Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [115]
I put a hand over my mouth to cover my surprise as I realize why Sung-ling chose Kumei to play the maiden in our propaganda play and why the cadre was so tolerant of my friend for ignoring the set script. Comrade Ping-li’s husband wasn’t the only one being struggled against that night. Kumei was also being made to tell her story. How many times has she been forced to do that in one form or another since Liberation? Other moments come to mind too: when we first arrived and I asked Kumei why more people didn’t live in the villa and she was so evasive, and the night my mother came to Z.G.’s house and he said that we’d been housed in the villa as punishment. Even when people were telling me things, I wasn’t hearing them.
I tune back in to Kumei’s tale as she says, “I waited on the wives and concubines and took care of their bound feet. Yong was the youngest and prettiest wife—”
“I was also the meanest,” Yong confesses. “I was from Shanghai and spoke Shanghainese. The villa was beautiful, but Green Dragon wasn’t Shanghai. Our master was never satisfied either. He had many wives and concubines. He had plenty of children. Sons, even. But he wanted to prove his strength to the village. He was the headman, see?”
I don’t see, but Kumei goes on to explain it to me. “He had control over us, but as the headman he also needed to prove his strength to everyone in Green Dragon. What better way to do that than to have me in his bed and show that he could give me a son. By then, I was eleven. After the first night, I ran to my uncle and aunt’s house in Black Bridge Village. I begged them to let me live with them, but they turned away from me, stepped back into their house, and shut the door. I walked back to Green Dragon, to the house where I’d been born. I sat outside and cried. I rubbed dirt over my face and arms, into my clothes, and into my mouth. And then I stood up and walked back to the villa.”
“Why didn’t your parents help you?” I ask.
“They starved to death the winter they gave me away,” she answers. Then, after a moment, she continues. “I didn’t understand the things that went on in the villa. I was a servant, but I was also a concubine.”
“You were a little girl!”
Yong has been saying that the landowner was a good man, but how could he have been?
“We treated Kumei worse than the lowest servant, because she was the master’s favorite in the bedchamber,” Yong admits. Then she addresses Kumei directly. “You had no proper status in the household, and you could never enjoy the luxury that the other wives and concubines did. I remember Third Wife used to poke you with the sharp end of her brooch. She insisted that the kitchen servants feed you only melon rinds and rotten vegetable leaves.”
“At least I got something to eat—”
Are they teasing each other?
“And what about that concubine from Hangchow?” Yong rolls right over Kumei, laughing. Despite her pain and humiliation, Yong is managing to find humor in what I think is a ghastly story. “She thought she was so special—one of the great beauties! If her tea was too cold, she threw it on the floor and made you mop it with your clothes.”
“If it was too hot, she threw it in my face!” Kumei giggles at the memory. This must be how she got her scars, but before I can ask this, she exclaims, “Oh, I would have gladly traded places with any of you! The things he did! The things he made me do! I don’t know how real husbands and wives do this thing, and I will never find out.”
Now Yong and I exchange glances. Was what Kumei did then any different than what she’s been doing with the brigade leader? Kumei, as far as I can tell, has had sex only out of duty or necessity. Wouldn’t that color the experience, especially if she wasn’t in love the way I once loved Tao?
“I did many chores,” she goes on. “I washed the feet of the