Peach Blossom Paradise

by Ge Fei

  Magpie just giggled. After a while, she said, “You should go downstairs and have some breakfast. Then I’ll take you to Miss Sun’s place to watch the Land and Water alms ceremony.”

  Xiumi asked if Mother and Lilypad were going. Magpie said that they had left ages ago. Xiumi asked about Zhang Jiyuan. Saying his name made her chest tighten. Magpie replied that he was in the rear courtyard doing heaven knows what. Xiumi stared blankly into the folds of the mosquito canopy above her. After a long pause, she told Magpie that she didn’t care about the alms ceremony, nor did she want breakfast; she would rather lie in bed for a while. Magpie closed the mosquito net for her and went downstairs.

  Right after she left, Xiumi heard the song of a street vendor selling gardenias. A sudden impulse to buy a flower to wear got her out of bed, but by the time she had dressed and made it out into the alley, the flower seller was gone. She went back inside and retrieved some water from the well to wash her face. Then she ate breakfast and walked aimlessly around the courtyard. Magpie came to the well to wash clothes, and Xiumi went to speak with her but their conversation didn’t get far before Zhang Jiyuan hurried over to them. Xiumi tensed and thought about running, but he was upon them in an instant.

  “Hey!” Zhang Jiyuan greeted them excitedly. “The lotus flowers in the basins in the back have bloomed!”

  “Have they?” Magpie replied, after glancing at Xiumi and realizing she had no interest in the conversation. “That’s good to know.”

  What an idiot! Xiumi thought. Who gets excited over a couple of lotuses blooming? Thinking of the dream made her angry. She wouldn’t even look at Zhang Jiyuan, who made ingratiating noises and asked if she would like to go with him to the rear courtyard to see. Xiumi wanted to reply, I’d rather see you in hell first, but instead she simply leaned on the wall by the stairs and asked, “So you like flowers and plants and stuff?”

  Zhang Jiyuan appeared to think seriously for a moment. “I suppose that depends on the flower,” he said. “The orchid grows in deep valleys, chrysanthemums cloister themselves in abandoned gardens, and the plum blossom scorns snowy peaks, but only the lotus swims in mud and yet never gets dirty. It symbolizes the highest, purest will, and thus earns the most affection . . . ‘I made a coat of lotus petals, and wove a robe of water-chestnut leaves.’ ”

  The line was from Qu Yuan’s famous poem “Encountering Sorrow,” though Zhang Jiyuan had listed the plants backward. Xiumi couldn’t be bothered to call him on it. Seeing that Xiumi wasn’t leaving immediately, Zhang Jiyuan continued, “The poet of Jade Stream has a line about lotus blossoms—do you remember it?”

  Now he was quoting Dream of the Red Chamber, from the scene in which Lin Daiyu quizzes the young Jia Baoyu on Li Shangyin’s poetry. It seemed the bearded little man was more bookish than he looked. Xiumi felt utterly uninterested in carrying the conversation further, and replied, “What could it be but ‘leaving old lotuses to listen to the rain’?”

  Zhang Jiyuan shook his head and smiled wryly. “Now you’re calling me Lin Daiyu.”

  “Then which verse do you like best?”

  “ ‘Beyond the lotus pool echoes distant thunder,’ ” Zhang Jiyuan replied.

  The quoted line reminded Xiumi of digging lotuses from the pond outside the village with Father, and a chasm suddenly opened within her. Father loved lotus flowers to distraction; all through the summer he would keep a miniature lotus in a bowl of water on his desk as a kind of offering. She remembered that its flowers bloomed crimson and bright as new peaches, though they seemed delicate and unassuming. Father called it “a twist of red,” and would sometimes pluck a few petals to grind into ink for his personal seal.

  Zhang Jiyuan asked her what kind of flowers she liked. “Peonies,” she blurted out.

  Zhang Jiyuan shook his head again and laughed. “Now you’re just driving me away.”

  Wouldn’t you know it, thought Xiumi. This idiot might be odd, but he has obviously read quite a bit; perhaps I’m being too hard on him. Yet her tone remained unsympathetic. “How am I driving you away?”

