The Valley of Amazement (47 page)

Until Magic Gourd put up her resistance to him, I had had doubts about my feelings for him. But each suspicion she put up, I knocked down, and love grew stronger out of stubbornness. I reasoned that my conversations with Perpetual about high ideas were far better than listening to a man talk about port treaties and taxes. He admired my mind, which I would always possess, whereas most men wanted charming words that told them how virile they were. When my looks withered, those men would have no interest in applying their virility on me. Perpetual would love me, whether I slept beside him in bed or in a grave. Magic Gourd wanted me to wait until a repulsive rich man collected me as one of his concubines. She would rather I perform degrading scenes from pornographic novels than perform a poem.

The next day I received a letter from Perpetual and another poem. The poem was another masterpiece.

Vaporous clouds hide the mountain,
clear pond reflects his majesty.

He said he was the mountain whom no one understood, and I was the pond, whose depth of feeling could show him his best qualities. Those two lines were Perpetual’s declaration of love and his wish that I be his wife. I waited three days before telling Magic Gourd that I had decided to marry him. I did not want her to ruin my newfound happiness with her warnings of doom. They came soon enough.

“Are you telling me his gauzy lies have so thoroughly swaddled your judgment?” Magic Gourd said. “Vapors, majesty? What kind of poem is this? He’s placed you in the pond and thinks he’s majestic for doing so. If you think this poem is a masterpiece, that’s proof that you have poetic clouds in your head and can no longer think.”

The following day a letter arrived:

Dearest Reflection of My Soul,

In Moon Pond Village, you will no longer be bothered by the decay of Shanghai. You won’t have to tolerate the daily boatloads of arrogant foreigners with their coarse habits, slabs of meat, demands, and insults. You won’t have to entertain men with rootless morals. There are no conniving madams, no cutthroat competitors.

In my home village, it is peaceful. You will be with like-minded people. Every evening, you will be able to see the sunset at the moment of its blazing glory against a pink sky that is not obscured by columned buildings built by foreigners.

Imagine it, my darling, together we will have all the riches we need, the beauty of mountains, pond water, and sky that inspired the poems I wrote for you. You will have the respect of being Wife in a scholar household, with five generations of family under one harmonious roof.

Ours will be a simple life, to be sure. You are used to one that is more exciting. But I feel there is more to all that I have said so far. It is what I would give you, far more than the equal of what you have given me when you moved me beyond grief and into joy. I will shower you with poems in praise of you, which I will read just before you fall sleep and upon waking, when we will share each new day as the beginning of love.

Magic Gourd raised one eyebrow. “He certainly has the wooing words. So effortless. And the quiet village life he brags about—
oyo!
—I never knew there were so many advantages to boredom in the backwaters! Of course, those five generations will keep you on your toes. So many people to please, so many arguments, just like a courtesan house. And you’ll be busy lighting incense and bowing all day long to revere ten generations of continuous scholars. Their altar table must be ten meters long. Don’t give him an answer.”

“I already did. I have agreed.”

“Then you’ll have to go back to him and say you now disagree.”

“Why do you think you can decide my life?”

“Because I talked to Mansion today. I asked about Perpetual’s business. He said he didn’t know if he had a business, since he never talked about one. I asked what he knew about his family. He said he didn’t know them at all, only that Perpetual was his second cousin by way of his mother’s brother whose wife was the sister of one of Perpetual’s aunt. Mansion said his mother might have known more about the family, but she had died long before meeting Perpetual. I asked if he knew anything about Perpetual’s dead wife. He was surprised to hear that Perpetual even had a wife. He had never mentioned her. Mansion then said that men don’t think to ask these kinds of questions of their relatives. It would be like accusing them of hiding something. And that’s exactly what I think Perpetual is doing.”

