Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

  By now you may be wondering who it is telling this story, who has been listening in on this old woman’s thoughts. So let me get the introductions out of the way. I have lived a long time amidst woks and greasy chopsticks, beside chicken feathers and plump dough ready to be fisted down into dumplings. In short, I am a god. But not the storm-bringing, death-doling type – rather a common household deity: the Kitchen God.

  The truth is, however, that being immortal has its drawbacks. The almost infinite pleasures of the many heavens begin to lose their appeal after the first millennium or two, and no matter how much they try to resist, most gods find themselves creeping back down to earth whenever they get the chance. We cannot help ourselves. I am not alone in returning time and time again, although I have not as yet disguised myself as a white bull or a swan, or started whispering in the ears of would-be prophets. My powers do not stretch much further than being able to dip into people’s thoughts as easily as you might trail your fingers through the lazy flow of a river. And until lately I was doing this as much as possible. In fact, I could have been star-bathing by the bright rapids of the Milky Way or attending the most lavish of celestial soirées over the last fifty years, and yet instead I followed Bian Yuying and Hou Jinyi, trying to understand what it is that enabled their love to survive the separations, the famine, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and even death.

  It would be easy to say that I did this simply to win a bet I made with the Jade Emperor about the workings of the human heart. However, that would not be quite true. As soon as you glance into a person’s thoughts, you’re trapped. If I stayed with these two people for so long, it is because I once had a heart myself, although I never learnt how to keep it from destroying me. But we will come to that later – once again, I seem to be getting sidetracked. After all, this is not my story: it’s theirs.

  ‘Bian Chunzu – come here! Quick! I have something for you.’

  She heard her father’s shout rumbling through the house. She was sixteen, and he was the only person who still called her Chunzu. Everyone else called her Yuying, the name her Japanese teacher had given her and which she had recently decided to take in place of her own. Chunzu – ‘spring bamboo’ – was too pretty, too artifical, too delicate. When I am an adult, she thought to herself, I will be a suave Japanese translator and no one will think me delicate. Her Japanese teacher was a petite woman whose every word she had hung on to for the last few years; the last time Yuying saw her, however, she had been placed in a wooden cage after the other Japanese had left, and the locals were shouting about revenge for the occupation. Yuying tried not to dwell on this image.

  Her father called again, and his hoarse voice rattled through the large house. It was the type of place where echoes were still heard days after the words were first uttered, slowly winding through the cold stone corridors. She fought the urge to shout back. I am not that type of daughter, she told herself as she placed her pen in the book to save her place. By the time she would return to her bedroom, a dribble of ink would have spread from the stunted nib and blotted out an intricate point of advanced Japanese grammar. As she passed her servant outside her door she blushed, knowing that she too had heard the shout.

  Yuying had once overheard the two younger servants whispering about her father’s nocturnal journeys to visit one of his many other women in the city. They had giggled as they recounted how they had heard him slipping past their rooms late at night. Now, when she could not sleep, Yuying’s imagination conjured up the sound of padded slippers gently slapping against the stone hallway, the bamboo in the courtyard rustled by the breeze his creeping form created.

  As she reached her father, she pushed these thoughts from her mind and chastised herself. She loved her family more than anything she could imagine.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Sit down. I have found a way to grant both our wishes, Chunzu.’

  She stole a glance directly at her father as she sat. He looked exhausted. Below his pug nose, his thin moustache twitched like the bristly mane of a regal dragon, and, when she dared to raise her head to look more closely, she saw that his pupils had melted to eclipse the rest of his eyes. She had no doubt as to where he had spent most of the day: the Golden Phoenix, the priciest opium lounge in the city.

  ‘Come on then. Take a look.’ He let his hand fall to the slim bundle of papers on the table between them. ‘I have made most of the arrangements already. The rest should be simple enough,’ he said as she slowly furrowed through the bundle to find a small grey photograph within a milk-white frame. It showed a wild-haired young man.

