I weigh all this and decide to accept her conditions. Still, I will remain cautious. Things always change to the opposite. The road up is the same as the road down. If Lady Kuo’s mind goes in a new direction tomorrow, then what? If all this weren’t enough for me to take in, she adds one more request.
“I’ve longed for years to ask a kindness of you.” She rests her wrist palm up on my thigh. “Can you find what is wrong with me?”
My mind is jumbled with thoughts and emotions, but I have the wherewithal to say, “I don’t need to read to your pulses. I have long known what ails you.”
There will be days and months—maybe even years—to sort out and understand all that’s transpired, but for now I send Sparrow to my room to gather what I’ll need. When she returns, I put Sichuan pepper flower in a pot of water and set it on the brazier. While I wait for the mixture to brew, I blend ingredients for an emetic to induce vomiting. Once both infusions are ready, I pull a small table to the bedside and set out two pairs of chopsticks and a bowl filled with the liquor my mother-in-law likes to drink.
“Sparrow, bring a lamp to the bed and hold it still,” I order. Then I ask my mother-in-law to gargle the fiery pepper flower liquid until her mouth and throat are numb. Next, I give her the emetic to drink. The results are immediate. She vomits into the bowl until the watery traces of last night’s meal are expelled. Sparrow cries out and backs away when she sees movement in the bowl. This prompts Lady Kuo to peer into it as well. When she sees baby worms swimming, she retches several more times, but nothing more comes out. She falls back to the bed, exhausted and pale. I put a hand on her shoulder to soften my warning.
“This next part will be uncomfortable.”
“I’m ready,” she says, bracing herself against the bed’s back wall.
“Open your mouth as wide as you can.” I use a flat piece of jade to hold down her tongue. “Relax,” I instruct. “I’m going to massage your throat.” To Sparrow, I say, “Hold the lamp a little closer.”
Lady Kuo’s tongue quivers as I use my left hand to massage from the hollow of her neck upward along the pipe leading to her mouth. After a couple of minutes, something white appears at the back of her throat. My right hand grabs a pair of the chopsticks.
“Close your eyes,” I tell my mother-in-law. As soon as they’re shut, I use the chopsticks to reach to the very back of her throat, grab hold of what I believe to be the head of the mother worm, and begin to pull. As it rises past Lady Kuo’s lips, my flesh crawls. Sparrow whimpers next to me, but she keeps the lamp steady. I pull out the piece of jade, drop it on the floor, and move the chopsticks to my left hand. I pick up the other pair of chopsticks, reach down to pluck what I hope is the middle of the worm, and keep pulling. It looks like the type of long noodle we serve on special occasions to bring to mind long life, but noodles don’t wiggle and squirm. And this is no mere garden worm. Its body ripples like that of a snake. I was born in the Year of the Snake, I tell myself. I am not afraid.
Using the chopsticks in my left hand, I put the upper part of the worm in the bowl of liquor where the babies continue to swim, and then reach back into Lady Kuo’s mouth to latch on to the next segment. Finally, the tail snaps out of her throat. I drop the rest of the worm in the bowl. It must be a meter in length.
It wasn’t my mother-in-law who had a thirst for liquor. It was the worm and her babies.
* * *
I next devote myself to completing the task Grandmother set for me: to help Meiling get pregnant. I stay up late to read by lantern light Grandmother’s books and notebooks. I study the medical classics about pregnancy and birth. I pull my notebook from its hiding place in my marriage bed to review my own cases. I go over in my mind the herbs Meiling told me Grandmother and Doctor Wong gave her and why they were ineffective. I consider the words of the great physician Chen Ziming from two hundred years ago: Men think of the bedroom when their Essence is exuberant; women crave pregnancy when their Blood is exuberant.
A path becomes clear to me. I decide to use cooling and tranquilizing herbs for Meiling’s husband in a formula composed of lotus buds and snake-bramble seed to boost his potency, and deer horn and a particular species of rose hips, which inspires the male body to gather and consolidate fluids, especially Essence. For Meiling, I make Beginning of Joy pill, which has sixteen ingredients, including ginseng, licorice, angelica, and atractylodis, to strengthen her qi and Blood and, crucially, prevent miscarriage. I also burn moxibustion on her belly to build welcoming warmth in her child palace.
