Chapter 1

I divorced Shen Shi’an in the eighth year of our marriage.

When I told him I wanted a divorce, the entire household was astonished.

We had been unhappy together for so long that it wasn’t the divorce itself that shocked them, but the moment I chose to ask for it.

It had been a perfectly ordinary day. That morning I had paid my customary respects to my mother-in-law and served her two cups of tea. At noon I had gone out to a shop and ordered fifty boxes of pastries to take on our visits to relatives during the Dragon Boat Festival. Even after my afternoon nap, when I decided I disliked the pattern on the screen, I had drawn a new design myself.

Everything I did presumed a long future here. Nothing suggested I meant to leave.

Yet that evening, freshly bathed and ready for bed, I hadn’t even dried my hair before I calmly told Shen Shi’an I wanted a divorce.

There had been no warning at all.

As far as anyone else was concerned, if I was going to divorce him, I should have done it long ago.

I had had three excellent opportunities.

The first was when Shen Shi’an was demoted to a clerkship in Songshan County.

A paltry post in the middle of nowhere.

I had traveled all that way from Qingzhou with him, enduring the misery of long journeys by boat and carriage.

The moths in Songshan were as big as my hand, their wings patterned like human faces with two eyes. They crowded around the well in layer upon layer. Lower a bucket and haul it up again, and you got half water, half mud, and a few startled moths floating on top, their wings shedding a luminous white powder. It was revolting.

Back then I hated heaven and earth. I hated the enemy army for not advancing as far as Songshan, hated Shen Shi’an for coming to this wretched place to serve as an official, hated Songshan’s sun and its setting moon, hated the endless distance. All I wanted was my mother and father, so far away.

Yet it never once occurred to me to divorce him and go back to Qingzhou, to be the happy, carefree daughter of the Xu family again.

The second opportunity came when my mother-in-law gave him two maids to share his bed.

I had married beneath me when I married Shen Shi’an. Our families had agreed he would never take a concubine.

But what in this world ever stays the same?

It was our fourth year of marriage, and we still had no children. Countless doctors had examined me, all saying my constitution was too cold for me to conceive easily. I swallowed bitter medicine in such quantities that even the tears I choked out at the end seemed to reek of bitter herbs.

Never mind Shen Shi’an’s reluctance to enter my room and sleep with me. Every morning I woke to the smell of my own body and lost my appetite myself.

By then he had climbed out of damp, dismal Songshan. He had backed the right side in the struggle for the throne, and the new emperor had appointed him Superintendent of Imperial Textiles in Suzhou.

The Shen family had come back to life. Prosperity lay ahead; only heirs were lacking.

My mother-in-law chose two maids for Shen Shi’an.

She spoke to me earnestly, choking up several times.

It wasn’t that the Shens meant to break yesterday’s promise now that their fortunes had changed, she said. But heirs mattered too much to a family. My father-in-law was living proof. He had been the only son in his branch. Had there been a few brothers to support him, the family would never have scattered so completely when he fell.

She urged me to understand that, as a Shen wife, I shared the family’s fortunes, for better or worse. Strictly speaking, bedchamber maids weren’t concubines. Almost every young master in a great family had them. I would hardly be the first wife to accept it.

So I swallowed my feelings and let him have his two maids.

The third opportunity came when he brought Li Muyao, the woman he had cherished for years, into our home.

Li Muyao. Li Muyao.

I had been married to Shen Shi’an for eight years.

And for eight years I had known this girl through what other people said of her.

It had begun eight years earlier, before the elder Shen’s downfall.

Childhood sweethearts, families of equal standing, two innocent children with nothing between them.

Fate had been cruel to Shen Shi’an. Just as their families were about to discuss a marriage, his family suffered disaster, cold rain beating against the window.

The nights were long, separation bitter. Her name slipped out in his sleep; he did not need to summon her to mind to find he could not forget her.

Then fate had shown him mercy. He had made his name, and his childhood sweetheart was still his childhood sweetheart, that moonlight still the same moonlight.

Only, after all those turns of fortune, she was the one in distress.

