The Last Daughter of Xiao

The Last Daughter of Xiao
Nanjing, 1864

My son,
I wish I could tell you your ancestors were warriors. I wish I could give you tales of heroes, men who shaped the world with their strength or their name. But our family did not survive that way.

Yet what they carried was still courage.

Courage isn’t always a shout in a storm. Sometimes it’s quieter than that: a breath, a tremor, something small that keeps going when everything else has fallen silent. Sometimes courage is the blade of grass that rises after fire has passed through a field. The first green in a place of ash.

If you stand in the wind long enough, you might hear it, the xiao sheng. The 萧声. The sound our name comes from. The sound of branches remembering. Our ancestors speak that way now. Not loudly, but as steady as a whisper that refuses to disappear.

This story begins with one such whisper in the year 1864 near the end of the Qing Dynasty, the last daughter of Xiao, a small life pushing upward through smoke and soot, when the old city of Nanjing lay in ruins around her.

______

The Girl crawls out from underneath a cellar of a house south of the Qinhuai river. Crawled slowly, testing each movement, pushing up a stone tile. Her fingers search the air in tiny, trembling movements. The air stale with mold and the smell of her own sweat and urine. She listens. Beyond her own shaking breath, beyond the scratch of insects, she hears distant screams seeping through the soil.

The Girl lay back down. She stares up at the hole in the ceiling, pressing her hand against her mouth. She tastes blood from her fingers, the broken nails and raw palms that had been gripping wood for days. There she stays for another day, watching the sunlight brighten and then fade through the crack. 

A poem leaks out of her in the dark. A fragment. A faint childhood memory. 

“...rises renewal..clan…preserve…heaven…ascend…”, she mouths into the darkness. “...坤乾...家声...继翔...” 

She tries to speak to her father. No words come out. For a moment she thinks she still feels her baby brother sleeping next to her. She reaches out and finds only dirt. She mumbles more to herself silently waiting for the sun.

She finally comes out of the cellar when the screaming stopped. The pained screams of soldiers dying in the mud, not the wailing of people discovering bodies of loved ones. (Those would come later.)

The Girl cups her hands and drinks the rainwater puddled around the smashed doorway. It feels like broken shards in her throat. She has not had water in days. 

Outside the cellar, the city was gone.

Broken beams lay across courtyards. Pottery lay smashed in heaps. Fires still smoldered in the alleys. Wild dogs wandered freely, feeding on unclaimed bodies. The streets were filled with the dead.

The Girl saw none of that at first. She is disoriented by the ash, falling like snow. For a moment she is eight years old again, chasing her brother along the market stalls near the Confucius Temple in winter. For a moment her family is still alive. For just a moment she is about to taste the snow before she stumbles over a burned body sticking out of the rubble. 

She opens her mouth to apologize but stops. She stares for a very long time before remembering her aunt. The Girl forces herself to stop reminiscing. Nostalgia could get her killed. She needs to find her aunt. But she also does not want to. She hopes she does not find her aunt the way others are soon to find theirs.

The Girl pushed open the ruined gate. It caught against something heavy. A body. 

She looks away and repeats the fragments of the paizi ge her father made her memorize. She looks (and does not look) at the faces in the streets, in the gutters. She hopes not to find anyone she knows. She hopes not to find her. She keeps walking.

She hears metal clacking on stone. The sound of boots marching in the gravel. The Girl hears the Qing soldiers and stops. They speak in a Hunan dialect, loud, coarse, words that jump like a panicked horse. The men are shouting and laughing at each other. She knows that sometimes laughter is more terrifying than any shouting. 

The soldiers approach. She freezes. 

Then paws at the wall of what was once a building, clawing at the black. She rubs the soot over her face. Not carefully, but in frantic streaks across her cheeks, along her jaws, under her eyes. Anything to un-woman herself.

She pulls her hair loose. Messes it up, and looks down immediately, hunching over. The Girl stays quiet.

“Hey, there’s someone here”.

The speech is slurred, drunk. The half-lucid soldier looks hard at her and asks where her family is.

“All dead.”, she says in as thick an accent as she can. “I serve the Wang household”

“There are no houses here”, laughs the soldier. 

Behind him, a bearded soldier eats a bun while making vulgar gestures with the hand of a dead body. The others howled with laughter.

She glances furtively at the drunk man questioning her. He is wearing armor. Layered with metal studs. On his breastplate was carved the character 勇. “Courage”.

He reaches out to her. She feels warmth spreading down her leg and wants to die from shame before the soldier even touches her.

