Red Silk

My father was a shipbuilder and his father before him. They built the large riverboats that plied the Pearl River with their cargoes of salt, and the seafaring junks that sailed from Canton to Amoy and Formosa. My father had three hundred men who worked in his yards, and we lived in a red-columned mansion in the eastern hills of Canton.

Father was an enlightened man. Although I was only a daughter, he made sure I was educated, almost like a son. We had a private tutor who taught us calligraphy, painting and poetry. I read the Five Classics, the Four Books, the Book of Filial Piety. And I dreamed of Muk Lan, the daughter who dressed as a man and saved her father from battle.

But I never wore the clothes of a man. I could not go out like my brothers, to watch the street theatre, or sit in tea-houses with pearl-faced women—the red dust of their cheeks, their lips painted rose-bud vermilion. Sometimes I'd go out in a sedan chair and watch the world from behind its curtains, but mostly I stayed at home, reading The Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, or doing needlework.

I was a good girl, respectable. Until I was fifteen, no one outside of the family knew of my existence. Then my father's elder sister arranged my marriage. She enquired after all the good families with page 127 eligible sons. There was the eldest son of Magistrate Chew, but although his father was known as a fair man, the son was renowned for his foul temper and lack of respect for the ancestors. There was the second son of the Lees, the wealthiest family in Canton—ah, but he was a spendthrift and a gambler. There was the third son of the Kwoks, who had a thriving silk business, but he was born with not enough breath—they say he had beautiful blue-white skin, a gentle man waiting to expire.

It was then that my aunt heard of my husband. A man from the neighbouring village of my father. A man who had come back from the New Gold Mountain looking for a wife. His name was Wong Joe-Yee. He was eighteen, and being a Gold Mountain man, he had prospects. I did not know whether he was tall or handsome or kind, or whether he could quote from the classics or write a good couplet, but there did not seem to be any history of madness or of leprosy or tuberculosis—or of excessive opium or gambling. And our horoscopes were favourable: there would be plenty of sons and a life of good fortune.

Mother was First Wife. She had given birth to two sons and myself, the only daughter. No one spoke of these things but I know Mother did not want Father—it was Mother who found First Concubine for him. Over the years there followed a second concubine, and then the third. Third Concubine was barely older then me, uneducated but wily. She had large phoenix eyes and fine white skin, paled with the application of crushed pearl cream. She was, after all, educated in pleasing men.

Mother could order First, Second or Third Concubine to do her bidding, and I had precedence over all their daughters. This is the way things are: the first has power; the last has none—unless by stealth and deception. Third Concubine fed First Concubine opium-laced dumplings, and she died—though nothing, of course, was proven.

Now I would become a wife also. Unlike Mother, I hoped there would be no others.

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On the day selected according to the almanac, my father and eldest brother carried me to the sedan chair. As we came outside, a woman chaperone hired from my father's village opened an umbrella; another threw a handful of rice to feed and distract the spirits. Everything was red—red silk, red satin and brocade—red as happiness and the mark on a bedsheet. They took me to my husband's house to the pounding of gongs, hoping not to meet any pregnant cats or dogs, or indeed, any four-legged things. I heard my husband outside the sedan chair—he kicked in the door and carried me inside.

This was the place my father-in-law had rented: two rooms on the south side of a courtyard that was shared with three other families. Still in the eastern suburbs, where the New Gold Mountain men buy when they come home with their riches.

There I learned to steam rice covered with half a finger of water. I learned how to hold a live chicken and a cleaver—how to pull the skin tight and pluck out the feathers of the throat. Bare pocked skin stretching over the windpipe, the way the eyes close in like a blade. I could pour the blood into a rice bowl, plunge the body into scalding water and strip off the feathers. One cut to pull down the warm entrails.

I learned to wash clothes: my hands stinging with the cold water of winter, calloused from the smooth wooden stick, beating a man's trousers on stone.

And I went shopping in the market—the first time I had walked the dusty streets, the first time I had been out alone. I did not know how to carry the bottles of pickles and fish, the vegetables and the flour. Many times I dropped them and had to go back to buy all that I had broken.

My husband stayed with me six months, enough time to fill me with a son. Then he returned to the New Gold Mountain and I came here to his village. A village in the same county as my father's ancestors.

When my time came, I gave birth to twin boys. This was a comfort to me. My husband's older brother's wife had no children, only daughters. The first had been smothered with ashes as she opened her mouth to suckle, the second thrown in the river, and only after much weeping, the third had been left by the roadside. No one knows page 129 whether she was taken by strangers or eaten by dogs.

But I gave birth to sons, the first who looked like my mother and the second who took after his father. This was a double happiness, a blessing of the goddess Goon Yum.

It was Sister-in-law's envy that cursed us—that, and the ghosts of her daughters.

The day before their fifth birthday my sons came down with fever. I boiled ten different herbs, fed my sons the bitter black tea; I took a coin and scraped their foreheads, the backs of their arms, and along their spines; I went to the temple, lit incense and prayed to Buddha and Goon Yum.

It was the fourth day, the number of death, that the one like my mother died. Only the one like my husband survived.

Now I look at my son whom I love—I see the straightness of his nose, the fullness of his lips, a certain way of lifting his head when lost in contemplation—now this is the shape, the space left behind by my husband.