Yun Yun understood the woman’s meaning. But Yun Yun wanted to believe, had to believe that her parents had not failed entirely, that when she learned how to please her husband and in-laws, they’d soften, become kind.
So Yun Yun, pressing the string of cash into the guide’s hands, begged, “When you take the sweets to my family, don’t worry them by repeating what you’ve seen and heard. Tell them the sweets are a gift from the Chows. Say I’m happy.”
In the girls’ house next door, Mei Ju heard Yun Yun’s in-laws and husband yelling at her night after night. And out on the streets and in the fields, it seemed to Mei Ju that Yun Yun had the look of a frightened dog: when walking, she skulked against the walls of houses; if approached, she cowered, her eyes darting fearfully.
One morning, as Mei Ju and her sister and Shadow were leaving the girls’ house for home, Yun Yun limped past them, leaving such a heavy scent of linament in her wake that their noses pricked and their eyes stung.
Mei Ju, turning so as not to embarrass her, saw Shadow wince.
“I’d rather be Eldest Cousin,” Bak Ju muttered.
More than ten years had passed since Eldest Cousin had died. Mei Ju, only five at the time, hadn’t understood their cousin was dying, hadn’t grasped their second uncle’s intention when he’d started bundling his daughter’s quilt around her. But Eldest Cousin, not quite eight and wasted from the spitting blood disease, must have known, for as soon as her father loomed over her, she flailed her arms and legs, mere skin over bone, and mewled pitifully between rasping breaths, “Don’t. I’ll get better. I will.”
Second Uncle, his face strangely twisted, stolidly continued to cocoon Eldest Cousin in the quilt. Confused, Mei Ju turned to her sister. For once, however, Bak Ju looked as bewildered as herself.
Frightened now, Mei Ju cried for their mother. Bak Ju, staring at uncle and cousin, wrapped her arms around Mei Ju. Ignoring them, Second Uncle scooped Eldest Cousin into his arms, stalked out of the room toward their front door.
Mei Ju broke free of Bak Ju, chased after uncle and cousin, shrieking, “Ma,” in a long, drawn out wail.
Ma, hurrying into their common room, peered uneasily into Grandmother’s sleeping room, quickly shut the door, grabbed hold of Mei Ju.
“Didn’t Grandmother tell you to go help your aunts in the wormhouse?”
Mei Ju sniffed, wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Eldest Cousin wanted water, and Second Uncle …”
“Open the door for your uncle,” Ma snapped.
As Bak Ju obeyed, Mei Ju butted her head against their mother’s belly. “Why? Where’s Second Uncle taking Eldest Cousin?”
“You fool,” Second Uncle choked. “I’m trying to protect the family.”
Poking her head around Ma, Mei Ju saw him carry her cousin outside. Bak Ju shut the door, hurried back to Mei Ju.
“Where’s Second Uncle taking Eldest Cousin?” Mei Ju repeated.
Ma shook her finger sternly at them both. “If you’d gone to the wormhouse with your aunts like good girls, you’d have been spared what you can’t yet understand.”
Bak Ju hung her head.
“Where’s Second Uncle taking Eldest Cousin?” Mei Ju insisted.
“You know your cousin’s been very sick for a long, long time. Now she’s dying. She won’t last out the day whether she’s in her bed or not. But if she dies under our roof, her hostless spirit can harm the family.”
Bak Ju’s head jerked up. “Second Uncle took Eldest Cousin outside to die in the open?”
Mei Ju’s eyes welled with fresh tears. “I don’t understand.”
“Didn’t I say you’re too young?” Ma came back.
Bak Ju quickly took Mei Ju’s hand. “Come on. We’d better go.”
“No.” Mei Ju pulled free, tugged on their mother’s jacket. “What’s a hostless spirit?”
Ma glanced uneasily at Grandmother’s door, turned back to Mei Ju. “Each person has three souls. One that remains in the body at death and is buried, one that undergoes judgment in the Courts of Hell, and one that enters the spirit tablet.”
She pointed to the spirit tablets—each a long piece of wood with the name of a dead ancestor painted on it—resting on the family altar. “Daughters must marry before they can have a tablet, a host for their spirit.”
“Can’t we get Eldest Cousin a host some other way?” Mei Ju pleaded.
