Chapter 51: Those who love are mocked by those who do not (XII)

Yun Niang? Song Shijiu chewed the noodles and looked at Li Shiyi.

“My husband, called Shen Sanbai, born in the twenty-eighth year of Qianlong,^[1] was from Changzhou.” Yun Niang added a phrase, “It’s the Suzhou of today.”

Shen Fu, “Six Records of a Floating Life”. Li Shiyi’s eyes filled with an expression of clear understanding, and she raised her forearm to support her chin, calmly listening to her engaging speech.

“Along with my husband, we were the qin and the se,^[2] our affections deep and inseparable, the highest grade of conjugal love. My husband’s temperament was gentle and sweet, and his character was also friendly; if there was a single defect in the perfection, it was that my father- and mother-in-law didn’t like me much, because I was envious. Among the women of the common world, if there was one’s true love, naturally she would want to take the entirety of the singular love and favour from the world; how would she not be envious?”

Envious? Song Shijiu paused her chopsticks, taking out a handkerchief and dabbing the corner of her mouth, attentively pondering this argument.

“At the time, I didn’t understand too well that matters of the world didn’t have to be perfect; it was just because of this that the white jade had a minute blemish, and it was polished into an illness of the mind; I controlled myself and was deferential to the extreme, in order for my in-laws to like me.” She blew out a smoke ring, and said, “By chance, I obtained the flesh of the lingmao. The traces of the spiritual beast you speak of is most likely this. From childhood, I was well-educated; in the Shanhaijing I had read about the lingmao, also known as the ‘Lei’ beast, dual in its sex, its appearance similar to a palm civet—‘consumption will remove envy’.”

Song Shijiu was startled; seeing Li Shiyi was also distracted, she had some thoughts in her mind as she looked at Yun Niang.

“That’s right,” Yun Niang nodded. “After eating the lingmao’s flesh, I lost my envious nature.” She picked up an empty cup, flicking the cigarette ash into it, her eyelashes lowering, jet-black shadows splaying out on her face; as if the independent opera highlight had finally risen to the height of pitch, her chest rose and fell heavily. She said, “After that, I met Han Yuan. Han Yuan, I had met while in Huqiu sightseeing with A Fu, and she was a woman who dressed as a man; although she had come from a background of prostitution, just then her appearance was excellent, that of a rare, cleverly handsome beauty. I had taken on the motives of a generous, virtuous wife, and wanted to express filial piety before my in-laws, and because of the lingmao’s flesh, I wanted to request to take her as a wife for my husband, to bring her in as a concubine. At first, she didn’t know; she went back and forth with me a few times, drinking wine and singing answering duets, and we got along quite well; she and I became close friends, and I even gave her a bracelet; she put on the bracelet, and her face was like the rosy clouds on the horizon that day, just gazing at me without making a sound.”

Yun Niang smiled broadly through the water-light Song Shijiu, the rosy clouds in her eyes smudged across her cheeks. “I had never thought,” her index finger tapped the smoking pipe, “when I spoke to her sincerely, that sunset glow was in fact being shattered as if by frost forming on its surface, and she gazed at me with a trembling expression, clearly disbelieving. I grabbed her hand and carefully stated clearly, and had my husband gift her a painting; she took it silently, only asking me over and over: did you truly think like this?”

“You truly…think like this?” Seeing him and I whisper sweet nothings to each other, seeing the mutual respect in marriage between him and I, seeing him and I pulling a deer cart together, of one mind.

Yun Niang muttered it in repetition to herself for a while, her words halting. At that time, the shattered question from Han Yuan had weighed on her heart, whose inside was empty, with nothing in it at all.

The story, suddenly falling silent, seemed to be imprisoned in time, with a sense of haste that came to a spontaneous end; Yun Niang carried and enjoyed this sort of suddenness, intentionally restraining her speech, drawing in the last breath of smoke unhurriedly, and flattened her lips, saying thinly, “And after, she turned her back on me. She had originally agreed to marry into the Shen family, but at the last moment, she reversed it in regret, searching for another rich merchant, and marrying into his distant home. At that time, I was inconsolably sorrowful, unable to sleep the entire day and the entire night, and I stroked the verse she’d written, turning over the qin score she had played, my heart hurting immensely, and also regretting immensely. But I didn’t know why it hurt, why I regretted.”

Losing the sense of envy, the seven emotions and six desires were incomplete, like an embroidery piece that had been half-completed, an assortment of thread ends tangled in the middle, scattered and fragmentary, their ends unable to be found. Yun Niang narrowed her eyes, throwing the cigarette butt into the cup, and then picked up the wine pot, pouring a few drops of wine in. With a hissing sound, the compacted tobacco strips gradually opened up.

“And then what?” Song Shijiu prodded idly at the lumpy surface.

