Three Souls (21 page)
***
He didn’t even read those rare books. He just wanted to look like a wealthy gentleman scholar.
I shake my head, watching Gong Gong lock the glass doors of the bookcase where he kept the finest items in his collection.
My
yang
soul looks a little uncomfortable.
After that,
I tell my souls,
there was no need to ask whether my dowry would be used for repairing the broken paving on the terrace, the creaky stair treads, or the wobbling handrails. What was the point? Jia Po didn’t even raise the subject.
You looked down on Jia Po for not standing up to Gong Gong and his spendthrift ways,
my
yin
soul remarks.
Your mother-in-law was raised in a very traditional family,
my
yang
soul hastens to say.
Her father was the supreme authority. It never occurred to her that she could criticize her husband.
Are you saying Gong Gong was right to squander her fortune like that?
A pause, and then a nervous cough.
He was entitled. He was the patriarch. But he could have shown some restraint,
my
yang
soul admits.
Do you remember the other thing that happened that afternoon?
my
yin
soul asks. She had managed to coax the calico back onto the terrace and it rested on its side, chin blissfully raised to accept her stroking.
Yes. Yes, I do. That was the moment I vowed that no child of mine would ever depend on dowries or the generosity of in-laws.
That was when your ambitions began to stir again, a spark of purpose awakening.
My
hun
soul gave me a prod.
You had ambitions for your child.
W
hat’s the next generational name for the family?” I asked Baizhen one day. He had come to the door of my library. It was now June and the windows were open. Fresh green scents from the garden drifted in, smells of damp earth and white peonies.
“
Wei,
‘strength.’ And the generational name is the middle name.” He had come to see what I was doing.
A stack of blank cardboard squares lay on the table. I wet my brush on the slick dark surface of the ink stone, then carefully wrote the character
wei
on one of the squares. It was a good word, one that lent itself easily to pairing with a given name.
Baizhen picked up a card. “Wife, what are these?”
“They’re for teaching children how to read. It’s how I learned.”
I couldn’t help but feel excited when I spread out the cards I had already made, simple words such as
mountain, water, big, small,
person.
And of course,
mother
and
father.
On the reverse were images to go with the words, pictures cut out from magazines or simple sketches I had drawn and coloured. I imagined how my child would play with them, picture-side up at first, and then poring over the written characters.
“They’re not as beautiful as the printed cards we have at home in Changchow,” I said, “but I like making them.” I surveyed the results with pride.
“Our tutor used to have us play games using word cards,” I continued. “By the time I went to middle school, I had a better reading vocabulary than any of my classmates.” Except Nanmei, I remembered, with a small ache in my heart.
“You played games to learn how to read?” Baizhen’s eyebrows lifted.
“I don’t remember exactly how, but somehow everything fell into place and it became easier and easier to recognize the characters. We were surrounded by books,” I said, thinking longingly of Changchow.
I remembered following Gaoyin’s slim finger as it moved along the lines of text in a book of folk tales. She read me the stories so often I had memorized many of them. One day, she was reading the tale of how the rabbit went to live in the moon; then the next day I found myself running my own finger beneath the lines and sounding out the ancient tale word by word. I was suddenly ablaze with understanding, with the realization that each character held a meaning of its own. After that, I couldn’t learn new words fast enough.
The look on Baizhen’s face, the emotions I saw struggling there, startled me. He picked up the card with the character for
wei
and studied it carefully. When he finally spoke, he was looking down at the card, a red flush on his cheeks.
“My tutor didn’t believe in these modern methods. Do you think word cards would help me learn?” I could barely hear him, and hardly knew how to reply.
He looked away, toward the bookshelves, his eyes those of a child peering into a candy-shop window.
“We can begin now, if you like.” The words sprang from my heart, the first genuine impulse of kindness I had felt for him since arriving in Pinghu.
He hesitated. “It sounds like a lot of work. Perhaps we should wait a few years. When you’re teaching our child, I can just sit in.”
“It’s no trouble,” I said reassuringly. “I have so little to do all day. I’d welcome the distraction.”
I waited for his response, for the anxious pucker between his brows to soften.
“But please, Wife, don’t let my parents know.”
***
Dearest Second Sister,
Although I didn’t manage to train as a teacher, I’m teaching now, every day. After talking over the meals and chores for the day with Jia Po, I return to my library and teach Baizhen. Please don’t mention these lessons in your “open” letters.
Dear Eldest Sister,
Don’t laugh, but I’m inventing new ways to teach Baizhen how to read. To teach him the same way as children would be insulting, so I’ve devised a different sort of word card. Instead of a single word, I’ve written a phrase that uses that word. Seeing how one character is used in many different ways has been very helpful for him.
***
“When you were young, Husband, why did you find it so hard to read? You’re memorizing words at a very good rate now.”
We had just finished a lesson and it was nearly time for lunch. I sharpened some pencils and Baizhen put away his notebooks. Over the weeks he had filled their pages, copying each new word a hundred times. It was a repetitive task, but necessary if he was to commit them to memory.
“I don’t know. Teacher Liao never actually explained anything. He just made me memorize poems. Then he’d beat me for not being able to recite them perfectly.”
Baizhen didn’t sound resentful but the more he told me, the more indignant I grew.
Teacher Liao was a sixty-something gentleman from an impoverished family, a failed scholar of the sort every small town possesses. Before the Qing Dynasty fell, Liao had gone to Hangchow no less than twelve times to take the Imperial Examinations, until his family’s funds and his own hopes ran dry. Some of the townsfolk actually took a perverse pride in how many times he had failed. His was by no means the record for our province; there was an elderly scholar in Ningbo who had failed the Examinations for twenty years. But as far as Gong Gong was concerned, Liao was the closest the town had to a classical scholar and so he engaged the bitter old man as a tutor.
