chapter 1

Song Xidi had a stutter. She was my younger sister.

She was dead.

I hated her because she was the one who had sent me to Yuzhen Convent.

But it was the only way she had known to save me. Otherwise, our father would have sold me to a brothel.

Xidi had not known that Yuzhen Convent was no different from one.

I was an illegitimate child. My father had gotten a maid in his household pregnant.

It was a disgrace, but my grandmother could not bear to cast away the baby in the maid’s belly. She promised the woman money if she carried it to term.

And so I was born—a girl.

The maid received only two taels of silver.

The agreement had been that a boy would stay while a girl would go with her mother. The maid was shrewd. That very night, she abandoned me, still wailing for milk, and fled back to the countryside.

Grandmother rolled her eyes, called me a curse, and dumped me in the kitchen for Nanny Zhang to raise.

Nanny Zhang had no children and hoped someone might care for her in old age. She treated me well enough.

When I was ten, she married. The next year she gave birth to a son, and she no longer wanted to keep me.

“Who has money to waste feeding a worthless girl for free? Master, have pity on me. I have a boy at home who’ll need schooling. Every copper has to be split in half!”

My father put me under Madam Wang.

She was the woman he had married later, the daughter of a silk merchant. She had never known her husband had an illegitimate daughter.

I knelt, kowtowed, and called her First Madam.

A little girl stood beside her, watching me timidly. That girl was Song Xidi.

Xidi’s stutter made listening to her exhausting. She might have to turn a sentence over three or four times before she could get it out.

If she wanted to say, “I want to eat,” and managed not to repeat the first few words, she would become trapped on “want,” forcing it out seven or eight times before she could finally reach “eat.”

Whenever that happened, Madam Wang’s teeth clenched with fury. She would pinch the flesh on Xidi’s arm and twist it twice around, or lash her calves with a fresh willow switch until the room filled with its sharp swish.

“You plague-ridden little fool! How did I ever give birth to something as stupid as you? You can’t even speak properly. What use will you be when you’re grown? No respectable family will take you. You might as well die now and get out of my sight!”

Madam Wang did not like Xidi.

No one in that household did.

So Xidi was always crying.

I often woke in the middle of the night to see her biting down on the corner of her quilt, choking the sobs back in her throat. They came in broken, gurgling spurts, as if she might stop breathing.

By morning, though, she would look just as she always did: eyes lowered, meek and resigned.

It was not her fault. That was how every woman survived.

When I was fourteen, Madam Wang coaxed the truth out of Nanny Zhang.

I was not a bought servant. I was Father’s illegitimate daughter.

Nanny Zhang pitied Madam Wang.

“Madam, they’ve kept you in the dark! You’ve fed another woman’s daughter for four whole years!”

Ever since Nanny Zhang had borne a son, she had resented me bitterly. Every grain of rice that went into my stomach was a grain that might have been saved for her Guangzong.

The Song family owned a rice shop. They refused to acknowledge me, but they would hardly let me starve.

Nanny Zhang kept urging Madam Wang, “Send her away now. If she stays until marriage, you’ll have to provide a dowry. What about the young master?”

Madam Wang went before my father, weeping and threatening to kill herself.

“All these years I’ve been married to you, and I never knew you had a bastard daughter. Do you mean to shame me to death? I’ve borne and raised your children. What do you take me for?”

I was only a daughter—an illegitimate daughter whose existence would cost him face.

“We may as well sell her and buy Tianbao more books,” she said.

My father agreed.

He had always been weak-willed. My grandmother had made every decision for him while she lived; after she died, he relied on Madam Wang.

All he cared about was not being troubled.

Xidi rushed out.

For once, she did not stutter.

“Don’t sell her, don’t sell her! Send her to Yuzhen Convent. Let her pray for Tianbao!”

Madam Wang glared impatiently and twisted Xidi’s ear until it looked wrung like a rag.

“Wretched girl. Who asked you?”

Tears filled Xidi’s eyes as she pleaded, “Mother, earn some merit for Brother.”

However distant or uncertain the promise, anything that might benefit her son had to be considered. Madam Wang relented and agreed to send me to Yuzhen Convent.

Xidi let out a long breath. “It’s all right now,” she told me.

Xidi did not know the convent was filthier than any brothel.

Every night, carriages came to the back gate and carried girls to doors selected in advance.

How were we chosen?

The Prioress sent clients portraits and ages. A man put down a deposit for whichever girl he wanted, and that evening she was delivered to his room.

The Prioress gave me the name Song Wenxi.

She looked gentle and benevolent, like a living Guanyin.

“You’re a person, not some stray cat or dog. How can you have no name?”

I thought she was kind. But her kindness was reserved for obedient girls.

Caiyue was not obedient.

Her husband’s family had sent her there after his death. She had been willing to remain a widow for life, eating vegetarian meals and praying for his soul. She had never imagined Yuzhen Convent was a secret den of prostitution.

She tried to report it to the authorities.

First, a client beat her until she coughed blood. Then the guards dragged her back and hung her upside down from a tree. After an hour, blood ran from her mouth and nose.

The Prioress asked if she would submit.

Caiyue spat blood in her face. “Never. Not even in death!”

At Yuzhen Convent, dying was easier than living.

“She could have fetched a fine price,” the Prioress told us regretfully.

Yuzhen Convent served only dignitaries. A man without money or power could not even cross its threshold.

They cut Caiyue down and casually sold her to the Alley, the lowest and filthiest kind of brothel. Anyone could go there—ruffians, drifters, gangsters. A coin was all it took to lift a woman’s skirt.

For three nights, I dreamed of blood spilling from Caiyue’s mouth and nose.

Yan Gui, who shared my room, said, “If only she’d had a son. A son would have given her standing, and she never would have come here.”

Yan Gui had arrived a year before me, fleeing a marriage arranged by her family. Now she thought marriage would have been better.

“Accept your fate,” she advised me.

I began to hate Xidi. Without her, I would never have come to Yuzhen Convent.

Then again, if not the convent, Madam Wang would merely have sold me somewhere else.

The ending would probably have been the same.

Everyone despised daughters, yet they still put on a show of preparing dowries for them. Otherwise, neighbors would point at their backs and call them unfit parents.

Somewhere deep inside, perhaps they knew they were guilty.