The Girl with No Face

by M. H. Boroson

  “The great Daoshi is too modest,” the Ghost Magistrate said. “The Forbidden City has its wonders, and yet it saddens me, Sifu, to learn that the closest you have come to the soaring beauties of the Song Dynasty was in buildings whose proportions were adulterated by Manchurian aesthetics.”

  My father blinked slowly but said nothing; grudgingly, he’d found himself agreeing. The Ghost Magistrate was so skillful with his rhetoric that it was unnerving; by pointing out that the current Qing Dynasty had been influenced by Manchurian invaders, the Ghost Magistrate made it seem like the dynasty he came from was the true China, and the China my father and I had been born in had been watered-down and corrupted, made impure by foreign influences. The simple sentiment conjured for Father and me a vision of a nostalgic past, a China more truly China than we had ever known.

  “Ah, Daoshi Xian,” the Ghost Magistrate said, waving his multitudinous arms, “what a team you and I shall be, what allies, and what friends! Together we shall bring peace to the dead, and keep the peace at the borderlands between life and death. We shall bring the real China to the spiritual realm of this new world, and we shall share the dinner table at festival meals, discussing literature and telling each other the great traditional stories of our homeland.”

  “There is nothing more valuable than tradition,” my father said.

  “No?” said the Ghost Magistrate. “Then tell me something, please, Sifu. The woman at your side, she is your daughter?”

  Father gave a reluctant tick of his head, and listened.

  “If tradition is so important to you, Sifu, then why did you not have her feet bound?”

  Father glanced at me. He wore a scowl on his face, but wore it like a costume; I could tell he was feeling playful. “This girl? Even when she was an infant, she would have broken my fingers if I’d tried,” he said. The Ghost Magistrate joined him in a bout of laughing. After a moment, I made myself join the laughter too.

  “In seriousness, then,” the Guiyan said, “it does make me wonder about your relationship to tradition.”

  My father grimaced, and took a moment to formulate a reply. “Families in the textile industry bind their daughters’ feet so they won’t be able to stray too far from their looms, and I was never in that industry.”

  “A woman’s bound feet can also be a mark of cultivation and status,” the Ghost Magistrate said. “Many prosperous men seek wives with crescent feet. If you’d had her feet bound as an infant, you could have married her into a wealthy family, vied for prestige and riches.”

  “What of it, Ghost Magistrate?”

  “I am simply trying to gain insight into my honored guest,” the Guiyan said, fluttering his many hands. “Like myself, you seem to be both a traditional man and an ambitious one. I find it curious that a man of your nature would defy tradition and potentially blunt his own ambitions by leaving his daughter’s feet unbound.”

  My eyes flitted back and forth between the men. Up till this point, I’d been aware of some subtle sizings-up, quick matches of wit, possibly competitive moments between the authoritative men. Now the Guiyan’s line of questioning felt more aggressive, and, to me, personal.

  “Foot-binding,” my father said, and the vehemence of his disgust startled me. “My own mother had bound feet, you know. For a man of my father’s standing, to have wives with bound feet was an expression of his wealth and status; he could afford to keep women as mere aesthetic objects, crippled pieces of beautiful jade. He had sons and grandsons to run the business, and servants to perform more menial duties.

  “When I was a boy, my mother sometimes asked me to unwrap the swaddling cloth and rub salve into her disfigured toes to help soothe the pain. Her feet reeked, Lao Guiyan; her toes were stunted, putrid things. So I swore, if I ever had a daughter of my own, I would allow her feet to go unbound.”

  I listened to Father’s speech, and felt my eyes glistening.

  “Tell me truly, Sifu,” the Ghost Magistrate said, his tone as affected and oily as ever, “have you never regretted it?”

  My father’s glance rolled toward me, wry and teasing. “This one gave me plenty of reasons to regret it,” he said. “She has always been difficult, always running around, climbing places she shouldn’t go, hiding in nooks no one else noticed, always up to no good, constantly fighting with the boys. I have no idea where I went wrong. I suspect it was in her stars.”

