Peony in Love Read online

  Ren was wonderful, but he’d made a terrible, nearly irreversible, mistake. When we’re alive, we’re told that if a dead one appears to someone in a dream and that person tells others about it—or, worse, if he shows through writing the words of the dead—then the spirit will be driven away. This is why fox spirits, ghosts, and even immortals beg their human lovers not to reveal their existence to the world. But humans cannot keep a secret. Of course, the spirit—whatever form it takes—doesn’t “disappear.” Where would it go? But the ability to visit in dreams becomes nearly impossible. I was devastated.

  IN THE SIXTH week after my death, I should have crossed the Inevitable River. In the seventh week, I should have entered the realm of the Prince of the Wheel, where I would be brought before judges who would decide my fate. But none of these things happened; I remained on the Viewing Terrace. I began to suspect that something was terribly wrong.

  I never saw Baba approach Ren about a ghost marriage. My father was too busy, preparing to move to the palace in Beijing to take up his new post. I should have been distressed about this—how could he allow himself to make obeisance to the Manchu emperor?—and I was. I should have worried for my father’s soul when he decided to give up his morals in exchange for making a fortune—and I did. But I was far more anxious that Baba would try to trap a husband other than Ren to accept me as a ghost bride. It would have been easy for Baba to throw some money on the road outside our gate, wait for some passerby to pick it up, and tell the man that in picking up the “bride price” he had accepted me as a wife. But this didn’t happen either.

  Mama said she wouldn’t follow Baba to Beijing, refusing to waver in her steadfastness never to leave the Chen Family Villa. I took comfort in this. For Mama, the joys and laughter of our once happy days in the Spring Pavilion before I retired to my room had disappeared, only to be replaced by tears of blood and woe. She spent hours in the storeroom where my belongings were kept, finding my scent clinging to my clothes, touching the brushes I’d handled, letting her eyes rest on the items I’d embroidered for my dowry. I had resisted my mother for so long; now I longed for her all the time.

  Forty-nine days after my death, my family crowded into our ancestral hall for the dotting of my ancestor tablet and a final goodbye. Storytellers and a handful of singers gathered in the courtyard. Someone of great distinction—a scholar or member of the literati—is always given the honor of placing the final precious dot on the ancestor tablet. Once this was done, a third of my soul would be transferred to the tablet, where it would watch over my family. The dotting would allow me to be worshipped as an ancestor and give me a place to inhabit on earth for all eternity. My dotted ancestor tablet would also be the object through which my family would send their offerings to sustain me in the afterworld, make requests for my help, and provide comfort to me as a way of averting potential hostility. In the future, when my family embarked on a new business venture, named a child, or considered a marriage proposal, they would consult me through my tablet. I was sure Commissioner Tan, who was the highest-ranked person my father knew in Hangzhou, would perform the dotting. But my father chose the one person who would mean more to me than anyone else: Wu Ren.

  He was more distraught than he’d been on the day of my funeral. His hair was tousled as though he’d given up sleep altogether. Pain and regret filled his eyes. Now that I’d been banned from his dreams, he understood his loss all too clearly. That part of me that was to reside in my ancestor tablet came to rest next to him. I wanted him to know I was there at his side, but neither he nor anyone else seemed aware of my presence. I was less substantial than a whiff of incense smoke.

  My ancestor tablet stood on an altar table. It had been inscribed with my name, the hour of my birth, and the hour of my death. Next to the tablet stood a small dish of cock’s blood and a brush. Ren dipped the brush in the blood. He lifted the brush to animate my tablet, hesitated, and then dropped the brush, groaned, and ran from the hall. Baba and the servants followed him outside. They had him sit under a ginkgo tree. They brought him tea. They comforted him. Then Baba noticed my mother was missing.

  We all followed him back into the hall. Mama lay on the floor, sobbing and clutching my tablet. Baba stared at her, helpless. Shao crouched down next to Mama and tried to pry the tablet from her hands, but she wouldn’t let it go.

  “Husband, let me keep this,” Mama sobbed.

  “It needs to be dotted,” he said.

