Reluctantly, I turned my eyes to my natal family home. My father had returned from his posting in the capital to perform his filial duties. Bao, my brother of seven years, had married in. Disappointingly, his wife had only succeeded in birthing three stillborn sons. Whether it was from this failure or from a general weakness of character, Bao had taken to spending most of his time with pleasure women along the shores of West Lake. My father didn’t seem perturbed by this, as he and my mother went to the family graveyard on New Year’s Eve to invite the ancestors home for the holiday.
Baba wore his mandarin robes with great dignity. The elaborately embroidered emblem on his chest told anyone who saw him of his rank and importance. He carried himself with far greater assurance than he had when I’d been a daughter in the household.
My mother seemed far less secure. Mourning had caused her to age. Her hair was now streaked with white and her shoulders seemed thin and brittle.
“Your mother still cares for you,” Grandmother said. “This year she will break with tradition. She’s a very brave woman.”
I couldn’t imagine my mother doing anything that strayed from the Four Virtues and Three Obediences.
“You left her childless,” Grandmother went on. “Her heart fills with grief whenever she sees a book of poetry or catches the scent of peonies. These things remind her of you and are a heavy burden on her heart.”
I didn’t want to hear this. What good would it do me? But my grandmother didn’t often attend to my feelings.
“I wish you’d known your mother when she first married into our family,” Grandmother continued. “She was just seventeen. She’d been highly educated and her womanly skills were flawless. It’s a mother-in-law’s duty, obligation, and reward to complain about her daughter-in-law, but your mother did not allow me this gift. I didn’t mind. I had a house full of sons. I was happy to have her company. I came to look at her not as a daughter-in-law but as a friend. You can’t imagine the places we went and the things we did.”
“Mama doesn’t go out,” I reminded her.
“She did in those days,” she countered. “In the years leading up to the fall of the Ming emperor, your mother and I questioned the true nature of a woman’s calling. Was it the traditional womanly arts that she so excelled at or was it her adventurousness, her curiosity, and her beautiful mind? Your mother, not your father, was the first to take an interest in the women poets. Did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“She felt it was the responsibility of women to collect, edit, anthologize, and critique the work of others like ourselves,” Grandmother continued. “We traveled many places in search of books and experience.”
This seemed far-fetched. “How did the two of you go? Did you walk?” I asked, trying to make her stop her exaggerations.
“We practiced walking in our rooms and in the corridors in the villa,” she answered, smiling at the memory. “We toughened our golden lilies so they wouldn’t hurt, and what pain we still experienced was soothed by the pleasures of what we saw and did. We found men who were so proud of the women in their families that they published their writings to memorialize the domestic bliss in their households, establish the family’s sophistication, and honor their wives and mothers. Like you, your mother stored in her heart all the plunder of her readings, but she was modest in her own writing. She refused to use ink and paper, preferring instead to mix powder with water and then write on leaves. She wanted to leave behind no trace of herself.”
Below us, New Year’s Day arrived. In our ancestral hall, my parents laid out trays of meats, fruits, and vegetables, and I watched as my grandmother’s flesh began to fill out. After the ceremony, Mama took three small rice balls, went to my old room, and left them on the windowsill. For the first time in seven years I was fed. Just three rice balls and I was strengthened.
Grandmother looked at me and nodded knowingly. “I told you she still loves you.”
“But why now?”
Grandmother ignored my question and continued her earlier topic with renewed fervor. “Your mother and I went to poetry parties held under the full moon; we traveled to see jasmine and plum blossoms in bloom; we went to the mountains and made rubbings of stone stelae at Buddhist retreats. We rented pleasure boats and journeyed on West Lake and along the Grand Canal. We met women artists who supported their families with their paintings. We dined with professional women archers and celebrated with other gentry women. We played instruments, drank late into the night, and wrote poetry. We had fun, your mother and I.”
