paper moon

Our truck bumped through the potholes in the badly-paved road, and so did my head upon the roof of the car. I pressed harder on my Nei Guan point, three fingers below my wrist, and swallowed back my bile. Rolling outside my window were huge cows milling by flimsy tin shacks, roosters and chickens pecking aimlessly under their swollen bellies. Huge trees shadowed our car with their dappled leaves and ruby fruit, so the inside of our car was stained red. Men lugging water buffalos waved at us as we passed, as well as women carrying reed baskets on their heads, and children running naked and dripping wet from the village river. 

Today, we were visiting my relatives in the countryside. Because of the difficult terrain of my mother’s home village, they were always the one who had to venture out to visit us. But Grant Auntie Ze had been ill for some time, they said. Mumbling about this and that, wringing her hands ceaselessly, embroidering deep into the night, and hiding her pieces whenever someone came close to her. So naturally, my parents were worried and wanted to see for themselves the turmoils of my Grand Auntie’s behaviour.

“When we get there, do not talk too loudly or make sudden movements.” My mother said from beside me. “Lan says that she is very sensitive.”

My Auntie Lan—aunt twice removed or something along the lines of that—greeted us profusely, yelling in seamless Hakka for our cousins to get our luggage. Leaning in to whisper in my mother’s ear, she said, “Grand Auntie Ze is sleeping now. She was very cranky earlier on, yelling because one of the babies got into her room.”

Was Grand Auntie really that ill to show anger? For as long as I had known her, she had never been the type to drop harsh words, especially on one of the baby cousins. 

We had lunch in the dining area. My cousins ran haphazardly in and out, bare feet slapping onto the sandy dirt of the house. They stopped ever so often to watch the TV, which was showing a blurry cartoon in faint sepia. I sat with the adults.

“So, Pearl,” Auntie Lan said. “Your mother tells me you have started embroidery.”

I nodded, horror unfurling in my chest. Auntie Lan continued, “You’ll have to see my dowry. Perhaps you’ll be inspired?”

I nodded again. My mother hid a smile. Auntie Lan and my mother, her sister, were excellent in embroidery. I could do nothing compared to them. They had spent their entire lives preparing their trousseau, while I was just a simple-minded city girl looking for a hobby. 

My father, who had moved him and my mother to the city when they were newly-weds, said, “Did you mention that Grand Auntie Ze had also taken up embroidery again?”

Auntie Lan sighed. “Yes. I don’t even know why, for her hands seize up with arthritis every few minutes. Whenever I hide her equipment, she finds it and starts it up again.”

“What has she been embroidering? You didn’t mention that in your letter.” My mother asked.

Auntie Lan fixed my mother a significant look. She waved her hands in the air and said mysteriously, “You know. The usual.”

They both laughed knowingly. They were so sweet, sisters who knew what the other was thinking with nothing but their hands and facial expressions. But I was feeling a little left out. There was obviously something very amiss.

Grand Auntie Ze woke up in the evening, demanding water. I was the one who brought the jug to her. I dabbed at the corners of her mouth where water had settled into the cracks of her skin, and at her chin where it had dribbled down. I looked at her carefully: her face, like crumpled paper, didn’t look too pale or sallow. Her eyes were sparkling and bright, like a child’s. She clasped my hands to her heart once she put down her cup.

“Dear Pearl! How nice to see you again.”

I smiled, satisfied that she was able to recognise and greet me amicably. I said softly, “Hello Grand Auntie Ze. How have you been?”

“Fine, fine. How is your husband?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

Her forehead furrowed. “Have you divorced dear Henry? But he was so kind to you.”

“I don’t have a husband.” I repeated this blankly. I did not want to face the fact she was going senile already. “I’m afraid you have me confused for someone else. I’m Pearl? Your niece?”

She shook her head rapidly, and I held her down firmly by the shoulders, afraid the spinning would make her sick. She said, “Pearl! I have it.”

“Have what?”

She smiled surreptitiously. “It.” She hobbled out of bed, using her cane to mark her way across the dust to her armoire. I followed her, hands held out, afraid that she would tip back. She lifted up her hanging clothes and felt her way across the bottom of the armoire. Then, she plucked two knobs out, and peeled away the layer to reveal a hollow space underneath. She dug her hands in and lifted out a thin grey cloth embroidered with a repeating pattern of black swirls.

“What do you think of this?” She asked, holding it out to me. “Isn’t it my best work?”

“Uh.”

“They won’t be able to crack it!” She cackled.

My mother came in, with a tray of fruit. At the sight of her, Grand Auntie Ze’s face grew dark and she practically ran back to her bed. She pulled the covers up to her head. At last, I was witness to what our relatives had been so worried about, for she started crying out, “I don’t have it, I am a simple, foolish country woman, they’re just patterns!”

