Three Souls (37 page)

“Will you remember this when you wake up?” I ask.

“Wake up?” She looks puzzled.

I slip off the rickshaw and follow the threads from my fingers to the edge of the dream.

In the morning, Dali goes to my room. She opens the door as though expecting to see someone inside. She steps over the threshold, removes the cover from the bed, and takes it to her room, where she slips it over her own thin quilt.

***

I can enter anyone’s dreams, but I have to enter my own dream image to be seen and heard. I can only make myself known if people dream about me. Otherwise, I’m as invisible as I am in the real world.

My
yin
soul perches on the railing of the pavilion. My
yang
soul is gazing into the bamboo grove, hands on top of his cane. My
hun
soul is hovering near the roof of the pavilion.

It could’ve been a coincidence. We don’t know whether or not Dali remembered your words,
it says.
Perhaps she just woke up feeling reassured about using your quilt cover.

We need to find out whether you can communicate with the living,
says my
yang
soul.
In a way that they can remember.

And what words do I need to say? Please help me make amends for Hanchin’s death? Burn paper money for him?

One step at a time,
says my
hun
soul.
We don’t know what use dreams can be to a ghost who needs to get to the afterlife. But perhaps they can be of use to a mother who wants something for her child.

But first Baizhen must dream about me.
I guess I can’t put it off any longer.

***

I enter his sleep every night that month. He dreams of Weilan, of playing word games with her in the library, of taking her for strolls along the banks of the canal to watch old men play
go
on stone tables inlaid with black-and-white squares. He dreams of window-shopping in Shanghai, of streets where one block of stores contains more flashing neon signs than all of Pinghu. Finally, on a night when the full moon casts leafy shadows across his bedroom floor, my husband dreams about me.

He’s at school, the elementary school in Pinghu he attended for a few humiliating months. He’s a small boy again, close to tears, cowering at a low desk. A middle-aged man in well-worn tunic and trousers stands over him, slapping a ruler in the palm of one hand.

“I’ll smack your hands again if you don’t get it right,” the teacher shouts. “Can’t you see that the symbol for wood,
mu,
when written twice side by side, means
ling,
forest?”

Now Baizhen is no longer at his desk. The cracked walls of the classroom fade away, replaced by a room lined with bookshelves. He’s in the library at home, with Teacher Liao pointing a long fingernail at characters on a sheet of rice paper. Although the paper is covered in writing, not a single character represents a real word.

“Yes,” says Baizhen, now a grown man. “That’s exactly how Leiyin explained it to me, Teacher. I do remember.”

Teacher Liao looks up toward my dream image, which stands across the table, watching.

“How dare you interfere with my lessons! You’re behaving in a most unseemly way for a woman.”

“Please, Teacher Liao,” Baizhen says placatingly. “My wife comes from a very learned family.”

I waste no time walking into my dream image. I ignore the pins and needles that prick me all over as I enter my shape and I ignore Teacher Liao.

“Baizhen, we must talk about our daughter. You must find her a tutor so she can continue her lessons.”

“But you’re tutoring her,” he says, looking puzzled.

“My husband, it’s your responsibility now to make sure she receives a good education. Please, it’s the most important thing you can do for our child.”

“Yes, I know. You’re right, you always are.” His face brightens. “I know it’s only a dream, Wife, but it’s so good to see you again. I think of you all the time.”

“Can you tell this is only a dream?” Hope rises in me, perhaps he will remember.

“Yes. How can I forget you’ve died? This must be a dream.”

“Then please, remember my words when you wake up. Find Weilan a tutor. Please.”

I hasten to the edge of the room and step out. It seems best to leave before I do any damage.

***

Over the next few days I stay close to Baizhen, watching for signs that the dream has left an impression. He seems thoughtful, and on a number of occasions he opens his mouth to speak to Jia Po when they are alone, but he never says what I’m waiting for. Nor does he dream about me again.

Then one afternoon he ventures into his mother’s sitting room, where Jia Po and Meichiu are sewing by the window, talking together softly. Meichiu is embroidering tigers onto a pattern for baby shoes, and Jia Po is basting long strips of soft cloth into night diapers. Meichiu’s needlework is impeccable.

