Lisa See - Peony in Love

“This is my family home,” I said.

“Your status in life has no importance here,” a creature to my right growled.

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“If you had any status at all, you would have been buried properly. Another worthless branch,” sniffed a woman, her flesh so corrupted that bits of her skull had broken through her skin.

The man in the mandarin robe dropped his odorous, yawning mouth down to my face. “Your family has forgotten about you and they have forgotten about us. We’ve been coming here for years, but look what they give us now! Almost nothing. Your new brother seems not to understand his mistake. Jaaaaa! ” He spewed his putrid breath on me, and I smelled the rotten offerings in his gullet. “With your baba in the capital, Bao thinks this festival is not necessary. He took the best offerings, such as they were, to his room to share with his concubines.”

With that, the creature in the mandarin robe picked me up by the back of my neck and tossed me away. I hit the wall of the compound across the street, slid to the ground, and watched as the others gnawed and tore at the paltry offerings. I crept around them and knocked futilely on our wind-fire gate. In life, all I had wanted was to leave the compound and go on an excursion; now all I wanted was to get in.

For so long I hadn’t thought about my natal family. Lotus and Broom had to be living in their own homes now, but my aunts were inside. The concubines were still there. My little cousin Orchid would be preparing for her betrothal. I thought of all the hundreds of fingers—the amahs, the servants, the cooks, and most of all my mother—who lived behind the gate. There had to be a way for me to see my mother.

I walked around the compound, making wide turns to avoid the sharp-ness of the corners. But it was hopeless. The Chen Family Villa had only one gate and it was closed against hungry ghosts. Was Mama in the Lotus-Blooming Hall thinking about me? I looked up into the sky, trying to glimpse the Viewing Terrace. Was Grandmother looking down at me? Was she shaking her head and laughing at my stupidity?

Ghosts, like living people, do not like to accept the truth. We delude ourselves to save face, maintain a measure of optimism, and keep going forward in truly untenable situations. I didn’t like to think of myself as a hungry ghost, who was so famished she would shove her face into a platter of moldy fruit to feed her ravenous emptiness. I sighed. I was still hungry. I had to eat enough on this one day to sustain me for a year.

When I was still on the Viewing Terrace, I’d periodically looked in on the Qian family in Gudang that my father had visited during New Year’s Festival soon after I died. I set off in the right direction, fighting off others like myself when I had to, making wide turns when necessary, and getting ( 1 6 4 )

lost in the twisting pathways between rice fields just as the farmers intended.

Night fell, the time when even more creatures should have come out to fill their bellies, but in the countryside I met few other ghosts. Out here, most people met undesirable demises from earthquake, flood, famine, and plagues of various sorts. They died near or in their homes, so their bodies weren’t lost. Rarely did accidents occur where a body disappeared entirely; perhaps an occasional house fire consumed a whole family or the collapse of a bridge during flood season carried away a man going to market with his pig. So most of the dead in the countryside were carefully buried and the three parts of their souls sent to their proper resting places.

I did, however, encounter a few perturbed spirits: a mother who’d been interred improperly so that her body had been pierced by tree roots, causing her unbearable pain; a man who’d been driven from his coffin because it had flooded; a young wife whose body had shifted when her coffin was placed in the ground so that her skull was so twisted that the rest of her soul was unable to proceed to her next incarnation. These spirits were agitated and troubled; in trying to find help, they caused problems for their families. No one likes to hear ghostly wails of unspeakable anguish when trying to fall asleep, feed the baby, or make clouds and rain with your husband. But except for these few souls, my journey was un-eventful and lonely.

I reached the Qian family home. Although they were poor, they had good hearts; their offerings were modest, but the quality was better than anything I’d eaten so far. Once I was sated, I drifted closer to the house, wanting to rest before my journey back to the city, enjoying the sensation of being full, and wishing to connect for just a few moments to people who were closely tied to my natal family.

But during the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, wooden screens covered the Qians’ windows and the doors were locked from the inside. I smelled rice cooking. Lantern light leaked from under the doorjamb. I heard the low murmur of voices. I listened very hard, and then the sound of Madame Qian’s voice coalesced. “Since I stopped gathering kingfisher feathers along the emerald river, I have kept to my poor and humble abode, just chanting my poems.” I knew this poem well, and it made me sad and homesick. But what was I to do? I was alone, deprived of my family, companionship, and the gift of words and art. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed. From inside the house I heard the scraping of chairs and sounds of consternation. These ( 1 6 5 )

people had comforted me, and now I’d terrified them with my netherworld cries.

wh e n th e f e st ival was over and I returned to Ren and Ze’s bedchamber, I was fortified, strong, and unexpectedly focused. Being full for the first time since long before I died brought back a different hunger, the one I had once reserved for my project about The Peony Pavilion. What if I could add to what I’d written in the margins and turn it into a self-portrait that Ren would recognize as symbolizing everything I held inside of me?

Didn’t Liniang’s self-portrait and my writings harbor our souls?

Suddenly, I was as selfish as my sister-wife. I’d educated Ze about The Peony Pavilion. I’d touched her thoughts enough so that she’d written on those slips of paper and hidden them in our bedchamber. Now she had to do something for me.

I began to keep Ze in the bedchamber by day, preferring that she stay with me rather than join her husband and mother-in-law in the eating hall for breakfast or lunch. I did not love light, so I forced her to keep the doors closed and the windows covered. During the summer, the room stayed cool, the way I liked it. In fall, quilts were brought in. In winter, Ze took to wearing padded jackets or jackets lined with fur. The New Year came, followed by spring. In the fourth month, the flowers opened their faces to the sun, but inside we found companionship in our shared darkness that refused to warm even by day.

I made Ze reread what I’d written in Volume One. Then I sent her to Ren’s library to find the sources for the three pastiches I hadn’t found before I died. I helped her pick up her brush and write these answers and my thoughts about them on the pages right next to my other writing. If I could make Ze play the flute with my husband, how hard was making her pick up a brush and write? Nothing. Easy.

But I was not remotely satisfied. I desperately needed Volume Two, which begins with Mengmei and Liniang’s ghost swearing eternal love.

Then he dots her ancestor tablet, exhumes her body, and resurrects her. If I could make Ze write down my thoughts and make her give them to Ren to read, wouldn’t he be inspired to follow Mengmei’s example?

At night, in Ze’s dreams, we met by her favorite pond and I said to her,

“You need Volume Two. You must get it.” For weeks I was like a cockatoo, repeating these lines again and again. But Ze was a wife. She could no ( 1 6 6 )