A small charcoal stove roasted over dry firewood, a copper mesh screen laid over the top, rows of sliced mutton curling on the grate, sizzling out a rich, savory aroma.
The meat was what Huo Qiqian had brought from outside the city, a good five or six catties of it. She generously cut half a catty for the newlywed bride Huang, and got another half catty out to roast and share with Aunt Qian, which nearly infuriated Old Zhu to death.
Aunt Qian was a frugal, thrifty woman, not one for gluttony, but the moment she met Huo Qiqian she felt an odd sense of kinship, and so she let her sit beside her under the corridor, drinking wine and roasting meat, chatting idly to pass the time.
There wasn’t really much to talk about, so Aunt Qian asked Huo Qiqian, “How many children does your family have, sister?”
Huo Qiqian flipped the meat over with her chopsticks and laughed, “Six, they’re a nuisance, they can’t stand to see me have a moment’s peace.”
That was something to be envied indeed. Aunt Qian looked her up and down, and cautiously probed further, “And they’ve all survived, all of them?”
Even in a first-class household in town, if five were born and three survived to adulthood, that already counted as a family blessed with many descendants — this woman must have great fortune.
Huo Qiqian smiled, “Yes, they all made it.”
Now that was true envy. Aunt Qian picked up her coarse bowl and took a fierce swig of wine. Though dressed as a Daoist priestess, in truth she knew nothing at all about Daoist matters — this Dragon Mother Temple was simply her own turf, so naturally she could carry on however she pleased.
She set down her bowl, ate two more pieces of meat, and then said, “That’s truly wonderful! So, how many boys? How many girls?”
Huo Qiqian also took a sip of wine — the southern rains were damp and cold, and drinking helped ward off the chill — before saying, “Five boys and one girl. My girl is the youngest, and she’s clever and well-behaved too, she’s the one my husband and I dote on most. As for the ones above her — oh, when they get into mischief, sometimes I want to strangle them.”
Hearing the unconcealed affection in her words for her daughter, Aunt Qian smiled even more sincerely, “Then your family’s all right — treating a girl that well, that’s far better than things are around here.”
Once she’d gotten this far, Huo Qiqian asked, “Say, Auntie, I’ve traveled quite a few roads in my time, and across our whole Great Liang dynasty, from top to bottom, I’ve never once come across a place like Luofeng Town — treating women with so little regard. Aren’t you afraid of cutting off your own bloodline? How did these strange customs come about?”
Huo Qiqian’s question sent Aunt Qian’s thoughts drifting far away. She thought for a long while before saying, “Around here, it was actually quite good once, decades ago. Girls weren’t valued much, but at most it just meant being raised to be married off to someone else’s family, and that was that…” She smiled and picked up another piece of meat to eat.
“But later on, girls started having bad luck.”
Huo Qiqian shifted her legs, trying to sit as steadily cross-legged as she could, and asked, “So when was that, later on?”
The window lattice behind her was propped open, and Aunt Qian tilted her face up and smiled, “There we go, letting the smoke out.”
Laughter drifted out from inside the room, pretty as little silver bells.
It wasn’t really about letting smoke out at all — they wanted to hear Aunt Qian’s idle chatter.
Aunt Qian had a tenderness that didn’t match her sharp-featured face. She picked up her chopsticks, took some meat, and stuffed it through the window gap twice. From inside, voices called out their thanks to “Madam Auntie.”
There was an Old Zhu inside who eyed the meat as if it were her own flesh — who could be bothered to look at her.
Aunt Qian came back and checked Huo Qiqian’s expression. Huo Qiqian, however, added more fresh meat and encouraged her, “Give them some more, they’ve barely had a few bites.”
Aunt Qian laughed, “You really are generous.”
Huo Qiqian laughed it off, “This counts as generous? Just a few slices of meat.”
Aunt Qian shook her head, though. “A few slices of meat — these girls have lived cooped up at home for a dozen-some years, ask them how many times they’ve eaten meat. Back home, even one extra bite meant watching their family’s faces for permission.”
