Peony in Love

  The Blood-Gathering Lake

  ZE’S SOUL BROKE INTO THREE. ONE PART BEGAN ITS journey to the afterworld, one part waited to enter its coffin, and the last part roamed until it was time to be placed in its ancestor tablet. Her corpse submitted humbly to the rites that had to be performed. The doctor cut the baby from Ze’s stomach and threw it away, so it wouldn’t go with her to the Blood-Gathering Lake and would have a chance at rebirth. Then her emaciated body was washed and dressed. Ren remained at her side, refusing to take his eyes off her pale face and still-red lips, seemingly waiting for her to waken. I waited in the bedchamber for the roaming part of her soul to appear. I was convinced she would be relieved to see someone familiar. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The moment she saw me, her lips drew back and she bared her teeth.

  “You! I knew I would see you!”

  “Everything will be fine. I’m here to help you—”

  “Help me? You killed me!”

  “You’re confused,” I said soothingly. I too had been disoriented upon my death. She was lucky I was here to ease her mind.

  “I knew even before my marriage that you would try to harm me,” she went on, in a no-less-furious tone. “You were there on my marriage day, weren’t you?” When I nodded, she said, “I should have smeared your tombstone with the blood of a black dog.”

  This was the worst thing a person could do to a dead soul, since this type of blood was believed to be as odious as a woman’s monthly excretions. If she’d done that, I would have been set on a path to kill my natal family. I was surprised by her bitterness, but she wasn’t done.

  “You haunted me from the very beginning,” she continued. “I heard you crying in the winds of stormy nights.”

  “I thought I made you happy—”

  “No! You made me read that opera. Then you made me write about it. You made me imitate you in everything I did, until finally there was nothing left of me. You died from the opera, and then you made me copy you copying Liniang.”

  “I only wanted Ren to love you more. Couldn’t you tell?”

  This calmed her somewhat. Then she looked at her fingernails. They’d already turned black. The harsh reality of her situation crushed her remaining anger.

  “I tried to protect myself, but what chance did I have against you?” she asked pitifully.

  So many times I’d said the reverse of this to myself: My sister-wife didn’t have a chance against me.

  “I thought I could make him love me if he read the commentary and believed the work to be all mine,” she continued, reproach creeping back into her voice. “I didn’t want him reading about your lovesickness. I didn’t want him believing I’d continued your project as a way of honoring the ‘first’ wife. I was the first wife. Didn’t you hear my husband? You two were never married. He cares nothing for you.”

  She was ruthless in death.

  “We are a match made in Heaven,” I said, and I still believed it to be true. “But he loved you too.”

  “You were sick with cleverness. You made me cold, kept me in darkness, and hunted me in my dreams. You made me careless with my meals and careless with my rest—”

  That this line came from The Peony Pavilion didn’t reassure me, because I had made her careless.

  “The only way I could escape you was in the safety of the pavilion on the pond,” she went on.

  “The zigzag bridge.”

  “Yes!” Her lips drew back again, showing her dead-white teeth. “I burned your copy of The Peony Pavilion to exorcise you from my life. I thought I’d succeeded, but you never left.”

  “I couldn’t leave, not after what you did next. You let people believe our husband wrote the commentary.”

  “What better way to show my devotion? What better way to prove I was an ideal wife?”

  She was right, of course.

  “But what about me?” I asked. “You tried to make me disappear. How could you do that when we’re sister-wives?”

  Ze laughed at the stupidity of my question. “Men are the flowering of pure yang, but ghosts like you are all that is deathly and sick in yin. I tried to fight you, but your constant interference killed me. Go away. I have no need or want of your friendship. We are not friends. And we are not sister-wives. I will be remembered. You will be forgotten. I made sure of that.”

  “By hiding the missing pages that describe the true authorship—”

  “Everything you made me write was a lie.”

  “But I gave you credit. Almost everything was about you—”

  “I didn’t pick up the commentary out of a desire to continue your work. I did not write from the heart. You made your obsession my obsession. You were a ghost and you wouldn’t admit what you’d done, so I tore those pages out of the book. Ren will never find them.”

