A Flower’s Shade Read online

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  The Background

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Epilogue

  From the bridge, you enjoy the view.

  Overhead, someone enjoys the view—looking at you.

  Bright is the moon adorning your window,

  you are the adornment of another's dream.

  "Fragment" (1933) by Bian Zhilin (1910-2000)

  The Background

  A small town in the Yangtze River region in the 1920s is the town of this story. There are no more towns like it anymore, they have become a thing of the past, a part of history. But the human imagination, like an arrow, can pierce the thin tissue of time, bringing a lost era back to life, reversing the flow of passing moments, reviving old dreams. In the end, the little Yangtze town emerges once again before our mind's eye.

  A major river passed through the town, making a bend at the liveliest quarter, and flowing on and on towards the distant railroad lines. It was a time when the new was supplanting the old, when both new ways of thinking and ancient forces were simultaneously weak and unimaginably powerful. The ancient forces rolled onward with the immense strength of habit, while the new ways of thinking were surging up everywhere, like sprouts coming out of the ground after a spring rain. The new wave of thinking had gradually come into its own in the little town, and primary and middle schools according to the new model had emerged and were already producing the first generation of "new people." As warlords wrangled in the north, ruthlessly jockeying for territory, the little town seemed entirely unaffected. Small vessels, plying their way back and forth on the great river, brought exaggerated tales of the world outside. The traditional isolation of many years was broken, and while the older people yearned for a bygone era, they looked on anxiously as the younger generation adopted new ways of life and grew increasingly restless. The first regular newspaper appeared in the little town, carrying frequent reports of both outside and local news. The word "new" was in fashion, and its progress into the human heart was unstoppable.

  For many years, whatever was going on in the Zhen Estate was the most contentious topic for the people of the little town, and the delectable subject of endless talk. Although the glory days of the Zhen family lay in the past, and their Estate was in decline, they were still that southern town's great emblem of prosperity, they were still the local idea of paradise. Zhen Estate represented unending money, the supply of beautiful women beyond any possibility of satiation, the acme of the endeavors of the human male.

  Future scholars of architecture would doubtless have esteemed, even admired, the way the forefathers of the Zhen family had laid out their Estate. The entire Estate faced north, exactly according to China's well-known feng shui geomantic principles. The northward orientation indicated that the builder of the Estate must have been a great merchant. The Zhens had always been in commerce, though in the grandfather's generation, they had bought their way into some scholarly renown. In the Han Dynasty text The Art of Planning Residences, it is written: "Merchant houses must not face south." And then: "For merchant gold, the south is fire." Since fire was inauspicious for gold, and the north represented water, gold and water represented an auspicious combination, and thus the Estate's main gate had to be north-facing.

  The Zhen Estate was a complex laid out symmetrically along two lines, based on the classical southern-style courtyard model, forming several closed clusters of buildings. On each principal line one could move southward from one main hall into the next. The spaces between each building were mostly closed off into walled courtyards, creating a picturesque patchwork which also resolved the problems of light and air flow in the most agreeable fashion. A deep passage divided the two adjacent lines. The passage had been designed in order to allow women and servants to move easily in and out, while also serving as a very effective fire-stop.

  On account of the dampness of the southern climate, in the rainy season the people of the little town would grow concerned about the ubiquitous problem of mold. On the question of how to prevent mold, the methods of the Zhen family met with widespread acclaim. Unusually, the surface of the interior floors was made up of even tiles. Underneath the tiles were flowerpots or jars, creating a small gap between the floor and the ground. This use of tiling not only proved effective against dampness, it also had the effect of making the floors warm in winter and cool in the summer. Outdoors, the ground was paved in flagstones or with neat, even tiles, and in some places various patterns were made in mosaics of cobblestone and ceramic shards.

  As the curtain rises on our story, the Zhen Estate is in a state of thorough decline. The luxury of yesteryear is a shadow of its former self, and the red paint on the doors and window frames is peeling, with every nook and cranny bearing testament to neglect. Unidentifiable weeds had sprung up in the cracks between the stones, and thick moss flourished in the damper places. But a whiff of licentiousness was still in the air, and the rouges and powders of lascivious women seemed to have worked their way into the dampness of that special southern climate. Many of the empty rooms were leaky.

  The eminence of the Zhens in this little town had diminished, and yet the colorful legend of the Zhens, father and son, continued to circulate widely in embellished form. It was the legend of a great Estate, brimful of beauties, marked by night after night of mad revelry. It is a bizarre legend, a flighty, aimless story: a gaudy butterfly of a tale. The way people imagined it, the Zhens were like characters in forbidden, erotic novels, leading lives of debauchery and dissipation, imbibing the ancient aphrodisiacs their ancestors had passed down to them, increasing their pleasure with arcane devices that would soon be lost to human knowledge, steeping themselves in their final ecstasies.