  “She’s my daughter, let me do it,” she begged. “Please.”

  But Mama was not someone of distinction! She was not a writer or a member of the literati. Then to my absolute bafflement, a look of deep understanding passed between my parents.

  “Of course,” Baba said. “That would be perfect.”

  Then Shao wrapped her arms around my mother and led her away. My father dismissed the storytellers and singers. The rest of my family and the servants dispersed. Ren went home.

  All through the night, my mother cried. She refused to let go of the tablet, despite Shao’s constant coaxing. How could I have not seen how much she loved me? Was this why Baba had given her permission to dot my tablet? But that didn’t make sense. This was Baba’s duty.

  In the morning, he stopped by Mama’s room. When Shao opened the door, he saw Mama hidden under quilts, moaning her sadness. Sorrow pierced his eyes.

  “Tell her I had to leave for the capital,” he whispered to Shao.

  Reluctantly, he turned away. I went with him to the front gate, where he got in a palanquin to carry him to his new post. After the palanquin disappeared from view, I returned to my mother’s room. Shao knelt on the floor next to Mama’s bedside, waiting.

  “My daughter’s gone,” Mama whimpered.

  Shao hummed her sympathy and smoothed away strings of damp hair from my mother’s wet cheeks.

  “Give me the tablet, Lady Chen. Let me take it to the master. He must perform the rite.”

  What was she thinking? My father was gone.

  Mama didn’t know that, but she tightened her arms around the tablet, refusing to let go of it, of me.

  “You know the ritual.” Shao spoke sternly. How like her to rely on tradition to try to relieve my mother’s sorrow. “This is a father’s duty. Now give it to me.” When she saw my mother waver, she added, “You know I’m right.”

  Against her will, Mama gave the tablet to Shao. As Shao left the room, Mama buried her face in the quilts again to cry. I followed my old wet nurse as she walked to a storage room at the back of the compound and watched helplessly as she tucked the tablet on a high shelf behind a jar of pickled turnips.

  “Too much trouble for the mistress,” she said, and cleared her throat as if getting rid of a bad taste. “No one wants to see this ugly thing.”

  Without the dot I was unable to enter the tablet, and the part of my soul that was supposed to settle there united with me on the Viewing Terrace.

  The Viewing Terrace of Lost Souls

  I WAS UNABLE TO JOURNEY BEYOND THE VIEWING TERRACE, so I had no opportunity to plead my case before the panel of infernal judges. As the days went by, I discovered that I still had all the needs and wants I had when I was alive. Death, rather than quelling my emotions, had intensified them. The Seven Emotions we talk about on earth—joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, and desire—had traveled with me to the afterworld. These ancestral emotions, I saw, were more commanding and enduring than any other force in the universe: stronger than life, more persistent than death, more powerful than what the gods can control, floating about us without beginning and without end. And while I was awash in them, none was stronger than the sorrow I felt for the life I’d lost.

  I missed the Chen Family Villa. I missed the smells of ginger, green tea, jasmine, and summer rain. After so many months without an appetite, suddenly I hungered for lotus roots braised in sweet soy, preserved duck, lake crabs, and crystal shrimps. I missed the sound of nightingales, the chatter of the women in our inner quarters, and the lappi
ng of the lake along the shore. I missed the feel of silk on my skin and the warm wind coming through my bedroom window. I missed the smell of paper and ink. I missed my books. I missed being able to step into their pages and into another world. But what I missed most was my family.

  Every day I looked over the balustrade to watch them. I saw Mama, my aunts, my cousins, and the concubines go back to their usual routines. I was happy when Baba came home to visit, have meetings in the Hall of Abundant Elegance with young men in handsome robes in the afternoons, and sip tea with my mother in the evenings. I never heard them talk about me, however. Mama didn’t mention that she hadn’t dotted my ancestor tablet, because she thought Baba had done it. And he didn’t bring it up, because he thought she’d done it. Which meant, of course, that Baba didn’t invite Ren back to dot my tablet either. With my tablet hidden away, I might be stuck here forever. When I got too scared about that, I comforted myself with the knowledge that Prefect Du had left for his appointment right after Liniang’s death and had forgotten to dot her tablet too. With so many parallels between Liniang and me, surely I would also be brought back to life through true love.