  I tried again to make her see the truth. “I wanted you to be happy—”

  “So you used my body.”

  “I was happy when you got pregnant—”

  “That child was not mine!”

  “Of course he was yours.”

  “No! You brought Ren to my bed night after night against my will. You made me do things….” She shivered with anger and disgust. “And then you put that baby inside me.”

  “You’re wrong. I didn’t put him there. I only watched that he’d be safe—”

  “Ha! You killed me and the baby too.”

  “I didn’t…”

  But what was the use of denying her accusations when so many of them were true? I’d kept her up all night, first with her husband and then with writing. I’d made her room cold, closed her in the dark to protect my sensitive eyes, and sent breezes with her everywhere she went. When I forced her to work on my project, I’d kept her from joining her husband and mother-in-law for meals. Then, when she retired to her room after burning my original work and giving all credit to Ren, I hadn’t encouraged her to eat because I was so dispirited. I’d been fully aware of all this even as I’d denied what I was seeing and doing to myself. I started to feel sick with the truth. What had I done?

  She pulled back her lips, once again revealing her ugly essence. I turned my eyes away.

  “You killed me,” she proclaimed. “You hid in the rafters where you thought no one could see you, but I saw you.”

  “How could you?” All my earlier confidence was gone. Now I was the one who sounded pitiful.

  “I was dying! I saw you. I tried to close my eyes to you, but every time I opened them you were there, staring at me with your dead eyes. And then you came down and put your hand on my heart.”

  Waaa! Had I truly played a part in her death? Had my obsession for my project made me so blind that first I had died and now I had killed my sister-wife?

  Seeing the horror of understanding on my face, she smiled triumphantly. “You killed me, but I’ve won. You seem to have forgotten the deepest message of The Peony Pavilion. It’s a story about fulfilling love through death, which is exactly what I’ve done. Ren will remember me and he will forget about the foolish unmarried girl in her inner rooms. You will waste away to nothing. Your project will be forgotten and no one—no one—will remember you.”

  Without another word, she turned away from me, left the room, and went back to roaming.

  FORTY-NINE DAYS later, Ze’s father came to dot her ancestor tablet, which was then set in the Wu family’s ancestral hall. Since she’d died pregnant and married, one part of her soul was sealed inside her coffin, which would remain exposed to the elements until her husband’s death, when the family would be reconstituted through simultaneous burial, as was proper. The last part of her soul was dragged to the Blood-Gathering Lake, which was reputed to be so wide that it would take 840,000 days to cross it, where she would experience 120 kinds of torture, where she would be required each day to drink blood or be thrashed with iron rods. This was her eternity, unless her family bought her freedom through proper worship, offerings of food to monks and gods, and prayers and bribes to the bureaucrats who governed the
hells. Only then might a boat carry her from the lake of anguish to the bank where she might become an ancestor or be reborn into a blissful land.

  As for me, I realized that if I’d helped Tan Ze and her baby die—knowingly or not—then I no longer had moral thoughts: no empathy, no shame, no sense of right and wrong. I thought I’d been very clever and even helpful, but Ze was right. I was a ghost of the worst sort.

  Exile

  MAMA USED TO SAY THAT GHOSTS AND SPIRITS WEREN’T bad by nature. If a ghost had a place to belong, it would not become evil. But many ghosts are roused to action by the desire to retaliate. Even a small creature like a cicada can bring about savage vengeance against those who have harmed it. I hadn’t thought I wanted to hurt Ze, and yet if what she said was true I’d done just that. Filled with a desire for self-punishment and terrified that I might do something deadly to my husband by accident, I banished myself from Ren’s home. In the earthly realm, I was twenty-five and I’d given up. I wasted away to almost nothing, just as Ze predicted.

