During Nephrite’s stay with this Lady of the Tao, she fell one afternoon into a conversation with a Purified Teacher, the holiest of the women at Darkdazzle Vista. The Purified Teacher, whose austere devotions and skilful practice of alchemy had transformed her into a transcendent spirit on earth, told Nephrite of her visionary travels to the palace of the Western Motherqueen. After that. Nephrite wanted nothing else but to become a Lady of the Tao herself, though Mama Chen declined to be of any help.
So Nephrite studied, saving every coin that came to her in hopes of buying her freedom from Mama Chen, while Baby and I worked and laughed together by day, sleeping at night together in our little room. But things could not remain so: I broke the melon, went to Darkdazzle to be instructed, and returned to enter into the life for which I had been trained.
The first day, I was nervous. I made my courtesy calls to the other houses in the entertainment district that afternoon, bowing to Mama Yuan and Mama Bai and the rest, asking formally for their favour in my new career. Their daughters gathered round to greet me, some solemn, most merry-eyed, a few quite openly appraising my looks and my new clothes. Saffron had helped me pile my hair up in a high loop, rather than a musician girl’s two simple knots. Then she had dotted a glittering beauty mark, a ‘yellow star dimple’, on my cheek.
When I returned to Lutegarden, she called Bellring and the kitchen maids to come and admire my new look.
The two kitchen maids joked and chattered. Bellring brought her lute in with her – a beautiful thing, its pear-shaped body made of red sandalwood inlaid with flowers of tortoiseshell –and lent it to me for the evening. Tilting her graceful neck, she told me I would play well. Her kindness, and Saffron’s, eased my mood a little.
Of course I had played for guests before. I often helped serve the wine and dishes I brought up from the kitchen, and once or twice, late in the evening, I had been allowed to join in a party game. I had even gone along on several pleasure trips to the countryside when some gentleman decided to appreciate nature with his friends. But Mama Chen had always been careful to keep me in the background. ‘Men desire more to pick the flower they haven’t seen a hundred times before,’ she would say, calling me away.
I can’t even remember who it was we played for that first night. Saffron and Glory and 1. Glory was annoyed at first, because Mama Chen had told her not to play her chyn but to accompany me on the wether drum while I played and sang. But just before we went into the best room to meet the gentlemen. Saffron scolded Glory for sulking. The emperor himself is famous for his skill at beating the wether drum, silly Glory. How can you look down on it?’ Glory brightened up then.
I do recall that the guests were five old men, who teased me when I spilled some tea. Towards midnight, one of them asked his friends who would be ‘the one to enrich his virility by returning some night to join with the little virgin’, but just then another old gentleman broke out with a snore and all of us laughed. Nephrite had urged me to store up vital energy the way some Taoist adepts do, taking as many lovers as Mama Chen’s notions of profitable elusiveness would allow – provided I kept my own emotions under firm control. But I was in no hurry to enter into that part of my new life.
What I had worried about most, keeping up an entertaining conversation, turned out to be easy enough. One old scholar took me aside and recited an ancient poem from The Book of Odes. He praised me extravagantly when I recited it back. But most guests preferred a courtesan as young as I to smile, and listen, and nod.
A few weeks later, a minor government assistant named Fan began to visit Lutegarden regularly, and to ask for me to keep him company. He gave me a finely carved ivory plectrum for the old lute I played, something I valued much more than the hairpins or earrings he might have chosen. His high smooth forehead reminded me of that gleaming ivory, and although he drank heavily, he took great care about his person, always bathing in water scented with aloeswood. The crab apple in the garden blossomed luxuriantly that year, just when he presented Mama Chen with a gift of silk and asked me if he might stay with me one night.
On the advice of the older girls, I refused at first, hanging my head and blushing, which was not at all difficult to do. But when he sent me a poem on a slip of deep crimson paper, it moved me.
I still slept in the apprentices’ room, because there was no other free, but Nephrite changed with me for a night, helping me to fill the incense brazier with cassia and patchouli and musk before young Fan arrived. Baby waited on us, slipping into the room with hot wine and dishes, for Mama Chen was careful to send up plenty of food, not only to increase the bill, but in order that he might not sink too far into intoxication. Even then, my heart beating with nervousness and anticipation, I noticed how subdued Baby was, though I supposed she was taking pains not to break the mood.
After a while, his face flushed but his eyes still clear. Fan led me towards Nephrite’s gauze-curtained bed. Baby loosened my hair and helped me undress, but then left quickly, though I would have preferred her to stay a while longer. Mama Chen had given me powdered cuttlefish bone and hyssop dissolved in wine that afternoon, to protect me from pain or undue bleeding; indeed, although I normally drank little, that night I had gone cup for cup with Fan, until I grew quite tipsy. At first he sat on my left, and then he spread his legs out and took me onto his lap, wrapping his arms around me. We kissed and touched one another, all in the proper way. But he lost his restraint and hurriedly pushed me onto my back, so that I might be the rising phoenix and he the dragon overturned. In that moment, I thought of Nanny by the riverbank and saw the river-polished stone of dark green jade that brought her to her violent end.
