"The second level," Kai Jing continued, "is Magnificent." We looked together at another painting, of several stalks of bamboo. "This one goes beyond skill," he said. "Its beauty is unique. And yet it is simpler, with less emphasis on the stalk and more on the leaves. It conveys both strength and solitude. The lesser painter would be able to capture one quality but not the other."
I acted as big sister to this same Little Ding without legs, and Little Ding was big sister to a younger girl named Little Jung who had only one hand. Everyone had a relationship like that, being responsible to someone else, just like in a family. The big and small girls shared the same living quarters, three rooms of twenty girls each, three rows of beds in each room. The first row was for the youngest girls, the second row was for the in-between girls, and the third row was for the oldest girls. In this way, Little Dings bed was below mine, and Little Jungs was below Little Dings, everyone positioned by her level of responsibility and respect.
A few days later, the students and I took the banners to the fair. Kai Jing accompanied me, walking alongside, talking quietly. He held a little book of brush paintings done on mulberry paper. On the cover it said: The Four Manifestations of Beauty. "Would you like to know whats inside?" he asked. I nodded. Anyone who overheard us would have thought we were speaking of school lessons. But really, he was speaking of love.
"Mother is well, but she complains that she is so busy her fingertips are always black. They are still working hard to replenish the inksticks lost in the fire. And Father and our uncles had to rebuild the shop in Peking. They borrowed the money and lumber from Chang the coffinmaker, who now owns most of the business. They received part of the business when I married Chang Fu Nan, the fourth son, the boy you were supposed to marry.
"Eat until full, but do not hoard," I read.
Kai Jing, who was a geologist, was actually a very good calligrapher, especially for someone whose right side had been weakened by polio when he was a child. Lucky for him, when he fell ill, the family spent a great deal of money, their entire savings, to hire the best Western and Chinese doctors. As a result, Kai Jing recovered with only a small limp and a drooped shoulder. The missionaries later helped him get a scholarship at the famous university in Peking where he studied to become a geologist. After his mother died, he returned home to take care of his father and work with the scientists in the quarry.
During chapel, Miss Towler always told us that we had a choice to become Christians or not. No one would ever force us to believe in Jesus, she said. Our belief had to be genuine and sincere. But Sister Yu, who had come to the orphanage when she was seven, often reminded us of her old fate. She had been forced to beg as a child, and if she did not collect enough coins, she was given nothing but curses to eat. One day when she protested she was hungry, her sisters husband threw her away like a piece of garbage. In this school, she said, we could eat as much as we wanted. We never had to worry that someone would kick us out. We could choose what we wanted to believe. However, she added, any student who did not choose to believe in Jesus was a corpse-eating maggot, and when this unbeliever died, she would tumble into the underworld, where her body would be pierced by a bayonet, roasted like a duck, and forced to suffer all kinds of tortures that were worse than what was happening in Manchuria.
"How could beauty be more than divine?" I murmured, knowing I would soon learn the answer.
My next-favorite job was tutoring the other students. Sometimes I taught painting. I showed the younger students how to use the brush to make cat ears, tails, and whiskers. I painted horses and cranes, monkeys, and even a hippopotamus. I also helped the students improve their calligraphy and their minds. I recalled for them what Precious Auntie had taught me about writing characters, how a person must think about her intentions, how her chi flowed from her body into her arm, through the brush, and into the stroke. Every stroke had meaning, and since every word had many strokes, it also had many meanings.
That week Sister Yu did not criticize me. Instead I received an award for Remarkable Sanitation, two hours free to do anything I wanted, as long as it was not evil. In that crowded place, there was no room to be alone. So that was what I chose to do with my prize. For a long time, I had not reread the pages Precious Auntie had written to me before she died. I had resisted because I knew I would cry if I saw those pages again, and then Sister Yu would scold me for allowing self-pity in front of Little Ding and the other younger girls. On a Sunday afternoon, I found an abandoned storeroom, smelling of must and filled with small statutes. I sat on the floor against one wall near a window. I unfolded the blue cloth that held the pages. And for the first time I saw that Precious Auntie had sewn a little pocket into the cloth.
