A Thousand Miles of Dreams by Welland Sasha Su-Ling;

Author:Welland, Sasha Su-Ling;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442210066
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Shuhua told Hu Shi that she had discussed with Xu Zhimo a plan for him to leave the country to extricate himself from potential scandal. She asked Hu Shi to encourage him to take this trip, for the sake of his position and the Crescent Moon Society. Then she reiterated, “I want to state that Xu Zhimo and I have always been literary friends.” This clarification of emotions toward Zhimo opened the way for an increasingly close relationship with her editor at Contemporary Review. Xu Zhimo eventually extended his comparison of Ling Shuhua to Katherine Mansfield by likening Chen Xiying to Mansfield’s husband, the critic-editor John Middleton Murry.

The publication of “Intoxicated” marked the beginning of an extremely productive year for Shuhua. In March 1925, Chen Xiying published another of her best-known stories, “Embroidered Pillows,” in which a young woman painstakingly embroiders a pair of pillows. Her amah blots perspiration from her face while she sews the tiny stitches that make up a kingfisher with lotuses and a phoenix on a mountain of rocks. The cushions will be sent as a gift to a family whose son her parents hope to attract as a marriage partner. The young mistress labors intensively over these objects, which will represent her on the marriage market. After the pillows are sent, two years pass, without a response from the receiving family until she inadvertently learns from a maid’s story that on the night the pillows were presented, a drunken guest at the party vomited on one of them. A mahjong player carelessly used the other as a footstool.

She began to recall that when she had made the crest she had had to embroider it, then take it out, altogether three times. Once her perspiration had discolored the delicate yellow thread. She didn’t discover it until she was through embroidering. Another time she used the wrong color of green for the rock. She had mistaken the color while embroidering at night. She couldn’t remember why she had taken it out the last time. For the light pink of the lotus petals, she didn’t dare just take up the thread after washing her hands. She had sprinkled her hands with talcum powder before touching it. The large lotus leaf was even harder . . . she had matched twelve different colors of green thread to embroider it.6

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