Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

  ‘Of course I have. Now, best to get some rest,’ she whispered. Although her steps were small and stunted, as she rocked forward tentatively on the balls of her feet, she still gave the impression of retaining an untouchable grace. After she left, the girls wandered to their separate rooms, the youngest two no longer daring to tease Yuying.

  Yuying flopped down on the hard wooden bed, which would soon be given up to her youngest sister. It was now that she should have retreated to the loft to mourn her separation from her family and curse the go-between who had arranged the union which would usually prise apart a family. She should have been singing strange laments with her sisters for the things she could not know that she would lose. She had not learnt these songs, had not yet heard the music of departure and its bittersweet arguments that bubble and blister on the tongue. All her friends had drifted into different stories, scrabbling new beginnings from little rooms. But she was going nowhere. She imagined herself aged a hundred, moving from corner to corner of that same house, sharing space with spiders’ webs and her precious retinue of books, with their perfectly cracked spines and pages whose reek of must and ink rubbed off on her eager fingers. Yet, in the years to come, when the books were stoked up in the fire or buried beyond the back of the garden, she would not even shrug.

  Unable to rest, Yuying got up to look once more at the photo her father had given her earlier that day. Just as she never imagined that the Japanese, present on every corner since she was a toddler, would ever leave, she could not imagine being a married woman. The world was becoming alien to her. The streets seemed empty without the Japanese soldiers, and the wild celebrations of the end of the occupation had quickly faded into more local squabbles. And now a wedding. She did not dare to consider the half-lit rooms in which her father might have found him. The photo slipped out of her fingers.

  She slumped down amid the piles of copious and useless notes for which her sisters mocked her so unremittingly. The declensions and tenses and equations would be replaced by tea-making and babies as soon as her four years of college were finished. Trying to think any further than this seemed to cause the future to retreat and contract to a hazy vanishing point. She flicked through a couple of books, knowing she would not read them now. In the tinny light of dusk the brush-strokes floated from the open pages, a sea cast over by shadows. Her head thumped like a kitchen orchestra of pot-and-pan percussion.

  These were the last things she remembered of that day more than half a century ago: silver streaks sneaking in under the door, snoring and moonlight and tiptoeing footsteps at the threshold of sense as the whole house slipped toward sleep.

  Did she dream about the future? Don’t ask me – I’ve already told you, dreams are off-limits. Did she dream about how her heart would be forged in the furnace of her marriage, and come out welded to another, hot and heavy and inseparable? Or did she dream about me, scuttling along behind her and Hou Jinyi, trying to figure out why they kept going?

  Let me tell you a secret. Even us gods have trouble predicting the future, let alone dreaming it. Look around at the city of Yuying’s birth if you want proof. Who could have guessed that the sun-starched plains attacked by plough and hoe and ox would give way to squat apartment blocks and offices littering the landscape like insatiable insects? Would anyone in Old Bian’s household have had the imagination to predict that Fushun would sprawl outwards from those few ancestral courtyard homes into skyscrapers and chimneys churning out smoke that would leave the sky the colour of scratched metal? That old men who ought to be revered and welcomed in each house, as custom dictated, might end up foraging through the bins in search of plastic bottles and cola cans which could be sold at factory doors for a handful of change?

  Anyone who had said as much in the summer of 1946 would have been laughed out of the room, and their sanity called into question. So let’s leave dreams and predictions to those that want to make fools of themselves, and get back to the wedding preparations.

  The newspapers of June 1946 were still filled with talk of the surrender that had been forced the year before and its aftermath, while the civil war crept back across villages, distant cities and everyone’s lips. As the preparations for the wedding become more frantic, Yuying tried to ignore the fact that the usual pre-wedding gifts of cakes, liquor, mandarin oranges or notes from the groom’s family had not appeared. Instead, as the day grew closer, she focused on her studies, scribbling away in her notebooks and deriving philosophical speculation from the shortest of essay questions, until each night’s candle had burnt down to its scaly stub. Both her sisters and her classmates took the view that she was nervous about the wedding night, but this did not explain the gnawing curiosity that wriggled inside her chest. Her father had been out of the house most of those days, like a magician trawling props behind the sheet of some cheap street theatre to produce increasingly wild tricks.