"The fourth level," Kai Jing said, "is greater than this, and it is within each mortals nature to find it. We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure. It is what innocent children have. It is what old masters regain once they have lost their minds and become children again."
Later I learned I had been welcomed so thatI could be both student and tutor. There were only four teachers, former students of the school, who now lived in one of the thirty-six rooms and buildings in the compound. Teacher Pan taught the older girls. I was his helper. When he had been a student fifty years before, the school was for boys only. Teacher Wang taught the younger girls, and her widowed sister—we called her Mother Wang—took care of the babies in the nursery, as did older girls she assigned as helpers. Then there was Sister Yu, a tiny woman with a bony hunched back, a hard hand, and a sharp voice. She was in charge of Cleanliness, Neatness, and Proper Behavior. Besides scheduling our baths and our tasks for the week, she liked to boss around the cook and his wife.
"Can you read that, can you?" one of them asked me, pointing to a sign in Chinese.
We can study, we can learn,
The orphanage was an abandoned monastery near Dragon Bone Hill, a hard climb up a zigzag road from the railway station. To spare the donkey, Mr. Wei made me walk the last kilometer. When he let me off and said good-bye, that was the start of my new life.
Suddenly I wanted to find that beggar girl. She could talk to Precious Auntie for me. She could tell me where she was. Was she wandering in the End of the World or was she stuck in the vinegar jar? And what about the curse? Would it find me soon? If I died this moment, who would miss me in this world? Who would welcome me in the next?
After we finished with those statues, there were no more idols to be changed to angels. By then, I too had changed, from tutor to teacher, from lonely girl to one who was in love with Teacher Pans son.
As I stepped over the threshold, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Dead bodies in shrouds, twenty or thirty. They stood in the middle of the hall, along the sides, some tall, some short. Immediately, I thought they were the Returning Dead. Precious Auntie had once told me that in her childhood some families would hire a priest to put a dead body under a spell and make it walk back to its ancestral home. The priest led them only at night, she said, so the dead wouldnt meet any living people they could possess. By day, they rested in temples. She didnt believe the story herself until she heard a priest banging a wooden bell late at night. And rather than run away like the other villagers, she hid behind a wall to watch. Kwak, kwak, and then she saw them, six of them, like giant maggots, leaping forward ten feet into the air. What I saw I cant say for certain, Precious Auntie told me. All I know is that for a long time afterward, I was not the same girl.
"Teacher said he is not a good influence. We should not believe in the old gods, only Christian ones."
We can work, we can earn,
"My dearest sister, I apologize for not writing sooner. Not one day has passed that I dont think of you. But I could not write. Mr. Wei would not tell me where he had taken you. Neither would Mother. I finally heard in the market last week that the quarries at Dragon Blue Hill were becoming busy again, and that the American and Chinese scientists were living in the old monastery, along with the students of the orphanage. The next time I saw First Brothers Wife, I said, I wonder if LuLing has met the scientists, since she lives so close to them. And she answered, I was wondering the same. So then I knew.
Whenever special visitors came by the school, Miss Grutoff had us perform a skit and Miss Towler played piano music, very dramatic to hear, like the kind in silent movies. One group of girls held up signs that were connected to Old Fate: opium, slaves, the buying of charms. They stumbled around on bound feet and fell down helpless. Then the New Destiny girls arrived as doctors. They cured the opium smokers. They unbound the feet of the fated ones and picked up brooms to sweep away the useless charms. In the end, they thanked God and bowed to the special guests, the foreign visitors to China, thanking them as well for helping so many girls overcome bad fate and move forward with their New Destiny. In this way, we raised a lot of money, especially if we could make the guests cry.
