Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (30 page)

Then, before I could say anything else, I heard my husband’s voice calling me. “Lily! Lily! Lily!”

With that, I ran—yes, ran—downstairs and outside. When I saw him, I fell to my knees and put my head at his feet, so embarrassed I was by how I must have looked and smelled. He lifted me up and enfolded me in his arms.

“Lily, Lily, Lily . . .” My name came out muffled as he kissed me again and again, oblivious that others watched our reunion.

“Dalang . . .” I had never before spoken his name.

He took me by the shoulders and pushed me back so he could see my face. Tears glistened in his eyes; then he pulled me close again, crushing me to him.

“I had to get everyone out of Tongkou,” he explained. “Then I had to see our children safely on their way. . . .”

These actions, which I didn’t fully understand until later, were what changed my husband from the son of a good and generous headman to a much-respected headman in his own right.

His body trembled as he added, “I looked for you many times.”

So often in our women’s songs, we say, “I had no feelings for my husband” or “My husband had no feelings for me.” These are popular lines, used in chorus after chorus, but on that day I had deep feelings for my husband, and he for me.

My last moments in Jintian went by in a blur. My husband paid the butcher a handsome reward. Snow Flower and I embraced. She offered me the fan to take home, but I wanted her to keep it, for her sorrow was still near and all I felt was happiness. I said goodbye to Snow Flower’s son and promised I would send him some notebooks to study men’s writing. Finally, I bent down to Snow Flower’s daughter. “I will see you very soon,” I said. Then I got on the cart and my husband flicked the reins. I looked back to Snow Flower, waved, and turned toward Tongkou—toward my home, my family, my life.

Letter of Vituperation

THROUGHOUT THE COUNTY PEOPLE WENT ABOUT REBUILDING
their lives. Those of us who survived that year had experienced too much, first with the epidemic and then with the rebellion. We were depleted—emotionally, and by the numbers of those we’d lost—but grateful to be alive. Slowly we gained weight. Men went back to the fields and sons returned to the main hall for study, while women and girls retired to their upstairs rooms to embroider and weave. We all moved forward, invigorated by our good fortune.

Sometimes in the past I had wondered about the outer realm of men. Now I vowed I would never venture into it again. My life was meant to be spent in the upstairs chamber. I was happy to see my sisters-in-law’s faces and looked forward to long afternoons spent with them in needlework, tea, song, and story. But this was nothing to how I felt upon seeing my children. Three months was forever, in their eyes and in mine. They had grown and changed. My eldest son had turned twelve while I was away. Safe in the county seat during the chaos, protected by the emperor’s troops, he had studied very hard. He had learned the supreme lesson: All scholars, no matter where they lived or what dialect they spoke, read the same texts and took the same exams so that loyalty, integrity, and a singular vision would be maintained across the realm. Even far from the capital, in remote counties like ours, local magistrates—all trained in an identical manner—helped people to understand the relationship between themselves and the emperor. If my son stayed on this track, one day he would surely sit for the examinations.

I saw Snow Flower more that year than since we were girls. Our husbands did not try to stop us, even though the rebellion still raged in other parts of the country. After all that had happened, my husband believed I would be safe in the butcher’s care, while the butcher encouraged his wife’s visits to my home, knowing she always returned with gifts of food, books, and
cash.
We shared a bed in each other’s homes, while our husbands moved to other rooms to allow us time together. The butcher dared not object, following my husband’s lead in this regard. But how could they have stopped any of it—our visits, our nights together, our whispered confidences? We had no fear of sun or rain or snow. “Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.”

Snow Flower and I continued to meet in Puwei for festivals as we always had. It was good for her to see Aunt and Uncle, whose lifetime of goodness within the family had earned them love and respect. Aunt was beloved as a grandmother to all her “grandchildren.” At the same time, Uncle was also in a better position than he had been when my father was alive. Elder Brother needed Uncle’s advice in the fields and in keeping the accounts, and Uncle was honored to give it. Aunt and Uncle had found a happy ending that no one could have imagined.

That year when Snow Flower and I went to the Temple of Gupo, our thanks were profound and deep. We made offerings, kowtowing in thanks that we had survived the winter. Then, arm in arm, we walked to the taro stand. Sitting there, we planned our daughters’ futures and discussed the methods of footbinding that would ensure perfect golden lilies. Back in our own homes, we made bindings, purchased soothing herbs, embroidered miniature shoes to place at the altar of Guanyin, formed glutinous rice balls to present to the Tiny-Footed Maiden, and fed our daughters red-bean dumplings to soften their feet. Separately, we spoke with Madame Wang about our daughters’ match. When Snow Flower and I met again, we compared conversations, laughing at how her aunt was still the same, with her powdered face and wily ways.

