When it seemed they’d finally reached an agreement, my father suddenly threw in something new.
“Twenty live geese delivered ten days from now,” he said, “or I won’t agree to the marriage.”
This was nothing, but Madame Wu wanted something more in exchange.
“I seem to remember that your daughter was meant to come with her own servant. Even now someone will have to care for her through her ancestor tablet when it comes to my home.”
Baba allowed himself a smile. “I was waiting for you to ask.”
He motioned to the servant standing by the door. The servant left the room and returned a few minutes later with a woman. She came forward, dropped to her knees, and kowtowed before Madame Wu. When she looked up, I saw a face worn by hard circumstances. It was Willow.
“This servant recently returned to our household. I made a mistake when I sold her many years ago. It’s clear to me now that her destiny has always been to care for my daughter.”
“She’s old,” Madame Wu said. “What am I going to do with her?”
“Willow is thirty-nine. She has three sons. They stayed with her previous owner. His wife wanted sons and this one gave them. Willow may not be much to look at,” Baba said practically, “but she could serve as a concubine if you need one. I can guarantee she will produce grandsons for you.”
“For twenty geese?”
My father nodded.
The matchmaker grinned. She would make a good profit from this. Willow crawled across the floor and put her forehead on Madame Wu’s lily feet.
“I’ll accept your offer on one condition,” Madame Wu said. “I want you to answer a question. Why didn’t you give your daughter a ghost marriage before this? One girl died because of your refusal to entertain my offers. Now the life of one who carries my grandson is threatened. This was something easy to mend. A ghost marriage is common. It alleviates so much trouble—”
“But it wouldn’t help my heart,” Baba confessed. “I couldn’t let go of Peony. All this time I’ve longed for her company. By keeping the tablet in the Chen Family Villa, I felt I was still connected to her.”
But I was never here with him!
My father’s eyes clouded. “All these years, I hoped to feel her presence, but I never did. When you sent the matchmaker today, I decided it was finally time to let my daughter go. Peony was meant to be with your boy. And now…It’s strange, but I feel her with me at last.”
Madame Wu sniffed dismissively. “You needed to do the right thing for your daughter, but you didn’t. Twenty-three years is a long time, Master Chen, a very long time.”
With that, she stood and swayed out of the room. I stayed behind so I could prepare myself.
GHOST MARRIAGES ARE not as ornate, complicated, or time-consuming as a wedding when both parties are living. Baba arranged for the transfer of goods, money, and food for my dowry. Madame Wu reciprocated with everything that had been agreed upon for my bride-price. I brushed my hair and pinned it up and straightened my old and tattered clothes. I wanted to wrap my feet in clean bindings, but I hadn’t had new ones since I’d left the Viewing Terrace. I was as ready as I could be.
The only real challenge was that my ancestor tablet needed to be found. Without it, the stand-in bride couldn’t be made and I couldn’t be married. But my tablet had been hidden away for so long that no one remembered what had happened to it. In fact, only one person knew where it was: Shao, the longtime amah and wet nurse to my family. Naturally, she was no longer a wet nurse; she was barely even an amah. She’d lost all her teeth, most of her hair, and a good part of her memory. She was too old to sell and too cheap to let retire. She was useless in locating my tablet.
“That ugly thing was thrown out years ago,” she said. An hour later, she changed her mind. “It’s in the ancestral hall next to her mother’s tablet.” Two hours after that, a different memory surfaced. “I put it under the plum tree just like in The Peony Pavilion. That’s where Peony would have wanted to be.” Three days later, after various servants, Bao, and even my father had begged, ordered, and demanded that Shao tell them where she’d hidden the tablet, she cried like the scared and frail old woman she was. “I don’t know where it is,” she warbled querulously. “Why do you keep asking about that ugly thing anyway?”