  He held out his cup, and from the motion of his wrist I could tell he was not asking me to pour more wine. I accepted the cup from his hand, and a kind of transformation came over him; as soon as both his hands were ready, he no longer sat like a casual guest but like a warrior. He looked directly into the eyes of the Ghost Magistrate, who seemed to flinch from my father’s intense gaze. I knew how it felt to be the recipient of that glare. “She has always been difficult, Guiyan, and she came here with a purpose.” My father’s tone was steel honed to an edge. “She wants you to relinquish your claim on one of your wives. I am going to annul the marriage. I am asking you to give your blessing to this annulment, Venerable Ghost Magistrate; as a show of friendship, please accept my decision, and pursue no retribution against any of us.”

  The Guiyan’s mouth contracted as if he’d just eaten sour fruit. “Come now, Sifu, we have only just met; don’t you think it’s asking a bit much for you to request I let go of one of my wives?”

  The power and harshness of my father’s countenance did not diminish; in the room lit by lanterns held by human arms projecting from the walls, where live shadows slid and scrambled liquidly along the corners, Father’s intensity only grew. The man’s energetic charge just kept blazing higher, like a fire in a furnace.

  “It is unfortunate, Guiyan, but your possessive grip on this ‘fourth wife’ of yours has left Li-lin with a poor opinion of you,” my father said. “And though she has always been difficult, I must admit, some of her sentiment has been rubbing off on me.”

  “Sifu?”

  “I think of my own mother, Ghost Magistrate, whose feet were so twisted she could not run away; of women imprisoned in their husbands’ homes like caged birds with broken wings. The image does not incline me to think generously of you.”

  The Guiyan steepled his hands. And steepled another pair. Many others flitted around him, crashing into each other. “One might almost conclude,” the Ghost Magistrate said, “that if I were to release my fourth wife and allow that marriage to be annulled, it might demonstrate my good intentions and my suitability for the position of Tudi Gong.”

  “It would go some way toward convincing me,” my father said. “I would still need to hear your philosophy, your plans for this region, and how you mean to enforce justice. But as I said, Li-lin has always been difficult; if you do not grant her this favor, I will need to prevent your Investiture.”

  The starkness of the ultimatum and my father’s confrontational tone stunned me. That he was making these demands on my behalf moved me more than I could say.

  Behind the Ghost Magistrate’s commotion of arms, and behind his furrowed brow, I could see him thinking; his mind was an abacus in motion, and many of his fingers seemed to be counting out measures and balances, ticking items off as he weighed his options. All the motion stopped at once; he’d reached a decision.

  “It’s true my servants refused to allow my fourth wife her freedom,” he said. “Forgive their overeagerness, Sifu, I beg you. In the name of our friendship, I will not interfere with the annulment of that marriage; to remove inconvenience from your life, I forfeit any claim to a hearing in the Celestial or Infernal Courts. She has my blessing to leave here in your custody.”

  The men relaxed; a kind of rapport settled around them both. “Now,” my father said, “let us talk about the future.”

  The Ghost Magistrate’s innumerable hands started expositing as he spoke. “Though I am an ancient ghost, I am a man with modern ideas. I am going to build a lighthouse on the cliffs at the edge of the sea, in the spirit world, to guide the ghosts of drowned men in
to land; then I will find suitable employment for these drowned ghosts. And this is but one of many innovations. I have already established an office on the fourth floor of the Chinese embassy in San Francisco.”

  “The embassy only has three floors,” my father said, trying to conceal his skepticism.

  “Not anymore,” the Guiyan said. One of his hands removed his black hat; another yanked it away and replaced it on his scalp; a third patted it down to make it look more even. Two more engaged in a handshake. My eyes boggled, watching how the Ghost Magistrate seemed utterly unaware of the goings-on. “The fourth floor of San Francisco’s Chinese embassy is a tapestry painted in the horizontal style of a handscroll, in a building at the next train stop.”

  “So . . .” my father started extrapolating. “A spirit messenger would enter the painting, which portrays a floor that doesn’t exist—and the floor’s number binds it to the word for death—and . . . the painting also depicts a flight of stairs leading downwards?”

