But when she pulled out a candle from her sleeve and lit it outside in daylight, I jumped to my feet. I paced back and forth anxiously, and the air around me swirled in response. I watched in absolute horror as she tore a page out of Volume One and slowly and deliberately placed it in the flame. Ze smiled as the paper crinkled into blackness. When she could hold it no longer, she dropped the tiny shred that remained over the railing. The last of the paper trailed down, burning into nothing before hitting the water.
She tore out another three pages from the book. Again she set them on fire and dropped them over the edge of the pavilion. I tried to run to the bridge, but my bound feet were useless. I fell, scraping my chin and hands. I scrambled back to my feet and hurried to the zigzag bridge. I stepped onto it, made my way to the first turn, and stopped cold. I couldn’t walk wide around this corner. Zigzag bridges were designed this way as a barrier to spirits like me.
“Stop!” I screamed. For a moment the whole world shivered. The carp stilled in the pond, the birds went quiet, and flowers lost their petals. But Ze didn’t even look up. She methodically tore out another few pages and burned them.
I ran, tripping, scrambling, flailing, back to the shore. I shouted across the pond, sending waves against the zigzag bridge and the pavilion, spinning the air in hopes of blowing out the candle. But Ze was wily. She took the candle from the ledge and sank to her knees on the pavilion floor where she’d be sheltered from the breezes and gusts I sent her way. Once she was settled, a new even crueler idea seized her mind. She tore out all the pages from the book, crumpled them, and put them into a pile. She tipped the candle, and then hesitated for a moment, letting the wax drip down onto the wadded sheets. She glanced around, her eyes furtively scanning the shore and the surrounding halls to make sure no one was looking, and then she touched the flame to the paper.
So often we hear about this or that Manuscript Saved from Burning. This wasn’t an accident or even a momentary loss of faith in the quality of the writing. This was a deliberate act committed against me by the woman I’d come to see as my sister-wife. I wailed in agony, as though I’d been set on fire myself, but she didn’t care. I whirled my body and thrashed my arms until spring leaves fluttered down around us like snow. But this was the worst thing I could have done; the frenzied air fed the flames. If I’d been on the pavilion, I would have swallowed the smoke, sucking in all my words. But I wasn’t there. I was on the shore, on my knees, sobbing with the knowledge that the writing that had come from my own hand and been stained by my tears had disappeared into ash, smoke, nothing.
Ze waited on the pavilion until the ashes grew cold and then she brushed them into the pond. She came back across the bridge not with worry or remorse in her heart but with a quickness to her step that made me apprehensive. I followed her back to the bedchamber. She opened the copy of The Peony Pavilion into which she’d transcribed my comments and added her own. With every page she turned, I trembled with fear. Would she destroy this too? She thumbed back to the first two pages that explained the “true” authorship of the commentary. In a movement as sharp, brutal, and quick as the stabbing of a knife, she ripped out those pages. This was worse than when my mother had burned my books. Soon there’d be nothing left of me on earth beyond an undotted ancestor tablet lost in a storage room. Ren would never hear me, and I would be completely forgotten.
Then Ze took the two ripped pages and hid them in the folds of another book.
“For safekeeping,” she said to herself.
With that, I was saved. That is what I felt: saved.
But I was physically and spiritually wounded. In the time it took Ze to perform her wickedness, I became almost nothing. I crawled out of the room. Hand over hand I pulled myself along the covered corridor. When I felt I could go no farther, I dropped over the edge, made myself very small, and slipped under the foundation.
I skittered out two months later to find nourishment during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. There was no roaming for me, no visit to my old home, no trek out to the countryside to see my father’s lands and sample the Qian family’s offerings. I had only the energy to uncoil myself from my hiding place, slither down to the pond, and eat the pellets the gardener dropped in the water for the carp. Then I scuttled back up the bank and once again hid myself in the dank darkness.