When I shook my head in disbelief, Grandmother observed, “You’re not the first girl not to know her mother’s true nature.” She seemed pleased that she’d surprised me, but her pleasure was brief. “Like so many women in those days, we enjoyed the outer realm, but we knew nothing about it. We employed our calligraphy brushes and had our parties. We laughed and sang. We didn’t pay attention to the Manchus’ southward trek.”
“But Baba and Grandfather knew what was coming,” I cut in.
Grandmother tightened her arms over her chest. “Look at your father now. What do you think?”
I hesitated. I’d come to regard my father as someone without loyalty, either to our Ming emperor or to his only child. His lack of deep feelings for me still hurt, but my emotions hadn’t kept me from observing him. No, not at all. Some perverse place inside me wanted to see him. Watching Baba was like picking at a sore. I turned to look for him now.
In these past few years, my abilities had expanded and I could now see beyond Hangzhou. As part of my father’s New Year’s duties, he ventured into the countryside to visit his lands. Not only had I read the Speed the Plough scene in The Peony Pavilion, I had seen it performed in our family garden. What I saw now was a visual echo. The farmers, fishermen, and silk laborers brought him dishes prepared by the best cooks in each village. Acrobats tumbled. Musicians played. Big-footed peasant girls danced and sang. My father praised his workers and ordered them to provide good harvests of crops, fish, and silk in the coming year.
Even though I’d become disillusioned by my father, I still hoped to discover I was wrong and that he was a benevolent man. After all, I’d heard about our lands and these workers for years. But what I saw was extreme poverty. The men were thin and wiry from their labors. The women had been used up from a lifetime of hauling water, having babies, keeping house, spinning silk, and making clothes, shoes, and meals. The children were small for their ages and dressed in clothes handed down by older brothers and sisters. Many of them also worked; the boys were in the fields while their sisters used their unprotected fingers to unravel silk cocoons in boiling water. For these people, the only purpose in life was to provide for my father and those who lived in the Chen Family Villa.
My father stopped at the house of the headman of Gudang Village. The husband was a Qian, as were all the people who lived in the village. His wife was unlike the other women. She had bound feet and carried herself as though she were once from the gentry class. Her words showed refinement and she did not cower before my father. She held a baby in her arms.
My father tweaked one of the infant’s pigtails, and said, “This one is very pretty.”
Madame Qian stepped back, out of my father’s reach.
“Baby Yi is a girl—another worthless branch on the family tree,” her husband said.
“Four daughters,” my father said sympathetically. “And now this fifth one. You are unlucky.”
I hated to hear those words spoken so bluntly, but were they worse than what I’d experienced? My father had spoken to me with a smiling face but to him, it seemed, I too had been just a worthless branch on the family tree.
Feeling bereaved, I looked at Grandmother.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think he would pay attention to anything beyond his own enterprises.”
She nodded sadly. “This is how it was with your grandfather too.”
Although Grandmother had been visiting me for years, I’d
been careful not to ask certain questions. Partly I’d been afraid of her unpredictable moods, partly I hadn’t wanted to appear unfilial, and partly I didn’t want to know the answers. But I’d held on to my blindness for too long. I took a deep breath and let my questions flow, fearing I might not survive her truths, whatever they were.
“Why don’t you ever bring Grandfather to visit me? Is it because I’m a girl?” I asked, remembering that as a small child he hadn’t cared very much for me.
“He’s in one of the hells,” she answered, in her usual brusque way.
I took this to be her customary wifely rancor. “And my uncles? Why do they not come?”
“They died away from home,” she said, and this time her voice held no edge, only sorrow. “They have no one to clean their graves. They roam the earth as hungry ghosts.”
I shrank into myself. “Hungry ghosts are horrible, disgusting creatures,” I said. “How could we have them in our family?”
“Are you finally asking this question?”
Her impatience was obvious, and I drew farther away. Would she have been this way in the earthly realm, treating me as the insignificant girl I was? Or would she have indulged me with sesame sweets and little treasures from her dowry?