Her father had taught her brushwork and poetry. She once memorized lines about honor, virtue, and grace. But there is no elegance now. Only the stink of fear and the soldier’s shadow falling over her. Her mind slips somewhere above the clouds, watching from outside her own body. When sensation returns, she realizes she is standing in a warm puddle. The soldier’s eyes look down and up again.

“滚”, he says, spitting the word as if at a stray dog. “Get out of my sight”

______

She runs only a few steps before she forces herself to stop. Running would get her killed. The Qing hunted runners. The Girl stops. She sits down, hugging her still damp legs, trying not to breathe the stink in the air. She smells something sour, an over-ripe smell of decomposition, covering the other smells of burning. Burned wood, burned rice. Burnt flesh. 

She sees the blackened foundation stones of the Porcelain Tower. The Taiping had already torn it apart years ago, stripping it for walls and gun platforms. She hears no birds. Only the constant buzzing of flies, louder than the soldiers’ shouts and distant cries. The Girl remembers walking here with her family. She tries to forget. Bao En Si. The “temple of repaying kindness”. No kindness left. Only ruin.

The Girl wills herself to walk, one foot in front of the other. Her legs feel as stiff as the shards of porcelain in the dirt that crunch under her steps. She looks away from the barefoot boy with a shaved head. He is silent too. Dazed. Sitting beside his dead mother.

Finally she reaches the south bank of the Qinhuai. She gags. But there is nothing to throw up. The river air is foul with the smell of rotting flesh and sewage. Its water the color of ink. Ink under occasional rainbow colored film. Things that once were alive float. Later, missionaries would say the river was thick as porridge with bodies. She only saw water black with rot.

There are soldiers guarding the riverbank. She holds her head low when she hears another shout.

“Where are you from?”

“Servant”, she says in a low voice. “From south of the wall”

The Girl half-wishes the soldier would not let her through. She hopes for a moment that he tells her to turn back. She almost turns back. He waves her through.

The streets leading toward the Confucius Temple once bustled with teashops, pawnshops, and vendors. Nothing remains but twice-over desolation. They are less like streets and more like lines of litter. Shattered signs. Burned scrolls. More dead in the alleyways. She steps past something with strings that had once made music, soaked with rainwater. 

The Girl tries to listen for a familiar voice. She hears quiet footsteps behind a toppled stone lion. She hesitates before entering the cracked shrine and sees a small group of women lighting incense for their families. There is barely a roof. She almost stumbles past the fallen beams. She turns to leave. Something catches her eye. Pairs of children’s shoes lay over the back steps.

She does not know how long she has been walking. Her thoughts tossed to other places. She walks simply to walk, no longer expecting to find her aunt. Her feet retrace a path without thinking. The Girl arrives at what used to be the Xiao family home. But it is no longer a house.

A house is only walls, a roof, a door, and the people inside. Without those, what is left? 

She does not see a home but a partial courtyard wall. A stump remains where a pillar once stood, a blackened threshold. There is only silence filled by the absence of furniture. The absence of family. The absence of life. She stands still for a long time, staring at the patch of blood on stone. 

______

The Girl has not seen her home in ten years. Not since the Taiping lunatics came, separating man from woman, taking houses and shops, speaking of heaven and peace as they tore everything apart for their communes and dragged people away. 

 “For the good of all under heaven”, they said. She remembers their hair first. The longhairs. How they cut their braids and let their bangs grow, repeating the same slogans as if the words themselves were virtue.

“For the good of heavenly peace.” 

The words had filled the streets then. She hears them now as only thin and empty echoes, blown through the broken walls.

In the skeleton of the small siheyuan, a four-box courtyard, there still barely breathes something resembling a room. It used to be a storehouse, now just wreckage surrounded by charred beams, a gate, and litter. A junkyard left behind by people who burned what they could not carry.

The Girl waits outside the pillar. She does not know what she waits for. Afraid to enter, she wonders what if there is another soldier behind the wall? What if this is a trap? She only hears whispers of a life stolen long ago that she barely remembers. They belong only to the wind now. 

She hears another whisper. Is it real? The voice murmurs again. “Is that you?”

On the other side of the beams, a woman is crouched in the dust. Her hair is wild and shaking. Face, gray with ash.

It takes time, long moments, for them to understand what they are seeing. When they do, the woman’s mouth begins to tremble. Then her hands.

Between frantic breaths, The Girl can make out just a few words. 

“Thought you lost”, gasps Auntie Xiao. “My Plum Blossom”

The Girl cannot answer. She cannot breathe. She has no voice left.

She does not notice the man standing behind her aunt until she is pulled back into her body.