Yun Niang scoffed lightly. “Not long after, I died of melancholy.” The last phrase as she approached her end—Han Yuan betrayed me. “I followed my hun spirit to be reborn, entering the Taishan prefecture, and was taken to the Yellow Springs by a ghostly messenger, and I said to Meng Po, I’ll trouble A Po, please give me an extra bowl.” Yun Niang laughed, saying, “I had lived a lifetime, yet my words were confused as a child’s; arriving at death, I was unhappy, and wanted to drink some extra Meng Po soup; I didn’t know whether the effect of the lingmao’s flesh could be reduced, and in the next life, I could properly look at my own heart, and understand my own feelings.”

Without the tobacco to rely on, her hand was incredibly lonely, and she crossed them on the tabletop, using some effort to wring them. “But Meng Po laughed, and said to me: what a coincidence this is; just now, there was a woman who passed over this Naihe Bridge, who also begged this old woman for extra soup; I said this soup is bitter, but she said she wasn’t afraid of the soup being bitter, only fearing that she couldn’t forget the person in her heart. Meng Po said, that woman drank three bowls of soup in a row, and forgot the matters of the past entirely, dazed as a newly-born child, not even able to speak clearly, yet at the last mouthful of soup, she began to cry. Meng Po asked her, could it be that you still remember?”

Yun Niang stuck her neck out, her outline even more extensively implicit with charm than heated wine. “She said, I only remember two characters.”

—Yun Niang.

The bowl of noodles in her hands had cooled, and what remained was incredibly hard to swallow; the spicy meat didn’t enter the stomach in time, and gave off a pungent mutton scent; Song Shijiu rubbed her finger along the rim of the bowl, gazing at Li Shiyi’s reflected image on the tabletop, not speaking for a good while.

Yun Niang was silent for a while, and then continued, “When I heard, my grief was great; unexpectedly, I vomited the lingmao flesh in my stomach out.” The boundary of the Naihe Bridge was by the Sansheng Stone, which cleansed the pasts of the wandering hun spirits. Yet Yun Niang had finally found her sense of envy; so, it had appeared when Han Yuan had taken A Fu’s painting, when Han Yuan had asked whether or not she truly thought that she and A Fu would live together until their hair went white with age, when Han Yuan had married a man in a distant place—the target wasn’t Han Yuan, but the husband that she had loved, and that merchant that she had never met. This hard to define pain tormented her to emaciation, yet there was no way to trace it back to its origin and find a cause.

She didn’t want to speak too bluntly about the mutual affection between her and Han Yuan; perhaps her past foolishness caused her to feel unfitting of this frankness; in the end, she didn’t speak those words, only raising the tip of her foot, making that long-ago longing merge into the insignificant movement.

“Then, why did you fall into your current plight?” Song Shijiu’s voice was a bit hoarse.

“Meng Po said, if Meng Po soup was drunk, the predestined relationship between her and I would be severed, and thereafter, we would be strangers rubbing shoulders, face to face without recognition. I wouldn’t agree to reincarnate, wouldn’t agree to bring our affection to an end, and became a wandering ghost. Perhaps I wandered into prostitution because in a previous life, she had earned a living that way; I wanted to live the life she had lived, see how she won advantages from both sides, everything going her way, how lonely and empty its feeling was. Or perhaps—what if, in the coming and going people of Xianyuesi, I could meet her by accident?” Finally, she gazed at Li Shiyi, and smiled. “Your ears, and the motion of grasping a cup in your hand, are a bit like hers.”

The watchman’s rattle sounded the geng hour, and the shop proprietor still dozed behind the counter on his sleeves; the lamp had burnt too long, and it bent limply over into the kerosene, powerless to hold up against the endless night.

Having finished telling the story, Yun Niang raised a hand to touch the red line on the bowl, and said to Li Shiyi, “My speech has come to its end; farewells should be bid.”

Li Shiyi collected her thoughts, and quietly apologised, untying the red string on her pinky, and withdrew it from Yun Niang’s wrist. Yun Niang watched these practised actions of hers come to an end, and loosened her muscles and bones, half tilting her head and massaging her neck, standing slowly to bid goodbye, and swaying three times for each step of her high heels, walked out. Her movements were the same as when she was in Xianyuesi, her gait smoke and charm, causing one’s mind to be moved like a banner swaying in the wind.

Li Shiyi lowered her head and held the wine cup in her hands, what she was pondering unknown; suddenly, her cuff was tugged by Song Shijiu, and she raised her head, seeing Song Shijiu’s slightly squinted eyes gazing after Yun Niang’s retreating figure, carrying a cryptic probing. Li Shiyi followed, looking over.

Yun Niang, crossing over the threshold, was cut out excellently by the qipao wrapping around her form, her jade legs slender and long, her feet slim; the hem of her qipao swayed in a slight breeze, and a blueish black, slightly transparent serpent’s tail swept over the threshold, and then rapidly drew back.

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Translator's notes:

[1]: 1763, under the Qinglong emperor of the Qing dynasty (r. 1735 CE to 1795 CE).

[2]: The qin and the se are a pair of traditional instruments that play in perfect harmony, and are used to refer to marital harmony.