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An Excerpt from Dragon Springs Road by Janie Chang

CHAPTER 1

November 1908, Year of the Monkey

The morning my mother went away, she burned incense in front of the Fox altar.

The emperor Guangxu and the dowager empress had both died that week. My mother told me our new emperor was a little boy of almost three called Puyi. A child less than half my age now ruled China and she was praying for him. And for us.

My mother knelt, eyes shut, rocking back and forth with clasped hands. I couldn’t hear the prayers she murmured and did my best to imitate her, but I couldn’t help lifting my eyes to steal glances at the picture pasted on the brick wall, a colorful print of a woman dressed in flowing silks, her face sweetly bland, one hand lifted in blessing. A large red fox sat by her feet. A Fox spirit, pictured in her human and animal forms.

The altar was just a low table placed against the back wall of the kitchen. Its cracked wooden surface held an earthenware jar filled with sand. My mother had let me poke our last handful of incense sticks into the sand and even let me strike a match to light them. We had no food to offer that morning except a few withered plums.

The Fox gazed down at me with its painted smile.

After we prayed, my mother dressed me in my new winter tunic.

“Stay here, Jialing,” she said, pushing the last knot button through its loop. “Be quiet and don’t let anyone know you’re here. Stay inside the Western Residence until Mama comes back.”

But three days passed and she didn’t come back.

WE LIVED BY OURSELVES, just the two of us, in the main house of the Western Residence. I usually slept with my mother in her bed, but I was just as used to spending nights in my playroom. It was out in the erfang, a single-story row of five connected rooms, each with a door that opened onto the veranda that wrapped around the front of the building, steps leading down to a paved courtyard. There were two erfang that faced each other across the courtyard, but the other was derelict, its roof fallen in.

Whenever Noble Uncle came to visit my mother, I had to leave the main house. She would send me to my playroom and fetch me the next morning after he left. Then our placid life would resume.

Sometimes Noble Uncle took her away for a day or two, but never for this long.

ON THE FIRST day of my mother’s absence, I paged through the few books in my playroom, then wandered out to the courtyard to shake more plums from the fruit trees. I pulled off their desiccated flesh and put the pits in my pocket. Using the charred end of a stick from the kitchen stove I drew a checkers board on the paving stones and placed pits in the squares. Morning and afternoon I shook the trees, hoping more fruit would fall so that I could have more pieces for my game.

After two days, I began eating the plums despite their moldy taste.

But mostly, I watched and waited for my mother to return.

The smaller front courtyard had gates that opened out to Dragon Springs Road. Years ago my mother had pushed broken furniture against one corner of the courtyard’s walls, tying wooden legs and chair backs together to steady the stack into a platform we could climb. From this perch we had spied on the world outside.

The honeysuckle that clambered across the top of the wall was bare of leaves, but the tangle of vines was still thick enough for concealment. Looking down to the left, I could see the front courtyard of the Central Residence, the home where Noble Uncle and his family lived. There was a door in the wall between the two front courtyards, but the only one who ever used it had been Noble Uncle.

To the right was the street. Standing on tiptoe I peered through the vines, hoping to see my mother’s figure alight from a sedan chair or rickshaw, but all I saw were our neighbors, unwitting and uncaring of my presence.

Back at the Fox altar I knelt down to pray, rocking on my haunches, gaze fixed on the picture pasted to the wall. My nostrils prickled with the musty fragrance of incense. Please, bring back my mama. But the Fox woman looked into the distance, and the Fox merely smiled.

“Fox spirits are almost always female,” my mother had said. “They can appear in Fox shape or as beautiful women. They help those who befriend them. Some are especially sympathetic to unfortunate women.”

Now I wondered at my mother’s words. Did she pray to a Fox because she was an unfortunate woman?

That night I dreamed that I had wandered out to Dragon Springs Road all on my own, when a dreadful knowledge seized me that my mother had gone away never to return. Fear jolted me out of sleep and into the gray light of early morning. I was utterly alone. I cried and cried, but my forlorn wails went unheeded. Curling up under the quilt, I sobbed myself back to sleep.

The next morning, I lay on the pallet bed with all my clothes on, quilt pulled over my head, trying to keep warm. The plate on the floor taunted me with reminders of chicken and sticky rice steamed in lotus leaf packets, the scent of garlic and sesame oil still clinging to the leaves. My stomach ached, a harsh kneading that twisted my insides. I tried chewing on a lotus leaf, but when I tried to swallow, the tough fibers made me retch and I spat them out.

Finally, I went outside to get a drink from the well in the courtyard. I knelt beside its low stone wall and pushed aside the wooden lid. I tossed in my tin cup, heard it splash in the dark depths, and pulled on the rope, hand over hand as my mother had taught me. I took care not to lean too far over the stone rim, as she’d always cautioned, and replaced the lid. I didn’t want to end up as the ghost of a drowned girl, dank hair hanging over my face, luring victims to share my fate.

It won’t be long now, a voice behind me said. People are coming. I can hear them up the road. The voice was high pitched, the words pronounced precisely.

I swung around. An animal with tawny red fur yawned, showing a pink tongue and sharp white teeth. It looked like one of the stray dogs that sometimes came into Dragon Springs Road, but it was sleek, not mangy, with a plume of a tail. A fox. Its eyes shone amber yellow, dark centers with flecks of green in their depths. Its snout was long and elegant, its paws neat and stockinged in black. Then it vanished.

Startled, I dropped my cup and toppled over, my back against the well. Had I fallen asleep and dreamed the creature?

Then I heard voices. Unfamiliar voices. Voices shouting commands, voices shouting in reply.

