Peony in Love

  “Is it lovesickness?” Ren asked, after Doctor Zhao examined his new patient.

  “She has a fever and a bad cough,” the doctor intoned grimly. “It might be water-lung sickness. It could be blood-lung disease.”

  He cooked an infusion of dried mulberries, which Yi drank. When it did nothing to ease her lungs, he poured powdered sea sparrow down her throat to scare away the yin poisons that lurked there, but Yi continued to fade. I urged her to call on the inner strength that had kept her alive all these years, but the doctor grew increasingly bleak.

  “Your wife is suffering from qi congestion,” he said. “The oppression in her chest is causing her slowly to suffocate and lose her appetite. These things must be corrected immediately. If she grows angry, her qi will rise up and smash open the congestion.”

  Doctor Zhao had tried this with me many years ago and it hadn’t worked, so I watched in dismay as they dragged Yi from the bed and yelled in her ears that she was a bad wife, an incompetent mother, and cruel to the servants. Her legs hung limp beneath her torso. Her feet slid along the floor behind her as they pushed and pulled her, trying to irritate her into barking at them to stop. She didn’t oblige. She couldn’t. She had too much goodness in her. When she started vomiting blood, they put her back in bed.

  “I can’t lose her,” Ren said. “We were meant to grow old together, spend a hundred years together, and share the same grave.”

  “All that is very sentimental but not terribly practical,” the doctor reasoned. “You must remember, Master Wu, that nothing in the world is permanent. The only permanent thing is impermanence.”

  “But she has lived only twenty-three years.” Ren groaned in despair. “I had hoped we’d be like two birds soaring in flight for many years to come.”

  “I’ve heard that your wife has been indulging herself with The Peony Pavilion. Is this so?” Doctor Zhao asked. When told that, yes, it was, he sighed. “I’ve confronted problems caused by this opera for too many years. And for too many years I’ve lost women to the disease that oozes from its pages.”

  The whole family followed dietary restrictions. The diviner came to write charms and the like, which were burned. The ashes were gathered and given to Willow, who took them to the cook. Together they brewed a decoction made from boiled turnip and half the ashes to relieve Yi’s cough. A second brew was made of weevil-eaten corn and the other half of the ashes to lower Yi’s fever. Madame Wu lit incense, made offerings, and prayed. If it had been winter, Ren would have lain in the snow to freeze himself, come to the marital bed, and pressed his chilled body next to Yi’s to cool her down. But it was summer, so he did the next best thing. He went out into the street to find a dog and put it in Yi’s bed to suck out all the illness. None of these things worked.

  Then strangely, over the next few days, the room turned cold, and then colder. Thin mists gathered along the walls and under the windows. Ren, Madame Wu, and the servants draped quilts over their shoulders to keep warm. The brazier roared, but Ren’s breath came in great white clouds from his mouth, while only the lightest vapor escaped Yi’s lips. She stopped moving. She stopped opening her eyes. She even stopped coughing. Long were her slumbers, deep her stirrings. Still, her skin burned.

  But it was summer. How could it be so cold? At any deathwatch, ghosts are suspected, but I knew I wasn’t causing any problems. I’d lived with Yi since she was six and, apart from her footbinding, had never caused her pain, sorrow, or discomfort. Rather, I’d protected her and given her strength. I lost all optimism and fell into heartsickness.

  “I wish I could say that fox spirits were protecting your wife,” Doctor Zhao said in resignation. “She needs their laughter, warmth, and wisdom. But already ghosts have gathered to take her. These spirits are filled with disease, melancholy, and too much qing. I hear their presence in your wife’s erratic pulse. It’s disordered like tangled threads. I feel their presence in her burning fever as they boil her blood as though she were in one of the hells already. Her heart fluctuations and flaming qi are sure signs of ghost attack.” He bowed his head respectfully before adding, “All we can do is wait.”