The vision of the stone, its coolness and gloss, stayed in the air above me. Soon Fan cried out, and afterwards lay snoring beside me on the bed. The next day. Nephrite told me I should be pleased: though his male essence had been nourished by my virginity, in his greed for exhilaration he had enriched me by the prodigal wastage of his vital force. I too had been taught this at Darkdazzle Vista, but I felt less certain. A new hunger had been stirred up in me, and it remained unsatisfied.
That very afternoon. Mama Chen heard that Fan’s gambling debts already rose around him like a floodtide and that he had failed to pay several large bills in the Entertainment Quarter when he left Lo-yang the previous autumn. The next three times he came to visit, she told him curtly I was previously engaged. The weeks passed and I sometimes thought of him, but so many things were different now I was no longer an apprentice. I came to pride myself on my growing facility at the word games our guests played as we ate and drank, and at playing that other game of banter with both word and glance.
After Baby danced, or when she slipped into a party to refill the ewers, she would roll her eyes comically to show how overworked she was, but we both knew there would be another apprentice soon. In fact, it looked as if Saffron was about to be taken off to the south by a well-to-do officer of advanced years. I think she still longed sometimes for that visiting Emissary Gao from Chang-an, though I never heard her speak of him; in any case, this older officer found her flute music and her Indian good looks enchanting, and he seemed the sort who, whatever happened, would not leave her destitute.
Finally, it was late spring, and the peonies bloomed. Saffron’s officer was transferred and she did go with him to the south, just when the heavy crimson flowers scattered their petals on the ground. Taking her leave of us, she threw her arms around me for the first and only time, and we both wept. I never learned what became of her, but afterwards I would remember Saffron, as people think of absent lovers, when the peonies bloomed. I don’t know what circumstance of life had cast her into Lute-garden House – none of us talked about that – but I did know that her family, though arrived three generations back from India, had come to be fully people of Tang. Little Pink and Glory had kept their remarks about barbarians to themselves in Saffron’s presence, and the combination of her Chinese ways with her narrow foreign face had comforted me when I gazed i
nto my mirror.
So Little Pink took Saffron’s rooms, having persuaded Glory –who should have moved up into them by right of seniority – that it wasn’t worth the bother of moving, and I switched into Little Pink’s old room, which was no bigger than Nephrite’s. In midsummer, a new apprentice named Jujube came to help Baby, and Mama Chen let me know it was time I found a patron.
Secrets of the Jade Terrace
by Ji Ni-lu. Lars Jensen, translator
BOOK SIX: THE TEACHINGS OF THE WOMAN INCOGNITA
…Thus the seeker, having heard of the arcane mysteries of the Western Motherqueen, went to inquire of [her devotee] the Woman Incognita. She answered his many questions, saying, ‘It has long been taught [that] the union of man and woman is no other than the struggle of air and blood, each seeking to subdue [the other] by stifling [his or her own] joyfulness [i.e. orgasm] and gaining [the other’s] vital essence [i.e. the vaginal secretions or the semen of the sexual partner].’
Then [he] asked [her], saying, ‘But is it not so that [in this way] the hundred illnesses are banished and [a lifespan of] ten thousand years is achieved?’
Forthwith [she] replied, saying, ‘[They] say it is so. Yet is this not a foolish thing? For after ten thousand [years] must come [the] ten thousand and first, and on earth even a lifetime free of illness must end. How much better it is, then, to put aside this business of stifling [one’s own] excitement and preying on the passion [of the unsuspecting or undisciplined partner]! How much better to celebrate the rites with joy and so become a transcendent, if only [for a] brief [span of time]!’
Then [he] asked again, saying, ‘I see. To do otherwise [than what you recommend] is merely to grasp after vanities. But how is the celebration to be accomplished?’
Again the woman answered, saying, ‘I have the form of a woman, while your body is [that of] a man. Let us observe how, when the Jade Stalk is first brought into contact with the Lute Strings and the Crimson Seed…’
[text ends]
This previously unknown esoteric text, recently discovered in the Un-u-ji Temple in Nara, Japan, is unique among Taoistic sexological writings in its advocacy of sexual pleasure as an end in itself, provided of course that the Woman’s teachings are offered in earnest and not for her own purposes. The fragment has been tentatively identified as a Heian era copy of a seventh- or eighth-century Chinese original; words appear to be garbled or missing in several places, suggesting that the copyist’s knowledge of Chinese was less than perfect.
The translator most gratefully acknowledges the extraordinary generosity of the abbess of the temple, and the contributions of Ms Rose Edo, without whose expertise the technical terms would, perforce, have remained untranslated.
