Under Fishbone Clouds (5 page)

Years later, Yuying would tell her grandchildren how she had been tricked by the photograph. At first she doubted that this short man, with a mess of hair resembling a muddy mop, could be the same figure as the one in the picture, and suspected her father of having simply hired someone else to sit and pose in the studio. The man in front of her was thinner, with none of the stocky
exuberance
that the picture hinted at. She would go as far as to ask Jinyi, once their marriage had moved from the nervous unfamiliarity of its beginnings into the knowing, casual ease that only comes with time spent close together, if it really was not some handsome friend who posed in his place. Yet, for all this, there was no
mistaking
the lopsided smile that frequently sneaked across his face. A photograph presents a simulacrum of real life, but it is always one we cannot fully trust, for it seeks to give life to things that are already irrevocably altered.

The mahjong tables that had been rattling with the moves of the waiting guests were silenced, the half-finished games abandoned as Hou Jinyi moved to Yuying’s side. She tried her best not to blush as the wedding began; she had never had this much attention focused on her before. She felt the phoenix wriggling across the folds of her long dress as the crowd surrounded the couple, judging how each was changed by the proximity of the other. She tried to push the fact that he was inches shorter than her from her mind, and they turned, moving under the arch through the main door into the house.

When a bride arrived at her husband’s house on the morning of her wedding, she would have expected to stay there until her death. Hou Jinyi measured his steps, trying neither to walk ahead of his new bride nor to fall behind and admit that he was ignorant of the layout of the sprawling house. Yuying, as she had been taught to do since birth, showed no emotion in her fixed expression. She too was
reluctant to acknowledge the fact that they were acting out a strange reversed image of ancient customs, as if they had stepped into the other side of the mirror. In the main hall, they bowed together to an effigy of me, to heaven and earth, and to the stone tablets which contained the spirits of her ancestors. They offered prayers, which melted into the air, mingling with the smell of the roast suckling pig and the uncorked bottles of liquor lying offered and untouched on the altar before them. From the kitchen they could hear fat sizzling in hissing woks as the servants prepared for the banquet. The carefully crafted ancestors watched their every move.

Her parents were seated solemnly in a pair of high-backed wooden chairs facing the doorway. Bian Yuying and Hou Jinyi sunk to the floor in unison to kowtow to them.

‘We wish you both a future full of joy and understanding. Let your love learn from the cypress, the gingko: let these little roots spread, nourish, grow and endure against the wild. Take this name and fill it with life. Bian Jinyi, welcome to our family.’ Her father clasped his hands together as he finished speaking. Yuying and Jinyi then turned, not quite identically, and knelt before each other.

The couple rose and poured dark and sweet-smelling tea from a delicate pot into two white china cups emblazoned with
paintings
of blue-bearded dragons. Each one knelt to present the cup to a parent. As she served her father, Yuying slyly studied the dark crescents under his eyes – it had been years since she had been that close to him. She remembered her sister’s teasing words, and that she would have to spend her life tied to her husband’s shadow as he got older and uglier. This is how the world works, though, she assured herself; why should I resist something so natural? After serving the heads of the household they turned again, and each of them waited on older aunts and uncles in return for gifts of money folded up in small red envelopes. Eventually they came to her siblings and poured a small cup full of red tea for each of them.

Buddhist myths recount that an ancient Buddha, determined to gain enlightenment, left the city and climbed to an empty
mountain
plain. However, instead of meditating, he soon fell into a deep sleep on the sun-parched grass. He ended up sleeping for seven years, his snores drawing seedlings from the ground as birds nested on his gently thrumming chest. When he awoke, he was so
disheartened
at his lack of concentration that he ripped off his eyelids
to stop himself from falling asleep again. Where they fell, the first tea bushes grew. Secular stories claim that an ancient Chinese ruler discovered how to brew tea when dark leaves blew into his boiling water. The caffeine consumption of the Asian Buddhists who first adopted tea-drinking as an integral part of the monastic day was motivated by their desire for clarity, to rid their vision of the world of their lingering dreams.

During the tea ceremony, Yuying continually stole glances at her new husband. From the familiar pattern and stitching of the long granite-blue silk robe, stiff at his neck and loosely hung about his wrists and ankles, she correctly guessed that it had been picked out, ordered and bought by her father. He lowered his head before her relatives, and never once seemed to look in her direction. Is he even interested in me, she wondered, or has he struck some kind of deal with Pa? What is it he imagines he has traded his name for? As she put down the tea-tray loaded with envelopes, she conjured up a probable past for him, but not yet a future.

