Inheritance (2 page)

She knew that it was possible to live through this grief and shame. Anything was possible. But did she want to be the woman who would emerge at the end of it? A woman without hope? Chanyi stood before the vast, indifferent beauty of the lake. She watched the world reflected on its surface: a promenade, a temple, and mountains in the distance. For one long moment all else faded from her vision. Her eyes found the lake as deep and promising as rest.

Marriage

Hangzhou 1930–31

MY FAMILY STORY IS LIKE A STONE. I OFTEN THINK ABOUT ITS
true dimensions, weight, and shape. Many years ago, it was pitched into deep water, pulling after it a spout of air, leaving only ripples.

BAD LUCK STRUCK
us long before my grandmother’s death by drowning. This much I know from Hu Mudan, our former housekeeper, who said the trouble began before my mother was born. One autumn night in 1911, a group of men entered the family’s unlocked front door. Inside, they lit fire to the house, then hurried out to report what they had done to the Revolutionary Alliance. At the last minute one man, thinking of the people inside, turned back and knocked once, twice, thrice. But his knocking was muffled by the shadow wall, which had been built inside the door to repel unhealthy influences. The fires spread steadily and brightly in the autumn air, and by the time the household was aware of what had happened, it had become impossible to stop the conflagration.

Only one person inside heard the soldier’s knocks. Hu Mudan was then fourteen, fifteen in Chinese years. She wasn’t yet our housekeeper or even a maid. She was a hungry girl, a stray, who had stolen into the house to lie with the errand boy in his small side room near the door. Like many hungry people, Hu Mudan did not sleep well. And she knew something was the matter; she had an ear for trouble. That is how she described her memory of the Revolution: the sound of trouble, three loud knocks on the heavy wooden door, waking her in the middle of the night.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Hu Mudan remembered the fire’s quick consummation in images of extraordinary lightness and weight. The gold light flickered up the rice-paper windows, illuminating them in brief screens of blaze that quickly settled into ash. The rows of glazed green roof tiles glittered like serpents’ scales. She saw a man stagger into the courtyard, carrying an armful of ledgers. He should have hurried to escape, but instead he stood, a small, gray-bearded figure, staring at the scene as if he were not part of it. A falling beam, heavy with tiles, struck him on the forehead, and he dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Hu Mudan couldn’t reach the man; the blazing beam lay between them. She turned away from the fire, hoping to find the back door and disappear. But then something made her stop in her tracks. On the left side of the house, a young woman hovered on the rail of a balcony. The stairway was ablaze, and her robe of pale green silk was lit up in reflections of the flames.

Their eyes met, the woman’s beseeching. Hu Mudan couldn’t look away. She couldn’t leave behind this woman staring down into the courtyard as if it were the maw of death. She must take the woman with her. She must become her safety net.

She gestured with her arms. “Jump, jump!” she shouted. But the rough roaring voice of the fire rose higher.

“Jump! I will help you!”

The green figure hurtled into smoke. The woman fell to the ground, bringing Hu Mudan down with her.

Hu Mudan could hear her own cry, faint against the roaring flames, but she heard no sound from the woman next to her. This silence worried her. She pulled herself to a poised, defensive crouch. She took the woman’s shoulders in her hands and turned them over. They were the slender, almost sharp-boned shoulders of a young wife. Her eyes were half closed and her eyeballs had slid back; her parted lips exposed a few even, white teeth. Her face, which was serene and smooth, was lit up in unearthly shadows from the glow of the fire. Hu Mudan studied the sensuous flare of her upper lip, her curved cheekbones, her high oval forehead and shadowed, deep-set eyes. The eyelids flickered.

“Up, up,” Hu Mudan gasped in the heat. “Hurry.” She pulled the green silk robe, warm and smooth against her fingertips.

The woman, coughing, pointed toward the back of the house. She had difficulty walking and leaned heavily on Hu Mudan. Step by step, they struggled.

