Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (17 page)

“Auntie Wang?” My mind reeled. “You mean
our
Auntie Wang, the matchmaker?”

“She is my mother’s sister.”

I pressed my fingers to my temples. The very first day I met Snow Flower and we went to the Temple of Gupo, she had addressed the matchmaker as Auntie. I thought she’d done this out of courtesy and respect, and from then on I’d also used the honorific when I spoke to Madame Wang. I felt stupid and foolish.

“You never told me,” I said.

“About Auntie Wang? That was the one thing I thought you knew.”

The one thing I thought you knew.
I tried to absorb those words.

“Auntie Wang saw right through my father,” Snow Flower went on. “She understood he was weak. She looked at me too. She read in my face that I did not like to obey, that I didn’t pay attention, that I was hopeless in the arts of home care, but that my mother could teach me embroidery, how to dress, how to act in front of a man, our secret writing. Auntie is only a woman, but as a matchmaker she is also business-minded. She saw where things were headed for our family and for me. She began looking for a
laotong
match, hoping it would send a good message through the countryside that I was educated, loyal, obedient—”

“And marriageable,” I concluded. This was true for me as well.

“She searched the county, traveling far outside her usual matchmaking territory until she heard about you from the diviner. Once she met you, she decided to hitch my fate to yours.”

“I don’t understand.”

Snow Flower smiled ruefully. “You were headed up and I was going down. When you and I first met, I didn’t know anything. I was supposed to learn from you.”

“But
you’re
the one who taught
me.
Your embroidery has always been better than mine. And you knew the secret writing so well. You trained me to live in a home with a high threshold—”

“And you taught me how to haul water, wash clothes, cook, and clean the house. I have tried to teach my mother, but she sees things only as they were.”

I had sensed already that Snow Flower’s mother held on to a past that no longer existed, but having just heard Snow Flower tell her family story, I think my
laotong
also saw things through the happy veil of memory. Knowing her for all those years, I knew she believed in the idea that the women’s inner realm should be beautiful and without worry. Perhaps she thought things would somehow go back to the way they once were.

“From you I learned what I needed to know for my new life,” Snow Flower said, “except that I have never been able to clean as well as you.”

True, she had never been good at it. I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realized it was easier for her mind to glide through the air far above the clouds than to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes.

“But your house is much larger and harder to clean than mine, and you were just a girl in your hair-pinning years,” I argued stupidly, trying to make her feel better. “You had—”

“A mother who could not help me, a father who was an opium addict, and brothers and sisters who left one by one.”

“But you’re marrying—”

Suddenly I recalled that last day when Madame Gao had come into the upstairs chamber and I witnessed her final argument with Madame Wang. What had she said about Snow Flower’s betrothal? I tried to remember what I knew about the arrangement, but Snow Flower rarely if ever talked about her future husband; she rarely if ever showed us any of her bride-price gifts. We had seen bits and pieces of cotton and silk that she was working on, true, but she always said these were everyday projects like shoes for herself. Nothing fancy.

A frightening thought began to formulate in my mind. Snow Flower had to be marrying out into a very low family. The question was, just how low?

Snow Flower seemed to read my thoughts. “Auntie did the best she could for me. I’m not marrying a farmer.”

That hurt a little, since my father was a farmer.

“He’s a merchant then?” A merchant would have a dishonorable profession, but he might be able to restore some of Snow Flower’s lost circumstances.

“I will be marrying out to nearby Jintian Village, just as Auntie Wang said, but my husband’s family”—again she hesitated—“they are butchers.”

Waaa!
This was the worst marriage possible! Snow Flower’s new husband would have some money, but what he did was unclean and disgusting. In my mind I replayed everything from the last month as we’d prepared for my wedding. In particular I recalled how Madame Wang had stayed at Snow Flower’s side, offering comfort, quietly cajoling. Then I remembered the matchmaker telling “The Tale of Wife Wang.” With deep shame I saw that the story had not been meant for me at all but for Snow Flower.

I didn’t know what to say. I had heard the truth in snippets, ever since I was nine, but had chosen not to believe or acknowledge it. Now I thought, Isn’t it my duty to make my
laotong
happy? Make her forget these troubles? Make her believe that everything will be fine?

I put my arms around her. “At least you will never go hungry,” I said, although I turned out to be wrong about that. “There are worse things that can happen to a woman,” I said, but I couldn’t think what they could be.

She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed. A moment later, she roughly pushed me away. Her eyes were wet with tears, but I saw not sadness in them but wild ferocity.

“Don’t pity me! I don’t want it!”

Pity had not entered my mind. I felt sick with confusion and sadness. Her letter to me had ruined my enjoyment of my wedding. Her not showing up for the reading of my third-day wedding books had deeply wounded me. And now this. Under all my turmoil simmered the feeling that Snow Flower had betrayed me. For all our nights together, why hadn’t she told me the truth? Was it that she honestly didn’t believe what her fate was to be? That because in her mind she was always flying away, she thought this would happen in real life too? Did she truly believe that our feet would leave the ground and our hearts would actually soar with the birds? Or was she just trying to save face by keeping her many secrets, believing this day would never come?

Maybe I should have been angry at Snow Flower for lying to me, but that’s not what I felt. I had believed I had been plucked for a special future, which made me too self-centered to see what was directly in front of me. Wasn’t it
my
lack as a friend—as a
laotong—
that had prevented me from asking Snow Flower the right questions about her past and her future?