  I began to look for Ren’s home. Finally, after countless attempts, my vision found the way by skimming across the surface of West Lake, passing over Solitary Island, and crossing onto the north shore. I located the temple where torches had burned so brightly on the night of the opera and from there located Ren’s family compound.

  I was supposed to be a jade maiden marrying a golden boy—meaning that our family status and wealth matched—but the Wu family’s villa had just a few courtyards, a handful of pavilions, and only 120 fingers. Ren’s older brother had moved to a posting in a distant province, where he lived with his wife and daughter, so the Wu compound was home now only to Ren, his mother, and ten servants. Did I question this? No. I was lovesick and saw only what I wanted to see, which was a small but tasteful villa. The main doors were painted the color of cinnabar. The green tile roof blended beautifully with the willow trees that surrounded the compound. The plum tree Ren had told me about stood in the central courtyard, but it had lost its leaves. And then there was Ren, composing in his library during the day, taking his meals with his widowed mother, and wandering in the garden and along the dark corridors at night. I watched him all the time and forgot about my own family, which is why I was unprepared when Shao came to call at the Wu home.

  My old wet nurse was escorted to a hall and told to wait. Then a servant brought Ren and his mother into the room. Madame Wu had been a widow for many years and dressed appropriately in somber hues. Her hair was shot through with strands of gray and her face showed the suffering of the loss of her husband. Shao bowed several times, but she was a servant, so they did not exchange pleasantries and Madame Wu did not offer tea.

  “When Little Miss was dying,” Shao said, “she gave me some things to give to your family. The first—” She peeled back the corners of a silk kerchief that lined a basket and brought out a tiny package also wrapped in silk. Shao lowered her head and held out the bundle cupped in the palms of her hands. “Little Miss intended these for you as a token of filial piety.”

  Madame Wu took the package and slowly opened it. She picked up one of the shoes I’d made for her and examined it with a mother-in-law’s shrewd eyes. The peonies I’d embroidered were striking against their deep blue background. Madame Wu turned to her son, and said, “Your wife was very talented with a needle.”

  Would she have said that to me if I’d been alive? Or would she have criticized me as a proper mother-in-law should?

  Shao reached back into the basket and pulled out my copy of The Peony Pavilion.

  Here’s a truth about death: Sometimes you forget things that you once thought were important. I’d asked Shao to bring Volume One to my new home three days after my marriage. She hadn’t done that for obvious reasons, and I’d forgotten about her promise and my project. Even when I’d seen her daughter hiding her embroidery patterns in the folds, I didn’t remember.

  After Shao explained that I’d stayed up late at night reading and writing, that my mother had burned my books, and that I’d hidden the volume in my bedclothes, Ren took it in his hands and opened it.

  “My son saw the opera, and then he searched the city to find this particular copy,” Madame Wu explained. “I thought it best if my daughter-in-law gave it to your Peony. But this is only part one. Where is the second volume?”

  “As I said, the girl’s mother burned it,” Shao repeated.

  Madame Wu sighed and pursed her lips in disapproval.

  Ren leafed through the pages, stopping here and there.

  “Do you see?” he asked, pointing to characters blurred by my tears. “Her essence glistens on the paper.” He began to read. A few moments later he looked up and said, “I see her face in every word. The ink looks vivid and new. Mother, you can sense her hand’s moisture on the pages.”

  Madame Wu regarded her son sympathetically.

  I felt sure Ren would read my thoughts about the opera and know what he had to do. Shao would help him by telling him to dot my tablet.

  But Shao mentioned nothing about my missing dot, and Ren didn’t look hopeful or inspired in any way. Rather, sadness deepened his features. My pain was so deep I felt as though my heart was shredding.

  “We’re grateful to you,” Madame Wu said to Shao. “In your mistress’s brushstrokes, my son finds his wife. In this way, she continues to live.”

