Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (26 page)

Now I had a terrible choice to make. I had kept my children protected in my room, but my duty as my husband’s wife was to his parents above all else. To serve them did not just mean bringing them tea in the morning, washing their clothes, or accepting criticism with a smiling face. Serving them meant that I should esteem them above everyone else—above my parents, above my husband, above my children. With my husband away, I had to forget my fear of the disease, expel all feelings for my children out of my heart, and do the correct thing. If I didn’t and my mother-in-law died, my shame would have been too great.

But I didn’t abandon my children easily. My other sisters-in-law were with their own families in their own rooms. I didn’t know what was happening behind their closed doors. They might have already taken sick. They might have already died. I couldn’t trust my father-in-law with the care of my children either. Had he not spent the night beside his wife? Wouldn’t he be the next to get sick? And I had not seen Uncle Lu since the epidemic began, although he left his empty bowl outside his room each morning and evening for me to refill.

I sat in the kitchen, twisting my fingers with worry. Yonggang came over, knelt before me, and said, “I will watch your children.”

I remembered how she had escorted me to Snow Flower’s house just after my wedding, how she had cared for me after I’d given birth to my babies, and how she had turned out to be loyal and discreet in carrying my letters to my
laotong.
She had done all this for me, and along the way, without my noticing, she had grown from a ten-year-old girl into a big-boned, big-footed young woman of twenty-four. To me, she was still as ugly as a pig’s genitals, but I knew she had not yet fallen ill and that she would care for my children as though they were her own.

I gave her exact instructions for how I wanted their water and food prepared, and I gave her a knife to keep with her in case things got worse and she had to guard the door. With that, I left my children in the hands of the fates and turned my attention to my husband’s mother.

For the next five days, I cared for my mother-in-law in all the ways a daughter-in-law can. I cleaned her lower half when she no longer had the strength to use the chamber pot. I made her the same
congee
that I had made my children; then I cut my arm as I had seen my mother do so that my vital fluid could be stirred into the porridge. This is a daughter-in-law’s supreme gift and I gave it, hoping that through some miracle what had given me vitality would replenish hers.

But I don’t have to tell you how terrible this disease is. You know what happens. She died. She had always been fair, and often kind, to me, so it was hard to say goodbye. When her last breath seeped out, I knew I couldn’t do everything that should be done for a woman of her stature. I washed her soiled and desiccated body in warm water scented with sandalwood. I dressed her in her longevity clothes and tucked her
nu shu
writing in her pockets, sleeves, and tunic. Unlike a man, she had not written to leave a good name for a hundred generations. She had written to tell her friends of her thoughts and emotions, and they had written her in the same way. Under other circumstances, I would have burned these things at her grave site. But with the heat and the epidemic, bodies had to be buried quickly with little thought given to issues of
feng shui, nu shu,
or filial duty. All I could do was make sure my mother-in-law would have the comfort of her friends’ words for reading and singing in the afterworld. As soon as I was done, her body was carted away for a hasty burial.

My mother-in-law had lived a long life. I could be happy for her in that regard. And, because my mother-in-law died, I became the head woman of the household, though my husband was still away. Now the sisters-in-law would have to answer to me. They would need to remain in my good graces to receive favorable treatment. With the concubines also dead, I looked forward to more harmony, because on one thing I was very clear: There would be no more concubines under this roof.

Just as the servants had intuited, the disease was leaving our county. We opened our doors and took stock. In our household, we had lost my mother-in-law, my third brother-in-law, his entire family, and the concubines. Brothers Two and Four survived, as did their families. In my natal family, Mama and Baba died. Of course I regretted that I had not spent more time with them on my last visit, but Baba and I had stopped having much of a relationship after I had my feet bound, and things had never been the same with Mama after our argument over the lies she had kept about Snow Flower. As a married-out daughter, my only obligation was to mourn my parents for a year. I tried to honor my monkey mother for what she had done to and for me, but I was not heartsick with grief.

All in all, we were lucky. Uncle Lu and I did not exchange words. That would have been improper. But when he came out of his room he was no longer a benign uncle idling away his retirement years. He drilled my son with such intensity, focus, and dedication that we never had to hire an outside tutor again. My son never shirked in his studies, buoyed by the knowledge that the night of his wedding and the day his name appeared on the emperor’s golden list would be the most glorious of his life. In the former, he would be fulfilling his role as a filial son; in the latter, he would leap from the obscurity of our little county to such fame that the whole of China would know him.