Seeing the meat on the grate was cooked through, Huo Qiqian scooped half a bowl and handed it to Aunt Qian, tilting her chin toward the room.
But Aunt Qian wouldn’t take it. “You eat. A person can’t satisfy everyone.”
Hearing this, Huo Qiqian didn’t press the matter, and just smiled, “All right then, let’s keep talking about things around here.”
Aunt Qian sat back down cross-legged on the low couch. “What could there possibly be here, a cold, joyless place… That was so long ago, still the previous dynasty. I was just a few years old then. Our Luofeng Town had an old official named Cen come back to retire here. Old Master Cen had held some office in Yanjing, they said quite a high one, though thinking back now, anyone who could say the things he said was at most some petty sesame-seed official — he couldn’t hold his ground in Yanjing anymore, so he came back to his hometown to throw his weight around and scare people instead.”
As she spoke, Aunt Qian wanted a smoke, so she packed her pipe and puffed a few times against the open flame, then exhaled a mouthful of smoke before continuing, “Luofeng Town is nothing but a poor little place a few miles wide, not even much flat farmland around it — that’s what my grandfather used to say — the old Cen family sucked up all the town’s good fortune just to raise one capital official. He’d seen the wider world, so naturally whatever he said, we country bumpkins believed.”
She kept puffing at her pipe even though the embers had long gone out, sucking at it like it was bitter medicine.
Seeing her looking upset, Huo Qiqian carefully asked, “What did he say?”
Aunt Qian gave a cold snort, knocked her pipe against the low couch a few times, and said, “Hmph, what didn’t he say, damned words fit for hell! Something about how heaven and earth divide male and female, how man is heaven and woman is earth, how in yin and yang, the yang side belongs to men and the yin side to women, how petty men and women aren’t even proper people, how they’re disasters, narrow-minded and easily led astray, improper — these were the things he’d say all the time. He’d been an official, so the local gentry believed him, thinking that’s how things were in Yanjing.
That old master’s family had money, and they opened up several of the biggest shops in our town. He didn’t want women setting foot in his shops — but who could have guessed… he died within a few years, and somehow that became the custom of Luofeng Town? From then on, the women of this town were doomed.”
For some reason, Huo Qiqian suddenly recalled something someone had once said — oh, it was Grandmother.
It felt like something from a past life.
Grandmother used to say that the same book read by a thousand people brings out good in the good and bad in the bad — the perceptive see their own future in it, the foolish see nothing but a mess of ink blotches, and none of that is frightening. What’s frightening is when a fool reads blindly and takes it as truth — that’s what ruins countless people.
Stirred by old memories, Aunt Qian couldn’t help drinking a bit more. As it happened, the wine Old Fang and the others had bought was strong stuff, and she got a little tipsy. At last, her voice went soft and floaty as she said to Huo Qiqian, “Sister, let your old sister tell you something… I’ve… I’ve been in prison.”
Huo Qiqian was startled. “You?”
Aunt Qian nodded. “Yes, me. That year I’d just become a spirit medium, and the incense at this temple was doing very well — people came to me for marriage matches. I told them, a local girl mustn’t marry a local man, or it means death! Later someone reported me… they locked me up at the county office, convicted me of spreading heresy to deceive the masses. First I took twenty strikes of the board, and they said they’d behead me come autumn…”
Recalling her own heartbreak, clear mucus ran down Aunt Qian’s nose before her tears even came, and she wiped it away with her hand. “I really thought I was going to die. Back then I even regretted it, thinking, why did I do this good deed for nothing? My children were still so young. But not two months later, I was quietly released… This is something you outsiders wouldn’t know, but everyone in our town knows it. Lucky for me I was a shaman, or else they might have drowned me too.”
She raised her hand and bowed a few times toward the main hall, then leaned close to Huo Qiqian’s ear and muttered, “See? A person’s worth isn’t even as much as a lump of mud.”
Huo Qiqian burst out laughing despite herself.
The meat on the grate was all gone now. Huo Qiqian took the screen off and added fresh firewood, and the fire roared up strong. Aunt Qian stretched her hands out to warm them by it.
