Golden Lilies Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF EILEEN GOUDGE

  “Eileen Goudge writes like a house on fire, creating characters you come to love and hate to leave.”

  —Nora Roberts, #1 New York Times–bestselling author

  Woman in Red

  “Once you start this wonderful book, you won’t be able to put it down.”

  —Kristin Hannah, New York Times–bestselling author

  “Beautifully intertwines … two stories, two generations … [Goudge’s] characters are appealing both despite of and because of their problems.”

  —Library Journal

  “Eileen Goudge has crafted a beautiful tale of loss, redemption and hope. Woman in Red is a masterpiece.”

  —Barbara Delinsky, New York Times–bestselling author

  Blessing in Disguise

  “Powerful, juicy reading.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  The Diary

  “A lovely book, tender, poignant and touching. It was a joy to read.”

  —Debbie Macomber, New York Times–bestselling author

  Garden of Lies

  “A page-turner … with plenty of steamy sex.”

  —New Woman

  “Goes down like a cool drink on a hot day.”

  —Self

  One Last Dance

  “Enlightening and entertaining.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  Such Devoted Sisters

  “Double-dipped passion … in a glamorous, cut-throat world … Irresistible.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Thorns of Truth

  “Goudge’s adroit handling of sex and love should keep her legion of fans well-sated.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Woman in Black

  “This novel is the ultimate indulgence—dramatic, involving, and ringing with emotional truth.”

  —Susan Wiggs, New York Times–bestselling author

  Woman in Blue

  “Romance, both old and new, abounds. Fans of Goudge’s previous books, romance readers, and lovers of family sagas will enjoy the plot, characters, and resolution.”

  —Booklist

  “A touching story with wide appeal.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Golden Lilies

  Kwei-li

  Adapted and with a Foreword by Eileen Goudge

  Illustrated by Zhang Qing

  Contents

  Preface

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Author’s Note

  A Biography of Eileen Goudge

  For every pair of golden lilies

  there is a kang of tears.

  — Old Chinese saying

  Preface

  I FIRST HAPPENED upon Kwei-li’s story ten years ago while researching Chinese customs for a novel I was writing. At the local library in Santa Cruz, California, among the dusty stacks of biographical works, a timeworn volume caught my eye. It was called My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard. More than half a century old, its cover discolored, its pages jaundiced with age, it looked as if no one had read it in years. I had never heard of its author, Elizabeth Cooper, or its long-defunct publisher. Opening its musty pages, I sneezed. Okay, I thought, nothing to get excited about. I was wrong.

  Years later, its first words would still haunt me: “The house on the mountaintop has lost its soul.”

  Here was treasure: a hidden door into an inner courtyard of old China.

  I was transported back a hundred years, to the home of a wealthy Chinese nobleman in Soochow, where his young bride is pining for her absent husband. She is Kwei-li, the highborn daughter of a viceroy of Chih-li, and accomplished as well as beautiful. Educated even, we are told—unusual in an era when less than ten percent of Chinese women could read or write.

  She is also a woman in love—with a husband she had never once seen until their wedding ceremony. Of that occasion, she recalls: “Do you remember when first you raised my veil and looked long into my eyes? I was thinking, ‘Will he find me beautiful?’ and in fear I could look but a moment ... But in that moment I saw that you were tall and beautiful, that your skin was clear and your teeth like pearls.”

  I was Kwei-li’s age, eighteen, when I first married. Reading of Kwei-li’s struggle to learn the ways of her new husband’s family, which according to Chinese custom she was bound to honor and obey over her own, I could feel for her. And as a new bride, she also has to cope with a bossy mother-in-law, family squabbles, a big kitchen, and servants. Then, while her husband is on an extended overseas diplomatic mission, she discovers that she is pregnant with her first child!

  My firstborn, Michael, nearly died in his first moments of life, and he was sickly for some weeks after. I recall clearly those anxious days, peering into his incubator. I remember aching to hold him, and yet, superstitiously, I feared that if I made that connection, if I dared to love him more than I already did, he would be snatched from me.

  My son survived; Kwei-li was not so lucky. Her cherished baby boy, whose ear she had pierced in order to trick the gods into thinking he was a girl (and thus unworthy of being claimed by them), didn’t live long enough for his father to see or hold him. Her faith shattered, Kwei-li fell into despair. Her anxious family found an abandoned baby girl on a nearby towpath, and placed her in Kwei-li’s arms. Of this she tells us: “... I sat stiff and still, and tried to push away the little body pressing close against me; but at the touch of baby mouth and fingers, springs that were dead seemed stirring in my heart again.”

