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from nature excellence in letters….

    “What are you reading now?” Baba asked.
    Caught! Blood rushed to my cheeks.
    “I…I…”
    “There are things in the story a girl like you might not understand. You could discuss them with your mother—”
    I blushed an even deeper red. “It’s nothing like that,” I stammered, and then I read him the lines, which on their own seemed perfectly innocent.
    “Ah, so you want to know the source for this too.” When I nodded, he got up, went to one of the shelves, pulled down a book, and brought it to the bed. “This records the deeds of famous scholars. Do you want me to help you?”
    “I can do it, Baba.”
    “I know you can,” he said, and handed me the volume.
    Aware of my father’s eyes watching me, I leafed through the book until I came to an entry about Kuang Heng, a scholar so poor he couldn’t afford oil for his lamp. He drilled a hole in the wall so he might borrow his neighbor’s light.
    “In a few more pages”—Baba urged me on—“you’ll find the reference to Sun Jing, who tied his hair to a beam, so fearful was he of falling asleep at his studies.”
    I nodded soberly, wondering if the young man I’d met was as diligent as those men of antiquity.
    “If you’d been a son,” Baba went on, “you would have made an excellent imperial scholar, perhaps the best our family has ever seen.”
    He meant it as a compliment and I took it that way, but I heard regret in his voice too. I was not a son and never would be.
    “If you’re going to be here,” he added hurriedly, perhaps aware of his lapse, “then you should help me.”
    We went back to his desk and sat down. He carefully arranged his clothes around him and then adjusted his queue so that it hung straight down his back. He ran his fingers over his shaved forehead—a habit, like wearing Manchu styles, that reminded him of his choice to protect our family—and then he opened a drawer and pulled out several strings of silver
cash
pieces.
    He pushed a string across the desk and said, “I need to send funds to the countryside. Help me count them out.”
    We owned thousands of
mou
planted with mulberry trees. In the Gudang area, not far from here, whole villages relied on our family for their livelihood. Baba cared for the people who raised the trees, harvested the leaves, fed and nurtured the silkworms, pulled the floss from the cocoons, spun thread, and, of course, made cloth. He told me what was required for each enterprise, and I began putting together the proper amounts.
    “You don’t seem like yourself today,” my father said. “What troubles you?”
    I couldn’t tell him about the young man I’d met or that I was worrying about whether or not I should meet him again in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion, but if Baba could help me understand my grandmother and the choices she’d made, then maybe I’d know what to do tonight.
    “I’ve been thinking about Grandmother Chen. Was she so very brave? Did she have any moments when she was unsure?”
    “We’ve studied this history—”
    “The history, yes, but not about Grandmother. What was she like?”
    My father knew me very well, and unlike most daughters I knew him very well too. Over the years I’d learned to recognize certain expressions: the way he raised his eyebrows in surprise when I asked about this or that woman poet, the grimace he made when he quizzed me on history and I answered incorrectly, the thoughtful way he pulled on his chin when I asked him a question about
The Peony Pavilion
for which he didn’t know the answer. Now he looked at me as though he were weighing my worth.
    “The Manchus had seen city after city fall,” he said at last, “but they knew that when they got to the Yangzi delta they’d find strong loyalist resistance. They could have chosen Hangzhou, where we live, but instead they decided to make Yangzhou, where my father served as a minister, a lesson to other cities in the region.”
    I’d heard this