“They are lost,” Jinhua says. The Master of Wind and Water has asked her, “Do you know the ba zi, the eight characters of the hour, day, month, and year of your birth?” She remembers only the year. It is the Dog Year in which she was born, and she tells the old man this and is thinking of the three black gates at the entrance to this house and the six stone lions that flank them, and she is thinking, too, about Lao Mama, who is waiting for her in the first court and will be getting angry that she has been gone for so long.
She would like to leave this place, to get away from this beautiful, strange woman, who frightens her, and to go back to what she knows.
“No matter,” the fortune-teller says. “It is in your face that I will see your future most clearly.” He is a blind man, and his eyes are closed, and he says this in a kindly way. Sitting on a wooden chair, he raises his hands. One hand trembles terribly, and Jinhua begins to breathe more calmly.
She has never seen a man who looks as old as this man does. The fortune-teller’s face is withered, as wrinkled as a nut, and his hair is white, his eyelids blue and streaked with veins. He explores the arch of Jinhua’s eyebrows with his fingers; he touches the collar of her tunic, and he must surely know about the mark she has made that is hidden underneath it, that is burning, burning, burning her skin at that place in the middle of her throat. But the man is gentle, and it is because he is so very gentle that she begins not to mind him touching her. He opens his eyes, and she sees clouds, and it is hard to look at someone who is looking back at her but doesn’t see. An hour is a moment sitting on a low stool across from him, leaning in and wondering, allowing him to feel and search, and wondering more. He traces the outline of Jinhua’s face and breathes from his throat. He takes his time, and it is almost as though he were sleeping. Jinhua has forgotten about her fear. She has forgotten, too, about Lao Mama waiting.
“You don’t think I will let you run off by yourself like this,” Lao Mama said when the sedan chair came to collect her.
“You, Old Lady, are not permitted,” the gatekeeper barked when they arrived, raising an arm to block Lao Mama, “to pass through the second gate to the inner realm. The girl must go alone to appear before Madam Hong.”
Lao Mama seemed cowed by the three black gates and the six stone lions and the gatekeeper’s raising of his arm.
Jinhua has forgotten, too, that Madam Hong is here. She is thinking only of the fortune-teller—and what it is that he sees in her face and whether he can help her to understand her life, because understanding feels more important now than anything else. He is touching the ridges of her cheekbones with the cool tips of his fingers. His blind man’s cane with which he came tap-tap-tapping into the room is leaning against his chair. It is a tall and solid cane made of polished wood.
Madam Hong clears her throat—a polite sound, a refined one that is not like Lao Mama’s honking and spitting—and her hands are tightly clasped, and it is clear that she, now, is anxious. The fortune-teller is deep in thought and doesn’t look at her. Perhaps he hasn’t heard the clearing of her throat.
“In all my years,” he says after a long, long silence, “I have not seen one like her. This girl, born along the waterways of Suzhou, will drink from rivers that are far from here.” His ancient hands are steady now, stroking Jinhua’s forehead. “She has much to learn. In a single lifetime she will be both one and many people. She will lead both one and many lives, and the course of these lives will appear to be a line and yet it is a circle.” He takes her hand, her right hand, in his own and traces the lines on Jinhua’s palm with more gentleness than she has ever felt in the touch of a man—except for Baba in that other life. He takes her left hand now. His eyelids shudder. “She will remember too long and forget too quickly,” he says, nodding. “She will see, and she will be blind. She will lose her way, and if she is lucky she will find it.”
“It is not enough,” Madam Hong replies, and her voice is cool. “I must know about her past life, Master Zhou. I must know whether this person is or is not the courtesan who was my husband’s lover. That is why I have asked you to come, and not to hear of what this person will lose or find and see or not see.”
The fortune-teller leans back in his chair. He sighs and looks exhausted. The ancestors are huge on the wall. They watch, and surely they are listening too.
