by Ge Fei
“Isn’t that what you want? You’re always running off anyway.”
“But I don’t want to leave,” Lilypad replied.
Lu Kan finally understood: she didn’t want to leave, she wanted to escape.
It happened one more time after they arrived in Puji. She returned an absolute wreck a month or so later, crying, her hair matted, clothes torn, feet shoeless. Biting flies and hunger had driven her back, not far from death’s door. Her legs were red and swollen, and she had lost so much weight Lu Kan could barely recognize her. After she recovered, Lu Kan came to her room with a pot of tea. All smiles, he asked, “Not going to run off again, eh?”
“No guarantees,” Lilypad replied. “If I get the right chance, I’ll take it.”
Lu Kan spat his tea out across the room.
In the end, it was Grandma Meng who solved the problem. She told Lu Kan that there was only one way to keep Lilypad home. Immediately curious, Lu Kan asked what it was, to which she replied, “Buy yourself another serving girl.”
This made no sense to Lu Kan. “We could buy two if we needed them, but that won’t stop her from running.”
“Think about it. She’s been running since she was a child. The tighter you fence her in, the more she wants out. It’s not that she doesn’t like life in your house; she just can’t control her feet, just like an opium smoker can’t control his hands. If you cut off her drug, you’ll cut out the addiction.”
“How do I do that?”
“Just like I said: buy another girl,” Grandma Meng responded.
“Grandma, what on earth do you mean?” Lu Kan asked again, still lost.
“Buy another girl, then tell Lilypad that you’ve just bought more help, and she can leave whenever she likes, you no longer depend on her. Then, every time she gets the urge to run, she’ll think, ‘They said I could leave whenever I wanted, and nobody will stop me, because they have other servants, so what’s the point?’ Think about it: Why run off if she’s already gotten permission to do so? After a while, the addiction will fade.”
Lu Kan nodded. Brilliant, he thought, it was brilliant. Impressive that an illiterate old lady could come up with a plan like that. He asked her right then for her help in finding a girl, preferably someone strong and obedient. If the price was right, appearance wouldn’t matter, and she could bring her by at her earliest convenience.
Grandma Meng chuckled and said, “I’ve already got the perfect candidate for you. As far as money goes, just give what you feel is right.”
Having said this, she turned and left. A few hours later, she returned with a distant relative in tow.
Xiumi remembered Magpie’s arrival at the house. She stood in the antechamber with her head down, biting her lower lip and toeing the moss nervously as she held a cloth sack with all her belongings in it to her chest. Grandma Meng tried to drag her inside, but she wouldn’t budge. Irritated, the old lady slapped her twice across the face. Magpie neither cried nor flinched, but she refused to move.
“You hang around the house all day, eating enough for three people, and once that old bastard finally climbs on top of you, you’ll be stuck to me like wet dough. But I’ve put my name on the line to persuade the master here to take you into his house, and it’s a good home, and you’re not going to bite the hand that feeds you this time, you little bitch.” She slapped her again.
When Xiumi’s parents appeared from the rear courtyard, the old lady put on an ingratiating smile, now fixing Magpie’s hair, now rubbing her shoulders. “Now, my dear one, remember that for you to make it into a good house like this will have your mother and father crying with joy in the underworld.” Grandma Meng tiptoed over to Mother and whispered, “This child is sweet and obedient. Beat her, curse her, make her do whatever you want, but just one thing: Master and madam should avoid mentioning arsenic in front of her.”
“And why is that?” Mother asked.
“Oh, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you when I have the time.” Grandma Meng took the bag of coins from Mother’s hand, jingled it by her ear, and skipped out the doorway, all aglow.
•
Lilypad was in the middle of her afternoon nap when Xiumi burst into her bedroom. Finding the young girl standing by her bedside, red-faced and huffing with exertion, eyes brimming with tears, gave Lilypad quite a shock. She got up immediately, lifted the child onto her bedside, and poured her a cup of tea before asking what was the matter.
“I’m gonna die!” Xiumi cried out.
Another shock. “You’ve been perfectly fine, how is it that you’re dying?”