  ‘In a little under one month, this will be your husband.’

  She felt her throat tighten.

  ‘He has agreed to let you continue your studies. You will both live here, of course, and so our family need not be broken. He will even take our name. Well?’

  She tried to stop the tears slipping down her face. Her father banged his fist on the table.

  ‘Ungrateful daughter! Everyone told me that educating a girl was the most foolish thing a father could do, but did I listen? No, I heard only your pleas. And now I have worked so hard to find a suitable match, and you do not even give me thanks! Get your tears out now, then, but be sure your eyes are not red in one month, when we will have a joyous wedding. Do not bring shame on your family, Bian Chunzu!’

  She sniffed and nodded.

  ‘Leave me now. Go tell your sisters.’ He waved his hand towards the door.

  She stood, hesitating. For months she had looked over photos of prospective grooms, sending messages through matchmakers and her father. Yet their unusual demands had meant that the family had already turned down a large number of young men. If one finally agrees to everything, her father had reasoned, there will be nothing else to consider. She would soon be seventeen, and no one would want to marry an old woman.

  ‘Can I keep it?’

  He said nothing, but stared across at where dust swirled in the solitary slice of sun falling in from the window. He tapped his fingers lightly on his temples.

  ‘Thank you, Father.’

  Yuying left him studying a fly that had found a way into the room but not yet a way back out. She was never quite sure what he was thinking. She stepped over the mute’s large black dog dozing in the hallway, and tried to concentrate on the dizzying image of a swelling red wedding dress snug against her skin, suddenly transforming her into someone else. She did not dare look at the photo again, but instead held it tight against her side.

  Yuying could already see her life forming, fluttering out from this photograph. Her mother, in her more bitter moments, had told her that a woman is a receptacle into which a man pours his dreams and his desires. Yuying did what she did whenever the world seemed at odds with her own hopes – made herself small, made herself a stone that rivers might rush over without uprooting. I wish I could have told her that although it is easy to make yourself stone, it is difficult to turn back. But us gods have a policy about interfering with humans, so there was not much I could do.

  Let me tell you a little more about Yuying in the summer of 1946. Already others mistook her shyness for superiority. Already she had begun to bite her bottom lip when the world seemed to veer beyond her control. Already she had picked up her father’s stubbornness, and her mother’s superstition that if others talk about you too much you will become the person others think you are. Already she had learnt the one thing that would keep her alive in the years to come – that sometimes silence is a kind of love.

  Yuying’s room was in the east wing with her siblings, though after she married she would move to the north wing, to the large empty room just before the mute’s chamber and the servants’ quarters, to have some space with her new husband. She shuddered at the thought. Yuying had never considered it strange that her mother slept in the east wing while her father usually stayed in his study in the central compound, next to the entrance hall and small shrine, so that he could hear people coming and going (o
r, as the servants whispered, sneak in and out himself more stealthily).

  She stopped, hearing laughter. Inside the next room her two younger sisters, Chunlan and Chunxiang, were playing weiqi, although they had learnt to call it Go, just as the Japanese did. Each had a handful of slate and clamshell pieces, tar-black and dirty white, and were stretched out over the floorboards, leaning down to surround each others’ imaginary army. As they threw down the pieces, tactically trying to trap each in ever increasing circles and squares, Yuying could not help but picture the armies that until recently had swooped through the city, outside the schools, through the restaurants and around the park. Every little victory for one of her sisters made it harder for her to open her mouth. She hung back in the hallway to watch them play. Within an hour everyone in the house will know anyway, she thought.