“I have just one answer for your question, Madam Hong,” the fortune-teller says. “I know nothing of courtesans. I know nothing of your husband’s lover. But I do know this. You cannot have this child inside your house—and yet she must be here. And as for her—there is Great Love waiting, but she must allow what is real to be real and what is unreal to fade, and so, Madam Hong, must you. And now—”
The fortune-teller, the Master of Wind and Water, reaches for his blind man’s cane. He shifts a foot in a black slipper, and Madam Hong lifts her arms as though to stop him, and he shakes his head.
“I must go,” he says. “I have told you all I see. I am old and I am tired now. Some things are clear to me in the way that black writing on white paper is clear to a person with sight, and these things I have told you in the best way that I know. All other things I cannot see and therefore cannot speak of.”
The old man rises from his chair, and when he has gone Madam Hong turns and kneels before the ancestors. She bows once and then twice more, and when she rises she says one last thing: “I will see for myself this mark on your neck. Open your collar and show me, and then I will know for sure.”
A gong sounds and fades to nothing, and Jinhua touches her throat, and she feels sad and sorry and tired almost to death. Madam Hong’s gaze doesn’t waver, and her lips part, and then she says, “Ò,” in a voice that can barely be heard.
19
LIKE A SMILE AND YET NOT
Jinhua
“Please, Lao Mama, may Suyin come with me to live in Madam Hong’s house?”
After Jinhua said this, the silence was like thunder.
“Please, Lao Mama.” Jinhua was on her knees.
After a long, long time, Lao Mama said, “You came here alone and with nothing.” Her eyes and her emerald ring glittered with one hard light, and Jinhua knew that it delighted Lao Mama to see her weak and on her knees, and even so she stayed there just like that, begging. “You will leave in the same way,” Lao Mama said. “Alone, taking not a single thing from here. Especially not,” she added, “Suyin, who is my daughter.”
“It is not the worst thing,” Suyin is saying now. “In fact it is the very best thing that could happen to you, Jinhua, and the thing has been done. Madam Hong has paid the money, and you will be a concubine in a great house with three black gates and six stone lions, just as you have described to me—a great house with ancestor paintings and high walls and a courtyard all of your own. Think of it—you will leave the life of a money tree behind you, and I will think of you living a new and better life.”
Suyin has begun to cry, but just a little, and Jinhua is crying too, but harder. “I am not,” she says, “the person that Madam Hong believes me to be. I am not the courtesan who was that man’s lover, and I don’t remember what they want me to remember—and how can I forgive what that man has done to someone else?”
And yet, it is true what Suyin says. The thing has been done. The money is in Lao Mama’s purse, and it is a large sum, and she will not let go of it. Jinhua will have to leave the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love; she will leave the grinning, pink-faced god of wealth, the opium and drinking games, and the men who come to her bed. She will leave behind Monkey Squat and Fishes Gobbling, Flying Dragon and Cranes Entwined, and she will learn another language, the language of a concubine. Jinhua reaches for Suyin and feels a kind of pain that is both new to her and not new at all.
“And what about you, Suyin? What will happen to you?”
They hold each other tightly, Suyin’s arms around Jinhua and Jinhua’s arms around Suyin. “You and I are like skin and bones,” Jinhua says. “We are jiemei—we are sisters in a f
amily that should stay together forever and for always.”
A coughing sound in the doorway is Lao Mama standing there and listening, pipe in hand. “Hè,” she says, sipping smoke. “What do you two girls know of sisters anyway? You know nothing at all about such things, and both of you are liars when you talk jijizhazha like this. When you say family, Suyin, when you say that word you must say my name because you belong to me, and you are my daughter, and I am your mother. And as for Jinhua, she is nothing to you and you are nothing to her. She will leave you behind, Suyin, because Madam Hong has paid for her, and you will never see each other again. It will be as though Jinhua never knew your name, Suyin, because she will forget you and remember nothing, not even your ugly face or your stinking feet or anything you have ever said to her.”
