The Valley of Amazement (51 page)

The maid brought lunch, but I was not hungry. Although Pomelo had an honest face and open way of speaking, I didn’t know how I could trust anyone in this house. As she spoke I listened with one ear attuned to lies.

Like me, when she arrived from Shanghai, Perpetual was not there. The coward did not want to be present when she learned the truth. When he finally arrived, he told her that he truly thought his wife would have been dead by then. She would not last much longer, he assured her, and soon, he said, Pomelo would be his rightful wife.

“Why did I believe him?” she said. “We courtesans are experts at spotting men’s outward lies and half-truths. They leave out facts, the most important ones. We can still see through them. But with Perpetual, I was fooled. Why was that? When I came here, Azure really was ill. He took me to her room. There I saw a woman who looked like a skeleton. She lay motionless on the bed, and her eyes were open, staring upward like a dead fish. Her skin was pulled over her bones like a shroud. I was both horrified and happy that what Perpetual had said was true. Azure would soon die. Yet, I thought it odd that he did not go to her side and speak a few tender words. Hadn’t he talked about their love as their reunion from past lives? What was it he had said about their fate? Their spirits were like twin constellations, fixed in the sky and eternal! That was it. He knew he was going to be devastated without her, so he had to prepare by pretending she was already gone. Imagine that! My heart was so wide open, I would have believed him if he had said he was the God of Literature and I the lowly Milking Maiden.”

Pomelo learned over time that Perpetual had twisted the truth to its opposite in nearly everything about her. Bit by bit, the real facts came out. From the age of ten, he had been shackled to a marriage contract, unbreakable because of the large dowry paid. His family needed the money. What does a ten-year-old boy know about marriages, dowries, and who his bride behind the veil might be? Perpetual was sixteen when he first saw her, and he was aghast that she was a scrawny woman ten years older than he, with one squinty eye and a wide mouth whose upper row of teeth leaned out. The lower row was as crooked and discolored as the kernels in a bad ear of corn. He was angry—not at his family for taking the dowry—but at Azure for being ugly. He went to his wife’s room only to perform his breeding duties. “Once she gave birth to our son,” he told Pomelo, “I no longer had to seed the furrow.” Thereafter, he traveled to other villages and satisfied himself with prostitutes.

“Furrow!” Magic Gourd said. “What kind of man uses an expression like that for the mother of his child? A donkey ought to seed his ass!”

“He told me he grieved as a chaste man for three years.” Pomelo said.

“With Violet, it was five,” Magic Gourd said, and snorted. I did not appreciate her letting Pomelo know I was even more of a fool.

“When I came I knew none of this. I could not tell how old Azure was or what she looked like. She was an apparition hanging on by a fingernail. But it was strange, very uncomfortable to see how little feeling Perpetual had for her. He never went to her room and I did not remind him of his years of being chaste. Like him, I was waiting for Azure to die, which I was sure would happen the next week, then the one after that.”

Every few days, Pomelo had gone to the room to see how much more flesh had fallen off Azure’s bones, whether her eyes were still moist or were dull and flat, signaling death had come.

“It was like staring at an old tortoise that never moved,” she said. “I would have had sympathy for her if she weakened more each day until her face turned gray and she died. But she was the same every time I saw her. It made me so mad.”

One day, Pomelo said, she decided to settle into her role as Wife sooner than later. She went to Azure’s room and took a tally of Azure’s furniture and other belongings. She wrote down what she wanted and what she did not, talking aloud as she criticized the jewelry or clothes. “Cheap stuff. This would make a beautiful woman look hideous. She sat before the mirror of the vanity table, and pinched her cheeks to make them rosy and healthy-looking. She practiced her facial expressions, which she then could pull out as needed—agreeable, trusting, willing, dutiful, pleased, and grateful. She put extra effort into looking enamored. She opened a drawer and took out a necklace that had been in the family for hundreds of years, a mosaic of pearls, rubies, and jade set
into linked curved bars, with a large pendant of pink topaz. She draped it around her neck and looked in the mirror. It was crude in design and the stones were not the best quality. But it was the family heirloom that each generation of wives had worn.

Just as she reached to undo the clasp, she heard someone calling her. “Second Wife, Second Wife.” It was a raspy whisper, like that of a ghost. She nearly jumped out of her skin, thinking that Azure was using her last breath to curse her for wearing the necklace before she died. But then Azure spoke again, and her lips actually moved. “He can be cruel,” she said to Pomelo. “He cannot help it. He has a sickness in his brain. You should escape before you suffer from it.”

