Peach Blossom Pavilion Read online

  Peach Blossom Pavilion

  Peach Blossom Pavilion

  Mingmei Yip

  For Geoffrey, Who gives me both the fish and the bear's paw.

  When there is action above and compliance below, this is called the natural order of things.

  When the man thrusts from above and the woman receives from below, this is called the balance between heaven and earth.

  -Dong Xuanzi (Tang dynasty, AD 618-907)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As everyone knows-or doesn't know-writing and polishing a novel is long and difficult. Most difficult of all is to make your book known to the world. I could not have achieved these without the generous help and kindness of many people.

  I am forever grateful for my husband Geoffrey Redmond, endocrinologist and expert on women's hormone problems, who is also an excellent writer. He endures his writer wife's eccentricities with good humor and has given her the constant support and help most other writers could only dream of. Geoffrey's compassion, wisdom, love, and amazing qi have turned this treacherous red dust into a journey filled with pleasure, excitement, wonder, and trust.

  Susan Crawford, my cheerful, positive-thinking agent, who not only found for me an ideal publishing house-Kensington-but also a dream editor, Audrey LaFehr.

  Others to whom I must express gratitude include:

  Tsar The-yun, who taught me the qin as it was played in ancient China. Without her inspiration, the protagonist in this novel could not have been conceived.

  The late Huang Tzeng-yu, my Tai Chi teacher, a man with strong qi and moral character, from whom I learned the "strength of steel wrapped in cotton"-the balance of yin and yang, resilience and flexibility.

  Hannelore Hahn, founder and executive director of IWWG (International Women's Writing Guild) and her daughter Elizabeth Julia Stoumen, whose inspiration and support to authors are like flowers for butterflies.

  Teryle Ciaccia, my good friend and fellow Tai Chi enthusiast, whose good qi, concern, and kindness provide great strength in my life.

  Kitty Griffin, gifted children's book writer and extraordinary teacher, for her generous help, inspiration, and friendship.

  Ellen Scordato, my instructor at New School University and virtuoso grammarian, who generously answers my numerous questions with patience and kindness.

  My writer friends, Sheila Weinstein and Esta Fischer, to whom I am indebted for their helpful readings and suggestions.

  Elizabeth Buzzelli, writing instructor and colleague at IWWG, who gave me one suggestion of extreme importance.

  Neal Chandler, director of the Cleveland Writer's Workshop, for his untiring work in teaching writing.

  Claudia Clemente, a fellow writer who welcomed me when I was a lonely International Institute of Asian Studies fellow in Amsterdam.

  Elsbeth Reimann, whose kindness and smiling face always makes me happy.

  Eugenia Oi Yan Yau, distinguished vocalist, professor of music, my former student and best friend to whom I am thankful in more ways than I can express. And her husband Jose Santos, for his computer expertise.

  Last but not least are my beloved singer-father and teachermother who arranged for me to take music and art lessons at a very young age. Sadly, they are no longer in this life. If they are reading these words in their new incarnations, I want to express my indebtedness for their faith in the transformative power of art.

  Prologue

  Precious Orchid

  she California sun slowly streams in through my apartment window, then gropes its way past a bamboo plant, a Chinese vase spilling with plum blossoms, a small incense burner, then finally lands on Bao Lan-Precious Orchid-the woman lying opposite me without a stitch on.

  Envy stabs my heart. I stare at her body as it curves in and out like a snake ready for mischief. She lies on a red silk sheet embroidered with flowers in gold thread. "Flower of the evil sea"-this was what people in old Shanghai would whisper through cupped mouths. While now, in San Francisco, I murmur her name, "Bao Lan," sweetly as if savoring a candy in my mouth. I imagine inhaling the decadent fragrance from her sun-warmed nudity.

  Bao Lan's eyes shine big and her lips-full, sensuous, and painted a dark crimson-evoke in my mind the color of rose petals in a fading dream. Petals that, when curled into a seductive smile, also whisper words of flattery. These, together with her smooth arm, raised and bent behind her head in a graceful curve, remind me of the Chinese saying "A pair of jade arms used as pillows to sleep on by a thousand guests; two slices of crimson lips tasted by ten thousand men."

  Now the rosy lips seem to say, "Please come to me."

  I nod, reaching my hand to touch the nimbus of black hair tumbling down her small, round breasts. Breasts the texture of silk and the color of white jade. Breasts that were touched by many-soldiers, merchants, officials, scholars, artists, policemen, gangsters, a Catholic priest, a Taoist monk.

  Feeling guilty of sacrilege, I withdraw my nearly century-old spotty and wrinkled hand. I keep rocking on my chair and watching Bao Lan as she continues to eye me silently. "Hai, how time flies like an arrow, and the sun and moon move back and forth like a shuttle!" I recite the old saying, then carefully sip my ginseng tea.

  "Ahpo, it's best-quality ginseng to keep your longevity and health," my great-granddaughter told me the other day when she brought the herb.

  Last week, I celebrated my ninety-eighth birthday, and although they never say it out loud, I know they want my memoir to be finished before I board the immortal's journey. When I say "they," I mean my great-granddaughter jade Treasure and her American fiance Leo Stanley. In a while, they will be coming to see me and begin recording my oral history.

