by Justin Hill
“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.
“Yes,” her mother said.
“Who?”
Her mother looked at her. She had small hard eyes, beautiful when she smiled, but hard as a rock wall now. She ignored the question. “You rode out today to the Singing Sands.” It was not a question. “It is not safe.”
“But you go there,” Snow Vase said.
“I am trained,” her mother said. She had a withering stare. She turned it onto Snow Vase but she refused to yield, tossed back her hair and returned the stare with interest.
“I am trained too,” Snow Vase said.
“You are too young,” Jiaolong snapped. “Trust me. I was young once, and made too many mistakes.”
Snow Vase looked down. On the table before them was a platter of five-spice cold beef, pickled peanuts and sweet and sour cucumber. The servants had set out two bowls and two cups painted with wild dark horses on a vast green land. Yellow lanterns lit the room. There was a pot of rice wine on the table.
Her mother let out a sigh. She set down her chopsticks. “I have something to tell you,” she said. Snow Vase stopped and waited.
Jiaolong drew in a deep breath. She sighed and looked at her daughter. “When I was your age my father was Governor of Gansu Province. He raised me as any girl: to be pretty and obedient and strong enough to bear a husband as many sons as he could plant inside me. I could not stand it. I was a wild horse. I would not bow to such a fate. I could not.
“I was a terrible child. I endured a stifling succession of tutors who wished to teach me nothing more than needlework, singing, playing the erhu and entertaining men. It was the life of a songbird. I was this close to hanging myself, or dashing my brains out against the wall. All my governess ever wanted me to do was learn the tales of eminent widows and hard-working mothers. You could not imagine a duller bunch of women in the whole wide world. Who wants to be remembered for raising good sons? What am I—a brood mare? I wanted to leave my mark. I trained secretly. I was the hidden dragon,” she laughed. “Alone, after dark, when all the household was asleep. And I became good.”
She paused. “It is a long story, but I became pregnant.”
Snow Vase looked away. This felt too close to home. Her mother coughed to clear her throat. “He was a warrior,” she said. “I felt such desire for him. It tormented me. I ran from it but it pursued me. Whenever I hid it was there in the morning. It tormented my dreams. I knew that I could not defeat my feelings, so I decided to master them.
“I gave birth in a hostel, weak, alone, in the middle of a snowstorm.” Jiaolong took a sip of wine, and looked directly at her daughter. She did not want to tell this tale, and almost shied away, like a skittish horse. But the memory of that blood on her fingers came back to her, and Snow Vase was the closest person to her. “My child was lost,” she said. “You were a foundling. I took you in. Cared for you. You were a comfort for me who had lost my own child.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Snow Vase said, the temper in her voice rising. Her mother was a difficult woman, and Snow Vase was angry at her for not telling her before, but at the same time she felt a surge of joy: she had never thought she had much in common with her mother, and now she had the proof. They were not related. She was not her mother really, somewhere her real mother was out there, beautiful, kind, gentle, loving. Everything her own mother was not.
“I am telling you this . . .” Jiaolong paused for breath. “I am telling you this because I am sick.”
Snow Vase looked at the woman who was not her mother. “Sick?”
“Dying,” Jiaolong said.
“What do you mean, dying?” Snow Vase didn’t know if this was another tale she should believe, or not. She loved her mother, but sometimes she was impossible. The two of them looked at each other. Neither spoke.
“I’m dying,” her mother said again. She put a hand to her chest. “It is my chest,” she said simply. She saw her daughter’s expression, and held out the cloth she held scrunched up in her fist. The white cloth was spattered with dark, arterial red. The pattern clearly stated Jiaolong’s coming death.
“I summoned the local doctor. ‘Drink this twice a day,’ he said. ‘Will it help?’ I asked him. He nodded. ‘Will it cure me?’ I said, and he paused and sighed through his nose, and gently shook his head. ‘Nothing can cure the sickness you have.’”
Jiaolong laughed at the end of her story. There was no greater disaster in life than one’s own death. “It is ironic. I have fought so many battles, and learned a hundred ways of turning an opponent’s blow, of preserving my life from violence. And death comes, not in a sword or club or fist, but cloaked, unseen. Inside me! Like a maggot within the rotting carcass.”
Snow Vase didn’t know how to take this news in. Mothers did not die. Not so soon. Not when they appeared so . . . she looked for the word . . . unvanquished.
It began to rain. Tiny drops, so rare this deep in the desert. They were almost refreshing in the warmth. It was a good enough excuse. “Bring more wine!” her mother called, and Steward Bai came back with a warm pot that he set in the middle of the table.
Snow Vase felt somehow her mother’s equal now. It was as if the years of deception had dwindled her mother’s moral standing and elevated her own. She was like the lotus flower that rises from the mud of the lake: clean, white, perfect.
“Will you drink with me?” her mother said.
“Yes,” Snow Vase said. She deliberately did not say “Mother.” It felt like a little victory to her that night.
