The Concubine's Daughter Read online

  “You defy me and spit upon my kindness. These papers are old and full of rubbish; good only as a home for cockroaches.” He flung them at her. “Today you will visit Great-Uncle Ming … you will have no need of such nonsense.”

  He seized her jaw, forcing her to look directly into his eyes. “Never mention such a thing to anyone at Ten Willows—do you hear me?”

  His thumb, Li-Xia thought, is big as a soup ladle, but his eyes are those of a tired old dog.

  Before she could find the words that would stop him, he scooped up the remaining papers and left, banging the door behind him. She watched through the window as he tossed the precious pages onto the dung hill beside the buffalo stall and set it alight. The pages lifted like leaves in the wind to drift and disappear.

  Number One nodded wisely when she heard how slyly the fox fairy had deceived them all and tried to teach itself to read. Yik-Munn was quickly bathed and changed, then served with Swatow tea to soothe his nerves. How brave he had been to face this thing alone, and how wise he was to see to it that this unholy being would leave the farm this day, never to return.

  Yik-Munn was dressed in his finest clothes for the journey to the Ten Willows silk farm—a plum-colored gown of shantung velvet and his official high-crowned hat trimmed with gold. The prefect must not think that his daughter came from a poor and unimportant family, or the price might go down even further. His wives had fussed about him until he looked the picture of prosperity, a casket of rare spices beneath his arm as a gift for Ming-Chou.

  Li-Xia walked behind him to the jetty and to the front of the sampan, well beyond his reach. Why had he taken her papers and burned them? She could find no forgiveness for such a terrible thing.

  Watching lotus flowers drifting by, she cherished her few remaining secrets. Hidden under her new clothes and flat against her heart was the book she had kept hidden in its secret place, the story of the Moon Lady, to be remembered forever through her mother’s hand. As precious as this was the orange-peel finger jade, sewn carefully into the hem of her sam-foo, weighing no more than a baby frog.

  These great secrets helped her forget the sight of the pages turning black under a cloud of yellow smoke. As long as these last things were safe, she felt protected too, wondering who rich Uncle Ming could be, and if he would be pleased to see her. She had never felt as pretty as she did today; the apricot sam-foo fit her well, and the wives had dressed her hair and dabbed her cheeks with rouge till they were rosy as an apple. Her mouth had been carefully painted red as a rose petal and her eyelashes and eyebrows were black as ink. The wives were nices to her than ever before, but the thought of going far away from the spice farm filled her with a grim determination: She would never return to the rice shed and its jars of pickled snakes and the pink little bodies of baby mice.

  When all was done and she was ready for her journey, Number Three returned with a yellow water iris to wind into her hair, and a most beautiful gift. It was a sunshade, which when opened bloomed in the same bright yellow as the iris on a stalk of green bamboo. Ah-Su had found a moment when the others were engaged in readying Yik-Munn. She kissed Li-Xia and said with her secret smile, “I have gathered the rest of your mother’s things from the rice shed; I will keep them safe for you until we see each other again. Remember, my Beautiful One, your feet are your freedom. While you have them, nothing is impossible.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Ten Willows

  In the smoky blue mulberry groves, there were as many trees as there were scales on a snake, or so it was said among the mui-mui, the young girls who killed the moths and collected the tiny pearls of silk. The rolling hills of the Ten Willows silk farm were covered with the trees as far as could be seen from the banks of the river.

  Unlike at smaller spinning mills, which depended on cocoons supplied by others, Ming-Chou, a man of great prosperity and power, had the advantage of owning his own groves. Established by his great-grandfather, they had made him the richest silk merchant in the Pearl River Delta, living in a world of lordly privilege beyond that of even the city taipans of Canton or Hong Kong.

  Here, behind the high, dragon-back walls of his tranquil gardens, he employed one hundred women. Fifty of these were sau-hai, “women without men,” an ancient sisterhood born to the cult of survival. As hungry children, victims of flood and famine, mauled and molested by field hands for a handful of rice, they had been plucked from the darkest depths of despair. The oldest of them had forsaken the notion of wedlock and motherhood, banding together and welcoming any virgin girl to join their ranks and accept the traditional comb and mirror as she took the sacred oath of sau-hai.