I hurried through the bamboo grove to the front courtyard and climbed up the pile of furniture. Next door, the gates stood wide open. There was excited laughter and chatter from the street, and then a woman’s voice called out in stern tones.

“Silence! Show respect for the spirits in our new home!”

The chatter ceased immediately.

“All the doors and windows are open, Old Mistress.” A sturdy man in plain blue servant’s garb came out from the main courtyard to face the entrance gate. “Any spirits who wanted to leave should be gone now.”

“Does everyone have something to carry?” A male voice, deep and jovial. “We mustn’t enter our new home empty-handed.”

A man stepped over the threshold of the entrance gate. An exuberant smile lit his round face. His long queue gleamed with the same dark shine as his satin skullcap, and he carried a bundle of books under his arm.

The old woman by his side wore her white hair scraped severely into a bun, her forehead covered by a wide band of black silk. She carried a pair of scrolls and tottered in on tiny feet. Then two younger women stepped into the entrance courtyard. One had a rounded, smiling face and a rounded belly; she held a basket of fruit against her hip. The other was tall and pale, with pursed lips that gave her a dour expression; a panel of embroidered fabric hung over one thin arm.

A young man and a girl followed. The young man carried a small lacquerware box, the girl a covered basket. She was tall, nearly as tall as my mother, with hair dressed in two heavy braids looped with ribbons on either side of her head, glossy and thick. Her padded winter tunic of dark blue flannel just reached her ankles.

Then came a female servant holding a little boy by the hand. Two more female servants entered, gazing around and up, but they didn’t see my face peering from behind the vines.

“Lao-er, where’s our lucky orange tree?” The jovial voice belonged to the round-faced man. He stood at the threshold of the inner gate, ready to enter the main courtyard. “Go, go. Plant it!”

The servant who had first spoken pushed the entrance gate open wide and wheeled in a barrow. On the barrow were gardening tools and a small orange tree, its root ball bound inside a muddy burlap bag. The small procession crossed through the inner gate and into the main courtyard. More handbarrows and workers followed, loaded down with furniture and belongings.

My mother wasn’t among those parading in and out.

Back in the courtyard, I shook one of the plum trees at the edge of the bamboo garden. Four aged fruits fell from its branches. I scooped what I could into my hands and ate it all, not caring about the grit that covered the plums. I spat out the pits and arranged them on my checkerboard.

A scraping noise sent me scuttling into the playroom, the sound of the gate between the two front courtyards opening. I waited, kneeling by the window. Through the carved latticework of the window shutters, I saw a figure enter the courtyard. It was the girl.

For a moment she vanished from sight as the path took her through the bamboo trees, then she appeared again, following the path through the rockery and under the garden arch. She took her time, pausing to look at a rock, a striped bamboo trunk, the carved stone of the arch. She gazed around the courtyard and the buildings that enclosed it, the two-level main house at the far end of the courtyard, the erfang where I was hiding, the derelict erfang opposite, the bamboo garden she had just come through. She climbed the steps to the veranda of the main house and peered through the carved lattice windows, into the rooms where my mother and I had lived. Then she walked back down the veranda steps and paused to look down at the plum pits lying on the makeshift checkerboard.

Show yourself to her, the voice said.

I blinked at the Fox who had appeared beside me. I reached my hand out to touch, to feel whether it was real. The creature gave me a small lick, a raspy warm sensation that gave me courage.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

Your mother burned incense to a Fox spirit, it said. Don’t you remember?

My mother had been fond of telling stories about Fox spirits. “Are you a good spirit or an evil one?”

She gave a small bark of disdain. How can you tell whether anyone is truly good or evil? I’ve been a Fox for hundreds of years and from what I’ve seen it takes generations before consequences truly run their course.

This answer made no sense to me, but her next suggestion did. Go to that girl. She’ll give you something to eat.

“My mother said not to let anyone know I was here,” I said, but my words of protest were feeble. The hollowness in my stomach mattered more.

In response, the Fox nudged me toward the door.

CLOSER, THE GIRL’S eyes were the first thing I noticed. Her looks were unremarkable, smooth flat features on a plain face. But her eyes were large and deep-set, solemn and serene.

She spoke first. “The neighbors outside said they’ve heard crying for the last two nights since the Fong family moved away. They say it’s the ghost of a concubine who committed suicide. Have you seen such a ghost?”

I shook my head. My mother had never mentioned any ghost.

“You were the one crying, weren’t you?” she said. “I thought so. I knew there was someone here when I saw those plum pits. They were still damp.”

“Have you seen my mother?” The question tumbled out, more important than food.

“Who’s your mother?”

“Her name is Mama.” What other name could she have? The girl looked at me, as if expecting more. “She went away with everyone else. But she’s coming back.”

“Why didn’t you go away with her?” the girl asked.

I had asked myself this question for days and could only look away, unable to answer.

“What’s your name?”

“Jialing.”

“My family name is Yang,” she said. “Yang Anjuin. What’s your family name?”

“Zhu. I think.” How could I have been uncertain of my own name? My mother had never made a family name seem important. She only ever called me Jialing. My little Ling-ling, she sometimes teased, like the sound of a bell.

“Let’s go talk to my grandmother, Jialing.”

Anjuin held her hand out and I took it. My fingers were cold and rather sticky, but Anjuin’s grip was firm, and her eyes as she looked down were clear and kind. My wariness dissolved, and when she squeezed my hand, I squeezed back.

As we left, I heard a rustle in the bamboos. A small note of caution from Fox sounded in my mind, warning me not to mention anything about a Fox spirit to anyone.

And behave yourself, the voice added. Be good and make it easier for them to let you stay.