After a good while, a little girl’s voice came from behind the window lattice, “Madam Auntie, so what happened after that?”
Aunt Qian said flatly, “After that — right, there’s more to it. Afterward I found out, while I was locked up, three families in town happily married their daughters off right at their doorstep… That year, I don’t know how it happened, but within just a few days, all three new brides found rope and hanged themselves together from a crooked-neck tree.”
The firewood in Huo Qiqian’s hand fell to the ground, and a small startled cry came from the room behind them.
Aunt Qian braced against the wall to stand, reached up and rapped on the window, scolding, “Little ones with nothing better to do, listening to everything — hurry up and lie down while it’s warm, or there won’t be any charcoal money from the kind lady tonight for you, understand?”
Reluctant voices came from inside, “We heard you, Madam Auntie, we’re going to sleep now.”
Aunt Qian sat back down smiling, and said softly in Huo Qiqian’s ear, “It’s such a small place, everyone coming and going is some kind of distant relative.”
A gust of wind brought rain with it, scattering droplets onto the stove’s surface, which only made the flames leap higher.
Night fell early.
They lit an oil lamp, and by its dim glow, Aunt Qian gazed toward the direction of the Dragon Mother’s main hall and said, “I came out and recovered for a few months before I was well again. Afterward…”
Her eyes reddened, and she forced back tears as she said, “Those few girls left word with someone reliable for me. They said the women of Luofeng Town are pitiable — even if they don’t die now, sooner or later life will be unbearable anyway, and they wouldn’t let me carry the fire alone. That’s why the three of them died — to prove my words true, that the local soil and water can’t nourish daughters, that marrying elsewhere is the only way to avoid death… They were still so young then, about the same age as the girls in there. How could they be so perceptive?”
Huo Qiqian was stunned speechless by this. Her whole body felt wooden. After a long moment, she finally thought to comfort her, “It’s all right. They did a good thing. They’re bodhisattvas in heaven now.”
This had been something the women of the whole town had conspired together back then. Though they didn’t fully understand what they were resisting, at least with one of them thrown in jail and three lives lost as the foundation, this whole drama had carried on ever since.
Huo Qiqian picked up the wine gourd and poured out the last of the wine onto the ground below the steps — those women, too, had lived a whole lifetime.
After pouring out the wine, Huo Qiqian asked Aunt Qian, “Something this secret — Auntie, aren’t you afraid I’ll tell others?”
Aunt Qian just smiled, unconcerned. “It’s not really a secret. Whenever an outside woman marries into our town, her mother-in-law always sends her here to spend one night, and I’m the one who tells her — from now on, if she has a daughter, never let her fall into this cursed land.”
Huo Qiqian said solemnly, “We don’t marry our daughters to locals.”
Aunt Qian nodded. “Then go spread it far and wide, tell them, warn them — even if raising a daughter is like piling manure in your own yard, still don’t marry her into Luofeng Town, or else even if you raise ten daughters, most of them are fated to drown!”
She said this fiercely, and Huo Qiqian shivered.
The oil lamp flickered, nearly going out, then struggled back to life with a faint glow.
Aunt Qian pulled out the thorn branch holding up her hair bun and trimmed the wick a few times, then quietly said to Huo Qiqian, “The women around here, no matter what the clans say, unless it’s truly a matter of survival requiring an exchange marriage, most of them marry out these days.”
She pointed toward the room and smiled. “Doesn’t look bad in there, does it? I heard from outside travelers that in their clans, if there’s a widow, they take care to protect and provide for her rather than neglect her — even without a husband to support her, she still has the clan’s sacrificial fields, and when she dies she can be buried in peace. Children who’ve lost their fathers also have clan elders reaching out to look after them.”
Huo Qiqian let out a breath of pent-up frustration. “That’s how it ought to be.” She thought of her own past, then added, “It depends on the person, depends on their conscience.”
Aunt Qian immediately understood and nodded. “Mm, but there’s no shortage of wicked people gathered together either way. Anyway, whenever someone comes to me for a marriage match or divination, that’s what I tell them — girls must leave this soil, or it’s a death trap.”
