Jade was wounded. They had never disagreed about anything before, and Jade tried to shake off the feeling that there was a change in their friendship as thin and inevitable as a hairline break in a frozen lake. She tried to reassure Lotus that no one would take her place, that they would always be the oldest and closest friends in the world. But still, no matter how many times Jade tried to get her to come out and meet JungHo, she refused. Instead, Lotus stayed in the house next to Luna, who was heading to late pregnancy in catatonic silence.
From then on, whenever Jade came out of the house to play, JungHo was waiting for her by the gates. Sometimes he brought the dog and they cuddled him or made him fetch sticks. Other times he came alone and they strategized the elephant’s escape while walking around the block. By the time JungHo let her know he’d lost his entire family and slept outside in a tent, Jade didn’t think there was anything wrong about her new friend.
“You know, we’re not so different. I don’t have parents either, although mine are still alive,” Jade told him. “My mother told me I must never come back looking for them. They would be ruined if the other villagers found out I’d become a courtesan apprentice.”
“Do you miss them?” JungHo asked. Jade tried to recall her mother combing and braiding her hair at night, and how she embraced Jade one last time while making her swear not to come back. Those memories were already becoming fainter, like stars at the approaching of dawn.
“I used to miss them, but now I feel like I’ve met my real family,” Jade said.
One especially cold day, Jade snuck out one of the countless silk comforters from the paulownia-tree chest and gave it to JungHo. He seemed more shocked than pleased.
“Don’t worry, take it,” Jade said, pushing it into his arms. “We have dozens more inside.”
JungHo wordlessly looked down at the comforter filled with silk cocoons as light as air. Something seemed to stir in his mind, and he turned resolute.
“When I’m older I’ll give you something a hundred times finer than this,” he told her. Jade smiled and said of course, without expecting him to ever make good on his promise. This was why JungHo made such an impression on her, the way he said with total confidence that he would give her something worth more than he would probably earn in his life. JungHo had nothing compared to Jade, yet he seemed incapable of cowering. He never blamed his circumstances or thought regretfully about the past. He was like an empty vessel, but in the best way: it was true he didn’t hold a lot of knowledge, but his mind was free to flow in whatever direction, and he didn’t nurture pain. Whatever he did keep permanently, Jade was certain that he would protect firmly in the bottom of his jangdok pot. He might never fling himself far from where he’d landed, Jade thought, but he would nonetheless be happy for the simple reason that he refused to be caged.
8
I Have Met the Right Person, at Last
1919
THE SECRET TO DANI’S SUCCESS WAS THAT SHE LIKED NOT JUST TO BE busy, but to have projects to which she could apply her considerable mental and physical abilities. Her fame, her two-story house with its exquisite furnishings and rarefied garden, her powerful protector, even her unusual beauty and allure—none of these had resulted from chance, but from her imagination, planning, and execution.
Her most recent project was rearing her three young charges. They had come into her life unbidden, as a favor to her dearest cousin. But she had accepted them partly because she was at an age when wealthy, childless courtesans started to think of adopting foster daughters to care for them in retirement. She thought it would be amusing to teach everything she knew to worthy successors, the same way men of higher status tried to leave their legacies through bequests, writings, and descendants in general. Why not her?
But this project was turning out to be more complicated than she’d imagined. While the children, even Jade, were growing on her, she still didn’t feel like a mother. This lack of instinct probably originated from an emptiness in her womb, she thought. Dani had never become pregnant, and now she wondered if she just wasn’t meant for the job. All through her twenties, she had been terrified of falling prey to this malady, stuffing herself with silk cocoons beforehand and afterward taking the tea that would bring on her cycle earlier and more heavily than usual. But she couldn’t always know when an encounter would take place; and sometimes when, in the middle of the act, she would whisper to her client that she wasn’t properly protected, he would nonetheless go inside her. On such occasions, she lay very still, horrified by the stickiness between her legs, while the man rolled off, sighing contentedly and closing his eyes, as though he’d just accomplished a great deal. Though a grand courtesan, admired in vast circles of cultured and important men, all she could do in those situations was wait until he felt well enough to leave, wash off as thoroughly as possible with scalding hot water, and never see him again.
These events had happened often enough over the years that now, at an age when most married women had at least three or four children, Dani suspected that she was never able to conceive in the first place. On one hand, it mystified her to see Luna fall pregnant after just one unfortunate incident and endure such prolonged agony; on the other hand, she felt relieved that she’d never had to suffer that way.