She could not change my mind. Who would I become if I did not take this chance? What would remain of my self-esteem? Waiting for something better was a luxury of young girls. I had a chance to keep my self-respect and to also have respect from others. I could pass the days without worry over where I would live the next month or the next year or when I was old. I would have the leisure to sit in a garden and reflect on my life, my character, and my memories of Edward and Flora. I could form opinions and share them as a peer with my husband. No man was perfect. I was not perfect. We two would come together with our faults, and together we would learn to forgive ourselves and accept inadequacies. We would come with our pain and console each other. We would bring our individual hopes, some impossible, some sentimental, and we would find those we could share and fulfill, perhaps even with a child. If he did not have great wealth, we would still have like-mindedness, which cannot be purchased. And we would have love, not infatuation, not what I had with Edward, but one that would be our own. That love would endure and enable us to hold each other through whatever troubles might come.

I appreciated all that Magic Gourd had done for me over the years. She had been like a mother to me. But I didn’t need her approval. She had already threatened she would not accompany me to my husband’s home. Her threats over the years had usually proved false. But this time, she might actually make good on it when she learned, as I recently did, that Perpetual’s family home was in a little village called Moon Pond, and it was three hundred miles away.

CHAPTER
10

M
OON
P
OND
V
ILLAGE

From Shanghai to Moon Pond Village
1925
Violet

Summer heat poured into my body and rose from my face like a damp fever, turning the dust on my face into tears of mud. Then rain came once again and diluted the tears, softened the roads and deepened the ruts, until, once again, we were stuck.

We had started on our journey to Moon Pond three weeks ago. Perpetual had said he would accompany us to make sure we were safe and comfortable. But just days before we were going to leave, he had been called away from Shanghai. He had business somewhere in the south, important matters, he said. He would take a different
route to get to Moon Pond, and with luck he might arrive even before we did. We would be perfectly safe traveling alone, he had assured us. The way there was easy and he had never heard of problems with bandits or anything like that. “The worst that can happen,” he had said, “is that you’ll be bored.”

He was right. I was already weary of travel and wondered how I could endure more. We had been moving ever west and inland along a zigzag route no devil would want to follow—past cities, then county seats, and later, smaller and smaller market towns, until there were no trains or trucks, no steamers or tenders, nor barges or poled fishing boats that could take us from one fork to the next. At the last river town, Magic Gourd found a cartman waiting for fools at the dock. He had an honest face and called himself Old Jump, a name that promised he had much industrious experience. He claimed he had the best carriage in five counties, one that had belonged to a warlord. She bargained for the prized carriage, sight unseen, which came with two donkeys, an extra cart, the man’s services, and the shoulders of two strong men, who happened to be his addle-minded sons. And now we were jiggling and bouncing over ruts and potholes on the spring-coiled banquette of a rich man’s carriage—a broken-down seat that had been yanked out of its high social standing and roped onto a mule cart with a tattered canopy of oilcloth and moth-eaten silk. The cartman still insisted that the contraption was indeed the best, and that Magic Gourd should walk through all five counties if she thought he was lying.

Each morning she cursed Old Jump and his two sons anew for faults besides his dishonesty—such as smiling when there was no reason to do so other than to mock her. “They’re the kind of idiots who live in a place named after a pond,” she said to me. “You have no idea what village life is like, Little Violet. You might change your mind, but that’s all you’ll be able to change. Women kill themselves in places like that, because there’s no other way to escape.”

Today the wind was blowing, and to keep out the dust, she wore a scarf around her neck and face. With just two squinted eyes showing, she looked like one of the mummy-wrapped walking dead. The wind grew stronger and whipped away the scarf. Only moments before, the sky had been filled with cauliflower-headed clouds. Now there was a sea of churning black mushrooms. I had thought we were leaving trouble behind, but maybe we were catching up to it. There were already many signs that we should turn back. The day before yesterday, a cartwheel had come loose, and it took two hours to repair. Another delay. Yesterday it appeared that a donkey had gone lame. It refused to move for several hours. The wind blew my hair loose and across my face, and raindrops the size of leaves fell on our heads. Before we could jump down to take shelter under the cart, lightning cracked the yellow-green fields of rice. The thick grass swayed in one direction and then the other, as if the field were a living creature, heaving deep breaths as it changed yellow to green. With another bright crack, rain poured all at once, and washed my dirty face and soaked my clothes. In minutes, the downpour softened the ruts and deepened them, so that when we tried to move, we sank and were stuck. Edward had written about a similar predicament in his travelogue. He used boards and swung them like a clock dial, then fell face forward into the mud. I laughed out loud at the memory, which made Old Jump think I was belittling his efforts to extricate us.

