured my tea, knelt before me, and looked up into my face, waiting for me to question her.

“Tell me what’s happened,” I said, expecting to hear that my mother had decided to release me or that she was going to let Willow stay in my room again.

“When Master Chen asked me to play the part of Spring Fragrance, I said yes, hoping that one of the men in the audience might see me, approach your father, and ask if he would sell me to another household,” she answered, her eyes bright with happiness. “The offer came last night and your father agreed. I’m to leave this afternoon.”

I felt like Willow had just slapped my face. Never in ten thousand years would I have guessed or imagined this.

“But you belong to me!”

“Actually, until yesterday I was your father’s property. Today, I belong to Master Quon.”

That she smiled when she said this unlocked a pocket of anger in me.

“You can’t leave. You can’t
want
to leave.”

When she didn’t answer, I knew she truly wanted to go. But how could this be? She was my maid and companion. I had never thought about where she’d come from or how she’d come to be my servant, but I’d always believed her to be mine. She was a part of my everyday life like the chamber pot. She was at my feet when I fell asleep; she was the first person I saw in the morning. She started the brazier before I opened my eyes and fetched hot water for bathing me. I had thought she would go with me to my husband’s home. She was supposed to care for me when I got pregnant and had sons. Since she was my age, I had expected her to be with me until I died.

“Every night after you fall asleep, I lie here on the floor and hide my tears in my handkerchief,” she confessed. “For years, I have hoped your father would sell me. If I’m lucky, my new owner will make me a concubine.” She paused, considered, and then added in a practical tone, “A second, third, or fourth concubine.”

That my servant had longings like this shocked me. She was far ahead of me in her thinking, in her desires. She had come from the world outside our garden—the world I was suddenly obsessed with—and I had never once asked her about it.

“How can you do this to me? Where is your gratitude?”

Her smile faded. Did she not answer because she didn’t want to or because she didn’t feel she owed it to me?

“I’m thankful your family took me in,” she admitted. She had a pretty face, but in that moment I saw how much she disliked me, how much she had probably disliked me for years. “Now I can have a different life than the one I was born to as a thin horse.”

I had heard the term before, but I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t fully understand what it meant.

“My family was from Yangzhou, where your grandmother died,” she went on. “Like so many families, mine suffered greatly. The old and ugly women were massacred along with the men. Women like my mother were sold like salted fish—in sacks, by weight. My mother’s new owner was an enterprising man. I was the fourth daughter to be sold. Since then I have been like a leaf in the wind.”

I listened.

“The thin-horse trader bound my feet and taught me to read, sing, embroider, and play the flute,” she continued. “In this way my life was not unlike yours, but in other ways it was very different. Those people grew girls on their land instead of crops.” She lowered her head and glanced at me furtively. “Spring came, autumn went. They could have kept me until I was old enough to sell into pleasure, but inflation and a glut on the market lowered prices. They had to unload some of the crop. One day, they dressed me in red, painted my face white, and took me to market. Your father examined my teeth; he held my feet in his hands; he patted my body.”

“He wouldn’t do that!”

“He did, and I was ashamed. He bought me for a few bolts of cloth. These last years I hoped that your father might take me as his fourth concubine and that I might bring him the son your mother and the others can’t give him.”

The thought curdled my stomach.

“Today I go to my third owner,” she said matter-of-factly. “Your father has sold me for pork and
cash.
It’s a good deal, and he’s happy.”

Sold for pork? I was to be married in exchange for bride-price gifts, which included pigs. Perhaps Willow and I were not so different after all. Neither of us had any say in our futures.

“I’m still young,” Willow said. “I may change hands again if I don’t bear a son or I stop making my master smile. The thin-horse trader taught me that buying a concubine adds to a man’s garden. Some trees bear fruit, some give shade, some give pleasure to the eye. I’m hopeful that I will not be weeded out and sold again.”

“You’re like Xiaoqing,” I said in wonder.

“I don’t have her beauty or talent, but I hope my future is better than hers and that in my next life I will not be born in Yangzhou.”

This was my first true understanding that my existence in our garden villa was not at all like that of girls in the outside world. Terrifying and horrible things happened out there. This had been kept a secret from me, and I was grateful but curious. My grandmother had been out there and now she was worshipped as a martyr. Willow had come from out there and her future was as set as my own: Make the man in her life happy, bear him sons, and excel in the Four Virtues.

“So I’m going,” Willow said abruptly, as she got up off her knees.

“Wait.” I stood, crossed to a cabinet, and opened a drawer. I fingered my jewelry and hair ornaments, looking for a piece that would be neither too ordinary nor too extravagant. I settled on a hairpin of blue kingfisher feathers shaped into a soaring phoenix, its tail flowing delicately behind it. I placed it in Willow’s hand.

“To wear when you meet your new owner.”

“Thank you,” she said, and with that she left the room.

Not two minutes later, Shao, my old wet nurse and our head amah, entered. “I will be taking care of you from now on.”

I could not have received worse news.

MY MOTHER HAD
plans for me, and Shao, who now lived in my room, had to make sure they were fulfilled. “Tong—Same—you will prepare for your wedding, nothing else,” Shao announced, and she meant it.