  Mirrors and a sieve were hung in the room, limiting my movements. Willow and Madame Wu took turns sweeping the floor, while Ren swung a sword this way and that to scare away whatever vindictive ghosts were lurking, waiting to steal Yi from life. Their actions kept me up in the rafters, but when I looked around the room I didn’t see any creatures. I lowered myself straight down to Yi’s bed, avoiding the swinging sword, sweeping women, and refractions from the mirror. I put my hand on her forehead. It burned into me hotter than coals. I lay down next to her, let down the protective shields I’d built around myself these past years, and let all the coldness that I’d trapped inside myself come to the surface and seep into her in an effort to lower her fever.

  I hugged her close. Spirit tears dripped from my eyes and cooled her face. I had raised her, bound her feet, cared for her when she was ill, married her out, and brought her son into the world, and she had honored me in so many ways. I was so proud of her—for being a devoted wife, a caring mother, a…

  “I love you, Yi,” I whispered in her ear. “You have not only been a wonderful sister-wife, but you saved me and made sure I was heard.” I hesitated as my heart swelled and nearly burst from the pain of mother love, and then I spoke the truth of my heart. “You have been the joy of my life. I love you as though you were my daughter.”

  “Ha!”

  The sound was cruel, triumphant, and definitely not human.

  I swirled up, careful to avoid the swinging sword, and there was Tan Ze. Years in the Blood-Gathering Lake had left her hideous and deformed. Seeing my shocked look, she laughed, which caused Willow, Ren, and his mother to stop their actions and shiver with fright and Yi’s body to heave and shake with a bout of brutal coughing.

  I was too stunned to speak for a moment, too terrified for those I loved to think quickly. “How are you here?” Such a stupid question, but my mind was in turmoil, trying to figure out what to do.

  She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. Her father knew the rites, and he was rich and powerful. He must have hired priests to pray for her and given them long strings of cash, which were then offered to the bureaucrats who supervise the Blood-Gathering Lake. Once released, she could have become an ancestor, but she’d obviously chosen a different path.

  A swoosh of Ren’s sword sliced away a piece of my gown. Yi moaned.

  Anger roiled up inside me. “I’ve been burdened by you my whole life,” I said. “Even after I died, you caused me trouble. Why did you do that? Why?”

  “I caused you trouble?” Ze’s voice grated like a rusty hinge.

  “I’m sorry I frightened you,” I confessed. “I’m sorry I killed you. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I can’t accept all the blame. You married Ren. What did you think would happen?”

  “He was mine! I saw him on the night of the opera. I told you I’d chosen him.” She pointed a finger at Yi. “Once this one is gone, I’ll finally have him to myself.”

  With that, many of the events of the last few months became clear. Ze had been here for a while. After Yi found my poems, Ze must have caused the book holding the pages she’d torn out of the commentary to fall from the shelf, shifting Ren’s attention back to her and stealing my poetry from his eyes. She must have drawn Yi to comment on what she’d written in the margins of the opera. The freezing temperatures on the day the Shaoxi edition burned also had to have been caused by Ze, but I hadn’t understood what I was seeing because I was too entranced by Ren and Yi dancing in the snow. The cold in Yi’s bedchamber…Yi’s illness…and even farther back in time, when the boy had been born. Had Ze been inside Yi, trying to strangle the boy with his cord, yanking it tighter and tighter around his neck even as I tried to loosen it?

  I took my eyes off Ze, trying to figure out where she’d been hiding all this time. In a vase, under the bed, in Yi’s lungs, in her womb? In the doctor??
?s pocket, in one of Willow’s shoes, in the decoction of weevil-eaten corn and ashes used to bring down Yi’s fever? Ze could have been in any or all of those places and I wouldn’t have known, because I hadn’t been looking for her.

  Ze took advantage of my distraction by swooping down and sitting on Yi’s chest.

  “Remember when you did this to me?” she screeched.

  “No!” I screamed. I reached down, grabbed Ze, and pulled her back into the air.

  Willow dropped the broom and covered her ears. Ren swirled and caught Ze’s leg with the sword. Spirit blood splattered the room.

  “Ren loved you,” Ze reproached me. “The two of you never met and yet he loved you.”