“I think you should go hang out with your cousins. Leave Grand Auntie Ze to me.” She steered me out of the room before I could protest and shut the door firmly behind me. I put an ear to the door. I could hear my mother’s gentle, patient tones, and Grand Auntie Ze’s harsh squawks. After a few minutes of my mother’s cajoling, I could feel Grand Auntie’s tension seep out of the cracks beneath her door, until all I could hear was the confused mumbling of a harmless old lady.

I volunteered the next morning to watch her. The old lady was dozing off for her nap, so I just sat in her room, reading my book. I had left my embroidery kit in the city. I was too embarrassed to bring my silly, childish embroidery of cartoonish figures, as they were inferior to my aunt’s and mother’s intricate designs of phoenixes and lotuses, lilies and dragons. Their stitching was refined, for they had spent most of their lives doing such an art.

The blanket Grand Auntie had shown to me yesterday was spread out at the base of her bed. I edged my chair closer to it in hopes of inspecting it closer, but my chair hit the wooden foot of the bed. With a snort, she woke up. I rushed to her side with a glass of water at the ready. She gulped it down in three seconds flat.

“Is that my blanket?”

“Yes. Would you like me to get it for you?”

She nodded. When I spread it out across her lap, she said sharply to me, “What do you see?”

“A pattern.”

She rapped her knuckles at the side of my head. While I was reeling from the shock, she demanded another answer. “Quickly! Look closer.”

I moved my eyes closer. The pattern wasn’t repetitive. It differed slightly every ‘block’. It was made up of gentle, sloping lines. I found myself reading them from top to bottom, just how you would read Chinese characters in the olden days. “It looks like Chinese characters. Only, more curvy?”

She cackled and patted me on the shoulder. “Good eye, good eye. This is nüshu. It is an ancient script created by women in this province. It was for women, by women. You have no idea how important this is.” Her voice was clearer than I could ever remember, with a level of clarity I knew had been missing from her voice for months. So I listened, instead of taking them as the nonsensical ramblings of a decrepit old lady. “See how it slants, how its legs curve across the fabric? It is gentle, like a wind whisper through a grove of trees.”

“And you know how to write this?” I had never heard of such an art.

“Yes. My mother taught me.” She had a far-off, dreamy look upon her face, reminiscent of the olden days. “Did you know I used it? In the uprising?”

“The uprising?”

“Yes. The uprising.” She opened her drawer to retrieve a piece of parchment with nüshu calligraphed upon its crackly surface. The lines of the script in black ink were sharper and more wispy than with thread, like the legs of a mosquito. I watched as she turned it inside and out, moved it this way, folded it that way, until it become the sharp sliver of a moon. Like a book, she opened it so that a full moon sat in her lap. Then, she folded it back again into the waxy wane of a crescent moon. She grinned at me, the missing gaps in her teeth giving her a lopsided, childlike look. “They looked down on you if you were a woman. They treated you like scum if they knew you were a clueless, female countryside loafer. They underestimated us. So of course, our messages, written in nüshu, were never discovered. Only the country women could read it. Men do not know how to read it and took it as silly, ugly patterns. Pah!” She spat onto the floor. “Nüshu was instrumental at sending messages from camp to camp. We saved a lot of lives, prevented major disasters that would have changed China forever.”

My mother had told me two years ago that Grand Auntie Ze lived during the uprising. But I had never known how far she had been involved in it.

She stared at her hands, the crumpled skin, mottled purple and green. “I am getting old. I am forgetting. You were named after her. My best friend. She died in the revolt of Hunan.”

“What?”

Tears rolled down her cheeks, clear marbles running rivers. “My best friend. Pearl. Pearl and her husband. My dear friend. I was there. But I could not save her.”

Wanting her to forget, at least in this moment, her pain, I pulled the covers up and said in a low voice, “Tell me about your childhood, Grand Auntie Ze. You told me you had a marvellous childhood. Tell me about it and do not miss out a detail.”

“My mother, I, aunts, sisters, both blood and sworn, would sit in the inner chambers and chant songs and stories while the men worked hard in the fields. We worked hard at our embroidery. I worked very hard to make my characters on the cloth perfect, like the curve of a smiling lip, the slice of a paper moon, the stalk of a flower swaying in the night breeze …” Her words gave way to murmurs, as the shores of sleep began to take her away.

I watched her sleep, her peaceful face unmarred by the horrors of the uprising. I was shocked, amazed, by this woman who had lived through such a time, gone through so much, and had probably saved countless lives through her writing. And not just any writing, women’s writing. I would never know of her nightmares, the guilt that she seemed to feel towards my namesake, Pearl, and her husband Henry. In the day, I would try to understand her, through all her long-winded explanations of nonsense and temper tantrums. But in sleep, I would leave her to revel in the joyous past of her childhood, of singing in the women’s chambers with the people she cherished, embroidering phoenixes and lotuses, lilies and dragons, and the elegant script of nüshu.

I was first introduced to nüshu from Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, a novel I adore so much. I recommend you to read up on nüshu, for it is a fascinating but dying art.