  The sisterhood cherished and protected its own as surely as nuns in a convent. It had always been the way for a poor woman of China, if her family was unable to feed her but had failed to kill her at birth, to be sold to anyone who would have her. Such lost women had sought the sisterhood and shared its strength for centuries. It offered food and shelter, but above all it promised a measure of dignity, and security from the injustices of men.

  The sau-hai were much sought after as dometic servants, and any household worthy of its name was prepared to pay a little more for an amah who wore the black tzow and showed the white handkerchief of purity, her hair wound into a tight bun and caught by the wooden comb. Thus had been formed a network of secret communications that could stretch from house to house, village to village, and town to town, even from province to province. Members of the sisterhood became a constant source of information on the fortunes of rival clans and competitive households.

  Ming-Chou was deeply proud that he had chosen the sisters of sauhai to become his weavers. He paid them well, saw that their conditions were pleasant, and treated them with respect. Most could not read nor write, so questioned nothing. Yet they were intelligently led and there were some among them who were of considerable breeding, whose families had been beset by disaster, or who despised or feared the male sex and preferred the company of women. Some, like Elder Sister Ah-Jeh, the Ten Willows superintendant, had great skill with the abacus, a keen eye for business, and a deep knowledge of healing the sick. The money paid to them at the end of each month was less than half of that given to men and boys, but it was wisely used or carefully saved.

  Ming-Chou knew well—and did not challenge—that they created their own laws and enforced them by rules and rituals laid down by the society over the centuries. Controlled completely by the elder sisters, they did not drink rice wine or fornicate. Their discipline was absolute, and their punishment swift and brutal.

  The peaceful and efficient running of his mill he owed to Superintendent Ah-Jeh, who oversaw the weavers as diligently as the abbess of a sacred temple watching over her novices. For this, her personal rewards were considerable. What punishment or promotion she meted out was done in private, unseen and unheard. It was she who decided which girls among the mui-mui should leave the groves for the more delicate work of the sheds, perhaps to become a spinner or even a weaver if she accepted the comb and the mirror of sau-hai.

  From this small number, so carefully chosen, if a young girl shone brightly enough among her sisters, she might be selected as a “lantern girl,” whose charms would be wasted at the loom and better suited to the master’s bed. In this, as in other matters, Ming-Chou relied on the judgment of his superintendent and paid her handsomely if that judgment pleased him.

  To attract the eye of the Master of Ten Willows for even an instant was thought to be ordained by kindly gods. When such a child was found, she would be prepared by amahs skilled in the expectations of the bedchamber, dressed in a robe of white, and given a paper lantern, to be carried to the house of Ming-Chou on the night of a propitious moon. If she was found acceptable, she might become part of a privileged few, and join other favorites in accommodations of their own. Neither concubines nor mistresses, these were comfort girls in the Pavilion of Pleasure, called upon when needed and offered as gifts to the mandarins who were sometimes sent to meet with the
prefect and gather taxes.

  If she was not found acceptable, the superintendent lost much face. The girl might be considered as a sister of sau-hai, but if she lacked the hummingbird hands and butterfly fingers and subservient soul of a sau hai weaver, she would be whipped and sent back to the huts to live out her usefulness among the mulberry groves.

  If a girl resisted, she was deemed to be bewitched and her fate was decreed by ancient laws: She would be beaten and tethered beside a goat for the sport of others. When her humiliation was complete, she would be trussed in a weighted pig basket and drowned in the river. The Master of Ten Willows had never witnessed such a ritual, nor did he wish to hear of it, leaving all things female to the judgment of Ah-Jeh. The conscience of Ming-Chou the silk merchant was as untroubled as his garden was at peace with the universe.