He is filthy. His tunic is dark with blood. He stands hunched, eyes lowered, as if ready to shrink away. His hair is unbraided, his bangs hidden under a strip of cloth.

The Girl jerks back, searching for a way out.

“Stop,” her aunt says quickly.
“It’s all right. He saved me.”

______

In the days before The Girl found her auntie and her ruined home, Liu Chunlin had been underneath a pile of bodies and rubble. It was a pile he put over himself. He was never a fighter, just a starved boy who joined a hopeless cause. He lay dead for days. Under the rot, the smell, and the hot stinking rain — heavenly punishment for the false peace that never was.

Chunlin drank the rainwater at night when the patrols let up. It was the silence that scared him. He did not know the sounds in his head from what he heard during the day. He has lost all sense of time, only knowing the hours by the sounds of shouting. And the vibrations from the thudding. Sometimes boots. Sometimes other things.

The first day he lay there he thought he heard bootsteps approaching but it was only the thudding sounds of a head falling, then rolling, in the street somewhere a few feet away from his right ear. Another thud as a body is thrown onto the pile above him. 

It was the quiet that was harder. The slowing of steps. The moving shadow and the pause as a soldier kicks at him. Pokes at a few bodies with a spear. Chunlin imagined himself a wood plank for the first day. By the second he waits, half hoping to be found, wanting a way out. By the third he did not imagine anymore; he truly believed that he had died and this was karmic retribution. 

On the afternoon of the fourth day, the storm came with vengeance, washing the red smoke from the sky. Rivers of red flowed to the ground where Chunlin laid. It was on that night that he decided to move.

The rain was indiscernible from thunder. It pounded the ground in angry splotches, covering any sounds of footsteps. The monsoon was so strong that Chunlin could not see the streets ahead. He could only feel the burned walls. He moved slowly, careful not to trip over the bodies. By random luck or perhaps by grace of heaven, he stumbled onto an abandoned ruin. Perhaps the gods truly were merciful, he thought as he pulled a nearly full water jug off a dead soldier.

There was only silence in the structure. He waited to be found as the day came and passed, turning the beam of light from the crack as if a lever. There were no hiding places here. Yet there were no sounds of footsteps, no sounds of enemy soldiers. The old house might have been one tucked behind the old alleyways of the Temple district. It was almost afternoon when he heard a shift underneath a broken beam. The pile of old clothes moved just slightly. Except it wasn’t clothes. 

The beam had collapsed on an older woman. Gray hair. Perhaps not as old as she looked, but it was hard to tell in those days. Those years were not kind to locals of the river capitol. 

Beyond the woman’s outstretched hand sat several jars, presumably what she had been after. Chunlin greedily dug his hand into one, shoving the raw millet into his mouth. It tasted of dust and mold. The ash lingered in his throat and he swallowed painfully.

He waited until dark before looking at the old woman. Her face brought back memories of another lifetime. An impoverished home village in Anhui. A sick mother starved to death. He had forgotten he had a mother. He had forgotten he was once a son.

“求求你”, she whispered. “Please.” 

She had awoken to the sounds of Chunlin’s hunger. 

He froze. Stared. With what seemed the last of his strength he pushed against the wood with all that his starved bones allowed. She rolled slowly, shifting away. He propped her against the wall, bringing the stolen jug to her lips. 

They sat in silence past the night and another daytime, moving only as he offered more sips of water or scraped some of the starch from the jars for her to lick. 

The two left the ruin and made for the alleys by the following nightfall. The old woman could barely walk and Chunlin propped her with his arm, half lifting. They limped slowly forward, through the thin spaces between the buildings that the woman seemed to know by heart, two ghosts in the storm.

After hours of inching in the dark, they arrived at a wreck of a small courtyard home. Only a gate, a few walls, and a room remained standing.

______

The Girl clears the surviving room of the house of debris. The bits of wood, brick, broken glass and furniture. This will be more than a suitable place to sleep. Auntie sits leaning against the door, having collapsed in exhaustion, but not before passing The Girl a small handful of the stale millet from the jars she almost died to retrieve. Liu Chunlin gathers wood and barricades the main gate, holding it shut with a makeshift plank. 

The world is oddly still save for the continuing bootsteps outside. They are no longer hurried and decisive; just tired, peppered with the occasional sounds of coughing and complaining, accompanied by the scraping of shovels and the creaking of carts. The dead are being dragged away.

The three pause every now and then as they hear murmurs of people beyond the wall. Over the past months they had become so accustomed to the sounds of pained screaming that it feels alien to hear voices whispering and to hear even the brief sound of a child crying. The Girl makes a motion to head outside before she sees a stern look from Auntie Xiao. 