Kai Jing was quiet for a long time. "This fourth level is called Effortless," he said at last. He put the booklet back in his jacket and looked at me thoughtfully. "Recently I have felt this beauty of Effortlessness in all things," he said. "How about you?"
The American missionaries had not been expecting me, and I had not expected them to be Americans. And because I had never talked to a foreigner, I could not speak, only stare. They both had short hair, one white, the other curly red, and they also wore glasses, which made me think they were equally old.
If a girl wore a long face, Sister Yu would say, "Look at Little Ding over there. No legs, and still she smiles all day long." And Little Dings fat cheeks rose and nearly swallowed her eyes, she was that glad to have buds instead of limbs. According to Sister Yu, we could find immediate happiness by thinking of someone else whose situation was much worse than our own.
Sister Yu admired Kai Jing a great deal. She once pointed him out to the children and said, "See? You, too, can set a goal to help others rather than remain a useless burden." Another time I heard her say, "What a tragedy that a boy so handsome has to be lame." Perhaps this was supposed to comfort the students as well. But to my mind she was saying Kai Jings tragedy was greater than that of others simply because he had been born more pleasing to the eye. How could Sister Yu, of all people, think such a thing? If a rich man loses his house, is that worse than if a poor man loses his?
"Whoever arranged to take Liu LuLing as an orphan." The girl ran off. A moment later, two lady foreigners were standing before me.
"Sorry to say," the other added, "most orphans are much younger."
He turned the page. "With any form of beauty, there are four levels of ability. This is true of painting, calligraphy, literature, music, dance. The first level is Competent." We were looking at a page that showed two identical renderings of a bamboo grove, a typical painting, well done, realistic, interesting in the detail of double lines, conveying a sense of strength and longevity. "Competence," he went on, "is the ability to draw the same thing over and over in the same strokes, with the same force, the same rhythm, the same trueness. This kind of beauty, however, is ordinary.
We can marry whom we choose.
It was autumn, and the leafless trees looked like an army of skeletons guarding the hill and the compound at the top. When I walked through the gate, nobody greeted me. Before me was a temple of dried-out wood and peeling lacquer, and in the bare open yard stood rows of girls in white jackets and blue trousers, lined up like soldiers. They bent at the waist— forward, side, back, side—as if obedient to the wind. There was another strange sight: two men, one foreign, one Chinese. It was only the second time I had seen a foreigner so close. They walked across this same courtyard, carrying maps, followed by a troop of men with long sticks. I was afraid I had stumbled upon a secret army for the Communists.
But then I noticed what he was doing. Whatever character or figure I drew, he would make the same. If I drew "fortune," he drew "fortune." If I wrote "abundance," he wrote "abundance." If I painted "all that you wish," he painted the same, stroke by stroke. He used almost the same rhythm, so that we were like two people performing a dance. That was the beginning of our love, the same curve, the same dot, the same lifting of the brush as our breath filled as one.
"Sorry to say, no arrangements have been made," the white-haired lady told me in Chinese.
"This household is a misery of shouting and madness, a constant search for money for more opium. If Fu Nan could sell pieces of me for his smoke, he would do so. Hes convinced I know where to find more dragon bones. He jabbers that I should tell him, so we will all be rich. If only I did know, I would sell them to leave this family. I would even sell myself. But where would I go?
I thought of Precious Auntie. Like Kai Jing, she had been born with a natural beauty, and then her face was ruined. I heard people say all the time, "How terrible to have a face like that. It would have been better if she had died." Would I have felt the same if I had not loved her? I thought of the blind beggar girl. Who would miss her?
Once a week, Miss Grutoff and the cooks wife went to the railway station to pick up packages and mail. Sometimes there were letters from their friends at other missionary schools in China or from the scientists at Peking Union Medical College. Other times there would be letters with pledges of money. These came from far away: San Francisco in California, Milwaukee in Wisconsin, Elyria in Ohio. Miss Grutoff would read the letters aloud at Sunday chapel. She would show us on a globe, "Here we are, there they are. And they are sending you love and lots of money." Then she would spin the globe so we could become dizzy with this idea. I used to wonder, Why would a stranger love another stranger? Mother and Father were like strangers to me now. They did not love me. To them, I no longer existed. And what about GaoLings promises to find me? Had she tried? I did not think so.