They drank three cups together, but three cups was not enough for Jiaolong, and too much for her daughter. That was how tragedy was made, she thought, and when her mother went to fill her cup a fourth time she put her hand over it.
“It is late,” she said at last.
Jiaolong nodded. Her daughter was right. She let her go, refilled her own cup to the brim and held it up with two hands in a gesture of gratitude. With a cup of wine all troubles diminish, the saying went, but wine only deepened her melancholy.
The next morning the rain had passed but there was a pleasant damp to the air, and a scent of earth. In the south, mist wreathed the mountains, and the waning moon still hung in the western sky.
Snow Vase sat to meditate in the yard.
A host of conflicting thoughts had gathered in the night like a mob of voices. They had woken her early, insistent and loud: clamoring at her door. She took them out, one by one, and addressed them as a wushu master takes on a crowd of fighters and leaves each in the dust. Her breathing was slow and deep and regular as the night faded around her, the world fading from black and white moon shades to the rich colors of day: the green roof tiles, the blue of sky, the yellow earth, sprinkled with the drowned cherry blossom.
Her maid had laid out her clothes but Snow Vase put them aside, opened her chest and picked out thin black trousers, leather boots and a short black jacket lined with blue silk.
She took the long way around to the front courtyard. Her mother had always welcomed fellow wushu fighters. There had been many of them when she was young.
The eastern courtyards had once been full of young men pitting their skills against each other, or training their muscles to leap harder, faster, more explosively. But now the paper windows were brown with dust, holes flapped in the wind, and there was a carpet of moss on the doorsteps. Snow Vase paused. She could remember the day Bald Wu had taught her Flying Crane Fist; the first day she showed her mother.
Jiaolong’s face had been impassive as she watched her daughter: a slender girl, hair plaited to the sides of her head, in black trousers and top, suddenly assuming the stance of a striking crane. She was grace and elegance and then she struck and she was speed and power and penetration, then soft and flowing and graceful again, as the dancing bird.
“Who dared teach my daughter this?” she said at the
end.
Bald Wu fell to his knees and touched his forehead to the dirt.
“Forgive me!” he said. “She taught herself at first. Following the men in the yard. I never saw such a fighter! Talent should not go untrained.”
“It seems you have the heart of a boy, and the talent of a warrior,” her mother had said. The words were spoken solemnly. Seriously. “Do you understand what that means?” she had asked.
Snow Vase had nodded. “Yes, Mother,” she said.
When she reached her mother’s courtyard, Steward Bai stood waiting for her.
Snow Vase sat silent as the servants brought in her breakfast of steamed pork buns. She took the buns and walked out into the yard. The sky was clear and early summer blue, but the heat had not yet got up, and the air was cool still with just the hint of dew that occurred in these dry regions.
She paced across to the well and sat down on the stone lip. One of the women had been washing this morning. There were large wet stains on the ground, but the parched earth had sucked the water in and left no mud: just a dark brown bruise.
Snow Vase chewed slowly. She watched the round moon gate that led to her mother’s courtyard, but the sun rose over the roof of the gateway and still she had not come.
“Where is my mother?” she asked one of the maids as she came to sweep the yard.
“I do not know,” the girl said.
“Can you ask Steward Bai to come?” Snow Vase said.
The girl bowed, and hurried off with little steps.
A few minutes later Steward Bai arrived.
“I’m waiting for my mother,” Snow Vase said.
Steward Bai bowed slightly. “She went out this morning,” he said.
“Where?”
“A messenger came. Before the sun rose.”
“From the magistrate?” It was common for the local authorities to turn to Jiaolong when there were bandits on the road.
Steward Bai shook his head. “No. I do not know who he was. Your mother went out early. With her sword and two horses.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
He shook his head.
“Did she say when she would be back?”
He shook his head. There was a pause. “That is all,” Snow Vase said. She looked down at her bowl, where her pork bun lay half eaten.
Snow Vase waited all day, pacing the courtyards, practicing her swordplay, reciting old scraps of poems she had learned as a child—her ears always eager for the sound of a horse returning to her home.
A number of times she felt the distant thunder of hooves and stood still and paused, but the horses passed by or turned onto another path some way off, and they did not trouble her gate.
It was typical, she thought, for her mother to tell her she was adopted, and then disappear. It was infuriating. It was also concerning, and as the day went on she began to fear for her mother.
She summoned Steward Bai back. “Mother is sick. Did she take any medicine with her?”
Steward Bai did not know. He didn’t know much, Snow Vase thought.
When the sun began to turn the world to gold and shadows Snow Vase walked to the compound gateway and looked out. She looked north and south and east and west, but there was no sign of a rider. No sign of the woman she had thought her mother.
One day passed, and another. Snow Vase’s emotions rose and fell like the tide. At last she summoned Steward Bai.
“I’m worried about my mother,” she said. “I’m going to take two horses.”
Steward Bai bowed low. “I will see it is all arranged,” he said.
Snow Vase was gone for a week. When she came back, thirsty, exhausted, the guards on the gates of Dunhuang looked up expectantly. “Miss?” they said as they saw her walking from the desert. “Is that you, miss?”