When the room has been cleared and the gate has been shut with bits of beam and plank, Chunlin stands. Unsure of what to do with his hands he picks up a broken handle of an old garden hoe. 

The Girl does not look at him. Instead, she looks at Auntie.

“What is he still doing here?” she asks. The light is already fading. 

Chunlin looks at Auntie Xiao. His mouth opens, then closes.

“I can stand guard,” he says, after a pause. He drags another beam to the gate. “While you sleep.”

The Girl scowls. The man speaks with the rough, clipped accent of hill people, scraping the air instead of settling into it.

Auntie gazes at him. And let out a soft breath. “Stay”, she says. “Watch the door.”

“I’ll wake you if —”

The Girl has already turned away, gathering broken tiles from the floor.

______

Outside the gate, heavy rains begin to fall with the darkness. The two women lay curled behind the broken door. But only Auntie sleeps. The Girl wakes, every while or so. She grasps at the stone tiles, still wanting for the softness of earth. She reaches out, placing a palm on Auntie’s chest. Still breathing. The Girl does this three, four times, to make sure. 

She crawls to the door and crouches, looking through the crack. The man outside sits with knees bent, leaning against the wall, still holding the broken hoe. He flinches at every noise he hears through the rain. He stands up again, shaking, sitting down after a few brief moments.

Sounds of a wagon leak through the wooden gate. He stands, ready to fight. Then leans to the wall and collapses to the ground after the noise has passed, burying his face in his hands.

The Girl checks her Aunt’s breathing again. Three more times. Mouthing the words of the poem again, she places another hand on the door. It does not move. She hugs her knees when her shoulders begin to shake. Without sound, she weeps.

______

In the morning the two women sift through the bits and pieces of things in the space behind the main room. Fragments of broken wood, parts of old furniture. Torn pieces of filthy cloth. Jagged edges of pottery. The Girl finds an old tailoring kit still intact, needles, scissors and all. Sticking out underneath bits of wild grass that has sprouted through cracks, Auntie finds one half, then another half, of their smashed ancestral tablet. 

The Girl falls to her knees, afraid to look, then carefully touches the ruined names with gentle hands. 

“They’re not there”, says Auntie. The Girl looks up, bewildered.

“Child, they’re not in the tablet”, Auntie continues. Her voice and gaze soften. 

“They’re in how we live.”

Chunlin watches but stays behind a small distance. How long may he stay in this little family turned shelter? Will they ask him to leave now that the first night has safely passed? How far will he survive down the road to Anhui if he chooses to return home?

His worries are interrupted as Auntie calls him over. “Kneel”, she says.

Chunlin had grown up among farmers and peasants. Is this some strange ritual of the gentry class he has yet to know of? He trembles and closes his eyes before he hears the sound of snipping and feels Auntie’s warm hand on his shoulder. They are cutting his hair.

The Girl brings a small bowl of water, while Auntie squats down behind him and braids his hair. He has not worn a queue since he had last seen his mother, coughing in bed too weak to move. He feels the tug in the back of his head and it itches slightly. The Girl picks up the scissors and continues cutting off his long bangs, shaving them crudely, leaving a slight stubble. Auntie wipes the dirt and bits of hair from his now bare forehead with a wet rag as The Girl picks up the longer locks of hair off the ground. She hides it under a loose stone tile.

“Now you look like a person again.”, says Auntie.

______

Because the jars of millet would only be enough to last a few days, the three had silently agreed that all of their efforts would be spent on foraging for food. In the wreckage, Auntie had found one or two bowls and a gourd which she uses along with Chunlin’s stolen water jug, to collect rainwater at night. 

Chunlin spends the rest of the day gathering wood of no immediate use in hopes of making a fire when it is safe. He does so as quietly as he can, still fearing for every noise outside the wall, flinching at every roll of a cart and every shout of a soldier. He drops a small beam with a dull clack, sinking his head even lower than before as The Girl throws him a glare filled with scorn. They leave untouched the burnt plum tree that grows in the center of the small courtyard — they have neither the tools nor the strength to cut it down. 

The Girl is relieved at this; the plum tree had once been her father’s favorite. She does not mention this sentiment. Sentiments are not for times of survival, when the immediate needs are for warmth and sustenance. Yet this tree may be the only thing she has left of a once beautiful past.

From cracks in the ground and the lanes outside the siheyuan, Auntie and Chunlin pull leaves of wild grass and bits of tree bark. They taste bitter and pungent, giving Auntie stomach pains throughout the twilight hours. It is enough to last a few more days, before the three must resort to licking starch paste and powder from jars.