But before any of that happened, my husband came home. I cannot begin to explain the relief I felt as I saw his palanquin come up the main road, followed by a procession of oxen-pulled carts loaded with bags of salt and other goods. All the things I had worried about and cried about were not going to happen to me—at least not yet. I was swept up in the happiness that all of Tongkou’s women showed as our men unloaded the carts. We all cried, releasing the burdens, fear, and grief we had been carrying. For me—for all of us—my husband was the first good sign that any of us had seen in months.

The salt was sold throughout the county to desperate but grateful people. The extravagance of these sales washed away our financial worries. We paid our taxes. We bought back the fields we’d had to sell. The Lu family’s standing and wealth abounded. That year’s harvest turned out to be bountiful, which made autumn even more celebratory. Having weathered dark days, we could not have been more relieved. My father-in-law hired artisans to come to Tongkou and paint additional friezes under our eaves that would tell our neighbors and all those who would visit our village in the future of our prosperity and good luck. I could walk outside today and see them now: my husband in his jacket boarding the boat to take him downriver, his dealings with the Guilin merchants, the women of our household wearing flowing gowns and doing our embroidery as we waited, and my husband’s joyous return.

Everything is painted under our eaves just as it happened, except for the portrait of my father-in-law. In the frieze he sits in a high-backed chair, surveying all he owns and looking proud, but in reality he missed his wife and no longer had the heart to care for worldly things. He died quietly one day, walking the fields. Our first duties were to be the best mourners the county had ever seen. My father-in-law was laid in a coffin and placed outside for five days. With our new money, we hired a band to play music, all day and all night. People from around the county came to kowtow before the coffin. They brought with them gifts of money wrapped in white envelopes, silk banners, and scrolls decorated with men’s writing praising my father-in-law. All the brothers and their wives went on their knees to the grave site. The people of Tongkou plus others from neighboring villages followed behind us on foot. We were a river of white in our mourning clothes as we inched our way through the green fields. At every seven paces, everyone kowtowed, foreheads to the ground. The grave site was a kilometer away, so you can imagine how many times we stopped on that rocky road.

Young and old wailed their grief, while the band blared their horns, trilled their flutes, crashed their cymbals, and banged their drums. As the eldest son, my husband burned paper money and set off firecrackers. The men sang; the women sang. My husband had also hired several monks, who performed rites to help lead my father-in-law—and, we hoped, all those who had died in the epidemic—to a happy existence in the spirit world. Following the burial, we hosted a banquet for the entire village. As the guests went home, high-ranking Lu cousins gave each person a good-luck coin in paper, a piece of candy to wash away the bitter taste of death, and a washing towel for body cleansing. That took care of the first week of rites. Altogether we had forty-nine days of ceremonies, offerings, banquets, speeches, music, and tears. By the end—although my husband and I were not yet done with our official mourning period—everyone in the county knew that we were, at least in name, the new Master and Lady Lu.

Into the Mountains

I STILL DID NOT KNOW WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO SNOW FLOWER
and her family during the typhoid outbreak. In my concern for my children, in my duties to my mother-in-law, and in the joy of my husband’s return, followed by my father-in-law’s death and funeral, and finally by my husband and I becoming Master and Lady Lu sooner than perhaps we were ready, I had—for the first time in my life—forgotten about my
laotong.
Then she sent me a letter.

Dear Lily,

I hear you are alive. I am sorry about your in-laws. I am sadder still to hear of your mama and baba. I loved them very much.

We survived the epidemic. In the early days, I miscarried—another girl. My husband says it is just as well. If I had carried all my children to term, I would have four daughters—a disaster. Still, three times to hold a dead child in your hands is three too many.

You always tell me to try again. I will. I wish I could be like you and have three sons. As you say, sons are a woman’s worth.

Many people died here. I would tell you things are quieter now, but my mother-in-law lives. She says bad things about me every day, turning my husband against me.

I invite you to visit. My lowly gate hardly compares to yours, but I long to put our troubles behind us. If you love me, please come. I want to be together before we begin binding our daughters’ feet. We have much to talk about in this regard.

Snow Flower

With my mother-in-law in the afterworld, I thought constantly of what she had told me about a wife’s duty: “Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.” Without my mother-in-law’s watchful eyes, I could finally see Snow Flower openly.

My husband had plenty of objections: Our sons were now eleven, eight, and one-and-a-half, our daughter had recently turned six, and he liked me to be at home. I eased his concerns over several days. I sang to him to calm his mind. I gave each of the children projects, which soothed their father’s heart. I prepared all his favorite dishes. I washed and massaged his feet each night after he came in from roaming the fields. I attended to his below-the-belt area. He still did not want me to go, and I wish I had listened.