“Well, I’m just gonna.” Xiumi grabbed one edge of a bed-curtain and worked it with both her hands. Lilypad put a palm to her forehead: it felt a little warm.
“Whatever’s wrong, tell me, and I’ll help you figure it out,” Lilypad comforted Xiumi as she got up to close the door. Her bedroom had no windows, and shutting the door threw the whole room into darkness. “Just speak slowly,” she continued. “I’m here for you, no matter what.”
Xiumi made her swear she would never tell anyone else. Lilypad hesitated, but closed her eyes and swore anyway. She swore five oaths one after the other, ransoming the honor of every family member she could remember. Yet Xiumi still said nothing, and simply sat on her bed and sobbed until the front of her shirt was soaked. It occurred to Lilypad that while she, in her impatience, had cursed a full eight generations of her family, she hadn’t known a single one of them since she was old enough to remember. The thought pinched her heart and brought a tear to her own eyes.
A fractured memory surfaced in Lilypad’s mind: Heavy rain the day her uncle came to Huzhou to take her away. Rain on the fishpond by her front door, falling droplets roiling the water like boiling congee. So she must have lived somewhere with a fishpond. The oath had proved her wrong about her own history: though she believed she recalled nothing at all from her childhood, it reminded her that she once had a home in Huzhou with a pond out front. She could almost hear the sound of the rain. The tears welled up again.
Lilypad cried quietly, allowing herself to be washed in sorrow. Sniffing, she said, “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine. I’ll guess, and if I guess right, you nod.”
Xiumi looked at her, then nodded furiously. “I haven’t guessed yet, what are you nodding for?” Lilypad laughed, then began guessing aimlessly. After a string of failed attempts, however, her patience began to run thin, and she asked, “Why are you here if you’re not going to tell me? I’m exhausted, and my lower back is killing me.”
Xiumi asked her why her back hurt—had she caught a chill outside?
“Oh, no. My you-know-what’s come around again.”
“What do you mean by ‘you-know-what’?” Xiumi asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough how a woman’s body works,” Lilypad said with a smile. Xiumi asked her if it hurt or not. “It’s not that it hurts so much, I just get so bloated, and nothing comes out when I go to the bathroom. It’s very frustrating.” Xiumi asked her what it was that “came around,” and whether it could be cured. Now she was irritating Lilypad, who replied, “It’s only blood. It goes away in four or five days, so what is there to cure? It’s the one annoyance about being a woman; every month, you have to go through it.”
Xiumi stopped asking questions; now she sat on the bed, counting days on her fingers. After a while, she muttered, “So, it’s already been two months since the master ran away?” Then nodded to herself: “I see.”
Spying a hair band lying by Lilypad’s pillow, Xiumi picked it up and asked with a smile, “Where’d you get this?”
“I bought it during New Year’s at a temple fair in the village. If you like it, go ahead and take it.”
“I think I will!” Xiumi slid the hair band onto her head, and stood up to leave. Lilypad yanked her back. “Hey, didn’t you come here to talk about something?” she asked suspicious
ly.
“When did I ever say that?” Xiumi smiled coyly and blushed.
“That’s strange, because you were just in here crying your eyes out and screaming about dying, making me swear on every grave in my family that I wouldn’t tell on you.”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Xiumi started to snicker, and waved Lilypad off with a hand. “I’m going. Go back to sleep.” She slipped through the door and dashed up to her own room, where she let out a long sigh, throwing herself onto the bed and laughing into the covers until her sides nearly split. The pressure of two months’ anxiety and irritation evaporated instantaneously. Her stomach didn’t hurt nearly as much as before. She ladled up water to wash her face; then she rouged her cheeks and powdered her face, slipped on a new set of clothes and a red hair band, and stood in front of the mirror, smiling at herself. Filled with an inexhaustible energy, she galloped around upstairs like a newborn calf and then down, zipping outside and weaving back and forth through the courtyards and hedges. She had never felt so perfectly at ease.
