I was happy to be officially diagnosed as lovesick. A fanciful thought entered my mind. What if I died from my lovesickness as Liniang did?
( 8 3 )
Would my poet find me and bring me back to life? The idea pleased me, but my mother had a very different reaction to the doctor’s news. She buried her face in her hands and wept.
The doctor led her away from my bed and lowered his voice. “This kind of melancholy syndrome is also associated with spleen dysfunction.
It can cause someone to stop eating. What I’m telling you, Lady Chen, is that your daughter could die from her congested qi. ”
Aiya! Doctors always try to scare mothers. This is how they make money.
“You must force her to eat,” he said.
And that’s exactly what they did. Shao and Mama held down my arms, while the doctor pushed clumps of cooked rice into my mouth and held my jaw shut. A servant brought in stewed plums and apricots. The doctor shoved the soggy pieces into my mouth until I vomited out everything.
He looked at me in disgust, but to my mother he said, “Do not worry.
This stasis is related to the passions. If she were a wife already, I would say that a night of clouds and rain would cure her. Since she is not yet married, she must silence her desires. Good Mother, on her wedding night she will be cured. But you may not have enough time to wait for that. I’m going to recommend that you try something different.” He took her elbow again, pulled her close, and whispered in her ear. When he let her go, a mask of grim determination covered her fear. “Anger is often enough to release the stasis,” he added reassuringly.
Mama escorted the doctor out of the room. I laid my head back on the pillow, my books spread out about me on the bedclothes. I picked up Volume One of The Peony Pavilion, closed my eyes, and let my mind drift across the lake to my poet’s home. Was he thinking of me as I was thinking of him?
The door opened. Mama entered with Shao and a couple of other servants.
“Start with those over there,” Mama said, pointing to the stack of books I had on a table. “And you, get those on the floor.”
Mama and Shao approached my bed and gathered up the books nestled near my feet.
“We’re removing the books,” Mama announced. “The doctor has instructed me to burn them.”
“No!” Instinctively I tightened my arms around the book I was holding. “Why?”
“Doctor Zhao says it will cure you. On this he has been very clear.”
( 8 4 )
“You can’t do this!” I cried. “They belong to Baba!”
“Then you won’t mind,” Mama replied calmly.
I dropped the book I was holding and frantically scrambled free of my silk quilt. I tried to stop Mama and the others, but I was too weak. The servants left with their first piles of books. I screamed, my arms stretched out to them as though I were a beggar instead of the privileged daughter in a family of nine generations of imperial scholars. These were our books!
Precious with learning! Divine with love and art!
On the bed I had my editions of The Peony Pavilion. Mama and Shao started to take those too. The horror of what they were about to do sent me into a frenzied panic.
“You can’t! They’re mine!” I screamed, gathering together as many of the volumes as I could reach, but Mama and Shao were suprisingly strong.
They ignored me, slapping away my efforts to save my books as easily as they might a pesky gnat.
“My project, please, Mama,” I cried. “I’ve worked so hard.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You have only one project: to get married,” she said, as she swooped up the edition of The Peony Pavilion that Baba had given me for my birthday.
Outside, in the courtyard below my room, I heard voices.
Mama said, “You need to see what your selfishness has created.”
She nodded to Shao and the two of them pulled me from the bed and dragged me to the window. Below, the servants had lit a fire in a brazier.
One by one they dropped Baba’s books into the flames. The lines of the Tang dynasty poets he loved disappeared into the air as smoke. I saw a volume of women’s writings burn and curl into nothing. My chest heaved with sobs. Shao released me and went back to the bed to gather up the rest of the books.
When she left the room, Mama asked, “Are you angry?”
I was not that. I felt nothing but despair. Books and poems can’t keep away hunger, but without them I didn’t have a life.
“Please tell me you are angry,” Mama pleaded. “The doctor said you’d get angry.”
When I didn’t answer, she spun away from me and sank to her knees.
Below, I watched as Shao dropped the editions of The Peony Pavilion I’d collected into the flames. As each one was eaten by the fire, I shriveled inside. Those were my most treasured possessions. Now they’d been reduced to tiny feathers of ash that drifted up on the wind and out and away from our compound. My project and all my hopes for it disappeared. I was ( 8 5 )
numb with despair. How could I go to my husband’s home now? How would I survive my loneliness?
Next to me, Mama cried. Her body bent forward until her forehead was on the ground, and then she shuffled to me, as submissive as a servant. She gathered the hem of my skirt into her fingers and buried her face in the silk.
“Please be angry with me.” Her voice was so soft I could barely hear her. “Please, daughter, please.”
I let my hand rest lightly on the back of her neck, but I didn’t say a word. I just stared at the fire.
A few minutes later, Shao came and took Mama away.
I stayed by the window, my arms resting on the sill. The garden was bleak in winter. Storms and frost had stripped the trees bare. The shadows lengthened and the light dimmed. I didn’t have the strength to move.
Everything I’d been working on had been destroyed. At last, I pulled myself up. My head spun. My legs trembled. I thought my lily feet wouldn’t be able to bear my weight. Slowly I made my way across the room to the bed. The silk quilt was twisted and rumpled from my futile attempts to save my books. I pulled back the quilt and climbed back in the bed. As my legs slipped down under the cool silk I felt them bump into something. I reached under the fabric and pulled out Volume One of the copy of The Peony Pavilion that my future sister-in-law had sent me. In the madness of the purge, this one book with all the writing in the margins had been saved. I sobbed in gratitude and grief.
s om et i m e s late at night after that horrible day I’d leave my bed, step over Shao’s sleeping form, and go to the window, where I’d pull aside the heavy curtains that kept out the winter cold. The snows had come and the thought of once-fragrant blossoms being crushed by the bitter whiteness troubled me. I stared at the moon and watched its slow trek across the sky.
Night after night, dew dampened my gown, weighted my hair, chilled my fingers.
I could no longer bear the endlessness of the frigid days. I thought of Xiaoqing and how she had dressed every day, smoothing her skirts about her. She had sat up in bed so as not to muss her hair, she had tried to remain beautiful, but the bleak gloom I felt about my future life paralyzed me and I did none of these things. I even stopped caring for my feet. Shao washed and wrapped them with great tenderness. I was grateful but wary ( 8 6 )
too. I kept my saved volume of The Peony Pavilion hidden in the silks around me, afraid that she would find it and tell Mama, and it would be taken away to be burned.
Doctor Zhao came again. He examined me, frowned, but then said,
“You took the correct action, Lady Chen. You exorcised the curse of literacy from your daughter. Burning those inauspicious books has helped ward off the evil spirits that surround her.”