  The son and heir to the Zhen family, Naixiang, had been renowned as a truly lecherous fiend. Ten years earlier, having just indulged his opium addiction, he had become mysteriously paralyzed after a session of lovemaking. Now he was all but dead—little more than a breathing corpse. As for the cause of his paralysis, many peculiar theories circulated. "A maiden of sixteen may be feeble in flesh, but she carries a weapon which can behead many a fool. Though you may not see a man's head roll, secretly he withers from the marrow of his bones out." The people firmly believed that lust was the greatest of sins, and that Naixiang's fate was the inevitable result of an excess of lust. And they all believed just as firmly that one day the same fate awaited his father.

  It was a day in early spring, when the sky was somber and the air so humid it seemed you could wring the water out of it. A great rainstorm was brewing, and people on the streets were hurrying home. A projectionist was riding in a boat towards the town, carrying his small projector with him. Posters had been hung days earlier, and someone had been sent to meet him, and was waiting at the pier. Just as the projectionist got out of the boat, the rain began to pour down with a vengeance: the projectionist, worried that his expensive projector and the reels would get wet in the rain, climbed back aboard, looking very displeased. The man who had been sent to meet him followed him onto the boat, apologizing profusely, and kept on fiddling with his belongings in an attempt to give the projectionist cigarettes, as though he were personally responsible for the sudden downpour. The projectionist accepted the Old Knife cigarettes, held them up to his nose and sniffed, but when he discovered that they already had a whiff of mold about them, he threw them away without a sign of hesitation, took a newly-opened packet of Three Cannons cigarettes out of his coat, and lit one up without a thought for anyone else. The rain poured down without respite, and the projectionist was annoyed and distracted. In the end, he had to leave the projector and the reels on
the boat, and the man sent to meet him held an umbrella open to shield him, as he hastened off to a little inn not far from the pier.

  The downpour continued for several days, and the man was constantly at the projectionist's service, treating him like a person of great consequence. In only a few days, the projectionist had visited all the local eateries, and on three consecutive days patronized the house of pleasure. That was where he spent all of the money he had brought with him, and finally he was even compelled to leave his gold watch behind as security. His reckless, spendthrift ways brought to mind the revelries of Naixiang in the house of pleasure over ten years before. People could remember that on the occasion of Naixiang's birthday practically all of the girls in the brothel had received his special attentions, and all of the servants had been given red envelopes. Ten years on, the projectionist seemed to have been cast from the same mold. Naixiang had in his day visited several women that night without the drooping of his precious spear, but the projectionist had been making waves with the girl called Jonquille. Without the slightest compunction, he passed his own gonorrhea onto her. The little town paid a cruel price for the warm reception it had given the projectionist, for now the clap was being passed around as habitually as the common cold. The ladies of pleasure gave it to their customers, and the customers passed it on to their wives and concubines, and before long the alleys of the little town were covered with advertisements for venereal treatments.

  The rain finally stopped and the projectionist's wooden trunks with the projector and the reels were carried to the school's sports ground. These great wooden trunks were fitted with corners of iron sheeting, which lent them an even bulkier look. Work began in the morning and carried on until it was nearly dark, under the instructions of the anxious projectionist. When everything was settled, the black masses of people gathered on the grounds, craning their necks to see, boring into the darkness with their staring eyes, waiting for the miraculous images to appear on the silver screen. Then, what no one had dared to believe occurred, and when they saw the shapes of people on the screen, moving about like real human beings, they could not suppress their astonished cries. More than a few curious people even found their way behind the screen, trying to figure out if there was someone back there intent on pulling their leg.

  An indescribable hubbub ensued. Certain precautions had been taken beforehand, but once the tumult actually began, the handful of people who were supposed to maintain order were entirely incapable of controlling the situation. People weren't at all concerned with what was going on up on the screen, and were instead nattering contentiously about how all this could be, arguing and debating and refusing to compromise. When the pirate on the screen threw himself at the damsel in distress, the entire audience erupted in an indiscriminate fistfight. With mud-covered shoes and a fedora from which the brim had been all but torn off, having been flung through the air and chucked back at him, the projectionist was flustered by the sudden uproar and in his rush to change the reels mixed up the order. Just as the story was reaching the halfway point, the happy ending prematurely appeared on the screen.

  On the following day, as everyone rushed to have their morning tea at the tea house, or played drinking games around their banquet tables, or washed their rice and cleaned their vegetables by the well, or bathed in the large pool of the little town's only bathhouse, all conversation revolved around the movie of the preceding day. Yesterday's unfinished arguments were taken up again with renewed acrimony. Although a scientific explanation had already made the rounds, older people still asseverated that these so-called electric shadows, these moving pictures, were merely a question of many tiny people concealed in the projector. These tiny people were made of dough—but no one could quite explain how the tiny dough people moved about. In their opinion, the projectionist contemptuous ways could be traced back to the fact that, like a magician, he knew the secret of making the tiny people move about.

  Once the projectionist and his wooden chests departed from the small town, the excitement surrounding the movie showing rapidly subsided. Two days after his departure, events at the Zhen Estate once again drew general attention. On the morning of that day, at approximately nine o'clock, the master of the house, having partaken excessively of his medicine, summoned Peach Blossom. Since he hadn't fully enjoyed the lovemaking the night before, she was to mount him again before getting out of bed. In theory, Peach Blossom was his own son Naixiang's concubine, but since his son was paralyzed, she and the master had come to an understanding. In the groaning and tussle, the master had been overcome by a spasm. As her climax came like water welling up out of the ground, Peach Blossom noticed, out of the corner of her own half-closed eyes, that the master's eyeballs had rolled back entirely into his head.