  “You’re well versed in the histories and classics, Little Sister, and your mind is always active. Why ask about what you already know? In his ‘Catechism of Nature,’ Gu Yuanqing notes that the peony has also been called the ‘Two-Leaf,’ as in ‘to leave,’ and is frequently given as a gift at parting. But then, it’s time for me to leave anyway.” At this, he straightened his cuffs, waved to Xiumi, and went out through the front door.

  Xiumi followed Zhang Jiyuan’s figure with a thoughtful gaze. After the previous night’s dream, it seemed like something had passed between the two of them. She felt somewhat hollow.

  Magpie looked up from her work at Xiumi. “What in the world were you and Uncle talking about? I’ve been here listening all along and I couldn’t understand a word of it.”

  “It’s all a bunch of empty posing anyway, why would you need to understand it?”

  Magpie asked if she wanted to go see the Land and Water alms ceremony at Miss Sun’s. Xiumi replied, “If you want to go, you should go. I’m going to see Mr. Ding.”

  8

  MR. DING was writing calligraphy at his desk, his hand still wrapped in gauze. Seeing Xiumi come through the door, he told her, “No class today.” Apparently he was too busy writing a tomb inscription for Miss Sun. He asked Xiumi why she hadn’t gone to see the Land and Water ceremony; she said that she didn’t want to. As she turned to leave, he stopped her: “Hold on a minute. I have a question for you.”

  Now that she was asked to stay, Xiumi flopped down into the wooden sedan chair by the window and began to play with the two thrushes in their cages. Mr. Ding wrote with such concentration that he had to mop his brow regularly with his handkerchief, his silk shirt already stained with sweat. As he worked, he muttered, “Such a pity, such a pity. Such a shame!” Xiumi knew he was referring to Miss Sun. Overpowered with distress, he paused now and then to wipe his eyes and nose. She watched him scrape the fingers he had just used to wipe his nose along the edge of his desk before shaping his goat-hair brush with his tongue; a wave of nausea passed over her. He kept abandoning his drafts and starting over, cursing his own illiteracy as he tossed crumpled-up sheets onto the floor. In the end he used all of his paper and had to climb the ladder into the attic to get some more. Grief for the dead young woman had swallowed him up—he completely forgot about Xiumi. Seeing his desperation and disorganization, she went to his desk to help him lay out new paper, grind ink, and rinse his sweaty handkerchief in a washbasin. The cloth turned the water black immediately.

  Ding Shuze was a commendable literary stylist with a reputation for fast and decisive compositions. He liked to compare himself favorably to Yuan Hu, the ancient general who wrote a thousand words to the emperor on paper held against his horse’s flank. Form was no object—he could produce a poem or a lyric, an essay or an exegesis, quickly and in full. Often when someone came to commission a formal invitation, a door-frame couplet, or a tomb inscription, he would produce the entire composition while still negotiating his fee. Moreover, once the piece was finished, he absolutely refused to change a single word of it. Asking for a second draft was like pissing in the wind. Once, he wrote a birthday tribute for a ninety-year-old man in which he accidentally misspelled his elder subject’s name. When the man’s grandson pointed this out and asked him to rewrite the piece, he exploded, “Ding Shuze’s compositions do not bother with ‘rewriting’! This is the piece; you can work with what I’ve given you.”

  “You didn’t even get his name right—whose birthday is it?” the grandson complained.

  “That’s not my problem!”

  Voices rose, and the two men jawed at each other until Mr. Ding’s wife, Xiaofeng, swept into the room to arbitrate. Eventually, she pointed at the grandson and said, “You’re totally wrong,” before turning to her husband and saying, “Shuze, you’re correct.” Then she an
nounced to both parties: “All done!” The grandson had no choice but to triple the fee and beg until Ding Shuze agreed to break his own custom and do a second draft with the old man’s name written correctly.

