Yu and Jing - Chapter 3

My name is Jiang Yu. I’m a physician—and a woman dressed as a man.

My father was a physician too, but he had no son. In Great Chu, where women were expected to stay out of the public eye, he should have taken in a few apprentices to carry on his practice. Instead, he believed a healer’s sex made no difference, and taught me everything he knew.

He had always raised me as a boy. My clothes and appearance were those of a boy, of course, but alongside medicine I even had to learn martial arts.

When I was twelve, I cried and protested to my father for the first time. I refused to go back to the training hall. I could not understand why other girls got to wear pretty dresses and cling to their fathers’ necks, while I had to wear boys’ clothes and spend my days kicking and punching under the martial arts master’s eye until I was covered in bruises.

Father let me cry. Only when I had exhausted myself did he calmly ask, “Wasn’t it you who said you wanted to study medicine and save people?”

“Yes,” I answered between sobs.

He stroked my head. “Then for now, you must look like a boy. Otherwise, in another three years you’ll be like the other girls: married to a man, serving your husband and raising his children, bound by the rules of obedience and virtue. You’ll spend your whole life shut away at home. You can forget about practicing medicine.”

I knew he was thinking of my former senior apprentice, Sister Chen next door.

For as long as I could remember, Sister Chen had helped my father. She loved studying medicinal herbs, and she always carried their scent on her.

She was one of only two people who knew I was a girl. Her favorite pastime was pinching my cheeks and teasing me. “Our little Yu wears boys’ clothes, but anyone can see she’ll grow into a beauty.”

Sister Chen was the real beauty. Everyone in town knew it. Perhaps that was why, at sixteen, she was married to an elderly gentleman nearly fifty years old.

I was only eight then. As I watched her bridal sedan depart, I asked Father why she had to marry that old man.

Because her parents decided her marriage, he said. Because she had two younger brothers. Because the old man had money.

I told Father not to marry me off to an old man.

He gave no answer. He only rubbed my head and said, “Have you finished today’s lessons? If you have, go to the training hall.”

I had nothing to say to that.

When I was thirteen, Sister Chen died in childbirth, just as my mother had. I never quarreled with Father about it again. When I was eighteen, he too passed away. Before he died, he held my hand and said, “I’m sorry, child. I never bought you a proper dress.”

Now I was twenty-one, and at last I had bought myself one.

When I brought it home, I told Lu Jing it was for him. He tried it on and said it did not quite fit. We were much the same size, but his shoulders were wider than mine, so the dress was a little tight on him.

I kept my expression steady and said I would return it. Instead, I carried it to my room, shut the door, leaned against it, and stood clutching the wide-sleeved dress while I struggled to breathe evenly.

Some secret feeling seemed to break through the earth inside me. I could feel how excited I was.

Yet even after my heart had settled and my palms had grown damp, I did not try it on.

First, I did not know how. Second, some things, once begun, could not be put away again.

So I buried the dress beneath my men’s clothes and locked it in the wardrobe, unsure when it would see daylight.

I had lived as a man all these years. Surely I could endure this little while longer.