“Ma, I’ve been thinking.” He clears his throat. “Weilan should go to school.”

She looks amazed, then scandalized.

“The women in this family do not attend the public school.”

“Then I’d like Weilan to have a tutor.”

“Teacher Liao is retired,” says Jia Po. Like the rest of the town, she maintains this fiction to save face for Teacher Liao, who now spends all his waking hours at wine shops. “Anyway, we can’t afford to waste money educating a girl.”

“When it’s time to find a match for her, we’ll have a better chance with a good family for they would value an educated daughter,” he continues, determined.

Meichiu listens to all this silently, her needle bobbing in and out.

“My son, this is a futile discussion,” Jia Po says impatiently. “We can hardly provide a dowry for her as it is. An education will just give her expectations we can’t meet.”

There it was. The problem I had refused to face since the day Weilan was born. No matter how pretty and talented she might be, a woman’s true value is measured by the size of her dowry. Even though the groom’s family has to pay the girl’s family a bride-price, it’s a token amount. It’s the size of the dowry the bride’s family provides that secures her position in her husband’s family. Jia Po knows this better than anyone.

I used to write letters to Gaoyin and Sueyin, asking about good families with promising sons, but I had been deluding myself. Without a dowry, who would want my beautiful girl? She would probably marry into another proud and poor Pinghu family, a family who needed a daughter-in-law able to cook meals frugally and mend tunics so cleverly they could be worn another few years. Russian novels, the Tang classics, and knowledge of English would be worthless.

“Ma.” Baizhen’s voice is gentle but firm. “By the time Weilan is a young woman, she may need to support herself. There are women working in banks and offices, there are schoolteachers and nurses. If she can earn her way, a dowry will matter less.”

I can hardly believe my docile husband is talking back to his mother. He’s dared to bring up the unmentionable: that her granddaughter may have to earn a living. Baizhen has reasoned his way through Weilan’s options in a way I never had. Despite my fantasies of attending university and helping Hanchin set up village schools, I had never actually considered the prospect of a real career. I had pictured living with Hanchin in a lovely house of our own, holding salons for artists, writers, and poets. With what income would we have paid the rent?

“There’s one more thing, Ma. Leiyin’s father left a fund for Weilan’s education, so she could attend boarding school and university. But she’ll never get into a good school if she doesn’t have a tutor to prepare her.”

“He did? But too much education for a girl is a waste.” I can tell Jia Po is wavering. My father, patriarch of the Song clan, had felt it mattered for his granddaughter.

Meichiu is soft and respectful when she speaks.

“My mother reads a little. She’s very good with arithmetic. She helps my father in his business.”

“Your mother married into a family of merchants.” Jia Po speaks sharply, always a little defensive about her own background, despite her family’s tremendous wealth. “The Lee clan does not trade.”

“My mother’s dowry was small, but my father always says he wouldn’t have been as successful without her.” That undertone of steel I’d heard before in Meichiu’s voice. “He couldn’t afford a bookkeeper at first and she kept track of their money. If Weilan can read, write, and do her sums, it won’t hurt her prospects. And if she doesn’t marry, she’ll be able to work and help support our family.”

I can’t believe Jia Po is just sitting there allowing her son and daughter-in-law to offer contrary opinions after she has stated hers so firmly. Then I look at her again, an old woman in a household kept afloat by dowries. Her own huge fortune, so quickly depleted, then my dowry, and now Meichiu’s too.

“Find someone cheap,” she says.

***

With the help of a dictionary, Baizhen composes a letter, copying it out four times before he finally puts his pen to a sheet of fine cream-coloured stationery:

Esteemed Brother-in-Law:

I hope all is well with you and your honoured family. How fondly I recall your last visit to Pinghu.

I’ll keep this letter brief so as not to insult you with my poor calligraphy.

Your dear sister was teaching Weilan to read and write. I’d like our daughter’s education to continue. Can you recommend a tutor who isn’t very expensive? We can’t offer much more than room and board, and no more than two silver yuan per month in wages. Your good opinion is all I require to have confidence in any tutor you recommend.

