Chinese Literature

sweets for some traveller to take to Chun Pao, but she could find no one going to her home village. She would often walk outside the gate with Chiu Pao in her arms, and there, standing by the roadside, she would gaze with melancholy eyes at the country paths. This greatly annoyed the scholar’s wife who said to her husband,

“She really doesn’t want to stay here any longer. She’s anxious to get back home as soon as she can.”

Sometimes at night, sleeping with Chiu Pao at her bosom, she would suddenly wake up from her dreams and scream until the child too would awake and start crying. Once, the scholar asked her,

“What’s happened? What’s happened?”

She patted the child without answering. The scholar continued,

‘Did you dream your elder son had died? How you screamed! You woke me up!’

She hurriedly answered, “No, no... I thought I saw a new grave in front of me!”

He said nothing, but the morbid hallucination continued to loom before her—she saw herself approaching the grave.

Winter was drawing to a close and the birds began twittering at her window, as if urging her to leave quickly. The child was weaned, and her separation from her son—permanent separation—was already a foregone conclusion.

On the day of her departure, the kitchen-maid quietly asked the scholar’s wife,

“Shall we hire a sedan-chair to take her home?”

Fingering the rosary in her hand, the scholar’s wife said, “Better let her walk. Otherwise she will have to pay the fare herself. And where will she get the money? I understand her husband can’t even afford to have three meals a day. She shouldn’t try to be showy. It’s not very far from here, and I myself have walked some forty li a day. She’s more used to walking than I am, so she ought to be able to get there in half a day.”

In the morning, as the young woman was dressing Chiu Pao, tears kept streaming down her cheeks. The child called, “Auntie, auntie’ (the scholar’s wife had made him call her “mummy,” and his real mother, “suntie”). The young woman could not answer for weeping. She wanted so much to say to the child,

“Good-bye, darling! Your ‘mummy’ has been good to you, so you should be good to her in the future. Forget about me forever!’ But these words she never uttered. The child was only one and a half years old, end she knew that he would never understand what she wanted to say.

The scholar walked up quietly behind her, and put ten twenty-cent silver coins into her palm, saying softly,

“Here are two dollars for you.”

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