Magpie was in the kitchen preparing a pig’s head, plucking out hairs with a large pair of tweezers, sunlight pouring in through the window. Xiumi blew in through the kitchen door without saying hello and snatched the tweezers from Magpie’s hands. “Take a break, I’ll pluck for you,” she said while getting down to work. “Let me do it. You’ll ruin your clothes,” Magpie implored her, but Xiumi pushed her away, laughing: “I like plucking pig hairs.”
Magpie couldn’t imagine what was going on with Xiumi that day, to make the girl actually enjoy housework. She stood by the hearthside and stared at her in dumb disbelief. Xiumi continued for a spell, then turned to Magpie to complain: “I don’t care if I can’t pull his whiskers out, but even his eyelashes are so slippery, I can’t get a grip!” Magpie snorted with laughter. Just as she returned to the table to show Xiumi how to do it, Xiumi tossed the tweezers into the bowl. “That’s enough. I guess you should do it.” And in a flash, she disappeared.
Just as Xiumi began to worry she had run out of places to wander, she heard the click-clacking of an abacus. Baoshen was working in the office. One hand flicked the beads of the abacus back and forth, while he licked the index finger of the other to turn the pages of the family ledger. Xiumi grabbed the door frame and poked her head inside. He saw her and asked, “Is Miss Xiumi not taking her nap today?”
Xiumi marched into the room without replying and sat down in a chair opposite him. She stared at him for a long while, then inquired, “Can you see what’s written in the ledger with your head all cockeyed like that?”
“My head may be cockeyed, but my eyes see straight,” he responded.
“What would happen if you tried pushing it straight?”
Baoshen raised a querulous eye, as if to ask where she got such a strange idea. He shook his cockeyed head, and replied, “So even the young miss is teasing me now? My head grew this way, you think it can be set straight again?”
“I’m gonna try it,” Xiumi said. Circling around behind Baoshen, she grabbed his head in her arms and tried to wrench it over a couple of times. “It really won’t straighten,” she murmured to herself. “Baoshen, stop doing the books. Teach me how to use an abacus.”
“What do you want to learn that for? How many girls have you ever seen using an abacus?” Xiumi sensed Baoshen’s unwillingness, so she grabbed the abacus and shook it, causing him to yelp in surprise and frustration: “I had that all added, and now it’s a mess!” She merely giggled.
Seeing that Xiumi had no intention of leaving immediately, Baoshen picked up his pipe and lit it. “Well then, young miss, you can give me some advice. I have a question for you.”
Xiumi asked him what was up. Baoshen told her he was planning a trip back home to Qinggang to fetch his son. “Tiggie’s already four years old. His mother can’t get out of bed, and I worry he’ll run off and fall in the fishpond. I’d like to bring him back here, but I fear your mother won’t allow it.”
“Go get him; it will be fine,” Xiumi said with careless surety, as if she had already asked Mother, who had already agreed. Moments later, Xiumi seemed to have another thought, and asked, “What’s your son’s name again?”
“His mom likes to call him Tiger; I call him Tiggie.”
“Is his head all cockeyed too?”
What has this girl had for breakfast, thought Baoshen, that has her skipping naps and tormenting me like this? He held back his impatience and irritation, and merely chuckled drily, “No, it isn’t. It isn’t cockeyed at all.”
•
Xiumi left Baoshen in the office and made her way into the skywell, where she slid herself down the door frame and sat on the stepstone before the threshold. Looking through the far door, she could see a woman washing clothes in the courtyard pond. The repeated drumming of her wooden pestle echoed loudly in the empty skywell. A field of cotton plants, fully grown, tall and oily black, stretched down to the river; an occasional wind lifted their leaves to expose the white cotton bells. Not a single person moved in the field. A few sparrows bickered underneath the eaves, while moss grew in a thick carpet of verdant green along the walls. The powerful heat of the summer sun, together with the cool breeze that touched Xiumi’s cheeks, was wonderfully delicious. She sat there for a long while, looking out in every direction, thinking of unrelated and irrelevant things.
