“I always thought you told that tale because it was romantic. I didn’t understand.”
A long silence followed. Her interpretation of the story was dark and negative. There were so many things I didn’t know about her.
“Mama, please. What happened to you?”
She looked away from me.
“We’re safe now,” I said, and gestured around us. We were in our family’s Moon-Viewing Pavilion, the crickets were singing, and the lake spread out cool and still before us. “Nothing bad can happen to either of us here.”
Mama smiled at that, and then she tentatively began. She reminisced about marrying into the Chen family and going on excursions with her mother-in-law, about her writing and what it meant to her, and about collecting the works of forgotten women poets who had been writing for nearly as long as our country’s existence. I saw and felt everything as Mama spoke.
“Never let them tell you that women didn’t write. They did,” she said. “You can go back more than two thousand years to the Book of Songs and see that many of the poems were written by women and girls. Should we assume that they produced those poems by merely opening their mouths and mindlessly spouting words? Of course not. Men seek fame with their words—writing speeches, recording history, telling us how to live—but we are the ones who embrace emotions, who collect the leftover crumbs of seemingly meaningless days, who touch on the cycles of life and remember what happened in our families. I ask you, Peony, isn’t that more important than writing an eight-legged essay for the emperor?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. I don’t think she even wanted one.
She talked about the days leading up to the Cataclysm and what happened when it arrived, and it all matched what my grandmother had told me. Mama stopped when they reached the girls’ lookout pavilion and she had gathered all the jewels and silver from the other women.
“We’d been so happy to be out,” Mama said, “but we didn’t understand that there is a big difference between choosing to leave our inner chambers and being forced out. We are told many things about how we should behave and what we should do: that we should have sons, that we should sacrifice ourselves for our husbands and sons, that it is better to die than bring shame on our families. I believed all that. I still do.”
She seemed relieved that she was finally able to talk about this, but she still hadn’t revealed what I wanted to know.
“What happened after you left the pavilion?” I asked gently. I took her hand and squeezed it. “No matter what you say or what you did, I’ll love you still. You’re my mama. I’ll always love you.”
She stared out across the lake to where it faded into mist and darkness.
“You were never married,” she said at last, “so you don’t know about clouds and rain. It was beautiful with your father—the building of the clouds, the rain that fell, the way we were together like one spirit, not two.”
I knew more about clouds and rain than I would ever tell my mother, but I didn’t quite understand what she was talking about.
“What the soldiers did to me was not clouds and rain,” she said. “It was brutal, pointless, and unfulfilling even for them. Did you know I was pregnant then? You couldn’t know. I never told anyone except your father. I was in my fifth month. The baby didn’t show beneath my tunic and skirts. Your father and I thought we’d take this one last trip before my confinement. On our last night in Yangzhou we were to tell your grandparents. That never happened.”
“Because the Manchus came.”
“They wanted to destroy everything that was precious to me. When they took your father and grandfather, I knew what my duty was.”
“Duty? What did you owe them?” I asked, remembering my grandmother’s bitterness.
She looked at me in surprise. “I loved them.”
My mind scrambled to shift with hers. She raised her chin in an offhand manner.
“The soldiers took the jewels and then they took me. I was raped many times by many men, but that wasn’t enough for them. They beat me with the sides of their swords until my skin split open. They kicked me in the stomach, taking care not to mar my face.”
As she spoke, the mists gathering on the lake turned to drizzle and finally to rain. Grandmother had to be listening on the Viewing Terrace.
“It felt like a thousand demons driving me toward death, but I swallowed my sorrow and hid my tears. When I began to bleed from inside, they stepped back and watched me crab-crawl away from them into the grass. After that, they left me alone. The agony was so great it overpowered my hatred and fear. When my son spilled out of me, three of the men who’d put their organs inside me came forward. One cut the cord and took away my baby. Another lifted my body during the contractions to expel the placenta. And the last held my hand and murmured in his gruff barbarian dialect. Why didn’t they just kill me? They’d killed so many already, what was one more woman?”
All this had happened on the last night of the Cataclysm, when men suddenly began to remember who they were. The soldiers burned some cotton and human bone together and used the ashes to treat my mother’s wounds. Then they dressed her in a clean gown of raw silk and found cloth in the piles of looted goods to pack between her legs. But they were not so pure of heart.
“I thought they’d remembered their own mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. But no, they were thinking of me as a prize.” The locks in Mama’s clothes rattled as she handled them anxiously. “They argued about which of them would take possession of me. One wanted to sell me into prostitution. One wanted to keep me in his household as a slave. The last one wanted me for a concubine. ‘She’s not repulsive,’ the man who wanted to sell me said. ‘I’ll pay you twenty ounces of silver if you let me keep her.’ ‘I won’t let her go for less than thirty,’ barked the one who wanted me as a slave. ‘She looks like she was born for singing and dancing, not weaving and spinning,’ the first man reasoned. And it went on that way. I was only nineteen, and after everything that happened and everything that was still to happen this was my darkest moment. How was selling me as the bride of ten thousand men so very different from the general trade in women as wives, concubines, or servants? Was selling me or bartering me any different from dealing in salt? Yes, because as a woman I had even less value than salt.”