  Halfway through this remarkable epistle, I felt as if I had known Kwei-li all my life. Though separated by a century and a vast cultural gulf, we weren’t really so different, she and I. Hers is the story of wives and mothers everywhere; of joy and despair, of promises and compromises, of the grains of domestic life that fill Kwei-li’s “rice bowl” to overflowing. Under her rooftree we are joined, East and West, by the common landscape of our experience.

  The tale of Kwei-li, as a young bride, ends with the imminent return of her beloved husband. The second group of letters, dated twenty-five years later, is addressed to her mother-in-law, to whom she has grown devoted. Kwei-li, by now, is a mother many times over. She is also a woman of prominence. Her husband is governor of Kiang-su under the new revolutionary government of President Yuan Shih-kai, who dethroned the last Ching emperor, Pu-yi. It is 1912, a time of chaotic change for Chin
a.

  Kwei-li, living far from her family’s ancestral home, feels displaced and unsettled not only by the loss of familiar surroundings but by the onset of modern times. A daughter with unbound feet who wishes to become a doctor! A son, educated abroad, who openly defies the government! Yet she wisely keeps her perspective, focusing on what is most important to her: her children. In the last letter, she speaks of cradling her first grandchild in her arms: “... I have learned in life’s great, bitter school that the joy of my Chinese womanhood is to stand within the sheltered courtyard, with my family close about me, and my son’s son in my arms.”

  Still, I was curious to learn more about Kwei-li’s history, so I decided to do some research. I learned that she was, most likely, born in 1867, and married in 1885. Her first son was born a year later—and the fever to which he succumbs was, I believe, typhus, which was then ravaging China.

  By the time Kwei-li’s husband became governor of Kiang-su, China had seen the bloody Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the death of the dowager Empress Kuang-hsu, and the toppling of the Imperial throne. Kwei-li witnesses with veiled displeasure the influx of foreigners into her native country—and their “unladylike” wives. Occasionally she finds her own modern daughters rude and unladylike as well. She watches as her son’s bride is borne to the altar, not in a sedan chair, but in a motorcar adorned with satin rosettes. Later, she agonizes when that son, Ting-fang, is accused of being involved in an assassination attempt against a high government official and sentenced to death.

  Luckily, Ting-fang did not die a traitor. My research revealed a Dr. Ting-fang Liu who lived at that time and who became a distinguished professor and theologian. Born in 1891, he was educated in Shanghai, and later at Columbia University, where he earned his doctorate. After receiving a divinity degree from Yale, he became the first Chinese ever appointed to teach any subject other than Chinese at Union Theological Seminary. After returning to China, Dr. Ting-fang Liu, among other achievements, was elected Dean of the School of Theology at Yenching University. He is listed in the Directory of Contemporary Chinese Who’s Who, published in Japan in 1937.

  Of Kwei-li, far less is traceable. Our best source remains Elizabeth Cooper:

  I knew her many years afterward—her husband having been appointed governor of Kiang-su—when she was the happy mother of sons and daughters. She was a blessing to our province in many ways. Homes for the poor were erected, schools for girls were started, and the generous hands of Kwei-li were ever open to her people. Although in the many charities that were started in the provincial capital her name was never mentioned, yet we who knew realized that it was the wife of the governor who was the power behind the throne ...

  Ten years after I had first read Cooper’s little book—during which time I had raised a family and written books of my own—I was reminded of her by the chance remark of a publisher who mentioned she was looking for a book about life in China. I immediately thought of Kwei-li. By then, however, I’d forgotten both the book’s title and the author’s name. So it seemed a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack. After numerous frustrating phone calls (including several from my home in New York to Santa Cruz, where a gem of a librarian came up with a directory for partial title listings), I located a single, crumbling copy of My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard in the depths of the Brooklyn Public Library. Rereading these letters after a decade, I found them as fresh and enchanting as I did the first time.

  I have retitled the book Golden Lilies, as a reminder of Kwei-li’s bound feet, a symbol of old China’s women. Kwei-li, like all wellborn girls of her time (as well as many peasant girls), had had her feet bound—toes curled under, and the arch broken—from her fifth birthday to achieve the goal of three-inch feet, which would nestle in the bowl of a teacup. These “golden lilies” were greatly prized as objects of supreme beauty, as well as erotic stimuli. The prevailing myth was that bound feet made women not only more desirable wives but better lovers.

  The changes I made in the text itself were minimal. I have modernized “thee” and “thou” to “you,” and rearranged some of the archaic syntax for clarity. But otherwise, I have faithfully followed Elizabeth Cooper’s text, which she refers to in her preface as a “translation” of Kwei-li’s original letters, given to her by Kwei-li’s husband. It is not clear what liberties Mrs. Cooper may have taken in embellishing these letters with her own research and observations, based on her ten years as the wife of an American missionary in Shanghai. To my knowledge, Kwei-li’s own letters—if they existed at all—have never been recovered. We do know that epistolary “memoirs” purporting to be fact were quite common among late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century missionary writers. I feel, however, that it is likely that Kwei-li did exist, and that Elizabeth Cooper knew her. Certainly Ting-fang Liu’s existence is a matter of record, and though the accuracy of some of the biographical details Elizabeth Cooper provides is subject to scholarly dispute, it seems highly probable that he was, indeed, Kwei-li’s son.