  Should I tell her the truth of that? Would it matter now?

  “You were always in his mind,” she went on mercilessly. “You were the dream of what could have been. So I had to be you. I remembered hearing about your lovesickness and how you turned away food—”

  “But I shouldn’t have stopped eating! That was a terrible mistake.”

  But even as I spoke, a memory of a completely different sort came to my mind. I’d always dismissed Doctor Zhao as stupid, but he had it right all along. Ze was jealous. He should have forced her to eat the jealousy-curing soup. And then I recalled a line from the opera: Only women who are spiteful are jealous; only those who are jealous are spiteful.

  “I remember,” Ze went on. “I remember it all. You taught me what the consequences of not eating would be. So I wasted away to become you—”

  “But why?”

  “He was mine!” She broke away from me, sank her black nails into the rafter, and hung there like a disgusting creature. She was a disgusting creature. “I saw him first!”

  Ren dropped to his knees next to Yi’s bed. He held her hand and wept. Soon she would be flying across the sky. At last, I fully understood my mother’s sacrifice for my father. I would do anything to save the daughter of my heart.

  “Don’t punish this insignificant wife,” I said. “Punish me.”

  I edged toward Ze, hoping she would forget about Yi and come after me. She loosened her grip on the rafter and breathed a noxious cloud of filth in my face.

  “How best to do it?” In her voice I heard the little girl who was so selfish—no, insecure, I realized now, when it was too late—that she couldn’t let anyone else speak for fear it would take attention away from her.

  “I’m sorry I forgot to let you eat,” I tried again, hopelessly, helplessly.

  “You aren’t hearing what I’m saying. You didn’t kill me,” she gloated. “You didn’t crush me. You didn’t steal my breath. I stopped eating, and for once I had total control over my destiny. I wanted to starve that thing you put in my belly.”

  I recoiled from the shock of her words. “You killed your baby?” When a satisfied smile came over her face, I said, “But he did nothing to you.”

  “I went to the Blood-Gathering Lake for what I did,” she admitted, “but it was worth it. I hated you and told you what would hurt you the most. You believed it and look what you’ve become. Weak! Human!”

  “I didn’t kill you?”

  She tried to laugh again at my ignorance, but sadness poured from her mouth. “You didn’t kill me. You didn’t know how.”

  Years of sorrow, guilt, and regret rolled off me, fell away, and disappeared into the cold air around us.

  “I was never afraid of you,” she went on, seemingly oblivious to how unburdened and light I suddenly was. “It was the memory of you. You were a ghost in my husband’s heart.”

  From the first time I’d seen Ze, a part of me had felt sorry for her. She had everything and nothing. Her emptiness had left her unable to feel anything good—from her husband, her father, her mother, or me.

  “But you’ve been a ghost in his heart too.” Again I edged forward. If she hated me so much, she’d come for me eventually. “He couldn’t abandon either of us, because he loved us both. His love for Yi is just a continuation of that. See how he stares at her. He’s imagining how I must have looked all alone with my lovesickness and remembering how you looked when you were dying.”

  But Ze wasn’t interested in reason, and she certainly didn’t care for what she could see with her own eyes if she’d chosen to look. Both of us had been doomed because we’d been born girls. We’d both struggled on the precipice between being worthless or valuable as a commodity. We were both pathetic creatures. I hadn’t killed Ze—the relief of that!—and I didn’t believe she truly wanted to kill Yi.

  “Look at him, Ze. Do you really want to hurt him again?”

  Her shoulders slumped. “I let our husband take credit for what we did with The Peony Pavilion,” she admitted, “because I wanted him to love me.”

  “He did love you. You should have seen the way he mourned.”

  But she wasn’t listening to me. “I thought I could beat you in death. My husband and our new sister-wife made offerings to me, but you know this family has always been insignificant.” I waited, knowing the word she would use next. “Mediocre. Fortunately, I had my father to buy me out of the Blood-Gathering Lake, but once I was free, what did I find?” She pulled at her hair. “A new wife!”

