As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong Page B

almanac, Father and Eldest Brother carried me to the sedan chair. As we came outside, a chaperone hired from my father’s village opened an umbrella; another threw a handful of rice to feed and distract the spirits. Everything was red – red silk, red satin and brocade – red as happiness and the mark on a bed sheet. They took me to my husband’s house to the pounding of gongs, hoping not to meet any pregnant cats or dogs, or indeed any four-legged things. I heard my husband outside the sedan chair – he kicked in the door and carried me inside.
    This was the place Father-in-law had rented: two rooms on the south side of a courtyard that was shared with three other families. Still in the eastern suburbs, where the Gold Mountain men buy when they come home with their riches.
    There I learned to steam rice covered with half a finger of water. I learned how to hold a live chicken and a cleaver – how to pull the skin tight and pluck out the feathers of the throat. Bare pocked skin stretching over the windpipe, the way the eyes close in like a blade. I could pour the blood into a rice bowl, plunge the body into scalding water and strip off the feathers. One cut to pull down the warm entrails.
    I learned to wash clothes, my hands stinging with the cold water of winter, callused from the smooth wooden stick, from beating a man’s trousers on stone.
    And I went shopping in the market – the first time I had walked the dusty streets, the first time I had been out alone. I did not know how to carry the bottles of pickles and fish, the vegetables and the flour. Many times I dropped them and had to go back to buy all that I had broken.
    My husband stayed with me six months, enough time to fill me with a son. Then he sailed for the New Gold Mountain and I came to his village. To the house of his mother and father and his older brother’s wife.
    I wept for three days. Mother-in-law scolded, ‘Do you want your son to bear the mark of your tears?’ And so I tried to forget my husband – a man who made me laugh and cry and consider wondrous possibilities. I washed my face and closed my heart. And when my time came, I gave birth to twin boys.
    This was a comfort to me. My husband’s older brother’s wife had no children, only daughters. The first was saved, the second smothered by ashes when she turned her face to suckle, and only after much weeping the third was left by the roadside. No one knows whether she was taken as a slave girl or eaten by dogs.
    But I gave birth to sons, the first who looked like my mother and the second who took after his father. This was a double happiness, a blessing of the goddess Kuan Yin.
    It was Sister-in-law’s envy that cursed us – that, and the ghosts of her daughters.
    The day before their fifth birthday, my sons came down with fever. I boiled ten different herbs, fed my sons the bitter black tea; I took a coin and scraped their foreheads, the backs of their arms and along their spines; I went to the temple, lit incense and prayed to Buddha and Kuan Yin.
    It was on the fourth day, the number of death, that the one like my mother died. Only the one like my husband survived.
    Now I look at my son whom I love – I see the straightness of his nose, the fullness of his lips, a certain way of lifting his head when lost in contemplation – this is the shape, the space left behind by my husband.

Chung-yung’s Wife
Tíle Kíln
    Every woman has two faces. One a fine white porcelain – a slipping smoothness, carefully shaped, dressed for the eye. The other big and raw and strong, ingrained with the hardness of life.
    I do not speak these things; I cannot think in daylight. Only at night when all is quiet, when the only sounds are those of frogs calling and Father-in-law’s sporadic snoring. When I lie awake in this room barely big enough for the beds and the wooden barrel toilet.
    I listen to Mother-in-law swear and push