  Exile…

  Not knowing where to go, I made my way around the lake to the Chen Family Villa. The house, to my surprise, was more beautiful than ever. Bao had added furniture, porcelains, and jade carvings to every room. Shimmering new silk tapestries hung on the walls. But as magnificent as it all was, a disturbing quiet infused everything. Far fewer fingers lived here now. My father was still in the capital. Two of his brothers had died. My grandfather’s concubines had also died. Broom, Lotus, and some of my other cousins had married out. With fewer Chen family members in the compound, servants had been sent away. The villa and the grounds screamed beauty, abundance, and great wealth, but they were poor in the sounds of children, joy, and miracles.

  Into the eerie silence came the haunting sound of a zither. I found Orchid, now fourteen, playing for my mother and the aunts in the Lotus-Blooming Hall. She was a pretty girl, and I had a momentary flash of pride that her bound feet had turned out so well. Sitting next to her was my mother. Only nine years had passed, but in that time her hair had gone gray. Deep sadness filled her eyes. When I kissed her, she shivered and rattled the locks hidden in the folds of her gown.

  Bao’s wife’s face was pinched with the sadness of infertility. She hadn’t been sold, but her husband had taken in two concubines. They too were infertile. The three women sat together, not fighting but mourning what they could not have. I didn’t see Bao, but I had to consider that maybe I’d been wrong about him. He’d been perfectly within his rights to sell off these women, but he hadn’t. These past years, I’d expected—wanted?—this adopted stranger to ruin my family through bad management, gambling, and opium. I’d envisioned the estate dwindling and Bao selling off my father’s book, tea, rock, antiques, and incense collections. Instead, these things had been built up and enhanced. Bao had even replaced the volumes my mother had burned. I hated to admit it, but Bao had probably found my poems when he’d read that book on dam building. But why had he sold them? No one needed the money.

  I went to the ancestral hall. Grandmother and Grandfather’s ancestral portraits still hung above the altar. I was a ghost, but I paid obeisance to them. Then I bowed to the ancestor tablets for my other relatives. After that, I went to the storage room where my tablet had been hidden. I couldn’t go in, because the corner was too sharp, but I saw a dusty edge of it on a shelf covered with mouse and rat droppings. Even though my mother mourned for me, I’d been forgotten by the rest of the family. I wished none of them ill, but there was nothing for me here.

  Exile…

  I had to go somewhere. The only other place I’d been was to Gudang Village during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. The Qian family had fed me for two years. Maybe I could find a place with them.

  I set out as night covered the land. Fireflies flitted about me, lighting my way. It was a long walk when I wasn’t driven by hunger and had only my regrets for company. My feet hurt, my legs ached, and my eyes burned when dawn broke. I reached the Qian home as the sun hit the apex of the sky. The two eldest daughters worked outside under an awning, tending trays of silkworms that ate their way through freshly cut mulberry leaves. The next two daughters were in an open shed with another dozen or so girls, their hands in steaming water, washing the cocoons, and pulling and spinning the silk floss into thread. Madame Qian was inside the house, preparing lunch. Yi, the child I’d first seen as a baby in her mother’s arms, was now three years old. She was a sickly little thing, thin and pale. She rested on a low wooden platform in the main room, where her mother could watch her. I sat down next to her. When she wiggled, I put a hand on her ankle. She giggled softly. It didn’t seem possible that she would reach seven.

  Master Qian, although it was hard for me to think of this farmer as a master of anything, came in from the mulberry grove and everyone sat down to lunch. No one gave anything to Yi; she was just another mouth to feed until she died.

  As soon as the meal was done, Master Qian motioned to his oldest daughters. “Hungry worms do not produce silk,” he snapped at them. With that, they got up and went back outside on their big flapping feet to resume their work. Madame Qian poured tea for her husband, cleared the table, and carried Yi back to the platform. She pulled out a basket and handed the child a piece of cloth with a needle and thread tucked into it.

  “She doesn’t need to learn to embroider,” the girl’s father said scornfully. “She needs to get strong so she can help me.”

  “She’s not going to be the daughter you need and want,” Madame Qian said. “I’m afraid she takes after her mother.”

  “You were cheap, but you’ve cost me a lot. Only girls—”

  “And I’m no help with the worms,” she finished for him.

