Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (24 page)

I searched my mind for the right words to write the woman I loved, and to my great shame I let the conventions I’d grown up with wrap around my heart as I’d done that day in the palanquin. When I picked up my brush, I retreated to the safety of the formal lines appropriate for a married woman, hoping this would remind Snow Flower that our only real protection as women was the placid face we presented, even in those moments of greatest distress. She had to try to get pregnant again—and soon—because the duty of all women was to keep trying to give birth to sons.

Snow Flower,

I am sitting in the upstairs chamber thinking deeply.

I write to console you.

Please listen to me.

Dear one, quiet your heart.

Think of me beside you—my hand on yours.

Imagine me crying at your side.

Our tears form four streams that run forever.

Know this.

Your sorrow is deep but you are not alone.

Do not grieve.

This was preordained, just as riches and poverty are preordained.

Many babies die.

This is a mother’s heartbreak.

We cannot control these things.

We can only try again.

Next time, a son. . . .

Lily

Two years passed during which our sons learned to walk and talk. Snow Flower’s son did these things first; he should have. He was six weeks older, but his legs weren’t sturdy trunks like my son’s. His thinness stayed with him, and it seemed a thinness of personality. This is not to say he wasn’t smart. He was very clever, but not as clever as my son. By age three, my son already wanted to pick up the calligraphy brush. He was magnificent, the darling of the upstairs chamber. Even the concubines showered him with attention, bickering over him as they did over new pieces of silk.

Three years after my first son was born, my second son arrived. Snow Flower did not share the good luck of my destiny. She may have enjoyed bed business with her husband, but it produced nothing—except a second stillborn daughter. After this loss, I recommended she go to the local herbalist to procure herbs to help her conceive a son and enhance her husband’s strength and frequency in his below-the-belt region. Thanks to my advice, Snow Flower informed me, she and her husband had been satisfied in numerous ways.

Joy and Sorrow

WHEN MY ELDER SON REACHED FIVE YEARS, MY HUSBAND
started to talk about bringing in a traveling tutor to begin our boy’s formal education. Since we lived in my in-laws’ home and had no resources of our own, we had to ask them to bear the expense. I should have been ashamed of my husband’s desires, but I never regretted that I wasn’t. For their part, my in-laws could not have been more pleased than the day the tutor moved in and my son left the upstairs chamber. I wept to see him go, but it was one of the proudest moments of my life. I secretly harbored the hope that perhaps one day he might take the imperial exams. I was only a woman, but even I knew that these exams provided a stepping-stone for even the poorest scholars from the most wretched circumstances to a higher life. Nevertheless, his absence in the upstairs chamber left me with a black emptiness that was not filled by my second son’s amusing antics, the squawking of the concubines, the bickering of my sisters-in-law, or even my periodic visits with Snow Flower. Happily, by the first month of the new lunar year, I found myself pregnant again.

By this time, the upstairs chamber was very crowded. Third Sister-in-law had moved in and given birth to a daughter. She was followed by Fourth Sister-in-law, whose complaining grated on everyone. She, too, had a daughter. My mother-in-law expended particular cruelty on Fourth Sister-in-law, who later lost two sons in childbirth. So it is fair to say that the other women in the household greeted my news with envy. Nothing caused more consternation in the upstairs chamber than the monthly arrival of one of the wives’ bleeding. Everyone knew; everyone talked about it. Lady Lu always noted these events and loudly cursed the young woman in question for all to hear. “A wife who does not bear a son can always be replaced,” she might say, though she hated with her entire soul her husband’s concubines. Now, when I looked around the women’s chamber, I saw jealousy and smoldering resentment, but what could the other women do but wait and see if another son came out of my body? I, however, had experienced a change of heart. I wanted a daughter, but for the most practical reason. My second son would leave me for the world of men very shortly, while daughters did not leave their mothers until they married out. My secret ambition flamed with news that Snow Flower was also with child. I cannot tell you how much I wanted her to have a daughter too.

Our first and best opportunity to meet to share our aspirations and expectations arrived with the Tasting Festival on the sixth day of the sixth month. After five years of living with the Lus, I knew my mother-in-law had not reversed her position on Snow Flower. I suspected that she was aware that we saw each other during festivals, but so long as I didn’t flaunt the relationship and kept up with my household duties, my mother-in-law left the subject alone.