  So what was wrong with Ding Shuze now? Rubbing his cheeks and scratching his head, tapping his forehead, or pacing around with his hands clasped behind him. Either the tomb inscription must be too difficult to write, Xiumi thought, or Mr. Ding must have suffered too severe a shock when he saw the body the night before. Perhaps the suddenness of her death perplexed him. Grief was clearly visible in his face as he paced around the classroom. “Such a soft little thing, gone just like that. Alas, alas!” he muttered. Yet once he actually finished the inscription, he seemed fairly satisfied with himself. He called Xiumi over to read it, but fearing that she wouldn’t understand, he read it out loud for her anyway. The inscription ran thus:

  Miss Sun Youxue, of Puji village, Meicheng, daughter of Sun Dingcheng, well recognized for his filial piety and camaraderie, and his wife, née Zhen. Born on a day of heavy snows and blossoming winter plums, and named after snow, assuredly in reference to the purity of snow and frost, pines and poplars. As a child, she was clever, kindhearted, and careful, with the scent of orchids about her, and a gaze like distant mountains. Her faithful, upright character and her pleasing, womanly decorum were extolled by everyone. In her youth, she lost her tender mother, her father became sickly, and the family was frequently too poor to eat. Thus Youxue decided to make sacrifice of her own figure, pure as ice and clean as jade, and opened the door to guests. Though this was denounced as a soiling of the lotus, in truth, it was like the child cutting off his own leg to feed his parents. Both rough and elegant visitors received the benefit of her munificence, while salesmen and soldiers alike reposed in her fragrance. Kidnapped and brutally abused by an outlaw, she resisted his advances with the strength of the white cypress, giving her life for fidelity.

  Alas, death remains the greatest trial in all our history, and we weep for more than just the kidnapped Peach Blossom princess. Poets of other centuries weep for the same tragic tales, here memorialized in stone that it may last forever. Thus we sing:

  On ethics and precepts is founded the nation.

  Who can change this? Oh, Miss Youxue.

  Wondrous fidelity, sagely behavior:

  different paths to a single end.

  You served your family with the grace of the bamboo spear;

  kept your house with the character of the blooming peach.

  One fewer voice rings on the mountainside, as lovely bones lie in silence;

  her deep morality here inscribed above this lonely mound,

  never to be sung of in millennia to come.

  “What do you think?” her teacher asked.

  “It’s good.”

  “What part is good? Tell me.”

  “The whole thing,” Xiumi replied. “But normal people might not be able to understand it.”

  This elicited a joyful laugh from Ding Shuze, in which one could hear no trace of the sadness he had displayed before. Xiumi understood that in her teacher’s mind, incomprehensibility represented the highest possible achievement for literature. It had become a maxim of his: “Good writing leaves people confused.” If a hack driver or a tofu seller could understand your meaning, what was to love? Still, this particular inscription seemed fairly comprehensible to Xiumi. Mr. Ding explained the whole thing for her from start to finish, then asked her which parts she liked the best, to which she replied, “ ‘You served your family with the grace of the bamboo spear’ and the sentences after it show true genius.”

  Her teacher laughed out loud, praised her cleverness and precocity, and assured her that if she kept up with her studies, she would surpass him someday. He patted her head with his greasy, bandaged hand.

  Just as Ding Shuze was at the height of his spirits, the door curtain rose and his wife stormed in, throwing herself into a chair by his desk and sitting speechless, as if frozen. Mr. Ding tried to pull her over to his side so she could see the inscription, and tell him if she thought it was good or not, but she batted his hand away and snapped, “Who cares if it’s good? Looks to me like you’ve just wasted a whole morning’s work. He won’t take it.”

  “Not even for twenty strings of cash?”

  “Never mind twenty, he wouldn’t even give me ten.”

  “And why is that?”

  “That Old Man Sun is tight as a drum.” Xiaofeng’s anger hadn’t yet abated. “He said that his daughter’s tragedy was so sudden, he didn’t even know how he would pay for a funeral, a coffin, or the monks and Taoist priests for the service, let alone useless business like this. He also said that she came from a poor family, hadn’t even gotten married, and had no real moral accomplishments to boast about, so they didn’t need an inscription. He wants to bury her in a cheap coffin and get it over with. We went back and forth about it forever, and he still wouldn’t pay.”

  “The son of a bitch was hiding lechers inside his house all day, letting his daughter make dirty money, and now that I offer to clean her name up a little, and spend all morning writing until I can’t see straight, he wants to look a gift horse in the mouth?” Mr. Ding spat.

  “And that’s not the half of it!” Xiaofeng waved her handkerchief in the air. “I asked him for ten strings, and he said that even if you gave it to him for free, he wouldn’t take it. Said he’d just have to spend more money buying a headstone and hiring someone to carve it.”

