The Price of the Little Shoes

When Asheng put on the new shoes, he didn't say they were too small. He took a couple of steps around the room first and told his grandmother the ones she made were shinier than his mother's. Xiaoman frowned at that. He usually complained about how loud new shoes were, and today he couldn't praise them fast enough. She crouched, pressed the toe of the shoe, and told him to relax his toes. There was no room to do it. His little smile slowly turned into a look that begged her to stop asking.

Granny Qin reached out and said the shoes would soften once he wore them awhile. Instead of arguing, Xiaoman asked her son to take them off. Sure enough, a faint mark had been pressed into the side of his foot. She had meant to speak gently, but she saw the boy still looking at his grandmother, afraid that saying he disliked them would upset a grown-up. Her voice suddenly hardened. If they pinched, she said, he should say so. He couldn't make people happy by letting his feet hurt. A-Sheng lowered his head, and Granny Qin drew back her hand.

The old woman said she'd allowed some extra room based on the size he'd been on his last visit. How could the fit be so far off after just two months? Xiaoman turned the shoe over to look inside. The upper was taut and his toes were growing forward. All of it added up to something another day of wear wouldn't fix. She showed her mother, who asked why she hadn't sent back a proper measurement in the first place. She hadn't been there to measure his feet herself.

“I never said you had to make them,” Xiaoman said.

She knew as soon as she'd said it that it had come out too harshly. These shoes were a far cry from a forced marriage set down on paper. Her mother had brought them on a two-day journey by water and made them for the child stitch by stitch. Yet if in the end he had to wear them and put up with the discomfort for the sake of her good intentions, Xiaoman could almost hear the old talk about what was best for her, how however ill at ease she felt, she must first acknowledge the trouble someone else had taken. She put the shoes on the table, trying to keep her hands gentler than her voice had been.

Granny Qin said fine, then he could go without wearing them. Her voice was hard too, as if she cared as little about giving as anyone did about receiving. A-Sheng stood between them in his socks, the floor cold under his feet. He started edging toward his mother, then stopped halfway. Seeing him, Xiaoman told him to put his old shoes on and go to Gao Man to write out the characters from yesterday. He had no need to stand there listening. Only after the boy ran out did she feel the room had one fewer pair of eyes trying to feel hurt on behalf of them both.

Her mother gathered up the new shoes and went to look for scissors. Xiaoman knew she probably meant to get it over with in one cut and took the shoes back. They could still be altered, she said. Start by unpicking the inside seam so the uppers wouldn’t be ruined too. Their fingers touched and both stopped. Granny Qin said quietly that she’d always been like this, even before. She could never just accept a kindness first. She had to put everything in words no one could bear to hear.

Xiaoman’s chest tightened. She was about to say that was because her mother only heard what she wanted to hear, when she turned and saw the public lantern by the window waiting to be repaired. Her mother had smoothed the new bamboo strips first thing that morning, and the work was faultless. Xiaoman saw that dismissing everything with ‘you’ve been this way your whole life’ would be another way of making things easy on herself. She let the remark go and pushed the needle case over so her mother would have something to do.

But Granny Qin didn't move. She sat there and said she didn't always know how Xiaoman was getting on now, either. She had wanted to make shoes because, in those few days they were back, A-Sheng had had to pull up his old shoes every couple of steps. She had wanted to come to Lanting because she'd heard her daughter was still asking whether her cough had cleared up. Sometimes she wanted to do something first because she was afraid that if she asked and waited for an answer, several more days would pass. As she spoke, she finally came back to the past. After you left, she said, you wouldn't even see to it that someone brought back word you were safe.

Xiaoman raised her head and asked whether the river traveler had reached her the first time. The shoe in her mother’s hand wavered, and she didn’t answer at once. That pause was harder to bear than a refusal to admit it. Xiaoman knew she had guessed part of it, but she had no wish to learn how much of the waiting had been hers alone and all for nothing. She watched her mother and waited to hear her say, in her own voice, that the message had come.

Granny Qin said the message had come. It was two years after Xiaoman had left home, in the summer, with a trader who'd brought oil by boat. Xiaoman had asked him to say she was still with the troupe, she had enough to eat, and her mother shouldn't worry. The old woman remembered it word for word, so clearly that it bore no resemblance to the silence she'd spoken of all these years. Xiaoman asked why, then, the only word she'd heard back was that her mother refused to acknowledge her, leaving her without even knowing how to begin another message home.

Her mother said she'd never put it that way. The message she'd sent was that if Xiaoman had the nerve, she could come back herself, instead of asking someone to carry a few vague words. She stopped herself as she reached the end. Back then she'd been returning the Zhou family's betrothal gifts. Every lantern she made felt like paying off a little of the shame her daughter had brought upon herself in front of others. When she heard her daughter was getting by, her first feeling had been anything but relief. Then why won't you come back and acknowledge me?

“I never said I wouldn't acknowledge you as my daughter,” she repeated, her voice already less steady than before.

Xiaoman said the meaning had been clear enough. She'd only been twenty that year. Afraid people would hear her forever asking for word from home, she'd pretend to ask where the cargo came from whenever a boat arrived from a familiar route. When that traveler told her that her mother wanted her to come home and speak for herself, she thought she'd be coming back to the same engagement and the same shut door, and that until she agreed, she couldn't even call her “Mother.”

