Chinese Literature
“Td better leave here as soon as I can. She’s always spying on me!”
Later, the scholar changed his plan a little; he decided he would send Mrs. Shen on another mission: to find out whether the young woman’s husband was willing to take another thirty dollars—or fifty dollars at most—to let him keep the young woman for another three years. He said to his wife,
“I suppose Chiu Pao’s mother could stay on until he is five.”
Chanting “Buddha preserve me” with a rosary in her hand, the scholar’s wife replied, .
“She has got her elder son at home. Besides, you ought to let her go back to her lawful husband.”
The scholar hung his head and said brokenly,
“Just imagine, Chiu Pao will be motherless at two... .
Putting away the rosary, his wife snapped,
“TI can take care of him, I can manage him. Are you afraid ’m going to murder him?”
Upon hearing the last sentence, the scholar walked away hurriedly. His wife went on grumbling,
“The child has been born for me. Chiu Pao is mine. If the male line of your family came to an end, it would affect me too. You’ve been bewitched by her. You’re old and pigheaded. You don’t know what’s what. Just think how many more years you may live, and yet you’re trying to do everything to keep her with you. I certainly don’t want another woman’s tablet put side by side with mine in the family shrine!”
It seemed as if she would never stop pouring out the stream of venomous and biting words, but the scholar was too far away to hear them.
Every time Chiu Pao had a pimple on his head or a slight fever, the scholar’s wife would go around praying to Buddha and bring back Buddha’s medicine in the form of incense ash which she applied to the baby’s pimple or dissolved in water for him to drink. He would ery and perspire profusely. The young woman did not like the idea of the scholar’s wife making so much fuss when the baby fell slightly ill, and always threw the ash away when she was not there. Sighing deeply, the scholar’s wife once said to her husband,
“You see, she really doesn’t care a bit about our baby and says that he’s not getting thinner. Real Jove needs no flourishes; she is only pretending that she loves our baby.”
The young woman wept when alone, and the scholar kept silent.
33
On Chiu Pao’s first birthday, the celebration lasted the whole day. About forty guests attended the party. The birthday presents they brought included baby clothes, noodles, a silver pendant in the shape of a lion’s head to be worn on the baby’s chest and a gold-plated image of the God of Longevity to be sewn to the baby’s bonnet. The guests wished
118
Sore tiie