As it had always been, Snow Flower and I found pleasure in the upstairs chamber of my natal home, but our old intimacy couldn’t be shown, not when we had our children in our bed or in cots around us. Still, we whispered together. I confessed to her that I longed for a daughter who would be my companion. Snow Flower smoothed her hands over her belly and in a small voice reminded me that girls were but worthless branches unable to carry on their fathers’ lines.

“They will not be useless to us,” I said. “Could we not make a
laotong
match for them now—before they are born?”

“Lily, we
are
worthless.” Snow Flower sat up. I could see her face in the moonlight. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Women are the mothers of sons,” I corrected her. This had secured my place in my husband’s home. Surely Snow Flower’s son had secured her place too.

“I know. The mothers of sons . . . but—”

“So our daughters will be our companions.”

“I’ve already lost two—”

“Snow Flower, don’t you want our daughters to be old sames?” The thought that she might not crushed against my skull.

She looked at me with a sad smile. “Of course,
if
we have daughters. They could carry our love for each other even after we go to the afterworld.”

“Good, that’s settled. Now, lie down beside me. Smooth your brow. This is a happy moment. Let us be happy together.”

We returned to Puwei with newborn daughters the following spring. Their birthdays did not match. Their birth months did not match. We peeled away their swaddling and held their feet sole to sole. Even as infants, their foot size did not match. I may have looked at my daughter, Jade, with mother eyes, but even I could see that Snow Flower’s daughter, Spring Moon, was beautiful in comparison to mine. Jade’s skin was too dark for the Lu family, while Spring Moon’s complexion was like the flesh of a white peach. I hoped Jade would be as strong as the stone she was named for and wished that Spring Moon would be heartier than my cousin, whom Snow Flower had honored in her daughter’s name. None of the eight characters corresponded, but we didn’t care. These girls would be old sames.

We opened our fan and looked at our lives together. So much happiness had been recorded there. Our match. Our marriages. The births of our sons. The births of our daughters. Their future match.
“One day two girls will meet and become
laotong,” I wrote.
“They will be as two mandarin ducks. Another pair—their hearts glad—will sit together on a bridge and watch them soar.”
Above the garland at the top, Snow Flower painted two small sets of wings flying toward the moon. Two other birds, nesting side by side, looked up.

When we were done, we sat together, cradling our daughters. I felt so much joy, yet I didn’t stop to consider that by ignoring the rules governing the match of two girls, we were breaking a taboo.

TWO YEARS LATER,
Snow Flower sent me a letter announcing that she had finally given birth to a second son. She was jubilant and I was elated, believing that her status would rise in her husband’s home. But we hardly had time to rejoice, because just three days later our country received sad news. Emperor Daoguang had gone to the afterworld. Our county was plunged into mourning, even as his son, Xianfeng, became the new emperor.

I had learned, from Snow Flower’s family’s bitter experience, that when an emperor dies his court falls out of favor so that with every imperial transition come disorder and disharmony, not just in the palace but across the country. At dinner when my father-in-law, my husband, and his brothers discussed what was happening outside of Tongkou, I absorbed only what I could not ignore. Rebels were causing trouble somewhere and landowners were pressing for higher rents from their tenant farmers. I felt for people—like those in my natal family—who would suffer, but truly these things seemed far removed from the comforts of the Lu household.

Then Uncle Lu lost his position and returned to Tongkou. When he stepped out of his palanquin, we all kowtowed, putting our heads to the ground. When he told us to rise, I saw an old man dressed in silk robes. He had two moles on his face. All people cherish the hair on their moles, but Uncle Lu’s were splendid. He had at least ten hairs—coarse in texture, white in color, and a good three centimeters long—sprouting from each mole. As I got to know him, I saw that he loved to play with those hairs, pulling them slightly to encourage them to grow even more.

His clever eyes looked from face to face before settling on my first son. My boy had lived eight years now. Uncle Lu, who should have greeted his brother first, reached out a veined hand and laid it on my son’s shoulder. “Read a thousand books,” he said, in a voice resonant with education yet twisted by many years in the capital, “and your words will flow like a river. Now, little one, show me the way home.” With that, the most esteemed man in the family took the hand of my son, and together they passed through the village gate.