Transferred back to the capital, he had encountered Li Muyao beneath a silk tree, on a stone bridge, worn almost beyond recognition by the torments of her husband’s household.

It was as though all those years of hardship and trial had existed for this moment alone: power in his hands, a twelve-ribbed oilpaper umbrella raised to shelter his beloved from everything.

I knew he had loved Li Muyao for years. When he wanted to bring her into our home, I didn’t object.

What was the point, if objecting would change nothing?

After all, I still harbored a little hope about Shen Shi’an.

My family was well known in Qingzhou. The Xus had been butchers for three generations. The trade had come down to my father, and slaughtering pigs and selling pork had supported my mother and me.

When I was eight or nine, my father finished slaughtering a pig, saw me squatting beside him with a large basin to catch the blood, and finally remembered I was a girl.

A girl probably wouldn’t have the strength to hold a pig down and kill it.

And if she did, she would be rather too formidable. Finding her a husband might prove difficult.

In despair, my father realized that our ancestral trade would probably die with him.

Then, amid his despair, he had another thought. If it was doomed to die out, what did it matter whether he worked until he was too old to continue or stopped that very day?

If it would die out sooner or later, he might as well find another way to make a living now.

So he went into business. First he took to the sea, trading by ship. Once he had saved enough silver, he returned to Qingzhou and opened a restaurant.

By the time the disgraced Shen family arrived in Qingzhou, our Yipinxian was the largest restaurant in the city.

I had grown up trailing broad-shouldered, thick-waisted butchers. Later I had haunted the restaurant and seen any number of useless men drunk out of their wits.

When I saw Shen Shi’an in his blue robe, poised as a pine, it was like seeing an immortal descend to earth.

Even if that blue robe had been washed almost white.

The great Shen household, a family a hundred years old, was so poor then that little remained but its name plaque. Between his studies, Shen Shi’an set up a stall beneath Yipinxian to earn money writing letters for people.

I went to him for a letter every day.

I handed over a piece of silver. When he asked what I wanted written, I smiled and told him it was for my husband.

“My dearest husband, let these words bring my face before you; may opening this letter bring a smile to yours.

“Though we have been married for years, our love is as fresh as ever. I still remember our first meeting beneath the crabapple tree, outside Yipinxian. You wore blue, with a spray of ink-dark bamboo on your shoulder. I fell in love at first sight, wishing I could become that bamboo and sit forever in your embrace.”

My eyes traveled up from the bamboo on his shoulder. I swallowed and went on. “My husband’s lips press thin and red as roses in the second month. The little mole on his nose shines like a star in the night. A glance from his fine eyes is a pool of spring water, rippling on and on, wave after wave, until it reaches my heart and leaves me flooded.”

The more I said, the darker his face grew.

At “flooded,” he finally lost patience. He threw down his fine brush and snapped, “Young lady, have some self-respect.”

I gazed at him, wounded, on the verge of tears.

“Master Shen, what have I said wrong? If anything is unsuitable, perhaps you would polish it for me?”

“You’re clearly talking about… about…”

He shook with anger, which frightened me so badly that I began to cry too.

I dabbed my eyes with a handkerchief and sniffled. “I’m only writing to my husband. How have I offended you? Oh, Master Shen! You’re wearing blue with ink-dark bamboo too, just like my handsome husband. What a coincidence. What a coincidence!

“Master Shen, you’ve already taken my silver. The letter isn’t finished. You mustn’t go back on our agreement.”

After that, he refused my custom.

He might refuse mine, but I was determined to win his.

Yipinxian was Qingzhou’s largest restaurant. The grain merchants and cloth merchants all owed our family a little consideration.

So I took some rice and a length of cloth, balanced them on a carrying pole, and swayed along to knock on Shen Shi’an’s window.

“Master Shen, would you like some rice?”

He said no.

“Some cloth, then?”

He said no.

I smiled. “Buy rice and cloth and get a wife for free. Master Shen, would you like a wife?”

He wouldn’t open his window. A head poked out next door instead.

Erhutou of the Wang family said he’d buy one.

Grinning, I swung my carrying pole at his protruding head. “You want to buy? Well, I’m not selling! Dream on, you bastard!”