Even now, looking back at those months of spring and early summer, I see how blithely happy I was. I had my family and I had my
laotong.
As I said, I moved forward. This was not the case with Snow Flower. She did not regain the weight she had lost. She picked at her food—a few grains of rice, two bites of vegetable—preferring instead to drink tea. Her skin became pale again, while her cheeks refused to fill out. When she came to Tongkou and I suggested that we visit her old friends, she politely declined, saying, “They wouldn’t want to see me” or “They won’t remember me.” I nagged her until she agreed she would come with me next year to the Sitting and Singing ceremony of a Lu girl here in Tongkou, who was Snow Flower’s second cousin twice removed and my next-door neighbor.

In the afternoons Snow Flower sat with me as I did my embroidery, but she gazed out the lattice window, her mind elsewhere. It was as though she had jumped off the cliff after all, on our last day in the mountains, and was in a soundless fall. I saw her sadness but refused to accept it. My husband warned me several times about this. “You are strong,” he said one night after Snow Flower had returned to Jintian. “You came back from the mountains and you make me more proud every day with the way you manage our household and set a good example for the women of our village. But you—and please, do not get angry with me—are blind when you look at your old same. She is not your
same
in every way. Maybe what happened last winter was too much for her. I do not know her well, but surely you can see she puts a brave face on a bad situation. It has taken you many years to understand this, but not every man is like your husband.”

That he would confide this to me embarrassed me deeply. No, that’s not right. Rather, I was irritated that he dared to interfere in the inner-realm affairs of women. But I did not argue with him, because it wasn’t my place. Still, in my own mind I had to prove him wrong and myself right. So I looked more closely at Snow Flower when she next visited. I listened, really listened. Life had degenerated for Snow Flower. Her mother-in-law had cut back on her food, allowing her only one-third of the rice required for subsistence.

“I eat only clear porridge,” she said, “but I accept it. I’m not so hungry these days.”

Far worse, the butcher had not stopped beating her.

“You said he wouldn’t do it again,” I protested, not wanting to believe what my husband had seen so clearly.

“If he assaults me, what can I do? I can’t fight back.” Snow Flower sat across from me, her embroidery lying in her lap as limp and wrinkled as tofu skin.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She answered with a question of her own. “Why should I trouble you with things you cannot change?”

“We can shift fate if we try hard enough,” I said. “I changed my life. You can too.”

She stared at me with mouse eyes.

“How often does it happen?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm but frustrated that her husband was still using his fists against her, angry that she accepted it so passively, and hurt that she hadn’t confided in me—again.

“The mountains changed him. They changed all of us. Don’t you see that?”

“How often?” I pressed.

“I fail my husband in many ways—”

In other words, it happened more often than she cared to admit.

“I want you to come and live with me,” I said.

“Desertion is the worst thing a woman can do,” she responded. “You know that.”

I did. For a woman it was an offense punishable by death by her husband’s hand.

“Besides,” Snow Flower went on, “I would never leave my children. My son needs protection.”

“But to protect him with your own body?” I asked.

What response could she give?

I look back now and see with the clarity of eighty years that I showed far too much impatience with Snow Flower’s despondency. In the past, whenever I had been unsure of how to react to my
laotong
’s unhappiness I had pressured her to follow the rules and traditions of the inner realm as a way of combating the bad things that happened in her life. This time I went further by launching a campaign for her to take control of her rooster husband, believing that as a woman born under the sign of the horse she could use her willfulness to change the situation. With only a useless daughter and an unloved first son, she should try to get pregnant again. She needed to pray more, eat the proper foods, and ask the herbalist for tonics—all to guarantee a son. If she presented her husband with what he wanted, he would remember her worth. But this was not all. . . .

