by Lisa See
So a small band of men set out, treading carefully down the mountain, hoping to find food and other necessities in the villages we had evacuated. Only a few made it back, and they told of seeing their friends decapitated and the heads mounted on stakes. The new widows, unable to bear the news, committed suicide: throwing their bodies over the cliff they had worked so hard to climb, swallowing burning embers from the evening fire, cutting their own throats, or slowly starving themselves. Those who didn’t take this path dishonored themselves even more by seeking new lives with other men around other fires. It seemed that in the mountains some women forgot the rules about widowhood. Even if we are poor, even if we are young, even if we have children, it is better to die, remain true to our husbands, and keep our virtue than to bring shame on their memories.
Separated from my children, I observed Snow Flower’s closely, seeing how they had been influenced by her, learning more about her through them, and—because I missed my own so terribly—comparing mine to hers. In my home, our eldest son had already taken his rightful place and a bright future stretched before him. In this family, Snow Flower’s eldest son had a position even lower than hers. No one loved him. He seemed adrift. Yet to me he was the most like my laotong. He was gentle and delicate. Perhaps this was why she had turned away from him with such a hard heart.
My second son was a good and smart boy, but he did not have the inquisitiveness of my first son. I imagined him living with us for his entire life, marrying in a bride, siring children, and working for his older brother. Snow Flower’s second son, on the other hand, was the bright light of this family. He had his father’s build, short and stocky, with strong arms and legs. The child never showed fear, never shivered from cold, never whined with hunger. He followed his father like a shadow spirit, even going on hunting expeditions. He must have been a help in some way or else the butcher would not have allowed such a thing. When they returned with an animal carcass, the boy sat on his haunches next to his baba, learning how to prepare the meat for cooking. This similarity to his father told me a lot about Snow Flower. Her husband may have been crude, stinky, and beneath my old same in every way, but the love she showed the boy told me that she also cared very much for her husband.
Spring Moon’s face and manner were everything that my daughter’s were not. Jade carried my so-so family’s coarseness in her features, which was why I was so hard on her. Since the moneys made from the salt business would provide her with a generous dowry, she would marry well. I believed Jade would make a good wife, but Spring Moon would become an extraordinary wife, if she were given the chances I’d been given.
All of them made me miss my family.
I was lonely and scared, but this was softened by the nights with Snow Flower. But how do I tell you this? Even here, even under these circumstances, with so many people about, the butcher wanted to do bed business with my laotong. In the cold and open space right next to the fire, they did it under their quilt. The rest of us averted our eyes, but we could not close our ears. Thankfully he was quiet, with only the occasional grunt, but a few times I heard sighs of enjoyment—not from the butcher but from my laotong. I did not understand this thing. After that business was over, Snow Flower would come to me and wrap her arms around me as we had done as girls. I could smell the sex on her, but with the freezing temperatures I was grateful for her warmth. Without her body next to mine I would have been just another woman who died in the night.
Naturally, with all that bed business, Snow Flower got pregnant again, though I hoped that between the cold, the hardship, and our lack of nourishment that her monthly bleeding had simply paused as had mine. She did not want to hear that kind of talk.
“I’ve been pregnant before,” she said. “I know the signs.”
“Then I wish for you another son.”
“This time”—her eyes gleamed with a combination of happiness and certainty—“I will have one.”
“Indeed, sons are always a blessing. You should be proud of your eldest son.”
“Yes,” she responded mildly, then added, “I have watched you two together. You like him. Do you like him enough for him to become your son-in-law?”
I liked the boy, but this proposal was out of the question.
“There can be no man-woman match between our families,” I said. I owed Snow Flower a great deal for what I had become. I wanted to do the same for Spring Moon, but I would never allow my daughter to stoop so low. “A true-heart match between our daughters is far more important, don’t you agree?”
“Of course you are right,” Snow Flower responded, unaware, I think, of my true feelings. “When we get home we will meet with Auntie Wang as planned. As soon as the girls’ feet have settled into their new shapes, they will go to the Temple of Gupo to sign their contract, buy a fan to write of their lives together, and eat at the taro stand.”
“You and I should meet in Shexia too. If we are discreet, we can watch them.”
“Do you mean spy on them?” Snow Flower asked, incredulous. When I smiled, she laughed. “I always thought I was the wicked one, but look who’s scheming now!”
Despite the privations of those weeks and months, our plan for our daughters gave us hope and we tried to remember life’s goodness with each passing day. We celebrated Snow Flower’s younger son’s fifth birthday. He was such a funny little boy and we were entertained watching him with his father. They acted like two pigs together—nosing about, foraging, jostling their strong bodies against each other, both of them streaked with dirt and grime, both of them delighting in each other’s company. The older son was content to sit with the women. Because of my interest in the boy, Snow Flower began paying attention to him too. Under her eyes, he smiled readily. In his expression, I saw his mother’s face at that age—sweet, guileless, intelligent. Snow Flower looked back at him—not with mother love exactly, but as though she liked what she saw more than she had previously thought.
