The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham Read Free Book Online Page B

glue, and twine. Over tea, sweets, and tall tales told beneath a waxing moon, they practiced the traditional art of lantern making. On Mid-Autumn Night, every child would have a beautiful lantern for the moonlight parade.
    On Mid-Autumn Day, important guests started arriving for the festival in the afternoon. My cousin Tan and I came out to the Ancestral Gate to watch them. It was a fine sight. We had never seen so many new faces. The wealthiest came in horse-drawn carriages. High-ranked officials from the old warlord lines rode horses and wore mandarin robes and slacks. Each had a retinue of two to four guards and banner bearers. Local visitors, often of more moderate wealth, traveled in wood palanquins with silk canopies carried by liveried men. Distinguished scholars and elders of modest means came in man-pulled rickshaws. None of stature passed through the Ancestral Gate on foot.
    Villagers arrived in droves, coming through the rear gate. They found their way to the courtyard, sat on mats laid on the paved bricks, and helped themselves to tea and sweets from the kitchen. In the grand hall, people congregated to play Chinese chess and cards—the men with men, the women with women. Men stood around, chatting and swaggering with the confidence of farmers after a good harvest and a new promising crop already in the fields. Mid-autumn was the season of indolence; all the hard work of planting was long finished and there was nothing to do except watch the seedlings grow.
    People sorted themselves into parties befitting their stations. Folks of equal wealth sat on the same straw mat. Even then, families of similar status stayed near each other. It was a world where titles, however minor, mattered. A man’s social station determined everything, from whom he may wed to which school his children may attend. It determined where a person sat, when he spoke, the manner in which he addressed others, and even how large a share of a public feast he took home. It was a harsh world where people relied on the rigid order of the centuries.
    A hush rolled across the dining hall as the magistrate and his wife made their entrance. Uncle Thuan was a stocky man of average height with a dark, broad face, a boxy jaw, and a prominent forehead. He was built in the image of his line—men who knew both the plow and the sword; wide-beamed shoulders, meaty hands, and nut-brown skin, though his bearing was of someone born into wealth, who knew from his earliest youth that he was destined to rule. He eschewed Western trappings, displayed no pocket watches or rings, and refused to wear European suits even when he went to the Province Seat on official business. He kept his hair long in the traditional topknot tucked inside a formal headdress. His attire rarely varied from what he wore today: sandals, white trousers beneath a mandarin robe of black silk, the ivory insignia of his office pinned on his chest.
    Aunt Thuan, the mistress of the estate, was in her late twenties. The well-bred daughter of a wealthy merchant family, she was tall and her slimness made her seem even taller when she stood next to her stocky husband. She wore black slacks beneath the traditional
ao tu than
—a modest silk gown of four colors, cinched by a sash around the waist. Her glossy black hair was wrapped in a tight coil and piled above her head, encircled by a velvet headdress. She was a classic beauty in that she had all the prized features: pearly white skin, oval face, full red lips, and slanted almond eyes. Men said she was the most beautiful woman in the province. Women were envious. They claimed that her full lips were a sign of wanton sexual desire; that the slant of her eyes indicated a mean spirit; and that her high cheekbones were a bad sign for her husband’s longevity.
    None of this touched her, for she was a supremely confident woman. Although she was the third wife, wedded after the death of the magistrate’s first wife, she had proven to be a very efficient and