Chapter 1

I was a beautiful child. Auntie Wang said no girl for ten villages around had features as fine as mine. That was why, when a broker from the capital came buying people, I fetched a full two jin of millet—enough, watered down into gruel, to keep my family alive for a month.

Everyone said Father had raised a daughter worth the trouble. In a famine, even half-grown boys found no buyers, yet I had earned food for my parents.

Father smiled as he hugged the grain sack. Mother frowned over the slight swell of her belly. She had become pregnant when none of us knew whether we would see tomorrow. This pregnancy felt different from the ones that had given her me and my two younger sisters: her belly was pointed, and she craved sour things. Suspecting a son, Father would not let her end it.

But living mouths had to be fed, and hers counted as two. She lay awake hungry every night. Bark and leaves had been stripped from every tree for ten li, even the dried moss scraped from the ditches. Father had nowhere else to turn but me.

When my red thumbprint marked the contract, his brow eased. Holding the grain in one arm, he reached to touch my forehead with the other. I dodged him. My throat felt packed with the clay starving people ate to fill their stomachs. I could neither offer obedient understanding nor spit out words of hatred.

In such times, selling a daughter seemed the only road left. The Wangs, the Zhangs, and the Lis next door had all done it. Only the Songs had not. Song Que’er’s pedantic scholar father had declared that his household would starve before committing so wicked a crime as selling a child.

Then Song Que’er fell down a slope while gathering wild greens. The following night, the smell of meat drifted from the Song courtyard.

Where had it come from? No one knew.

I turned to leave, but Mother caught my sleeve, her eyes swollen red. “A-Xi, be good when you get there. The capital is full of rich people. You’ll have food. Don’t blame us.”

Looking at her skeletal frame and pregnant belly, I could not bring myself to answer cruelly. I glanced at my two little sisters. “When the millet is gone, sell them too. Six jin will carry you to spring.”

Spring meant hope. Hope meant they might live.

I freed my sleeve and climbed into the cart. Before the curtain fell, someone sprang in after me.

“I’m coming with you!”

It was Zhao Si, the Zhao boy next door. His mother had died young, his father remarried, and no one in the village cared what became of the wild child. After Song Que’er’s death, I had warned him to hide in his cellar and brought him half a bowl of wild-herb broth every three days—food saved from between my own teeth. I had never expected repayment. Yet here he was.

The cart held daughters sold by their families. He was the only boy, conspicuous as a weed in a rice field.

The broker eyed him. “What are you doing here, you brat?”

“Where A-Xi goes, I go.”

Calculation flashed in her eyes. “You haven’t signed a bond. Without one, you cannot come.”

Young as I was, I knew a bond must not be signed lightly. Once his name was on it, the rest of his life would belong to someone else. The cart had not yet moved. I tried to shove him out. “Who asked you to follow me? Get down!”

He set his jaw like a mule. “Scholar Song said a drop of kindness must be repaid with a gushing spring. I owe you.”

I had not eaten in two days and could not budge him. The broker tossed him a contract.

“Press your thumb here, and you may—”

Before she finished, Zhao Si had marked it. Grinning, he said, “Granny, I don’t need a sale price. Just give me something to eat.”

She snorted, returned with a scoop of millet, and scattered it on the cart floor as if feeding chickens. The girls scrambled. Starvation left no room for cleanliness; everyone grabbed what she could and stuffed it into her mouth. Most of my handful was grit.

Zhao Si asked what I was thinking. I sifted the millet and sighed. One could calculate the future, but never the human heart. Two jin had become one. Father—three daughters would not carry you to spring after all.

The cart jolted north until it reached the capital. Before displaying us, the broker fed us a full meal to improve our looks. I had been hungry too long and ate without restraint. The moment I entered Yichun House, before anyone could inspect me, I vomited everything onto the floor.

A beautiful woman covered her nose with a handkerchief. “Does the child have some hidden illness? Take her away. Don’t bring every stray thing through my door.”

The broker simpered. “Madam Yu, surely you jest. I chose only the prettiest girls. How could anything be wrong?” She raised a hand at me. “Wretched girl! You dare disgrace me before an honored customer?”

Zhao Si blocked the blow. “Don’t hit A-Xi!”

Madam Yu arched a brow and laughed. “I did not know your merchandise came with a guard.”

“No guard. Just a little dog that insisted on following.” The broker tugged me forward. “But look at this girl’s brows, eyes, figure, and skin. Born to be the leading courtesan—born to snare men.”

She reached to strip off my coarse clothes. Madam Yu frowned. “Enough. Even the cheapest girl in my house is not undressed in public. Do you think you’re selling livestock?”

She turned to Zhao Si. “If I buy her, you’ll enter with her?”

“Yes.”

Her gaze slid from his face to his groin. Pleasure houses sold handsome young men as well as women. “Then you know you must sell something too. She will sell her body. What will you sell?”

Zhao Si considered. “My strength.”

Madam Yu stared, then burst out laughing. She tossed the broker a filigreed silk purse containing exactly fifty taels—thirty for me, twenty for him. It was funny: villagers prized sons and sold daughters, never knowing that out here, the absence of three ounces of flesh made a girl more valuable.

The broker hustled the others away. The door shut out the market’s roar, leaving only music and laughter.

“Come,” Madam Yu called.

I followed. Through the narrowing crack of the sandalwood door, I glimpsed the bright life that might have been mine. Then I turned away and entered the cramped rear courtyard.

I ceased to be my mother’s daughter and became the madam’s girl.

That year, I was eight.