Her eyes were downcast, her spirit defeated, her horses had a weary, lethargic air. She had found the messenger, and learned his message; and now she knew that her mother was not coming back. Her confused feelings exhausted her.
Steward Bai watched her from the doorstep of the house.
Snow Vase let her horse drink before she did so herself. She washed the rims of dust from her eyes, she sat back on the wooden trough. “She has gone,” she said. “She has gone away. I do not think she means to come back.”
Steward Bai looked at her. “Why?” he asked.
Snow Vase splashed more water over her face. “She has one last thing she wants to do before she dies. She is looking for someone very special to her. A young man. I do not think we will see her again.”
“None of us?”
Snow Vase looked at the old man and saw the sadness in his eyes. She put her hand to his shoulder. “None,” she said.
Snow Vase paused. She has left us. She’s gone to meet her fate. I cannot stay here, without a master. I will have to go too, my destiny awaits.
4
“What is this?”
Wei-fang’s mother held up his training manual, Shaolin Monastery: 108 Styles. Wei-fang had known that this was not going to go well from the moment he had been summoned that morning, in a hushed whisper, to come and speak to his mother in the family shrine. “She’s not eaten all morning,” the maid whispered to him. “She’s been asking for you since dawn. We’ve been trying to put her off, but she says we must wake you now or she will come herself.”
“I’ll come,” Wei-fang had said, and quickly ruffled his hair to make it look as though he had just woken.
Now he was standing in his family shrine, and his mother had dressed in her formal red jacket, eyebrows freshly plucked and hair rigidly combed into place. She was waving his wushu manual at him, and from under the high forehead she was fixing him with her hard black eyes.
“Well?” she said.
He wondered how much he should tell her.
“Imagine I know everything,” she said, “and for once tell me everything.”
He opened his mouth but no sound came out. She was a dramatic woman, and if he told her the truth she would make a scene. Or a worse scene than she was going to make anyway.
“Speak!” she said, her voice shrill. She had always treated him, indulged him, loved him—overloved him, some said, if such a thing were possible. He had never seen her this angry. “Tell me what this is!”
“A book.”
“I can see that.”
The book was ancient and well-thumbed, and as she held it up some of the papers fell out onto the floor. As he bent to pick them up her voice became shrill. “Leave them alone! Tell me, what is this?” She took a step toward him.
The skin of her face was so tight her face was a snarl, her teeth small, stained needles of fury. She screamed at him. “Just because you are nearly seventeen years old you think that means you can do what you wish! That is not so. You have lied to us! You have lied to me!”
He saw her gold-plated fingernails raised above him like the claws of a bird and realized that she was actually going to hit him. Both of them paused for a moment and then, deliberately, intentionally, she slapped him across the face.
The blow did not smart, except for where her nails had raised a red welt. But she had never struck her son before, and from that moment, when he fell to his knees in apology, and she saw his face and what she had done to him, and she fell to the floor next to him, and wept for his forgiveness, then Wei-fang knew that something he and his mother had shared, a deep, secret thing that bound them together, had finally broken and could never be repaired.
“This is all his fault,” she wept.
“Whose?”
“You know whose! Master Zhang! I wish he had never lived!”
Wei-fang could not bear to hear the old man spoken of in this way. He stood over his mother. “It’s not his fault,” he said gently. “And anyway he’s been dead for two years.”
&nbs
p; “His ghost refuses to let go. I will summon the priests and have his spirit banished.” He laughed at her and she threw him off. “He corrupted you. I warned your father. He told you all those silly tales and now look at you. You want to study these fighting skills. What karma will you earn? You’ll come back as a dog or a rat. Our souls will never reach the Pure Land,” she said, and pulled her hair and wailed.
Master Zhang had run a medicine shop in the southern quarters of Luoyang. He was old and wrinkled; his skin as brown and polished as old copper. He had no sons that anyone knew of. No wife either. But Wei-fang’s father liked him, and went to buy medicines from there, and when he turned eight years old Wei-fang had started accompanying his father to the shop.
Master Zhang had taken a liking to the eight-year-old boy. He smiled kindly, beckoned him over. “Come!” he would say. Wei-fang was a trusting child, and he would climb up next to the old man and take a licorice root, and chew it as the old man told him tales of Monkey King and Pigsy, and how they fought demons across the Western Deserts. Sometimes Master Zhang would act out the fights, leaping into the air, kicking his upraised palm, balancing on one toe while he slow-kicked the other leg up to his nose.
Wei-fang dropped the licorice root. “Wa!” he said. “Again!”
Eventually Wei-fang said, “Master. Can you teach me how to do that?” And Master Zhang had looked toward his father, a genial man, now retired from office, who was enjoying life as a retired scholar by indulging in his penchant for Buddhism.
His father had always said that he did not think his son would become a fighter, but at the time he had not really been paying attention, and he liked to say “yes” to his son. It was a habit. He was an only and beloved child.
