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?”
BEFORE 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.
Perpetual had chosen my new name the night before he left on his business trip: Xi Yu, “Fine Rain,” taken from the famous lines of the Tang poet Li Shangyin, whom we both admired. The choice suggested that I was from a family of literati, which, in some respects, was true. My Western mother had been educated in America, and she and tutors had schooled me to be literate in both Chinese and English. We would not, however, explain that to his family. I later cursed when I remembered that Li Shangyin was famed for romanticizing illicit love. If his family was scholarly, they might recognize the origins of the name. It was too late to tell Perpetual we had to choose another.
Beyond the unsuitable name, I worried about his family’s reaction to my slightly Western appearance. Perpetual had told me he would think of a way to make it acceptable. If they had objections, I would surely be able to win them over. I had supplied him with the made-up lineage of the Manchu family distantly related to royalty and from a northern part of China, where a thousand years ago invaders of all races galloped back and forth. To bolster the story, Magic Gourd dyed my hair black.
Just when I had solved one problem, Magic Gourd threw up another: “His mother will wonder why you are so old and never married. For me, it is easy. I’ll say I’m a widow to an honorable bureaucrat who never took bribes, and hence, as a woman of modest means, I have led a traditional, quiet, and mournful life. As virtue requires, I have never given in to men tempting me to remarry.”
“You’ll have a hard time convincing them that’s true if you can’t control your temper and foul mouth.”
“And you better not say you’re a widow. You’ll also have to explain your relationship to me.”
“Mother and daughter?” I said, and wai
ted for her to cite one of her fluctuating ages.
“Chh! How could I be old enough to be your mother? We are only twelve years apart. I’ll be your older sister instead.” She quickly corrected herself. “That is, if I decide to go with you. I don’t recall whether you actually asked.”
This had been an ongoing accusation because of my having stupidly said to her: “Where else would you go?”
She accused me of handing her pity for a beggar. I said I had already told Perpetual I could not possibly go alone to his village without her as my companion—companion, not beggar. She said a companion could be anyone—a cat, even. I might find many companions in my new home.
“You are going there to be Perpetual’s wife. You have a purpose. If I serve no purpose, I shouldn’t come. I don’t want to go all the way there and discover that. I can make my own way in life. You don’t have to pity me.” A few minutes later, she said, “But if there is a reason and I decide to go, I’ll need a name as well.” She said aloud the possibilities. Some were coquettish, others were too literary for her level of education. She finally chose Wan Xia, “Dusk Glow,” which, in my opinion, was ridiculous. There was nothing about her that gradually faded. “Lightning” or “Thunderstorm” would have suited her better.
Magic Gourd had waited until the day before we were due to leave to come up with her face-saving reason for accompanying me: “Little Violet, I just heard something terrible from one of the maids. She worked for a Chinese scholar family about twenty-five years ago. An American girl became the eldest Chinese son’s concubine. He brought her home and his mother treated the girl like a slave. No matter what the American girl did, she could not please anyone in the family, including her husband. Soon after joining the household, her mother-in-law beat her to death, and no one did a thing about it. The American side said they could not interfere in Chinese family matters, and it was the reason they discouraged Americans from marrying Chinese. The Chinese side said she deserved it because she was insolent. It’s the truth! She died because of American insolence in her blood and there was no one there to protect her.”
She waited for my reaction. I had told her that story years ago. I overheard my mother and Golden Dove talking about it. But I knew what I was supposed to say. “Ai-ya! I’m so glad you’re coming with me! You must protect me against anything like that happening. You’re willing to do that for me, aren’t you?”
ON OUR JOURNEY, Magic Gourd often gave me sisterly wisdom that would be useful in adjusting to my new life.
“Soon you won’t need that book you’re reading. You’ll be busy embroidering handkerchiefs until your eyes dry up and go blind. And forget about eating what you want and when you want. There’s no restaurant in those backwaters, no runners to get what your tongue desires. You can’t send the soup back to the kitchen just because it’s a little oily. What you’ll get is yesterday’s food that nobody touched because it was already rotten. And here’s the worst. You’ll have to rise at dawn every day. The only times you’ve seen the sunrise is when you haven’t yet gone to bed. That’s life in the countryside. I remember.”
She was interrupted by the guffaws of the two sons who had been telling jokes. “… That idiot from Dog Tail Village believed the conniver, paid two cents for flying feathers, and jumped off a cliff. The idiot said he doubted the feathers would work, but he didn’t want to waste two cents.”
The old cartman rushed over and beat his sons with a crop. “I’ll crack your heads open and take out whatever shit and piss are in your brains that makes you too stupid to understand what it means to work.”
“You see!” Magic Gourd said. “That’s the kind of vulgar talk you’ll hear from now on.”
Magic Gourd had gone mad. It was as if she had an unreachable itch, she could not stop digging up warnings and stories of suicidal escape, and soon I would lose my mind as well.