On the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month, I put on a lavender silk tunic I had embroidered with a chrysanthemum pattern appropriate for fall. I had once thought that the only clothes I would ever wear were the ones I had made during my hair-pinning days. I hadn’t considered that my mother-in-law would die and leave behind her untouched bolts or that my husband would make enough riches that I would be able to buy unlimited quantities of the very best Suzhou silk. But knowing I was going to Snow Flower and remembering the way she had worn my clothes when we were girls, I took nothing else for the three nights I would be away.

The palanquin dropped me before Snow Flower’s house. She sat waiting on the platform outside her threshold, dressed in a tunic, pants, apron, and headdress of soiled, worn, and poorly dyed indigo and white cotton. We did not go inside right away. Snow Flower was pleased to have me beside her in the cooling afternoon air. As she chattered on about this and that, I saw clearly for the first time the giant wok where the pig carcasses were boiled to remove their hair and loosen their skin. Inside the open door of an outbuilding, I glimpsed meat hanging from beams. The smell turned my stomach. But what was worse was the mother pig and her babies who kept coming up onto the platform, looking for food. After Snow Flower and I finished our lunch of steamed water grass and rice, she took our bowls and set them at our feet so the sow and her babies could eat what we’d left behind.

When we saw the butcher returning home—pushing a cart loaded with four baskets, each containing a pig stretched out full length on its belly—we went upstairs, where Snow Flower’s daughter embroidered and her mother-in-law cleaned cotton. The room was musty and gloomy. Snow Flower’s lattice window was even smaller and less decorated than the one in my natal home, though I could see through it to my window in Tongkou. Even up here we could not escape the smell of pig.

We sat down and spoke of what was foremost in our minds—our daughters.

“Have you thought about when we should start their footbinding?” Snow Flower asked.

It was right and proper for it to begin this year, but I hoped from Snow Flower’s question that she and I were of the same mind.

“Our mothers waited until we were seven, and we have been happy together ever since,” I ventured carefully.

Snow Flower’s face broke into a broad grin. “This is exactly what I thought. You and I had our eight characters matched so perfectly. Should we not only match our daughters’ eight characters but also match those eight characters to ours as much as possible? They could start their binding on the same day and at the same age as we did.”

I looked over at Snow Flower’s daughter. Spring Moon had her mother’s beauty at that age—silken skin and soft black hair—but her demeanor seemed resigned as she sat with her head down, squinting at her embroidery as she assiduously tried not to eavesdrop on her fate.

“They will be like a pair of mandarin ducks,” I said, relieved that we had come to such an easy agreement, though I’m sure we were both hoping that our matched characters would make up for the fact that the girls’ eight characters were not so perfectly in accord.

Snow Flower was truly lucky to have Spring Moon; otherwise she would have been left alone all day with her mother-in-law. Let me say this: That woman was still as biting and mean-spirited as I remembered. She had but one refrain: “Your oldest son is no better than a girl. He’s a weakling. How will he ever have the strength to slaughter a pig?” I thought something not befitting Lady Lu: Why couldn’t the spirits have taken her in the epidemic?

Our evening meal brought back tastes from my childhood before my dowry gifts began to arrive—preserved long beans, pigs’ feet in chili sauce, wok-fried slivers of pumpkin, and red rice. Every meal when I was in Jintian was the same in the sense that we always had some part of the pig. Pig fat in black beans, pig ears in a clay pot, flaming pig intestines, pig penis sautéed with garlic and chili. Snow Flower ate none of it, quietly eating her vegetables and rice.

After dinner, her mother-in-law retired for the night. Although tradition says that two old sames should share a bed when visiting—meaning the husband sleeps elsewhere—the butcher announced that he would not remove himself to other quarters. His excuse? “There is nothing so evil as a woman’s heart.” This was an old saying and probably true, but it was not a gracious thing to say to Lady Lu. Nevertheless, it was his house and we had to do what he said.

Snow Flower took me back upstairs to the women’s chamber, where she made a bed with some of her clean, though frayed, dowry quilts. On the cabinet she placed a low bowl filled with warm water for me to wash my face. Oh, how I wanted to dip a cloth into that water and wipe away the cares that played across my
laotong
’s features. As I thought this, she brought out an outfit almost identical to hers
—almost,
because I remembered when she had pieced it together from one of her mother’s dowry treasures. Snow Flower leaned forward, kissed my cheek, and whispered in my ear, “Tomorrow we will have all day together. I will show you my embroidery and what I have done on our fan. We will talk and remember.” Then she left me alone.