Pomelo felt a chill run through her, because she half-believed that Azure was speaking truthfully. What reason did a dying woman have to lie? If he were indeed sick in the head, she would cure him of that after Azure died. But Azure did not die. Pomelo gave her reason to live. She was not a weak twig that could be easily snapped off. Her strength lay in her love for her son. She did not want her son to love a former courtesan as his mother. And she did not want him to become like Perpetual. He had his father’s nature, but she would make sure he did not have his character. She wanted a son who would return the Sheng family to glory. And so Azure began to eat again. In a week’s time, she could sit up and speak. In another week, she could stand in the courtyard and imitate bird songs. While ill, most of her teeth had further rotted and fallen out. She had them all removed and put in large and straight false teeth, which made her look quite fierce, especially when she smiled. She was strong, not just in body and teeth, but also in her will. She no longer bowed to other people’s wishes, not even Perpetual’s. Her mother-in-law was already dead, and Azure ruled the house unchallenged. One thing that Perpetual claimed about her was true. She was smart. She could discuss matters with the same reasoning as a man. And she had three other great advantages over everyone else in the house. The first was her family, who lived in a town fifty miles away. They were wealthy, and Perpetual depended on regular sums from them for the expenses of the house and his own spending money. The second was her son, the firstborn of the generation. Her son would inherit her family’s wealth and she could use that fact to make Perpetual yield to her will. Her third advantage was her ability to think clearly, without becoming insane with jealousy or made stupid by beautiful lies. She did not weaken to his charms.

Pomelo had given us the gift of knowledge. And it was all bad. We shared an alliance based on the same betrayal. We had led sophisticated lives in Shanghai. We spoke the same language, and we had known our share of charming men. We had been enamored of some, and we each had one great and devastating love before we met Perpetual. With Perpetual, we had been caught in the same trap, chased by our own fear into what we thought was the safety of an ideal arrangement and lofty existence at a scholar’s retreat. We had been equally foolish, and so we could be truthful with each other at times. But it was not with complete trust. We had both been tricked too often by too many people.

Without money, we were living in a prison. Magic Gourd and I went over Perpetual’s lies matching them to what he had said to us in Shanghai. His so-called cousin Mansion had no doubt also been duped. I wondered who Perpetual really was. Who would I meet when he returned home?

Meanwhile, Azure was the one I had to be wary of. Azure was strong, the one who had spoken to me when I first stood in the courtyard wearing my fancy silk clothes, beaten and dried out after nearly three months of travel. She was the one who had called me a whore. She told Magic Gourd and me to eat our meals on our side of the house. We preferred that as much as she did. We had little to do with the rest of the family: the senile great-grandmother, the melancholy grandmother, the two wives of Perpetual’s dead brothers, and the various brats of those women. Azure did not beat me. But she found ways to humiliate me, and the worst was where she had us live: the storage rooms of the dilapidated north wing, where it was the coldest during winter and the hottest during summer.

B
EFORE
P
ERPETUAL’S ARRIVAL,
I prepared myself for more of his lies. I imagined every excuse he could make. I would cut loose the strings that held those excuses together. I would be businesslike and demand that he provide me with a separate house so that I could be the First Wife of that household.

He arrived a month late, by which time I was so miserable I could hardly leave my bed. I had become Third Wife of Nobody in this desolate part of the world. Where were the scholars, the respect, the peaceful gardens where I could wear my tailored clothes and feel the breeze blow through them? I cursed myself daily. How could I have let this happen to me? I once thought I could meet any adversity. But none of what I knew or thought or believed mattered out here. There was nothing to grab onto. No opportunity was going to pass by here. Magic Gourd tried to boost my spirits, but she, too, was listless in spirit and mind.

I cursed him when he came to my room. I refused to listen. But he knew me in a certain way—the weakest of me. And soon I was willing to take any scrap of an excuse from him as hope that his love for me had been genuine. That would be proof that I was someone important. All of my intelligence, common sense, and resolve were like sand through his fingers. He apologized, begged for forgiveness, and claimed he did not deserve me. I wanted to believe that, so I did. He confessed he had lied but only out of agonizing fear of losing me. He explained that his story about his wife was his way of showing me he could love me with excessive devotion.
He claimed that the feelings he expressed were true, otherwise how could a woman experienced with so many men—hundreds—feel it was also genuine. He said I should hate him for the rest of his days and he would admire the fortitude of my character for doing so. He said he would make me First Wife if he could change the order of the universe decreed by the emperor. He said he would take me back to Shanghai, and buy me a house where I would be his wife—when the day came that he had the money to do so.