  I shivered in revulsion. It had to be hard for a woman of such refinement to have fallen so low.

  “With Yi this way, I won’t be able to marry her out,” he complained. “What family would want a useless wife? We should have left her to die when she was born.”

  He took a last noisy sip of tea and left. Once he was gone, Madame Qian gave her full attention to Yi, showing her the stitches to make a bat, the symbol of happiness.

  “My parents were once members of the gentry,” Madame Qian said dreamily to her daughter. “We lost everything in the Cataclysm. For years we wandered as beggars. I was thirteen when we came to this village. Your baba’s parents bought me out of pity. They didn’t have much, but don’t you see? If I’d lived so long on the road, I had to be strong. I was strong.”

  My despair grew deeper. Did every girl suffer?

  “My bound feet kept me from working at your father’s side, but I’ve brought him prosperity in other ways,” Madame Qian continued. “I can make bedding, shoes, and clothes so fine they can be sold in Hangzhou. Your sisters will do physical labor their entire lives. I can only guess at the pain in their hearts, but I can do nothing for them.”

  She bowed her head. Tears of shame dripped from her eyes and stained her plain cotton skirt. I couldn’t swallow any more sorrow. I slunk out of the house and away from the farm, embarrassed for my weakness and afraid of the harm I might do this family even unwittingly, when they were so miserable already.

  Exile…

  I sat down by the side of the road. Where could I go? For the first time in years I thought of my old servant, Willow, but there was no way for me to find her. Even if I could, what could she do for me? I had thought her a friend, but in our last conversation together I’d seen that she’d never felt the same about me. I hadn’t had a single friend in life, and in death I’d hoped to be included in the circle of lovesick maidens. I’d tried to be a good sister-wife to Ze, and I’d failed there. My coming here was a mistake too. I was not part of the Qians nor were they a part of me. Maybe I’d been in exile my whole life…and death.

  I had to find somewhere to live where I’d be assured I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I returned to Hangzhou. For several days, I scouted along the lakeshore, but too many other spirits already inhabited the
caves or had found comfort behind rocks or nestled in the roots of trees. I wandered aimlessly. When I came to the Xiling Bridge, I crossed over it and onto Solitary Island, where Xiaoqing had been banished long ago to keep her safe from a jealous wife. It was quiet and remote, a perfect place for me to languish in my sorrow and regret. I searched until I found Xiaoqing’s tomb, hidden between the lake and the small pond where she’d contemplated her frail reflection. I curled in the tomb’s doorway, listened to the orioles sing to one another in the canopy of trees above me, and brooded about what I’d done to an innocent wife.

  OVER THE NEXT two years, however, I was rarely alone. Almost daily, women and girls left their chambers and came to Xiaoqing’s tomb to consecrate the spot with wine, read poems, and talk about love, sadness, and regret. It seemed I was just one of hundreds of women and young girls who suffered for love, who thought about love, who desired love. They weren’t as deeply affected as the lovesick maidens—like Xiaoqing or me—who’d died from too much qing, but they longed to be. They each wanted the love of a man or fretted about the love of a man.

  Then one day the members of the Banana Garden Five came to the tomb to pay their respects. By every measure, they were famous. These five women liked to gather together, go on excursions, and write poetry. They didn’t burn their manuscripts out of self-doubt or humility. They were published—not by their families as mementos but by commercial publishers who sold their works throughout the country.

  For the first time in two years, curiosity drove me from the security of Xiaoqing’s tomb. I followed the women as they strolled Solitary Island’s tree-lined pathways, visited the temples, and sat together in a pavilion to sip tea and eat sunflower seeds. When they boarded their pleasure boat, I joined them, sitting on the deck as it sliced through the water. They laughed and drank wine. They engaged in games, challenging one another to compose poems under the open sky in broad daylight. When their outing was over and they went back to their homes, I stayed with the boat. The next time they gathered to meet on the lake, I was there, cheating my punishment, ready to go anywhere they wanted.