White Ivy(15)

Over the years, Meifeng and Yin had two more children, both girls, and they gave up all hope of a boy. Four daughters were more than they could afford. The Miaos lived off what they grew and sold what little remained to buy the essentials they couldn’t grow, subsidized by Meifeng’s pay. But there was never enough. Some child was always sick. Medicine and hospital visits emptied the stash of cash tucked under a loose bed slat. Nan gave up school to work on the farm alongside her father while her older sister found work in a factory line butchering rabbits. The younger girls were too little to work. Money and food. Food and money. These were the tenets of life.

The first time Shen Lin saw Nan, she was selling vegetables in a basket hooked in the crook of her arm, her two thick black braids swinging down her back. Shen was thirteen years old to her fifteen, and to hear him tell the story, he knew she would be his wife.

Of course, Nan didn’t notice Shen at all. He was small, brown, and scrawny—no more than a child. Nan, like all the girls in her village, admired Anming Wu.

Anming was their village’s homegrown treasure. His parents were teachers, but it was really Anming’s grandfather who brought prominence to the Wu family—he had been a successful tailor, with women from all over Sichuan flocking to him to make their qipaos and other year-end celebratory frocks. Unlike the other boys in their drab gray garb, Anming always wore the latest styles copied from Shanghai. If that wasn’t enough, he also had exceptional academic and athletic talents: valedictorian of their high school, class president, holder of the four-hundred-meter dash record.

During his last year in high school, he auditioned for the school play and was cast as the hero: a humble farmer who falls in love with the moon goddess, played by Nan. Anming already knew Nan by reputation, but when he saw her beauty up close—the ungodly lashes, the petallike skin with the slight flush around the cheeks—he thought he might be the right man to look after her. During the play, they fell in love, as pure and devoted to each other as the fabled characters they were portraying. Anming courted Nan, though dating between students was strictly frowned upon, and everyone felt it was a satisfactory match.

Everyone except Meifeng.

It was 1967, during Mao’s return to power in China on the backs of the persecuted elite of society. With their accumulated wealth from generations of business-savvy ancestors, Anming’s family had undeniable bourgeois roots. Meifeng knew that sooner or later, the Red Guards would come for the Wu family. Anming, along with all his siblings and cousins, would be sent to the countryside for years of servitude and hard labor, perhaps even death. His family’s money, property, and titles would be stripped away. No matter how smart or handsome Anming was, he was born a Wu. Meifeng would not allow her daughter to be bound to such a fate.

She pulled Nan from the play (the understudy, a plain girl with a beauty mark on her chin in the shape of a star, would go on to become a famous actress) and forbade her from seeing Anming again. To make certain of it, she sent Nan to live with her aunt in the neighboring village of Neijiang. All the love letters, the hairpins, the red cloth pouch with crushed hibiscus, Meifeng found underneath Nan’s bed and threw away. She paid a visit to Anming’s house, where she had a shouting match with his mother, telling her to keep her no-good son away from Nan. The entire village came to watch this showdown. Anming’s mother didn’t stand a chance. She was a cultured woman.

Nan didn’t get to say goodbye to her love. She arrived in Neijiang with a woven bag containing two cotton shirts and a pair of navy trousers—all the clothes she owned. Her aunt and mother conspired to keep her letters from ever reaching the Wu household. The following month, Anming left for Chongqing, the first person in the village to attend college. But classes never began. Before he had time to unpack his things at the dormitory, Anming was taken by the Red Guards and sent to a labor camp, where he died the following year, beaten to death by another boy for stealing his ration of sweet potato.

Nan fainted when she heard the news. When she had first been sent away to Neijiang by her mother, she bore the suffering, buoyed by the conviction that once Anming finished college, he would come back to the village. In the short time they had been together in the school play, he had promised that he would one day marry her, he could never love anyone else. Their love was just like the love between the farmer and the moon goddess—not even the heavens could keep them apart.

But then Anming had died. Since Nan’s love never had time to ripen to maturity, her heart remained unfinished, frozen in time by shock and guilt. She feared Anming might not have known why she had left town so suddenly and cruelly. Probably her mother had made up a convenient lie to convince him she no longer cared, or—worse—was betrothed to another.

Frightened by Nan’s rapidly deteriorating health, her aunt sent her back to Meifeng. One look at her daughter was enough to spur Meifeng on the twenty-kilometer hike to Wuling Temple in Mount Jinfo, where an old fortune-teller resided beside the temple in a wooden hut, making a living from pilgrims like Meifeng who came from afar to change their futures. Meifeng asked the fortune-teller to break the string of fate connecting Anming and Nan. Even in death, the Chinese believed, this red string could bind two spirits together. Meifeng came prepared with an old newspaper clipping announcing Anming’s acceptance to Chongqing College. The fortune-teller took one look at the faded gray photo and proclaimed that Anming’s hold on Nan from the other world was still strong, as Meifeng had feared. But she assured Meifeng she could break this connection once and for all—for an additional five yuan, which Meifeng dutifully pulled out from the hidden stash in her underwear.