  Oral history! Do they forget that I can read and write? They treat me as if I were a dusty museum piece. They act like they're doing me a great favor by digging me out from deep underground and bringing me to light. How can they forget that I am not only literate, but also well versed in all the arts-literature, music, painting, calligraphy, and poetry-and that's exactly the reason they want to write about me?

  Now Bao Lan seems to say, "Old woman, please go away! Why do you always have to remind me how old you are and how accomplished you were?! Can't you leave me alone to enjoy myself at the height of my youth and beauty?"

  "Sure," I mutter to the air, feeling the wrinkles weighing around the corners of my mouth.

  But she keeps staring silently at me with eyes which resemble two graceful dots of ink on rice paper. She's strange, this woman who shares the same house with me but only communicates with the brightness of her eyes and the sensuousness of her body.

  I am used to her eccentricity, because she's my other-much wilder and younger-self! The delicate beauty opposite me is but a faded oil painting done seventy-five years ago when I was twentythree.

  And the last poet-musician courtesan in Shanghai.

  That's why they keep pushing me to tell, or sell, my story-I am the carrier of a mysterious cultural phenomenon-ming ji.

  The prestigious prostitute. Prestigious prostitute? Yes, that was what we were called in old China. A species as extinct as the Chinese emperors, after China became a republic. Some say it's a tragic loss; others argue: how can the disappearance of prostitutes be tragic?

  The cordless phone trills on the coffee table; I pick it up with my stiff, arthritic hand. Jane and Leo are already downstairs. Jane is Jade Treasure's English name, of which I disapprove because it sounds so much like the word "pan fry" in Chinese. When I call her "Jane, Jane," I can almost smell fish cooking in sizzling oil- Sizzz! Sizzz! It sounds as if I'd cook my own flesh and blood!

  Now the two young people burst into my nursing home apartment with their laughter and overflowing energy, their embarrassingly long limbs fla
iling in all directions. Jade Treasure flounces up to peck my cheek, swinging a basket of fruit in front of me, making me dizzy.

  "Hi, Grandmama, you look good today! The ginseng gives you good qi?"

  "Jade, can you show some respect to an old woman who has witnessed, literally, the ups and downs of a century?" I say, pushing away the basket of fruit.

  "Grandmama!" Jade mocks protest, then dumps the basket on the table with a clank and plops down on the sofa next to me.

  It is now Leo's turn to peck my cheek, then he says in his smooth Mandarin, "How are you today, Popo?"

  This American boy calls me Popo, the respectful way of addressing an elderly lady in Chinese, while my jade Treasure prefers the more Westernized Grandmama (she adds another "ma" for "great" grandmother). Although I am always suspicious of laofan, old barbarians, I kind of like Leo. He's a nice boy, good-looking with a big body and soft blond hair, a graduate of journalism at a very good university called Ge-lin-bi-ya? (so I was told by jade), speaks very good Mandarin, now works as an editor for a very famous publisher called Ah-ba Call-lings? (so I was also told by jade). And madly in love with my jade Treasure.

  Jade is already clanking bowls and plates in my small kitchen, preparing snacks. Her bare legs play hide and seek behind the halfopened door, while her excessive energy thrusts her to and fro between the refrigerator, the cupboard, the sink, the stove.

  A half hour later, after we've finished our snacks and the trays are put away and the table cleaned, Leo and jade sit down beside me on the sofa, carefully taking out their recorder, pads, pens. Faces glowing with excitement, they look like Chinese students eager to please their teacher. It touches me to see their expressions turn serious as if they were burdened by the sacred responsibility of saving a precious heritage from sinking into quicksand.

  "Grandmama," Jade says after she's discussed it in English with her fiance, "Leo and I agreed that it's best for you to start your story from the beginning. That is, when you were sold to the turquoise pavilion after Great-great-grandpapa was executed."

  I'm glad she is discreet enough not to say jiyuan, prostitution house, or worse, jixiang, whorehouse, but instead uses the much more refined and poetic qinglou-turquoise pavilion.

  "Jade, if you're so interested in Chinese culture, do you know there are more than forty words for prostitution house ... fire pit; tender village; brocade gate; wind and moon domain-"

  Jade interrupts. "Grandmama, so which were you in?"

  "You know, we had our own hierarchy. The prestigious book chamber ladies," I tilt my head, "like myself, condescended to the second-rate long gown ladies, and they in turn snubbed those who worked in the second hall. And of course, everyone would spit on the homeless wild chickens as if they were nonhuman."

  "Wow! Cool stuff!" Jade exclaims, then exchanges whispers with Leo. She turns back to stare at me, her elongated eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. "Grandmama, we think that it's better if you can use the `talk story' style. Besides, can you add even more juicy stuff?"

  "No." I wave them a dismissive hand. "Do you think my life is not miserable enough to be salable? This is my story, and I'll do it my way! "

  "Yes, of course!" The two heads nod like basketballs under thumping hands.

  "All right, my big prince and princess, what else?"

