Under Fishbone Clouds (3 page)

Yuying could already see her life forming, fluttering out from this photograph. Her mother, in her more bitter moments, had told her that a woman is a receptacle into which a man pours his dreams and
his desires. Yuying did what she did whenever the world seemed at odds with her own hopes – made herself small, made herself a stone that rivers might rush over without uprooting. I wish I could have told her that although it is easy to make yourself stone, it is difficult to turn back. But us gods have a policy about interfering with humans, so there was not much I could do.

Let me tell you a little more about Yuying in the summer of 1946. Already others mistook her shyness for superiority. Already she had begun to bite her bottom lip when the world seemed to veer beyond her control. Already she had picked up her father’s stubbornness, and her mother’s superstition that if others talk about you too much you will become the person others think you are. Already she had learnt the one thing that would keep her alive in the years to come – that sometimes silence is a kind of love.

Yuying’s room was in the east wing with her siblings, though after she married she would move to the north wing, to the large empty room just before the mute’s chamber and the servants’
quarters
, to have some space with her new husband. She shuddered at the thought. Yuying had never considered it strange that her mother slept in the east wing while her father usually stayed in his study in the central compound, next to the entrance hall and small shrine, so that he could hear people coming and going (or, as the servants whispered, sneak in and out himself more stealthily).

She stopped, hearing laughter. Inside the next room her two younger sisters, Chunlan and Chunxiang, were playing
weiqi
, although they had learnt to call it Go, just as the Japanese did. Each had a handful of slate and clamshell pieces, tar-black and dirty white, and were stretched out over the floorboards, leaning down to surround each others’ imaginary army. As they threw down the pieces, tactically trying to trap each in ever increasing circles and squares, Yuying could not help but picture the armies that until recently had swooped through the city, outside the schools, through the restaurants and around the park. Every little victory for one of her sisters made it harder for her to open her mouth. She hung back in the hallway to watch them play. Within an hour everyone in the house will know anyway, she thought.

By the time of Confucius, Go was considered an art form, ranked alongside painting, poetry and music. Old stories said that an ancient emperor invented it over four thousand years ago to
educate his dull son. In the newly unified Japan of the seventeenth century, four Go houses were set up and subsidised by the
government
, schooling students in the strange and divergent probabilities of its play. Since the careful strategies implicit in the game ensure that the occurrence of two identical matches is a virtual
impossibility
, the game took on an intellectual aspect to complement its martial application. Scholars debated its relation to cosmology, physics, consciousness and infinity, sipping blossom tea while watching stubbornly long matches. The idea of infinitely
changeable
empires, conquered, reclaimed, conquered again and
continually
swept clean, must have appealed to the warlords of the early twentieth century, who might have recognised in the game’s shifting patterns the possibility of rewriting whole maps according to the formation of different colours. When the Japanese invaded the north of China to proclaim the state of Manchuria, how many people spotted the first throws of a handful of black pebbles?

‘Hey, little devils, come here. Guess what?’

Her sisters scrabbled to their feet and ran to her. The middle one, Chunlan, was bony and sharp, right down to her fierce eyes and her pursed lips that were always ready to sting. The younger one, Chunxiang, was tall and awkward, with a spirit-level fringe and thick black-rimmed glasses, her round face always breaking into blushes, her shoulders slouching to try and hide her height.

‘I’m getting married.’

They made twittery noises, like morning birds.

‘Who is he, Yu? Where did he come from? No, I mean, what’s he like?’

She held out the picture hesitantly. They huddled close to study it.

‘Well, he’s kind of handsome …’ Chunxiang ventured.

‘When’s it going to be?’ Chunlan asked.

‘I’m not sure. Soon. Pa has arranged it all, I think.’

‘Wow. Just imagine it, Yu. I bet we’ll have pig’s trotters, and goose eggs, and spicy pork, and well, of course, more dumplings than you’ve ever seen!’

‘Do you always have to think with your stomach, Xiang? It won’t be like that. It’ll be romantic, and we’ll be too busy looking
beautiful
in Ma’s best jewellery and new silk dresses to want to go too near all the food,’ Chunlan chided her sister.

‘So, you’ll be leaving, Yu?’ Chunxiang asked.

‘No. Pa said he’ll come to live here. And I can keep going to
college
.’

‘Well, it’s great you get to keep your precious books, but when I get married, we’ll live in a big place that’s all our own, and I’ll be the lady of the house, and everything will be different to here. We’ll visit, of course. Come and see you and your husband and your pile of papers.’ Chunlan giggled to herself.

Yuying pursed her lips. She didn’t have the energy to argue with her sister, not now. ‘I’ll be able to finish my degree, and then I’ll be able to do anything I choose,’ she said.

‘So, who is he? Is he from the city? Did a matchmaker find him?’ Chunxiang asked, cutting through the tension between her two sisters.

‘I don’t know,’ Yuying conceded. ‘He could be anyone.’

‘But he’s not. He’s your husband.’

Her sister could not know how, in the years to come, those words would catch like swallowed bugs at the back of Yuying’s throat, struggling and beating wings to draw back the dark. Her
youngest
sister – who would disappear into the smoke of the steelworks and iron forges that dotted the frosty plains of the furthest north – stared at her and grinned.

‘There’s so much to think about,’ Yuying said, and, though for a moment the sentence seemed serious, the three girls suddenly burst out laughing.

‘At least you know he won’t be old and ugly. Remember what happened to Meiling from down the road? Her new husband looked like he’d been hanging around since the last dynasty. If only he’d had half as many teeth left as he had bars of gold stashed away! And what about Ting from school – do you remember how her lanky husband stuttered his way through the ceremony?’ Chunlan set them laughing again.