Lao Mama hurls smoke from her mouth into the air, and the look on her face is like a smile and yet not, and she tells Suyin that she must go downstairs and do her work. “Right now.” When Lao Mama has gone, Suyin tells Jinhua, “She is not wrong. You will forget, Jinhua, because you must. We do not own ourselves, and we do not own each other. We will live where we must live and go where we must go. We must accept what is real, and as for what is not—”
Jinhua replies, and she is angry. “Lao Mama is wrong and you are wrong too. The feelings of one sister for another can never, ever be forgotten. You have not forgotten Little Sister, or the scar on her lip, or how she was carried away from here because Lao Mama did not want her. You have not forgotten Aiwen, Suyin, and I will not forget you.”
Jinhua pauses, and her breath is coming quickly, and there is more she has to say. “I am afraid, Suyin,” she whispers. “I am afraid of Madam Hong, and I do not want to live where I cannot hear your voice. I am afraid of that as well.”
Now it is Suyin who is sobbing and cannot stop. Before she leaves the room to do her work, she says one last thing. “When you have gone away to that great house, Jinhua, you can imagine the sound of my voice—at least for a while. You can imagine the words that I would say, and this will be enough for you. And whether you are or are not the person they believe you to be, no one can know this for sure. Between one life and the next there is much that can happen. You and I both have seen this before.”
Jinhua hears the sound of Suyin’s old wooden shoes on the floor going tok, tok-tok, tok, tok-tok the way they always do, and the sound gets smaller and smaller until it is gone. And then Jinhua thinks of something else Lao Mama said that is not at all true. Jinhua did not come here to the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love with nothing. She had her tiger shoes that Lao Mama threw onto the fire, and she had the things she remembered from the life she had before. She came here with Baba and Timu and “A Night-Mooring Near Maple Bridge” in her mind. She came with the sound of a gate that cried like a baby, and with Nüwa and Mama, who were both of them curious and wise and virtuous. All of this she had with her; all of it she will always have. She will not forget Suyin, and Suyin, surely, will not forget her either.
Jinhua is leaving in a thin rain, late in the morning, when the Hour of the Horse has just begun—and Suyin has not come to say good-bye. The guard dog is barking ferociously, and Jinhua is wearing red underclothes, red stockings, and a red veil that hides her tears. Drums and flutes and wailing strings fill her head with concubine-wedding sounds, and the dog will not be still, and seen through the veil and her tears, everything is a hazy vermilion. It is difficult now to feel what it means to be going away when there is so much noise, and it is raining, and when Suyin has not come. It is a strange feeling for Jinhua to be not here and not there, both of these things at the same time. Lao Mama watched her dress this morning in these concubine clothes that Madam Hong has sent. “Suyin doesn’t want to see you. She is busy with her work,” Lao Mama told her with that same smile that is not a smile. And then, when Jinhua was putting on her shoes, she said, “Madam Hong didn’t even try to get a cheaper price to buy you. She is a stupid woman with a stupid husband who allows his wife to choose a concubine for him. What kind of man obeys his wife in a matter such as this?”
And then Lao Mama said her last words: “If you are miserable in that house you can powder your face and then hang yourself, and this, Jinhua, is my last piece of advice for you. Remember, too, to wear red when you do it, for a better fortune in your next life. That is the thing to do, to wear red.”
It was Lao Mama’s last cruelty to tell her this—that and keeping Suyin away, which is almost the worst of all the cruel things that she has done, because surely Suyin would have wanted to see her one last time to say good-bye. Surely Suyin is grieving now, and Jinhua will grieve too, waiting in the great house for the tok, tok-tok of Suyin’s footsteps, longing for the stories that she and Suyin have told each other in days that have passed, and longing, too, for the comfort that used to come from this, but won’t anymore.
PART THREE
Facing Madam Hong
THE TWELFTH YEAR OF
THE GUANGXU REIGN
1887
Suzhou
20
THE TENTH DAY OF
THE CONCUBINE
Madam Hong
“Can you not be still for even a moment?”
From Madam Hong, Huizhong’s round, northern face hides nothing at all. The maid does not like that the courtesan has come. She doesn’t agree with what Madam Hong has done in bringing her here. Huizhong is a simple person; she has a soft, bean-curd heart where her mistress is concerned, and Madam Hong has always known this. It is the one thing she can count on.
