Peony in Love (11 page)

Jade Shattering

I SPENT THE NEXT MONTH PORING OVER EACH OF THE
twelve editions of
The Peony Pavilion
I’d collected and transcribing all the notes I’d ever written in those copies into the margins of Tang Xianzu’s original two-volume edition my future sister-in-law had sent me. Once I finished that, I gathered my father’s books around me and looked through them until, after another month, I’d identified all but three of the original authors of the pastiches in Volume One and most of those in Volume Two. I didn’t explain terms or allusions, comment on the music or performance, or try to compare
The Peony Pavilion
to other operas. I wrote in tiny characters, packing them tightly between the lines of the text.

I didn’t leave my room. I allowed Shao to wash and dress me, but I turned away from the food she brought. I wasn’t hungry; being light-headed seemed to make me think and write more clearly. When my aunts or cousins came to invite me to take a walk in the garden or join them for tea and dumplings in the Spring Pavilion, I graciously thanked them but said no. Not surprisingly, my attitude did not agree with my mother. I didn’t tell her what I was doing and she didn’t ask. “You cannot learn to be a good wife by hiding in your room with your father’s books,” she said. “Come to the Spring Pavilion. Have breakfast and listen to your aunts. Come for lunch and learn how to treat your husband’s concubines. Join us at dinner and perfect your conversation.”

Suddenly everyone wanted me to have a meal, but for years my mother had told me to beware of becoming chubby like Broom and to eat little so I would be slim at my wedding. But how can you eat anyway when you’re in love? Every girl has this experience. Every girl knows this is so. My heart was dreaming of my poet, my head was filled with this project that I was sure would protect me in my married loneliness, and my stomach? It was empty and I didn’t care.

I began to stay in bed. All day I read from the two volumes. All night I read by the flickering light of the oil lamp. The more I read, the more I began to think about the small links that Tang Xianzu had used to create a deeper whole. I pondered the key moments in the opera, the foreshadowing, the special motifs, and how every word and action illuminated the one thing I was obsessed with: love.

The plum tree, for example, was an arbor of life and love. It was the place where Liniang and Mengmei first met, where she would be buried, and where he would bring her back to life. In the very first scene, Mengmei changed his name because of a dream, becoming Dream of Plum. But the tree also evoked Liniang, for plum blossoms are delicate, ethereal, almost virginal in their beauty. When a girl falls into marriage, she exhales her beauty and loses forever her romantic image. She still has many obligations to fulfill—giving birth to sons, honoring her husband’s ancestors, becoming a chaste widow—but she has already begun her glide into death.

I pulled out my ink, ground it into the inkstone, added water, and then in my finest hand wrote my thoughts in the upper margin of Volume One:

Most of those who grieve over spring are especially moved by fallen blossoms, as I was when I last walked in our garden. Liniang sees the petals and understands that her youth and her beauty are fleeting. She doesn’t know that her life is frail too.

What had always captured my imagination about the opera was its portrayal of romantic love, which was so different from the arranged loveless marriages that I’d grown up with in the Chen Family Villa or the one I was going to. To me,
qing
was noble, the highest ambition a man or woman could have. Although my experience of it was limited to three nights under the light of the quarter moon, I believed it gave meaning to life.

Everything begins with love. For Liniang, it begins with her tour of the garden, then her dream, and it never ends.

Liniang’s ghost and Mengmei enjoyed clouds and rain. They were both so honest in their love for each other—as my poet and I were—that this was not some ugly thing between a concubine and a man.

Theirs is a purely divine love. Liniang always behaves like a lady.

As I wrote this, I thought of myself on the last night in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion.

I wrote about dreams—Liniang’s, Mengmei’s, and my own. I also thought about Liniang’s self-portrait and compared it to what I was doing with my project. In the upper margin, I wrote in my finest hand:

A painting is form without shadow or reflection, just as a dream is shadow or reflection without form. A painting is like a shadow without a frame. It is even more of an illusion than a dream.

Shadows, dreams, reflections in mirrors and ponds, even memories were insubstantial and fleeting, but were they any less real? They weren’t to me. I dipped my brush in the ink, smoothed off the excess, and wrote:

Du Liniang sought pleasure in a dream; Liu Mengmei sought a mate in a painting. If you don’t consider such things illusion, then illusion will become real.

I worked so hard and ate so little that I began to doubt I had ever met a stranger in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion for two nights. Had the poet and I actually left the Moon-Viewing Pavilion to walk along the lakeshore? Was all that a dream or real? It had to be real, and very shortly I would be sent into a marriage with someone I did not love.

When Liniang goes to the library, she passes by a window and wants to fly out to meet her lover. Naturally, she is too afraid to do so.

Tears came to my eyes, rolled down my cheeks, and fell onto the paper as I wrote this.

Visions of love consumed me. What little appetite that had survived my first confinement left me completely. Xiaoqing used to drink half a cup of pear juice each day; I took only a few sips. Not eating stopped being about maintaining control over my life. It even stopped being about my poet and the tumultuous feelings of love and longing I felt were consuming me. One of the sages once wrote:
Only when you are suffering in extremity will the poetry you write be any good.
Gu Ruopu, the great woman poet, responded to this when she commented:
Officials and scholars will engrave their very flesh and carve into bone, turning white-haired and using up their lives contriving to produce dark and melancholy lines.

I traveled to a place deep within myself where everything worldly was stripped away and I felt only emotion: love, regret, longing, hope. I sat propped up in bed, wearing my favorite gown with the pair of mandarin ducks flying above flowers and butterflies, and allowed my mind to travel to the Peony Pavilion. Had Liniang’s dreams compromised her chastity? Had my dreams—my wandering in our family garden—compromised my own? Was I no longer pure because I’d met a stranger and let him touch me with the petals of a peony?