The next morning, a high-ranking Manchu general dressed in red with a rapier at his waist arrived with a Manchu woman with big feet, her hair drawn back in a bun and a flower clipped to one temple. The two of them were scouts for a Manchu prince. They took Mama away from the soldiers, back to the compound where she’d been held the night before with her mother-in-law, the concubines, and all the other women who’d been separated from their families.
“After four days of rain and killing,” Mama remembered, “the sun came out and cooked the city. The stench of corpses was staggering, but above us the sky blurred blue into forever. I waited my turn to be examined. All around me, women cried. Why hadn’t we killed ourselves? Because we had no rope, no knives, no cliffs. Then I was brought before that same Manchu woman. She checked my hair, arms, palms, and fingers. She felt my breasts through my clothes and prodded my swollen belly. She lifted my skirts and looked at my lily feet, which said everything about who I was as a woman. ‘I see where your talent lies,’ she said disdainfully. ‘You will do.’ How could a woman do this to another woman? I was led away yet again and placed alone inside a room.”
Mama thought this might be her chance to kill herself, but she found nothing she could use to cut her throat. She was on the first floor, so she couldn’t throw herself from the window. She didn’t expect to find rope, but she did have her gown. She sat down and tore at her hem. She made several long strips of cloth which she tied together.
“Finally I was ready, but I had one thing I still needed to do. I found a piece of charcoal by the brazier, picked it up and tested it on the wall, and then I started to write.”
When my mother began to recite what she’d written, I was struck throu
gh the heart.
“The trees are bare.
In the distance, the honks of mourning geese.
If only my tears of blood could dye red the blossoms of the plum tree.
But I will never make it to spring….”
I joined in for the last two lines.
“My heart is empty and my life has no value anymore.
Each moment a thousand tears.”
Grandmother had told me my mother was a fine poet. I hadn’t known she was the most famous poet of all—the one who’d left this tragic poem on the wall. I looked at my mother in wonder. Her poem had opened the gateway to the kind of immortality that Xiaoqing, Tang Xianzu, and other great poets had achieved. No wonder Baba had allowed Mama to take my ancestor tablet. She was a woman of great distinction and I would have been lucky—honored—to have her perform the dotting. So many mistakes, so many misunderstandings.
“I didn’t know when I wrote those words that I would live or that other travelers, mostly men, would chance upon them, copy them down, publish them, distribute them,” Mama said. “I never wanted to be recognized for them; I never wanted to be branded a fame-seeker. Oh, Peony, when I heard you recite the poem that day in the Lotus-Blooming Hall, I could hardly breathe. You were my sole small vein of life’s blood—my only child—and I thought you knew, because you and I, as mother and daughter, were so closely tied. I thought you were ashamed of me.”
“I never would have recited that poem if I’d known. I never would have hurt you that way.”
“But I was so afraid, I locked you in your room. I’ve lived with my regrets ever since.”
I couldn’t help it, but I blamed my father and grandfather for what happened in Yangzhou. They were men. They should have done something.
“How could you go back to Baba after he let you save him and after Grandfather used Grandmother to save them both?”
Mama’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t go back to Baba; he came for me. He’s why I lived and how I came to be your mother. I finished my poem, looped my handmade rope over the beam, and tied it around my neck, but then that Manchu woman came to get me. She was very mad and slapped me hard, but it didn’t shake me from my plan. If not now, I knew I would have a chance later. If they were going to keep me for some Manchu prince, I would have to be clothed, housed, fed. I would always be able to improvise a weapon.”
The woman procurer led Mama back to the main hall. The general sat at the desk. My father was on his knees, his forehead on the floor, waiting.
“At first I thought they’d caught your father and were going to cut off his head,” Mama went on. “Everything I’d done and everything I’d gone through was for nothing. But he’d come to buy me back. With the days of horror and murder over, the Manchus were trying to prove how civilized they were. Already they were hoping to create order out of disorder. I listened to them bargain. I was so numb with pain and grief that it took me a long time to find my voice. ‘Husband,’ I said, ‘you can’t take me back. I’m ruined.’ He understood what I meant, but he was undeterred. ‘And I have lost our son,’ I confessed. Tears rolled down your father’s cheeks. ‘I don’t care about that,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to die and I don’t want to lose you.’ You see, Peony, he kept me after what happened. I was so broken he could have sold me or traded me—just as those men who’d raped me wanted to do—or he could have discarded me completely.”
Was Grandmother hearing this? She’d kept our family from having sons to punish my father and grandfather. Did she now see she was wrong?
“How can we blame the men when we made our own choices, your grandmother and I?” Mama asked, as if following my thoughts. “Your father saved me from a terrible fate that would have ended in suicide.”
“But Baba went to work for the Manchus. How could he do that? Did he forget what happened to you and Grandmother?”