I blew out the lantern and lay beneath the quilts. The moon was nearly full, and the blue light that came through the lattice window transported me back many years. I buried my face in the folds where Snow Flower’s scent was as fresh and delicate as when we had been in our hair-pinning years. The memory of low moans of pleasure filled my ears. Alone in that dark room I blushed at things perhaps best forgotten. But the sounds didn’t go away. I sat up. The noises were not in my head but coming up to me from Snow Flower’s room. My
laotong
and her husband were doing bed business! My
laotong
may have become a vegetarian, but she was no Wife Wang of the story. I covered my ears and tried to fall asleep, but it was hard. My good fortune had made me impatient and intolerant. The polluted and polluting nature of that place and the people who lived there rasped against my senses, my flesh, my soul.

The next morning, the butcher left for the day and his mother went back to her room. I helped Snow Flower wash and dry the dishes, bring in firewood, haul water, slice the vegetables for the midday meal, go to the shed where the sides of pork were kept to fetch meat, and attend to her daughter. Once all this was done, Snow Flower set water to heat that we could use for bathing. She carried the kettle back upstairs to the women’s chamber and shut the door. We had never had any inhibitions. Why would we now? The air in that little house was surprisingly warm even though it was the tenth month, but goose bumps rose on my skin behind the path of Snow Flower’s wet cloth.

But how do I say this without sounding like a husband? When I looked at her I saw that her pale skin—always so beautiful—had begun to thicken and darken. Her hands—always so smooth—felt rough on my skin. Lines were etched above her lip and at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was pinned back in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Strands of gray threaded through it. She was my age—thirty-two. Women in our county often do not live beyond forty years, but I had just seen my mother-in-law go to the afterworld, and she had still looked very handsome for a woman who had reached the remarkable age of fifty-one.

That night, more pig for dinner.

I DIDN
’
T REALIZE
it then, but the outer realm—that tumultuous world of men—was pushing its way into Snow Flower’s and my lives. During my second night at her house, we were awakened by terrible sounds. We met in the main room and huddled together, all of us, even the butcher, terrified. Smoke filled the room. A house—maybe a whole village—was burning somewhere. Dust and ash settled on our clothes. The clatter of clanging metal and the beat of horses’ hooves pounded into our heads. In the dark of night, we had no idea what was happening. Was it a catastrophe in just one village or was this something much worse?

A big disaster was coming. The people who lived in villages behind us began to flee, leaving their farms for the safety of the hills. From Snow Flower’s window the next morning, we saw them—men, women, and children—on hand-drawn or oxen-pulled carts, on foot, on ponies. The butcher ran to the edge of the village and shouted to the stream of refugees.

“What’s happened? Is it war?”

Voices called back.

“The Emperor has sent word to Yongming City that our government must take action against the Taipings!”

“Imperial troops have arrived to drive out the rebels!”

“There’s fighting everywhere!”

The butcher cupped his hands and yelled, “What should we do?”

“Run away!”

“The battle will be here soon!”

I was petrified, overwhelmed, and dazed with panic. Why didn’t my husband come for me? Again and again I berated myself for choosing this time—after all these years—to visit Snow Flower. But this is the nature of fate. You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.

I helped Snow Flower assemble bags for her and the children. We went to the kitchen and gathered together a large sack of rice, tea, and liquor for drinking and to treat injuries. Finally, we rolled four of Snow Flower’s wedding quilts into tight bundles and set them by the door. When everything was ready, I dressed in my silk traveling outfit, went outside to stand on the platform, and waited for my husband, but he didn’t come. I looked up the road to Tongkou. A stream of people were leaving there too, only instead of going up into the hills behind the village they were crossing the fields, going toward Yongming City. The two trails of people—one going into the hills, the other going to town—confused me. Hadn’t Snow Flower always said that the hills were the arms that embraced us? If so, why were the people of Tongkou going the opposite direction?

In the late afternoon, I saw a palanquin leave the Tongkou group and veer toward Jintian. I knew it was coming for me, but the butcher refused to wait.

“It’s time to go!” he bellowed.

I wanted to remain behind and wait for my family to get me. The butcher said no.

“Then I will walk out and meet the palanquin,” I said. So many times sitting at my lattice window I’d imagined walking here. Couldn’t I now go toward my family?

The butcher chopped his hand through the air to prevent me from saying another word. “Many men are coming. Do you know what they will do to a lone woman? Do you know what your family will do to me if anything happens to you?”