Magic Gourd pulled her foot out of her shoe, then her shoe out of the mud. “This may be your fate, but why is mine tied to it? What wrong did I commit to you in a past life? Tell me, so I can make amends and then be on my way. I don’t want to come back as your donkey in my next life and have you staring at my ass telling me to go faster.”

When we were finally on our way, she said, “Why should we hurry to get there? To meet a bunch of country bumpkins with literati pretensions?”

B
EFORE WE LEFT
Shanghai, Magic Gourd threw up all sorts of worries to make me reconsider.

“They’ll be Confucian down to the tips of their fingers,” she said, “the same ones that will yank out your hair when you’re slow to obey. You’ll have to revere each member of the family in proper order and with the right amount of obeisance from old to young. And your position will be at the bottom with the chickens. You think Mother Ma was cruel? Wait until you work like a slave for a mother-in-law! You can’t even imagine it. I lived through it, just barely. My sweet-talking rascal said I’d be free of worries through old age and into heaven. He did not say I would make a detour first to hell in his ancestral village. I couldn’t endure it even one month. I said to myself, Why should I die for this idiot’s mother? I’d rather be a streetwalker than a concubine.”

“I’ll be the wife, not a concubine.”

“Oyo!
You think they’d treat you any better, a fancy woman from Shanghai with your American face? Look down at those big flapping feet of yours. People from the countryside will be shocked to see them. And those lizard-green eyes. They’ll think you’re a fox-maiden. They’ll pounce on every mistake you make. You’ll have to swallow being unjustly accused, speak sparingly and never complain, endure gossip about you without showing anger, and agree heartily that the old ways are best.” And then she said in a false simpering voice: “Yes, Mother-in-law, you are wise to slap me so I can learn.” Her hands imitated mincing steps going backward in retreat. “You better practice now.”

Surely there were some mothers-in-law who were either kind or stupid. And even if Perpetual’s mother turned out to be cruel, I could gradually change whatever I did not like. I was clever. It would simply take time.
Besides, a mother-in-law could not live forever. My biggest worry was boredom.

For my role as Perpetual’s wife, I went to the tailor and asked him to make me the proper attire of a scholar’s wife and capable daughter-in-law.

“A wife!
Oyo!”
he crowed. “You must have put the jealous worm in every courtesan’s stomach. I’ve made clothes for very few who graduated to a position like yours.”

“I’ll be living in their countryside estate in An-hwei—the ancestral home of a scholar family. Ten generations. Did you know that many famous scholars come from An-hwei? It may not be as glamorous as Shanghai, but it will be civilized, more like a scholar’s retreat. The clothes should not be too fancy or modern. No Western touches like last season’s clothes. I am guessing they are a bit traditional out there. Of course, that does not mean my clothes have to be hideously old-fashioned.”

“I will make them look more historic in style—like the clothes of heroines in romantic novels.”

“Don’t use the style of the tragic characters,” I said. “I don’t want to wear a memorial to their bad fate.”

The tailor made four fancy jackets, one for each season. The work was as fine as usual, the silk was the best, smooth and not slippery, glossy but not shiny. But they lacked, in my opinion, any hint of the historic. They were dowdy, like the clothes that faithful widows wore so as to not incite lust, so voluminous that two more of me could have fit inside them. The tailor assured me I looked the epitome of a lady of noble birth. He also made three simple costumes for daily wear, without embroidery. The winter jackets had a silk padding, instead of thick cotton. The summer clothes had a cotton lining as fine as baby hair, and the halter underneath was of the same light cloth. The placket was plain. The shape of the jacket was similar to what I had had made years ago in a style Magic Gourd had called “breezy.” It fit more tightly at the top and widened toward the bottom. And the slits on the sides ran past my waist and were loosely held together with small frog clasps. The clothes were still sedate in appearance and would be suitable for a life of repose and garden reverie. At the last minute, I packed a few of my
chi-paos,
choosing ones without too high a collar or too long a side slit. It might turn out that Moon Pond Village was less of a backwater than I thought.