When Meiling’s monthly moon water doesn’t arrive, she dismisses the symptom, saying, “It has been an infrequent visitor since we left Beijing.” The week after that, she looks tired and pale. She rejects these signs too. “The fish I ate last night did not agree with me.” With those words, as innocuous as they are, it finally comes to me why Grandmother and Midwife Shi thought I would be a good match for Meiling. If I had physical and emotional flaws, which Meiling’s caring heart could rescue me from time and again, then she had the weakness of feeling she was not worthy of the blessings of the world, which I could help through my unconscious acceptance of the gifts and privileges I was born into. In our friendship—with all its twists and moments of tumult—was the yin and yang of life.
The next week, although I’m confident of my diagnosis, I decide to test if Kailoo has successfully planted a baby. Meiling places her wrist in my hand so I can feel her pulse. I let my heart and breath slow until I am one with my friend, and there it is. I find striking yin and salient yang. I smile and tell her the good news, but she remains skeptical, afraid to be disappointed.
“I anticipated this, and I’m prepared,” I tell her. “I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied with the usual tea made from lovage root and mugwort, though you know that it stimulates the fetus to jump and twirl so that a mother can feel it at just a few months. So, I’ve added honey locust fruit as a male doctor would.” I hand her the cup. “We say, Joy at its height births sorrow, but couldn’t we look at it the other way around and say that extreme adversity can be the beginning of good fortune?”
She regards me, a hopeful look on her face.
“Trust me,” I say. “Drink.”
Meiling swallows the tea and—happiness of happiness—promptly throws up.
Her morning sickness turns out to be relentless. I include perilla stalk in a tonic to strengthen her stomach. To ward against miscarriage, I create a formula using purple thyme and skullcap to cool maternal Fire.
“Be calm,” I tell her. “Follow my instructions, and all will be well.”
* * *
There is soft happiness in sadness and deep sadness in happiness. This aphorism can be applied to many situations, but perhaps none is more poignant than preparing a daughter to go to her husband’s home. What joy it is to pin up Yuelan’s hair, signaling to the women and girls in the inner chambers that she is ready for marriage. What sadness it is to see her clothes packed into trunks and the most precious of her dowry gifts of jewelry, scrolls, and strings of cash wrapped in red silk and placed in lacquer boxes inlaid with gold. What satisfaction I feel to give Second Aunt, as the woman in our household with proven fecundity at giving birth to sons, the honor of sending her to Yuelan’s future home to “make up the room” in preparation for her arrival. What surprising pleasure I get from imparting words of advice alongside my mother-in-law. “Always respect your mother-in-law,” I say. “Always obey.” Lady Kuo hears this, folds her hands together, and adds in a sweet—mocking?—tone, “Listen to your mother-in-law, but follow your mother’s example: Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.” I never could have imagined that my mother-in-law and I would one day find a way to laugh together, and yet we have.
I think back to my own wedding day, the first time I saw Maoren, and our first night of bedroom affairs. No one expects passion to last forever, but ours dissipated too soon. I’ve told myself that perhaps he lost interest in me during the time I was away on the Grand Canal and at the palace, caring for the ill in the Hermitage, observing weeks of ritual mourning for Grandmother, and being bedridden with my recent illness. Or maybe what I did to get to the truth of what happened here in the Garden of Fragrant Delights tainted me in his eyes. In the end, the cause doesn’t matter, because we’ve accomplished our obligation to secure the Yang family line. (And in truth, it’s been years since we enjoyed night sports by day.) I could harbor disappointment in my husband, but I prefer to look at it this way: I’m a wife with responsibilities, and he’s earned the right to have the company of a woman whose only purpose is to entertain… and provide treats in the bedchamber. He seems pleased when I offer to buy him a concubine.
“I trust she will be pleasant,” he says.