by Tan, Amy
“Good news,” Old Jump announced a few days later. “We will soon reach Magnificent Canal. From there, we cross the river by ferry, and then we are only two days from Moon Pond Village.” The town, he said, was a bustling port and county seat. The river was choked with boats and sampans bringing in food of all kinds. We would have our choice of a dozen inns. “Clean enough to please even you,” he said, looking at Magic Gourd. “I haven’t been there since I was a young man, but I still remember it sharp as yesterday. The outdoor theater and acrobats, little boys stacked hands on hands, then feet on feet, then hands on hands. The girls were prettier than ones I’d seen anywhere else. Nice and shy, too. Oh, and those spicy snacks—I’ve been savoring them in my memory ever since …”
Whatever he had savored would remain a memory. Magnificent Canal had no canal, no river, not even a trickle. It was a flat plain of silt. Old Jump ran back and forth, cursing. “I must have taken the wrong road.” A man standing in a dark doorway said, “It’s the same place.”
We learned that twenty years before, the river that had fed the canal flooded and changed course, drowning many villages in both its old and new path. When the floodwaters receded, it left behind a colorless ghost town. The only inhabitants were old folks who wanted to be buried in their ancestral home beside those family members who had drowned.
“What fate brought me here to see this?” Magic Gourd said. “Why this?”
Old Jump snapped, “Don’t blame me! You think I know every disaster that’s happened over the last twenty years?”
One lane of the town remained, and its buildings were covered with the soot of cooking fires, which gave the town the appearance of having nearly burned down. A badly listing teahouse was propped up by a splintered beam of wood. Why bother? If you stepped inside for tea, the place would become your casket. The stage of the acrobat theater had caved in and the cavity contained whatever the floodwaters had brought—broken buckets, sickles, and stools. I shuddered to think that the owners of those everyday things might be underneath the heap.
The innkeeper was overjoyed to see us, his first customers in over twenty years. As he led us to our quarters, he boasted about a duke who had nearly passed through Magnificent Canal. “We built a grand archway painted red and gold, carved with dragons at the corners. We also widened the road, planted trees, spruced up the temple, washed the gods, and patched them up … But then the flood came.”
When he opened the door to our room, swirls of dust rose, as if a ghost tenant had awakened. A skeletal wooden bed held a nest of dead mice, and the quilt was nothing more than feathery shreds. This was not the worst we had seen along our journey. In some places, the mice were still alive. Magic Gourd and I removed the mess and washed down the floor. We set our mats down on the bed’s bare wooden platform. I slept fitfully. Magic Gourd shrieked often, waking me, one time claiming she had opened her eyes to see a rat twitching his whiskers, as if he were deciding which of her ears to eat first. Then I screamed because I saw it above us, crossing along a crossbeam. The next morning, we saw Old Jump talking to one of the local farmers, a man with handsome features so leathered by the sun he could have been any age between thirty and fifty. He eyed me, and I heard Old Jump explaining that I looked foreign but was actually Chinese.
“Good news, miss,” Old Jump said, full of smiles. “This man knows exactly how to go from here to there. There’s a hard clay road up ahead. The flood washed away the rocks and filled the potholes, and the drought baked the clay good and hard. Hardly anyone uses it, so there aren’t any ruts.”
“If it’s so good, why doesn’t anyone use it?” I said.
“Everyone calls it the Ghost Road,” the man replied, “because a whole village higher up got swept down the mountain—houses, people, cows—and they were all ground up and washed down to the next landing of the road where this tragic sludge became a smooth white road. That’s what people say, anyway.”
Old Jump was no longer smiling. “You’ve been on this road?”
The man paused. “I have no reason to go in that direction,” he said. “You can take another road going east, but it’s a day out of your way. The road is not as smooth, and in the last few years, brigands have attacked people. I heard they killed only a couple of people this year. It was much worse in the past because of famine. You can hardly blame them. They had to eat. If you decide to go that way, you shouldn’t worry too much. They’ve been using some old muskets left by foreign trappers who died, and they don’t fire half the time. Anyway, it’s your choice.”
Old Jump nodded uneasily. “We’ll take the shortest route.”
“The Ghost Road it is. Listen carefully then. You take this road toward the west, and at the next village, where the road divides, go west again. That’s about two days from here. Then you’ll get to that white stretch with the bones I told you about. That’ll take another two days. When you reach a place where you can keep going west on Ghost Road or turn north and take a rough road, go north, and head upward for another two days. Where the road splits, take the left toward the Undulating Hills. You can’t miss them. They look like buttocks and breasts. You’ll enjoy a couple of days winding in and out of those.” He looked at Magic Gourd and me. “Pardon me.” He grinned at Old Jump. “Go through a narrow opening between two hills. Once you come out of those hills, you’ll be looking down on a long narrow valley between low mountains and a river wiggling down the middle. At the end of the valley are five mountains. Moon Pond lies at the foot of those mountains. You’ll know you’ve arrived because the road ends there. They’re tall mountains, so don’t be fooled into thinking you’re almost there. You’ll need a full day just to wind down the Undulating Hills. And you better have plenty of rope fastened to the sides of your carts. The road down is steeper than it looks. Grab on to keep your load from pushing those donkeys over the ledge. There’s a village at the bottom. You can stay there or go another seven or eight hours to reach Moon Pond.”