“How could he forget?” Mama asked, and smiled at me patiently. “He could never forget. He shaved his forehead, braided his hair, and put on Manchu clothes. This was nothing but a disguise, a costume. He’d proved to me who he was: a man who was loyal to his family above all else.”
“But he went to the capital after I died. He left you all alone. He—” I must have been veering too close to the subject of my ancestor tablet, because I was unable to continue.
“That plan had long been in place.” Mama scrolled back in time to before my death. “You were supposed to marry out. He loved you so much. He couldn’t bear to lose you, so he’d decided to take the appointment in the capital. After your death, his desire to be away from memories of you was even greater.”
For too long I’d believed he was not a man of integrity. I’d been wrong, but then I’d been wrong about so many things.
Mama sighed, and again she abruptly changed the subject. “I just don’t know what will happen to our family if Bao doesn’t have a son soon.”
“Grandmother won’t allow it.”
Mama nodded. “I loved your grandmother, but she could be vindictive. However, in this instance, she’s wrong. She died in Yangzhou and didn’t see what happened to me, and she wasn’t here on earth when you were alive. Your baba loved you. You were a jewel in his hand, but he needed a son to care for the ancestors. What does your grandmother think will happen to her and all the other Chen family ancestors if we don’t have sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons to perform the rites? Only sons can do this. She knows that.”
“Baba adopted that man, that Bao,” I said, doing little to cover the disappointment I still felt that my father had so easily replaced me in his affections.
“It took him a while to learn our ways, but Bao’s been good to us. Look at how he cares for me now. I’m dressed for whatever eternity holds. I’ve been fed. And I was given plenty of spirit money for my journey—”
“He found my poems,” I interrupted. “He went to Ren to sell them.”
“You sound like a jealous sister,” Mama said. “Don’t feel that way.” She touched my cheek. It had been a long time since I’d received a physical show of affection. “I found your poems by accident when I was reorganizing your father’s bookshelves. When I read them, I asked Bao to take them to your husband. I told Bao to make sure Ren paid for them. I wanted to remind him of your worth.”
She put an arm around me.
“The Manchus came to our region because as the richest area in the country we had much that was vulnerable to destruction,” she said. “They knew we would make the best example, but that we also had the best resources for recovery. In many ways they were right, but how could we recover what had been lost in our families? I went home and shut the door. Now, when I look at you, I know that as much as a mother tries there’s no way to protect a daughter. I kept you locked inside from birth, but that didn’t keep you from dying too soon. And now look: You’ve been on pleasure boats, you’ve traveled—”
“And I’ve caused harm,” I confessed. After everything she’d told me, didn’t I owe her the truth about what I’d done to Tan Ze? “My sister-wife died because of me.”
“I heard it differently,” Mama said. “Ze’s mother blamed her daughter for not performing her wifely duties. She was the kind who made her husband fetch water, isn’t that true?”
When I nodded, she went on.
“You can’t blame yourself for Ze’s hunger strike. This strategy is as old as womankind. Nothing is more powerful or cruel than for a woman to make her husband watch her die.” She took my face in her hands and looked into my eyes. “You’re my beloved daughter, no matter what you think you’ve done.”
But Mama didn’t know everything.
“Besides, what choice did you have? Your mama and baba failed you. I feel especially responsible. I wanted you to excel at embroidery, painting, and playing the zither. I wanted you to keep your mouth shut, put on a smiling face, and learn to obey. But look what happened. You flew right out of the villa. You found freedom here”—she pointed to my heart—“in your seat of consciousness.”
>
I saw the truth of her words. My mother made sure I was highly educated so I’d become a good wife, but in the process she’d inspired me to depart from the usual model of a young woman on the cusp of marriage.
“You have a big and good heart,” Mama continued. “You don’t have to be ashamed for anything. Think instead of your desires, your knowledge, and what’s in here—your heart. Mencius was clear on this point: Lacking pity, one is not human; lacking shame, one is not human; lacking a sense of deference, one is not human; lacking a sense of right and wrong, one is not human.”
“But I’m not human. I’m a hungry ghost.”
There. I’d told her, but she didn’t ask how it happened. Maybe it was too much for her to know right now, because she asked, “But you’ve experienced all that, haven’t you? You’ve felt pity, shame, remorse, and sadness for everything that happened to Tan Ze, right?”
Of course I had. I’d driven myself into exile as punishment for what I’d done.
“How can one test for humanity?” Mama asked. “By whether or not you cast a shadow or leave prints in the sand? Tang Xianzu gave you the answers in the opera you love so well, when he wrote that no one can exist without joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, and desire. So, you have it from the Book of Rites, from The Peony Pavilion, and from me, that the Seven Emotions are what make us human. You still have these within yourself.”
“But how can I change the wrongs I’ve done?”
“I don’t believe you’ve done wrong. But if you do, you have to take all your ghostly attributes and put them to good use. You need to find another girl whose life you can repair.”