“Don’t worry.” Pulling out a handkerchief, Ma wiped Mei Ju’s face dry. “Grandmother will find a family with a dead son that Eldest Cousin’s ghost can marry. Then she’ll have a host for her spirit and people who’ll send her offerings.”
“Will Eldest Cousin be happy then?” Mei Ju asked.
“Yes,” Ma assured her. “Very happy.”
Despite her mother’s reassurance, Mei Ju had been haunted for months by the image of her cousin lying helpless and alone in the open. Now Mei Ju fretted over her sister’s meaning when she’d responded to Yun Yun’s hurts by muttering, “I’d rather be Eldest Cousin.” After all, their cousin had been dead when she’d married a ghost. Bak Ju was alive.
Day after day, Mei Ju waited for Bak Ju to say more, to explain why she would consider marrying a dead man, becoming a ghost wife. When Bak Ju didn’t, Mei Ju asked her friends.
She was just climbing into their bed. Shadow, already settled for the night, grimaced.
“To avoid a husband like Young Chow.”
Seated cross-legged beside Shadow, Rooster looked up from the book of sutras she was studying. “To avoid the bother of a man in bed.”
Mei Ju, uncertain exactly what couples did in bed, didn’t know whether a man was, in truth, a bother. But from watching her mother and aunts with her father and uncles, Mei Ju guessed it was the wife who did the pleasuring, the husband who was pleasured. In any case, she couldn’t believe the pleasure was greater than the thrill of exchanging ideas openly with her friends. And, kneeling so she faced them both, Mei Ju suggested, “Bak Ju could avoid a husband altogether by becoming a nun.”
Snatching Rooster’s long pigtails, Shadow wielded her fingers like scissors. “You mean cut off her hair and shave her head?”
Rooster thrust out her pointy chin. “I’d do that gladly except nuns have to beg for their livelihoods, and thanks to Old Bloodsucker, I’ve had my fill of begging for this lifetime.” She pulled her pigtails free and tapped Mei Ju’s shoulder with them. “What about you?”
“I don’t want to be a nun. But my mother and aunts have to ask Grandmother’s permission for every little thing. Isn’t that begging too?”
“Yes.” Rooster shut her book. “Maybe that’s why Bak Ju wants to be a ghost wife.”
“As a ghost wife, Bak Ju would have a dead husband, but her parents-in-law would be alive, and she’d have to serve them and beg their permission for things the same as any daughter-in-law,” Shadow pointed out.
“My sister wouldn’t mind,” Mei Ju said. “And since she never fails to please our grandmother, I’m sure she could satisfy the most demanding motherin-law.”
“So it must be the marriage bed that Bak Ju wants to avoid. I do too, because Empress was right when she said no baby will get through these.” Rooster placed her hands on her narrow hips. “If my belly were to swell with child, I’d almost certainly die. My child as well.”
Insides Turned Upside Down
TOO TROUBLED by Rooster’s and Bak Ju’s distress to sleep, Mei Ju waited impatiently for the night to pass so she could calm herself by reeling silk.
She’d long ago become used to the heat from the fire and steaming water, the stench of boiling cocoons and hanks of raw silk. She’d also become so skilled in manipulating the cocoons with chopsticks that she rarely burned her fingers.
The moment she completed unwinding silk from one cocoon, she replaced it with another so as to maintain an even thickness in the thread. She immediately removed the spent cocoon from the hot water, thus preventing the oil in the chrysalid from marring the appearance of the sil
k. She also made certain the fire was big enough to keep the water boiling, yet not so fierce that smoke would sully the water, robbing the silk of its lustre.
The challenge of performing multiple tasks simultaneously excited Mei Ju. And since she’d completed her three-year apprenticeship, there’d been the added pleasure of escaping Grandmother’s rule through reeling. For when there were no cocoons left at home, Mei Ju and her sister and Third Aunt went to work outside of family.
Where Grandmother scolded Mei Ju for being slow, Master Low, the landlord for whom Mei Ju reeled silk, praised her for being careful. He’d even told her, “You have the makings of a master reeler.”
What Mei Ju liked best about reeling, however, was that the concentration it demanded left no room in her head or heart or belly for troublesome thoughts and feelings.