How was it that I—who’d been born into privilege, who’d been educated, who was pretty and clever—had had so many bad things happen? Was I paying for misdeeds committed in a former life? Did I go through these things to amuse the gods and goddesses? Or was it merely my fate as a woman to suffer? During the following months, I found no answers, but I began to regain my strength, find my resolve, and once again remember that I, like all women and girls, wanted—needed—to be heard.
The Good Wife
ANOTHER FIVE MONTHS PASSED. ONE DAY I HEARD PEOPLE scurrying back and forth on the corridor above me: rushing to meet guests, calling out propitious greetings, and bearing fragrant offerings on trays and platters to celebrate the New Year. The clang of cymbals and the burst of firecrackers brought me back out into the daylight. My eyes burned from the harshness of the bright rays. My limbs were stiff from being folded for so many months. My clothes? They were too pathetic even to consider.
Ren’s brother and wife returned from Shanxi province for the festivities. Ren’s sister-in-law had sent me Tang Xianzu’s edition of The Peony Pavilion all those years ago. I hadn’t lived long enough to meet her. Now here she was, small and graceful. Her daughter, Shen—just sixteen and already married to a landowner in Hangzhou—came to visit too. Their gowns were exquisitely embroidered and personalized with scenes from antiquity to show mother and daughter’s individuality and sensitivity. Their soft voices carried refinement, education, and a love of poetry. They sat with Madame Wu and talked about their excursions during the holiday. They’d visited monasteries in the hills, they’d walked in the Bamboo Forest, and they’d visited Longjing to see tea leaves harvested and cured. They made me long for the life I’d missed.
Ze entered. During the last seven months as I lay under the corridor, I hadn’t heard much from her. I expected to see thin lips, a set jaw, and scornful eyes. I wanted her to look that way and she did, but when she opened her mouth, only charming words came out.
“Shen,” Ze said, addressing Ren’s niece, “you must make your husband proud with your entertaining. It’s good for a wife to display her elegant taste and style of manners. I understand you’re a wonderful hostess and that you make the literati feel comfortable.”
“Poets often come to our home,” Shen conceded. “I’d love for you and Uncle to visit one day.”
“When I was a girl, my mother took me on excursions,” Ze replied. “These days I prefer to stay home and make meals for my husband and mother-in-law.”
“I agree, Auntie Ze, but—”
“A wife needs to be extra careful,” Ze went on. “Would I try to walk across the lake after the first winter freeze? Under the full sun, there are those who will report on you. I don’t want to humiliate myself or bring shame on my husband. The only safe place is within our inner chambers.”
“The men who visit my husband are important,” young Shen replied calmly, ignoring everything Ze had said. “It would be good for Uncle Ren to meet them.”
“I have nothing against excursions,” Madame Wu cut in, “if my son will benefit from new connections.”
Even after two years of marriage she refused to openly criticize her daughter-in-law, but in every gesture and look she made it plain that this wife was not a “same” in any way.
Ze sighed. “If Mother agrees, we shall come. I’ll do anything to make my husband and mother-in-law happy.”
What was this? When I’d been in hiding, had the lessons I’d drilled into Ze somehow taken hold?
During the weeklong visit, the four women spent their mornings together in the women’s quarters. Madame Wu, inspired by her daughter-in-law and granddaughter, invited other relativ
es and friends to visit. Li Shu, Ren’s cousin, arrived with Lin Yining, whose family had been tied to the Wus for generations. Both women were poets and writers; Lin Yining was a member of the famous Banana Garden Five Poetry Club, which had been founded by the woman writer Gu Ruopu. The members of the club, seeing no conflict between the writing brush and the embroidery needle, had taken the idea of the Four Virtues in a new direction. They believed the best exemplar of “womanly speech” was women’s writing, so Li Shu and Lin Yining’s visit was a time of strong incense, open windows, and active calligraphy brushes. Ze played the zither for everyone’s entertainment. Ren and his brother performed all the rites to appease, feed, and clothe the Wu ancestors. Ren was affectionate with his wife in front of the others. I was not the merest glimmer of a thought for any of them. I could only watch and bear it.