  The other half of his female workers were the mui-mui, the little sisters; they were thought to be aged from eight to fourteen, but most had no age as well as no name. Among them were many who had not escaped the abuse of men—their fathers or brothers or those they called uncle—but had found the courage to run away and seek shelter in the nearest temple. The monks fed such children before handing them over to the silk farm or another employer. The mui-mui were also fifty in number, some brought to the Ten Willows silk farm by parents who could no longer feed them, accepting a paltry sum in return. Others, whose parents had died or whose families had abandoned them, came seeking the sisters of sau-hai. His mui-mui were fed well, clothed, and given shelter. For this they worked from sunrise to sunset—feeding the silkworms and harvesting cocoons, and sorting and cleaning them for the boiling vats, the spinning wheels, and the weaving mill.

  Some, whose hands were fast and nimble—too valuable to waste in the harshness of the groves—were taken into the spinning sheds to learn the secret of the golden thread. From their numbers, when a loom lost its weaver to illness, death, or old age, one would be chosen for the mirror and the comb. It was the dream of all of the mui-mui to spin the golden web and be taken into the lifelong sanctuary of sau-hai.

  The sun, almost level with hilltops, turned the river into a ribbon of flame as the sampan bumped the jetty beneath the row of towering willows. Li-Xia was the first to scramble from the prow, eager to arrive at this place so different from the brooding shadows of the great pine. Far from the echoing stone-flagged rooms and strident voices, the solitary gloom of the rice shed and the flat muddy fields of the spice farm, she was dazzled by flickering ceilings of leaves, delicate reflections strewn like flowers at her feet. She opened the yellow sunshade among the dancing blades of light, only to have Yik-Munn snatch it away.

  “Where did you get such a thing, to cast a shadow on the face so carefully prepared for inspection? Who gave you permission to pose beneath a sunshade made for wives and concubines?” He snapped it closed and tossed it into the river, to swirl away on the fast-flowing current. Silently, Li-Xia followed her father along the jetty, past a gang of boys who, stripped to the waist, loaded sacks and baskets into the open hatch of a river junk. Some paused to leer at the girl in the apricot sam-foo, their skinny bodies slick with sweat.

  They passed through towering scarlet doors and into a huge space, its walls lined with shimmering bolts of brightly colored silk. A row of chairs was lined along one side opposite an altar to the Supreme Being Yu-Huang—the Jade Emperor—to assure those he smiled upon of a prosperous life. Li-Xia did not know of such a god and found little comfort in his bloated belly and greedy smile. Before the altar was a high desk holding an open ledger, an ink block, a bamboo cup of brushes, and an abacus. A high wooden stool stood behind it.

  After a slow, silent wait that caused Yik-Munn to adjust his hat and smooth his hair many times, nervously sucking his teeth, a short, round woman seemed to roll into the room. She was followed closely by the silent figure of a girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, attached to her wrist by a silken thong. The stout woman, Li-Xia had already been warned a hundred times by her father’s nervous whisper, was the all-powerful Ah-Jeh, elder sister of sau-hai and superintendent of the mill.

  “You must remember your place in the presence of such a worthy person. Do not speak unless you are spoken to. It is she who will take you to Great-Uncle Ming if you do not displease her.”

  Crossing to the stool, Ah-Jeh hopped with unexpected agility onto its elevated seat, her short legs and broad feet hanging inches from the floor, to look down at Li-Xia with the eyes of one guessing the freshness of fish. She was dressed in a black tzow—a high-necked tunic with wide-legged trousers of waterproof twill that shone like the wing of a crow, making a faint swishing noise when she moved. A large white handkerchief hung from a pin on the sloping bulge of her breast.

  Her oiled hair was the color of ashes, skinned back like a skullcap and caught in a finely plaited bun at the back of her round head with a simple wooden comb, so smoothly held it gleamed like sculpted metal. The dark worm of a vein beat visibly in her temple; a tear of dark jade hung from a thin gold chain around her short neck.

  Her fleshy face was pampered and powdered until it was white as a mooncake; her thick brows drawn together in a frown of expectation; thin, disapproving lips daubed red as a fresh wound. Flat, waxen lids were stretched over eyes that were black and unyielding as spilled treacle. She hops onto her stool like a crow hops onto a dunghill. Li-Xia had learned to observe such things without any visible sign on her face or in her eyes. It was, she had decided, the voice of her heart.