A shadow poured through the open doorway. It sloped up into Peipei, their auntie, holding a single finger up to her lips. She was not really their auntie, though as she had nursed each one and calmed them through countless night terrors, they did not think to lose that familiar term of address.

‘Sshh. Your father is working,’ Peipei said. ‘Do something useful, like some needlework.’ Peipei still believed, despite their
schooling
, that the girls should not bother themselves with too much
thinking. Educating girls is like washing little boys: all well and good, but they only get dirty again, she told anyone who would listen. ‘Come on, you know what your mother said.’

‘Where is Ma?’

‘She’s resting.’ All four of them knew that this was not true – they had never known their mother to be anything but busy. Peipei scowled, pulling her trio of hairy moles further down her face. She then shooed them from the room, Yuying to her Japanese and Chunlan to her etiquette essay. Chunxiang was left to sweep up the Go pebbles and pile them into the two boxes. She didn’t bother to separate the colours, and in the quickly brokered armistice the armies became inseparable.

As she passed the study, Yuying peered in through the half-open door to see her father throwing three silver coins to the floor. She knew his temper well enough to realise that she should not stay and risk being caught. Yet she longed to see what he would find out, for she was sure that he was asking about her wedding. He would count up the number of heads and tails and convert them into either a straight line or a broken line (old or young, yin or yang). When he had done this six times, he would have a hexagram with which to divine the future. He would find the corresponding hexagram in his private, battered copy of the
I Ching
and read from the obscure explanations first set down more than two and a half millennia ago. He would then change each of the lines in the
hexagram
to its opposite and read the verse that described the resulting hexagram – for there are two sides to everything, and always at least two ways to see the world. The book describes everything and nothing: it is a little universe which you must immerse yourself in to find any kind of sense from the answer it gives. Yuying carried on back to her room as her father finished tossing the coins. Who knows what he found?

Yuying opened her Japanese grammar book and discovered the ink stain, which she dabbed at with the back of her hand. The rest of the day was blotted out like this. At dinner her mother’s exhausted eyes stared for a while at the birthmark-like blotch that the ink had mapped onto Yuying’s hand, but instead of speaking she only arched a carefully tweezered eyebrow.

With the news of the wedding, everything seemed suddenly
different
to Yuying – the lazy Susan’s slow orbit, her sisters’ chopsticks pecking at the plates like hungry beaks scrapping in the sawdust of the yard, the servant girl’s awkward manner when bringing the dishes; even her own sluggish chewing and swallowing seemed out of place. She looked up to see her mother staring at her. Will I still be your daughter, when my husband comes? she wondered. She imagined her home turned upside down. Will you still visit me, or will it be my children everyone comes to fuss over?

Yuying watched her mother, and wondered when it was that she had been young. She looked old, older than her forty-something years. Her husband, Yuying’s father, had already reached forty
before
he was pestered to take a young wife from outside the city. Her cheeks sagged under the weight of her eyes. Not enough pigment left to call them anything but black, her daughter noted. They were darker even than her chopstick-knotted hair. She was shorter than her daughters, with tiny shoes and terrible looks that could stop vines growing and silence anyone in the city – even her husband, though he sometimes pretended not to notice.

Old Bian did not often eat with them, and today was no
exception
. More than once, in barely audible whispers, the sisters had joked that he might be a ghost, neither eating nor moving much till night welled up, though they would never have said this if they thought anyone might have heard them.

‘Listen, girls. Tomorrow you can start preparing for the wedding. The three of you can begin by sewing the pillows. Oh, Yuying, remember: a smile makes you ten years younger. It will be the happiest day of your life. Your father has found you a wonderful husband.’

‘When will we be meeting his family?’

Her mother’s tongue skirted over her front teeth, like a pianist’s hands grazing the ivory. The girls recognised the movement – she always did this when she did not know how to answer.

‘There’s no need to worry about the details. You girls just make sure you’re prepared, and your father will do the rest.’

Her puzzling dismissal clouded the table. Yuying suppressed a shudder. A few picked-through scraps sat between the four of them. She looked at her sisters looking down at their laps, and knew she must ask.

‘Ma,’ she said, ‘have you met him?’

Before her mother could reply, they were interrupted by the sound of the mute’s dog barking, signalling his return from the restaurant. The nervous servant girl jumped, and their mother quickly rose from the table. She bent down and kissed her eldest daughter, her lips like breeze-borne embers, almost branding Yuying’s cheek.

‘Of course I have. Now, best to get some rest,’ she whispered. Although her steps were small and stunted, as she rocked forward tentatively on the balls of her feet, she still gave the impression of retaining an untouchable grace. After she left, the girls wandered to their separate rooms, the youngest two no longer daring to tease Yuying.

Yuying flopped down on the hard wooden bed, which would soon be given up to her youngest sister. It was now that she should have retreated to the loft to mourn her separation from her family and curse the go-between who had arranged the union which would usually prise apart a family. She should have been singing strange laments with her sisters for the things she could not know that she would lose. She had not learnt these songs, had not yet heard the music of departure and its bittersweet arguments that bubble and blister on the tongue. All her friends had drifted into different stories, scrabbling new beginnings from little rooms. But she was going nowhere. She imagined herself aged a hundred, moving from corner to corner of that same house, sharing space with spiders’ webs and her precious retinue of books, with their perfectly cracked spines and pages whose reek of must and ink rubbed off on her eager fingers. Yet, in the years to come, when the books were stoked up in the fire or buried beyond the back of the garden, she would not even shrug.