By the time the Ghost Festival arrived on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, I had peppered Snow Flower with many questions that she should have understood were suggestions for her to improve the overall situation.
Why
couldn’t she try to be a better wife?
Why
couldn’t she make her husband happy in the ways I knew she could?
Why
didn’t she pinch her cheeks to bring back the color?
Why
didn’t she eat more so she would have more energy?
Why
couldn’t she go home right now and kowtow to her mother-in-law, make her meals, sew for her, sing to her, do what she had to do to make that old woman happy in her old age?
Why
didn’t she try harder to make things right? I thought I was giving practical advice, but I had nothing like Snow Flower’s worries and concerns. Still, I was Lady Lu and I thought I was right.

So when I ran out of things Snow Flower could do in her home, I questioned her about her time spent in mine. Wasn’t she happy to be with me? Didn’t she like the silk clothes I gave her? Didn’t she present the gifts the Lu family sent to her husband for our continued gratitude with enough deference that he would be pleased with her? Didn’t she appreciate that I had hired a man to teach reading and writing to boys her son’s age in Jintian? Didn’t she see that by making our daughters
laotong
we would be changing Spring Moon’s fate, much as mine had been changed?

If she truly loved me, why couldn’t she do as I had done—wrap herself in the conventions that protected women—to make her bad situation better? To all these queries she just sighed or nodded. Her reaction made me even more impatient. I stepped up my questions and well-considered reasons, until she surrendered, promising to do as I’d instructed. But she didn’t, and the next time my frustration with her was even more pointed. I didn’t understand that the bold horse of Snow Flower’s childhood had been broken in spirit. I was stubborn enough to believe I could fix a horse that had gone lame.

MY LIFE CHANGED
forever on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month of the sixth year of Xianfeng’s reign. Mid-Autumn Festival had arrived. A few days remained before our daughters’ footbinding began. This year, Snow Flower and her children were to visit us for the holiday, but they were not who came to my threshold. It was Lotus, one of the women who’d lived under our tree in the mountains. I invited her to have tea with me in the upstairs chamber.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I am in Tongkou to visit my natal family.”

“A family likes to welcome home a married-out daughter,” I replied, with the customary nicety. “I’m sure they will be happy to see you.”

“And I to see them,” she said, as she reached into the basket of moon cakes that hung on her arm. “Our friend has asked me to give you something.” She pulled out a long slender package, wrapped in a fragment of celadon-colored silk I had recently given Snow Flower. Lotus handed it to me, wished me good fortune, and swayed down the alley and around the corner.

I knew from the shape what I was holding, but I couldn’t fathom why Snow Flower hadn’t come and had sent the fan instead. I took the bundle upstairs and waited until my sisters-in-law set out together to drop off moon cakes to our friends in the village. I sent my daughter with them, saying she should enjoy these last few days outside while she could. Once they left, I sat in my chair by the lattice window. Hazy light filtered through the latticework, casting a design of leaves and vines across my worktable. I stared at the package for a long time. How did I know to be afraid? Finally, I peeled back one edge, then another, of the green silk until our fan was fully exposed. I picked it up. Then I slowly clicked open one fold after another. Next to the charcoal-ink characters we had written the night before we came down from the mountains I saw a new column of characters.

I have too many troubles,
Snow Flower had written. Her calligraphy had always been finer than mine, the legs of her mosquito lines so thin and delicate that the ends wisped into nothing.
I cannot be what you wish. You won’t have to listen to my complaints anymore. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me as I am. Write to me, not to console me as you have been doing, but to remember our happy girl-days together.
And that was it.

I felt like a sword had thrust into my body. My stomach leaped at the surprise of it, then contracted into an uneasy ball.
Love?
Was she really talking about love with sworn sisters in
our
secret fan? I read the lines again, puzzled and confused.
Three sworn sisters have promised to
love
me.
But Snow Flower and I were
laotong,
which was a marriage of emotions strong enough to cross over great distances and long separations. Our bond was supposed to be more important than marriage to a man. We had pledged to be true and faithful until death parted us. That she seemed to be abandoning our promises in favor of a new relationship with sworn sisters hurt beyond reason. That she was suggesting that somehow we could still be friends literally took my breath away. To me, what she had written was ten thousand times worse than if my husband had walked in and announced he’d just taken his first concubine. And it wasn’t as though I hadn’t been given the opportunity to join a post-marriage sisterhood myself. My mother-in-law had pushed me very hard in that direction, but I had schemed and plotted to keep Snow Flower in my life. Now she was tossing me aside? It seemed that Snow Flower—this woman for whom I had deep-heart love, whom I treasured, and to whom I’d committed myself for life—did not care for me in the same way.