Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [71]
The longer the banquet went on outside, the more the bride suffered torments in her bridal chamber.
In the small hours of the morning, Auntie Cheung Tai woke Six Fingers with the news that the helpers had arrived. They washed her, trimmed the fine hairs on her face and neck, dressed her and applied her makeup. A dazed Six Fingers found herself gripped and kneaded from head to toe by a dozen hands. She had still not fully recovered from her illness but the face powder covered her sickly pallor. Half a dozen women worked for several hours to get her ready. Then someone gave her a square mirror. In its reflection, she saw a stranger, one with a pearly-white complexion, pink-blushed cheeks and lustrous bright eyes. She smiled. The stranger smiled back and the jewelled headdress jiggled gently.
At midday, the palanquin came to take her to the Fongs’ house, though the distance was no more than fifty yards or so. The heavy mantle over her head left her in complete darkness, but this only made her other senses more acute. She could tell who the bearers were, which route their black cotton shoes were taking, whose dog was barking furiously as the sedan passed, how hot the sun’s rays were on the palanquin roof. She could smell the scorching heat of the gaze of the bystanders as their eyes burned through the curtains of her palanquin, and she could even distinguish fiddle in the welcoming band whose timid notes were slightly out of tune. She had not imagined that the road from girlhood to her new life as married woman would feel so simple, so trouble free and so familiar.
It was the first month of the new year and, although it was still cool, the icy chill that had held them in its grip in winter was gone. Her forehead and the palms of her hands perspired slightly. She knew she had a scarlet handkerchief tucked into her waistband and could perfectly well have used it to wipe her face and hands. She tugged at it gently—then put it back. It was a gift which the matchmaker had brought her from Ah-Fat when she delivered his written marriage proposal, and she could not bear to use it. Ah-Fat had also given her two bracelets, one gold and one silver, an eightpanelled, embroidered skirt in silk gauze, four pieces of satin and two pairs of embroidered shoes. All these gifts had come from Canton city. “Everything he bought in Gold Mountain for the first girl has gone to her and her family,” the matchmaker informed them. The woman had passed on Ah-Fat’s message but not what it meant, since she did not know, but Six Fingers had understood immediately. Ah-Fat wanted to start their lives with a clean slate, putting new wine into a new bottle and leaving the old bottle for the past. So when Auntie Cheung Tai grumbled that the Fongs had been hasty and mean with their wedding gifts, Six Fingers merely looked down and smiled slightly.
In return, Six Fingers had given to her new husband the traditional gifts a bride gives the bridegroom: a figure of a boy on a lotus leaf, modelled in flour paste (symbolizing a succession of precious sons), ten guava fruits also made from flour paste (symbols of plenty), a pair of shoes and ten bags of salt. Everything was put together by Auntie Cheung Tai except for the shoes—a personal gift which she had made entirely herself, from gluing the cloth and stitching the soles to cutting out the uppers and sewing them together. She had not let Auntie Cheung Tai help her in any way, not even by finding out what his shoe size was. The day that he and she had written the scroll together in the back room, she had found out his shoe size. She had measured it at a glance.
Six Fingers used two kinds of stitches for the soles: chain stitch on one side, cross-stitch on the other. Of all the women in Spur-On Village, only her future mother-in-law had worked the stitches this way, when she was a young woman. On the uppers, she embroidered two clouds, each in a different