“I cannot be still,” Huizhong is saying now. She is darting here and darting there, a flyswatter in her hand, stalking a cockroach that has come in from the cold. “And I cannot be quiet either, Madam. You have hardly eaten a grain of rice in these ten days since that person arrived. You do not sleep.” Huizhong smacks the wall, and a cockroach shadow leaps to the floor. “The tea I bring you stays untouched in the cup until it is cold and unhealthy for you to drink. You have not left the house to visit your friends—nor have you invited them to come here to play mah-jongg, or to chat and laugh and tell—”
Madam Hong has stopped listening.
“She is a fox girl,” Huizhong said when the bride chair arrived not at the third gate, or the second, but at the first as Madam Hong had instructed. “What does the master need with such a person in his house?” she said. “Why, Madam, do you allow this? This hulijing, this fox girl, will send you to your coffin, and that, Madam, is as certain a thing as the dust that will gather in the bristles of my broom tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.”
Huizhong is an impudent goose. She cannot hold her tongue. But she knows—of course she does—the answers to these questions. She has been here long enough to know everything. Now she pounces, smacking again, and the cockroach lies on its back on the floor, legs paddling, not quite alive and not quite dead—and now that she has murdered the cockroach, Huizhong abandons the flyswatter and takes up a hairbrush.
She was here—Huizhong was—on the night that the courtesan’s mother came. Madam Hong was a bride of just one day; she was waiting for her husband to come to her, to do what a husband should do with his wife. Huizhong was nearby—and they both heard the pounding at the gate, and then they heard the screaming, the screaming that came from the lips and the throat of the courtesan’s mother.
Everyone heard the noise and the screams: the neighbors in their courtyards, the servants in their beds, people far and near and high and humble.
It was late at night and dark, and the screams stopped the blood in Madam Hong’s veins. It made her ears pound and her chest stomp, and Huizhong came running to her side.
The courtesan’s mother stayed at the gate for a long time, screaming this and screaming that. Screaming that her number one daughter was dead—that she was hanging by a rope—that it was Master Hong—the young and newly married one and not the old one—who made her do it. “My precious, my first and best and most filial daughter is dead,” she wai
led, “and what will become of me? He has done this to her, and he has done this to me, and her ghost—”
Madam Hong heard that screaming mother’s every word and closed her eyes and thought, This cannot be. My husband has not done this thing. That woman who is at the gate and will not leave is a wretch and a liar. Ten days had passed when her mother-in-law came “to explain that woman’s outburst,” she said. “It is a simple matter, no more and no less than a misunderstanding. That woman was mistaken. She believed that my son loved her daughter, that he had promised to take her away from her courtesan’s life—to marry her. But he did not love that girl. My son promised nothing. He would never have married her, and that is why she hanged herself.”
The old woman said all this without shedding a tear, without even blinking. “We will never speak of this again,” she pronounced with her ancient, weathered lips. And as she was leaving, this strange and difficult person of a mother-in-law turned to say one more thing. “I must protect my son, and so must you. Promise me. We are both of us stronger than he is. It is not a good thing for my son to have a hanged person’s ghost haunting his life and demanding vengeance and who knows what else. I will give the mother some money, and this will be the end of the matter.”
If only it had been so. If only the screaming woman had not come, and Madam Hong’s husband had been in a wifely bed on that night and on every night thereafter, and if only there had been sons born, one after the other. And now, if only this girl that Huizhong so despises had not been found. But she is here, and she has the brilliant red mark of the hanging rope on her throat—and the fortune-teller has spoken.
“The girl cannot be in this house and yet she must be here.”
She must be here—and there is Great Love waiting for her.
“You are as stubborn as a weed,” Madam Hong says now—and Huizhong is brushing her hair with long, firm strokes and oiling it with pomelo, and the relationship between the two of them is both tender and tough, which is as it should be. “How can it be, Huizhong,” Madam Hong continues, “that as each year passes you get fatter and more meddlesome, and nothing else changes, ever, with you? You must leave me some peace to do what I will do. Go and rest yourself, you old and clumsy servant girl, so that you have strength to work harder and better tomorrow.”
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