If she couldn’t recollect where she’d hidden my tablet, she certainly wouldn’t recall that she’d caused it not to be dotted. I’d come so far. I couldn’t let everything fail because one old woman couldn’t remember that she’d once hidden an ugly thing in a storage room on a high shelf behind a jar of pickled turnips.
I went to Shao’s room. It was the middle of the afternoon and she was asleep. I stood next to her bed, staring down at her. I reached out to shake her awake, but my arms refused to touch her. Even now, when I was so close to having my ghostliness resolved, I couldn’t do anything to help get my tablet dotted. I tried and tried, but I was powerless.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Let us do it,” a voice said.
I turned to see my mother and my grandmother.
“You came!” I exclaimed. “But how?”
“You are the flesh of my inmost heart,” Mama answered. “How could I watch my daughter’s wedding from afar?”
“We asked the netherworld bureaucrats and received one time return-to-earth permits,” Grandmother explained.
More pearls filled my heart.
We waited for Shao to wake up. Then my grandmother and mother got on either side of her, held her by the elbows, and guided her through the compound to the storage room, where Shao found the ancestor tablet. Mama and Grandmother let go of her and stepped away. The old woman brushed it off. Although her eyesight was bad, I felt sure she would notice my missing dot and take the tablet straight to my father. When that didn’t happen, I looked at Mama and Grandmother.
“Help me make her see it,” I begged.
“We can’t,” Mama said regretfully. “We’re only allowed to do so much.”
Shao took the tablet to my old room. In the middle of the floor lay a dummy made from straw, paper, wood, and cloth that the servants had assembled to represent me at my wedding. It rested on its back with its stomach exposed. Willow painted two crude eyes, a nose, and lips on a piece of paper and fastened it to the bride’s face with rice paste. Shao got on her knees and stuffed my ancestor tablet inside the dummy so quickly that Willow didn’t have a chance to see it. My old servant threaded a needle and sewed the stomach shut. When she was done, she went to a trunk and opened it. Inside lay my wedding costume. It should have been thrown out with all my other belongings.
“You kept my wedding clothes?” I asked my mother.
“Of course I did. I had to believe things would be set right again someday.”
“And we brought some gifts too,” Grandmother added.
She reached into her gown and pulled out clean bindings and new shoes. Mama opened a satchel and brought out a skirt and tunic. The spirit clothes were beautiful, and as they dressed me, the servants mirrored our actions, placing the dummy in an underskirt followed by the red silk skirt with the tiny pleats stitched in the pattern of flowers, clouds, and interlocking good-luck symbols. They slipped on the tunic and closed all the braided frogs. They wrapped the muslin-covered straw feet in long binding cloths, tightening and tightening them until the feet were small enough to fit into my red wedding slippers. Then they propped the dummy against the wall, settled the headdress on its head, and covered the grotesque face with the red opaque veil. If my ancestor tablet had been dotted, I would have been able to inhabit the stand-in fully.
The servants left. I knelt by the dummy. I fingered the silk and touched the gold leaves on the headdress. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. I was so close to righting my path, but with my tablet undotted, the ceremony would be meaningless.
“I know everything now,” Mama said, “and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was too brokenhearted to dot your tablet. I’m sorry I let
Shao take it from me. I’m sorry I never asked your father about it. I thought he’d taken your tablet with him—”
“He didn’t take it—”
“He didn’t tell me, I didn’t ask, and you didn’t tell me when I died. I found out when I reached the Viewing Terrace. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know how. You were confused. And it was Shao who—”
“You can’t blame her,” Mama said, waving away the idea as though it were insignificant. “Your father and I felt so guilty about your death that we abandoned our responsibilities. Your baba blamed himself for your lovesickness and your death. If he hadn’t planted the idea of lovesickness in your mind with all his talk about Xiaoqing and Liniang…if he hadn’t encouraged you to read, to think, to write—”
“But those things made me who I am,” I cried.
“Exactly,” Grandmother said.
