East Wind: West Wind: The Saga of a Chinese Family

  His parents were angry, but we could bear their anger, answering nothing. But my husband said that at last his old father gave up his arguments and fell to weeping silently, and when I heard of that it seemed a piteous thing that a son should make his father weep. If it had been anything except this, except my son, my heart would have weakened in my breast. But my husband is braver than I, and he even bore the pity of his father’s weeping.

  Ah, when we first moved away from his father’s house I reproached him for breaking the honored customs of the past. But now, selfish woman that I am, I do not care that the tradition is broken. I think only of my son. He will be mine—mine! I need not share him with twenty others—his grandparents, his aunts. I, his mother, may care for him; I may wash him and clothe him and keep him at my side day and night.

  Now has my husband recompensed me for everything. I thank the gods that I am married to a modern man. He gives me my son for my own. All my life is not enough to repay my gratitude.

  Daily I watch the rice grow yellow in the fields. The heads are full now and drooping. A little longer under this languorous sun and they will be bursting with ripeness and ready for the harvest. It is a good year in which my son is to be born—a full year, the farmers say.

  How many more days of dreamy waiting?

  I have ceased to think whether my husband loves me. When I have given birth to his son, my husband will know my heart and I shall know his.

  O My Sister, My Sister! He is here, my son is here! He lies in the curve of my arm at last, and his hair is as black as ebony!

  Look at him—it is not possible that such beauty has been created before. His arms are fat and dimpled, and his legs like young oak-trees for strength. I have examined his whole body for love. It is as sound and fair as the child of a god. Ah, the rogue! He kicks and cries to be at the breast, and he has eaten but an hour ago! His voice is lusty, and he demands everything.

  Oh, but my hour was hard, My Sister! My husband watched me with fond and anxious eyes. I paced before the window in my joy and agony. They were cutting the ripe grain and laying it in rich sheaves upon the ground. The fullness of the year—the fullness of life!

  I gasped at the snarling pain and then exulted to know that I was at the height of my womanhood. Thus I gave birth to my first-born son! Ai-ya, but he was a sturdy one! How he forced the gates of life into the world, and with what a mighty cry did he come forth! I feared to die with the pain of his impatience, and then I gloried in his strength. My golden man-child!

  Now has my life flowered. Shall I tell you all, that you may know how complete is my joy? Why should I not say it to you, My Sister, who have seen thus far my naked heart? It was like this, then.

  I lay weak and yet in triumph upon my bed. My son was at my side. My husband entered the room. He approached the bedside and reached out his arms. My heart leaped. He wished for the old custom of presentation.

  I took my son, and I placed him in his father’s arms. I presented him with these words,

  “My dear lord, behold thy firstborn son. Take him. Thy wife gives him to thee.”

  He gazed into my eyes. I was faint with the ardent light of his regard. He bent nearer to me. He spoke,

  “I give him back to thee. He is ours.” His voice was low and his words fell through the air like drops of silver. “I share him with thee. I am thy husband who loves thee!”

  You weep, My Sister? Ah, yes, I know—I, too! How else how could we bear such joy? See my son! He laughs!

  PART TWO

  X

  O MY SISTER, I thought that now, since my son is here, forever would I have only joyful words to speak to you. I was triumphant and sure that nothing could come near me to make me sorrowful again. How is it that so long as there are bonds of blood there may be pain come from them?

  To-day my heart can hardly bear its own throbbing. No—no—it is not my son! He has had nine months of life now, and he is a very Buddha for fatness. You have not seen him since he desired to stand upon his legs. Ah, it is enough to make a monk laugh! Since he perceived he could walk he is angered if anyone wishes him to sit. Indeed, in my arms there is not strength enough to bend him. His thoughts are full of lovely mischief, and his eyes dance with light. His father says he is spoiled, but I ask you, how can I scold such a one, who melts me with his willfulness and beauty, so that I am filled with tears and laughter? Ah, no—it is never my son!

  No, it is that brother of mine. I speak of him who is the only son of my mother, he who has been these three years in America. It is he who pours out the blood from my mother’s heart and from my heart like this.

  You remember I told you of him—how in my childhood I loved him ? But I have not seen him now for these many years, and I have heard of him even only a very little because my mother has never forgotten that against her will he left her home; and even when she commanded him to marry his betrothed he would not. His name does not rise easily to her lips.

  And now he is disturbing the quiet of her life again. He is not satisfied that he has already disobeyed his mother gravely in the past. Now he must—but see, here is the letter! It came a day ago by the hand of Wang Da Ma, our old nurse, who fed us both at her breast when we were born and who has known every affair of my mother’s family.

  When she entered she bowed her head to the floor before my son. Presenting this letter to me she wept and cried out with three deep groans, saying, “Aie—Aie—Aie—”

  Then I, knowing that only catastrophe could cause this, felt my life stop in my breast for a second’s space.

  “My mother—my mother!” I cried.

  I remembered how feebly she had leaned upon her staff when I last saw her. I reproached myself inwardly that I had gone to her but twice since the child’s birth. I had been too absorbed in my own happiness.

