Silk Plum Blossoms on the Table

Wen Jichang was crouched in front of the east gate looking at a cartwheel. They still hadn't finished unloading the timber that had arrived yesterday. The carter had led a mule to the mouth of the lane, leaving half a cartload that people would have to push by hand. The wheel was up against the base of the gatepost and scraped every time they pushed. When he saw Gu Qing coming, he slid the wooden wedge in his hand under the wheel before standing up. A streak of white dust had already rubbed off on his sleeve.

Gu Qing left the tree aside for the moment and asked if she could see the deed for the house. She couldn't read all the characters herself, she said, and would ask Mr. Ding from the market to read it to her. The deed would stay there, and he wouldn't take a brush to it. Wen Jichang seemed somewhat reassured when he heard Ding Fengquan's name. Then he asked what she meant to do once she understood it. Gu Qing had prepared plenty to say, but when the question came, all she said was that she wanted to know what the deed said about the wall.

Wen Jichang glanced at his wife. Xu Tan was counting short lengths of timber off the cart. When she found they were a different length from the previous load, she told the workers to keep the two lots apart. Without turning her head, she said to let Gu Qing see it. Otherwise it would be the tree today, the well tomorrow, and when would they get any work done? Gu Qing felt a little embarrassed, but Wen Jichang nodded and arranged to meet before noon. The seller was coming too, he said, so they could ask their questions together.

She went to invite Ding Fengquan, counting out five copper coins beside his brush rest. The teacher did not refuse, nor did he promise anything favorable simply because she paid readily. He found a paperweight worn smooth, wrapped it in cloth to take along, and brought a piece of charcoal too. He said the words on paper were one thing; the lines on the ground still had to be examined. Gu Qing asked whether they should invite her grandmother. He said that if they were only reading the papers, there was no need to bring the old woman out into the cold; if they truly came to discussing how many years of care were involved, she would have to speak for herself.

At the crossroads, Gu Qing returned the paper pattern to Sister Ji. Sister Ji lifted a corner and smiled, surprised it really was still around. Then she held down the little crescent with a finger and showed Gu Qing a nick on the back smaller than a fingernail. She'd made a bad cut years ago and patched it with wet paper. She said it matter-of-factly, but Gu Qing remembered her grandmother saying the night before that the buyer recognized her alone. The words felt like a loose thread inside her clothes, one she could neither pull free nor smooth flat.

She left the silk shop without lingering and went around to the house next door. Lu Zhao had already arrived. The broker who had sold the property stood by the door, brushing dust that wasn't there off Lu Zhao's cloak. Lu Zhao was in his fifties, thin-faced and quick of speech. The moment he saw Gu Qing he said he had let the two of them look after the tree all these years and had never charged a single cash. Gu Qing said that was precisely why she wanted to get things clear now. He turned to Wen Jichang as though those few words had added a little more to the price of the house he had just sold.

An old table had been set up for the occasion in the main room, with bricks under its legs. Wen Jichang spread out the deed and held down one corner with a clean, empty bowl. Gu Qing took the silk plum blossom out of her basket. She'd brought it in the basket to keep the flower head from being crushed, and when she set it at the edge of the table, it added a touch of color you wouldn't expect at a discussion about a house. The broker felt the edge of a petal and said it looked real. Could it be made to smell like the real thing too? She said it couldn't and left the price of the flower unmentioned.

Ding Fengquan first read out the name of the property and its four boundaries. On the east it fronted Stone Lane, on the south Locust Alley, on the west it extended to the neighboring Gu family's courtyard wall, and on the north it met the old channel. The words were much clearer read aloud than when Gu Qing stared at them herself, yet each line still left something out of sight. She asked him to read the western boundary again. When he came to “courtyard wall,” she asked which side a tree trunk wedged into the wall belonged to.

The master didn't take up his charcoal to draw a line straightaway. He asked Wen Jichang to take them to the foot of the wall, then crouched to examine the joints between the bricks. The old wall hadn't been built all at once. A section in the middle had darker bricks, as if it had collapsed and been repaired long ago. The plum trunk angled out of the wall right there, the bark and the edges of the bricks pressing against each other. Its thickest side was indeed in the Wen courtyard, but its roots had long since gone past where the deed said the property ended. Gu Qing hoped to hear something in this that would give the tree to the Gus. All she heard was that the deed made no separate mention of this tree.

The broker immediately said he'd never heard of listing a tree separately when selling a house. Lu Zhao nodded too. If every tuft of grass had to be counted, who would have agreed to find him a buyer in the first place? Wen Jichang didn't nod along. He asked Mr. Ding whether they'd need another document before they could start work. Ding Fengquan said it wasn't for him to judge which family was right. If both families stood their ground, they could bring someone in to measure again and look into the history of the old wall. That would take time and money, and even then the old roots might not grow along anyone's line.

Gu Qing was a little disappointed and couldn't help saying that her grandmother had tended the tree for over ten years. Lu Zhao immediately pointed out that he'd let them pick plums and borrow the empty courtyard to air their quilts. Surely those things counted for something too. His voice rose as he spoke, and the broker quickly put on a smile and stepped in to smooth things over, calling all the give and take between the two households years of neighborly goodwill. For the first time, Gu Qing found the phrase deeply annoying. It seemed able to swallow all the hard work she wanted to talk about like a bottomless sack.