When Baizhen turned twelve, Teacher Liao declared that Baizhen had received all the tutoring he needed and was ready for school. Baizhen enrolled in the village school, only to discover that Teacher Liao’s efforts had left him far behind the rest of the class.
Rather than lose face, Gong Gong pulled his son out of the classroom.
“Did your parents find you another tutor?” I asked in my mildest voice.
“No, Father said we couldn’t afford it. We would have had to hire someone from out of town, and then house him and feed him.”
But Gong Gong could afford rare books and antique snuff bottles.
“Oh. Then did your parents tutor you themselves?” I busied myself putting away some magazines so he couldn’t see my face.
“Father tried, but he didn’t have the patience, and Mother said what I knew was good enough. She doesn’t read that well herself.” He gave me an embarassed smile, but it was for his own shortcomings, not theirs.
Thus my husband could recite a few classical poems, use the abacus to do a little arithmetic, and write just enough to add a greeting at the end of my letters to Father. He always wrote the same sentence, laboriously, I had noticed:
Honoured Father-in-Law, I hope you are well.
If Baizhen had been raised in our family, how different a person he might have been.
I looked up and realized he was speaking to me.
“I’m sorry, Husband. What did you say?”
Standing at the door, he repeated in a low, self-conscious voice, “You had a scholarship to university, Wife. Do you ever regret not going?”
He didn’t wait for my answer, just ducked his head and left the room. I heard his footsteps creak away on the warped planks of the veranda floor.
***
He knew,
my
yang
soul declares.
He paces, jabbing a finger in my direction. I always said he knew you better than you thought. He knew you were ashamed of him.
Mostly, I was angry with Gong Gong and Jia Po for not taking more care with his education.
Jia Po, I can understand,
my
yin
soul says thoughtfully. A faint odour of something green and leafy.
Some merchant families are like that. As long as you can work an abacus, what other education do you need? But Gong Gong, I agree, has been negligent.
Negligent? I have a harsher word for him right now.
I’m outraged, even as my heart softens toward Baizhen. Despite it all, he had grown into a good person, kind and unpretentious.
Baizhen isn’t much to look at, but he’s very considerate,
says my
yin soul
, reading my thoughts.
Yes. Yes, he is,
I agree.
But it hadn’t been enough.
Were you still longing for Hanchin even though you were pregnant?
My
hun
soul gets straight to the point.
I sigh.
It was easier to forget Hanchin once I became pregnant, but I still dreamed about him. I couldn’t help wondering what it would have been like to have Hanchin in my bed instead of Baizhen.
My
yang
soul stops pacing, horror and disapproval so plain on his wrinkled face I have to laugh. So do my
yin
and
hun souls
, one a sweet giggle, the other a tinkling like wind chimes.
I thought you said there was no need for shame now that I’m dead.
I can’t help the little jab.
***
Each month I wrote to Father, my words carefully formal and distant. It was duty, no more. Father didn’t write back, not real letters. He never did more than add a few jotted lines at the end of Stepmother’s letters, polite greetings to my in-laws. I imagined my name on Stepmother’s list of chores for the month, her letters to me just another task to cross off. She wrote to me of domestic matters and family news, and of course always included a report on my father’s health. There was usually a recipe or a list of ingredients for a nourishing herbal soup that would balance my body’s elements. After a while, Gong Gong barely read past the first page of Stepmother’s letters, and just handed them to me without a word.
Unlike my sisters’ secret notes, which plainly stated their fears, Stepmother’s letters spoke guardedly of the problems our family faced as China’s fate grew more uncertain:
Gaoyin returned to Changchow for the birth of her son. Little Zhao Yang is beautiful and healthy. The Zhao family is already planning the hundredth-day celebration but it will be a modest affair. These days it is best to avoid displays of wealth.
You may have heard that Changyin’s wife is pregnant again. Geeling seems happiest when she’s expecting, and it is a good thing right now because Changyin is away in Shanghai most of the time. Your father has him renovating an old apartment building in Shanghai, one they bought ten years ago. The foreign presence in Shanghai makes it the only city safe from the civil war and Japanese aggression, so that’s where we shall relocate if we must. Yet Shanghai has its own dangers, so I’m not anxious to move there until it is absolutely necessary.
Gaoyin’s next letter was about motherhood, but it was also filled with worry:
I’m so relieved to be back in Shanghai. Shen’s mother practically lived in our quarters while we were in Changchow. Besides the baby, there was a lot of talk about family finances. Both our families are moving more cash to Hong Kong and Singapore, away from the uncertainties of our civil war. Tongyin spends a lot of time in Shanghai now, where he has rented rooms. All his friends have rented apartments and mistresses. At least he doesn’t have a mistress.
When Sueyin wrote, it was about her family’s new living arrangements, for the Judge had given in to Tienzhen’s requests for a second home in Shanghai:
We have leased an apartment in Shanghai, not far from Gaoyin and Shen. To placate my in-laws we spend half the month in Shanghai and half in Changchow. My husband’s obsession with the film world grows every day. The producers flatter him, hoping he will fund their next film. I think the Judge hopes Tienzhen’s fascination with the films will come to a halt when he realizes the producers are only interested in his money. But I fear Tienzhen also moved us here because opium is easier to find. His habit disgusts me. But when he smokes, he falls into such a stupor that he does not come to my bed.
I read the newspapers Gaoyin sent, looking for articles written by Hanchin, or any mention of his name. I looked for him out of curiosity, that was all, I told myself. He was no more than a scar on my heart now, and the occasional need to scratch at the memory waned each week as my child grew larger in my belly. He had no place in my life anymore.