WHILE I FEVERISHLY
wrote, wedding preparations swirled around me. One day a seamstress put me into my wedding costume and then took it away to make it smaller. Another day Mama arrived with my aunts. I was in bed, my books spread about me on the silk coverlet. They had smiles on their faces, but they weren’t happy.

“Your father has sent word from the capital,” Mama said, in her melodious voice. “He’s going back into service for the emperor as soon as you are married.”

“Have the Manchus left?” I asked. Had I missed a dynastic change during my confinement?

“No, your father will be serving the Qing emperor.”

“But Baba is a loyalist. How can he—”

“You should eat.” Mama cut me off. “Wash your hair, put on powder, and be prepared to greet him when he returns, as a proper daughter should. He has brought great honor to our family. You need to show him respect. Now get up!”

But I didn’t.

My mother left the room, but my aunts stayed. They tried to get me out of bed and make me stand, but I was as slippery and formless as an eel in their hands. My thoughts were just as elusive. How could my father serve the emperor when he was a loyalist? Would my mother leave the compound and follow him to the capital, as she once had to Yangzhou?

The next day, Mama brought the family diviner to discuss how to bring more color to my cheeks before my wedding.

“Do you have spring tea from Longjing?” he asked. “Brew it with ginger to improve her stomach and build her strength.”

I tried the tea, but it didn’t help. A light wind would have kept me from walking. Even my bed dress seemed heavy on me.

He gave me ten sour apricots—the common prescription for young women whose thoughts are considered a little overripe—but my mind did not go in the prescribed direction. Instead, I thought about being married to my poet and the salted plums I would eat when I got pregnant with our first son, knowing they would help me with morning sickness.

The diviner returned to sprinkle pig’s blood on my bed in an attempt to exorcise the spirits he was convinced hovered there. When he was done, he said, “If you start eating again, on your wedding day your skin and hair will exceed all earthly models of beauty.”

But I wasn’t interested in marrying Wu Ren and I certainly didn’t care to eat as a way to make him happier on our wedding day. It barely mattered anyway. My future was set and I had already done everything I needed to do to prepare for my wedding. I had perfected my embroidery. I could now play the zither. Every day Shao dressed me in tunics embroidered with flowers and butterflies or two birds in flight as an outward expression of the love and happiness I was supposedly feeling for my coming life in my husband’s home. I just didn’t eat, not even fruit; rarely anything beyond a few sips of juice. I fed myself by ingesting mystic breath, by thinking of love, by remembering my adventure with my poet outside the garden walls.

The diviner left instructions to keep the door to the hall closed at all times, to prevent any malevolent spirits from entering, and to readjust the stove in the kitchen and shift the direction of my bed to take advantage of more favorable aspects of
feng shui.
Mama and the servants made sure these things were done, but I didn’t feel any different. The moment they left the room, I went back to my writing. You cannot cure a longing heart by changing the direction of the bed.

A few days later, Mama arrived with Doctor Zhao, who listened to the various pulses in my wrist and announced, “The heart is the seat of consciousness, and your daughter’s is congested with too much yearning.”

I was happy to be officially diagnosed as lovesick. A fanciful thought entered my mind. What if I died from my lovesickness as Liniang did? Would my poet find me and bring me back to life? The idea pleased me, but my mother had a very different reaction to the doctor’s news. She buried her face in her hands and wept.

The doctor led her away from my bed and lowered his voice. “This kind of melancholy syndrome is also associated with spleen dysfunction. It can cause someone to stop eating. What I’m telling you, Lady Chen, is that your daughter could die from her congested
qi.
”

Aiya!
Doctors always try to scare mothers. This is how they make money.

“You must force her to eat,” he said.

And that’s exactly what they did. Shao and Mama held down my arms, while the doctor pushed clumps of cooked rice into my mouth and held my jaw shut. A servant brought in stewed plums and apricots. The doctor shoved the soggy pieces into my mouth until I vomited out everything.

He looked at me in disgust, but to my mother he said, “Do not worry. This stasis is related to the passions. If she were a wife already, I would say that a night of clouds and rain would cure her. Since she is not yet married, she must silence her desires. Good Mother, on her wedding night she will be cured. But you may not have enough time to wait for that. I’m going to recommend that you try something different.” He took her elbow again, pulled her close, and whispered in her ear. When he let her go, a mask of grim determination covered her fear. “Anger is often enough to release the stasis,” he added reassuringly.

Mama escorted the doctor out of the room. I laid my head back on the pillow, my books spread out about me on the bedclothes. I picked up Volume One of
The Peony Pavilion,
closed my eyes, and let my mind drift across the lake to my poet’s home. Was he thinking of me as I was thinking of him?

The door opened. Mama entered with Shao and a couple of other servants.

“Start with those over there,” Mama said, pointing to the stack of books I had on a table. “And you, get those on the floor.”

Mama and Shao approached my bed and gathered up the books nestled near my feet.

“We’re removing the books,” Mama announced. “The doctor has instructed me to burn them.”

“No!” Instinctively I tightened my arms around the book I was holding. “Why?”

“Doctor Zhao says it will cure you. On this he has been very clear.”

“You can’t do this!” I cried. “They belong to Baba!”

“Then you won’t mind,” Mama replied calmly.

I dropped the book I was holding and frantically scrambled free of my silk quilt. I tried to stop Mama and the others, but I was too weak. The servants left with their first piles of books. I screamed, my arms stretched out to them as though I were a beggar instead of the privileged daughter in a family of nine generations of imperial scholars. These were our books! Precious with learning! Divine with love and art!