Summary—Introduction
The opening parable of the fourth section depicts the
woman of the first three parables as she plays with a baby granddaughter.
She laments that she does not know whether to teach her granddaughter to
shed her innocence in order to protect herself from emotional injury
or to preserve her granddaughter’s optimism and faith in human goodness.
The woman regrets having taught her daughter (the baby’s mother)
to recognize the evil in people, because she suspects that to recognize
evil in others is to yield to the evil in oneself. The baby begins
to laugh, and the woman takes her laugh as a sign of wisdom. The
baby, the woman says, is really the “Queen Mother of the Western
Skies,” who has lived many times and has come back to answer the
woman’s questions about evil. The woman tells her granddaughter
that she has learned her lesson: one must lose one’s innocence but
not one’s hope; one must never stop laughing. The woman tells the
baby to teach her mother the same lesson.
Summary—An-mei Hsu: “Magpies”
In this final section of the novel, the mothers again
resume their narratives. An-mei Hsu tells the first story. She begins
by brooding on her daughter Rose’s decaying marriage. She remarks
that although Rose believes she has run out of choices, Rose is
in fact making a distinct choice in refusing to speak up for herself.
An-mei knows this, she says, because she was taught to desire nothing,
to absorb other people’s misery, to suppress her own pain. She received
her first lesson in such passive stoicism when she was a young girl
living at her uncle’s house in Ningpo. An-mei’s mother came and
cut her own flesh for her mother, Popo, who was dying (see the story
“Scar”).
After Popo’s death, An-mei’s mother prepared to leave,
and An-mei began to cry. Her mother told her that once, when she
was a girl, she had sat crying by the pond when a turtle surfaced,
swallowing her teardrops as they touched the water. The turtle then
said that he had eaten her tears and therefore knew her misery.
He warned her that if she continued to cry, her life would always
be sad. He spat out the tears in the form of tiny eggs, which cracked
open to reveal seven fluttering magpies, birds of joy. The turtle
said that whenever one cries, one is not washing away one’s sorrows
but feeding another’s joy. For this reason, one must learn to swallow
one’s own tears.
An-mei’s mother wanted to take An-mei with her. An-mei’s
uncle told her she would ruin her daughter’s life as she had ruined
her own. An-mei, defying the angry exhortations of her aunt and
uncle, decided to leave with her mother. They allowed her to go,
but her uncle deemed her “finished.” An-mei’s one deep regret was
that her brother could not come along. Mother and daughter traveled
to Tientsin, where An-mei’s mother had lived for the past five years
in the household of a rich merchant named Wu Tsing. She lived with him
as his third concubine, or “fourth wife.” The house was a huge Western-style
mansion, full of luxuries and amusements, including a European cuckoo
clock. An-mei lived in glorious happiness for a few weeks, until
Wu Tsing returned home from his travels accompanied by a young and
beautiful fifth wife, who replaced An-mei’s mother as the latest
concubine. An-mei’s mother became depressed at her sudden decline
in status and dignity.
Soon the winter came, and Wu Tsing’s second and third
wives returned to Tientsin from their summer homes. Second Wife,
an expensively dressed, older woman of forty-five, appeared especially intimidating
to An-mei. Although she seemed a bit too old to still have young
children, she carried in her arms a two-year-old son, Syaudi. Upon
first meeting An-mei, Second Wife gave her a pearl necklace. An-mei
felt honored by the attention, but her mother warned her not to
be manipulated by Second Wife. Later, An-mei’s mother crushed one
“pearl” of the necklace under her shoe, proving to An-mei that it
was made of mere glass. Afterward, An-mei’s mother gave her a sapphire
ring.
Yan Chang, the servant of An-mei’s mother, explained to
An-mei that Wu Tsing’s original wife, known as First Wife, bore
children with physical deformities or large birthmarks, thus failing
to produce a suitable heir. She took many pilgrimages to honor Buddha, hoping
to rectify her misfortune with a perfect child. Yet she had no more
children. Wu Tsing gave her money for her own household. Twice a
year, she visited his house, but she remained in her bedroom smoking opium.
One day An-mei’s mother informed her that Wu Tsing had arranged
for them soon to have their own household as well.
