(2007-04-22 14:46:21)
We sat and talked in her home - a clay-hut afffair of four rooms running in a square around a court-yard - and this is the story she told me.
She had been born in a village ten miles away where conditions were primitive, food scarce, comforts unknown, and she had worked hard ever since she could remember.
When she was fifteen, during the middle of the Japanese invasion, she fell in love with a boy named Li Pao, the primary schoolmate of her elder brother. He was, to hear her tell it, a distinctly good-looking boy of seventeen years, with a slender, trim body, odd, restful eyes, and a queer deep voice that had the ring of an old bell. It was the voice that got under Gold Flower;s reserve: it was so different from the coarse peasant tones to which she was accustomed. Whenever he came to see her brother, Gold Flower would drop whatever she was doing and go and listern to their conversation.
As she heard Lipao talking, his eyes earnest with youthful enthusiasum, his whole body bent forward intent on what he was saying, talking of such grand and to her, unheared of things as freedom, democracy and the future of China, her heart yearned over hime.
He was so noble! She wanted to tell him so, but her brother was always present and she never had the opportunity. So she just sat near him, sent him secret smiles and followed his every movement with her eyes.
He soon became aware of her interest, and noce, when her brother left the room for a moment, he leaned over close to Gold Flower and said: "I have learned something from your eyes. I know you heart."
Ashamed, ye delighted, Gold Flower was so excited she could make no reply. Later, she longed to have a secret conversation with him. But how?
It is necessary for a North China village girl to give the appearance, if not of disdain for men, at least of disinterest in them, since decorum and dignity rank abve love as the virtues most highly prized in China, and girls stay behind the wall of their homes until they were married and ever after that.
Although there are thousands of authentic instances of Chinese men selling their women into wifery, concubinage or whoredom, there is scarcely any record of a girl indulging a romance with a boy with the consent and knowledge of her parents; and the descent for a girl breaking this rule is very swift, since anyone finding her alone with a boy could accuse her of selling her maidenhood.
So hypocritial is Chinese society that while farmers may commit adultery with their tenant's wives without fear of punishment and while every village has and tolerates at least one "BROKEN SHOE", a young boy and girl, no mater how innocent their intentions, may neither talk alone together, hold hands nor much less kiss.
Under these circumstances, it must be accounted an act of courage, infatuation, or insanity that Gold Flower, another time, when her brother left the room for a moment, leaned over and whipered in Li Pao's ear:" My family will be away tomorrow, will you come?"
The next day, he obtained leave from school, and by nine o'clock was at her gate. She blushed as he entered, and she gave a little affected laugh to keep herself in countenance.
Then - so a stray visitor or her family returning would think no one was at time - she led hime to her room and immediately closed and bolted the door.
Gold Flower had thought only to have a secret talk with a boy whose intellectual attainments she admired.
But her companion mistook her unconventional behavior and the bolted door for an invitation of another sort, and he tried to make love to her.
At first shocked, then excited, the frightened, Gold Flower, rebuffed him, half-succumbed to him, the angrily told him to leave.
But when he rose to go, Gold Flower's heart was thrown into turmoil. At one moment she was afraid of not being loved, at another thought that Li Pao wanter her virginity as a kind of medal of conquest tortured her. Had she been sure of his affections, or had she ever had another experience with a man, perhaps she would have let him go, but to lose friendship of such a boy seemed to her at the moment the worst possible disaster.
Her passion carried her to the point of falling at Li Pao's feet and throwing her arms around his knees. She pleaded with him not to try to make love to her - for she would be tetrothed to another man - while at the same time she begged him not to desert her for she was lonely.
"Be my friend, my elder brother, my lover - in everything but that be my lover," she had cried. Moved by her word and her attitude of humility, the boy overcame his annoyance at being thwarted and agreed to her conditions.
In this way, a romance - childish, but forbidden by Chinese village code - had begun. And so it continued, for when her family returned Gold Flower still contrived wasy to meet her lover.
Every night when the others were in bed - her three brothers, father and mother, all together on one KANG - Gold Flower would tiptoe out her dooe and softly let back the latch on the front gate. Soon there would be a creaking at the gate and then a shadowy form would flit swiftly across the courtyard and Gold Flower's door would open and then shut again.
During these nightly meeting in Gold Flower's room, the couple poured out much talk from their hearts, but they did not make love, never kissed, only held hands, looked deeply into one another's eyes and swore eternal friendship.
Because her actions were so contrary to village morality, Gold Flower when she first paused to think about her conduct, felt stunned with remorse. But one day when her girl friends gathered in her room to sew flowered shoes she began to feel differently.
The girls played the game: "what kind of a man would like to marry?" and Glod Flower, her cheeks faintly red, relied:" I should like to marry someone like my neighbor Li Pao; he is so handsome and tender."