When they asked my name, I was still unable to talk, so I used my finger to paint the characters in the air. They talked to each other in English voices.
He turned the page. This painting was of a single stalk of bamboo. "The third level is Divine," he said. "The leaves now are shadows blown by an invisible wind, and the stalk is there mostly by suggestion of what is missing. And yet the shadows are more alive than the original leaves that obscured the light. A person seeing this would be wordless to describe how this is done. Try as he might, the same painter could never again capture the feeling of this painting, only a shadow of the shadow."
The missionary ladies, I found out, were not equally old. Miss Grutoff, the curly-haired one, was thirty-two, half the age of the other. She was the nurse and headmistress of the school. Miss Towler was the director of the orphanage, and she begged donations from people who should have pity on us. She also led our Sunday chapel, conducted dramas of Christian history, and played the piano while teaching us to sing "like the angels." At the time, of course, I did not know what an angel was. I also could not sing.
Of course, by then even the gods in the monastery had changed their minds. Over the years, Miss Towler had been removing the coverings from the statues, one by one, as cloth was needed for making clothes or quilts. Eventually, all the statues revealed themselves, mocking Miss Towler, so she said, with their red faces, three eyes, and bare bellies. And there were many, many statues, both Buddhist and Taoist, because the monastery had been occupied by both kinds of monks in different centuries, depending on which warlord was in charge of the land. One day, before Christmas, when it was too cold to go anywhere, Miss Grutoff decided that we should convert the Chinese gods into Christians. We would baptize them with paint. The girls who had grown up in the orphanage since they were babies thought this would be a lot of fun. But some of the students who had come later did not want to deface the gods and tempt their wrath. They were so scared that when they were dragged to the statues they screamed and foamed at the mouth, then fell to the ground as if possessed. I was not afraid. I believed that if I was respectful to both the Chinese gods and the Christian one, neither would harm me. I reasoned that Chinese people were polite and also practical about life. The Chinese gods understood that we were living in a Western household run by Americans. If the gods could speak, they, too, would insist that the Christian deities have the better position. Chinese people, unlike foreigners, did not try to push their ideas on others. Let the foreigners follow their own ways, no matter how strange they were, that was their thinking. As my brush ran over their gold-and-red faces, I said, "Pardon me, Jade Ruler, forgive me, Chief of the Eight Immortals, I am only making a disguise for you, in case the Communists or the Japanese come and recruit statues for a bonfire." I was a good artist. With some of the gods, I glued on sheeps hair for beards, noodles for long hair, feathers for wings. In this way, Buddha became fat Jesus, the Goddess of Mercy was Mary of the Manger, the Three Pure Ones, boss gods of the Taoists, turned into the Three Wise Men, and the Eighteen Lohan of Buddha were converted to the Twelve Apostles with six sons. Any small figures in hell were promoted to angels. The following year, Miss Grutoff decided we should also paint the little Buddha carvings throughout the compound. There were hundreds of those.
"You should also know that the Chang family is not as rich as we believed when we were children. Much of their fortune has been drained away by opium. One of the other sons wives told me that the problem began when Fu Nan was a baby and tore his shoulder out of the socket. His mother began feeding him opium. Later, the mother died, beaten to death, some say, although Chang claims she fell off the roof by accident. Then Chang took another wife, who used to be the girlfriend of a warlord who had been trading opium for coffins. The second wife had the habit, too. The warlord told Chang that if he ever harmed her, he would turn him into a eunuch. And Chang knew this could happen, because he had seen other men who were missing parts of their body for failing to pay their opium debts.