  Pamela Dorman, my editor at Viking, and I both felt that illustrations would enhance the text—particularly Kwei-li’s haunting descriptions of places and traditions unknown to most of us. Our search led us to Zhang Qing, one of a handful of modern Chinese artists who still paint in the traditional Chinese style. Born in Shanghai in 1944, he studied Chinese painting at the School of Art and Design in Shanghai, where he was influenced by such traditional techniques as third-century stone-carving and Ming Dynasty woodcuts. His paintings and murals depicting Chinese life have brought him renown in his native country, as well as a growing reputation in the United States, where he is presently a visiting professor at the City University of New York. Many of his illustrations for Golden Lilies are drawn from his own memories of Soochow, as well as from his grandmother’s ancestral home.

  Last, I must pay tribute to Kwei-li herself. I am convinced that, somehow, she was shining a guiding light on my efforts. And that she truly meant it when she wrote, quoting Confucius: “Birth is not a beginning, nor death an end.”

  I hope you will feel, as I do, that Kwei-li has indeed found a permanent place in our minds and hearts.

  Eileen Goudge

  March 1990

  Part One

  1

  My Dear One,

  The house on the mountaintop has lost its soul. It is nothing but a palace with empty windows. I go upon the terrace and look over the valley where the sun sinks a golden red ball, casting long purple shadows on the plain. Then I remember that you are not coming from the city to me, and I say to myself that there can be no dawn that I can see, and no sunset to gladden my eyes, unless I share it with you.

  But do not think that I am unhappy. I do everything the same as if you were here, and in everything I say, “Would this please my Master?” Meh-ki wished to put your long chair away, as she said it was too big; but I did not permit it. It must rest where I can look at it and imagine I see you lying in it, smoking your water pipe; and the small table is always nearby, where you can reach out your hand for your papers and the drink you love. Meh-ki also brought out the dwarf pine tree and put it on the terrace, but I remembered you said it looked like an old man who had been beaten in his childhood, and I gave it to her for one of the inner courtyards. She thinks it very beautiful, and so I did once; but I have learned to see with your eyes, and I know that a tree made straight and beautiful and tall by the gods is more to be regarded than one that has been bent and twisted by man.

  Such a long letter I am writing you. I am so glad that you made me promise to write you every seventh day, and to tell you all that passes within my household and my heart. Your Honorable Mother says it is not seemly to send communication from my hand to yours. She says it was a thing unheard of in her girlhood, and that we younger generations have passed the limits of all modesty and womanliness. She wishes me to have the writer or your brother send you the news of your household; but that I will not permit. It must come from me, your wife. Each one of these st
rokes will come to you bearing my message. You will not tear the covering roughly as you did those great official letters; nor will you crush the papers quickly in your hand, because it is the written word of Kwei-li, who sends with each stroke of her brush a part of her heart.

  2

  My Dear One,

  My first letter to you was full of sadness and longing because you were newly gone from me. Now a week has passed, the sadness is still in my heart, but it is buried deep for only me to know. I have my duties that must be done, my daily tasks that only I can do since your Honorable Mother handed me the keys to the rice bin. I realize the great honor she does me, and that at last she trusts me and believes me no child as she did when I first entered her household.

  Can I ever forget that day when I first came to my husband’s people? I had the one great consolation of a bride, my parents had not sent me away empty-handed. The procession was almost a li [half mile] in length, and I watched with a swelling heart the many tens of coolies carrying my household goods. There were silken coverlets for the beds, and they were folded to show their richness and carried on red lacquered tables of great value. There were the household utensils of many kinds, the vegetable dishes, the baskets, the camphor wood baskets containing my clothing, tens upon tens of them; and I said within my heart as they passed me by, “Enter my new home before me. Help me to find a loving welcome.” Then at the end of the chanting procession I came in my red chair of marriage, so closely covered I could barely breathe. My trembling feet could scarce support me as they helped me from the chair, and my hand shook with fear as I was being led into my new household. She stood bravely before you, that little girl dressed in red and gold, her hair twined with pearls and jade, her arms heavy with bracelets and with rings on each tiny finger, but with all her bravery she was frightened—frightened. She was away from her parents for the first time, away from all who loved her, and she knew if she did not meet with approval in her new home her rice bowl would be full of bitterness for many moons to come.