  The day before the wedding, the children of friends and family were invited to climb on the marital bed, to scrabble for the dates, pomegranates, lotus seeds and peanuts that were scattered across the sheets. In this way it was believed that something of their spirit would be left behind, making the bed more receptive to the possibility of conception. Perhaps it is true, Yuying thought, that we leave something of ourselves in every place we visit, in every thing we touch. And if the world around us retains such memories, then it is in this that we survive death.

  That night her sisters tiptoed to her room, each clutching an—orange – the smallest of stolen gifts to exchange for something they could not name. Scattering peel and pith over the furniture, they gossiped about classmates and shared the rumours they had overheard from the servant.

  ‘It’ll be strange, tomorrow, with a man in the house. I mean another man, not just father and the mute pottering around – though he doesn’t really count since he can’t speak,’ Chunlan said.

  ‘Don’t talk about Yaba like that! He’s our friend!’ Chunxiang said.

  ‘You don’t think it’s strange? That my husband is coming here, and I’m not leaving?’

  Her sisters exchanged glances. No one they knew had had a similar experience. According to their father’s wishes, her husband would even be giving up his family name to take hers. This was the antithesis of centuries of formal tradition.

  ‘Have you seen your new room yet, or do you want it to be a surprise?’ Chunxiang asked.

  ‘Hey, I know,’ Chunlan spoke before her sister had a chance to answer. ‘Why don’t we go have a look now? I’m sure no one will be nearby. Father is out somewhere, and Ma is probably working. Let’s see what a real wedding chamber looks like!’

  The two smaller sisters giggled and took Yuying’s hand to lead her across the house. She quietly consented, not wanting to spoil their excitement by telling them that she had already been in there to witness the blessing of the bed. She was suddenly aware of the years that separated them. Chunxiang reached out and pressed a clammy hand over each of her sisters’ mouths as they wandered through the echoing corridor.

  After taking a shortcut through the little garden, past the servant’s quarters and the small room where the mute lay rasping in his sleep, they found the brightly garlanded door. When they had worked up the courage to push it open, they were surprised to find their mother sitting in Yuying’s new room, her small frame perched on the bed that had been hauled in the day before.

  Yuying’s mother shooed the two younger girls from the room. A bed is a butterfly, and a couple are its wings, she explained. This is how we learn to fly. She mentioned nothing of the possibility that a butterfly’s beating body brews hurricanes. Yuying shivered when she touched it, and, for a second, thought that the next day might never come, that if she really believed this, time might stop.

  Her sisters were waiting for her outside the wedding chamber. They took her hands and wandered with her back across the house to her childhood bedroom, then settled themselves to sleep on the old rugs laid loosely on the floorboards beside her bed, to share her l
ast night as a girl. Their conspiracy of midnight whispers quickly turned to muted snores.

  Yuying woke before dawn and lay for a while listening to her sisters breathing, one faintly echoing the other. She soon heard the proud birds begin to strut and call out in the central courtyard, and pulled herself out of bed. Her sisters sat up slowly as Auntie Peipei and another servant girl flitted to and from the room, carrying large pots of warm water to fill the old wooden tub in the corner.

  ‘Do you think if you sleep in the same bed as someone else that some of their dreams spill out and get muddled with your own?’ Chunxiang said, as she rubbed her eyes and watched her eldest sister disrobe before the tub.

  The smell of pomelo and orange blossom floated between them. Yuying slipped into her reflection and disappeared. From under the water, the murmuring voices sounded like the music of a celestial zoo or a long-forgotten war. She could not keep still in the bath and pulled herself out after only a few minutes. As she dried herself, she eyed the wedding dress now laid out on the bed. A phoenix drifted across the red silk, moving toward some invisible point. Phoenixes feed on dewdrops, she remembered, and are wedded to dragons. Beneath its sharp beak and snake-scale neck, its feathers seemed to stir and rustle like leaves in the rain.