This isn’t quite what I had hoped for. Baizhen has made it plain that so long as Tongyin endorses the tutor, formal credentials don’t matter. An unqualified tutor costs far less than one with proper training. But will my brother be helpful or will he ignore the request? Does Tongyin even know such a person?

***

“Where’s Old Fong?” Mrs. Kwan demands, eyeing the newcomer up and down.

He’s a solid young man of medium height, legs sturdy as tree trunks. His bushy eyebrows arch above an impertinent smile. A rolled cloth bundle under one arm indicates he’s prepared to stay for a few days.

It’s now summer and in the courtyards the flagstones are still buried under drifts of fallen leaves from the previous year. Normally Old Fong, our last remaining tenant farmer, arrives in early spring, leaving his small plot for a few weeks so he can earn a little extra by tidying up the fall debris. But my funeral and then the wedding disrupted that routine, and then came spring planting. Now that planting time is finished, Jia Po has sent word to Old Fong, asking him to come. But the young man at the door isn’t Old Fong.

“Old Fong is my father. He’s getting too old to walk all the way into town. He says that from now on I’m to do the seasonal gardening.”

“You know what the chores are?”

“Sweep leaves, take them to the compost pile to burn. Pull weeds from all the gardens, take them to the compost pile to burn. Gather fallen branches, break them up for kindling, take them to the kitchen woodpile.” He recites the list of tasks as though he’s memorized it.

“All right. You can sleep where your father sleeps when he’s here.”

Mrs. Kwan points toward a room in the servants’ quarters and tells Dali to give the young man a blanket. Then she alerts Old Kwan that there will be an extra person to feed for the next few days.

“There’s a hole in the roof,” says Dali, handing Fong the blanket. “But as long as it doesn’t rain, you’ll only be cold, not wet. And if you want to burn leaves or twigs in that stove to keep warm, go ahead.”

“Where do you sleep?” he asks, flashing that insolent smile, white, wolfish teeth showing.

At this, Dali turns to leave the room, indignant, but just then Mrs. Kwan returns from the kitchen.

“Dali, show the boy where everything is. The garden shed, all the gardens, the orchard.”

“I’m too busy, Mrs. Kwan,” says Dali, her lower lip sticking out.

But after a while, I can tell she likes playing the grand lady to a peasant, enjoys pointing out the features of the houses and gardens. Fong saunters beside her, grinning and amiable.

When Fong gets to work, he’s efficient and doesn’t dawdle. He stops only to mop his forehead with a dirty kerchief. He repairs a loose handle on the wheelbarrow without being asked. He doesn’t look up when Mrs. Kwan walks past, but smiles from under those eyebrows at Dali.

***

How can you tell the difference between a dream that is only a dream, and one where the dreamer has real intent?

In Fong’s dream, I see green fields, stacks of harvested wheat, and a small cottage, its walls streaked with soot. I smell manure, urine, and vinegar, odours of despair and desperate poverty. I see an old man and three grown sons. There’s a woman of indeterminate age with callused, knotted hands, the oldest son’s wife. On the dirt floor, several children squabble and scream, naked and runny-nosed.

Then silence. Fong is standing in the doorway of a room in the servants’ quarters, looking at a sleeping woman. He pushes his way into her bed, and the woman’s face is the tired face of his brother’s wife. Her strong legs wrap around his back as he plunges into her again and again.

I move to the edges of the dream, not wanting to see any more.

Then a cry of pain and I look back. The woman turns her head and Dali’s face looks out from behind Fong’s shoulder. She resists, struggling fruitlessly because her hands and feet are tied to the bed, her screams choked by the filthy kerchief stuffed in her mouth. Fong strikes her face, then continues pumping between her legs. When he is finished, he pulls up his trousers and gives her ribs a kick. He picks up his cloth bundle, slips out of the servants’ quarters, and steals past Old Ming’s gatehouse. Fong opens the wicket gate and steps over the threshold into the silent dark street. He is whistling.

I stand in the first rays of morning light, shuddering from the violence of the dream. On the bed, Fong grunts, half awake. His hand moves rhythmically under the thin blanket.