“Peony,” she went on, “I love you. I hope you know that. I listened to you in life. I tried to help you. But these last seven years have left me wondering. Are you only a lovesick maiden, or is there something more inside you?”
I bit my lip and turned away. I’d been right to keep a respectful distance. My mother and grandmother may have been friends, but it seemed my grandmother also saw me as nothing more than a worthless branch on our family tree.
“I’m glad you’re here on the Viewing Terrace,” she continued. “For years I’ve come here to look over the balustrade for my sons. For these last seven years, I’ve had you at my side. They’re down there somewhere”—she gestured with her long water sleeves to the land below us—“wandering as hungry ghosts. In twenty-seven years, I haven’t found them.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died in the Cataclysm.”
“Baba told me.”
“He didn’t tell you the truth.” Her eyes narrowed and she crossed her water sleeves over her chest. I waited. Grandmother said, “You won’t like the story.”
I didn’t say anything, and for a long time neither of us spoke.
“On the day you and I first met here,” she began, “you said that I wasn’t like my portrait. The truth is, I wasn’t at all like what you’ve been told. I wasn’t tolerant of my husband’s concubines. I hated them. And I didn’t commit suicide.”
She gave me a sideways look, but I kept my face impassive and untroubled.
“You have to understand, Peony, that the end of the Ming dynasty was terrible and wonderful at the same time. Society was collapsing, the government was corrupt, money was everywhere, and no one was paying attention to women, so your mother and I went out and did things. As I told you, we met other wives and mothers: women who managed their families’ estates and businesses, teachers, editors, and even some courtesans. We were brought together by a failing world and found companionship. We forgot about our embroidery and our chores. We filled our minds with beautiful words and images. In this way we shared our sorrows and joys, our tragedies and triumphs, with other women across great distances and time. Our reading and writing allowed us to form a world of our own that was very much against what our fathers, husbands, and sons wanted. Some men—like your father and grandfather—were attracted to this change. So when your grandfather got his official posting in Yangzhou, I went with him. We lived in a lovely compound, not as grand as our family home in Hangzhou but spacious and with plenty of courtyards. Your mother often came to visit. Oh, did we have adventures!
“For one of those visits, your mother and father came together. They arrived on the twentieth day of the fourth month. We had four lovely days together, feasting, drinking, laughing. None of us—not even your father or grandfather—gave any thought to the outer world. Then, on the twenty-fifth day, Manchu troops entered the city. In five days, they killed over eighty thousand people.”
As Grandmother told her story, I began to experience it as though I’d been at her side. I heard the clang of swords and spears, the clatter of shield against shield and helmet against helmet, the pounding of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, and the screams of terrified residents as they sought safety when there was none. I smelled smoke as houses and other buildings were set on fire. And I began to smell blood.
“Everyone panicked,” Grandmother remembered. “Families climbed onto roofs, but the tiles crumbled and people fell to their deaths. Some hid in wells, only to drown. Others tried to surrender, but that was a serious miscalculation; men lost their heads and women were raped to death. Your grandfather was an official. He should have tried to help the people. Instead, he ordered our servants to give us their coarsest clothes. We changed into them and then the concubines, our sons, your parents, and your grandfather and I went to a small outbuilding to hide. My husband gave us women silver and gems to sew into our garments, while the men tucked pieces of gold into their topknots, shoes, and waistbands. On the first night, we hid in the dark, listening as people were killed. The cries of those who were not blessed with a quick death, but suffered for hours as their blood ran out of them, were pitiful.
“On the second night, when the Manchus slaughtered our servants in the main courtyard, my husband reminded me and his concubines that we were to safeguard our chastity with our lives and that all women should be prepared to make sacrifices for their husbands and sons. The concubines were still concerned with the fate of their gowns, powders, jewels, and ornaments, but your mother and I did not need to hear this admonition. We knew our duty. We were prepared to do the correct thing.”
