Authors: Janie Chang

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Three Souls (47 page)

BOOK: Three Souls

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“Come with me, Stepdaughter. It’s nearly dark. Let’s put the silkies back in their coop.” I hadn’t expected this gentleness from Meichiu.

***

Nanmei’s abrupt departure is a source of speculation in our home for only a few weeks. When a letter arrives from Changyin, addressed to Baizhen, the mysterious teacher is pushed out of everyone’s thoughts by far more dramatic news. The envelope contains a card bordered in black, announcing Tongyin’s death. Changyin’s precise handwriting tells the story as he knows it:

My brother obviously cherished his friendship with your family, for he visited your home twice after the death of Third Sister, and in his rooms we found photographs of little Weilan. You should know my brother was missing for weeks before his body was discovered. He didn’t die of natural causes. Shanghai is a violent and dangerous city, so we doubt his murder will ever be solved. If only he had spent more time in Changchow, or in your peaceful little town.

Baizhen weeps, for he had considered Tongyin a friend as well as his brother-in-law.

My in-laws decide it would be poor manners to ask Changyin to speak to the Cha family about Weilan. The fact that her photographs were still in Tongyin’s room was clear evidence that Tongyin had not yet approached the Cha family.

***

A feeling of lightness and then a plummeting drop.

There’s no reckoning of motives good or bad. There’s only a life, a death, what was averted, what was caused.
This is what my
hun
soul said.

And yet. And yet.

When I was shown Tongyin’s life as it should have been, an existence of idleness and comfort, I had felt a pause, a delay, as if a deliberation was in progress, a weighing. On every other occasion when I was shown the future, it was in quick splashes, each scene instantly washing out the previous one. This time, there was one scene from my brother’s future, ladled out slowly. It had remained before me for so long, like spilled water pooled on a table, that I was able to eavesdrop on Tongyin and his friends as they gossiped in a café. I had inhaled the fragrance of his coffee, breathed in the sweet stink of their cigarettes, hovered over his shoulder to read the headlines of the newspaper spread across his lap.

That’s how I know there’s more to do.

Cha Zhiming is no longer a threat but Weilan’s life is still in danger.

EPILOGUE

Pinghu, 1936

H
urry, hurry,” says Little Ming. She lifts Ah Jiao into the donkey cart and he toddles over to Weilan, who is already inside. Little Ming climbs in to join them and Dali shifts to make room. The rest of the cart is filled with food and small items of furniture. Weilan is sitting beside a cloth-covered cage. Beneath the cloth, the silkies cluck hesitantly and she croons back at them, reassuring noises. The coolness of early morning has burned off and the sycamores overhead struggle to block the glare of the sun, which falls hard and bright on my family.

In front of them is another cart. Meichiu sits under its canvas cover, Weihong on her lap. Baizhen climbs up beside the driver, who snaps his switch at the donkey’s rump. From the gate, Old Ming waves farewell.

“Why aren’t Old Kwan and Mrs. Kwan coming with us?” asks Weilan.

“They’re going back to their own village, it’s not far away,” Dali replies. “At the end of this week, we’ll all come back to Pinghu.”

“What about Old Ming?”

The old servant can’t remember a time when he wasn’t in service to the Lee family. He refuses to leave and has insisted to my husband that someone must stay behind to guard the property and look after the Master and Mistress. Jia Po and Gong Gong are also refusing to depart the estate.

“To go all that way, for just a few days,” Gong Gong said. “All on a whim. The Japanese won’t come here. We’re an insignificant town.”

“Not a whim, Father,” Baizhen pleaded with him. “I’ve had the same dream about Leiyin so many times over the past few months and so has Ma. Leiyin warned us to get away from Pinghu before tomorrow.”

“But your mother isn’t leaving.”

Jia Po snapped her fan shut.

“I’m not leaving because you’re not leaving. You’re my husband. What would people say? So we’ll both die in this house because you won’t leave your books and porcelain.”

Baizhen squeezes Meichiu’s hand.

“You’ll see,” he promises. “I’m not going mad. We’ll be safe in the cottage at Infant Mountain.”

“It’s wise to listen to the spirits of the dead when they make an effort to help us,” she says. “I lit some incense in front of First Wife’s name tablet this morning.”