  “It is not your mother, Daughter of the most Honorable Lady,” she replied, sighing heavily. “The gods have prolonged her life to see this sorrow.”

  “Is my father—” I asked, quick terror changing to anxiety.

  “That honorable one also drinks not yet of the Yellow Springs,” she replied, bowing.

  “Then?” I asked, seeing the letter she had placed on my knee.

  She pointed to it.

  “Let the young mother of a princely son read the letter,” she suggested. “It is written within.”

  Then I bade the servant pour tea for her in the outer room, and giving my son to his attendant I looked at the letter. Its superscription was my name, and the name of the sender, my mother. I was filled with wonder. She had never written a letter to me before.

  When I had marveled for a time, I opened the narrow envelope and drew out the thin sheet from within. Upon it I saw the delicate, studied lines of my mother’s writing-brush. I passed hastily over the formal opening sentences, and then my eyes fell upon these words, and they were the kernel of the letter,

  “Your brother, who has been in foreign countries these many months, now writes me that he wishes to take in marriage a foreign female.”

  Then the formal closing sentences. That was all. But, O My Sister, I could feel my mother’s heart bleeding through the scanty words! I cried aloud,

  “O cruel and insane brother—O wicked and cruel son!” until the maidservants hastened in to comfort me and to beg me remember that anger would poison my milk for the child.

  Then seeing that I was seized with so great a flood of tears that I could not stem it, they sat down upon the floor and wept loudly with me, in order to drain my rage from me. When I had wept myself to calmness and had wearied of their noise, I bade them be silent and I sent for Wang Da Ma. I said to her,

  “Wait yet another hour until my son’s father comes home that I may open the letter before him and know what he would bid me do. I will ask permission to go to my mother. Meanwhile, eat rice and meat for your refreshment.”

  She willingly agreed, and I gave orders that an extra bit of pork be placed before her, taking my comfort in consoling her thus fo
r her share in our family calamity.

  In my room awaiting my husband’s return I mused alone. I remembered my brother. Try as I might, I could not see him as he is now, grown a man, dressed in American clothes, walking fearlessly about the strange roadways of that far country, speaking, perhaps, to its men and women—nay, certainly this, since one woman he loves. I could only look into my mind and remember him as I knew him best, the little elder brother of my childhood, he with whom I played at the threshold of the gates into the courts.

  Then he was a head taller than I, quick to move, excited in speech, eager after laughter. His face was like our mother’s, oval, its lips straight and fine, and the brows clearly marked above the pointed eyes. The older concubines were always jealous because he was more beautiful than their sons. Yet how could he be otherwise? They were but common women, slaves in their youth, their lips full and coarse, and their eyebrows scattered like dog’s hairs. But our mother was a lady of a hundred generations. Her beauty was the beauty of precision and delicacy, full of restraint in line and color. This beauty she had bestowed upon her son.

  Not that he cared for it. He brushed aside impatiently the caressing fingers of the women slaves upon his smooth cheeks, when they flattered him to try to please his mother. He was intent upon his own play. But indeed, he was intense even in play and laughter. I seem to see him always with knitted brows above his play. He was filled with resolution over everything, and he would brook no will over his own.

  When we played together I dared not cross him, partly because he was a boy, and it would not have been seemly that I, a girl, should set my will against his. But I let him have his way most of all because I loved him greatly and could not see him grieve.

  Indeed, no one could bear to see him crossed. The servants and the slaves revered him as the young lord, and even the dignity of our mother was softened in his presence. I do not mean that she ever allowed him actually to disobey her commands, but I think she often restrained herself so that what she commanded of him would be in accord with his wishes. I have heard her bid a slave remove a certain sweet oil cake from the table before he came in, because he loved it and would eat it, and it always made him ill; and lest seeing it he would desire it, and she be compelled to refuse it to him.

  Even as a youth his life was thus made smooth before him. It did not occur to me to mark the difference made between him and me. I did not at any time dream of being on an equality with my brother. It was not necessary. I had no such important part to fulfill in the family as he, the first son and the heir of my father.

  Always in those days I loved my brother above all others. I walked by his side in the gardens, clinging to his hand. Together we stooped above the shallow pools, searching in the green shadows for the particular goldfish we called our own. Together we collected little stones of varied colors and built fairy courts patterned after our own courts, only infinitely small and intricate in design. When he taught me to move my brush carefully over the outlined characters of my first writing book, guiding my hand with his own placed over it, I considered him the wisest of human beings. Wherever he went in the women’s courts, I followed behind him like a little dog, and if he went beyond the arched gate into the men’s apartments where I could not go, I stood patiently there waiting until he returned.

  Then suddenly he was nine years old, and he was taken from the women’s apartments into those of his father and the men, and our life together was broken sharply off.

  Oh, those first few days! I could not live through them without long fits of weeping. At night I wept myself to sleep and dreamed of a place where we were always children and never separated. Ah, it was many a day before I ceased to mope about, seeing every room empty without him. My mother at length feared for my health and spoke to me.