Outside the guests were laughing and eating, the men on one side toasting and congratulating each other, the women giggling discreetly about topics that, if overheard, might make their
husbands
or fathers choke on their food. Chopsticks dived and glided above, below, around and between each other as if they were sparrows dividing a busy sky. These were the foods Yuying
imagined
: shark’s fin soup, crisp layers of duck rolled into wafer-thin pancakes, chickens stuffed with black rice and dates, whole fish sitting in spicy sauces slowly plucked bone-thin, green beans and whole chillies, broccoli swimming in garlic, sour soups, hot soups, spicy soups, noodle soups, lucky four-season meatballs, spring rolls, peanuts and sunflower seeds, and scores of empty plates whose previous contents were unidentifiable.

The truth was more prosaic; even for her rich family, there was no way to get those delicacies, even now that trade was no longer controlled by the Japanese. The liberating Russians had only recently left, and, although many thin prisoners had returned home after years of occupation, hunger had not yet surrendered or been bombed out. A few dishes had to suffice. But still Yuying thought of feasts. She was in the couple’s new bedroom. The bride was not allowed to eat, nor speak. Only wait. Her new husband, meanwhile, was making the rounds between the tables, receiving
toasts and playing drinking games. She knew how it would progress, although at other weddings she and her sisters had always been forced to sit silently, demure and shy with their mouths hidden behind intricate paper fans. They had always been packed off in rickshaws or the shiny new automobiles of family friends before the real fun had started.

As they raised the clear liquid in the ornamental thimbles, several of the older guests already appeared red-faced and sweaty. These were her father’s associates, men whom Hou Jinyi had never met before and would never see again. Yuying pictured them from her room – those few who had been in collusion with the Japanese, now denying everything; judges, officials and warlords in hiding with their many young wives; Manchu men who lost out in the republic and headed north; shopkeepers, brothel-owners, opium importers; the few other restaurateurs in the city who were not her father’s sworn enemies; and, of course, her father’s most trusted ally, Mr Zhu, one of the richest men in the province, downing drinks and slapping backs, no doubt. She had heard it whispered that he started off as an executioner for the republic, providing quick and clean decapitations. Since everyone knew that the only cure for tuberculosis was to eat a piece of dough soaked in human blood, he soon amassed a fortune by providing that delicacy for the choking children of rich, worried parents. By the time the Japanese arrived, he had found that buying and selling secrets and allegiances was just as lucrative.

As the banquet progressed and the shouts and songs spilt in under the closed door, Yuying pressed her finger into the starched white sheets to trace words and faces into the folds. Her sharpened
fingernail
mimicked the slow brushstrokes used in the classroom to
produce
the ancient ideograms. As she drew, she tested her Japanese, stretching simple characters into ever more complicated
constructions
, then trawling backwards, unwriting them, and beginning again, from the same few strokes, in Chinese. She noted where they overlapped, merged, converged and parted. But this was as far as she allowed the thought to go. She would not bring to mind her childhood friends, the rattlebag of kids she used to play
skipping
and marbles and imaginary war games with, whose parents had now been lost in the unmentioned world of mines, railways, factories and prisons, all under new command. Those would not
be suitable thoughts for her wedding day. Nor would the whispers she heard about the neighbours’ boy who, feverish from hunger in the difficult days soon after the occupation began, stole some rice from an unguarded store. People reported that, shortly after having gulped down the forbidden meal that he must have cooked quickly with dirty river water, soldiers spotted him and, when he had finished, cut his stomach open as an example to others. She practised grammar and advanced form, and wondered how soon after the wedding she could get back to college.

Soon Jinyi was wishing the older guests goodbye. Yuying smoothed the sheets down, and plumped the pillows. She was unsure what she should do with her wedding dress. She undid a button and seconds later did it back up. She knew something of what was to come, but the details were vague, blurry, and made up of instructions she had never felt interested enough to pay attention to. It must be
something
akin to the doubling of everything in the room, she thought to herself. Everything in there was paired, from the two pillows and two blankets on the new bed to the matching wooden chairs. The carefully drawn character for happiness was joined with its double and hung on the wall for good luck, and on the dresser stood twin candlesticks, on each of which was an etching of a solitary crane. Cranes live for a thousand years, she thought. She stood to light both candles.