One day as I was teaching him a song, she said, “He shouldn’t learn our women’s songs. We learned some poetry as girls—”
“Through your mother—”
“And I’m sure you’ve learned more in your husband’s home.”
“I have.”
We were both excited, rattling off titles of poems we knew.
Snow Flower took her boy’s hand. “Let’s teach him what we can to be an educated man.”
I knew this would not be so very much since we were both illiterate, but that boy was like a dried mushroom dropped into boiling water. He soaked up everything we gave him. Soon he could recite the Tang dynasty poem that Snow Flower and I had loved so well as girls and whole passages from the classical book for boys that I had memorized to help my son in his lessons. For the first time, I saw true pride in Snow Flower’s face. The rest of the family did not feel the same, but for once Snow Flower did not cower or cede to their demands that we stop. She had remembered the little girl who used to pull back the curtain on the palanquin so we could peek out.
Those days—cold and uncomfortable and as filled with fear and hardship as they were—were wonderful in the sense that Snow Flower was happy in a way I had not seen her for many years. Pregnant, without much food, she seemed to glow from inside as though she were lit by an oil lamp. She enjoyed the company of the three sworn sisters from Jintian and relished not being locked up solely with her mother-in-law. Sitting with those women, Snow Flower sang songs I hadn’t heard for a long time. Out here in the open, away from the confines of her dark and dreary little house, her horse spirit was free.
Then, on a freezing night after we had been up there for ten weeks, Snow Flower’s second son went to sleep curled by the fire and never again woke up. I don’t know what killed him—sickness, hunger, or the cold—but in the early morning light we saw that frost covered his body and his face had gone icy blue. Snow Flower’s keening echoed through the hills, but the butcher took it hardest. He held the boy in his arms, tears running down his cheeks, their wetness sending tra
ils through the many weeks of dirt that were ground into his face. He would not be comforted. He would not release the boy. He had no ears for his wife or even his mother. He hid his face in his son’s body, trying to block out their entreaties. Even when the farmers in our group sat around him, shielding him from our view and comforting him in low whispers, he did not yield. Every once in a while he lifted his face and cried to the sky, “How could I have lost my precious son?” The butcher’s brokenhearted question was one that appeared in many nu shu stories and songs. I glanced at the faces of the other women around the fire and saw their unspoken question: Could a man—this butcher—feel the same despair and sadness that we women feel when we lose a child?
He sat that way for two days, while the rest of us sang mourning songs. On the third day, he rose, hugged the child to his chest, and dashed away from our fire, through the clusters of other families, and into the woods that he and his son had ventured into so many times before. He returned two days later, empty-handed. When Snow Flower asked where her son was buried, the butcher turned and hit her with such ferocity that she flew back a couple of meters and landed with a thud onto the hard-packed snow.
He proceeded to beat her so badly that she miscarried in a violent gush of black blood that stained the icy slopes throughout our campsite. She was not very far along, so we never found a fetus, but the butcher was convinced that he’d rid the world of another girl. “There is nothing so evil as a woman’s heart,” he recited again and again, as though none of us had heard that saying before. We just kept to our ministrations of Snow Flower—stripping off her pants, melting water to wash them, cleaning her thighs of bloodstains, and taking the stuffing from one of her wedding quilts to stanch the putrid ghastliness that continued to flow from between her legs—and never raised our eyes or voices to him.
When I look back, I think it was a miracle that Snow Flower survived those last two weeks in the mountains as she passively accepted beating after beating. Her body weakened from the loss of blood from the miscarriage. Her body bruised and tore from the daily punishment her husband rained down on her. Why didn’t I stop him? I was Lady Lu. I had made him do what I wanted before. Why not this time? Because I was Lady Lu, I could not do more. He was a physically strong man, who did not shy away from using that strength. I was a woman, who, despite my social standing, was alone. I was powerless. He was well aware of that fact, as was I.
At the time of my laotong’s lowest moment, I realized how much I needed my husband. To me, so much of my life with him had been about duty and the roles we were required to play. I regretted all the occasions when I had not been the wife he deserved. I vowed that if I made it down from that mountain I would become the kind of woman who might actually earn the title of Lady Lu and not be just an actor in a pageant. I wished for this and willed it to come true, but not before I would reveal myself to be far more brutal and cruel than Snow Flower’s husband.
The women under our tree continued to watch over Snow Flower. We tended to her cuts, using boiled snow to douse away potential infections, wrapping them in cloth torn from our own bodies. The women wanted to make her soup from the marrow of the animals the butcher brought to feed us. When I reminded them that Snow Flower was a vegetarian, we took turns walking in groups of two to forage in the forest for bark, weeds, and roots. We made a bitter broth and spoon-fed it to her. We sang songs of comfort.