  “Sifu, you are most perceptive,” the Guiyan said. “Yes, and my allies among the living have arranged for a corresponding painting to be mounted on one of the walls on the third floor of the embassy.”

  “A painting of a flight of stairs, leading upwards,” my father said, looking authentically impressed. “The paintings connect with each other . . . I take it there is some kind of talismanic painting layered beneath the illustration of the stairs?”

  “Such brilliance,” the Ghost Magistrate said, in slickly oiled words.

  “We need to speak of your allies among the living,” my father said.

  The Guiyan grimaced, many of his hands clenching into fists. “You refer to that dissolute, shameful descendant of mine, Xu Shengdian?”

  I lurched forward at the name. My father nodded curtly.

  “I assure you, Sifu, if I had had a single option anywhere in the world aside from that scoundrel, I would never have availed of his assistance. But among all my living descendants, he was the only one who could hear me, so I gave him luck and taught him some rites. Sifu, once you and I have cemented our friendship, I will gladly give you my blessing to kill that miscreant.”

  I felt the Guiyan’s reassurances settle into my father, both muscle and bone. “And what about your servants here?”

  “A ragtag bunch indeed, unfortunately,” the Ghost Magistrate said. “My servants are former Hell Guards in exile, and small refugee spirits. Until my Investiture is complete, these are the best I can hope for.”

  “Even Biaozu?”

  The Guiyan missed a beat. Clearing his throat, he said, “My bailiff is a luosha demon, Sifu; compassion is not in his nature, nor is diplomacy.”

  “So you won’t mind if I kill him?”

  The Ghost Magistrate looked as if he were sucking on pickled lemons. “Kill him, Sifu?”

  Father glanced at me. “Biaozu tortured her mother’s soul in Hell.”

  The Guiyan’s mouth opened wide. One of his hands covered his mouth, while two others started cracking each other’s knuckles. He took control and made a hand push the hand away from his mouth, which he then closed.

  “If this is true, Sifu, then I am most terribly sorry, but the demon was only behaving according to his nature and his duties.”

  “So you won’t mind, then,” my father snapped, “if I behave according to my own nature and my duties as a hunter of monsters, and decapitate your pet demon?”

  “The luosha performs an important role as my bailiff, and he could not be easily replaced,” the Ghost Magistrate said. “Perhaps you could hold off on avenging your woman, at least long enough for me to find a suitable replacement?”

  My father’s human eye gleamed brighter than the one made from glass. Bloodthirsty. “I will wait,” he said, “but not for too long. And should he provoke me, in any way, his replacement will be a smoking crater in the ground.”

  The Ghost Magistrate swallowed. I stared at my father; something about the specificity of his threat was unaccustomed, a smoking crater . . . .

  “I suppose I could recruit one of the Hei Luosha,” the Guiyan said. “But they dither. Indecisive on every subject.”

  Father’s expression seeped scorn. “Because they have three heads?”

  “Exactly, Sifu. But we have matters of greater scope than my household staff to discuss,” the Guiyan said, elaborately flourishing many of his arms. “We have established railways, and have taken extraordinary steps to make sure the trains run on time. And, Sifu, have you experienced the grandeur and modernity of postal services?”

  Father, looking fascinated, said, “I would like to see what you have planned. Lead the way, Lao Guiyan.”

  The Ghost Magistrate stood, not seeming weighed down at all by the mass of his beehived arms, and led us down a grand hallway lit by another row of lanterns clutched in the hands of disembodied arms, a hundred or more on each side of the long hall.

  We walked silent minutes. I marveled at the softness of the exquisite embroidered carpet beneath our footsteps, muffling sound, and at last we arrived at a pair of curving, blue wood doors.

  A scuffle broke out between several of the Guiyan’s hands as they struggled to determine which should open the doors for us. At last a pair of victors emerged, and they swung the doors inwards.

  Behind the doors, a large, domed chamber. In a wide circle around the room’s periphery, on display in golden cages with elaborate filigree, were birds. Their murmurs sounded mournful.