  Ren closed the book and abruptly stood. He gave Shao an ounce of silver, which she pocketed. Then, without another word, he stalked out of the room with my book under his arm.

  That night I watched him in his library as he sank deeper and deeper into melancholy. He called for servants and ordered wine. He read my words, delicately touching the pages. He held his head, drank, and let tears fall down his cheeks. Distraught at this reaction—this was not at all what I wanted—I looked for Madame Wu and found her in her bedchamber. We shared the same name and we both loved Ren. I had to believe that she would do whatever she could to ease her son’s mind. In this we had to be “sames.”

  Madame Wu waited until the household grew quiet, and then she padded along the corridor on her lily feet. She quietly opened the door to the library. Ren had put his head down on the desk and fallen asleep. Madame Wu picked up The Peony Pavilion and the empty bottle of wine, and then she blew out the flickering candle and left the room. Back in her bedchamber, she slipped my project between two folded gaily colored silk gowns that, as a widow, she would never wear again, and closed the drawer.

  MONTHS WENT BY. Since I couldn’t leave the Viewing Terrace, I saw everyone who stopped here on their journey through the seven levels of the afterworld. I saw chaste widows dressed in layer upon layer of longevity clothes meet their long-dead husbands in joyful reunions and knew that they would be treasured and honored for decades to come. However, I saw no mothers who’d died in childbirth. They’d gone straight to the Blood-Gathering Lake, a place where women suffered in a perpetual hell for the pollution of their failed childbearing. But for all the others who passed this way, the Viewing Terrace gave the newly dead a chance to say goodbye to those below and at the same time be reminded of what their duties were now as ancestors. From now on, they would return to this spot to look down on the world, weigh how their descendants were doing, and then grant wishes or send punishments. I saw angry ancestors, who taunted, teased, or humiliated those left behind; I saw other ancestors—plump with offerings—reward their families with plentiful harvests and numerous sons.

  But for the most part I watched the newly dead. None of them knew yet where they would end up once they passed through all seven levels. Would they be sent to one of the ten yamens with all its different hells? Would they wait hundreds of years before being allowed to return to earth and inhabit another body? Would they be reincarnated quickly, as educated men if they were lucky, or transmigrated into a woman, a fish, or a worm if they weren’t? Or would Gu
anyin whisk them to the Western Paradise, ten thousand million li from here, where they would escape all further rebirths and spend the rest of eternity in a blissful haven of everlasting happiness, feasting, and dancing?

  Some of the other lovesick maidens I’d heard about when I was alive came to meet me: Shang Xiaoling, the actress who died onstage; Yu Niang, whose death inspired Tang Xianzu to write poems eulogizing her; Jin Fengdian, whose story was almost identical to mine, except that her father had been a salt merchant; and a few others.

  We commiserated. In life, we had all known the danger that emanated from the opera’s pages—reading it, reading anything, could be fatal—but we’d each been bewitched by the allure of dying young, beautiful, and talented. We were seduced by the pain and pleasure of contemplating the other lovesick maidens. We read The Peony Pavilion, we wrote poems about it, and we died. We thought our writing would live beyond the ravages of time and the decay of our bodies, thereby proving the power of the opera.

  The lovesick maidens wanted to know about Ren, and I told them I believed two things: first, Ren and I were a match made in Heaven; second, qing would bring us back together.

  The girls looked at me pityingly and murmured among themselves.

  “We all had dream lovers,” the actress finally confided, “but that’s all they were—dreams.”

  “I believed my scholar was real too,” Yu Niang admitted. “Oh, Peony, we were just like you. We had no say in our lives. We were all to be married to husbands unknown into families unknown. We had no hope for love, but we longed for it. What girl doesn’t meet a man in her dreams?”

  “Let me tell you about my love. In my dreams, we used to meet at a temple. I loved him very much,” said another of the girls.

  “I too thought I was like Liniang,” the salt merchant’s daughter added. “I expected that after I died my young man would find me, fall in love with me, and bring me back to life. We would have real love, not obligation or duty love.” She sighed. “But he was just a dream, and now here I am.”