Behind the house there was a smaller courtyard that had been built to house a temple and had fallen into disrepair. A small pond lay in its center. The water was low at this time of year, but still it made a firebreak. When they had hobbled around the pond, they couldn’t go another step. They collapsed to the grass, leaning on each other, watching the fire. The young woman wept. Hu Mudan stared dazed into the flames. The glowing house reflected in the pond recalled a fireworks spectacle that she had once glimpsed over the river.

Finally the woman raised her head and told Hu Mudan her name was Chanyi. “Who are you?” she asked, in her curious, gentle way. “Are you new in the house?”

“No.”

“Where do you come from?”

Hu Mudan shook her head.

“Please stay here with us,” Chanyi said, and closed her eyes.

Hu Mudan stayed there, in the garden, breathing the smell of autumn chrysanthemums and the sweet, worn scent of roses faint amid the odor of burning. The woman’s heavy head dropped into her lap. A thick braid slid against her calf, but otherwise she lay still, the head flung back over Hu Mudan’s knees. A jade pendant lay in the hollow of her throat, and the pockets of her robe were embroidered with dragons. Examining the pale green robe that washed and flickered in the flames, Hu Mudan noticed the slight bulge of the belly beneath, and understood that the robe was a gift from someone who very much desired this daughter-in-law to give birth to a boy.

The fire burned. All over China, houses were flaming up in a splendid light before they settled ghostlike into embers and ashes. Hu Mudan sat in the garden with the young daughter-in-law from the Wang family. She felt a sense of peace and determination rise through her like an answering flame. She had found someone on whom to focus her care. She had been with many men, but she had never felt trust before, and now she instinctively knew that to trust someone meant to be responsible for that person. Hu Mudan tipped her palm to the marbled glow of the fire, and she saw the path of her life run before her, like lightning branching in her hand.

SHE HAD BEEN HUNGRY.
She had been alone. In that time of trouble, Chanyi had made room for her. Hu Mudan believed in the old loyalties, and she immediately began to serve as Chanyi’s maid. Only she knew how to comb Chanyi’s knee-length hair, beginning at the ends and moving gently to her scalp. Only she understood how to keep her mistress safe from the despondency that haunted her. After Chanyi bore two daughters and her hair grew light and thin, Hu Mudan did not comment but continued to comb carefully, gently. When it became apparent that Chanyi had lost her beauty, Hu Mudan did not offer flattery or false hope. For this, her mistress loved her more. She gave Hu Mudan her pendant of green jade. She begged Hu Mudan to take care of her daughters if anything might happen to her.

When Chanyi died, Hu Mudan vowed never to marry. Instead, she would watch over the two girls.

For more than five years afterward, Hu Mudan immersed herself in the household whose master had stolen Chanyi’s beauty, serving the mother-in-law who had broken Chanyi’s spirit. She sat old Mma on her chamber pot and helped to pull her up. She watched over my grand-father and tried, with limited success, to keep him out of the paigao games. Most importantly, she looked after my mother and aunt. She watched the girls as tenderly as she had watched Chanyi. She monitored their manners, appetite, and growth. She checked their stools, fingernails, their palms, the scent of their breath, all with a dry, clear expression, as if she waited for the worst but would not flinch from it.

She worried that they would suffer from the melancholia that had overtaken their mother. But the sisters showed no sign of it. Junan had faith in justice and in the order of things. She read Confucius, with his strict hierarchy of obedience within family walls: wife to husband, daughter to father, younger to elder. According to these laws, she was responsible for Yinan, and Yinan must obey her. She would in turn obey her father, who would in turn respect and cherish old Mma. This system guaranteed that when she grew old, her own grandchildren would tend to her.