Huo Qiqian nodded. “No wonder I felt like there were so few people around when I arrived in this place.”
Aunt Qian laughed bitterly. “No one here is a fool. Marry a wife from elsewhere, bring back five out of ten strings of betrothal money — that’s a fine marriage. Our local men who want to find a wife, offer thirty strings and not a cent less as dowry, and she still might not marry them. Besides, who around here even has thirty strings? That’s a dream.”
Huo Qiqian asked curiously, “Do the men really not know?”
Aunt Qian just laughed. “They’re not fools, but it’s already become custom just like back then, so it’s hard to break.”
She suddenly began to sing: “A thousand days with a husband, a thousand days of joy; one morning without him, the heart knows only sorrow. A woman without a husband has no one to answer to, coming and going through the gate with no one to call her name. Let the husband not scorn his wife’s plain looks, let the wife not scorn her husband’s poor fate. Fate allots only eight measures of rice, search the whole world and you won’t find a full bushel more. When husband and wife respect each other, growing old together side by side — that is a good fate…”
Thinking back on it, Aunt Qian herself must have once cherished her own husband — she’d had good days too. Huo Qiqian knew this song was called the Exhortation to Virtue Sutra, though the truth in it was only ever meant to be told to the good…
Everything went quiet all around. Faintly, someone could be heard crying out from outside, saying someone had drowned… She looked at Aunt Qian, but Aunt Qian, unconcerned, asked instead, “Sister, what are you going to Jindian for?”
Huo Qiqian was startled for a moment, then said irritably, “To find an unfilial wretch and break his legs!”
She Wanlin let out an enormous sneeze, and helplessly set down his bowl to rub his nose, then rubbed his chest.
What was wrong with him today, feeling this inexplicable unease.
Ping Jin crept back in carefully from outside, bolted the door shut once inside, and then, timid yet full of admiration, walked up to She Wanlin and said, “I stole this from the medicine room at our tea plantation — it scared me half to death!”
He tossed the stolen goods aside like a hot potato, and only then did Ping Jin recover his wits.
How could he not be afraid — the young master of the direct line could fly!
He could also carry a person on his back and evade a citywide search, quietly transporting a living person back to his own room.
Driving the cart home himself, he’d been searched by soldiers no fewer than twenty times along the way. Young as he was, he’d twice been dragged back to the city gate by the collar, held by the chin and inspected like livestock.
Lucky that he was from the Ping family, with a tea plantation behind him and plenty of connections, or else… he really might not have made it back. But by the time he did return, Young Master Yi was already in the room.
Ping Jin, still young, naturally developed a hero-worshipping streak after seeing She Wanlin’s real skill. She Wanlin told him to keep it secret, so he kept it secret — he didn’t even tell the head steward, Ping Yan.
Told to steal fever medicine, he really went and stole it.
After stealing it, he thought: tomorrow, once this unlucky child gets better, I’ll kneel and kowtow to Young Master Yi first, ask him to take me as his disciple — not sure if he’ll accept… If he really won’t, I’ll just keep kowtowing, keep kowtowing, until he has no choice but to accept me.
Who wouldn’t want to fly? What imposing power that would be!
She Wanlin had no idea what thoughts were brewing in the boy’s head. He opened the medicine packet, checked through each type, then found a teapot and dumped the crushed medicine in to boil it as best he could.
Though he wasn’t a physician either, Chou Chou had taught him quite a bit, and he still remembered the basic prescriptions.
While he boiled the medicine, Ping Jin opened the bed curtain and looked at the boy inside, now changed into fresh clothes, burning with fever, breath faint, and asked, “Young Master Yi, do you think he can still be saved?”
He’d seen it when they changed his clothes, and it had frightened him — whip scars, knife wounds, club injuries, old and new, this child didn’t have a single patch of unmarked skin on him. Better not let him die in the room.
She Wanlin sat watching the fire carefully with his folding fan, understanding what Ping Jin meant, but even without looking at those wounds, his intent to save this child was already a matter of doing everything humanly possible.
Seeing those wounds, he suddenly remembered that his father’s back was covered in exactly the same kind of scars.
