Return to the Nest - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I’d never seen the high walls of the marquis’s mansion, and the ancestral hall was even more of a novelty. But once I stepped inside, I understood. Wreaths of white smoke rose from the offerings-so it was a temple after all.

“You worship this many gods? Why aren’t there any statues?”

Chen Duanyi hung her head and knelt on her own, and only after a long while said, “Not gods. Ancestors.”

“Ancestors?”

She looked up, mouth slightly agape. “You don’t know about ancestors?”

She was so astonished it was almost funny, her lashes still wet with tears. I only then noticed she’d been crying. We stared at each other a moment, and I remembered my handkerchief. “Here.”

Chen Duanyi didn’t take it, as if mesmerized. At last, like a wandering soul, she asked, “Father and Mother… are they gone?”

I was stunned too. “You were crying over that?”

Still so absurd. I’d traveled a thousand li north, never found the father and mother I’d imagined, but I found Chen Duanyi. A Chen Duanyi who could weep with me in a stranger’s ancestral hall for our own parents.

I said, “Papa passed in spring. Mama-”

Strange, I’d never called anyone that before, yet today I’d said it twice. At this moment, I really didn’t want Chen Duanyi, who’d had a mother since birth, to outdo me, so I decided to lie. “She passed this spring too. A great storm at sea-both of them, gone.”

Chen Duanyi’s eyes reddened again. “Do you have their spirit tablets with you? I must pay my respects.”

I asked, “Spirit tablets?”

It took a long time for me to understand that the dead here enjoyed treatment like gods.

Chen Duanyi pointed to the tablets and explained to me which one was the father of Marquis Meng’en, which one his grandfather, and which ones were further back. Those further back were covered in dense, tiny characters, looking very complicated.

“Every festival and holiday, we must worship. You learn these rites from childhood,” she said.

“So they bless you too? Like gods.”

Chen Duanyi nodded.

“That makes sense. Where I’m from, the dead don’t bother with the living.”

“Then what happens to the dead?”

“Either they’re thrown into the sea for the fish to eat. Or they’re burned with the ship. Nothing left behind, nothing taken away.”

Chen Duanyi’s face went a little pale. “Isn’t that too… disrespectful?”

“How could it be? The dead don’t bother with the living, and the living shouldn’t bother with the dead. If the living think too much, if their thoughts cling too deep, it might disturb their rebirth instead.”

She asked again, “Then what about us-if descendants want to keep a memory?”

“I said, ‘What they left on us is already left on us.'”

Papa once said that, and now I said it to Chen Duanyi.

She lowered her head, thoughtful. After a silence, she spoke again: “I really did think about switching back with you… not for riches. Do you believe me?”

“I believe you,” I took a deep breath. “Because I want to go back too. From here, when you look east, you can’t see the sea. It suffocates me.”

“What is the sea like?”

“A lot of water, gathered together, turning blue.” I felt words could never quite capture it. “You’d have to go see for yourself. But with your frame, once on board, the sea wind might just blow you away.”

Chen Duanyi smiled sheepishly. When she smiled, two little dimples appeared at her cheeks, like fishhooks cast into water.

She asked, “You said you have a name. What’s your name?”

“Xiao Jiang,” I said. “The oar that rows the boat.”

“Xiao Jiang,” she murmured. “From now on, when Mother isn’t here, I’ll call you that, alright?”

This “Mother” meant Madam Hou. Finally, someone had said my name, and I felt as if cotton had been pulled from my ears-so clear, so free. I said, “Alright.”

“Can you give me one too?”

I froze. Chen Duanyi looked at me expectantly. From Madam Hou, I’d received a new name that fit; now she wanted one too. The name she would have had. She wanted me to name her.

I looked into her eyes, deep as a well of water. So these were my mother’s eyes, I thought. Then I said, “Mama once said, if she ever had another daughter, she’d call her Xiao Zhou.”