Nan didn’t get to say goodbye to her love. She arrived in Neijiang with a woven bag containing two cotton shirts and a pair of navy trousers—all the clothes she owned. Her aunt and mother conspired to keep her letters from ever reaching the Wu household. The following month, Anming left for Chongqing, the first person in the village to attend college. But classes never began. Before he had time to unpack his things at the dormitory, Anming was taken by the Red Guards and sent to a labor camp, where he died the following year, beaten to death by another boy for stealing his ration of sweet potato.
Nan fainted when she heard the news. When she had first been sent away to Neijiang by her mother, she bore the suffering, buoyed by the conviction that once Anming finished college, he would come back to the village. In the short time they had been together in the school play, he had promised that he would one day marry her, he could never love anyone else. Their love was just like the love between the farmer and the moon goddess—not even the heavens could keep them apart.
But then Anming had died. Since Nan’s love never had time to ripen to maturity, her heart remained unfinished, frozen in time by shock and guilt. She feared Anming might not have known why she had left town so suddenly and cruelly. Probably her mother had made up a convenient lie to convince him she no longer cared, or—worse—was betrothed to another.
Frightened by Nan’s rapidly deteriorating health, her aunt sent her back to Meifeng. One look at her daughter was enough to spur Meifeng on the twenty-kilometer hike to Wuling Temple in Mount Jinfo, where an old fortune-teller resided beside the temple in a wooden hut, making a living from pilgrims like Meifeng who came from afar to change their futures. Meifeng asked the fortune-teller to break the string of fate connecting Anming and Nan. Even in death, the Chinese believed, this red string could bind two spirits together. Meifeng came prepared with an old newspaper clipping announcing Anming’s acceptance to Chongqing College. The fortune-teller took one look at the faded gray photo and proclaimed that Anming’s hold on Nan from the other world was still strong, as Meifeng had feared. But she assured Meifeng she could break this connection once and for all—for an additional five yuan, which Meifeng dutifully pulled out from the hidden stash in her underwear.
The fortune-teller conducted a Ritual of Severing by tying a string to two rocks, one to represent each party, then she held the contraption over a burning candle until the string broke. This lasted all of two minutes—the gods were swift and decisive. Only after seeing the red thread burned all the way through and the tiny wisps of smoke rising over a colorless sky was Meifeng satisfied that her daughter had been saved. She made her way back down to the village with renewed vigor. Then she waited.
Years passed. Yin passed away in his sleep from pneumonia, as unspectacular in death as he was in life. Meifeng kept herself busy with her four daughters’ schooling and jobs, all the while shouldering the household chores and what was left of the farmwork. At fifty-three years old, she still carried the eighteen kilos of rice on her shoulders and walked the three kilometers home from the rice paddies, doing the work of a woman half her age. “You’ll live to enjoy one hundred,” her friends exclaimed in admiration, “because you are so carefree.”
What her friends didn’t see were the sleepless nights when Meifeng tossed and turned in fear over the fate of her second daughter. Nan had not been accepted to college—she had fainted from anemia and exhaustion during the entrance exams—and had found a job working at a sewing factory. She still lived with Meifeng and cared for her sisters, but anyone could see she was unhappy. She had no friends or suitors, had rejected multiple offers of marriage, and spent her weekends patching old clothes by candlelight. Her beauty had waned over the years: dark circles puffed out her face; she was so thin that her wrist bones poked out like sharp stones. Meifeng cursed the fortune-teller—that old hag, that fraud, preying on the hopes of the poor—and she vowed to hike back up Mount Jinfo to give that shrew a piece of her mind. She planned the trip with the same tenacity she planned everything: she dusted her shoes, packed her lunch, got out her walking stick. But the very next day—a winter’s morning, icy downpour, howling winds—a young man showed up at Meifeng’s door.
“I’ve come to ask your permission to marry your daughter.” He spoke as if they were old acquaintances.
Meifeng looked at him in confusion. “Ping?” she asked, thinking he meant her flighty third daughter who was always flirting and giggling around men twice her age.
“No—Nan.”
Shen Lin, in all this time, had never forgotten about the girl with the basket and the two braids hanging down her back. When Nan had come to Neijiang to stay with her aunt, he had occasionally seen her walking down the street, head heavy with a sadness that belied a depth of character to her effervescent beauty. He followed her in the shadows, watching, longing, all the while listening to the gossip surrounding her heartbreak with a boy from her village. Shen didn’t care that Nan’s heart had once belonged to another. He only concerned himself with the present reality—namely, that Nan was the most desirable woman he knew and he would do anything to make her marry him.
The Lins were smart and determined in a no-nonsense way, without an ounce of the charm the Wus naturally possessed. Though they exhibited a calm, rational demeanor, a gambling streak ran through their blood. They were prone to sudden fits of irrational acts interspersed with long periods of meticulous routine. Shen had never before taken a risk or said anything superfluous, but now, he gambled his future on obtaining the woman he wanted.
To the chagrin of his parents, who had thought he would attend a large university to study medicine—one of the last prestigious but safe professions in China—Shen instead went to a local college and double-majored in English and Physics. In his last year, he took the TOEFL exam, passed with nearly perfect scores, and applied for graduate school in the United States. He didn’t know a single person in America, nor anyone who had applied to school abroad, but he knew he had to be exceptional to win Nan’s closed-off heart.
After receiving his acceptance letter from Suffolk University in Massachusetts, he armed himself with his new student visa and showed up that fateful winter morning at Meifeng’s doorstep, asking for her second daughter’s hand.
Meifeng gave herself over to a relief so strong it made her hand tremble on the wooden door frame. She knew she was a terrible mother for feeling such joy at the hope that someone was going to take Nan off her hands. Her poor, unbending Nan.
“I’m never going to marry anyone,” came a quiet voice behind them.
Both she and Shen turned around to see Nan in her pajamas, hair wet from the shower, ghostlike in her paleness. Her daughter’s eyes burned with such grief that Meifeng felt a vise grip around her heart she knew would follow her into the next life.
“Go away,” Meifeng snapped at Shen, furious at herself for nurturing such a foolish hope. She slammed the door in his face.
He came back to the house later that week when Nan was at the factory.
“I’m going to America,” he stated matter-of-factly, without arrogance. “I want to take Nan with me. In exchange, I’ll sponsor your other daughters once they finish college and want to come to the US as well.”