A Door Left Open in the Lantern Cabinet

The moment Aqiao set her first square lantern on the counter, Granny Qin turned it around. She thought the bamboo node showed too much on that face and would look better at the back. Aqiao turned it back and said the customer had ordered it with the node showing and had already seen the drawing beside it. Granny Qin kept her fingers on the handle, about to ask what the customer knew, when a voice outside asked if that was the knobbly lantern they’d ordered.

The customer held the lantern up to the sunlight, praised it repeatedly, paid the balance, and left. A-Qiao said nothing, merely wiping the empty cabinet. Granny Qin separated her wages from that small handful of money, more slowly than usual. After returning in the seventh month, she had agreed to let A-Qiao come every other day to help for half a day, yet she still had to put her hands to everything. When A-Qiao was absent, she thought how good it was to have a helping hand in the shop; when she came, Granny Qin always suspected those hands of straying from the path she had laid down.

Granny Qin had already paid for refusing to let others make decisions. Late in the seventh month, she took apart a lantern A-Qiao had repaired at the new price, then spent half the next day looking for the customer’s old clasp. Afterward A-Qiao told her plainly that if she was only allowed to mind the door, she would take only a doorkeeper’s pay and would leave Granny Qin to take the scolding from customers in a hurry. Now, at the mention of “疙瘩灯,” the knobby lantern, Granny Qin felt her face grow hot. All she could do was ask how many square lanterns A-Qiao could make in an evening. She genuinely wanted to hear how she did it.

A-Qiao said she couldn’t make them quickly. Folding the four corners took time, and few customers wanted them at present, so there was no point making dozens in one go. Granny Qin had assumed young people always found the old ways too slow, yet here was A-Qiao urging her to make fewer. She had other customers for her paper craft and couldn’t spend all day in the lantern shop. Granny Qin asked if she would come every day, then added as soon as the words were out, ‘Someone will have to take care of this shop down the road.’ A-Qiao looked up and was very careful to leave that ‘down the road’ unanswered.

She was twenty-three, with plans for a little paper-flower stall of her own. She hadn't decided whether she'd marry, and she had no wish to be promised to the Qin household as its next generation already. By the time Granny Qin had heard her out, she'd bent the bamboo strip in her hand too far, and when she let it go it sprang against the back of her fingers. She'd led with all the good things that might come years from now, but to the person hearing her it must have sounded as though she wanted to lay claim to all of her today. How had she always missed the sound of that before?

Auntie Xu came in the afternoon to repay the money for the oil and brought a very slender fish. She joked that with an apprentice now, Granny Qin could take things a little easier. A-Qiao was just going out with a paper parcel and immediately said she had only come to do a few jobs and was nobody's apprentice. Auntie Xu said “Oh” and let it drop until the door curtain fell, then remarked that young people had short tempers these days. Granny Qin had been about to say something herself, but in the end she said only that A-Qiao already knew the work when she came and had never taken her as a master. She could hardly take all the credit on the girl's behalf.

The fish was so slender that little flesh remained once the scales were scraped off. Aunt Xu said it had been cheap, a fresh bite for her own meal, not something meant for entertaining a whole company. Granny Qin put the fish down and suddenly remembered the soup that night in Lanting. When her daughter served it, it too had been only one bowl. She had not laid out twelve additional dishes to prove she was welcome. Granny Qin still resented Xiaoman's unwillingness to keep her longer, yet remembered that when she had said staying would be easy, she had not even looked at how the two beds in the room would have to be arranged.

At dusk she went over to the He house to look in. Azhao had asked the Dings to open the windows every few days, and Luo Yan was just coming out of the yard carrying bedding that had dried in the sun. From the doorway, Granny Qin saw the tall bamboo lantern on a wooden stand. The shade still had the new paper she'd patched it with in the third month. The lantern no longer belonged in anybody's ever-lit window. She asked when Azhao was coming back. Luo Yan said her letter mentioned coming to look at the planks in the ninth month and talking again when the lease was up. There was no hurry to get it all done in one visit.

Luo Yan said Ding Sui had taken on a few orders for new tassels. Every day she complained that her mother's color combinations were old-fashioned, then praised her for how fast she worked. Granny Qin laughed. When she got back to the shop, she moved two old lantern handles no one had collected to make room in the cabinet for the little paper flowers A-Qiao was trying out. When she was done, she wondered whether she had yielded too much. A-Qiao might turn every round lantern square tomorrow. So she put her favorite round frame mold away separately, sparing her old craft from being swept aside as if it were all in the way.

The next day she and A-Qiao discussed the terms. From now on A-Qiao would come in for half a day every day for a hundred and eighty cash a month, with paper flowers paid by the piece. If urgent work kept her there in the evening, they'd discuss it face to face. On ordinary lantern repairs, she could decide for herself about changes the customer wanted. She'd still ask about expensive materials and whole batches of new lanterns. A-Qiao's first question was whether she could refuse to sell on credit that day to a customer with an outstanding bill. Granny Qin thought of a few longtime regulars and nearly caught her tongue, but said that once a customer owed for two purchases, she'd collect the old money first. That went for people she knew well, too.

With the wages agreed, Granny Qin advanced her half a month's pay at the new rate. Aqiao put it away, bought paper first, then took a small packet of salt home. Watching her divide it up so clearly, Granny Qin realized that those 180 cash helped someone else make a living. She couldn't keep calling it just a little help because Aqiao was young and lived nearby.