Grandmother paused for a moment and then continued. “The Manchu soldiers looted the compound. Knowing they would eventually come to the outbuilding, my husband ordered us onto the roof, a tactic that had already proved fatal to many families. But we all obeyed. We spent the night in the pouring rain. When dawn broke, the soldiers saw us huddled together on the roof. When we refused to come down, the soldiers set fire to the building. We scrambled quickly back to the ground.
“Once our feet touched the earth,” Grandmother went on, “they should have killed us, but they didn’t. For this we can thank the concubines. Their hair had fallen loose. They weren’t accustomed to such rough clothes, so they’d loosened them. Like all of us, they were soaked, and the weight of the water pulled their garments away from their breasts. This, in addition to the pretty tears on their eyelashes, made them so alluring that the soldiers decided to keep us alive. The men were herded to an adjacent courtyard. The soldiers used rope to bind us women together around our necks, as if we were a string of fish, and then they led us into the street. Babies lay on the ground everywhere. Our golden lilies, which your mother and I had tried so hard to strengthen, slipped in the blood and smashed organs of those who’d been trampled to death. We walked next to a canal filled with the floating dead. We passed mountains of silks and satins that had been looted. We reached another compound. When we walked in, we saw perhaps a hundred naked women, wet, muddy, crying. We watched men pull women out of that quivering mass and do things to them—in the open air, in front of everyone, with no regard to propriety.”
I listened in horror. I felt terrible shame as my mother, my grandmother, and the concubines were told to strip and the rain pelted their naked bodies. I stayed by my mother’s side as she took the lead and wormed her way safely into the center of the crowd, all the while attached by the rope around her neck to her mother-in-law and the concubines. I saw that women in these circumstances no longer lived in the human world. Mud and excrement were everywhere, and my mother used them to smear the faces and bodies of the women in our family. All day they held on to one another, always shifting to the center as women from the edges were grabbed,
raped, and killed.
“The soldiers were very drunk and very busy,” Grandmother went on. “If I could have killed myself, I would have, because I’d been taught to value my chastity above all else. In other parts of the city, women hanged themselves and cut their own throats. Others locked themselves in their chambers and set fire to the rooms. In this way whole households of women—babies, little girls, mothers, grandmothers—burned to death. Later they would be venerated as martyrs. Some families would argue over who would claim this or that dead woman for her virtuous suicide, knowing of the honors that would be bestowed on them by the Manchus. We are taught that only in death can we preserve our virtue and integrity, but your mother was different. She was not going to die, and she wouldn’t allow herself or any of us to be raped. She made us crawl through the other naked women until we reached the back edge, and then through sheer will she convinced us to attempt an escape through the rear of the compound. We made it and were once again outside. The streets were lit by torches, and we scurried together like rats from one dark alley to another. We stopped when we thought it was safe, freed ourselves of the rope, and stripped the dead and clothed ourselves. Several times we dropped to the ground, grabbing loose entrails to drape over our bodies and pretending to be corpses. Your mother insisted that we return to find your father and grandfather. ‘It is our duty,’ she kept saying, even as my courage wavered and the concubines cried and whimpered.”
Grandmother paused again. I was grateful. I reeled from what I was seeing, feeling, and hearing. I fought back the tears I felt for my mother. She’d been so brave and suffered so much, and she’d kept it all a secret from me.
“On the morning of the fourth day,” Grandmother continued, “we reached our compound and miraculously found our way to the girls’ lookout pavilion, which your mother was sure would be unattended. We used it as girls and women have before and since, to see but not be seen. Your mother held her hands over my mouth to muffle my screams when we saw my sixth and seventh sons hacked to pieces with sabers and then hauled out to the street in front of the compound, where they—like so many others—were trampled until there was nothing left but mush and fragments of bone. My eyes were parched by the horror.”