PARROT
SPEAKS:
8
It was in the middle of the eighth month: the his-face lilies were budding on the Lutegarden pond. I stared at them as Little Pink told me my yearlong liaison with Collator Wu had come to an end. He hadn’t visited or written in two weeks, so I supposed that something was amiss, but it was Little Pink who gave herself the pleasure of telling me just what. She had been called out to a banquet and had seen him there with a singer from another house, a woman named Whitecaps. Little Pink quickly got the whole tale from an acquaintance of his: Wu was said to be deeply infatuated with Whitecaps and had been seen at breakfast time that very day, eating fried sesame cakes at a little stand opposite the lane where she lived. Tm sorry,’ Little Pink said, eyes a-dance, ‘to be the one to let you know. But I thought you might be wondering why he dropped you without a word.’
‘Oh, so that’s it,’ I replied; it wasn’t really so difficult to keep my voice calm. There was one thing I wanted to know – whether she looked foreign. Little Pink informed me soon enough: rumour had it that Whitecaps’s father had been a government minister executed for treason. ‘I’ve seen this Whitecaps,’ Little Pink added in a tone of innocent chatter, ‘and she certainly looks like a proper Chinese lady.’ She stopped, as if embarrassed, and added hastily, ‘Strange, isn’t it? I always thought Collator Wu preferred your special kind of prettiness.’
Baby was sitting with us, and she reached an arm around my shoulders to console me. Yet watching the pond water glint as a huge red-gold carp broke through into the late summer sunlight, I truly didn’t feel a great loss. I had liked Wu; he was spendthrift enough to keep Mama Chen happy and to allow me to put a little by. He hadn’t demanded all my time, and – except for his cowardice in leaving me without a farewell – hadn’t been unkind. His genuine interest in poetry far surpassed that of the officials who learn only how to turn out acceptable set pieces for examinations and social occasions; he didn’t know it, but in the early weeks of our flirtation, he had won me by his willingness to discuss his poems with me seriously and to polish the wording or correct the tone pattern of my own attempts.
Wu’s attentions had flattered me. But a few days before Little Pink gleefully informed me of his new romance, I had realized that he wasn’t going to come to Lutegarden again. I spent several hours hidden in my bedroom, staining my nails with Persian henna flower while tears washed the powder from my face. Then my thoughts turned to the nights he had stayed within the curtains of that very bed: he took no particular care for me, though I knew enough to shake my head and moan when he did; Mama Chen’s instructions on that point were strict and clear. In truth, though, I would only close my eyes to keep his face away, and in the darkness the image of the stone with which the Tibetan raider murdered Nanny would rise up again. Sometimes it was darkened by dried blood. Sometimes it glowed with an unearthly greenish luminescence, like an odd misshapen pearl. Looking at it then, while Wu’s steamy breath struck my shoulder or my neck, I felt somehow that I saw my true self, solitary and inviolate.
If this makes me sound unfeeling, I can only tell you that my ideas about many things were soon to change. And even then, my life was not untouched by the passions. The night after Little Pink dangled her toes in the lily pond and triumphantly passed on her news. Baby slipped into my room once again.
How she managed it, in a house where stealthy feet wandered the corridors at any hour and Mama Chen made it her business to know who was where, I don’t know. But although the gatekeeper’s duties included keeping a special watch over the place late at night, his ears had grown less keen with age. Even loo Mama Chen sometimes had to sleep, and Baby could move with the grace of beings not of this world. On the evenings when Wu stayed over, she would avoid me, waiting on the others if it could be managed, and letting Jujube serve as my little maid. Now she came, when all the house was quiet, to lie beside me in the darkness. Hearing her draw aside the bed-curtain, I sat up to light a candle. She made a wry face and picked up from the table by my bed a tiny glass sash ornament Wu had given me. She held it so it glittered in the candlelight; a faithful mandarin duck and drake amorously entwined their gleaming necks. What could I do but laugh? Soundlessly, she joined in.
Then, as she had done more than once these past few months, she leaned forward to kiss my lips. And I, as if groping after some unspoken language, kissed her back, softly, careful not to frighten her away. By the light of that candle she let me touch her scarred breast, as I had done just after she came to Lutegarden. ‘Don’t be angry,’ I whispered, and bent my head to kiss that poor torn nipple and then, as quickly as I could, the other one.
She jerked away and out of my bed in an instant, snuffing the candle as she stood up. ‘Wait!’ I hissed, too loudly. But her feet pattered swiftly over the floor and out into the hallway, and I knew that nothing I might have said would have made her stay. I slept little that night, and in the morning, when I whispered that I wanted to talk to her alone, she shook her head and walked off.
Mama Chen and the others assumed that my pale face and heavy eyes spoke of my longing for Wu. They treated me gently, or left me to myself, each in her own way, and Mama Chen told us at breakfast several of her favourite warning tales about the high cost of love.
‘Dragonfly’ meant me. When I was enrolled in the official government register of entertainers. Mama Chen gave me a new, more decorative name. She insisted that the others call me Dragonfly as well. Only Nephrite still said Parrot, in Khotanese, and Baby signified me by linking her thumbs and flapping her hands like wings in a way that could indicate an insect or a bird. I used Mama Chen’s surname as my own; all of us at Lutegarden House did. No one knew that deep inside I clung to Li, my own true family name.
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