Two days later, when we reached the Ghost Road, Magic Gourd, Old Jump, and his sons fell quiet. They stared at the white ground. The road looked to me like ordinary clay.
“It’s whiter,” Magic Gourd said, “like bones dug up by grave robbers. I’ve seen bones this color in the village where I lived with the mean mother-in-law.”
We rolled ahead. One of the wheels creaked like a wounded animal. Every time we heard sounds in the woods, Magic Gourd gasped and grabbed onto my arm. I felt a chill run through me before I told her to stop being ridiculous. Old Jump let the donkeys rest only briefly, and they protested when water was taken away too soon.
“How can you believe this ghost nonsense?” I said to Magic Gourd.
“What’s nonsense in Shanghai is not nonsense in the countryside. Those who don’t heed the warnings don’t live to admit they were stupid not to do so.” At nightfall, Old Jump and his son argued whether it was better to keep going, or to stop for the night and place one man on guard. The donkeys balked and made the decision for us. If they died of exhaustion, we’d be stuck there for good. Whenever we heard rustles in the bushes, the sons shouted and jabbed the air with their long knives—as if they could kill a ghost that was already dead.
We started again just before dawn, and by mid-morning, the wheels crunched noisily over pits and rocks. We had left the Ghost Road and were on the rough one headed north. We moved through the Undulating Hills. Just before dusk the next day, we reached the opening squeezed by two hills. We saw the valley below and a twisting river running its length. It was bounded by low hills that had been carved with terraced rice paddies, which were just now turning the gold-tinged green of harvest. At the far end were the dark shadow heads of four mountains, each one rising above the other. Between the second and third was a dark thundercloud with a pink udder. Sunlight shot through it and the land beneath it glowed. Moon Pond lay in that light.
It was beautiful, yet it gave me an ominous feeling. All at once, I knew why. I had seen a valley like this many times, the one in
the paintings Lu Shing had given to my mother and to Edward. I was looking at the Valley of Amazement. Had I always been destined to come here? I had secretly examined that painting a dozen times. Edward believed the valley was illuminated at dawn, at the waking hour. And I had said it was dusk, when life closes down. He thought the dark clouds were leaving and that the storm was over. I thought it was about to begin. And so we were both right and wrong. It was dusk, and the storm was leaving.
“Only four mountains, not five,” Magic Gourd said. “That farmer can’t count.”
Four mountains. The painting had five, two on one side of the golden opening, three on the other. The sky shifted and the thundercloud moved slightly, and we saw the fifth, an enormous dark mountain that lay just beyond the other four. The painting had been an omen. I looked for ways it was different and I found them. Here the valley was longer, and the hills were terraced with rice paddies. The mountains in the other were more jagged along the ridge. In fact, other than the five mountains, a river valley, and stormy clouds, it hardly looked the same. In the painting, there was something at the back that glowed. Here there were just the mountains.
The valley gradually took on its own shape and coloring. It was not gloomy, I told myself. Dusk would bring a close to my past and leave it behind as a secret. Tomorrow would be a bright beginning. I would be a Wife. Perpetual would be there to welcome me, and we would live the serene life of scholars in repose. We would walk in the mountains, and we would both be inspired to write poems. Who knows, we might even have a child together. All at once, sadness rolled over me as I thought about Little Flora. By living so far from the sea, I would never be able to find her. I would have to insist to Perpetual that I return to Shanghai to see if there had been any word.
We stepped out of the cart and Old Jump led the donkeys down the path. The sun fell and we saw the smoky glow of cooking fires. We passed through a lane of houses along the river and reached a small market square with a temple at one end. A man called out from the dark mouth of a wine shop that we should stop to quench our thirst. Old Jump was happy to accept his invitation. We stood in the cool shadow of a stone wall. Men, women, children, and even dogs were staring at us. I saw the wine seller giving directions to Old Jump. He pointed to some unknown place ahead, angled his head one way and bent his hand in the same direction, then twisted his body sharply, and rose up on his toes as he looked down at some imaginary danger we might fall into. As he continued to look downward, he again rose on his toes, gritted his teeth, and then he sank to his knees and bounced up. His hands moved downward, wiggling like the tail of a thrashing fish. Suddenly, he went still. His arms shot straight forward, and he cocked one eye, as if staring through a telescope. Then his arms fell to his sides and he gave Old Jump a satisfied look to indicate we had safely arrived in Moon Pond. Old Jump repeated the gestures, and the man nodded and corrected him twice. Satisfied, Old Jump bought the man a small bottle of wine, and the man again pointed in the direction we should go and shot his hand forward, as if we would now travel even faster. Two other young men came out of the shop’s doorway and leered at me. They made no effort to lower their voices as they discussed my foreigner looks and wondered what I tasted like in bed.
“Fuck your mother,” Magic Gourd said.
They laughed.
Old Jump returned after paying. “Good news—” he started to say.
Magic Gourd cut him off. “Stop saying good news this, good news that. It’s like a curse.”
