New Year’s Eve at Someone Else’s House

The New Year dinner Xu Tan invited them to was on the fifth. She said the south gate had still let in a draft on New Year's Eve. The workers had been watching the goods, and they hadn't managed to sit down all together. The new year would still know them a few days later, so they might as well have the meal now. Wen Jichang began to object to setting out a feast before the new trading house had opened. Before he finished, he saw two workers moving the dry cakes they had brought over to warm them by the stove. He swallowed the rest of his words and went himself to borrow a table that could seat six or seven.

Gu Qing and her grandmother had agreed only to bring a dish of sauce and hadn't meant to count themselves among the invited guests. When Xu Tan heard, she told Gu Qing to stop making so many distinctions. If she was a guest, she could sit. If she wanted to help, she could wash her hands. She could choose for herself. Shen Su handed over the sauce jar and, to Gu Qing’s surprise, headed straight for the kitchen and asked for work that wouldn't strain her eyes. Gu Qing hastened to tell her to sit and wait, but her grandmother had already taken a basin of half-picked greens and moved a stool to a spot by the window where she wouldn't be in anyone’s way.

The inside of the warehouse was different from what she had imagined. The front room was piled with supplies. Of the rooms at the back, one served as temporary quarters for the workers, and another was half living space, half storage for newly arrived sacks of goods. Xu Tan’s chest was only partly open. On its lid lay clothes her children had outgrown, ready to be taken apart to wrap porcelain. Gu Qing felt awkward looking at them and went to fold them neatly, but Xu Tan said to leave them be, as she would have to sort through them again tomorrow. She lifted the top garment herself, found an opening that had been mended, and cut out a piece of cloth exactly the size of her palm.

“You’d cut an edge as good as that?” Gu Qing asked.

Xu Tan turned the cloth over to show her. The color on the front still looked fresh, but the underside had long since worn thin. She said it would look neat hanging outside for New Year, but if you wrapped a bowl in it, the slightest knock would tear it. You had to know what it was good for. Gu Qing thought of the coat collar she'd bought her grandmother, smiled a little guiltily, and turned to set out the rough earthenware bowls. Two of the six were different sizes. Xu Tan didn't ask her to replace them, only to serve the soup a little less full so the bowls wouldn't burn anyone's hands.

Smoke hung thick in the kitchen, curling back through a vent that still needed fixing. Wen Jichang was bent over plugging the gap on the other side, and when he looked up his forehead was black. Auntie Chen came in with a plate of pickled beans and laughed at the sight of him. The shopkeeper might have fixed his new gate, she said, but the stove still wouldn't do as it was told. He wiped his forehead with a damp cloth until the soot looked evenly spread. Finally Xu Tan told him to stop rubbing and go wash his hands first. The guests were all standing outside.

Gu Qing laughed too, and when she was done she realized she could sit at this table without having to think all the time about how much business to talk so people would take her seriously. Shen Su finished picking over the vegetables and left the small knife alone. She took an empty bowl and talked with the young clerk A-Chun about the south. He had come up from Nanpu, and when the old woman asked whether the old ferry crossing at Heze was still there, he laid two chopsticks at the corner of the table to show her the way. One was the bridge, the other the bank where the boats stopped.

Shen Su watched intently. When the chopsticks reached the middle of the water, she asked if the lotuses were still thick there. Achun said they were. Sometimes when you carried goods along the bank, you could hear people calling as they picked seed pods, but their bodies were hidden entirely by the leaves. Gu Qing had meant to ask him to stop showing her, as the table wasn't fully set yet. Then she saw her grandmother sit up straight, still holding the empty bowl as she listened, and left the two chopsticks where they were.

Wen Jichang came in, heard Heze mentioned, and asked Auntie Shen whether she had been there before. Her grandmother hesitated and said it had always been like that around there, the water widest after rain. A-Chun nodded and went on to say that when he'd reached out to break off a lotus leaf as a child, his mother had slapped the back of his hand with a wet leaf. Everyone laughed. Gu Qing laughed along, but she remembered her grandmother saying quite clearly that she'd never actually made it to Jiangnan, and knew the streets of Nanpu only from other people's stories.

She kept the question to herself at the table. When the soup came, she half filled Grandmother's empty bowl before handing it back. Shen Su reached for it, her fingertips pausing on the rim. She lowered her head and drank, as though slowly swallowing those words from a moment ago along with the soup. Gu Qing saw that the silk plum blossom in her grandmother's hair, the one that was only partly white, sat a little crooked. She wanted to straighten it, but with so many people at the table, she held back.

Halfway through the meal, one of Wen’s older cousins arrived. He came with a small packet of fresh bamboo shoots and apologized to everyone for being late. He hadn’t come to claim a seat. Wen Jichang took him to the door, where they exchanged a few words about when the money was to be paid back. They didn’t deliberately lower their voices, though they weren’t speaking for the whole table to hear. As Gu Qing collected the soup bowls, she heard that the old warehouse had to be cleared out, the new house needed more repairs than they’d thought, and the borrowed capital would have to stay tied up another month.

She slowed her step a little. Wen Jichang had no extra chest of money standing open after buying the house. The money for supplies from Xu Tan's old little shop had gone into it too, and there were buyers waiting for goods after the New Year. The cousin sighed and said that if Wen really meant to leave part of the courtyard empty, he had to remember it wouldn't earn him what it could hold in burlap sacks. Wen Jichang glanced back at the plum tree and said he knew. It had been settled, and he wasn't going to reopen it now.

