The Valley of Amazement

  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.

  BEFORE PERPETUAL’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

  HEAVEN MOUNTAIN

  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 near
ly 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.

  No matter how much I studied, I would be branded as a son whose ancestors were charlatans. No hermit would come asking me for a sip of wine. But I refuse to inherit shame. I dare anyone to spit on the ground as I walk by. I will rebuild our house and our reputation. I will rise on my own and create a beginning for the next ten generations. I will receive what I deserve.

  This was the lofty reputation I had chased after. Like his father, he gave out more lies to cover the first ones. He justified them. “If I had told you the truth,” he had said, “would you have come?” Of course not. And now that I was here, I would not help him start the next ten generations of liars. I wouldn’t stay. Leaving, however, was proving difficult. The compound was like a prison, and the village was a larger one. Damn Perpetual. He knew we would be trapped.

  From our first week in Moon Pond, Magic Gourd and I had been scouting for escape routes. We walked the length and width of Moon Pond in half an hour. The market square turned out to be nothing more than an open yard of beaten earth. By the time we arrived in mid-morning, the farmers had already packed up their goods for the day. There was only one lane of commerce—stalls whose tradesmen provided the same service: the repair of pots, buckets, chisels, saws, and sickles, everything a farmer needed for ceaseless toil. The only other goods for sale were for funerals, the best of which was a paper mansion the size of ten men. Its faded colors and tattered edges made it evident that it had been on display for many years. The road we took to reach Moon Pond was half a day from the village at the other end of the valley. If we tried to take it, we would be spotted before we had gone a hundred yards. There were paths that led up into the mountains—to terraced rice paddies and the forests where old women chopped kindling and brought down a bushel on their bent backs. We saw the farmers trudging up early in the morning before the light of dawn and trudging back in the last light of dusk. Some footpaths became waterfalls with sudden rains. We noted them all and crossed off our list those that offered no escape. By the second week, we realized we needed clothes so we would not attract attention. I traded one of my fancy jackets and skirts for four pairs of plain blue tops, pants, and caps that the village women wore. Who knows where the woman who did the trade would wear her new fancy jacket? “She can put it on and enter a dream of being in a place where jackets like this are worn every day,” Magic Gourd said. “That’s where we’re going as well. A dream.” By the third week, it seemed like there were no other ways to leave without hiring a man with a cart. And we had no money to do that.

  When Perpetual returned from a business trip, he offered to take me on an autumn walk to see a scenic spot that had inspired many of his poems. I was eager to go. It would enable me to look for other paths and roads. Before we went, Perpetual recited aloud one of the poems that the scenic spot had inspired, so I would fully appreciate the importance of where he was taking me.

  “Where the hermit wears the shroud of night,

  A half-full wineskin is his only friend.

  No greater is he than the boulder on which he reclines,

  Knowing that with the erosion of time,

  Both he and the boulder will fall

  The same distance, he to his death.

  And the stars will still shine

  Indifferently, as they do tonight.”

  The poem put me in a wary mood.

  To get to the mountain path, Perpetual took me down the main road through the village. It was an odd choice. I could see from the road an elevated trail that cut into the foothills and went in the same direction. Surely it would have made a better choice to induce amnesia in me. But I soon figured out why he took this route. It was the best place to show me off—Perpetual’s newest courtesan from Shanghai. He walked proudly with my arm through his. I observed how much he enjoyed the attention we received. The women gaped and made humorous remarks to each other. The men sucked on their teeth and leered. The villagers never did this when we walked alone.

  Just past the bridge, we finally reached the path that went up Heaven Mountain. After climbing only ten minutes, Perpetual announced we had reached the spot. I surveyed the scenery below: the tiled roofs of houses, rice fields, and small sheds. I told Perpetual I was not tired and that we should walk farther up.

  “The footpath is blocked by mudslides and crumbling cliffs,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Why then did you promise to show me ‘wondrous beauty as we walk in clouds up high’?”

  “We don’t need to walk higher to reach the wondrous heights,” he said. “We can make love right here and you can be as loud as you want. No one will hear you.” He patted his groin. “See what you do to me? My sword is sharp. It’s already risen out of its scabbard and wants to drive its mighty self all the way inside you, with your rump as its pommel.”

  I had to keep from laughing at his poetic attempts to arouse me.

  “Only you give me this urgent need,” he said. “I have never asked Pomelo to come up here.”

  “Pomelo has bound feet,” I said. “She can’t walk up this far.”

  “I had not thought of that. And the fact that I haven’t is proof that I never had the desire to do so. Hurry and take off your dress. I’m in agony waiting.”

  I pointed to the sharp pebbles on the path and said it would make a miserable bed.

  “You Shanghai girls are so spoiled. Turn around then and lean against that boulder with your bottom facing me. I’ll enter you from behind. Are you damp yet?”

  In Shanghai, his approach to sex had been circumspect to the point of bumbling. But the way he talked about sex now was vile. “I have my monthly flow,” I lied. “I was too embarrassed to tell you.”

  ”But you should tell me everything,” he said gently, “always, no matter what it is. We agreed to share all of ourselves—mind, body, heart.” Suddenly, his tone turned dark. “Don’t keep secrets from me, Violet, nothing. Promise me right now.” I nodded to keep him from growing angrier, and he became gentle again. He told me to go down on my knees to service him with my mouth. In moments, he was done.

  As we walked back, he pointed out a few highlights I had failed to appreciate on the way up: a sour crab apple tree, the stump of a former giant tree, mounds of graves pimpling the hillside. I feigned interest while looking down for a cer
tain road that Magic Gourd had just learned about from Azure’s maid. All the maids shared gossip about their mistresses, and since they thought Magic Gourd was my maid, she was fed the same tattletale tidbits of the household. According to the maid, every three or four weeks, Perpetual told Azure he had to rent a cart and pony to go inspect his lumber mill, which, supposedly, was located about twenty miles away. Azure would tell him each time not to inspect another courtesan and bring her home. The maid said she had never seen the town. She had never even been outside Moon Pond. But a manservant, who we all knew was her not-so-secret lover, had offered to take her there one day. She reported that this offer must have been a marriage proposal. Her lover had heard it was easy to get to. “You take the main road through Moon Pond, go just a ways past the bridge, and keep on until you run into another road that’s pretty wide. Head west into the blinding sun and keep at it for twenty miles or until the road stops and, soon, there you are: Wang Town.” According to the manservant, it was a town, not a village, and it even had shops, brothels, and a port where small boats came and went. Whether that was true, he couldn’t say. He had not yet been there. But once or twice a year, someone passed through Moon Pond, either on their way to Wang Town or coming back. They stopped in Moon Pond only long enough for the manservant to dredge as much information as he could about the world beyond the only one he had ever known.

  I could picture those boats. I didn’t care where they went. I would take one of them, any one, as far as it would go. It might be to another town, and in that town there might be other roads, and these might lead to other waterways, other boats. I would keep moving farther away from Moon Pond and closer to the sea, to Shanghai. But to do so, I needed money, which I would not have until I could find out where Perpetual had hidden our jewelry and money. I once told him that I wanted to wear my bracelet, and he said there was no need to put on airs in Moon Pond. It would make me look arrogant, and there was no one here to be arrogant to.