The two carts clop along until the paved streets of Pinghu give way to a wide dirt road, baked hard as clay in the summer heat. I remember the first time I travelled this road, my feet dangling over the back of the cart, Weilan in front with her father and Little Ming beside me. I remember singing and playing word games all the way to Infant Mountain. I think back to our climb up the winding path to its summit, where I looked down on the serene beauty of Pinghu and its lake, the graceful pagoda of the Temple of Soul’s Enlightenment on its shores.

Tomorrow morning, I will stand at the summit of Infant Mountain once more and look down on Pinghu. And tomorrow, my souls and I will know.

I believe I will see Japanese bombers fly in formation over the town, on a practice run toward an inland target. One will struggle and fall behind, its engines spewing black smoke, and the pilot will drop his load of bombs in an effort to gain some control over his aircraft. The town will light up in a series of explosions, each one brighter than the last, seconds apart. Entire streets of houses will burn. The young pilot will try for a water landing, but the plane will fall from the air, spinning out of control until it crashes into the lake and sinks in an eruption of oil and water.

***

Until tomorrow, we won’t know if a bomb will destroy our home. But I believe that’s what will happen.

My souls are dim sparks balanced on top of the cart. I feel thin, translucent, like watered-down rice soup, my body stretched out, in pain. It takes all my will to think clearly. It gets harder every day.

Why else would the gods have allowed you that chance to read Tongyin’s newspaper?
my
yang
soul says in agreement.
You saw the name of the town and the date. You saw the news about a damaged Japanese aircraft, bombs, fire, and fatalities.

We must believe you were being given a chance to save many lives,
my
yin
soul says.
Enough lives to atone for the death of a brother, and the death of a lover. Oh, why wouldn’t Jia Po and Gong Gong come with us?

We can’t control their fate,
says my
hun
soul,
we can barely manage our own. But we can hope for tomorrow.

Tomorrow,
I say,
tomorrow we can
hope for rebirth.

And swaying with the motion of the cart, my souls and I look ahead, toward Infant Mountain.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
he family stories and anecdotes my parents shared with me during my childhood have been the primary sources for
Three Souls.
Leiyin’s character was inspired by my grandmother, whose ambitions might have been fulfiled had she been born just a decade later. Baizhen is a more sympathetic version of my grandfather, and Hanchin is loosely based on my grandmother’s first cousin Qu Quibai. At one time Qu was de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party; he met with the same fate as Hanchin.

Pinghu, my parents’ hometown, is real. To the best of my knowledge, there was no Hangchow Women’s University during the Chinese civil-war era. There were, however, at least two highly regarded women’s universities during that time, one in Beijing, the other in Shanghai.

My thanks to the Authors of Asian Novels group for the lively online debate that convinced me to use Pinyin for the characters’ names and Chinese Postal Map Romanization for the names of major cities. The Qing Dynasty officially adopted the latter for place names in 1906 and its use continued until 1949; it is the system that made “Peking” more familiar to the world than the Wade-Giles translation “Pei-ching.”

China has been host to numerous belief systems. Many of its folk religions stem from ancestor worship, in which the notion of multiple souls is common, with varied interpretations of the souls’ qualities. Daoism asserts that a person possesses three
hun
souls and seven
po
souls, but I felt three was quite enough.

To my mentor and classmates at The Writer’s Studio, Simon Fraser University: I will always treasure Shaena Lambert’s empathetic and thoughtful advice. My gratitude goes to David Blinkhorn, Claire DeBoer, Lara Janze, Lorraine Kiidumae, Toni Levi, Kacey-Neille Riviere, Anthony Patten, and Patricia Webb for workshopping the same damn story all year. Special thanks to Elizabeth Morwick, who handed me the winning ticket.

Robert McCammon and Nancy Richler had no reason to champion my book but they did, and I am forever humbled by their kindness. Many thanks also to Jennifer Pooley, whose talented guidance elevated
Three Souls
above the slush pile. Beverly Martin, thank you for the encouraging shove that put me on this path.

Iris Tupholme and Lorissa Sengara at HarperCollins Canada have been amazing and instructive editors. I feel fortunate beyond words to have Jill Marr at the Dijkstra Agency representing me.

To my husband, who took over the cooking and housekeeping so that I could write every night and all day on weekends: Geoffrey, thank you so much for the gift of time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Taiwan,
JANIE CHANG
has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand and New Zealand. She now lives in Canada. She is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. Three Souls is her first novel. Visit her at
janiechang.com
.

Three Souls

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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EPub Edition: August 2013

EPub ISBN: 978-144342-392-2

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