Granny Qin lowered her head and finally said she'd been the one who spoke harshly. The messenger hadn't made her words harsh for her. At that, Xiaoman felt her eyes grow hot, but the tears didn't come at once. She'd waited so long that by the time those words reached her, she was no longer the young woman who could have come running home at a single word. Her child was out in the courtyard learning his characters. Her husband was gone. Her mother's willingness to admit it today couldn't take a day off the road she'd already traveled.

Granny Qin truly hadn’t heard the second time. Xiaoman said it was after A-Sheng was born. Lu Zheng had written the message for her, and she’d entrusted it to a relative in the troupe who was going home. She’d assumed her mother had set it aside again. The old woman shook her head slowly, without her earlier haste to clear herself. If she’d ever got word that Xiaoman had a child, she said, however stubborn she was, she wouldn’t still have asked sixteen years later when she meant to settle down.

Xiaoman couldn’t account for everyone along that route on the strength of those words, and she didn’t want one lost message to explain all those years. She said the second one might never have reached her, but her mother had heard the first. Granny Qin murmured assent, without setting the hardships she’d faced alone back then against what her daughter had said. All they could hear in the room was the soft sound of flute practice outside. A-Sheng played a wrong note and laughed at himself, his laughter stopping and starting again.

Xiaoman put the new shoe back in her mother’s lap and told her to unpick the inside edge first. There was room to let it out a little there. She still had more to say, but she also had to go onstage that afternoon, and even if she sat there till dark, she couldn’t get back the message she’d sent at twenty. Granny Qin took the needle. Her fingers shook at first and steadied after a few breaths. She picked out the stitches carefully along the seam, without snipping through the whole thing at once.

The hall's lantern keeper came for the lantern Granny Qin had repaired. Seeing how well she had repapered it, he held out a few cash for the work. Granny Qin was going to refuse, but Xiaoman spoke first and said her mother had done it, so he should pay her directly. The old woman looked at her daughter and took the money in the end. She told the man to avoid holding it by just one side, or he would bend the bamboo brace out of shape again. Her craftsman's tone had returned, and she seemed to stand a little straighter, once again more than a mother who had said the wrong thing and made shoes that didn't fit.

Xiaoman watched, feeling tender and sore all at once. As a child she had loved to watch her mother make lanterns, marveling that those seemingly straight strips of bamboo could bend in her hands into something that would light up. Later, when they fought over her learning opera, she had asked what sense there was in spending a whole life fussing over lantern paper. She had had her reasons for saying it. She truly wanted another kind of life, but she had also made far too little of the thing her mother did best.

She didn't bring it up then so that each of them could own up to one thing and call it fair. She simply waited for her mother to finish mending one side of the shoe, then replaced the cold tea by her hand with warm tea and put away the scripts she'd left lying about, clearing another stretch of tabletop for those hands working in an unfamiliar place. Granny Qin worked with her head down. She didn't see the look on her daughter's face, or saw it and said nothing.

Xiaoman went on that afternoon. When she sang the mother's line about being unable to make someone stay, she suddenly fell half a beat behind. Cai Heng looked at her, and she caught up at once. She couldn't make the whole performance wait for her to sort out what had been said in her family that day. Across from her, Lu Heniang stepped slightly aside to give her room to breathe, then asked after the show what had happened and whether they should change the line. Xiaoman said it was her own affair today and to leave the words alone.

Her mother came to wait by the stage with the shoes in her arms. The audience had all gone, leaving only the two boards that served as a boat. She asked if the line she had just heard was in the original. Xiaoman said it was. There had been some anger in her voice the first time she rehearsed it too, but she couldn’t keep singing it to one person alone. Granny Qin lowered her head and tried touching the edge of a board with her toe. From far away it really looked like it might rock, she said. Up close it was just two pieces of wood. Xiaoman took the pole and went through the slowest step, showing her mother where her hand went first. The old woman raised her hand the same way without moving her body, and was the first to laugh. All she knew was how to bend bamboo strips, she said. She couldn’t bend water into being like that. Xiaoman drew in the pole and let it rest there. Mother and daughter stood at the front of the empty stage, looking together at the two old boards worn shiny by feet.

When they got back to the rear room, A-Sheng was already walking around in the shoes with the seams let out. There was still a little discomfort, and this time he was willing to say the left one was tight. Granny Qin took it and said she would let it out a little more. He needn't put up with it. The boy relaxed at once and handed her his strip of bamboo to look at, saying she had bent the strip for the lantern better than this one. She told him bamboo differed from piece to piece and some of it would hardly bend at all. Her face didn't darken just because he had found fault with the shoe again.

At dusk Xiaoman walked her mother back to the inn and carried her bundle. Several times her mother tried to take it, and each time Xiaoman moved it out of reach with her other hand. On the way they spoke only of which boat to take in the morning and which inn at Sangqiao was drier. Neither asked what today would have been like if things had gone differently back then. At the door, Granny Qin took A-Zhao's oil out of the bundle. She said not to pack the bottle with the cakes again. She'd thought she had it all figured out on the boat, and somehow both things had picked up a smell.

Xiaoman took it and smiled a little. She didn't say, “Now you finally understand,” and her mother didn't say, “Now you should know how I feel.” The bottle was slippery enough that it nearly slipped through their hands as it passed from one to the other. Mother and daughter both reached to catch it, touched hands, then each loosened her grip a little and settled it safely in the corner of the bundle.