She handed over a key to the counter. A-Qiao tied it at her waist. She didn’t suddenly work more like a daughter, and she didn’t call her Mother. When she said goodbye, she simply told Granny Qin she would be a little late tomorrow morning because she had paper to deliver to another customer first. Granny Qin felt a little hollow, then thought that if someone had to come every day to fill that hollow for her, they could work all they liked and still never fill it. She weighed down the ledger page and, for the first time, asked A-Qiao to mind the shop for half a day while she went to sit by the river.

A boat laden with baskets of beans was passing on the river. The young boatman traded cross words with someone on shore, and after a few exchanges they laughed. Granny Qin finished a hot cake and found herself with empty hands. At first she felt so restless she nearly went back several times to see whether the lantern paper had been pasted on crooked. Farther off, a carpenter was repairing a window. She stood watching for a while and told him the crossbar ought to be narrower. He took only so much notice and brought the saw down anyway. To her surprise, it didn't leave her cross all day.

At home she took out paper and wrote to Xiaoman. The first two lines were all news from the shop. When she got to A-Qiao, she wrote that the girl was sensible, paused, struck it out, and wrote instead that she did fine work and made handsome square lanterns. If someone was willing to work for her, obedience was a poor first measure of her worth. Her handwriting was clumsy and the crossed-out words looked like a little clump of ash. She thought of starting over, then remembered that A-Sheng left the characters he’d got wrong on his paper too, and kept writing.

She asked whether Xiaoman would like to come for two nights when she had time in the ninth month. Xiaoman could choose a day that suited her, and the shop could work around it. She left out the lines about growing old and having only so many chances left, and about forgetting the whole thing if Xiaoman wouldn’t come. She knew those words so well they’d already strung themselves together in her mind before she picked up the brush. When she’d finished, she added that if A-Sheng had lessons, Xiaoman needn’t bring him. If he wanted to come, she’d keep a table free for him and wouldn’t leave his schoolbooks by the shop door.

No answer came right after she sent the letter. For the first two days she kept asking the boat people. On the third she asked Luo Yan, who told her it took time to get there and back. A-Zhao's letters had never come that quickly. A little abashed, she went back to the shop and moved the stool by the door half a step farther from the view of the water, lest she start counting boats again as soon as she sat down. Shop business had carried on while the letter was away. Sure enough, a longtime customer who had already bought on credit twice tried asking her to make an exception.

A-Qiao had already spoken, so the customer turned to Granny Qin and said they had known each other for years. Was she really unwilling to let him take the lantern first? Granny Qin clutched the old ledger and nearly nodded, tempted to show that she was more accommodating than her helper. A-Qiao stood by without a word, her face tense. In the end Granny Qin asked the customer to settle the last two purchases first. Her voice was firmer than usual, partly to assert herself and partly because she was unused to admitting to old acquaintances that the rule was her own.

The customer did not leave particularly pleased. Feeling a weight in her chest, she turned and asked A Qiao whether she had spoken too sharply. As soon as the words left her mouth, she knew she was again trying to make A Qiao responsible for that unpleasantness. A Qiao said that if she had let him take the lantern first just now, she would stop bringing up the old debt in future. Granny Qin fell silent for a moment, then took paper and recorded the payment received that day. She did not look for some small mistake in the paper pasting to recover her dignity. Only that evening did she admit that she had felt a little bad earlier; it was not that A Qiao had said anything wrong.

Seven days passed before Zheng Qin's boat brought Xiaoman's reply. She planned to cross from Tongwei on the twelfth of the ninth month, leave again on the fourteenth, and reach Lanting on the fifteenth in time for the autumn performances. A-Sheng wanted to come and had already arranged with his teacher to make up the two lessons he'd miss. There was no need to prepare much. If the shop was busy, she could help make a meal. Granny Qin read the lines twice. Her first thought was still that two nights were too few. Only then did she see the long flute the child had added in the margin.

She sent word back that she understood. She didn't write about the bedding she'd already laid out for a third night, or immediately roll it up and toss it back into the cabinet. When there was something to look forward to, the hands always did a little more than the mouth said. She only had to refrain from using that bedding to ask someone else for another day. A-Qiao asked whether she should come for the whole day on the twelfth. She said there was no need. The morning would be as usual, and they'd divide up the afternoon work in advance. If an urgent repair came in, A-Qiao could call her at the back door.

Later Auntie Xu teased her for keeping the shop open when her daughter was finally coming home. Granny Qin said if there was work, she'd do it. People had to eat. Only after saying it did she remember using those very words sixteen years before to tell Xiaoman not to go and sing opera, as if the only thing that counted as work was pasting lantern paper at her own counter. This time she didn't go after Auntie Xu to explain. That evening she wiped the table clean and moved the paste bowl that was easiest to knock over farther back, leaving a place for the boy's brush and paper.

The round lantern in the window was newly papered that year. It needed to burn only a little while to test it, then she could put it away. Granny Qin turned down the wick, listening as the footsteps in the street thinned out. She no longer stood up at every sound of an oar on the water. Tomorrow there were two square lanterns to make, and the corners were tricky to fold. She had promised to follow A-Qiao’s lead and try. When her daughter came, the room would hold plenty of the old days. There ought to be a few new things in it that she had yet to see, too.