Tales of Ming Courtesans by Alice Poon

Author:Alice Poon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Earnshaw Books
Published: 2020-04-14T07:16:24+00:00

FOURTEEN

After reading Fo’s will for a second time, I stared into the space before me, my thoughts whirling and wheeling. There was such a lot to be done. Finding a burial ground and setting up a tombstone was among the priorities. On top of the chores at hand, fear constantly taunted me. I prayed that no one from Xie Sanbin’s household would take notice of my return.

Vaguely conscious that the other task was to find a buyer for Fo’s villa and her more valuable belongings like her paintings, because I needed to raise funds to pay Jingli for taking up Fo’s girls, I thought of writing to Zilong for help. I was hoping that when the Lantern Festival came around, I would have the proceeds to take to Jingli, along with the girls.

I took up the brush, and then put it down. Was it wise to make contact with him? I ruminated for a long time. Finally, prudence suppressed my emotional urge. I knew that if I got so much as even a few words from him, they would kindle the flame of desire again.

He was as much shackled by Confucian duties as I was pilloried by social scorn, which sadly arose from the same mountain of millennia-old class and gender biases. A pedantic scholar family would loathe accepting a courtesan into their household as a proper concubine. This proved true with both Song Zhengyu and Chen Zilong. The only difference between the two affairs was that there was genuine passion and respect between myself and Zilong, whereas it was absent with Zhengyu.

On the third morning after my return, with the help of the girls, I bought an expensive coffin made with the finest Liuzhou sandalwood. That was the least I could do in Fo’s honor. But a pang of guilt and shame pricked me at the thought of having buried my own mother in only a straw mat. After brooding in sorrow for a long time, I was eventually resigned to the fact that what had been done could not be undone.

In the afternoon, with a burial land broker’s help, we found and bought a small piece of burial ground on which two graves could be accommodated – one for Fo and one for my mother. For a small fee, the broker agreed to handle the inscription engraving for both tomb tablets. The land was on a quiet hillock shaded by a bamboo thicket, within walking distance of the villa.

Two days later, in late morning, the girls and I attended a simple burial rite conducted by two Buddhist monks. I knew Fo would have wanted this.

The long-missed winter sun smiled down on the hard frosted earth, melting away some of the bitter cold of the previous day. All dressed in white, we burned incense sticks and joss paper as coffin bearers lowered the coffin into the pit. Each of us scooped up a handful of loose soil and threw it on top of the coffin. The coffin bearers filled the pit with mounds of earth while the monks chanted the Lotus Sutra.

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