Rooster had said she found the same solace in practicing calligraphy. “From the moment I start grinding the inkstick and smelling the blackening ink, I stop fretting, and after I’ve written for a while, I forget about all the things I don’t understand. I feel completely at peace. But the feeling vanishes the moment I stop. That’s why I have to keep studying the sutras. Because only when I understand them will I know real peace. Peace that has no end.”
Mei Ju, though, didn’t see how Rooster would ever understand the Buddhist scriptures. Not because Rooster was stupid. But because she didn’t know enough characters. And when Mei Ju and Shadow tried to help Rooster figure out characters by breaking them down, identifying and then piecing together the radicals they recognized, there were so many irregularities that they were usually defeated.
For a few months after Shadow had stopped their lessons with a regretful, “There’s nothing left that I can teach you,” Rooster had picked up new characters by hovering around her brother Laureate whenever he was reading out loud. But Rooster had been forced to give that up since he’d made a fuss about her disturbing him.
“I know I leaned a little too close and blocked his light,” Rooster had seethed. “But I apologized and backed off immediately. Laureate lashed out anyway, and you know he’s big for a twelve-year-old and strong, so I started bruising almost as soon as he started hitting me. Yet our parents said nothing to him about it. They were too busy yelling at me, accusing me of deliberately bothering my brother, making it impossible for him—and therefore our family—to succeed.
“I tell you, their attack hurt me more than Laureate’s. How could I not defend myself? So I told them about my prayers to Gwoon Yum back when Old Bloodsucker tried to pull Laureate out of school to work for him. All that did, though, was make everyone angrier. Ba slapped me for talking back to my elders. Laureate shouted that it was his brains alone and not my prayers to the Goddess which won him the support of the Low elder who stopped Old Bloodsucker. And Ma added ill temper and stubbornness to her long list of my sins.”
Suddenly, Rooster’s voice had lost its fire. “Well, she’s right about that. I do flare up when I shouldn’t and I am stiff-necked. I’m envious too. Not of Laureate, but of his chance to study at our clan’s school. To have lasting peace within his reach.”
“Where there is proper order, there is peace,” Mei Ju’s grandmother liked to say. “And under proper order, children must obey their parents, wives their husbands, juniors their seniors.” Of course Grandmother made certain everyone at home observed proper order. Yet Mei Ju had never found it a place of peace.
For if Bak Ju should strike Grandmother’s back lightly with her fists, murmuring, “It’s damp today. Your old bones must be stiff. Let me loosen them up,” Grandmother would croon, “At least I have one grandchild I can count on.” Then Ma and Ba would beam as though they were being praised, while Second and Third Aunt and Uncle would set their children to shelling peanuts for Grandmother or amusing her with a rhyme, a story, a song.
In response, Grandmother might snap, “Peanuts are yeet hay, overheating. Do you want me to get sick?” Then Ma and Second and Third Aunt would fall over themselves running to the kitchen for leung cha, cooling tea. Or Grandmother might complain, “Ai, all that prattle makes my head ache,” sending them racing for her pungent medicated oils. And should she single out one child for praise, the rest of the children, urged by their parents, would try to prove themselves helpful and clever too.
Empress—until she’d left to marry—had likewise manipulated the members of their girls’ house into jostling for her favor. So had her successors. And their matchmakers had praised every one of these seniors for running a well-ordered house. Mei Ju, however, felt no peace in the girls’ house either.
Except in the loft with Rooster and Shadow. But even there, Mei Ju could not be completely at ease since there was always the fear that someone might overhear them and thereby discover—worse, expose—their secrets.
Sometimes Mei Ju dreamtalked with her friends of a place where they wouldn’t have to speak in whispers or hide their books and brushes. A place where they could escape the rule of seniors and family—the way her grandfather and his concubine had in their little house.
A house for three girls was, of course, impossible. And self-rule was against all proper order. In truth, Mei Ju’s insides turned upside down just thinking about it, and she was reminded of when, as a small girl, she’d somehow slipped outdoors unnoticed during the height of a big wind. Swept off her feet and tossed into the air, she’d screamed, terrified she’d end up alone among strangers, perhaps badly hurt. But she’d also screamed, at least a little, from the delicious thrill of sailing above the earth like a bird on the wing.