ANOTHER TWO YEARS
passed. I had recently given birth to a third son, and we were all working hard to keep things as they’d been, but anyone could see that between Uncle Lu’s loss of favor and the rebellion against the rent increase, life was not the same. My father-in-law began to cut back on his tobacco and my husband spent longer days in the fields, sometimes even picking up tools himself and joining our farmers in their labors. The tutor left and Uncle Lu took over my eldest son’s lessons. And in the upstairs chamber, the bickering between the wives and concubines increased as the usual gifts of silk cloth and embroidery thread diminished.

When Snow Flower and I met at my natal home that year, I barely spent any time with my family. Oh, we had our meals together and sat outside at night as we had when I was a girl, but Mama and Baba weren’t the reason I visited. I wanted to see and be with Snow Flower. We had turned thirty and had been
laotong
for twenty-three years. It was hard to believe that so much time had gone by and harder still to believe that once she and I had been heart-to-heart close. I loved Snow Flower as my
laotong,
but my days were filled with children and chores. I was now the mother of three sons and a daughter, while she had two sons and a daughter. We had an emotional relationship that we believed would never be broken and was deeper than the binds we had with our husbands, but the passion of our love had faded. We didn’t worry about this, since all deep-heart relationships must endure the practical realities of rice-and-salt days. We knew that when we reached our days of sitting quietly we would once again be together in the old way. For now, all we could do was share as much of our daily lives as possible.

In Snow Flower’s household, the last of her sisters-in-law had married out, eliminating the chores she had once needed to do for them. Her father-in-law had also died. A pig he was slaughtering had twisted so strongly at the final moment that the knife slipped in his hand and sliced his arm down to the bone; he bled to death on the family’s threshold as so many pigs had done. Now Snow Flower’s husband was the master, though he—and everyone who lived under that roof—was still very much under the control of his mother. Knowing Snow Flower had nothing and no one, her mother-in-law stepped up her needling, while her husband lowered his protection of her against it. Still, Snow Flower found joy in her second son, who had already grown from a baby into a robust toddler. Everyone loved this child, believing that the first son would not make his tenth birthday, let alone age twenty.

Although Snow Flower’s circumstances were not as high as my own, she paid attention and listened far more deeply than I did. I should have expected this. She had always been more interested in the outer realm than I. She explained that the rebels I’d heard about were called Taipings and that they sought a harmonious order. They believed—as do the Yao people—that ghosts, gods, and goddesses have an influence on crops, health, and the birth of sons. The Taipings forbade wine, opium, gambling, dancing, and tobacco. They said property should be taken away from the landlords, who owned 90 percent of the land and received up to 70 percent of the crop, and that those who worked on the land should share equally. In our province, hundreds of thousands of people had left their homes to join the Taipings and were taking over villages and cities. She talked about their leader, who believed he was the son of a famous god, about something he called his Heavenly Kingdom, about his abhorrence of foreigners and political corruption. I did not comprehend what Snow Flower was trying to tell me. To me, a foreigner was someone from another county. I lived within the four walls of my upstairs chamber, but Snow Flower had a mind that flew to faraway places, looking, seeking, wondering.

When I returned home and asked my husband about the Taipings, he answered, “A wife should worry about her children and making her family happy. If your natal family disquiets you so, next time I will not give you permission to visit.”

I did not say another word about the outer realm.

A LACK OF
rain and what that did to the crops made everyone in Tongkou hungry—from the lowest fourth daughter of a farmer to the revered Uncle Lu—yet I still didn’t concern myself until I saw our storeroom begin to empty. Soon my mother-in-law disciplined us over spilled tea or too large a fire in the brazier. My father-in-law refrained from taking much meat from the central dish, preferring that his grandsons eat this precious resource first. Uncle Lu, who had lived in the palace, did not complain as he might have, but as the truth of his circumstances sank in, he became more demanding of my son, hoping that this small boy would be the family’s passage back to better circumstances.

This challenged my husband. At night when we were in bed and the lamps turned low, he confided in me. “Uncle Lu sees something in our son, and I was happy when he took over the boy’s lessons. But now I look ahead and see we might have to send him away to pursue his studies. How can we do that when the whole county knows we will soon have to sell fields if we are to eat?” In the darkness, my husband took my hand. “Lily, I have an idea and my father thinks it is a good one, but I worry about you and our sons.”