  Ding Shuze’s face turned crimson and swelled like a ripe eggplant. He snatched the inscription and was on the verge of tearing it up when his wife held him back. “Don’t tear it up in anger now; I’ll send someone to talk to him later.” She took the paper from him, read it all the way through, then gave her husband a look of deep feeling. “Shuze, your prose has gotten even better.”

  The distant but approaching wail of funeral horns reached Xiumi’s ear. “They’re carrying Miss Sun out,” Xiaofeng said to her husband. “Shall we go see the affair?”

  “Go if you want to, I’m not going.” Ding Shuze slumped in his chair, still fuming. Xiaofeng asked Xiumi if she wanted to go. Xiumi looked at her teacher and asked, “Teacher, a minute ago you said you had a question for me?”

  Ding Shuze replied with an exhausted wave. “We’ll talk about that later.”

  Xiumi followed Xiaofeng outside. By the time they had stepped through the skywell and out the front door, the funeral procession was just passing by. While she had originally thought to go straight home, she instead fell into line with the others. The party reached the edge of the village; Xiumi brought up the rear. Looking up, she saw the coffin raised high above the heads of the crowd. It had been built in a hurry, and hadn’t even been painted. A sudden realization made Xiumi tense: the whole scene looked just like her dream from the night before. There was Grandma Meng, standing under the apricot tree by her house and handing out embroidered flowers from a bamboo basket. Just as the old woman reached the end of the procession, she ran out of flowers. Turning the basket upside down and shaking it, she smiled at Xiumi and said, “What bad luck! I’m just short the one.”

  Xiumi didn’t dare take another step. She stood dazed and motionless beneath the wide canopy of the apricot tree. Even though the flowers in the dream had been yellow, and the ones Grandma Meng had in her basket now were white, she couldn’t repress the terrifying feeling that she was reliving the dream. The sky above was so high and so blue it might have dripped with indigo dye. She couldn’t help but think that though she knew she was awake, she had no guarantee that this too wasn’t just part of a vaster, more distant dream.

  9

  BAOSHEN returned from Qinggang with his four-year-old son, Tiger. The boy’s head, unlike his father’s, sat straight on his neck, but he was totally uncontrollable. His skin was almost as dark as coal, and so greasy it made him shine. He ran constantly and ever
ywhere, wearing nothing but a pair of bright red underwear, and permeated the entire estate with his flashing presence coupled with the drumroll of his footsteps. Years without fatherly instruction made disaster inevitable after he arrived in Puji. During his first few days, he strangled a pair of the neighbor’s barred roosters, which he carried into the kitchen and threw at Magpie’s feet, demanding, “Now make soup for me!” The next day, he left a turd under Lilypad’s bed, causing her to complain for days that a rat must have died somewhere in her room. Later, he poked the wasp’s nest in Hua Erniang’s backyard until it exploded; and while Hua Erniang had to deal with a swollen face for a month afterward, he escaped without a sting.

  Baoshen spent most of his time in those days knocking on every door in the village to apologize, promising he would strangle the boy one day. In fact, he didn’t dare harm a hair on his son’s head; sometimes, when Tiger was sleeping, Baoshen would flip him over and kiss his little rear several times. Yet the day finally came when he almost killed his son.

  Xiumi, Lilypad, and Mother had been doing needlework together in Mother’s bedroom one evening when Magpie burst through the door. “Bad news!” she cried. “Baoshen’s going to strangle Tiger. He’s turning over everything looking for a rope. I tried to stop him. One of you has to go and do something!”

  Lilypad immediately put down her scissors and stood up. But Mother spat, “Nobody goes anywhere!” with such force that Lilypad didn’t dare move, and Magpie froze in the doorway. “The child needs serious discipline,” Mother explained. “If he doesn’t stop acting out, he’ll be heading straight back to wherever he came from!”

  Mother’s words were meant for Baoshen’s ears, and he heard her loud and clear from the courtyard. He had no choice but to prove his loyalty by doubling down on his commitment to punish his son. He tied Tiger to one of the pillars in the courtyard and started to beat him with a leather riding crop, slashing blindly as the boy screamed for his life and mother. Only when his cries started to weaken and fade into silence did Mother nod to Lilypad.