Only this child was even more pitiable, wounds covering both front and back.
So he had to be saved — and saved properly.
He didn’t know why, but some voice deep down told him this child mattered greatly to his family.
Choked by the smoke, he sniffed and stood up, tossed a towel to Yangdan to wipe him down, and She Wanlin looked at this face identical to Zhang Yongbao’s and said, “He can be saved. This one’s tough.”
“Really?” Ping Jin clearly didn’t believe it.
She Wanlin gave a faint nod, then, feeling it was getting late, sent him off, staying up himself to watch over the boy until midnight before dozing off in a daze.
In the middle of the night, Yangdan’s fever broke. His body felt more comfortable, and he unconsciously didn’t want to wake, letting himself be propped up by She Wanlin and fed half a bowl of pastry-soaked broth, letting others handle him without even bothering to open his eyes.
The next day, around the end of the Hour of the Dragon, Ping Jin came running in from outside and hauled She Wanlin up, saying, “Young Master Yi, hurry to the plantation gate! Several people from the opera troupe are there crying, looking for you and the old steward.”
She Wanlin had a steady temperament, so he threw on his robe and sat up, reached out and wrapped Yangdan in the blanket, leapt up onto the roof beam and tucked him away, then pointed at his own eyes, then at the beam, and instructed, “If I don’t come back, keep the door open and wait for me.”
Ping Jin was struck with awe again, nodding like he was pounding garlic, “I know, I know, hurry, sir — ah, Young Master, don’t worry, I’ll be steady as a rock.”
Old Chou had gone out to the plantation first, and by the time She Wanlin arrived, he could already hear Troupe Master Zhang kneeling on the ground, pleading from a distance, “Steward Ping, you’re like Guanyin reborn, saving us from suffering — the children really didn’t do anything, they were just strolling in the street yesterday with their senior brothers when a group of soldiers came, knocked them out with clubs, and dragged them all away…”
She Wanlin’s heart lurched. He ran over in a few steps and saw a large crowd from the opera troupe had come, but the only one he really recognized was Zhang Yongchun — Zhang Yongbao, Zhang Yongqing, and Zhang Yongcai were nowhere to be seen.
In that instant, he thought of Yangdan’s face, and his heart sank — this can’t be good. In his ears rang the voices of Yangdan and the others, their laughter, their playfulness…
“Young Master, this cake’s so sweet, right? You eat it, we’re happy just watching.”
“I want to learn all eighty-eight opera pieces!”
“I’m going to be a star someday for sure, and once I’ve earned money I’ll treat the young master to meat — and, and pastries too.”
“Your uncle actually gave you twenty coins! Let you spend it however you want? That’s great!”
“Little master, are you buying cakes? Really buying them?”
“Hey, hey, hey… hey… let’s go buy cakes!”
“Didn’t you say, if you sell me, you won’t have to sell my little brother?”
Little Bao sang along dreamily too: “Brows painted deep, the vermilion chamber stays unclosed, the long plank bridge’s head hangs slender willows…”
Author’s Note: This Shi Guan Niang Zi – Chapter was supposed to switch between three scenes, but with so many little ones in the scene it gets messy, so I could only write half. That verse Aunt Qian sang is quite good, called the “Seven-Character Exhortation to Virtue Sutra” — I used a short excerpt because it felt fitting; you’re welcome to look it up too. Some parts of it are good, some outdated, some are dross — it’s precisely because it’s old that I used it. After all, in ancient times, people probably felt that what seemed correct and good couldn’t be too far off. I once read a story about a famous courtesan who wrote poetry weeping in it, saying, poor me, from now on I have no protection under the Three Obediences and Four Virtues, the world is so vast, whom should I now follow? So, understanding the history of ancient women requires looking at it from many angles, using modern thought and sympathy to guide our understanding of them — doing otherwise is itself a kind of unfairness. The Three Obediences and Four Virtues were rotten at the root, but before ancient mothers could accumulate enough maternal authority to constrain their children, it did offer some measure of protection — this is just my own personal view, not necessarily correct.
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