Then teased to distraction by her friends, and in terror lest her secret be dicovered, she shrugged her shoulders and said with an air of worldly wisdom:" What is the use of talking about what kind of a man we would like to marry, when we have no choice in the matter?'
"Yes," her friends had answered. "How stupid it all this! Our parents arrange everything for us. Like us not we'll get an ugly husband."
The girls wished they had been born in England, France or America, where they heard women married men they loved. They had vague feelings the they are living in a "black society", and since in their hearts they were rebels against this scoiety, every one of them thought it all right to have a secret lover.
These conversations gave Gold Flower pleasure, for they clothed her affair with Li Pao in a moral garment of which it had hitherto been barren. She even began to revel in her defiance of scoiety and sought proofs that her adventure was making a better woman of her. Sometimes she would take her small mirror from under her pillow and look happily at her own face. Never had it seemed more beautiful. " I have a lover! a lover!" she would say, delighting in the idea like a child with a new toy.
The days following passed with new sweetness. The first time Li Pao told her he love her she nearly feel fainting in his arms with ecstasy. Then, because he asked for nothing in exchange for his love, she began to think generosity, nobility of soul and humanity existed only in this young student.
Li Pao taught her how to write a few simple characters. Thenceforth, when she wanted to see him, she wrote the character "come" on a scrap of paper and put it in the hollow of a tree by the village pond.
Li Pao came to find it and put there another note saying "yes" or "no," or "tonight" or "tomorrow" or "my room" or "your room" for these were nearly all the characters she could read.
Brief as were these note, Gold Flower guarded them like a treasure, hiding them in a corner of her KANG beneath the reed matting, and taking them out every once in a while and tracing the characters Li Pao had written over again with her finger.
In fact, the whole art of writing seemed to Gold Flower some powerful black magic. The word "come" often had for her semblance of a holy and potent incantation, for she only had to write and suddenly - proof! - in answer to her sorcery, Li Pao would be in her room.
In other ways, too, the whole horizon of her thoughts and life lifted/ Entirley absorbed, before Li Pao's coming, with that mass of work which is the lot of Chinese farm girl, Gold Flower had never thought about passion and love affairs, save in relation to the gossip she had heard in the mouths of other women.
But now these stories began to seem almost as real to her as her own life, and she began to adopt the tricks of every romance of which she had ever heard.
Because it was traditional with the heroines of her remembered stories to sew garments for their lovers, Gold Flower began to make Li Pao a jacket. Her month notice this and became suspicious. Gold Flower put her off saying:"His mother has no time to sew, I'll just throw this together carelessly and help her out."
To herself, however, she said:"I must show my love through my work," and she began to make a jacket of which any big city tailor might well have been proud.
Instead of the usual five buttonholes, she made thirteen, and around each hole she embroidered a flower. Such buttonholes are known to young boys and girls in this part of China as "the thirteen precious jewels." and Gold Flower was very happy in her work, believing she was having a romance in the best tradition.
Because she had grown very sentimental, she ran with the jacket to Li Pao and insisted that he try it on.
All the while she danced around him crying: " Do you like it? Oh, tell me, do you like it?"
Her enthusiasm was so captivating and her sentiment so infectious that Li Pao had answered just as her heart had wished.
"I love it because it was made by my own true love's hands."
As was the custom, he tried to give Gold Flower money to buy thread to make herself a pair of flowered shoes. At first, she refused, saying, "I don't want anything from you, but your love." But when her refusal saddened him, she took the money, but she never bought anything for herself and spent every dollar to buy cloth, thread and needles to make garments for Li Pao.
Gold Flower often thought this was the happiest time of her life - a honeymoon she might have called it had she known the word or been aware of the custom. She would have liked to shout her love for Li Pao to the whole village, and though this was impossible, she longed for some friend in whom she could confide. But not only was this denied her, but she had to redouble her caution to prevent the affair from becoming known.
By degrees a vague uneasiness took possession of her. She was no longer, as formerly, completely carefree. She began to wonder if she ought not to yield to Li Pao, or whether, since she could not completely satisfy his love, cease to see him any more.
Her refusal to give herself to him had at first proceeded from strength, but now she found herself wondering if it was not weakness that prevented her from fully consummating their love.
Then she asked herself what would become of her - if her parents would betroth her, and to whom? But Li Pao's face always rose before her and she could not picture any other hushand. Yet there always rang in her mind that thought: "If you should be betrothed! If youshould be betrothed!" At night she could not sleep; she tossed and turned and beat her pillow. Thinking that, after all, it would be worse to give herself to someone she did not know than to Li Pao, whom she loved, she promised herself to throw herself in Li Pao's arms the next time he came, but when he did come, she could not do it and remained silent.
I the autumn of 1942, Gold Flower was betrothed to a man named Chang,……………….