  “My daughter, this constant longing for your brother is unseemly. Such emotion must be reserved for other relationships. Grief like this is fit only for the death of your husband’s parents. Perceive the proportions of life and restrain yourself, therefore. Apply yourself to your studies and to your embroidery. The time has now come when we must fit you seriously for your marriage.”

  Thereafter the idea of my approaching marriage was held always before me. I grew to understand that my life and my brother’s could never go side by side. I did not belong primarily to his family, but to the family of my betrothed. I heeded my mother’s words, therefore, and resolutely applied myself to my duties.

  I remember my brother again clearly on that day when he desired to go to Peking to school. He came into our mother’s presence to ask her formal permission, and I was there. Since he had already obtained our father’s consent, his coming to our mother was only a courtesy. Our mother could scarcely forbid what our father allowed. But my brother was always scrupulous in the observance of proper outward custom.

  He stood before her clad in a thin gray silk gown, for it was summer. Upon his thumb was a ring of jade. My brother is ever a lover of beautiful things. That day he made me think of a silver reed for grace. He held his head drooping a little before our mother, his eyes cast down. But from where I sat I could see his eyes gleaming between the lids.

  “My mother,” he said, “if you are willing, I should like to study further at the university in Peking.”

  She knew of course that she must consent. He knew that she would have forbidden it if she could. But where another would have dallied with complaining and weeping, she spoke at once quietly and firmly.

  “My son, you know it must be as your father says. I am nothing but your mother—I know it. Nevertheless, I will speak, even though I may not now command against your father’s will. I see no use in your leaving home. Your father and your grandfather completed their learning at home. You yourself have had the most skilled scholars in the city to teach you from your childhood. We even procured T’ang, the Learned, from Szechuen to instruct you in poetry. This foreign learning is unnecessary for one in your position. Going to these far cities you imperil your life, which is not fully yours until you have given us a son to carry on the ancestral name. If you could have married first—”

  My brother stirred angrily and shut his fan, which he had been holding open in his left hand. Then he opened it quickly again with a snap. He lifted his eyes, and from under their lids protest leaped out. My mother raised her hand.

  “Do not speak, my son. I do not command yet. I only warn you. Your life is not your own. Take care of it.”

  She bowed her head, and he was dismissed.

  I saw him after that but rarely. He came home only twice before my marriage, and we had nothing to say to each other, and we were never alone together. Nearly always he came into the women’s courts merely to give his mother formal greeting or to bid her farewell, and I could not speak to him freely in the presence of an elder.

  I saw only that he grew tall and erect in bearing, and his face lost some of its youthful delicacy. He lost, too, the slender, childish, drooping grace of his body that in his early years had given him the look almost of a handsome girl. I heard him tell my mother that in the foreign type of school he had to exercise his body daily, and thus it grew in height and thickness and sinew. His hair he cut off according to the new fashion at the time of the first revolution, and it was smooth and black against his lifted head. I saw that he was beautiful. The women in the courts sighed after him, and the fat Second Lady murmured,

  “Ah, he is like his father when first we loved!”

  Then my brother went across the seas, and I did not see him again. He became indistinct in my mind and dimmed by all the strangeness surrounding him, so that I have never again seen him clearly.

  Sitting in my room, awaiting my husband’s return, with the letter from my mother in my hand, I perceived that my brother was a strange man whom I did not know.

  When my husband came home at noon I ran to him weeping, the letter in my outstretched hands. He received me with surprise, saying,

  “But what is this? But what is this?”
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  “Read this—read and see!” I cried, and fell to sobbing afresh to see the look on his face as he read.

  “Stupid boy—foolish—foolish!” he muttered, crumpling the letter in his hand. “How could he do this thing? Yes, go at once to your honorable mother. You must comfort her.”

  And he bade the servant tell the ricksha man to hasten his meal that I might lose no time. When the man was ready then, I took only the child and his attendant and besought the man to run quickly.

  When I had entered the gate of my mother’s house I perceived at once the silence of heaviness over all, as a cloud dims the moon. The slaves went about their business rolling their eyes and whispering, and Wang Da Ma, who had returned with me, had wept as we passed through the streets until her eyelids were thickened with tears.

  In the Court of the Drooping Willows, the Second and the Third Ladies sat with their children. When I entered with my son they could scarce give me greeting before they fell to questioning me eagerly.

  “Ah, the fair child!” cried the plump Second Lady, laying her pretty fat fingers against my son’s cheek and smelling his little hand in caress. “A little sweetmeat, thou!—Have you heard?” She turned to me with important gravity.

  I nodded. I asked,

  “Where is my mother?”

  “The Honorable First Lady has remained in her chamber these three days,” she replied. “She speaks to no one. There she sits in her chamber. Twice daily she comes forth into the outer room to command the ordering of the household and to give out rice and food. Then she returns again to her chamber. Her lips are set together like the lips of a stone image, and her eyes make us turn away. We dare not speak to her. We do not know her thoughts.

  “You will tell us what she says to you?” She coaxed me with nods and smiles, but I shook my head, refusing her curiosity. “At least leave us the little precious to play with,” she added.