Yun Yun could not please her new family. The water she heated for her parents-in-law and husband to wash in was too hot or too tepid or too cool. The tea she served them was too strong, not strong enough.
“Look at the color, you fool!” her motherin-law would shout. With her long, sharp nails, she’d peel back Yun Yun’s eyelids. “What are your eyes for? Just to stare at food?”
Cleaning up after their morning rice, Yun Yun threw away the few grains that had dropped on the tabletop and floor during the meal. Her motherin-law’s long face stretched even longer, and she carped at Yun Yun for being wasteful. “You could have used that to feed the chickens!”
The worm trays were heavy, too large and awkward for Yun Yun to pick up. When she dragged them as she’d always done at home, her father-in-law, built like a bull, scolded her for being weak, her husband accused her of being as inept at work as she was in giving pleasure.
Over and over Yun Yun’s parents-in-law and husband abused her for being lazy, a useless rice bucket, a stranger to work. But Yun Yun was, in truth, accustomed to labor from childhood. She’d been barely five when her grandmother had taken her into their wormhouse and taught her how to pick the dead ones from the live. The following year, her grandfather and father had shown her which mulberry leaves to pick, how to shred and feed them to the worms. At ten, she’d learned to reel silk. Only her grandparents and parents had always corrected her gently and with warm affection. They’d encouraged her diligence through praise. Nor had her neighbor’s parents and brothers and sisters-in-law been any less kind to Lucky. And although Old Granny, their teacher in the girls’ house, had sometimes frightened them, she’d always been fair.
Crushed beneath her husband at night, Yun Yun recalled the stone mortar for hulling rice that was set in the earthen floor of her family’s common room, the pestle fastened at the end of the beam which rose when her father stood on the other end, fell when he stepped off to release it. While she was still in split-bottomed pants, her father had let her clamp her arms and legs around the beam so she would have the pleasure of bobbing up and down. And after she tired of the game, she’d curl in her mother’s lap, where she’d be lulled to sleep by the beam’s rise and fall, her mother’s voice chanting wooden fish songs to the beat her father made with the pestle. He’d been so careful whenever Yun Yun rode the beam, ready to catch her if she should fall. How could he have let her become the grain in the mortar, poun
ded cruelly, relentlessly by the pestle?
Of course matchmakers—sly and skilled at exaggerations, even outright lies—did outsmart fathers. That was why Old Granny had taught the girls the lament:
“Sick at heart, my brows are knitted,
My insides are turned upside down.
My tears fall like rain,
They flow like rivers and streams.
All because my kind father
Listened to the treacherous words of the matchmaker.”
And Yun Yun’s father was kind, so trusting that her grandfather, too infirm with age to go to market himself, would shake his head over his son’s poor bargains and sigh, “You’re as blind as Day Jong Wong, the Earth King.”
Yun Yun, when a child, had thought her father’s sight actually did fail him at times. She had once even feared she’d become similarly blind.
It had been spring, she recalled. Water buffaloes had been dragging heavy plows, breaking up the soil for receiving seed, and Yun Yun’s mother had sent her out to their rice fields with hot tea for her father.
As always, he wouldn’t take a single swallow until he’d freed the buffalo from the plow and led it to the river where it, too, could slake its thirst. Yun Yun, waiting for the buffalo to drink its fill, threw herself onto the tall, soft grass that lined the river, and as the cool damp of the soil seeped through her thin cotton tunic and pants, tickling, she squealed gleefully.
Her father, finished with their buffalo, dropped down on his haunches beside her. “Do you see any buffalo in the clouds?”
Eagerly Yun Yun propped herself up on her elbows, squinted up at the sky. Not only could she find no buffalo, but the sun’s harsh glare soon sealed her eyes in a frightening golden glow.
“I’ve become blind like you and Day Jong Wong,” she cried.
Her father eased Yun Yun onto her back and gently stroked her eyes closed. “No, you haven’t.”
Cautiously she opened her eyes. “But I …”
He trailed his fingers across her lips, quieting her. “You can’t see buffalo in the sky because there are none. Not now. Long ago, however, buffaloes walked freely among the Gods.”
The Moon Pearl Page 8