  "That's all, Grandmama. Let's start!" The two young faces gleam as if they were about to watch a Hollywood soap opera-forgetting that I have told them a hundred times that my life is even a thousand times soapier.

  PART ONE

  1

  The Turquoise Pavilion

  -Io be a prostitute was my fate.

  After all, no murderer's daughter would be accepted into a decent household to be a wife whose children would be smeared with crime even before they were born. The only other choice was my mother's-to take refuge as a nun, for the only other society which would accept a criminal's relatives lay within the empty gate.

  I had just turned thirteen when I exchanged the quiet life of a family for the tumult of a prostitution house. But not like the others, whose parents had been too poor to feed them, or who had been kidnapped and sold by bandits.

  It all happened because my father was convicted of a crimeone he'd never committed.

  "That was the mistake your father should never have made," my mother told me over and over, "trying to be righteous, and," she added bitterly, "meddling in rich men's business."

  True. For that "business" cost him his own life, and fatefully changed the life of his wife and daughter.

  Baba had been a Peking opera performer and a musician. Trained as a martial arts actor, he played acrobats and warriors. During one performance, while fighting with four pennants strapped to his thirty pound suit of armor, he jumped down from four stacked chairs in his high-soled boots and broke his leg. Unable to perform on stage anymore, he played the two-stringed fiddle in the troupe's orchestra. After several years, he became even more famous for his fiddle playing, and an amateur Peking opera group led by the wife of a Shanghai warlord hired him as its accompanist. Every month the wife would hold a big party in the house's lavish garden. It was an incident in that garden that completely changed our family's destiny.

  One moonlit evening amid the cheerful tunes of the fiddle and the falsetto voices of the silk-clad and heavily jeweled tai tai-society ladies-the drunken warlord raped his own teenage daughter.

  The girl grabbed her father's gun and fled to the garden where the guests were gathered. The warlord ran behind her, puffing and pants falling. Suddenly his daughter stopped and turned to him. Tears streaming down her cheeks, she slowly pointed the gun to her head. "Beast! If you dare come an inch closer, I'll shoot myself!"

  Baba threw down his precious fiddle and ran to the source of the tumult. He pushed away the gaping guests, leaped forward, and tried to seize the gun. But it went off. The hapless girl fell dead to the ground in a pool of blood surrounded by the stunned guests and servants.

  The warlord turned to grab Baba's throat till his tongue protruded. Eyes blurred and face as red as his daughter's splattered blood, he spat on Baba. "Animal! You raped my daughter and killed her!"

  Although all the members in the household knew it was a false accusation, nobody was willing to right the wrong. The servants were scared and powerless. The rich guests couldn't have cared less.

  One general meditatively stroked his beard, sneering, "Big deal, it's just a fiddle player." And that ended the whole event.

  Indeed, it was a big deal for us. For Baba was executed. Mother took refuge as a Buddhist nun in a temple in Peking. I was taken away to a prostitution house.

  This all happened in 1918.

  Thereafter, during the tender years of my youth, while my mother was strenuously cultivating desirelessness in the Pure Lotus Nunnery in Peking, I was busy stirring up desire within the Peach Blossom Pavilion.

  That was the mistake he should never have made-trying to be righteous and meddling in rich men's business.

  Mother's saying kept knocking around in my head until one day I swore, kneeling before Guan Yin-the Goddess of Mercy-that I would never be merciful in this life. But not meddle in rich men's business? It was precisely the rich and powerful at whom I aimed my arts of pleasing. Like Guan Yin with a thousand arms holding a thousand amulets to charm, I was determined to cultivate myself to be a woman with a thousand scheming hearts to lure a thousand men into my arms.

  But, of course, this kind of cultivation started later, when I had become aware of the realm of the wind and moon. When I'd first entered the prostitution house, I was but a little girl with a heart split into two: one half light with innocence, the other heavy with sorrow.

  In the prostitution house, I was given the name Precious Orchid. It was only my professional name; my real name was Xiang Xiang, given for two reasons. I was born with a natural xiang-body fragrance (a mingling of fresh milk, honey, and jasmine), something which rarely happens except in legends where the protagonist lives on nothin
g but flowers and herbs. Second, I was named after the Xiang River of Hunan Province. My parents, who had given me this name, had cherished the hope that my life would be as nurturing as the waterway of my ancestors, while never expecting that it was my overflowing tears which would nurture the river as it flows its never-ending course. They had also hoped that my life would sing with happiness like the cheerful river, never imagining that what flowed in my voice was nothing but the bittersweet melodies of Karma.

  Despite our abject poverty after Baba's death, it was never my mother's intent to sell me into Peach Blossom Pavilion. This bit of chicanery was the work of one of her distant relatives, a woman by the name of Fang Rong-Beautiful Countenance. Mother had met her only once, during a Chinese New Year's gathering at a distant uncle's house. Not long after Baba had been executed, Fang Rong appeared one day out of nowhere and told my mother that she could take good care of me. When I first laid eyes on her, I was surprised that she didn't look at all like what her name implied. Instead, she had the body of a stuffed rice bag, the face of a basin, and the eyes of a rat, above which a big mole moved menacingly.