“Be quiet,” Mama ordered, and not very politely. “You’ve caused this girl enough heartbreak and confusion.”
Grandmother set her jaw, looked away, and said, “And I’m sorry for that. I didn’t know—”
Mama touched her mother-in-law’s sleeve to keep her from saying any more.
“Peony,” Mama went on, “if you’d listened only to me, you wouldn’t be the daughter I’m so proud of today. Every mother is afraid for her daughter, but I was terrified. I could only think of all the terrible things that could happen. But what’s the worst thing that could happen? What happened to me in Yangzhou? No. The worst thing was losing you. But look what you’ve done these past years. Look at what your love for Wu Ren has caused to flower in you. I wrote a poem on a wall in fear and sadness. When I did that, I closed myself away from all the things that had made me happy. Your grandmother and I, and so many other women, had wanted to be heard. We went out and it started to happen for us. Then the one time I was truly heard—the poem on the wall—I wanted to die. But you’re different. In death, you’ve grown to be an admirable woman. And then there’s your project.”
I drew back instinctively. She’d burned my books and hated my love of The Peony Pavilion.
“So many things you didn’t tell me, Peony.” She sighed sadly. “We lost so much time.”
We had, and there would never be a way to get it back. I blinked back tears of regret. Mama took my hand and patted it comfortingly.
“When I was still alive, I heard about Ren’s commentary on The Peony Pavilion,” she said. “When I read it, I thought I heard your voice. I knew that couldn’t be, so I told myself I was just a grieving mother. It wasn’t until your grandmother met me on the Viewing Terrace that I learned the truth—all of it. And of course, she had to learn a few things from me too.”
“Go ahead,” Grandmother urged. “Tell her why we’re really here.”
Mama took a deep breath. “You need to finish your project,” she said. “It won’t be the scribble of a desperate woman on a wall. Your father and I, your grandmother, your whole family—those here in the earthly realm and all the generations of ancestors who watch out for you—will be proud of you.”
I thought about what my mother said. My grandmother had wanted to be heard and appreciated by her husband, only to be relegated to false martyrdom. Mama had wanted to be heard, only to lose herself. I wanted to be heard, but only by one man. Ren had asked this of me in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. He wanted this from me. He’d created the possibility for me, when the world, society, and even my mother and father would have preferred me to keep silent.
“But how can I possibly take it up again after everything—”
“I almost died to write my poem; you did die writing your commentary,” Mama said. “I had to be cut to the bone and have my body invaded by many men to write the words on the wall. I saw you waste away as the words sapped your qi. For so long I thought, Maybe this sacrifice is what’s needed from us. Only after watching you these last few years as you’ve been with Yi have I realized that maybe writing doesn’t require sacrifice. Maybe it’s a gift to experience emotions through our brushes, ink, and paper. I wrote out of sorrow, fear, and hate. You wrote out of desire, joy, and love. We each paid a heavy price for speaking our minds, for revealing our hearts, for trying to create, but it was worth it, wasn’t it, daughter?”
I didn’t have a chance to respond. I heard laughter in the corridor. The door swung open and my four aunts, Broom, Orchid, Lotus, and their daughters entered. They’d been brought together by my father to make sure I was treated like a real bride. They made adjustments to the dummy, setting right the pleats in the skirt, smoothing the silk of the tunic, and using a few kingfisher feather hairpins to help hold the headdress in place.
“Quick!” Grandmother said as cymbals clanged and drums banged. “You have to hurry.”
“But my tablet—”
“Forget about it for now,” Grandmother ordered. “Experience your wedding as best you can, because it will not happen again—at least not in the way you imagined when you were alone in your bed all those years ago.” She closed her eyes for a moment and smiled knowingly to herself. Then she opened her eyes and clapped her hands crisply. “Now, hurry!”
I remembered everything I was supposed to do. I kowtowed to my mother three times and thanked her for all she’d done for me. I kowtowed three times to my grandmother and thanked her. Mama and Grandmother kissed me, and then they led me to the dummy. Since my tablet wasn’t dotted, I couldn’t step inside so I wrapped myself around it.
Grandmother was right. I had to enjoy this as best I could, and it wasn’t hard. My aunts told me I was beautiful. My cousins apologized for their girlhood ways. Their daughters told me they regretted that they’d never known me. Second Aunt and Fourth Aunt picked me up, placed me on a chair, and carried me out of the room. Mama and Grandmother joined the procession of Chen family women through the corridors and past the pavilions, pond, and rockery to the ancestral hall. Above the altar table, next to the scrolls of my grandparents, hung an image of my mother. Her skin had been painted in a translucent style, her hair pinned up as a young bride, her lips full and happy. This must have been what she looked like when she and my father were first married. She might not scare anyone into conducting themselves well, but she would inspire them.
On the altar table everything had been grouped into uneven lots to signify that this wasn’t a typical marriage. Seven sticks of incense stood in each of three braziers. Baba’s hands trembled as he poured nine cups of wine for various gods and goddesses, and then three cups of wine for each of my ancestors. He set out five peaches and eleven melons.
Then my chair was lifted and I was carried to the wind-fire gate. For so long I’d wished to pass through this gate to go to my husband’s home, and now it was happening. In a tradition unique to ghost marriages, Willow held a rice-winnowing basket over my head to screen me from heavenly sight. I was helped into a green rather than a red palanquin. Bearers carried me around the lake and up Wushan Mountain past the temple to my husband’s home. The door to the palanquin opened and I was helped out and put on another chair. Mama and Grandmother stood on the steps next to Madame Wu, who greeted me in the customary way. Then she turned to welcome my father. In ghost marriages, parents are usually so happy to see the ugly thing leave their home that they stay behind to rejoice privately, but my father had come with me, trailing behind my green palanquin in one of his own, letting all Hangzhou know that his daughter—the daughter of one of the city’s most respected and wealthy families—was finally marrying out. As I was carried over the Wu threshold, my heart was so full that the pearls overflowed and filled the Wu family’s compound with my happiness.
The procession of the living and the dead went to the Wu family’s ancestral hall, where the shadows of red candles dappled the walls. Ren waited there, and when I saw him I was overcome with emotion. He wore the wedding clothes I’d made for him. He was man-beautiful to my ghostly eyes. The only thing that set him apart from any other bridegroom were his black gloves, which reminded e
veryone present that this ceremony—as joyous as it was for me—was associated with darkness and secrecy.
The ceremony was performed. Servants picked up my chair and tilted it, so I could join my husband in bowing before my new ancestors. With that, I officially left my natal family and joined my husband’s family. A full and very lavish banquet was served. No expense was spared. My aunts and uncles, their daughters and their husbands and children, arrived and filled table upon table. Bao—still fat, his eyes still beady—sat with his wife and their sons, who were also pudgy, with eyes set too close. Even the Chen family concubines had come, although they were relegated to a table at the back of the hall. They gossiped and twittered among themselves, happy to be out for an excursion. I had been given the position of prominence. My husband sat on one side of me and my father on the other.
“Once there were those in my family who thought I was marrying my daughter to someone of lower standing,” my father told Ren as the last of thirteen dishes was set on the table. “And it’s true that money and status were not equal, but I loved and respected your father. He was a good man. As I watched you and Peony grow up, I knew the two of you were perfectly matched. She would have been happy with you.”
“I would have been happy with her too,” Ren responded. He lifted his cup and took a sip before adding, “Now she will be with me forever.”
“Take good care of her.”
“I will, I will.”
After the banquet, Ren and I were led to the bridal chamber. My dummy bride was placed on the bed, and then everyone left. Nervous, I lay down next to the dummy and watched as Ren undressed. For a long while, he stared down at the dummy’s painted face, and then he joined us on the bed.