He turned the page. On the next was an oval. "This painting is called Inside the Middle of a Bamboo Stalk. The oval is what you see if you are inside looking up or looking down. It is the simplicity of being within, no reason or explanation for being there. It is the natural wonder that anything exists in relation to another, an inky oval to a page of white paper, a person to a bamboo stalk, the viewer to the painting."
For we both knew we were speaking about the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to, as if we were two stalks of bamboo bent toward each other by the chance of the wind. And then we bent toward each other and kissed, lost in the nowhere of being together.
"Its the same for me," I said, and began to cry.
We girls always brought thermoses of tea and small cakes for the scientists, and when they saw us arrive, they quickly climbed up from the bottom, refreshed themselves, and said with grateful sighs, "Thank you, thank you. I was so thirsty I thought I would turn into another one of these dried-up bones." Every now and then, a rickshaw made its way up the steep road, and a pipe-smoking foreigner with thick glasses stepped out and asked if anything new had been found. Usually the scientists pointed this way and that, and the man with glasses nodded but seemed disappointed. But sometimes he became very excited, and sucked on his pipe faster and faster as he talked. Then he got back in the rickshaw and went down the hill, where a shiny black car would be waiting to take him back to Peking. If we ran to a lookout point on the hill, we could see to the far end of the flat basin, and there was the black car, running along the narrow road, sending up streams of dust.
I remember the day Teacher Pans son gave me special praise. "You are a careful worker," Kai Jing said. After that, sifting dirt carefully was my favorite job. But then the weather turned icy cold and we could no longer feel our fingers or cheeks. So that was the end of that kind of work and praise.
Every day he rode his bicycle from the orphanage to the quarry and back, pedaling right to the door of his fathers classroom. Teacher Pan would perch sideways on the back of the bicycle, and as his son pedaled off to their rooms at the other end of the compound, we students and teachers called out, "Be careful! Dont fall off!"
I asked an older girl about this, and she said, "What a stupid question. Of course! The handsome and the rich have more to lose." Yet this did not seem right to me.
Because I came from a family of inkmakers, I was the best calligraphy student the school had ever had. Teacher Pan said so. He often recounted to us the days of the Ching, how everything had become corrupt, even the examination system. Yet he also spoke of those old times with a sentimental fondness. He said to me, "LuLing, if you had been born a boy back then, you could have been a scholar." Those were his exact words. He also said I was a better calligrapher than his own son, Kai Jing, whom he taught himself.
I was about to run out the door when I saw the glint of golden feet. I looked more carefully. They were statutes of gods, not dead people. I walked toward one and pulled off the cloth. It was the God of Literature with his horned head, a writing brush in one hand, a valedictorians cap in the other. "Why did you do that?" a voice called out, and I turned around and saw a little girl.
The year after that, Miss Grutoff found the musty storeroom where I had gone to reread Precious Aunties pages. The statues there, Sister Yu said, were for a Taoist diorama that showed what would happen if a person went to the underworld. There were dozens of figures, very realistic and scary to see. One was a kneeling man with horned animals feeding on his entrails. Three figures dangled from a pole like pigs on a spit. Four people sat in a vat of boiling oil. And there were giant devils, red-faced with pointed skulls, ordering the dead to go into battle. When we finished painting those, we had a complete nativity scene, Baby Jesus, Mother Mary, Father Joseph, everybody including Santa Claus. Even so, the mouths on the statues were still wide open in screaming fright. No matter what Miss Grutoff said, most of the girls did not think the nativity statues were singing "Joy to the World."
"Who have you come to see?"
"Why is he covered?"
"Where is your teacher?"
In that pocket were two wondrous things. The first one was the oracle bone she had shown me when I was a girl, telling me I could have it when I had learned to remember. She had once held this, just as her father had once held this. I clutched that bone to my heart. And then I pulled out the second thing. It was a small photograph of a young woman wearing an embroidered headwrap and a padded winter jacket with a collar that reached up to her cheeks. I held the picture up to the light. Was it . . .? I saw that it was indeed Precious Auntie before she had burned her face. She had dreamy eyes, daring eyebrows that tilted upward, and her mouth—such plump pouting lips, such smooth skin. She was beautiful, but she did not look the way I remembered her, and I was sorry it was not her burnt face in the photo. The more I looked, however, the more she became familiar. And then I realized: Her face, her hope, her knowledge, her sadness—they were mine. Then I cried and cried, glutting my heart with joy and self-pity.