‘Everyone’s gone home.’ Jinyi was hovering hesitantly at the entrance to the room, unsure of whether or not to enter. His accent was coarse, rough, slipping at the ends of words. She tried to pretend that it did not bother her. ‘I hope you’re not disappointed. I don’t know if I’m what you expected. But your father told me a lot about you, and I promise you I’ll always be proud to call myself your husband.’

She smiled, and he smiled too.

‘I brought you some food.’ He unwrapped some sweet dumplings from a handkerchief. ‘Just leftovers. I know it’s against tradition. But, well, all of this is a bit topsy-turvy anyway, so I decided it wouldn’t matter – as long as no one else sees. I just thought you might be a bit hungry.’

She laughed at him, and he laughed at himself, still propped awkwardly in the doorway.

‘So can I come in?’

The single nod was enough for Jinyi to close the door behind him. And as it would be rude to intrude upon a couple’s wedding night, we must content ourselves to wait outside the closed door. Meanwhile, the servants began their nocturnal work to ensure that no trace of the sprawling party would remain the next morning. Yuying’s sisters had fallen asleep while fantasising of their own wedding days still to come. Their mother lay in bed alone, no
longer
expecting to be visited by her husband. Old Bian had led out a number of friends to continue the celebrations elsewhere, to while away the rest of the unusually long summer nights of 1946 with opium, liquor and one of the many madams he was on first-name terms with. Outside the windows, bamboo rustled, as if grazed by the lingering whispers lost in the old corridors and courtyards, and slowly the house fell silent. The twin candles in the wedding chamber burnt down to waxy stubs above the delicately painted cranes that had not yet learnt how to fly.

There were great silver moonfish, platters of fiery sea slugs,
ruby-encrusted
tureens overflowing with starfish soup, oysters in egg batter and plates of sautéed donkey. Most of the guests, however, simply nibbled or nodded in appreciation, having little need for food. Many went straight for the tall urns brimming with
three-thousand-year-old
rice wine. I had helped myself to a drink – it would have been rude not to – and was preparing to yawn my way through another of the Jade Emperor’s heavenly banquets, pushing through the crowd of fox spirits and day-out demons, when I was approached by one of the smaller dragons.

‘I do hope you have been keeping yourself entertained up here,’ it snuffled in a sonorous baritone. ‘All these soirées and this enforced joviality can be tiresome, and if you have the
misfortune
to be cornered by Confucius, well, he’ll talk at you until your brain melts.’

‘I’m all right,’ I replied. ‘I keep an eye on things down on earth when I’m bored or lonely.’

‘Oh. I pity you. I gave up interfering with that lot years ago. What is it now – floods, famines, wars?’

‘Well, yes, but there’s a bit more to it than that –’

‘I thought so.’ The dragon nodded and curled its supreme whiskers. ‘Any chance that there is a capable emperor keeping everything in line?’

‘Well, they don’t call him that anymore, but –’

‘Hmm. Sounds like a terrible mess,’ the dragon drawled.

‘It is. I reckon even I could do a better job of sorting everything out down there than the Jade Emperor is doing. Maybe he’s just lost interest in humans.’

The dragon nodded in sage agreement as I gave my practised critique of the human world, as I understood it. Soon something
 
of a crowd had gathered. I should perhaps have shut my mouth right then, but I was just getting into full flow, and once I begin talking I find it hard to stop. I was perhaps also more than a little flattered and encouraged by the nods and glances of a number of bird-people, unicorns, Lao Tzu and his motley gang of
disciples
, immortal toads and a couple of the angelic (though of course untouchable) daughters of the Jade Emperor.

The rest of the banquet was filled with the usual miracles – fountains of stars pulsing up from the floor; bodhisattvas recounting the highlights of their countless incarnations; prayers in a thousand languages and prayers in tiger skins and ineffable symbols; whole galaxies fading and dying all around us in the transparent walls.

It was only when I returned to my home as a silent presence in the many kitchens on earth, carried back down on the tail-end of a rushing cloud, that I thought about the consequences of what I had said.

I was not naïve enough to think that word would not get back to the Jade Emperor, for, just as on earth, the citizens of heaven love only one thing more than gossiping, and that is snitching on others. Still, for a while I simply wondered how he would respond to my indiscretion. I had heard stories of people reincarnated as mosquitoes for less. And if you think being dead limits your fear or the number of punishments that can be inflicted on you, then you lack imagination.