For a moment, Gu Qing wanted to go over and explain what else could be placed beneath the tree, as though she had to find some income in the space she had kept empty, lest she seem indebted to the Wen family. She reached the doorway, then stopped. That was money for someone else's household to discuss. She did not have to fill every difficulty she overheard with twenty flower sprigs. She stacked the empty bowls securely and first asked Xu Tan where the dishwashing water was, no longer craning to hear the next sentence.

After the meal, Achun took out a small piece of honey cake to share with his companions. He had brought it from home and hadn't had the heart to eat it on the way. Now only the hard edge was left. Wen Jichang told him there was no need to make everyone eat it if it was hard, but he broke it into pieces anyway, smiling as he said that even the hard part tasted like home. Gu Qing tried a bite. The grains of sugar stuck to her teeth, and she remembered how insulted she had felt in the West Market when people asked about scent. Some tastes really were beyond anyone else’s power to give you, and the price of a flower was only part of it.

She did not voice the thought. Grandmother was soaking the hard cake in warm water. Wen Jichang asked whether, after decades of making flowers, she found any particular kind hardest. She said the centers were hard. When she was young, she had always wanted to gather them more tightly than anyone else, believing tightness showed skill. As she spoke, a corner of cake broke apart in the water. She slowly gathered it with her spoon, then added that only later had she learned some flowers could not be gathered that way.

Xu Tan laughed and asked if she meant the blue plum blossoms Gu Qing was making now. Grandmother glanced at her granddaughter and said Xiaoman had a share in those too. Gu Qing’s face grew hot, then she remembered she had already told Luo Yi the same thing. If she could not bear to hear someone else say it now, her own words would have been mere politeness for a customer’s benefit. She told them about the paper bird with the crooked wing. She left Zhou Jiping’s name out, saying only that some people could make dozens of perfectly even umbrella frames and still could not fold one little bird. Everyone at the table laughed again.

Auntie Chen had to leave early. Her daughter was coming home on the sixth, and she still had bedding to air that day. Gu Qing had meant to ask her to come the next morning and help her grandmother try on the lined jacket, but held back when she heard. Shen Su herself asked Auntie Chen to go with her to South Bridge for rice in a few days. Auntie Chen knew how to pick it, she said, and all she herself could do these days was feel the corner of a sack. Gu Qing wanted to say she knew how to buy rice too, but by the time the words reached her lips, she asked if she should push the little cart for them. Her grandmother shook her head. They were only going somewhere nearby to have a look. They didn't have to do the whole household’s shopping every time.

On the seventh, the two of them really did go out. Gu Qing stayed home making flowers. At first she thought it was quiet, then she found herself looking up at the lane every little while. Grandmother came back with a small packet of dried fruit and only half a dou of rice. She said she’d run into someone she used to know and sat with them a little longer. When Gu Qing saw her take the money from her own pocket, she realized this wasn’t the coin purse they usually used at home. The cloth had worn shiny at the corners, and Grandmother tied the knot differently from the way she did.

She wanted to ask how much was in the pouch, but was afraid it would sound as if she were checking up on someone who had spent money behind her back. So she only asked who had wanted the dried fruit. Grandmother said she had wanted some herself. Gu Qing stared a moment, then tipped the fruit into a little dish. It turned out that a bit of sweet and sour could be worth buying without some customer or order for flowers to justify it first. She tried a piece and squeezed her eyes shut at the sourness. Grandmother laughed again beside her and asked how someone who made flowers could be so delicate about a thing like that.

Gu Qing waited until the night of the ninth to bring up Heze. She asked why her grandmother had sounded at the dinner as though she had been there. Shen Su's hand stopped on her sewing pouch. It was just a casual question, she said first, and she hadn't claimed to have taken any particular boat. Gu Qing was about to ask why she hadn't simply said so. Then she saw that her grandmother had taken the flower out from beside her temple and her hair had come loose. It dawned on her that some things were hard to say even in front of one's elders, and that decades of work could hardly make it easy to admit you had only heard about a place.

Shen Su slowly explained that when she was young, someone had wanted her to go south for a season of flower-making, with food and lodging provided. Just as departure became possible, another person at home needed care. There was another chance later, but the earnings were small and travel costly, so she thought of the following year. She did not list all those people’s names for Gu Qing or say anyone had wasted her life. She only traced a broad lotus leaf on the tabletop with her fingertip and said flowers on real water probably could not be like those made from silk.

Gu Qing said she would take her once business had settled down for the season. She spoke quickly, as though she could already put every payment for flowers after New Year, one after another, into the journey to Heze. Shen Su took a moment before asking who would do the work in the fifth month and who would look after the house. Gu Qing said they would find a way when the time came. Grandmother gave a little smile. She had sat up straight when Achun spoke of the way out to the middle of the lake. Now she simply tied her sewing pouch and said it was late and they should empty the basin right in front of them first.

Gu Qing went out to empty the basin and saw that a few more plum blossoms had fallen beyond the new wall. She swept the wet flowers gently together and raised her head to look south. She could see neither the river nor the lotuses. When she had said indoors that they'd go once business had settled, the words had sounded strong. Out here they were like a stem that hadn't been properly wrapped, long and thin, with no telling yet which vase to put it in.