One afternoon, after I had been at the orphanage for two years, Miss Grutoff handed me a letter. I recognized the handwriting immediately. It was noontime, and in that noisy main hall, I became deaf. The girls nearest me clamored to know what the letter said and who had written it. I ran away from them, guarding my treasure like a starved dog. I still have it, and this is what I read:
Every year, during the small New Year, the students painted good- luck banners for the temple fair in the Mouth of the Mountain. And so I was with Teacher Pan and our students in the classroom one day, painting the long red strips, which covered the desks and floors.
When I finished, the letter was still shaking in my hands. I remembered that I had once been jealous of GaoLing. Now her fate was worse than mine. Sister Yu had said we could find happiness in our own situation when we thought of people whose lives were much worse. But I was not happy.
Sometimes I wondered about the girls who could not choose. Where would they go when they died? I remember seeing a baby even the missionaries did not think had a New Destiny, a baby that had been fathered by her own grandfather. I saw her in the nursery, where I worked every morning. No one gave her a name, and Mother Wang told me not to pick her up, even if she cried, because something was wrong with her neck and head. She never made a sound. She had a face as flat and round as a large platter, two big eyes, and a tiny nose and mouth stuck in the middle. Her skin was as pale as rice paste, and her body, which was too small for her head, was as still as a wax flower. Only her eyes moved, back and forth, as if watching a mosquito drift across the ceiling. And then one day, the crib where she once lay was empty. Miss Grutoff said the baby was now a child of God, so I knew she had died. Over the years that I lived at the orphanage, I saw six other babies that looked the same, always fathered by a grandfather, born with the same "universal face," as Mother Wang called it. It was as though the same person had come back into the same body for someone elses mistake. Each time, I welcomed that baby back like an old friend. Each time, I cried when she left the world again.
Yet in time, I did become less unhappy. I accepted my life. Maybe it was the weakness of memory that made me feel less pain. Perhaps it was my life force growing stronger. All I knew was, I had become a different girl from the one who had arrived at the orphanage.
When winter came, the scientists had to hurry before the ground grew too hard and the season of digging came to an end. They let some of us girls climb down and help put the dug-up dirt in boxes, or repaint the white lines on the quarry floor, or carefully sift what had already been sifted ten times. We were not allowed in any of the places where there were ropes—that was where human bones had been found. To an inexperienced eye, it was easy to mistake the bones for rocks or bits of pottery, but I knew the difference from all those times I had collected bones with Precious Auntie. I also knew that Peking Man was the bones not just from one person, but from many—men, women, children, babies. The pieces were small, not enough to make even one whole person. I did not say these things to the other girls. I did not want to show off. So like them, I helped only where the scientists said we could be, where there were mostly animal bones, deer horns, and turtle shells.
My least favorite job was whatever Sister Yu assigned me to do for the week: sweeping the floors, cleaning the basins, or lining up the benches for chapel and putting them back at the tables for lunch. These jobs would not have been so bad if Sister Yu had not always picked apart what I had done wrong. One week, for a change, she put me in charge of crawling insects. She complained that the monks had never killed them, thinking they might have been former mortals and holy ones. "Former landlords is what these bugs likely were," Sister Yu grumbled, then told me: "Step on them, kill them, do whatever you must to keep them from coming in." The doors to most of the rooms, except those belonging to the foreigners, were never closed except in the winter, so the ants and cockroaches marched right over the thresholds. They also came in through any crack or hole in the wall, as well as through the large wooden latticed panels that allowed breezes and light to come in. But I knew what to do. Precious Auntie had taught me. I glued paper over the lattices. And then I took a stick of chalk from the schoolroom and drew a line in front of all the thresholds and around the cracks. The ants would sniff that chalk line and get confused, then turn around and leave. The cockroaches were braver. They walked right through the chalk, and the dust went into their joints and under their shells, and the next day they lay upside down, with their legs in the air, choked to death.
