Chapter 2

Mother had been ill all this time, and Father had arranged Xingdi’s quarters. Our old home was a cramped, single-courtyard house, so he had put her on the heated brick bed in the kitchen’s inner room. Whenever he wanted her, he made her prepare the richly decorated study and wait there.

Xingdi seemed delighted with the arrangement. “At my former master’s house, I slept on a plank propped beside the stove. Here I have a whole room to myself. I ought to burn incense and kowtow to Master and Madam.”

Mother looked at her beaming face and burst into tears, startling her.

Mother later told me that in that instant, she understood something. She and Xingdi could not have been more different in temperament or birth. Yet like every woman under heaven, both had the dictates of wifely obedience and patient submission soaked deep into their bones.

Mother erupted.

It was the first time she ever quarreled with Father—the first time she had quarreled with anyone. She called him inhuman for making a woman who had followed him a thousand miles sleep in a kitchen in the summer heat.

In a rage, Father slapped Mother and grabbed for her hair. Xingdi tried to separate them, but could not. Panicking, she lowered her head and rammed him in the stomach.

Father staggered backward, flung out the lofty words, “A good man does not fight with women,” and stormed away.

Mother was left clutching Xingdi and weeping.

“We may not be rich, but we have two spare rooms. I will have the east wing cleaned and papered at once, and put in a few pieces of fine rosewood furniture. You will live there, close to me and the little miss morning and night. And stop calling me Madam. Call me Elder Sister. We shall keep one another company for the rest of our lives.”

Xingdi stared at her, round eyes wide. After a long while, she suddenly covered her face with both hands and wailed.

“Elder Sister! Oh, Elder Sister!”

From that day forward, Father’s wife and concubine lived in harmony, leaving him to enjoy blessings on both sides.

But men are born incapable of enjoying the blessings they possess.

By the time I turned two, Father had grown completely tired of Xingdi, just as he had once tired of Mother. He no longer compared her lush beauty to the famous plump beauty of antiquity. Now he called her a “slab of rutting pork.”

One day, after kicking over the basin of foot-washing water she brought him, he told Mother that other men’s concubines were dainty, refined, and well read. He intended to sell Xingdi and buy another.

Mother cried, “I still have several dozen taels of dowry silver. If you want a new concubine, use that to buy one. Xingdi is my sister. If you mean to sell her, you will have to sell me first!”

Father was not yet brazen enough to sell Mother, so he accepted her proposal.

This time he brought home a coquettish courtesan named Ruyan.

Ruyan was nothing like Mother or Xingdi. She had seen the grand world and had money of her own, saved from selling her favors. Only after offending a powerful patron had she been forced to settle for Father, whom everyone called an “honest man.”

On her first day in the house, she put up her feet and ordered Xingdi to wait on her. Within a month, she had discovered that Mother was soft as cotton and began whispering into Father’s ear each night, urging him to beat her. By the year after her arrival, she no longer showed even me, the young mistress of the house, any respect.

When I was five, her arrogance reached its height. She told Father outright that Mother had been married to him for seven years and laid only one yolkless egg—me. He should repudiate Mother and raise Ruyan to principal wife.

Mother shook with fury. Xingdi lunged at Ruyan, fought her, and tore the corner of her mouth.

Fortunately, Father was not quite fool enough. He berated Ruyan, saying that a whore dreaming of becoming his wife had lost her mind.

Ruyan sobbed with rage. “You heartless beast! Three years of marriage, and the moment you’ve squandered my dowry, you turn your back on me!”

Her accusation was not unfounded. During those years, Father had sat the provincial examination again and failed again. Yet somehow he came into a thousand taels of silver. He bought himself the status of an Imperial Academy student, and our household prospered. We moved into a two-courtyard residence with a garden and a small embroidered tower, where I was supposedly to live once I grew older, never descending until the day I married.

Mother’s dowry had long since been spent. Xingdi had brought none. Father could neither lift a load nor carry one on his shoulder.

The source of that money deserved careful thought.