Until that time came, he said I would be the First Wife of the north wing. There he would be free to love me as the most desired of all. When he visited me, he fed me an elixir of words, and, for a while, I did not remember that this was where the wind blew through the cracks and the sun was cold. He had said all the things I needed to hear to recover from self-loathing and to restore my sense of importance, and with that in place, my other senses returned. He didn’t love me, I didn’t love him, and never had. But now I was like a bird, my wings once carried on a wind of lies. I would beat those wings to stay aloft, and when the wind suddenly died or buffeted me around, I would keep beating those strong wings and fly in my own slice of wind.

CHAPTER
11

H
EAVEN
M
OUNTAIN

Moon Pond
September 1925
Violet

In Shanghai, Perpetual had declared his love for me with poems, and one of them guaranteed that Moon Pond’s beauty would obliterate any lingering memories I might have of Shanghai. After seven weeks, I had still not suffered any bouts of forgetfulness. In fact, I could not stop thinking about Shanghai and all the possible ways I could escape Moon Pond and return. I should have read Perpetual’s gloomier poems as hints of what awaited me.

I used to wonder why he glorified loneliness, a barren life, and the sentimentality of death. When I came to Moon Pond, I discovered he did not live alone; he had two other wives. He did not choose his poverty; he resented it. And all those high ideas? All along he had wanted wealth, glory, and lavish respect until it overflowed from his gullet. There seemed to be no end to the shocking surprises I was finding out about his character—not to mention what I discovered about the Ten Generations of Scholars. From the moment I arrived, I had a bad feeling I had been duped. Whenever the subject of ancestors or scholars came up, people around me fell silent.

Last week, I learned the truth while searching for my jewelry and money, which Perpetual had confiscated for safekeeping. In a document box at the back of a cupboard, I found Perpetual’s personal account of his family’s history.

When I was nine, my grandfather died of jaundice and was laid out in the reception hall. The corpse of his leathery yellow body frightened me and I feared dying of the same disease. My father took this as an opportunity to teach me a lesson. I paid careful attention. He was a great scholar, who held a high judicial position in the province. If I memorized the Five Classics, he told me, I would soon meet a hermit who would ask for a sip of wine, and upon my giving it, I would become immortal. Thereafter, I studied furiously. Within ten years, I had memorized all of the Classics of Poetry: 60 folk ballads, 105 ceremonial songs, and 40 hymns and tributes. I had also memorized many of the imperial speeches in the
Book of Documents,
a task so tedious it nearly drove me mad.

One day, the Number Six Wife decided to surprise my father with thoughtfulness beyond what had been provided by his other wives. She had found in a trunk the lucky gown worn by each generation of scholars during the imperial examination. She took it to the tailor to repair the frayed sleeve hems. When she told my father what she had done, it was too late. The tailor had discovered under the lining thin layers of silk on which the more difficult portions of the Five Classics had been copied. Unfortunately for my father, a recent rash of cheating on the examination had led to an imperial edict that all cheaters would be beheaded. A few days later, I watched two men lead my father to the middle of the square, which was already crowded by jeering people from many counties. He was known for issuing harsh penalties for minor transgressions, and his unpopularity went far and wide. One soldier kicked my father behind his knees to make him kneel before a pile of our family’s most sacred possessions: scrolls of tribute to the scholars of our family, thousands of our ancestors’ poems, hundreds of memorial tablets and ancestor paintings, and our family altar and its implements for rites. My father was forced to watch these treasures being smashed and set afire, which exploded into flames as tall as trees. My father cried out, “I didn’t cheat. I swear it. I was a poor student and bought the gown at a pawnshop.” I was shocked that even to the end, my father was dishonest. One man held my father’s queue straight up, and the other raised the sword. A moment later, I saw my father’s head roll to the ground and his body fall forward onto the dirt. Our family’s reputation was severed on earth and in heaven. When we returned home, we saw the villagers had set the house on fire, and thieving bastards were stealing furniture and smashing whatever they did not take.