Before I let her waken, she had to promise me something. “Don’t mention our talk or that you saw me,” I said. She had to remain silent about our visits for my connection to her to continue. “No one, especially your husband, wants to hear about your dreams. Ren will think you su-perstitious and ignorant if you talk nonsense about his first wife.”
“But he’s my husband! I can’t keep secrets from him.”
“All women keep secrets from their husbands,” I said. “Men keep secrets from their wives too.”
Was this true? Fortunately, Ze had as little experience as I had and didn’t question me. Still, she resisted.
( 1 5 8 )
“My husband wants a new kind of wife,” Ze said. “He’s looking for a companion.”
At those words—which were so close to what Ren had told me—rage, deep and inhuman, roared out of me. For a moment, I became fearful in my aspect: hideous, repulsive, and frightening. After that, I had no more trouble from Ze. Night after night I visited her in her dreams until she no longer fought against me.
This is how Tan Ze became my sister-wife. Every night I waited for her, coiled in the rafters, when she came to the bedchamber. Every night I slipped down from my perch to the marital bed to guide her hips, arch her back, and help her open to our husband. I relished each moan that escaped her lips. I enjoyed tormenting her as much as I did him. When she resisted, all I had to do was reach out and touch this or that exposed piece of flesh to make desperate warmth seep into her body until she was nothing more than raw sensation, until her hair became disarrayed and her combs and ornaments littered the bed, until she reached her moment of sweet melting and the rains came.
Ze’s sudden fervor brought our husband back home from the pleasure houses. He grew to love his earthly wife. For every moment of enchant-ment she brought him—and there were many, as I thought of new and varied ways to please him—he challenged her right back with his ingenu-ity. There were many places on Ze’s body to explore and he found them all. She did not resist, because I wouldn’t let her. Now when she left the room, I did not hear complaints, criticisms, or angry words fly about the compound. She began to take tea to Ren’s library. His interests became her interests. She started treating the servants kindly and fairly.
How happy all this made Ren. He brought her little gifts. He asked the servants to prepare special foods that would entice and stimulate her. After clouds and rain, he stayed on top of her, looked into her beautiful dream face, and let words of adoration cascade from his mouth and drench her in love. He loved her in the way I’d hoped he would have loved me. He loved her so much that he forgot about me. But a part of her remained cold and distant, because for every shiver I sent through her body, for every sigh I let escape her wet and open mouth, for all the delights I gave her unselfishly—after all, I was wife number one—there was one thing I could not make her do. She would not meet his eyes.
But I never wavered in my determination to make her the wife I wanted her to be. Ren had said he wanted a marriage of companions, so I ( 1 5 9 )
filled Ze’s belly with books. I made her read volumes of poetry and history. She became such a good and deep reader that she kept books on her dressing table, along with her mirror, cosmetics, and jewelry.
“Your desire for knowledge is as strong as your need to maintain your looks,” Ren observed one day.
His words inspired me to be even more persistent. I got Ze interested in The Peony Pavilion. Again and again, she read my saved copy of Volume One. Soon she was never seen without it. She could recite whole portions of my commentary from memory.
“You never miss a word,” Ren said to her in admiration, and I was happy.
Eventually, Ze began writing notes about the opera on little pieces of paper. Were these her original thoughts or mine fed to her? They were both. Remembering what had happened when Ren told my father about his dreams and how we wrote together, I took care to remind Ze never to mention her writing—or me—to anyone. In this regard, she was an obedient second wife, acquiescing to the needs of wife number one.
Nevertheless, although everything was going well, I had a big problem.
I was a hungry ghost and I was becoming less and less.
( 1 6 0 )
Festival of Hungry Ghosts
as living g irls, ce rtain things happe n on sche dule whether we like them or not. We get our monthly bleeding.
The moon waxes and wanes. New Year comes, followed by the Spring Festival, Double Seven, the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, and the Autumn Moon Festival. We have no control over these things, yet our bodies are set in motion by them. At New Year, we clean our homes, prepare special foods, and make offerings not out of duty or custom but because the change in season and the hint of spring prods us, lures us, and compels us to those actions. The same is true in many ways for ghosts. We have the freedom to wander, but we’re also driven and called by tradition, instinct, and a desire to survive. I wanted to stay with Ren every second, but in the seventh month my hunger came on as strong and uncontrollable as bad cramps, a harvest moon, or firecrackers sending the Kitchen God to Heaven to report on a family. Even as I curled around my rafter or hovered over my sister-wife’s bed, I felt myself being beckoned, enticed, pulled outside.
Driven by hunger so powerful I couldn’t stand it, I left the security of the bedchamber. I needed a straight line, and I had it, drifting right through the courtyards and out the gate of the Wu family compound behind two servants holding paper and pots. The minute I passed through the gate I heard it close behind me and watched horrified as the servants pasted protective talismans on the doors and locked them to protect those inside from such as me. It was the fifteenth day of the month set aside for ( 1 6 1 )
the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. I was as much a victim of my desires as my sister-wife; my actions, like hers, were uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
I banged on the gate. “Let me in!”
Around me I heard cries and wails echo my wish: “Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!”
I swirled around to see creatures whose clothes were in shreds, whose faces were gaunt, gray, and wrinkled, and whose bodies sagged with loneliness, bereavement, and remorse. Some had missing limbs. Others reeked of fear, terror, or revenge. Those who’d died by drowning dripped rank fluids and smelled of rotten fish. But the children! Dozens of small children—
mostly girls who’d been abandoned, sold, abused, and ultimately forgotten by their families—scampered together in packs like so many rats, their eyes filled with an eternity of sadness. All these creatures had two things in common: hunger and anger. Some were angry because they were hungry and homeless; some were hungry and homeless because they were angry. Horrified, I swung back to the gate and banged on it as hard as I could.
“Let me in!” I screamed again.
But my fists had no strength against the talismans and protective couplets the servants had used to seal the door against me and my kind. My kind. I put my forehead against the gate, closed my eyes, and let that knowledge seep into my consciousness. I was one of those disgusting creatures, and I was deeply, overwhelmingly, and ravenously hungry.