  The birds imprisoned in the cages, making forlorn cries, were all seagulls.

  Each of them had an eye in its forehead, in addition to the two eyes normal gulls have.

  “Aaah!” they cried. “Aahh, ahh, rescue us, Xian Li-lin!”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There are moments when you know your life is going to change. A situation forces you to act, and whatever you decide to do next will determine the course of your entire future. The crush of this kind of moment means you cannot go on passively being the person you have always been; you can decide to remain that person, but after this moment, you will forever know it was by your own choice.

  And here, one of those moments had come for me, hunting me down through my life, weaving up through childhood into the quaking now. The moment came for me asking, Who are you, Xian Li-lin? What kind of person are you, truly?

  All my life, I deferred to my father. Always aware of my responsibilities, my position. And it was easy, in a way, to be a small person, to occupy little space, when the men in my life had been like gods and heroes. I was seven years old when my father stood astride Hell’s sky, a giant sternly destroying the enormous iron walls.

  But I was also seven years old when I hid at the bottom of a well while a demoness laid waste to everything in her path. My mother, my grandmother, the villagers, the trees, the moths, the birds; nothing survived the massacre, except for me. And the spirit-gull who hid with me.

  The seagulls murmured, their wings stretching out and striking against the bars of their cages. Who was I, really? The frightened child hiding in the dark? The terrified woman with her eyes shut tight, because opening her eyes would mean looking upon the face of the man who cursed her? Either way, I was afraid; fear defined me. In the hours since a man’s cruel hex nearly made me a victim, all I’d wanted was to be a follower. To trust my father and obey him. To be silent. To make no decisions. To take no stances. To speak so softly that my voice would not be heard.

  But the seagulls, my seagulls, were caged, and now the moment had come when I had to decide who I was and who I would be.

  I raised my voice and spoke out loud. “Release them. Release them right now.”

  “Li-lin, what are you—” my father said, but I interrupted.

  “These are the Haiou Shen. They are wild nature spirits; they speak human languages; and through me, they have formed a reciprocal relationship with the human world. I am sworn to protect them. They will not serve you like slaves. I will not allow you to keep them in cages.”

  �
�Li-lin,” my father hissed, “we must speak of this privately.”

  “No,” I said, facing him. “This matter is not up for discussion.”

  “What is this objection?” asked the Ghost Magistrate.

  “The seagulls must be released, Guiyan,” I said, “not in five years’ time, not in forty-nine days, not tomorrow. Every locked door to every cage must be unlatched and swung open, this very hour.”

  One of the Guiyan’s hands covered his mouth, as if he were embarrassed by my outburst. Another scratched his head. Several had clamped into hard fists, which swung in the air like banners held up above an advancing army.

  “You are not the Senior Daoshi here, Li-lin.” My father sounded ready to erupt. “These decisions are not yours to make.”

  “I have sworn an oath,” I said. “My name is written, sacrosanct, in vow upon a sacred document, a treaty signed by the spirit gulls and me, witnessed under Heaven. Do not damage my name, or yours.”

  “Mine?”

  His response gave me an opening. “A representative of the Maoshan sect and Linghuan lineage, one whom you Ordained, has sworn to protect these creatures,” I said, “from the time of ten suns until the time of none. If I violate my oath, we are all forsworn; all of us become oathbreakers; all of our spiritual contracts—including your own—diminish in value.”

  “How high of an Ordination did you hold when you signed this contract, Li-lin?”

  “Only the Second, but it does not matter. My name remains mine.” I saw from his face that he didn’t find the argument compelling; I needed to make it matter to him. “I am the caretaker of my name, and my husband’s; if I do not protect the spirit gulls, then I violate my oath, and our names are harmed. The reliability of every Daoshi of the Maoshan Linghuan is brought into question.”

  “Li-lin, a Daoshi of the Second Ordination has no authority to commit the entire lineage to a contractual obligation.”

  “Perhaps not,” I said, “but would you allow my name to be damaged so? I ask you to stand by me on this. I am asking you for something I have never asked for before. I ask you to give me face.”