But our words and deeds did nothing to ease her mind. She would not sleep. She sat by the fire, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. Her whole body rocked with gut-wrenching despair. None of us had clean clothes, but we had tried to remain neat in appearance. Snow Flower no longer cared. She neglected to wash her face with clumps of snow or rub her teeth with the hem of her tunic. Her hair hung loose, reminding me of the night my mother-in-law sank into illness. She became more and more like Third Sister-in-law on that same evening—barely present with us at all, her mind floating, floating, floating away.
There came a point every day when Snow Flower wrested herself away from the fire to wander the snowy mountains. She walked as if in a dream, lost, uprooted, untethered. Every day I went with her, unasked, holding on to her arm, the two of us tottering over the icy rocks on our lily feet as she wound her way to the edge of the cliff, where she wailed into the great expanse, the sound flying away on the strong northern wind.
I was terrified, always thinking back to our terrible escape into the hills and the hideous sounds of the women’s screams as they fell to their deaths so many meters below. Snow Flower did not share my trepidation. She looked out over the cliffs, watching snow hawks soar on the mountain winds. I thought of all of the times Snow Flower had talked about flying. How easy it would have been for her to take one step out and over the cliff. But I never left her side, never let go of her arm.
I tried to talk to her about things that would tie her to earth. I might say something like, “Would you prefer to approach Madame Wang about our daughters or shall I?” When she didn’t respond, I would try something else. “You and I live so close. Why should we wait for the girls to become old sames before they meet? The two of you should come for a long visit. We will bind their feet together. Then they will have those days to remember too.” Or, “Look at that snow flower. Spring is coming and soon we will leave this place.” For ten days she answered only in monosyllables.
Then, on the eleventh day, as she veered to the edge of the cliff, she finally spoke. “I have lost five children, and my husband has blamed me each time. He always takes his frustration and stuffs it in his fists. When those weapons need to find their release, they find me. I used to think he was angry that I’d been pregnant with girls. But now, with my son . . . Was it grief all along that my husband felt?” She paused and tilted her head as she tried to work things out in her mind. “Either way, he has to put his fists somewhere,” she concluded despairingly.
Which meant that these beatings had been going on since the first year she’d fallen permanently into the butcher’s house. Although her husband’s actions were common and accepted in our county, it hurt that she had hidden this from me so well and for so long. I had thought she would never again lie to me and that we would no longer have secrets, but I wasn’t upset about that. Instead, I felt guilty for having ignored the signs of my laotong’s unhappy life for too long.
“Snow Flower—”
“No, listen. You think my husband has evil in his heart, but he is not an evil man.”
“He treats you as less than human—”
“Lily,” she cautioned, “he is my husband.” Then her thoughts plunged to an even darker place. “I’ve wanted to die for a long time, but someone is always around.”
“Don’t say such things.”
She ignored me. “How often do you think about fate? I think about it nearly every day. What if my mother had not married out to my father’s house? What if my father had not taken to the pipe? What if my parents had not married me out to the butcher? What if I had been born a son? Could I have saved my family? Oh, Lily, I have been so ashamed of my circumstances before you. . . .”
“I never—”
“Ever since you first entered my natal home I have seen your pity.” She shook her head to prevent me from speaking. “Don’t deny it. Just hear me.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “You see me and you think I fell so far, but what happened to my mother was far worse. As a girl, I remember her crying all day and all night in sorrow. I’m sure she wanted to die, but she wouldn’t abandon me. Then, after I went to my husband permanently, she wouldn’t abandon my father.”
I saw where this was heading, so I said, “Your mother never allowed herself an embittered heart. She never gave up—”
“She went with my father on the road. I’ll never know what happened to them, but I’m sure she did not allow herself to die until he was gone first. It’s been twelve years now. So often I’ve wondered if I could have helped her. Could she have come to me? I’ll answer this way. I dream
ed I’d get married and find happiness away from the sickness of my father and the sadness of my mother. I did not know I would be a beggar in my husband’s home. Then I learned how to get my husband to bring home food I would eat. You see, Lily, there are things they don’t tell us about men. We can make them happy if we show them pleasure. And, you know, it is fun for us too, if we let it be.”
She sounded like one of those old women who are always trying to frighten girls before they marry out with that kind of talk.
“You don’t have to lie. I’m your laotong. You can be truthful.”
She pulled her eyes away from the clouds and for the briefest moment looked at me as though she didn’t recognize me. “Lily”—her voice came out sad and sympathetic—“you have everything, and yet you have nothing.”
Her words cut me, but I couldn’t think about them now as she confessed. “My husband and I didn’t follow the rules concerning the pollution of a wife after childbirth. We both wanted more sons.”
“Sons are a woman’s worth—”
“But you’ve seen what happens. Too many girls come into my body.”
To this undeniable problem I had a practical response.
“It wasn’t their destiny to live,” I said. “Be thankful, for something was probably wrong with them. We women can only try again—”
“Oh, Lily, when you talk like that my head feels empty. I hear only the wind rushing through the trees. Do you feel how the ground wants to give way beneath my feet? You should go back now. Let me be with my mother. . . .”
