Chapter 1
The rainy season was settling over Suzhou when Ah Ping came running off the boat, the marriage contract tucked inside his clothes.
“What a downpour! Miss, what are you doing out here yourself?”
He hurried toward me with his arms wrapped around himself. I shifted my umbrella over his thin shoulders and raised my voice against the wind and rain.
“I couldn’t wait! Where’s the contract? What did he say?”
Ah Ping was young, and every thought showed on his face. His expression was miserable.
He glanced at me twice, plainly afraid to speak.
My heart sank.
“…He doesn’t care, does he?”
Looking wretched, Ah Ping nodded. “He’d just come back from visiting someone when I arrived. That Miss Meng who married into a family in the capital…”
“He glanced at the contract and didn’t object. He even said he’d be back on the sixth to drink at the wedding feast!”
Rain slanted through the air, soaking my summer clothes.
After so many days of this tiresome rain, even my eyes seemed misted over.
Yang Bufan did not care whether the marriage contract was a sham. He did not care that I had deliberately replaced his name with his cousin’s.
All my life, nothing I did had ever made him take me to heart.
I understood now.
I should have understood long ago.
Yang Bufan was careless about everything. That was how I used to comfort myself.
According to Ah Ping, he was still stringing jasmine for Miss Meng.
It was fiddly work.
Before she married, when she was still a girl in Suzhou, Miss Meng had taught us how.
In the early summer, people south of the Yangtze liked to offer flowers to the gods. This was girls’ work: holding the needle with the greatest care so it would not split the fragile buds. A garland offered to Guanyin had to be flawless.
Yang Bufan was better at it than I was.
The same muddlehead who could get so distracted over a meal that he dropped and broke his bowl could thread one perfect string of jasmine after another. He would dangle them proudly in front of me.
All I had before me was a mess of torn petals. He would pull faces and laugh.
So I flung the flowers in his face, thoroughly discouraged.
Miss Meng laughed at our childishness and patted us each on the head.
She scolded Yang Bufan. “You’re older than Ah Lin. You ought to teach her and look after her, not bully her.”
Then she teased me. “Eat plenty and grow up quickly, Ah Lin. When you’re big enough, marry him and make him string jasmine for you all your life.”
Yang Bufan’s face fell at once.
“I’m not marrying that little shrimp!”
I puffed out my cheeks, folded my short little arms, and turned away in a huff.
“Well, I’m not marrying a muddlehead like you!”
Back then, the courtyard walls of our three houses stood side by side. Miss Meng was four years older than Yang Bufan, gentle and sensible. Whenever the grown-ups were busy with their businesses, they left us two little ones in her care.
She must have settled countless “cases” of quarrelling children like that.
She was so good to us.
Like a mother, like a sister, like the gently rocking water of Suzhou’s rivers, she held everything Yang Bufan and I understood as beautiful.
Even the prickliest person softened before her tender smile.
Her goodness won her a fine marriage, into a powerful, distinguished household in the distant capital.
Yang Bufan did not come to see her off on her wedding day.
That evening, I returned from the landing and slipped into his room. He had fallen asleep with his head on a table strewn with jasmine petals he had torn to pieces. Tear tracks marked the corners of his eyes.
That year, Miss Meng was nineteen and Yang Bufan fifteen.
He had fallen in love for the first time. I was still a foolish child who thought he was crying because he could no longer string the jasmine properly. After all, it was the only thing he could do perfectly.
Wanting to cheer him up, I spent all night working with the needle. I pricked my fingers red, but at last I made my best string of jasmine yet.
As I had when we were little, I climbed onto the courtyard wall to give him a fright, hiding my treasure with an air of mystery.
“Yang Bufan, guess what I’ve got in my hand!”
He turned the pages of his book without enthusiasm.
“What else would it be? A lotus flower, a seedpod, some funny rock, a stinking toad… Go away. You’re a silly little girl who never grows up. Don’t distract me from passing the imperial examinations.”
Back then, I did not understand what success in those examinations meant. I only knew that however many people came and went, Yang Bufan would always be beside me.
With him, I could go on playing childish games forever.
But Yang Bufan did not want to play anymore. He was growing up. He wanted to pass the examinations. He wanted to go to the capital.
Someone had gone away.
And she had taken a boy’s first love with her.
After that, he could never string the jasmine properly again. Everything perfect became flawed: summer was unbearable, pastries had lost their appeal, and…
He was tired of looking at Lu Ah Lin of Suzhou too.
…
Even now.
Miss Meng’s daughter was two years old.
He still had not let go.