And then my fortunes changed. I call it fortune, but maybe it was fate. Shen picked up The Peony Pavilion and began to read my words, the ones Ze had transcribed onto the pages. Shen opened her heart to the sentiments and touched on all seven ancestral emotions. She reflected on her own life and the moments of love and longing she’d experienced. She imagined herself growing old and harboring feelings of loss, pain, and regret.
“Auntie Ze, may I borrow this?” Shen asked innocently. How could my sister-wife deny her?
And so The Peony Pavilion left the Wu family compound and traveled to another part of Hangzhou. I didn’t follow Shen, believing my project was safer in her hands than in Ze’s.
AN INVITATION ARRIVED for Ren, Ze, Li Shu, and Lin Yining to visit Shen and her husband. When the palanquins came to pick them up, I held on to Ze’s shoulders as she walked through the compound. When we reached her palanquin, she stepped inside and I climbed up to the roof. We were carried down Wushan Mountain, past the temple, and around the lake to Shen’s home. This wasn’t the haphazard roaming of a dead girl on her way to the afterworld or the frantic search for food and scraps during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. At last I was doing the very thing that Ren had promised would happen once we were married: I was on an excursion.
We arrived at Shen’s house, and for the first time I stepped over a threshold that did not belong to my father or my husband. Shen met us in a pavilion covered by a wisteria vine that she said was two hundred years old. Huge clusters of the violet flowers hung down and swelled the air with the freshness of their scent. As promised, Shen had also invited established members of the literati. Her tutor, who had a long thin beard to show his age and wisdom, was given the chair of honor. The poet Hong Sheng and his pregnant wife arrived with gifts of wine and nuts. Several married women, some of them poets, congratulated Li Shu on the recent publication of her new drama. I was most impressed by the appearance of Xu Shijun, who’d written Reflection on the Spring Wave about Xiaoqing. He was known for supporting the publication of women’s writings. Today he’d been invited to discuss the Buddhist sutras. My mother-in-law was right; Ren would make some interesting connections here today. He and Ze sat side by side, looking like the handsome young married couple they were.
The Book of Rites says that men and women should never use the same hangers, towels, or combs, let alone sit together. But here men and women—strangers—commingled with no regard to the old ways of thinking. Tea was poured. Sweetmeats were passed. I sat on the balustrade and got drunk on the vivid fragrance of the wisteria and the lines of poetry that flew back and forth across the pavilion like birds soaring in the clouds. But when Shen’s tutor cleared his throat, everyone in the pavilion fell silent.
“We can recite and compose all afternoon,” he said, “but I’m curious about what Shen has let us read these past few weeks.” A few of the guests nodded in agreement. “Tell us”—the tutor addressed Ren—“about your commentary on The Peony Pavilion.”
Surprised, I slipped from my perch. A gust of wind blew through the pavilion, causing the wives to pull the silk of their gowns closer to their bodies and the men to hunch their shoulders. I had little control over the effect my actions had on the natural world, but I tried to be quiescent. When the air stilled, Shen looked at Ren, smiled, and asked, “How did you come to write the commentary?”
“Modesty doesn’t allow me to admit the depth of my feelings for the opera,” Ren answered, “but I haven’t written about it.”
“You are being modest,” the tutor said. “We know you’re an accomplished critic. You’ve written a lot about theater—”
“But never about The Peony Pavilion,” Ren finished.
“How can this be?” the tutor asked. “My student returned from your home with a copy of The Peony Pavilion. Surely it is you who wrote your thoughts in the margins.”
“I haven’t written a thing,” Ren swore. He glanced questioningly at his wife, but she said nothing.
“After Shen read it, she passed it to me,” Hong Sheng’s wife commented lightly. “I don’t think a man could have had such sentiments. Those words were written by a woman. I imagined a young one like me,” she added, blushing.