Hearing my new name, I had an inward shiver of despair. My place in the world was set by label and designation; through my name I was already changing from a daughter into a wife and daughter-in-law.

For the next seven weeks, Shao brought my meals, but my stomach had become an abyss of anguish and I ignored the food or stubbornly pushed it away. As time passed, my body changed. My skirts started to hang on my hips instead of my waist, and my tunics swung loose and free.

My mother never visited.

“She’s disappointed in you,” Shao reminded me every day. “How could you have come from her body? I tell her a bad daughter is a typical daughter.”

I was book-smart but no match for my mother. Her job was to control me and see me married out to a good family. Although she still did not want to see my face, she sent emissaries. Every morning, Third Aunt arrived just before dawn to teach me to embroider properly.

“No more sloppy or clumsy stitches allowed,” she said, her voice tinkling like white carnelian. If I made a mistake, she made me pull out the stitches and start again. With no distractions and Third Aunt’s exacting instruction, I learned. And with every stitch, I ached for my poet.

As soon as she swept out of the room, Shao let in Second Aunt, who drilled me on my zither. Despite her indulgent reputation, she was very strict with me. If I erred in my plucking, she struck my fingers with a stalk of green bamboo. My zither playing improved surprisingly quickly, becoming clear and limpid. I imagined each note floating out the window and traveling across the lake to my poet’s home, where the music would make him think of me as I was thinking of him.

In the late afternoons, as the colors of evening began to appear in the west, Fourth Aunt, widowed and childless, came to teach me the purpose of clouds and rain.

“A woman’s greatest strength is to give birth to sons,” Fourth Aunt instructed. “It gives a woman power and it can take it away. If you give your husband a son, you might keep him from entering the pleasure quarters on the lake or bringing in concubines. Remember, a woman’s purity grows through seclusion. This is why you’re in here.”

I listened hard to what she said, but she told me nothing about what to expect on my wedding night or how I could participate in clouds and rain with someone I didn’t love, like, or know. I relentlessly conjured the hours leading up to it: my mother, aunts, and cousins washing and dressing me in my wedding clothes; the five grains, the piece of pork, and the pig heart they’d hide in the underskirt I’d wear next to my skin; the tears shed by everyone as I was led outside to the palanquin; stepping over the Wu family threshold and letting that underskirt with its hidden treasures drop to the floor to ensure the fast and easy births of sons; and finally being led into the wedding chamber. These thoughts, which had once filled me with happy expectation, now made me want to run away. That I had no way to escape my fate made me feel even worse.

After dinner, Fifth Aunt took time from the nightly gathering in the women’s chambers to improve my calligraphy. “Writing is a creation of the outer world of men,” she said. “It is by its nature a public act—something that we, as women, should avoid—but you need to learn it so that one day you can help your son with his studies.”

We worked through sheet after sheet of paper, copying poems from the
Book of Songs,
doing drills from
Pictures of Battle Formations of the Brush,
and limning lessons from the
Women’s Four-Character Classic
until my fingers were stained with ink.

Apart from perfecting my brushstrokes, Fifth Aunt’s lessons were pure and simple: “The best you can do is take the ancients as your teachers. Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts, or emotions. Make yourself presentable, speak gently but don’t say anything, wash yourself diligently and frequently, and keep a harmonious mind. In this way you will wear your virtue on your face.”

I dutifully obeyed, but each stroke of my brush was a caress I gave my poet. Each swish of my brush was my fingers on his skin. Each character completed was a gift to the man who had so invaded my thoughts.

Every moment of the day and night that one of my aunts wasn’t in my room I still had Shao. Like Willow, she slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. She was there when I woke up, there when I used the chamber pot, there when I did my lessons, there when I went to sleep. I was there for her too, listening to her snoring and farting, smelling her breath and what left her body and went into the chamber pot, watching her scratch her rump or clean her feet. No matter what she did, she was unrelenting in what spewed from her mouth.

“A woman—and your mother has recognized this in you—becomes unruly through knowledge,” she told me, contradicting my aunts’ teachings. “In your mind you go too far beyond the inner chambers. It’s dangerous out there; your mother needs you to understand that. Forget what you’ve learned.
Instructions from Mother Wen
tells us that a girl should know only a few written characters, like
firewood, rice, fish,
and
meat.
These words will help you run a household. Anything more is perilous.”

Just as door after door was closing me in, my heart was opening wider and wider. A dream visit to the Peony Pavilion had given Liniang a case of lovesickness. Visits to pavilions in the Chen Family Villa had given me my lovesickness. I had no control over my activities—how I dressed or my future life with this Wu Ren—but my emotions remained untrammeled and free. I’ve come to believe that part of lovesickness comes from this conflict between control and desire. In love we have no control. Our hearts and minds are tormented, teased, enticed, and delighted by the overwhelming strength of emotions that make us try to forget the real world. But that world does exist, so as women we have to think about how to make our husbands happy by being good wives, bearing sons, running our households well, and being pretty so they don’t become distracted from their daily activities or loiter with concubines. We are not born with these abilities. They must be instilled in us by other women. Through lessons, aphorisms, and acquired skills we are molded…and controlled.