“We had so much freedom in Shanghai,” I heard Magic Gourd say in a wistful voice. She started up with the same arguments she had made when we were in Shanghai, the identical words: “You should have taken my advice and used your savings to start your own house. We could have gone to another city where the rent was cheaper, and with little competition. But instead, you wanted to become a respectable wife. Did you give him all your money? What about your jewels? And for what? To be respectable in a place where hermits go to die! With our two brains, we could have thought of something—”
“Two brains? These ideas are brainless, as foolish as my dream of marriage. What would have happened if we had followed your plan? If we failed, what would become of you and me? We’re too old to start off on our own. You’re already close to fifty.”
“Wah! Fifty? Now you’re adding years to insult me?”
“If I had stayed in Shanghai, I would have soon been headed for a cheap brothel in the Japanese Concession, where I would have had to spread my legs as soon as a customer called my name. That’s where you were headed before I let you be my attendant.”
Magic Gourd leaned back. “Oyo! You let me be your attendant?” She huffed and lowered herself out of the carriage. “No gratitude! If you don’t want to listen to me, fine. I’ll never speak about this again. I’ll never say anything to you for the rest of my life. You’re a ghost as far as I’m concerned. As soon as we reach the next town, I’ll be on my way back and out of your life. I promise you that. Forever. Do you hear me? Then we’ll both be happy!”
She had often rewarded me over the years with days of silence. Unfortunately, this time, after only two hours, she broke her promise and resumed her harangue.
“One day, you’ll weep over my grave and say, ‘Magic Gourd, you were right, I was stupid. If I had listened, I would not be lying in a cheap shack in Moon Pond letting peasants have a go at me for two cents a poke. I would still be a human being with a name and a mind that remembered who I could have been…”’
I stopped listening. I had already tormented myself with everything she had said—and with even more than that. I had changed my life so many times, had stepped onto the stage so often to create an illusion of love, that I no longer remember what love really was. I looked at the ring Perpetual had given me: one thin band that was so easily crushed. I was traveling three hundred miles to pretend to be someone I was not, to live with a man I had had to convince myself to love. I was chasing after happiness, that false salvation, all the way to a desolate place. I might not find it. And if I did, it might simply be the illusion I had created in my mind, and if I held on to it as real, I would exist only as part of that illusion.
I had once feared this might happen to Little Flora. I used to look at her and Edward’s photographs each night until Perpetual said it bothered him that I might be thinking of Edward while he was making love to me—at any moment—comparing him to Edward, wishing I was with Flora. So I put away the photographs. But I still recited to Little Flora the words that would keep her strong until I found her: “Resist much, obey little.”
AS THE DAYS plodded on, I regretted not having clothes made for suffering in hot sun and pouring rain. From among my simple summer jackets, I had chosen the one I liked best, a green gauze silk. It pained me when the first blotches of dirt appeared on the sleeves. The jacket’s panels looked like funeral banners as the wind whipped them sideways.
Magic Gourd was now in a sentimental mood and was tallying all the comforts and pleasures we were leaving behind: the storytelling halls, the music, the singing, our freedom to laugh, and also our shocking clothes, which had left a wake of envy among women who called themselves respectable. And what about the bets we had made for our patrons at the gambling table and the money we received when the bets were lucky?
“Remember the carriage rides we took with our clients,” she said, “how much fun we had as we rode through the city, waving to pious women making offerings at temples? Remember how we laughed when foreign women scowled and their husbands leered at us. Think of the many men who admired you, swooned over you, and bestowed you with gifts. Thos
e were the days and now they’re done …”
I closed my eyes and pretended to doze.
The cart stopped, and when I opened my eyes, I realized I had indeed been dozing. On the right side of the road was the steep slope of a mountain. On the left was a cliff. About a hundred feet in front, the road was covered by a mudslide that had swept away another cart—only ten minutes before, a boy told us. An entire family of six people went over when their cart became a boat carrying them to death in a waterfall of mud. “You can’t see any of them,” he said, “except for one arm and the top of a head. The arm stopped waving a while ago.” He gestured for us to come look. Everyone did, even Magic Gourd, but I stayed by the cart. Why did I need to see someone else’s bad luck? To feel glad it was not mine? To scare myself into thinking it still might be?
The road was impassable, Old Jump announced. We had to turn back, but he knew of a shortcut that would save us time. We soon learned the shortcut was not even a road, just a path through a rapeseed field and barely wide enough for the wheels of the cart. As we plunged forward, Old Jump praised himself. “You see? What books would tell you where to go?” A few hours later, Old Jump cursed and the donkeys stopped. The path was cut with a zigzag of trenches so that a cartwheel or donkey leg could not avoid slipping in one. We turned around and cut through another field, and hours later, we came upon a blockade of huge boulders that would take ten men to move. We took another route. That farmer had dug a maze of holes with broken clay shards awaiting those who fell in. “Hatred makes men clever,” Jump muttered. We were now three days behind where we should have been, rolling backward because we could not turn the cart around. At this rate, Perpetual would likely arrive at his home before we did. I would prefer it.