  Peipei sat down behind her, and began to arrange her hair. This was where the transformation should have taken place, the long loose black strands combed out, looped and tied up tight into the inflexible marriage style. Yuying fiddled her fingers on her lap. To calm her nerves about the unusual reversals of her wedding and to show Yuying that the breaking of tradition did not have to be a cause for sorrow and worry, Peipei began to tell her a familiar story, that of the only empress of China.

  Peipei’s version of the legend of Wu Zetian’s ruthlessness gave more space to the legends and old wives’ tales than the historic achievements of the empress’s reign, though she was careful to omit mention of the countless young men who were said to have shared the imperial bed. Yuying, however, was only half listening. On top of a small pine cabinet was the black-and-white photograph, face down.

  Once her hair was finished, she turned to her sisters.

  ‘You look lovely Yu. Just like a queen. I’m so jealous …’ her youngest sister began.

  ‘I know you’re lying. But thanks. Are you sure it’s fine? I feel like I’ve suddenly become Ma.’

  ‘No, Chunxiang is right. It suits you. Stop being so nervous, you’re not doing half the scary and boring bits anyway. A couple of hours from now and we’ll all be at the banquet, eating and laughing and everyone will be looking at you swishing about in your expensive dress, so enjoy it.’ Chunlan said.

  ‘I will, I will. Now go, you’ve both got to get ready too.’

  Yuying playfully shoved her sisters and they filed from the room. She peered out of the window and found herself unexpectedly disappointed that the courtyard was still empty. In the past, the groom’s family would have left their house at dawn to the sound of firecrackers and worn drums and marched to the bride’s house where the front door would be blocked by tearful relatives, making a show of not wanting to lose a daughter, a granddaughter, a niece, a sister. After performing acts of reverence before the bride’s family, the groom’s party would then have carried the bride in a small sedan carriage to her new home. In this way a bride would be torn from her childhood home and begin life in a new household, often miles from her family. Yuying knew that this would not happen to her. She would not be carried into the distance, toward servants that might spit in her food behind their master’s back, or to a husband’s spoilt siblings suddenly under her confused command, or, worst of all, to become the latest of a line of envious and warring wives. She had yet to hear any mention of the groom’s family – it was he who would slip into their family and be transformed. He had even bartered off his name for hers. For a brief second she imagined herself an empress, and her name that of dynasties, unchangeable and craved; but as she turned she stubbed her toes on the corner of the bed and these thoughts were lost among her weak curses.

  Her family had gathered in the dining room – her father on his wooden chair, a thin cigarette in his tight lips, her mother seated beside him looking at her feet, and her sisters standing as demurely as they could manage. Next to them stood the balding mute, Yaba, who had cared for her since she was a baby. He looked awkward and out of place. Everyone was dressed in a high-collared silk suit or neck-to-toe dark silk dress, each displaying a web of finely stitched patterns.

  ‘The guests have begun to arrive. Almost all the family is here. They are waiting in the garden. You wouldn’t want to be late,’ her father said.

  Her mother clasped Yuying’s hands tightly and whispered something inaudible in her ear. Outside, the sun was threatening to sauté the leaves upon the lanky trees. From the branches hung rows of red paper lanterns, which, by evening, would throw their light across the grass and plants, making them look as if they were dancing in a strange and heatless fire. At Yuying’s entrance, the murmurs of the crowd of family and friends mixed with the purr of the crickets and cicadas. This suddenly changed into an excited hush as they heard the clip-clop of lazy hooves against the rough stone cobbles of the adjacent street. A horse announced the imminent arrival of its rider with a loud snort.