“All right, I’ll tell the bride,” and he faced me. “There’s a widow who went mad after her husband died. She can’t stop washing the walls and floors, except when she welcomes boarders.”
That evening, I took a cool bath. As I twisted mud out of my hair, the madwoman dragged in another small wooden tub with clean water, and had me climb in, then removed the other. She did this twice more until I insisted I had nothing more to wash off but my own skin.
We woke early the next morning. I slipped into my clothes. The madwoman had shaken the dust off them. It was the leaf-green jacket and trousers. Magic Gourd put on a deep blue jacket. We had never worn such dowdy clothes, but when the widow saw us, her eyes and mouth rounded, and for the first time, I heard her speak. “I can die in peace,” she said in a rustic accent, “knowing the wives of the gods took a bath in my house.” I was pleased we had given that impression. These were the clothes I would wear to meet my new mother-in-law and the rest of the clan. And I would see Perpetual. Counting all our delays, we were over a week behind schedule.
As we mounted the carts, the heat sank into my body. The cartwheels once again turned, milling dust onto our faces and clothes. Every now and again, we slapped at each other’s clothes and raised small choking clouds. The wind gusted and the fine grit clung to us again. As we drew nearer, the sky was blocked by the wall of Heaven Mountain and its four sons. We rode now in their shade.
“The closer we come, the less we see,” I murmured.
“We’ll be blind by the time we arrive,” Magic Gourd replied.
We were quiet the rest of the way. I grew more and more nervous, imagining Perpetual’s family, scholarly yet old-fashioned, friendly in a fussy way, lamenting the many difficulties we’d had in reaching them. I imagined a grand courtyard house, the beautiful pond with the mountain in its mirror. The road wound next to the river, and on both sides farmers were harvesting the rice, splaying the grain where they slashed. They stopped work to stare at us, blank-faced.
We reached a narrow and dilapidated bridge, clearly what we had been warned was the perilous part of the journey. The water ran fast, streamed over large boulders and churned at the bottom of them with such force we had to shout to be heard. Across the river, we reached the main road leading into the village, which quickly narrowed into a path that tunneled between the outer walls of houses. A few minutes later, the path opened onto a market square next to a pillared temple with peeling red lacquer. It was an hour before dusk and most of the food vendors had already left, but there were still a few stalls that displayed baskets, funeral necessities, wine, salt, tea, and plain cloth. My life was changing for the worse second by second. Past the square, we entered another tunnel. We emerged, and straight ahead was a large round pond. It was not clear blue but green with algae. And it was not ringed with trees and grassy banks, as I had imagined. On both sides stood a mishmash of poor houses, misaligned with the one next to it. They resembled the upper and lower crooked teeth of a green yawning mouth. At the farthest point was a two-story house whose dark roof stood above fortresslike walls. It was grand in comparison to the other houses. But it was much smaller than I had imagined—much smaller than Lu Shing’s home, which I realized now I had copied in my mind as my future home. I looked at Magic Gourd. Her eyes were rounded in astonishment.
“Am I seeing a dream of my past?” she said. “I hope the road goes far beyond this place and to another pond and house.”
My mouth went dry. “I’m parched to death,” I said to Magic Gourd. “As soon as we get there, tell the servants to bring us tea at once, and hot towels, as well.”
“Oyo! I am your older sister, not your underling. You’ll soon be serving me as penance for where you’ve taken me.”
Magic Gourd’s wind-whipped hair looked like an abandoned swallow’s nest. Mine must have looked equally bad. We told Old Jump to stop and I found my traveling vanity kit. I lifted the lid and the mirror popped up. When I wiped away the grime, I gasped to see my dust-filled wrinkles. Two and a half months of sun and wind had transformed me into an old lady. I frantically pulled open the little drawers to find the jar of pearl cream. Some of those extra years were wiped away. We helped each other smooth and bundle our hair tightly at the back. Finally, we were ready. I told Old Jump to send one of his boys ahead to announce we were about to arrive. That way the family could quickly prepare a welcome for us.
We reached the outer walls of the Sheng family house. The white plaster was cracked, and in some places, there wer
e big patches of exposed clay bricks. Why had the house fallen into such disrepair? You did not need much money to smooth doors and repair hinges. Perhaps the servants had become lazy without the guidance of a wife.
The cart stopped at last, the wheels went silent. We were at the front gates. They were the height of two men. No one was there to greet us. For a while, I heard only the heaving breath and snorts of the tired donkeys and the thumping of my heart.
Old Jump called out, “Hey! We’ve arrived!”
The gates remained shut. A lazy gatekeeper must have fallen asleep. Old Jump ran his fingers over the bronze latches. Only a few sheaves of curled red lacquer remained on the two wooden doors. He looked up at the carved stone plaque at the top of the gate. They held some writing, but the plaque was too damaged to make out what it said. “Not bad,” Old Jump said. “You can tell these were people of wealth and class at one time.”
After the third shout, we heard a man shout back and then the scraping sound of the gate bolt as it slid to unleash the two thick doors. No firecrackers went off, no red banners flapped before us. It must not be the custom out here. Where was Perpetual?