I was only seventeen. I had spent the last ten years almost entirely in the upstairs chamber surrounded by women who saw a specific future for me. The same could be said for the men downstairs. But when I thought about all of them—Mama, Aunt, Baba, Uncle, Madame Gao, Madame Wang, even Snow Flower—the only one I could really blame was my mother. Madame Wang may have duped her in the beginning, but she had eventually learned the truth and decided not to tell me. How I felt about my mother twisted and warped with the realization that her occasional signs of affection, which I now saw as part of her greater lies of omission, had simply been a way to keep me on course to the good marriage that would benefit my entire natal family.

I was at a moment of supreme confusion, and I believe it set the stage for what happened later. I didn’t know my mind. I didn’t see or understand what was important. I was just a stupid girl who thought she knew something because she was married. I didn’t know how to resolve any of these things, so I buried them deep, deep, deep inside of me. But my feelings didn’t—couldn’t—disappear. It was as though I’d swallowed the meat of a diseased pig and it slowly began to spoil my insides.

I HAD NOT
yet become the Lady Lu who is respected today for her graciousness, compassion, and strength. Still, from the moment I walked into Snow Flower’s house, I felt something new inside me. Think again of that diseased piece of pork, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. I had to pretend I wasn’t sick or infected, so I used my will to good purpose. I wanted to bring honor to my husband’s family by being charitable and kind to people in the lowest of circumstances. Of course, I did not know
how
to do that, because these things were not natural to me.

Snow Flower was getting married in a month, so I helped her and her mother clean the house. I wanted it to be presentable to the groom’s party, but no one could deal with the foul odors that permeated the rooms. The sick sweetness came from the opium that Snow Flower’s father smoked. And the other rankness, as you have probably guessed, came from his impacted bowels. No incense, no burning of vinegar, no opening of windows even in those cool months could disguise the filthiness of that man and his habits.

I saw the routine of that household, in which two women lived in fear of the man who resided in a room on the ground floor. I experienced their hushed voices and the way they cowered reflexively when he called for them. And I saw the man himself, lying there in his stink and mess. Even in poverty, he was as petulant and quick to anger as a spoiled child. There may have been a time when he’d lashed out physically at his wife and daughter, but now he was just a drug-dazed creature who was better left alone with his vice.

I tried not to let my emotions show. Enough tears had poured in that house without mine being added. I asked to see Snow Flower’s bride-price gifts. In my mind I thought: Maybe this butcher family won’t be so bad after all. I had seen the silk pieces Snow Flower worked on. These people must be relatively prosperous, even if they were spiritually polluted.

Snow Flower opened a wooden chest and carefully laid out everything she had made on the bed. I saw the sky-blue silk shoes with the cloud pattern she had finished the day Beautiful Moon died. I saw a jacket that used some of that same silk on the front panel; then, in a neat row, Snow Flower propped five pairs of shoes of different sizes in the same fabric but embroidered with additional designs. This all looked familiar to me, and suddenly I understood why. These things had been fashioned from the jacket Snow Flower had worn on the first day we met.

My hands traveled over other items in her dowry. Here was the lavender-and-white material that had made up Snow Flower’s traveling outfit when she was nine, now recut and reshaped into vests and shoes. Here was my favorite indigo-and-white cotton weaving that had been slit into panels and strips to be incorporated into jackets, headdresses, belts, and decorations on quilts. Snow Flower’s actual bride-price gifts were minimal, but she’d taken pieces from her own clothes to create a unique dowry.

“You will make a remarkable wife,” I said, truly awed by what she had accomplished.

For the first time, Snow Flower laughed. I had always loved that sound, so high, so alluring. I joined in, because all of this was . . . beyond—beyond anything I could have imagined, beyond what was fair or right in the universe. Snow Flower’s situation and what she’d done with it was horrible and tragic and funny and amazing all at the same time.

“Your things—”

“Not even mine to begin with,” Snow Flower answered, as she gulped for air. “My mother recut
her
dowry clothes to make my outfits when I visited you. Now they are recut again for my husband and my in-laws.”

Of course! This had to be the case, because now I could remember thinking that a certain pattern seemed too sophisticated for a girl so young, or cutting loose threads from a cuff when Snow Flower wasn’t looking. I was stupider than a chicken in a rainstorm. Blood rushed to my face. I clasped my hands over my cheeks and laughed even harder.

“Do you think my mother-in-law will notice?” Snow Flower asked.

“If I was too blind to notice, then . . .” but I couldn’t finish because it was all too funny.

Perhaps it is a joke that only girls and women can understand. We are seen as completely useless. Even if our natal families love us, we are a burden to them. We marry into new families, go to our husbands sight unseen, do bed business with them as total strangers, and submit to the demands of our mothers-in-law. If we are lucky, we have sons and secure our positions in our husbands’ homes. If not, we are faced with the scorn of our mothers-in-law, the ridicule of our husbands’ concubines, and the disappointed faces of our daughters. We use a woman’s wiles—of which at seventeen we girls know almost nothing—but beyond this there is little we can do to change our fate. We live at the whim and pleasure of others, which is why what Snow Flower and her mother had done was so
beyond.
They had taken cloth that had once been sent from Snow Flower’s family to Snow Flower’s mother as a bride-price gift, been shaped into the dowry of a fine maiden, been reshaped again into clothes for a beautiful daughter, and now restructured another time to announce the qualities of a young woman marrying into the house of a polluted butcher. All of it was women’s work—the very work that men think is merely decorative—and it was being used to change the lives of the women themselves.

But so much more was needed. Snow Flower had to go to her new home with enough clothes to wear her entire lifetime. Right now, she had very little. My mind raced with things we could do in the month we had left.

When Madame Wang arrived for Snow Flower’s Sitting and Singing in the Upstairs Chamber, I took her aside and begged her to go to my natal home. “There are things I need. . . .”