As usual, Kai Jing came by on his bicycle to take his father to his rooms. The ground at Dragon Bone Hill was frozen hard, so most of Kai Jings time was devoted to drawing diagrams, writing reports, and making casts of different spots where bones were found. On this particular day, Kai Jing came early, and Teacher Pan was not ready to leave. So Kai Jing offered to help us paint banners. He stood next to me at my table. I was glad for the extra hands.
One of the ladies gave me a pencil and a sheet of paper. "Can you write those same words down?" I did, and they both exclaimed: "She didnt even look back at the sign." More questions flew at me: Could I also use a brush? What books had I read? Afterward, they again spoke to each other in foreign talk, and when they were done, they announced that I could stay.
The way we started was this.
As for the foreign men, they were not Communists but scientists who worked the quarry where the bones of Peking Man had been found. Two foreign and ten Chinese scientists lived in the north end of the monastery compound, and they ate their morning and evening meals in the temple hall with us. The quarry was nearby, about a twenty-minute walk down and up and down a winding path.
When the weather was good, Teacher Pan took us older girls to the quarry at Dragon Bone Hill. He was proud to do so, because his son was one of the geologists. The quarry had started as a cave like the one that belonged to Precious Aunties family, but when I saw it, it was a giant pit about one hundred fifty feet deep. From top to bottom and side to side, the walls and floor had been painted with white lines, so that it looked like a giants fishnet had been placed inside. "If a digger finds a piece of an animal, a person, or a hunting tool," Kai Jing explained to us, "he can write down that it came from this square of the quarry and not that one. We can calculate the age of the piece by where it was found, the eighth layer being the oldest. And then the scientists can go back to that spot and dig some more."
"Mother said we were lucky the Changs wanted any of the girls in our family at all. But I dont think Im lucky. I think you are lucky that you did not become a daughter-in-law to this family. Every day, with each bite I eat, I am reminded of the Changs position over our family. We are in debt to them for the wood, and the debt keeps growing. In a hundred years, the Liu clan will still be working for them. The inksticks no longer sell as well or for as much money. To be honest, the quality is no longer as good, now that the ingredients are inferior and Precious Auntie is no longer here to do the carvings. As reminder of our familys debt, I receive no spending money of my own. To buy a stamp for this letter, I had to barter away a hairpin.
Altogether, there were seventy or so children: thirty big girls, thirty little girls, and ten babies, more or less, depending on how many grew up and how many died. Most of the girls were like me, the love children of suicides, singsong girls, and unmarried maidens. Some were like the entertainers GaoLing and I had seen on Beggars Lane—girls without legs or arms, a cyclops, a dwarf. And there were also half-breed girls, all of them fathered by foreigners, one English, one German, one American. I thought they were strangely beautiful, but Sister Yu was always mocking them. She said they had inherited haughtiness in the Western part of their blood and this had to be diluted with humility. "You can have pride in what you do each day," said Sister Yu, "but not arrogance in what you were born with." She also often reminded us that self-pity was not allowed. That was an indulgence.
"Sister, I am sorry for any suffering or worry this letter causes you. I write this only so you know why I have not come to see you and why you are lucky to be where you are. Please do not write back to me. This would only cause me trouble. Now that I know where you are, I will try to write again. In the meantime, I hope your health is good and you are content. Your sister, Liu GaoLing."
And bad fate is all we lose.
To the missionaries, we were Girls of New Destiny. Each classroom had a big red banner embroidered with gold characters that proclaimed this. And every afternoon, during exercise, we sang our destiny in a song that Miss Towler had written, in both English and Chinese:
