Peony in Love Read online

  I was lost, curious, and excited. The world was in constant movement, with carts and horses rolling through the streets, salt wagons drawn by lumbering water buffaloes, flags and pennants flapping from buildings, and too many people pushing and shoving in great eddies of humanity. Hawkers sold fish, needles, and baskets in piercing voices. Construction sites battered my ears with their hammering and shouting. Men argued about politics, gold prices, and gambling debts. I covered my ears, but the wisps of vapor that were my hands could not keep out the raucous, torturous sounds. I tried to get off the street, but as a spirit I couldn’t navigate around corners.

  I went back to my family home and tried a different street. This brought me to a shopping area, where they sold fans, silks, paper umbrellas, scissors, carved soapstone, prayer beads, and tea. Signboards and trappings of one kind and another blocked the sunlight. I continued on, passing temples, factories for making cotton, and mints where the sound from the stamping machines pounded at my ears until tears poured from my eyes. The streets of Hangzhou were paved with cobblestones, and my lily feet bruised and tore until spirit blood oozed through my silk slippers. They say that ghosts feel no physical pain, but this is not true. Why else would dogs in the afterworld tear the evil limb from limb or demons spend eternity eating the heart of a miscreant again and again and again?

  After another long straight line that led nowhere, I returned to my family home. I set off in a new direction, walking along the edge of the exterior wall until I came to the crystal waters of West Lake. I saw the causeway, lagoons with shimmering ripples, and verdant hillsides. I listened to doves croon for rain and magpies bicker. I glimpsed Solitary Island and remembered how Ren had pointed out his house on Wushan Mountain, but I couldn’t figure out how to get from here to there. I sat on a rock. The skirts from my longevity clothes draped about me on the shore, but I was now of the spirit world and they didn’t get wet or muddy. I no longer had to worry about soiled shoes or anything like that. I left no shadow or footprints. Did this make me feel free or uncontrollably lonely? Both.

  The sun set over the hills, turning the sky crimson and the lake deep lavender. My spirit trembled as a reed in the breeze. Night draped itself over Hangzhou. I was alone on the bank, separated from everyone and everything I knew, sinking deeper and deeper into despair. If Ren wouldn’t come to my family’s home for any of my funeral activities and I couldn’t go to his since I was hampered by corners and noises, how would I find him?

  In the houses and business establishments around the lake, lanterns were turned down and candles blown out. The living slept, but the shore shimmered with activity. Spirits of trees and bamboo breathed and quivered. Poisoned dogs came to the lake desperate for a final drink of water before death shudders took them. Hungry ghosts—those who’d drowned in the lake or had resisted the Manchus, refused to shave their foreheads, and lost their heads as punishment—dragged themselves through the underbrush. I also saw others like myself: those just dead and still roaming before the three parts of their souls found their proper resting places. There would be no peaceful nights filled with beautiful dreams for us ever again.

  Dreams! I leaped to my feet. Ren knew The Peony Pavilion nearly as well as I did. Liniang and Mengmei first met in a dream. Surely since I’d died Ren had tried to reach me in his dreams, only I hadn’t known where or how to meet him. Now I knew exactly where to go, but I’d have to turn right to get there. I tried several times to go around the corner of the compound, each time widening my turn until finally I arced out wide enough to make it. I crept along the water’s edge, stepping on rocks, not worrying about puddles, pushing aside the rock roses and other bits of shrubbery that impeded my way until I reached my family’s Moon-Viewing Pavilion. Just as the tiniest sliver of sun peeked over the mountain, I spotted Ren, waiting for me.

  “I’ve been coming here, hoping to see you,” he said.

  “Ren.”

  When he reached for me, I didn’t shy away. He held me for a long time without speaking, and then he asked, “How could you die and leave me?” His anguish was palpable. “We were so happy. Did you decide you didn’t care for me?”

  “I didn’t know who you were. How could I know?”

  “At first, I didn’t know it was you either,” he answered. “I knew my future wife was Master Chen’s daughter and that her name was Peony. I didn’t want an arranged marriage, but like you I had accepted my fate. When we met, I thought you might be one of the cousins in the household or one of the guests. My heart changed, and I thought, Let me have these three nights, believing they were as close as I’d ever get to what I wanted from marriage.”

  “I felt the same way too.” I was filled with regret as I added, “If only I had said my name.”

  “I didn’t say my name either,” he said ruefully. “But what about the peony? Did you get it? I gave it to your father. You had to know it was me then.”

  “He gave it to me when it was too late to save me.”

  He sighed. “Peony.”

  “But I still don’t understand how you knew it was me.”

  “I didn’t until your father made the announcement about our marriage. To me, the girl I was going to marry had no face and no voice. But when your father spoke your name that night I heard it in a whole new way. Then when he said your name had to change because it was the same as my mother’s, somehow I felt—understood—he was talking about you. You don’t look like my mother, but the two of you share the same sensibility. I hoped when he made the announcement and pointed to me that you would see me.”

  “I had my eyes shut. After meeting you, I was afraid to see the man who would be my husband.”

  Then I remembered opening my eyes and seeing Tan Ze with her mouth pulled into a taut oh. She had seen exactly who it was. She had told me on the first night of the opera that she had set her heart on the poet. No wonder she was furious when we were walking back to the women’s quarters.

  Ren stroked my cheek. He was ready for something more, but I had to try to make sense out of what had happened.

  “So you decided it was me based on intuition?” I persisted.

  He smiled, and I thought, If we had married, this is how he would have responded to me at those times when I couldn’t release my obstinacy.

  “It was very simple,” he said. “After the announcement, your father dismissed the women. When the men stood up, I quickly separated myself from them and hurried through the garden until I saw the procession. You were at the front. The women were treating you as a bride already.” He bent down and whispered in my ear. “I thought how lucky we were that we wouldn’t be strangers on our wedding night. I was happy—with your face, your golden lilies, your manner.” He straightened up again and said, “After that night, I dreamed about our future life. We were to spend our days in words and in love. I sent you The Peony Pavilion. Did you get it?”

  How could I tell him that my obsession with it had caused my death?

  So many mistakes. So many errors. So much tragedy as a result. In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only. If only I hadn’t left the opera on the first night, I would have gone to my marriage and met Ren on my wedding night without incident. If only I had kept my eyes open when my father pointed out Ren. If only my father had given me the peony the next morning or a month or even a week before I died. How could fate be so merciless?

  “We can’t change what’s happened, but maybe our future isn’t hopeless,” Ren said. “Mengmei and Liniang found a way, didn’t they?”

  I didn’t yet fully understand how things worked here, or what I would be allowed to do, but I said, “I won’t leave you. I’ll stay with you forever.”

  Ren tightened his arms around me and I buried my face in his shoulder. This was where I needed to be, but then he pulled away and gestured to the rising sun.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “But I have so many things to tell you. Don’t leave me,” I pleaded.

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bsp; He smiled. “I hear my servant in the hall. He’s bringing my tea.”

  Then, just as he had on the first night of the opera, he asked me to meet him again. With that, he was gone.

  I stayed right there all day and into the night, waiting for him to come to me in his dreams. Those hours gave me a lot of time to think. I wanted to be an amorous ghost. In The Peony Pavilion, Liniang had done clouds and rain with Mengmei first in her dream and then later as a ghost. When she became human again, she still had her virginity and was unwilling to compromise her chastity before marriage. But could that happen in real life? Apart from The Peony Pavilion, almost every other ghost story involved a female spirit who ruined, maimed, or killed her lover. I remembered a story my mother told me in which the ghost-heroine kept herself from touching her scholar with the words “These moldering bones from the grave are no match for the living. A liaison with a ghost only hastens a man’s death. I could not bear to harm you.” I couldn’t risk hurting Ren in this way either. Like Liniang, I was destined to be a wife. Even in death—especially in death—I couldn’t show my husband that I was anything less than a lady. As Liniang observed, A ghost may be deluded by passion; a woman must pay full attention to the rites.

  That night, when Ren came again to the Moon-Viewing Pavilion, we talked about poetry and flowers, about beauty and qing, about lasting love and the temporary love of teahouse girls. When he left at daybreak, I was disconsolate. The whole time I was with him, I wanted to reach inside his tunic and touch his skin. I wanted to whisper the messages of my heart into his ear. I wanted to see and touch what he kept hidden inside his trousers, just as I wanted him to peel away my layers of longevity clothes until he found that place that was yearning, even in death, to be touched.

  The following night, he brought with him paper, ink, inkstone, and brushes. He took my hand and together we ground the ink against the stone, and then we walked to the lake, where he cupped my hands so that I might bring back water to mix the ink.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me the words to write.”

  I thought of my experiences of the last weeks and then began to compose.

  “Soaring across the sky in never-ending sleeplessness.

  The mountains are fresh with dew,

  The lake glimmers.

  You draw me to you from across the clouds.”

  When the last words fell from my lips, he set down the brush and removed my padded jacket with the sleeves embroidered in the kingfisher pattern.

  He wrote the next poem, his calligraphy as sumptuous as a caress. He called it “Visitation from a Goddess,” and it was about me.

  “Unable to express the sadness of your parting,

  Darkness without end.

  You come to me in a dream.

  I am flooded by thoughts of what should have been.

  But I find it here, with you, goddess of my heart.

  A sudden sob wakes me from my dream.

  Alone again.”

  Together we wrote eighteen poems. I’d say one line and he’d come up with the next, often borrowing from the opera that we loved. “Tonight I come to you whole in body, full of love, yours in every desire,” I quoted Liniang after her secret marriage. Each line was a revealed intimacy. Each line brought us closer together. And each poem got shorter and shorter as layer after layer of my longevity clothes fell to the ground. I forgot my concerns. Everything was reduced to words like pleasure, ripples, temptations, surging, clouds.

  Dawn broke, and he was ripped away from me. Simply gone. The sun was fully up in the sky and I was down to my last layers of clothes. The dead don’t feel heat and cold in the usual way. Rather, we feel something deeper, something connected to the emotions of these sensations. I shivered uncontrollably, but I didn’t dress again. I waited all day and into the night for Ren to come back to me, but he didn’t. The next thing I knew, strong forces pulled me away from the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. I wore only my inner garment and a gown embroidered with birds flying in a pair above flowers.

  I HAD BEEN dead five weeks, and the three aspects of my soul began to wrench apart irrevocably. One part settled forever in my corpse, the roaming part began to drift to the ancestor tablet, while my afterworld soul arrived at the Viewing Terrace of Lost Souls. At this point, the dead are so sad and filled with longing that they are given one last chance to look at their homes and listen to their families. From my great distance, I searched along the shore of West Lake until I came to my family home. At first all I could see were trivial things: the servants emptying my mother’s chamber pot, the concubines arguing over a dish of lion’s head, Shao’s daughter hiding her embroidery patterns between the folds of my copy of The Peony Pavilion. But I also saw my parents’ sorrow and was stabbed through with remorse. I had died from too much qing. I had left the world because an abundance of emotion had overwhelmed me, sapped my strength, and clouded my thoughts. Below me, Mama cried and I realized she’d been right. I should have stayed away from The Peony Pavilion. It had brought out too much passion, despair, and hope in me, and now here I was, separated from my family and my husband.

  Baba, as the eldest son, was in charge of all the rites. His main duty and responsibility now were to see me properly interred and my ancestor tablet dotted. My family and our servants prepared more paper offerings—all those things they thought I might need for my new life. They made clothes, food, rooms, and books for my entertainment. They did not provide a palanquin, because even in death Mama did not want me to go abroad. On the eve of my funeral, these offerings were burned in the street. From the Viewing Terrace, I saw Shao use a stick to beat at the fire and the leaves of paper as they twisted in the flames to keep away the spirits who wanted to take my belongings. My father should have had one of my uncles do this to show he meant business and my mother should have thrown rice around the edges of the fire to attract the attention of the hungry ghosts who craved the food, because Shao did not scare away the spirits and nearly everything was stolen before I had a chance to receive it.

  When my coffin reached the wind-fire gate, I saw Ren. Even as my Second Uncle broke a cup with holes in it just over where my head rested—from now on I would only be allowed to drink the water I’d wasted in life—I rejoiced. Firecrackers exorcised from around the compound inauspicious influences associated with me. I was placed in a palanquin, not a red one for marriage but a green one to represent death. The procession started. My uncles tossed spirit money to secure my right of way to the afterworld. Ren, his head bent, walked between my father and Commissioner Tan. They were followed by palanquins holding my mother, aunts, and girl cousins.

  At the cemetery, my coffin was lowered into the ground. The wind soughed through the poplars in ghostly song. Mama, Baba, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins each picked up a handful of dirt and threw it on my coffin. As the soil covered the lacquer surface, I felt that third of my soul disappear from me forever.

  From the Viewing Terrace, I watched and listened. No ghost marriage ceremony was performed. No banquet was presented at the graveside, which would introduce me to my new companions in the afterworld and pave the way for good understanding between me and my new associates. Mama was so weak from grief that my aunts had to help her back into the palanquin. Baba led the procession, and once again Ren and Commissioner Tan were beside him. For a long while, no one spoke. What comfort could anyone give a father who has lost his only child? What could anyone say to a groom who has lost his bride?

  Finally, Commissioner Tan addressed my father: “Your daughter is not the only one to be affected by this terrible opera.”

  What kind of solace was this?

  “But she loved the opera,” Ren mumbled. The other men stared at him, and he added, “I heard this about your daughter, Master Chen. If I’d been fortunate enough to marry her, I never would have kept it from her.”

  It’s hard to describe my feelings at seeing him there when so recently we had been in each other’s arms, composing poetry, letting qing flow between us.
His mourning was real, and once again I was filled with regret for the stubbornness and foolishness that had brought me to this place.

  “But she died from lovesickness, just as that sorry girl died in the opera!” Commissioner Tan spat out. It seemed he was unaccustomed to anyone disagreeing with him.

  “It’s true that life’s tendency to imitate art is not always a comfort,” my father admitted, “but the boy is right. My daughter could not live without words and emotion. And you, Commissioner, don’t you sometimes wish you could visit the women’s chambers and experience the true depths of qing?”

  Before Commissioner Tan could respond, Ren said, “Your daughter is not without words or emotion, Master Chen. For three nights, she visited me in my dreams.”

  No! I shouted from my spot on the Viewing Terrace. Didn’t he know what revealing this would mean?

  My father and Commissioner Tan looked at him in concern.

  “Truly we have met,” Ren said. “A few nights ago, we were together on your Moon-Viewing Pavilion. When she first came to me, her hair was pinned for marriage. The sleeves of her outer jacket were embroidered the color of kingfisher feathers.”

  “You describe her perfectly,” my father agreed suspiciously. “But how did you know her if you had not met her before?”

  Would Ren give away our secret? Would he ruin me in my father’s eyes?

  “My heart recognized her,” Ren answered. “We composed poems together: Soaring across the sky in never-ending sleeplessness…. When I woke, I wrote down eighteen poems.”

  “Ren, you have proved once again that you are a man of sentiment,” my father said. “I could not have asked for a better son-in-law.”

  Ren reached into his sleeve and pulled out several folded pieces of paper. “I thought you would like to read these.”