  “And look what she did for you—for both of us. She heard our words. You were in the margins of The Peony Pavilion as much as I was. And you helped Yi with part two. Don’t deny it.” I moved closer to Ze. “Our sister-wife helped Ren to see he could love us all—differently but completely. Our project is going to be published. Isn’t it a miracle? We’re all going to be remembered and honored.”

  As Ze’s tears began to flow, the ugliness of years spent in the Blood-Gathering Lake washed away, as did her anger, bitterness, spite, and selfishness. Those emotions—so persistent and strong—had followed her into death. They’d covered her terrible unhappiness. Now defeat, sadness, and loneliness oozed out of her like worms from the ground after a spring rain until Ze’s true essence—the pretty girl who inhabited her dreams and longed to be loved—appeared. She was not a demon or a ghost at all. She was at once a brokenhearted ancestor and, at last, a true lovesick maiden.

  I called on the inner strength of my mother and grandmother, reached out, and put my arm around Ze. I didn’t let her argue. I just pulled her with me, skirting around Willow’s sweeping, avoiding the mirrors, and slipping past the sieve. Ze and I went outside, and then I released her. She floated above me for a few seconds; then she turned her face skyward and slowly disappeared.

  I went back inside and watched with great joy as Yi’s lungs emptied of fluids, she gasped for breath, and Ren sobbed in gratitude.

  Shimmering

  THE THREE WIVES’ COMMENTARY WAS PUBLISHED AT THE end of winter in the thirty-second year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign in what would have been my forty-fifth year in the earthly realm. It was an immediate and enormous success. To my amazement and unabashed delight, my name—and those of my sister-wives—became known across the country. Collectors like my father sought out my book as something unique and special. Libraries purchased it for their shelves. It went into elite homes, where women read it again and again. They cried at my loneliness and my insights. They wept over their own lost, burned, or forgotten words. They sighed for the things they wished they’d written, about spring love and autumn regrets.

  Pretty soon their husbands, brothers, and sons picked up the book and read it too. Their interpretation and experience of it was completely different. What could make a man feel more like a man than the idea that another man’s work had attracted and mesmerized women—not just the three of us, but all the lovesick maidens—to such an extent that we’d stopped eating, pined away, and died? It made them feel strong and superior and helped restore to them more of their lost manliness.

  When New Year’s Eve arrived, Yi joined the family to clean, make offerings, and pay debts, but I could see her mind was elsewhere. As soon as those duties were done, she scurried through the compound to the room where my dummy bride was kept. She
entered the room, hesitated for a minute, and then she reached into her skirt, pulled out a knife—a forbidden object in the days leading up to the New Year—and knelt next to the dummy. I watched in shock as she cut off the dummy’s face. She removed the clothes, put them in a neat pile, and then carefully sliced open the dummy’s stomach.

  My emotions were thrown into tumult: I had no idea why she wanted to harm my dummy, and Ren would be furious if he found out, but if she pulled out my ancestor tablet she would see what was missing. I hovered next to her, with hope surging through me. Yi reached into the body and extracted the tablet. She quickly brushed away the straw and left the room with my tablet and the painted face. But she hadn’t really looked at the tablet.

  She stepped down from the corridor and into the garden, and then made her way to the plum tree where I lived. She set the tablet on the ground and then went back to her room. She returned with a small table. She went away again. This time she came back with one of the commercially produced copies of The Three Wives’ Commentary, a vase, and some other items. She put my tablet and portrait on the table, lit candles, and then made offerings of The Commentary, fruit, and wine. And then she worshipped me as an ancestor.

  What I mean is, I thought she worshipped me as an ancestor.

  Ren stepped out onto a balcony and saw his wife making supplication.

  “What are you doing?” he called down to her.

  “It’s the New Year. We’ve made offerings to others in your family. I wanted to give thanks to Liniang. Think how she has inspired me…and your other wives.”

  He laughed at her simple ways. “You can’t worship an imaginary character!”

  She bristled. “The spirit of the cosmos dwells in everything. Even a stone may serve as the home of a creature; even a tree may serve as the dwelling of a spirit.”