  By the time of Confucius, Go was considered an art form, ranked alongside painting, poetry and music. Old stories said that an ancient emperor invented it over four thousand years ago to educate his dull son. In the newly unified Japan of the seventeenth century, four Go houses were set up and subsidised by the government, schooling students in the strange and divergent probabilities of its play. Since the careful strategies implicit in the game ensure that the occurrence of two identical matches is a virtual impossibility, the game took on an intellectual aspect to complement its martial application. Scholars debated its relation to cosmology, physics, consciousness and infinity, sipping blossom tea while watching stubbornly long matches. The idea of infinitely changeable empires, conquered, reclaimed, conquered again and continually swept clean, must have appealed to the warlords of the early twentieth century, who might have recognised in the game’s shifting patterns the possibility of rewriting whole maps according to the formation of different colours. When the Japanese invaded the north of China to proclaim the state of Manchuria, how many people spotted the first throws of a handful of black pebbles?

  ‘Hey, little devils, come here. Guess what?’

  Her sisters scrabbled to their feet and ran to her. The middle one, Chunlan, was bony and sharp, right down to her fierce eyes and her pursed lips that were always ready to sting. The younger one, Chunxiang, was tall and awkward, with a spirit-level fringe and thick black-rimmed glasses, her round face always breaking into blushes, her shoulders slouching to try and hide her height.

  ‘I’m getting married.’

  They made twittery noises, like morning birds.

  ‘Who is he, Yu? Where did he come from? No, I mean, what’s he like?’

  She held out the picture hesitantly. They huddled close to study it.

  ‘Well, he’s kind of handsome …’ Chunxiang ventured.

  ‘When’s it going to be?’ Chunlan asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. Soon. Pa has arranged it all, I think.’

  ‘Wow. Just imagine it, Yu. I bet we’ll have pig’s trotters, and goose eggs, and spicy pork, and well, of course, more dumplings than you’ve ever seen!’

  ‘Do you always have to think with your stomach, Xiang? It won’t be like that. It’ll be romantic, and we’ll be too busy looking beautiful in Ma’s best jewellery and new silk dresses to want to go too near all the food,’ Chunlan chided her sister.

  ‘So, you’ll be leaving, Yu?’ Chunxiang asked.

  ‘No. Pa said he’ll come to live here. And I can keep going to college.’

  ‘Well, it’s great you get to keep your precious books, but when I get married, we’ll live in a big place that’s all our own, and I’ll be the lady of the house, and everything will be different to here. We’ll visit, of course. Come and see you and your husband and your pile of papers.’ Chunlan giggled to herself.

  Yuying pursed her lips. She didn’t have the energy to argue with her sister, not now. ‘I’ll be able to finish my degree, and then I’ll be able to do anything I choose,’ she said.

  ‘So, who is he? Is he from the city? Did a matchmaker find him?’ Chunxiang asked, cutting through the tension between her two sisters.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Yuying conceded. ‘He could be anyone.’

  ‘But he’s not. He’s your husband.’

  Her sister could not know how, in the years to come, those words would catch like swallowed bugs at the back of Yuying’s throat, struggling and beating wings to draw back the dark. Her youngest sister – who would disappear into the smoke of the steelworks and iron forges that dotted the frosty plains of the furthest north – stared at her and grinned.

  ‘There’s so much to think about,’ Yuying said, and, though for a moment the sentence seemed serious, the three girls suddenly burst out laughing.

  ‘At least you know he won’t be old and ugly. Remember what happened to Meiling from down the road? Her new husband looked like he’d been hanging around since the last dynasty. If only he’d had half as many teeth left as he had bars of gold stashed away! And what about Ting from school – do you remember how her lanky husband stuttered his way through the ceremony?’ Chunlan set them laughing again.

  A shadow poured through the open doorway. It sloped up into Peipei, their auntie, holding a single finger up to her lips. She was not really their auntie, though as she had nursed each one and calmed them through countless night terrors, they did not think to lose that familiar term of address.

  ‘Sshh. Your father is working,’ Peipei said. ‘Do something useful, like some needlework.’ Peipei still believed, despite their schooling, that the girls should not bother themselves with too much thinking. Educating girls is like washing little boys: all well and good, but they only get dirty again, she told anyone who would listen. ‘Come on, you know what your mother said.’