5
IN THE morning, Mother reminded Xiumi that she had not been to see her tutor in the two months since her father ran away. Mr. Ding had come by the previous night to say that he wouldn’t take money for not working, and he would return every penny the family had paid him if he had to.
“You’re not doing anything just sitting at home. You might as well go back there, read a few books, and learn some new words. It will be good for you.”
Xiumi had hoped that the mess caused by Father’s disappearance would mean she wouldn’t have to go back to Ding Shuze’s classroom again. His memory proved sharper than she expected; he had sent people by two or three times by then to summon her. But now she was hearing it from Mother, and there was nothing for her to do but excuse herself from breakfast and prepare for her walk to Ding Shuze’s estate.
Decades of study had never earned Ding Shuze an imperial posting—indeed, never even gotten him through the lowest level of the civil service exam. As he grew old, he set up a private classroom and admitted students, from whom he accepted a modest tuition to defray household expenses. Yet only a handful of families sent him pupils—not because the rest couldn’t afford his tuition, but because they couldn’t bear to let him beat their children. Ding Shuze’s pedagogy was strict and unforgiving: improperly reciting one character earned the student ten strokes of the cane on the buttocks, and miswriting a character earned him twenty strokes, while even the student who spoke, wrote, and recited perfectly was hit because, in Mr. Ding’s words, it would freshen his memory and remind him not to make mistakes in the future. During Xiumi’s first day of school, she noticed several students studying standing up; upon further inquiry, she discovered that their behinds were too swollen to sit. Meanwhile, any boy who was turning pages with his lips most certainly had had all ten fingers caned stiff.
Mr. Ding never caned Xiumi, not because she was an excellent student but because she was the only girl in his school. Not only did he never beat her, he bent another rule and allowed her to eat snacks while she read. She still didn’t like him. His stale breath, which reeked of garlic, was unbearable. She feared his guided readings, because every time he came to a word beginning with “t” or “d,” little flecks of spit would shower onto your face. He liked touching her head, and sometimes even her face, with his dirty hands. She always turned her head to the other side whenever he neared her, sometimes turning so far that her neck cracked.
Ding Shuze loved sticking his nose into other people’s business, especially when it involved an argument. He inserted himself into every single
village affair he could uncover, save childbirth. His favorite endeavor was helping villagers solve legal disputes, yet every lawsuit he ever touched inevitably ended with a loss. Eventually, everyone in the village treated him like a useless bookworm; only his wife thought him a genius. Whenever a fight between him and anyone else came to an impasse, with both parties holding their own positions, Zhao Xiaofeng would strut in between them, with her floral handkerchief in hand and a smile on her face, and say, “Stop fighting! Stop yelling! Each of you make your case, and I’ll be the judge.” After each side had presented its argument, her reply would be, “You”—her husband—“are right, and you”—anyone other than her husband—“are wrong. We’re done!”
•
The first thing Xiumi noticed upon entering Ding Shuze’s classroom was the heavy bandage covering her teacher’s right hand and his expression of intense pain. When she asked, “What happened to your hand, sir?” his face twitched violently at the question, then reddened. He replied with a smile that was not a smile, as he alternated low moans with a sharp sucking of air through his teeth. The injury was clearly quite serious. Just as Xiumi turned to ask Zhao Xiaofeng, Ding Shuze frowned and commanded, “Recite ‘The Righteous Minister Refuses to Serve the First Emperor’! Whatever you wanted to ask, forget about it.”
Xiumi sat down to recite, but memory carried her only to the end of the first paragraph. Ding Shuze called on her to recite the Book of Odes instead, but when she asked him which ode he’d like to hear, his constitution seemed to fail him. He simply stood up, held his right hand over his head, and draped his left arm over his wife’s shoulder as she helped him back to his room. A puzzled Xiumi looked around the room for answers. Spying a young boy with a tuft of fair hair atop his head copying large characters at his desk, she went to him and whispered, “What happened to Teacher’s hand?”
The boy, who was the youngest son of the ferryman Tan Shuijin, Tan Si, looked around to make sure no one else was listening before he replied, “He smacked it on a nail.”
