As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong Page A

in exactly the same order. Replaced the box in the wardrobe.
    That night she found Teddy. He was in the top drawer of her dresser, one of her own stockings pulled over his head.



Oi Harn Goong, the founding ancestor of the Wong clan in Melon Ridge, named the village ‘hoping his new home would endow him with prolific offspring like proverbial melons on the vines’.
    Edmon Wong, Zengcheng New Zealanders
    Ridge : (agriculture) one of a set of raised strips separated by furrows; (gardening) raised hotbed for melons, etc.
    The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary , Second Edition

Chung-yung’s Wife
Red Sílk
    My father was a shipbuilder, and his father before him. They built the large riverboats that plied the Pearl River with their cargoes of salt, and the seafaring junks that sailed from Canton to Amoy and Formosa. Father had three hundred men who worked in his yards, and we lived in a red-columned mansion in the eastern hills of Canton.
    Father was an enlightened man. Although I was only a daughter, he made sure I was educated, almost like a son. We had a private tutor who taught us calligraphy, painting and poetry. I read the Five Classics , the Four Books , the Book of Filial Piety . And I dreamed of Mu-lan, the daughter who dressed as a man and saved her father from battle.
    But I never wore the clothes of a man. I could not go out like my brothers to watch the street theatre, or sit in tea-houses with pearl-faced women – the red dust of their cheeks, their lips painted rosebud vermilion. Sometimes I’d go out in a sedan chair and watch the world from behind its curtains, but mostly I stayed at home, reading The Dream of the Red Chamber , Journey to the West , or doing needlework.
    I was a good girl, respectable. Until I was fifteen, no one outside of the family knew of my existence. Then Father’s elder sister arranged my marriage. She inquired after all the good families with eligible sons. There was the eldest son of Magistrate Chew, but although his father was known as a fair man, the son was renowned for his foul temper and lack of respect for the ancestors. There was the second son of the Lees, the wealthiest family in Canton – ah, but he was a spendthrift and a gambler. There was the third son of the Kwoks, who had a thriving silk business, but he was born with not enough breath – they say he had beautiful blue-white skin, a gentle man waiting to expire.
    It was then that my aunt heard of my husband. A man from the neighbouring village of my father. A man whose older brother lived in the New Gold Mountain and had made enough money to send for him. His name was Wong Chung-yung. He was eighteen, and being a Gold Mountain man he had prospects. I did not know whether he was tall or handsome or kind, or whether he could quote from the classics or write a good couplet, but there did not seem to be any history of madness or of leprosy or tuberculosis – or of excessive opium or gambling. And our horoscopes were favourable: there would be plenty of sons and a life of good fortune.
    Mother was First Wife. She gave birth to two sons and me, the only daughter. No one spoke of these things, but I know Mother did not want Father – it was she who found Second Wife for him. Over the years there followed a third wife, and then the fourth. Fourth Wife was barely older than I was, uneducated but wily. She had large phoenix eyes and fine white skin, paled with the application of crushed pearl cream. She was, after all, educated in pleasing men.
    Mother could order Second, Third or Fourth Wife to do her bidding, and I had precedence over all their daughters. This is the way things are: the first has power; the last has none – unless by stealth and deception. Fourth Wife fed Second Wife opium-laced dumplings, and she died – though nothing, of course, was proven.
    Now I would become a wife also. Unlike Mother, I hoped there would be no others.
    *
    On the day selected according to the