The tutor waved away the idea as though it were a bad smell. “What I read couldn’t have been written by a girl—or a woman, for that matter,” he said. “Shen allowed me to show the commentary to others here in Hangzhou. To a man, to a woman”—and here he gestured to the others sitting in the pavilion—“we’ve been touched by the words. We’ve asked ourselves, Who could have had such amazing insights about tenderness, devotion, and love? Shen invited you here to answer that question for us.”
Ren touched Ze’s hand. “Is this your copy of The Peony Pavilion? The one you worked on for so long? The one started by…?”
Ze stared into the middle distance as though he were speaking to someone else.
“Who wrote these beautiful words?” Hong Sheng asked.
Even he had read my commentary? I forced myself not to move or cry out from happiness. Ren’s niece had done something extraordinary. She’d taken my thoughts not just to her home and to her tutor but to one of the country’s most popular writers.
Ze, meanwhile, had put a look of utter confusion on her face, as though she’d somehow forgotten who’d written in the margins.
“Was it your husband?” the tutor prompted.
“My husband?” Ze inclined her head in the way of all humble wives. “My husband?” she repeated sweetly. Then after a long pause, she said, “Yes, my husband.”
Was there no end to this woman’s torture of me? She had once been docile and easy to control, but she’d learned my lessons too well. She’d become too much of a good wife.
“But, Ze, I’ve written nothing about the opera,” Ren insisted. He looked at the others and added, “I know of the commentary, and I did not write it. Please,” he said to Shen. “May I see it?”
Shen nodded to a servant to get the book. Everyone waited, feeling awkward that husband and wife were in disagreement. Me? I balanced on my lily feet, trying to remain as still as possible, while inside my emotions were in a storm of fear, astonishment, and hopefulness.
The servant returned with the book and placed it in Ren’s hands. The guests watched as he turned the pages. I wanted to run to him, kneel before him, and stare into his eyes as he read my words. Do you hear me? But I kept myself in a grip of serenity. To interfere in any way—willfully or negligently—would have destroyed the moment. He flipped the pages, stopping here and there, and then he looked up with a curious expression of longing and loss.
“I didn’t write this. This commentary was begun by a woman who was to be my wife.” He turned to Lin Yining and Li Shu, the two women to whom he was related. “You remember that I was to marry Chen Tong. She started this. My wife picked up the project and added her comments in the second half. Surely you who are of my blood know I speak the truth.”
“If what you say is true,” the tutor cut in before the women could respond, “why is Ze’s style so similar to Chen Tong’s that we cannot tell them apart?”
“Perhaps only a husband—a man who has known both
women well—would hear the two voices.”
“Love grows only when a couple is intimate,” Hong Sheng agreed. “When the moon shines on West Lake, you do not see a husband alone in his room. When a jade hairpin falls onto the pillow, you do not see a wife alone. But please explain to us how an unmarried girl could know so much about love. And how is it you would know her voice if you were never married?”
“I think Master Wu speaks the truth,” one of the wives interrupted shyly, saving Ren from answering the awkward questions. “I found Chen Tong’s words to be romantic. Her sister-wife has also done a good job adding her thoughts about qing.”
A few of the other wives nodded in agreement; Ze remained oblivious.
“I’d be happy to read these thoughts even without the opera,” Shen proclaimed.
Yes! This was exactly what I wanted to hear.
Then Xu Shijun snorted his skepticism. “What wife would want her name to be known outside the bedchamber? Women have no reason to get caught up in the degrading quest for fame.”
This, coming from a man who was known as an educator of women, who’d shown such sympathy for Xiaoqing’s plight, who’d been known to support the publication of women’s writings?
“No woman—let alone two wives—would want to exhibit her private thoughts in such a public way,” one of the husbands added, picking up on Xu’s surprising stance. “Women have the inner chambers for that. Liberalism, women venturing out, men encouraging women to write and paint for profit, all these things led to the Cataclysm. We can be grateful that some women are returning to old traditions.”