Bound (11 page)

Chapter
 26

The park had never held so many people at once before. They must have come from every village and town within a few days' distance, at the very least. Xing Xing had worried about how to keep herself from being seen by Wei Ping and Stepmother. Instead, it was easy to get lost in the crowd.

Buddhist monks in brown cassocks walked in weaving lines, beating drums with their palms, fingers, fists, elbows, wrists, knees, even toes. Jewel-bedecked women stood or sat in clusters, their silk dresses heavily embroidered in so many hues, they looked like a fragrance garden. Fans of gold paper with painting on them peeked out from their sleeves. Most of them were thin, and those who weren't did their best to appear fragile nonetheless to the men who wandered around in double-breasted jackets and hats with sashes. A few of those men had long thumbnails, a sign of being part of the leisure class, and most of them were corpulent. They watched Xing Xing walk by, and they instantly perked up. They called out about how pretty she was, dressed in green, a cool, watery dream, feathers fluffing around her neck and shoulders, like a spirit about to take flight. They spoke silly words to call her to them, silly but never clever, never funny. They were dunces.

Xing Xing wouldn't look at those men. She hadn't come to advertise herself for marriage. A girl alone couldn't do that. Young people who married without it being arranged by their parents could even be put to death. In the long week that had just passed, Xing Xing had talked with the spirits of her mother and her father. She had decided that she would marry and leave Stepmother's home; she was healthy and useful—some man would surely want her. But she hadn't yet figured out how to do it without Stepmother's help in the arrangements, for she never wanted Stepmother's help in anything again. A plan would come to her when she was ready. The spirits would help her. Today she was here only to" see the spectacles. And what spectacles they were!

She passed a snake charmer and magicians and fortune-tellers. She watched an erotic play by a group of transvestites. She stared at contortionists and acrobats. In a roped-off corner young men played kickball. Nearby, others did archery. There were jugglers and people leaping through hoops and balancing on poles. And everywhere she turned, troupes of musicians kept the air singing with flutes and whistles and bells.

Large oblong tables were set up here and there, decorated with fine cloisonné vases of fresh flowers. Small round trays and carved lacquerware overflowed with precisely arranged foods. Xing Xing used a rice paddle to fill a small bowl with white rice from the huge pot on a table and covered her rice with whatever foods she wanted, just as everyone else was doing. Roast chicken and duck, of course. But also cold strips of sheep tail, which Stepmother called "Mongol food" but which Xing Xing now sampled for the first time. She was delighted to find it delicately tasty. She ate fatty pork and onions and garlic, minced and wrapped in lettuce leaves. With her fingers, she dipped fresh steamed crab into vinegar and ginger. She nibbled on shrimp and venison and rabbit.

A young man who had watched her eating with her fingers offered a set of chopsticks—those sticks for eating that had become so popular. He looked at her suggestively. Instead of blushing, she accepted the chopsticks boldly and walked on, using them to eat noodle and vegetable dishes. She sipped fine wines and munched on lychee, kumquat, loquat, tangerines. She sucked away the sweet flesh of a longan, then rolled the big black seed from the middle around and around on her palm. When men followed her, she paid them no attention, and eventually they gave up and went away, muttering in frustration.

Xing Xing had seen imported foods before. Master Tang and Mei Zi had them on their tables at special occasions, and she'd seen some foreign treats at the market earlier in the summer when she was with Yao Wang. But now she tasted them herself. She put her finger into almost every dish. She ate spinach, cucumber, eggplant spiced with jasmine and cadamom and star anise. She smiled at the bite of black pepper, chili, lemon, coriander, fenugreek, Mediterranean olives. She loved the nuts: almonds, walnuts, pistachios. She reveled in the fruits: figs, bananas, pomegranates, star fruits, coconuts, pomelos.

Hanging in cages at many of the tables were exotic birds. Beside the fruit was a cockatoo with a red beak and green plumage; it must have flown in a jungle far from here. It screamed as people chose their fruit.

Never had Xing Xing wondered much about the world beyond the thirteen provinces of Ming China. But now she wanted to know if women ever traveled far and wide, if Chinese women ever saw cockatoos flying free. And food—a thing that Xing Xing had hardly paid attention to before—she now found to be a powerful lure. She imagined herself going straight north to the Great Wall on the border of her own Shaan Xi Province, crossing that wall, and heading out into whatever might be beyond. Or going down to the village and getting on a riverboat again, going downriver, down, down, to the Han River and then the wild yellow waters of the Yangzi River, where the winds blew all the time, all the way out to the coast, then boarding a ship to the South China Sea, looking and tasting and smelling and hearing and feeling all that the world had to offer.