They sat down in the main room again. Lu Zhao told them how the old house had fallen into disrepair and how he had come to need a quick sale. At first nobody wanted to listen. He had a younger brother who could no longer live alone and had gone to stay with relatives in a nearby prefecture. His living expenses came due every month. They had stripped old timber from the house several times to cover the bills, leaving it less fit to live in each time. The sale price sounded like one tidy sum, but a share of it had long been spoken for, and he still had to rent a place with what he kept. He stopped abruptly there, as though afraid that if he went on, he would be pleading for sympathy from strangers.

Wen Jichang didn't press him with troubles of his own. He simply had the broker count the old chests they had agreed to take away. Watching Lu Zhao’s hand tighten around the ties of his cloak, Gu Qing remembered that just a moment ago she had taken him for someone who could sit on an empty house and wait for others to do the work. Her face grew hot again. But the tree still had to be moved, and her grandmother still lived on the other side of the wall. Feeling sorry for him did nothing to solve her problem.

At noon Xu Tan brought in a pot of hot water and two coarse flatcakes. She gave each person a small piece without asking anyone to sit down to a spread, saying the stove was still out of repair and this was all she had. Gu Qing was about to decline and say her grandmother was waiting for her at home, when her stomach growled. She kept her head down as she bit into the cake, afraid someone would see how fast she ate. Xu Tan was already back at the door arguing with the men delivering the wood over a piece that was half a chi short. Nobody was looking at Gu Qing.

Ding Fengquan drew the wall, the well, and the gate on the ground in charcoal and asked each person to point out the places they recognized. Gu Qing saw that her family's well was even closer to the tree than she had said. She also saw how the old stove, the broken gallery, and the plum branches broke up the cart route through the Wen courtyard into several short stretches. Wen Jichang pointed his toe at the east gate. A cart could just about unload if it came in facing the house with its tail toward the gate, he said. A second cart would have to wait in the lane, and in the rain the goods couldn't stay outside indefinitely.

“If you move the tree, can a cart turn around here?” Gu Qing asked.

“It would free up this one corner.”

“Just this one corner?”

Wen Jichang looked at her without answering at once. Gu Qing thought he might be wavering and was about to press him when Xu Tan spoke from outside. It was more than the corner. They needed a shelter from the rain and somewhere for the people unloading to stand. They couldn't keep putting the cart in the drawing and leaving the people out of it. She laid a short length of wood across the charcoal line, and the space that had looked ample a moment earlier narrowed at once.

Gu Qing had meant to seize on the words ‘only a corner’ to win back a little room. Now all she could do was crouch and brush away the wood shavings that had fallen beside the charcoal line. When she made a flower, she could make room for the best petal by tucking the others behind it. A warehouse couldn’t fold the porters’ shoulders out of the way like that. She asked whether the awning could go somewhere else. Xu Tan said they were still looking, but the work already planned couldn’t sit idle.

Just then Auntie Chen's voice rang out in the lane again. A cartload of empty bamboo frames was blocking her drying pole. She wanted to pull it out from beneath the cart, but the driver thought it unsafe for her to keep ducking back and forth. Gu Qing was about to get up when Wen Jichang went outside and lifted one end. Each took a step back, the pole came free, and a fresh wet mark appeared beside the wheel. Gu Qing looked toward the broken side gate to the south. The lane beyond it seemed wider than the stone lane to the east. She was about to ask when the broker patted Lu Zhao's sleeve to remind him he had an appointment elsewhere.

Before leaving, the seller told her he had no objection if the tree could stay, provided nobody asked him to give back money he had already paid out. Gu Qing said she understood and kept to herself that she had never intended to ask him for money. There was no point in saying it. Lu Zhao had no way to set his brother, her tree, and the Wens’ carts all aside and make everyone wait a year.

Before leaving, Ding Fengquan rubbed out half the charcoal lines on the ground, leaving the wall, the well, and the east gate. If she had more questions, he said, she could use this sketch to ask them. There was no need to learn the words on the deed by heart. He wrapped up his paperweight and charged her nothing more. Gu Qing saw him out feeling a little hollow, as if the five cash she'd spent that morning had bought her the knowledge that things were more complicated than she'd thought, without buying her a way forward.

When she got home, Shen Su had already warmed the meal twice. Gu Qing was eager to say that the deed contained no separate mention of the tree, but her grandmother first asked whether she had used someone else’s bowl and whether the cake had been clean. Gu Qing grew impatient, said she was no child, and took out the piece she had left. Shen Su took it, broke off a bite, and chewed a while before saying the Wens did not always have a meal ready for them either. Gu Qing had hoped reading the deed would give her something good to bring home to Grandmother. Now the hollow feeling was even harder to put into words.

She told the story from the beginning, putting no harsh words into anyone's mouth. After listening, Shen Su slowly rubbed her hands over her knees and asked whether the space outside the broken southern door was where the Chen family usually kept its drying racks. Gu Qing looked up and asked how she knew that was the door she had been about to ask about. Her grandmother said that when she was little, charcoal sellers used to pass through there. Their carts could not turn, so they unloaded half the load onto the street. Everyone found it troublesome, and in the end they simply sealed the entrance.

For the first time, Gu Qing heard the word trouble without immediately taking it as advice to give up. She went to the window, drew the silk plum blossom from the empty vase, and put it back in her basket for another visit tomorrow. The artificial flower had spent the whole morning on the table while people argued. It still had the same touch of color and had proved nothing for her. What she did remember was Xu Tan asking where the people would stand. Back in her own courtyard, she paced out the open ground between the well platform and the gate.