By this point you may be thinking I have a foul mouth.

You can blame my father for that.

In my early years he was busy slaughtering pigs with tremendous vigor. Then he was busy opening a restaurant and thinking of nothing but money. By the time he came to his senses and remembered to hire me a tutor, hoping to turn me into a refined young lady, it was too late.

I learned my characters and my compositions, but the years spent holding a basin of pig’s blood were already deep in my bones.

That was why, even after we married, Shen Shi’an had always found me rather distasteful.

While I was running wild pursuing him, my father thought very little of him. The Shens had been banished to Qingzhou. No one knew whom they had offended in high places.

Everyone understood what that meant.

My father understood. His business rivals understood even better.

I was his only daughter. If I married an unreliable man, the Xu family would have no one to carry it on.

And so, one dark and windy night, someone knocked me unconscious. Someone knocked Shen Shi’an unconscious too.

When I woke, my mandarin-duck embroidered undergarment was still hanging from his waist.

No amount of explaining would help.

My virtue was gone, and it had gone with Shen Shi’an.

I pressed my handkerchief to the corners of my eyes.

Well. What a turn of events.

We married afterward. The Shens were too poor even to provide betrothal gifts. Looking at my father’s round face, purple with fury, I could only try to coax him gently.

“Just think what sort of man Shen Shi’an is!

“Beautiful handwriting, a head full of learning, such grace and bearing. A man like that won’t stay obscure forever. Think of it as a wager. Who knows? In twenty years, Yipinxian might have branches all over the capital.”

My wager on Shen Shi’an paid off.

But I never warmed his heart.

Looking back, he hadn’t wanted this marriage. My family hadn’t wanted it. I was the only one who had.

A traveling barber’s carrying pole: heat at one end only.

With a beginning like that, how could we possibly end well?

Shen Shi’an had married me because someone had trapped him. Though I hadn’t been the one to do it, my love for him had been the cause, and our marriage the result.

I had always felt guilty toward him.

All those years, however cold he was, I met him with a smile. Any hurt I felt would pass after a night’s sleep.

I always thought I owed him.

Perhaps if I endured a little longer, it would pass. Perhaps if I waited a little longer, things would improve.

An auntie in the village told me, “Make yourself a man’s habit. Then even if a Sister Lin falls out of the sky, he’ll be the one who can’t leave you, not the other way around.”

That was what I believed. That was how I lived.

But things never went as I hoped. After all those turns, I was still the only one in love, that barber’s pole with heat at just one end.

The day I asked Shen Shi’an for a divorce had begun quietly enough.

I had made a pot of jujube porridge in the little kitchen. Passing his study, I happened to see Li Muyao inside.

She had made him a plate of peach-blossom pastries.

He praised her skill.

In the old days, he recalled, her family had spoiled her so thoroughly she wouldn’t even shell a peanut herself. Now, as a married woman, she had become virtuous and thoughtful.

I overheard a little. Later, as I bathed, another small incident came back to me.

Back then, frustrated in his ambitions and endlessly harassed by Songshan’s deputy magistrate, Shen Shi’an had grown thinner by the day. I found all sorts of ways to climb trees and steal birds’ eggs for him.

I fell and bruised myself all over, simply trying to feed him until he was plump and healthy.

I chatted with the village aunties and collected a bellyful of amusing stories to bring home and make him smile.

Eating the eggs, he frowned at me. “You’ve had an education. Why do you think of nothing but fussing over the stove?” Those village women were coarse and vulgar, he said. I ought to respect myself and see less of them.

Li Muyao and I had both done the same thing: cooked for him.

What does it mean to break someone’s heart?

It isn’t being a white rose whose husband falls for a completely different spray of pomegranate red.

It’s your husband finding a camellia fresh with spring dew.

You are almost alike. You do the same things. Yet he wants her, not you, and makes no secret of his preference.

That is what breaks a heart.

So, without even drying my hair, I went to Shen Shi’an and wrote a divorce agreement in front of him.

The last thing I said to him was, “Shen Shi’an, all these years, I’ve fed you far too well.”