  ‘Where is Ma?’

  ‘She’s resting.’ All four of them knew that this was not true – they had never known their mother to be anything but busy. Peipei scowled, pulling her trio of hairy moles further down her face. She then shooed them from the room, Yuying to her Japanese and Chunlan to her etiquette essay. Chunxiang was left to sweep up the Go pebbles and pile them into the two boxes. She didn’t bother to separate the colours, and in the quickly brokered armistice the armies became inseparable.

  As she passed the study, Yuying peered in through the half-open door to see her father throwing three silver coins to the floor. She knew his temper well enough to realise that she should not stay and risk being caught. Yet she longed to see what he would find out, for she was sure that he was asking about her wedding. He would count up the number of heads and tails and convert them into either a straight line or a broken line (old or young, yin or yang). When he had done this six times, he would have a hexagram with which to divine the future. He would find the corresponding hexagram in his private, battered copy of the I Ching and read from the obscure explanations first set down more than two and a half millennia ago. He would then change each of the lines in the hexagram to its opposite and read the verse that described the resulting hexagram – for there are two sides to everything, and always at least two ways to see the world. The book describes everything and nothing: it is a little universe which you must immerse yourself in to find any kind of sense from the answer it gives. Yuying carried on back to her room as her father finished tossing the coins. Who knows what he found?

  Yuying opened her Japanese grammar book and discovered the ink stain, which she dabbed at with the back of her hand. The rest of the day was blotted out like this. At dinner her mother’s exhausted eyes stared for a while at the birthmark-like blotch that the ink had mapped onto Yuying’s hand, but instead of speaking she only arched a carefully tweezered eyebrow.

  With the news of the wedding, everything seemed suddenly different to Yuying – the lazy Susan’s slow orbit, her sisters’ chopsticks pecking at the plates like hungry beaks scrapping in the sawdust of the yard, the servant girl’s awkward manner when bringing the dishes; even her own sluggish chewing and swallowing seemed out of place. She looked up to see her mother staring at her. Will I still be your daughter, when my husband comes? she wondered. She imagi
ned her home turned upside down. Will you still visit me, or will it be my children everyone comes to fuss over?

  Yuying watched her mother, and wondered when it was that she had been young. She looked old, older than her forty-something years. Her husband, Yuying’s father, had already reached forty before he was pestered to take a young wife from outside the city. Her cheeks sagged under the weight of her eyes. Not enough pigment left to call them anything but black, her daughter noted. They were darker even than her chopstick-knotted hair. She was shorter than her daughters, with tiny shoes and terrible looks that could stop vines growing and silence anyone in the city – even her husband, though he sometimes pretended not to notice.

  Old Bian did not often eat with them, and today was no exception. More than once, in barely audible whispers, the sisters had joked that he might be a ghost, neither eating nor moving much till night welled up, though they would never have said this if they thought anyone might have heard them.

  ‘Listen, girls. Tomorrow you can start preparing for the wedding. The three of you can begin by sewing the pillows. Oh, Yuying, remember: a smile makes you ten years younger. It will be the happiest day of your life. Your father has found you a wonderful husband.’

  ‘When will we be meeting his family?’

  Her mother’s tongue skirted over her front teeth, like a pianist’s hands grazing the ivory. The girls recognised the movement – she always did this when she did not know how to answer.

  ‘There’s no need to worry about the details. You girls just make sure you’re prepared, and your father will do the rest.’

  Her puzzling dismissal clouded the table. Yuying suppressed a shudder. A few picked-through scraps sat between the four of them. She looked at her sisters looking down at their laps, and knew she must ask.

  ‘Ma,’ she said, ‘have you met him?’

  Before her mother could reply, they were interrupted by the sound of the mute’s dog barking, signalling his return from the restaurant. The nervous servant girl jumped, and their mother quickly rose from the table. She bent down and kissed her eldest daughter, her lips like breeze-borne embers, almost branding Yuying’s cheek.