Two more different sisters could not have been imagined. While Junan’s white skin and studied calm foretold her beauty and poise, Yinan’s narrow face and tadpole eyes predicted nothing. While Junan held her temper, showing only cool propriety, Yinan had no propriety to speak of. She favored roots and secrets, buried treasures. She liked to dig in the earth, arranging mud and stones into imaginary courtyards. When told to come indoors, she sat for hours in the kitchen, drinking rice porridge mixed with sugar and listening to the cook’s outlandish stories. She listened carefully and rarely laughed. It was as if she sensed that veil, thin as rice paper, which divided the living world from what had passed away.

And yet, with all their differences, the sisters loved each other with a ferocity that soothed Hu Mudan. It comforted and haunted her to see the way they loved each other. The two girls had always been close, but after Chanyi’s death, they grew inseparable. They did everything together and they never fought. In the afternoons, when Junan studied her characters, Yinan sat drawing at her side. On some nights when Hu Mudan could not sleep, she left the pallet in her room behind the kitchen and crossed the courtyard to the sisters’ quarters. She often found them together, in one of their bedrooms, with their dark heads close and their hair strewn across the pillows like lines of ink.

MY GRANDFATHER HAD
indeed taken a mistress, although not a mortal woman. He had always had a thirst for games, and in the time Hu Mudan had known him he’d gradually become insatiable for paigao. All other pastimes grew pedestrian and dull. Cards could be counted and chess strategized. Only in paigao did he find what he desired: the dedication to uncertainty, the fellow players who shared his own need to extinguish themselves in the wild and bitter hopefulness of chance.

He explained to Hu Mudan that she must keep the household expenses to a minimum. Only his daughters and old Mma must be spared. “Don’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “The trouble won’t last for long.” But the trouble lingered and of course the servants were the first to notice. The cook remarked upon the poor quality of the vegetables; the errand boy was not happy with the smaller pot of rice. Hu Mudan ate less. By day, she monitored the gossip of the neighborhood servants—the most reliable way to learn how much my grandfather had lost. On the nights when he played host, she would convince the girls that he was only having fun; after they had gone to bed, she would eavesdrop on the front room. She learned which players were cowards and cheats and which were bluffers.

Toward midsummer, the doorman took to wandering off for hours at a time. My grandfather didn’t notice and so Hu Mudan herself stood at the front doors, waiting. The mud from the spring rains had dried into a cracked visage. She stood shivering in the slanting sun. Something hung over the house, a shadow with black wings.

FROM HER POSITION
at the doors, Hu Mudan could detect the smell of horse mixed with the closer odor of ammonia. On her left, she could plainly hear the spattering sound of the errand boy relieving himself. From the kitchen came the sounds of china spoons scraping on china bowls.

For a half hour, nothing happened. Then she heard someone coming up the road. She peered between the doors and saw a man walking up the Haizi Street from the center of town. Clearly a countryman, a stranger, and no friend of the family. Despite the heat, he wore a bulky cotton jacket that made it impossible to see the shape of his body. But he seemed familiar to Hu Mudan. Perhaps it was his walk. She watched as he approached until she could almost make out the features under the brim of his straw hat: strong and sun-stained features with eyes hidden in shadow. It was the chicken seller from the neighborhood market. She knew little about him except that he came in twice a week from a large farm owned by his wife’s family outside the city.

Hu Mudan possessed a hunger unforgivable in a respectable housekeeper. The hunger showed in her small almond eyes, slanted a bit too high, and unusually bright; it showed in her shrewd mouth, which could soften into an enticing pout. She had a smooth neck and high breasts, neat arms and legs, and unblemished skin the color of sand. Moreover, she had never been pregnant. Long ago, she had suspected she was barren, and this brought her a freedom that lasted into her thirties.

She had noticed him earlier that morning, a warm morning when even sounds took on the vividness of impending summer. The sun already burned upon the merchants and their goods, brightening the flock of chickens and strengthening their smell. Hu Mudan recalled better times, not long past, when Mma had ordered a bird slaughtered for a single pot of soup. It was while contemplating this that Hu Mudan became aware of the man watching her.