White Ivy(16)

The fortune-teller conducted a Ritual of Severing by tying a string to two rocks, one to represent each party, then she held the contraption over a burning candle until the string broke. This lasted all of two minutes—the gods were swift and decisive. Only after seeing the red thread burned all the way through and the tiny wisps of smoke rising over a colorless sky was Meifeng satisfied that her daughter had been saved. She made her way back down to the village with renewed vigor. Then she waited.

Years passed. Yin passed away in his sleep from pneumonia, as unspectacular in death as he was in life. Meifeng kept herself busy with her four daughters’ schooling and jobs, all the while shouldering the household chores and what was left of the farmwork. At fifty-three years old, she still carried the eighteen kilos of rice on her shoulders and walked the three kilometers home from the rice paddies, doing the work of a woman half her age. “You’ll live to enjoy one hundred,” her friends exclaimed in admiration, “because you are so carefree.”

What her friends didn’t see were the sleepless nights when Meifeng tossed and turned in fear over the fate of her second daughter. Nan had not been accepted to college—she had fainted from anemia and exhaustion during the entrance exams—and had found a job working at a sewing factory. She still lived with Meifeng and cared for her sisters, but anyone could see she was unhappy. She had no friends or suitors, had rejected multiple offers of marriage, and spent her weekends patching old clothes by candlelight. Her beauty had waned over the years: dark circles puffed out her face; she was so thin that her wrist bones poked out like sharp stones. Meifeng cursed the fortune-teller—that old hag, that fraud, preying on the hopes of the poor—and she vowed to hike back up Mount Jinfo to give that shrew a piece of her mind. She planned the trip with the same tenacity she planned everything: she dusted her shoes, packed her lunch, got out her walking stick. But the very next day—a winter’s morning, icy downpour, howling winds—a young man showed up at Meifeng’s door.

“I’ve come to ask your permission to marry your daughter.” He spoke as if they were old acquaintances.

Meifeng looked at him in confusion. “Ping?” she asked, thinking he meant her flighty third daughter who was always flirting and giggling around men twice her age.

“No—Nan.”

Shen Lin, in all this time, had never forgotten about the girl with the basket and the two braids hanging down her back. When Nan had come to Neijiang to stay with her aunt, he had occasionally seen her walking down the street, head heavy with a sadness that belied a depth of character to her effervescent beauty. He followed her in the shadows, watching, longing, all the while listening to the gossip surrounding her heartbreak with a boy from her village. Shen didn’t care that Nan’s heart had once belonged to another. He only concerned himself with the present reality—namely, that Nan was the most desirable woman he knew and he would do anything to make her marry him.

The Lins were smart and determined in a no-nonsense way, without an ounce of the charm the Wus naturally possessed. Though they exhibited a calm, rational demeanor, a gambling streak ran through their blood. They were prone to sudden fits of irrational acts interspersed with long periods of meticulous routine. Shen had never before taken a risk or said anything superfluous, but now, he gambled his future on obtaining the woman he wanted.

To the chagrin of his parents, who had thought he would attend a large university to study medicine—one of the last prestigious but safe professions in China—Shen instead went to a local college and double-majored in English and Physics. In his last year, he took the TOEFL exam, passed with nearly perfect scores, and applied for graduate school in the United States. He didn’t know a single person in America, nor anyone who had applied to school abroad, but he knew he had to be exceptional to win Nan’s closed-off heart.

After receiving his acceptance letter from Suffolk University in Massachusetts, he armed himself with his new student visa and showed up that fateful winter morning at Meifeng’s doorstep, asking for her second daughter’s hand.

Meifeng gave herself over to a relief so strong it made her hand tremble on the wooden door frame. She knew she was a terrible mother for feeling such joy at the hope that someone was going to take Nan off her hands. Her poor, unbending Nan.

“I’m never going to marry anyone,” came a quiet voice behind them.

Both she and Shen turned around to see Nan in her pajamas, hair wet from the shower, ghostlike in her paleness. Her daughter’s eyes burned with such grief that Meifeng felt a vise grip around her heart she knew would follow her into the next life.

“Go away,” Meifeng snapped at Shen, furious at herself for nurturing such a foolish hope. She slammed the door in his face.

He came back to the house later that week when Nan was at the factory.

“I’m going to America,” he stated matter-of-factly, without arrogance. “I want to take Nan with me. In exchange, I’ll sponsor your other daughters once they finish college and want to come to the US as well.”

Meifeng’s heart beat in her rib cage like a trapped bird. America! The land of freedom! The land of abundant food and unlimited water and working electricity and great houses with twenty rooms. She never thought her daughters would have the opportunity to see such a place. Anywhere outside of Sichuan was as theoretical to her as heaven.

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded. “You think Nan’s an easy target for you? She’s the only eligible woman left so she’ll accept any scum? Just so you know, I won’t have some penniless scoundrel take my daughter away from me.”