  Years later, Yuying would tell her grandchildren how she had been tricked by the photograph. At first she doubted that this short man, with a mess of hair resembling a muddy mop, could be the same figure as the one in the picture, and suspected her father of having simply hired someone else to sit and pose in the studio. The man in front of her was thinner, with none of the stocky exuberance that the picture hinted at. She would go as far as to ask Jinyi, once their marriage had moved from the nervous unfamiliarity of its beginnings into the knowing, casual ease that only comes with time spent close together, if it really was not some handsome friend who posed in his place. Yet, for all this, there was no mistaking the lopsided smile that frequently sneaked across his face. A photograph presents a simulacrum of real life, but it is always one we cannot fully trust, for it seeks to give life to things that are already irrevocably altered.

  The mahjong tables that had been rattling with the moves of the waiting guests were silenced, the half-finished games abandoned as Hou Jinyi moved to Yuying’s side. She tried her best not to blush as the wedding began; she had never had this much attention focused on her before. She felt the phoenix wriggling across the folds of her long dress as the crowd surrounded the couple, judging how each was changed by the proximity of the other. She tried to push the fact that he was inches shorter than her from her mind, and they turned, moving under the arch through the main door into the house.

  When a bride arrived at her husband’s house on the morning of her wedding, she would have expected to stay there until her death. Hou Jinyi measured his steps, trying neither to walk ahead of his new bride nor to fall behind and admit that he was ignorant of the layout of the sprawling house. Yuying, as she had been taught to do since birth, showed no emotion in her fixed expression. She too was reluctant to acknowledge the fact that they were acting out a strange reversed image of ancient customs, as if they had stepped into the other side of the mirror. In the main hall, they bowed together to an effigy of me, to heaven and earth, and to the stone tablets which contained the spirits of her ancestors. They offered prayers, which melted into the air, mingling with the smell of the roast suckling pig and the uncorked bottles of liquor lying offered and untouched on the altar before them. From the kitchen they could hear fat sizzling in hissing woks as the servants prepared for the banquet. The carefully crafted ancestors watched their every move.

  Her parents were seated solemnly in a pair of high-backed wooden chairs facing the doorway. Bian Yuying and Hou Jinyi sunk to the floor in unison to kowtow to them.

  ‘We wish you both a future full of joy and understanding. Let your love learn from the cypress, the gingko: let these little roots spread, nourish, grow and endure against the wild.
Take this name and fill it with life. Bian Jinyi, welcome to our family.’ Her father clasped his hands together as he finished speaking. Yuying and Jinyi then turned, not quite identically, and knelt before each other.

  The couple rose and poured dark and sweet-smelling tea from a delicate pot into two white china cups emblazoned with paintings of blue-bearded dragons. Each one knelt to present the cup to a parent. As she served her father, Yuying slyly studied the dark crescents under his eyes – it had been years since she had been that close to him. She remembered her sister’s teasing words, and that she would have to spend her life tied to her husband’s shadow as he got older and uglier. This is how the world works, though, she assured herself; why should I resist something so natural? After serving the heads of the household they turned again, and each of them waited on older aunts and uncles in return for gifts of money folded up in small red envelopes. Eventually they came to her siblings and poured a small cup full of red tea for each of them.

  Buddhist myths recount that an ancient Buddha, determined to gain enlightenment, left the city and climbed to an empty mountain plain. However, instead of meditating, he soon fell into a deep sleep on the sun-parched grass. He ended up sleeping for seven years, his snores drawing seedlings from the ground as birds nested on his gently thrumming chest. When he awoke, he was so disheartened at his lack of concentration that he ripped off his eyelids to stop himself from falling asleep again. Where they fell, the first tea bushes grew. Secular stories claim that an ancient Chinese ruler discovered how to brew tea when dark leaves blew into his boiling water. The caffeine consumption of the Asian Buddhists who first adopted tea-drinking as an integral part of the monastic day was motivated by their desire for clarity, to rid their vision of the world of their lingering dreams.