  Instantly, the sudden death of the master of Zhen Estate became the talk of the small town. Since the master's only son, Naixiang, was an invalid and because the master had departed so abruptly, the family's vast wealth and property passed in its entirety to the master's only daughter, Miss Yu. Miss Yu was an old maid, and at one time before the old master's death the question of her marriage had at one time drawn the entire town's attention. When the master died, the first thing everyone thought of—the immediate question on everybody's mind—was the question of Miss Yu's marriage.

  Chapter One

  1

  The master drew his final breath at the very moment the sun had risen above the Mystery Chambers. At the time his son Naixiang was sitting in his wooden wheelchair, being wheeled about the Estate grounds, just as the old master had stipulated long ago. In the ten years since his accident, Naixiang had been able neither to move nor to speak, and lived the life of a vegetable. He was afflicted by serious insomnia, and the long nights always seemed to him like the end of the world. The expression on his face was always so rigid, so stiff and ugly. He lingered on like a living corpse, seated in his custom-made wooden wheelchair, at the mercy of anyone, like a specter. Every day after breakfast, the first thing to happen was invariably that his concubine Ai'ai would take his wheelchair out to go wheeling aimlessly about the great Estate.

  They walked down a long passage, Naixiang in his wheelchair, Ai'ai pushing, the wheelchair grating on the ears as it squeaked along. Naixiang wore a thick fur coat and a fur hat, the outfit of any rich young dandy. His expression was something between stiff and ridiculous, his gaze stupid and fixed directly in front of him. The squeaking broke the stillness of the empty Estate. Ai'ai pushed the wheelchair to the end of the passage, turned around, and began to walk slowly back the other way.

  Ever since Naixiang's paralysis, Ai'ai had always been there to push his wheelchair. She resembled a little porcelain doll, young and beautiful, with faint sorrow buried in the depths of her eyes. In fact, among Naixiang's many wives and concubines, Ai'ai was the one of least consequence. She was the second of four daughters, and twelve years earlier her father had brought her for the first time to the Zhen Estate. The purpose of her visit had been to go see her mother, who was a servant to the family. Her mother, Mrs. Wu, had been Miss Yu's wet nurse, and since the old master doted on his only daughter, Mrs. Wu had been kept on as Miss Yu's private maid. When Ai'ai had come to the Estate with her father, her mother had drawn a jade bracelet over the girl's hand and sent her to go play in the garden while she talked something over with Ai'ai's father.

  It was in the garden that Naixiang had caught sight of her. Just then it was the season for apple blossoms, and Ai'ai, who had grown up in the village, was stunned by the sight of the garden brimming with gorgeous blooms. It was like an ocean of flowers, and the earth was covered in a layer of crimson petals. With a child's mischievousness, Ai'ai had broken off twigs from the apple tree, one after another, carefully fashioning a crown of flowers out of them. As she was preparing to set the crown upon her head, she caught sight of a fashionably dressed man, attended by a number of women behind him, standing at no great distance, looking at her with exhilaration. One of the women standing behind him
had screeched at her in fury, "Filthy little girl, who asked you to come in here, making trouble?"

  Ai'ai stood motionlessly and helpless, stunned and frightened, frozen foolishly on the spot, her heart pattering erratically. She knew she was in the wrong, because her mother had always impressed upon her that she was allowed to touch nothing in the Estate. Naixiang, in his fashionable suit, neared her, took the crown of blossoms from her hands, and solemnly placed it upon her head. Ai'ai stood there, petrified, and let it be done to her. Naixiang took a step back, looked her up and down, removed the crown of blossoms, re-positioned it and crowned her with it once again. Then he smiled in satisfaction.

  "These flowers suit you perfectly." he told her, gravely.

  The women standing behind him fumed. Ai'ai didn't herself know why, but in any event she found herself blushing. She turned and fled. Naixiang's smile had left a deep impression on Ai'ai, who was feeling her first awakening. That evening, Ai'ai's parents were summoned by Naixiang. No sooner had they entered the room than they saw two high stacks of silver coins on the bed. Ai'ai's mother Mrs. Wu understood instantly what was afoot, and didn't even wait for Naixiang, sitting in the rosewood chair, to finish what he had to say before she began to stammer that her daughter was still too young.

  Naixiang laughed and said, "Too young? Not at all!"

  The high piles of silver coins were dazzling. Ai'ai's father had come to the Estate on an errand, namely to get some cash from his wife to fix the leaks in their old house, and had brought his daughter along. But those silver coins were enough to build a few new houses. "Young master, it can't be done, really it can't." Ai'ai's father was rambling incoherently, but whether this was on account of his fondness for the money or for his daughter was unclear, "Naturally, it honors her greatly that you've taken a fancy to this daughter of ours, and we're very honored also, but she really is still too young, I'm afraid it's all a good deal more than she deserves."