The day went too quickly. As the sun waned, men lit lanterns and sat around square tables listening to stories. The storytellers got the attention of the audience by opening and closing fans very quickly and smacking them hard on the side of the table. Some of them beat drums, some strummed lutes. They worked in pairs, using big clappers made of two plates of wood and little clappers made of five pieces of wood. The big clappers began and ended the story and sometimes were used within the story for dramatic effect, while the little clappers kept up a steady background beat throughout the narration. Every story began with the same claim: "If you hear the first part, you'll want to hear the second. If you hear the story today, you'll come back tomorrow for another. If you hear the story tonight, you'll think about it as you sleep." Smack went the fan, and the storyteller whipped out a long red scarf and twirled around once.

Xing Xing stood at a distance and watched. A pair of storytellers caught her attention and held it. In their story one played a teacher and the other played a student. The teacher was trying to get the student to use better language—the imperial language—focusing on mistakes in the use of pronouns: The actors were doing short comedies—
xiang sheng.

"Say I'm your teacher," said the teacher.

Clack clack clack 
went the little clappers.

"I'm your teacher," said the student.

Clack clack clack 
went the little clappers.

"No, no." The teacher shook his hands in the air and jumped up and down. "You're not the teacher. Say it!"

Clack clack clack 
went the little clappers.

"You're not the teacher."

And on it went, with the audience laughing and laughing. Xing Xing laughed too. When a story was surprising, the men pounded the table with both hands and Xing Xing pressed her hands together.

After awhile Xing Xing wandered over to other tables where men sat settling accounts. She watched as a woman stood behind a man and listened to him negotiate. It took only a few moments to figure out what was going on. The woman was one of his wives, and he sold her. Just like that. She screamed, she pleaded, she threw herself at her husband's feet. But in the end, she had to go stand behind her new husband. Would they have a ceremony, with her face covered by a red cloth? Or was that it—an exchange of person for coins?

How many years had she lived with him? Did she feel tenderly toward him? Did they have children? Were the children all girls?

Xing Xing's cheeks felt heavy. Her eyes closed against the hot wave of questions, as though she would cry. She pressed her fingers to her nostrils to stop her nose from running in this sadness.

A man walked through the crowd loudly announcing the 
ci 
competition. People gathered to sing their poems aloud. Another man promised to read from a story he was writing that would take pages and pages. It was a new literary form called a "novel." Normally, Xing Xing would have wanted to listen to both. But now, suddenly, she longed to go home. She wanted to get away from men who sold wives and men who bought them.

She opened her eyes and turned, and there was Wei Ping, looking right at her. Stepmother was watching her too.

Xing Xing's heart raced. She ran past them, toward the edge of the park. But somehow she wound up in a stand of Torreya trees. She couldn't remember Torreya trees in this park before, and she'd been here so many times. Branches turned to claws that grabbed and swiped at her. She fell over the roots of a dead tree. When a Torreya decays, it can become a nest for a python. She imagined a snake closing around her middle, squeezing, squeezing. She let out a little shriek and scrambled to her feet and ran, but at random, for she didn't know which way home was; she was lost. That was impossible. An evil spirit must have put a spell on her.

She panicked and changed directions and ran faster. A shoe came off. Alas, one of Mother's gold shoes. She stopped to go back for it. But as she turned she saw a man pick it up. And coming through the trees behind the man she saw Stepmother hobbling as fast as she could.

Perfect shoe. Mother's shoe. Most dreadful loss.

Xing Xing ran on, stupefied with grief.

She ran all the way home. She went straight into the storeroom and collapsed in a heap of sobs. When she could finally breathe smoothly enough to talk, she whispered, "I'm sorry." She undressed and folded Mother's lovely things away into the hole. "I'm sorry about the shoe," she crooned, holding herself in her own arms. "I'm sorry, Mother. I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

She crawled out and sat in the main cavern room looking out the overhead window as the very last memories of sunlight faded and stars appeared. She waited for the inevitable screaming of Stepmother, the inevitable cut of the switch, the inevitable banishing from this cave.

But Stepmother and Wei Ping didn't come and didn't come. Xing Xing was too anxious to just stay put. In her old dress she went outside to the jujube trees. The branches should have hung low with the weight of ripe fruit by now. But all the fruit had been picked long ago and given to Yao Wang. The trees looked empty and sad, as though they sensed their unjust loss.

And now Xing Xing remembered the Torreya trees in the park. They'd always been there, she knew that now. Of course. Her fear of Stepmother had disoriented her. Trees were not the enemy; fear was. Fear had made her lose Mother's gift to her. Oh, precious gift—the golden shoe.

Xing Xing wrapped her arms around the trunk of a bare jujube tree. Not a single date. Its thorns stuck out sharply, fending off intruders, protecting fruit that wasn't there. Poor tree. She fell asleep on the ground, hugging the base of the tree.