  The girl behind Superintendent Ah-Jeh, who was dressed in the same oily black, carried a furled black sunshade and a large fan of black feathers. Over her shoulder, a bundle of willow wands—some thin as whips, others thick and heavy as a club—were slung in a sleeve of leather. As though she had done so many times, the girl selected one of them and handed it to the superintendent, who took it in her outstretched hand without a glance.

  Li-Xia felt no fear of this woman, who resembled, her heart said now, a fat, shiny black beetle with the powdered face of a festival clown.

  “So you are the ungrateful one who disobeys her father and runs away whenever she can.”

  The tip of the long willow jabbed Li-Xia hard in the ribs. “Is it true that you dare to think above your station?” The willow whacked loudly across the deskop. “Look at me when I am speaking to you.”

  Ah-Jeh frowned with grim displeasure when this failed to make the farm girl flinch.

  “You are the one who refuses the golden lotus slipper, who breaks her father’s promise to the most honorable prefect Ming-Chou, great benefactor of us all and savior of our souls.”

  Accustomed to seeing threatening faces, Li-Xia did not blink an eye as the superintendent wielded the thin wand menacingly, slashing it through the air till it whistled like a tin flute.

  “She will not run away from me. You have treated her too well, sir.” The superintendent slipped from the high stool to walk around the farm girl. “We have a way to make those who run away wish they had no feet at all to run with.”

  Yik-Munn looked helpless, raising his hands in a humble gesture of defeat.

  As quickly as a conjuror, Ah-Jeh brought the wand down with a solid thwack across the back of Li-Xia’s legs, which made her scream inside, but she only blinked her eyes.

  “Bow before your superintendent, or feel this across your back,” Ah-Jeh hissed, as Li-Xia felt her father’s fingers jab hard into her back.

  “Bow when you are told. Where are the manners I have taught you?”

  You have taught me nothing but how to endure pain and that all promises are meant to be broken, her heart said, sure that her mother heard these words and approved of them. And this woman with the face of a clown does not deserve my respect. She bowed deeply, three times, comforted by the secret words of her heart. I will bow because I must, but you will never know what I am thinking and you will never make me cry.

  “I am told your name is Li-Xia, the Beautiful One.” The stocky woman sneered. “Well, you a
re not beautiful to me. You are one of the mui-mui—little sisters—and you are one among many others. You will have no other name until you are given one; your only value is in how many cocoons you can gather and how quickly you can fill your baskets.”

  She mounted the stool again and looked directly at Yik-Munn, whose hands were clasped before him like a man at prayer, his thin lips drawn back in the mask of a smile that showed his teeth in all their glory. “Come forward and sign the sung-tip,” she said, indicating the contract that would make Li-Xia the property of Ming-Chou for the rest of her life. “Be sure of what you sign, for if it is false she will be back on your doorstep and the name of Yik-Munn will be mud along the river.”

  She rolled a finely pointed brush on the ink block. “Do you assure me that this girl is a virgin?”

  Yik-Munn nodded his head gravely, pressing his folded hands against his heart.

  Ah-Jeh scowled uncertainly. “You swear that she is strong as she looks, that she has no illness of any kind, and can carry a load and bend her back? That she has brains enough to care for herself? Do you assure me of these things written in the sung-tip and put your name to them … or do you lie to me as you lied about her lotus feet?”

  Yik-Munn shook his head emphatically. “She has worked my fields as well as any boy, but”—he grabbed his daughter’s hands, one in each of his, as he had done in the rice shed—“see, Honorable Sister, she has hummingbird hands.” He offered them for her inspection.

  Ah-Jeh sniffed with scarcely a glance. “They are the hands of a duck herder. Do not think you can gain another single coin with such trickery.”

  Yik-Munn dropped her hands, shuffling back with a bowed head.

  “Will I also learn to read? Will my great-uncle teach me to read?” Li-Xia was startled by the sound of her own words.