That night, the three hear the sounds of revelry not far from the city wall. The faint music of song and wine, banquets accompanied by poetry and opera. The soldiers are celebrating.

Yet the drunken laughter rings too loud and too explosive. The gongs and drums clatter off-tempo at all times of the night. A careless victory carried by the humid summer air sullying a city of the starving and the dead. Every now and then bands of inebriated soldiers retch just outside the courtyard wall. The Girl grimaces as she hears the vomit and the spittle, then more bawdy yelling in Hunan-accented phrases of half forgotten verses incoherent to anyone but its source.  In the distance they hear a woman crying, then the scream is cut off by sounds of muffling and then more laughter. Auntie closes her eyes.  

Who is this celebration for? The city “saved” and re-taken by the Qing? Its inhabitants rescued from ideology and vengeance? The dead may not agree. Yet the dead do not argue. 

“安心去吧！”, screams a raucous voice from down the alley. “Go in peace, my brothers!”

Chunlin spits on the ground, letting the disgust drop from his tongue. Auntie gives him a stern look.

“I can steal some of their grub”, he says. “It’s not like they would notice anything missing. Just a few steam buns, I can just stuff them down my shirt and —”

The Girl gives him a look that cuts deeper than daggers. It is the first time she has looked at him in days. “Are you trying to get noticed?” 

Auntie makes a sound as if to speak. Changing her mind, she looks away.

______

Four weeks after the fall of the city, the Qing soldiers begin to distribute food. One of those feeding centers, they set up in the market square of the old Confucius Temple. It is on this overcast day that Auntie and Chunlin join the large crowd of hungry civilians, clustered at first, eventually forming long chaotic lines. Chunlin behind Auntie, shoulders hunched, as he tried to make himself as small as possible. A drizzle begins to fall.

The square does not look like a square at all — instead, it is a cesspool above ground: muddy and slippery, people pressed together in a space roughly cleared of rubble where, until only recently, corpses were piled and burned. The air smells of rot and smoke, raining both water and ash. A soldier hits both Auntie and Chunlin with a stick, prodding them forward. 

As they near the front of the line, Auntie sees the temporary tables and the massive pots. Another soldier ladles thin gruel into the bowl of a woman, who mutters something about the sour smell of mold. She is quickly shoved to the ground, and given a rough kick. The bowl follows with a loud clatter. 

She looks up and around, eyes darting. Then at the guards behind the table. On her hands and knees, the woman brings her face to the ground. She licks the gruel from the cobblestones.

Chunlin rises, inhales and opens his mouth. Auntie gives him a kick before he can speak. 

“Eyes down”, she hissed.

After receiving their bowls, Auntie leads Chunlin away from the crowd. “Eat this quickly now”, she says. As he eats, she wraps her bowl in cloth. They slowly trudge back.

The Girl had been instructed to hide. Despite the decline in violence the past weeks, youth may still invite savagery. Auntie knocks, beckoning her out, and hands her the bowl. The Girl eats the still warm sludge, not speaking until she has consumed half.

“Auntie, how were you able to ask for an extra bowl?”

Chunlin’s eyes widen at the realization of her sacrifice. He is about to speak before Auntie stops him with a hand. 

“An old woman still has her charms”, Auntie says with a smile. “Eat, little Plum Blossom. You are still the future of this house.” 

She falls asleep, exhausted.

Later in the evening, with a gentle nudge, Chunlin wakes Auntie, offering her a bowl of gruel not before lifting and propping her against the stone. The food is warmer than it should be. 

She eats slowly. Warmth and life return to her eyes a little after she finishes the bowl. She looks at Chunlin, and a sudden surprise comes to her face.

“Where did this come from?”

He does not answer. She asks him again.

Auntie looks at him with a sudden sadness. She places a gentle hand on his arm.

“君子固穷，小人穷斯滥矣, poverty is not the same as losing yourself,” she says softly.

“You have a compassionate heart—but this bowl was not mine to eat.”

The Girl inches closer. She had been listening, unsure of what had happened. Auntie turns to her, asking her to lie down.
Chunlin does not speak. He only looks at the bowl for a very long time.

______

In the following days, smoke appears in the nearby courtyard houses of the Temple district. Other locals have settled home. Chunlin rushes to grab the pieces of wood he had salvaged. He pauses and looks to Auntie, who nods, before making a fire and roasting a sparrow he had caught that morning, waiting patiently beside the plum tree. 

“Have you come back?”, whispers a voice outside the gate.

Motioning to Chunlin to stay back, Auntie peeks through the crack. Then opens the gate to find an old neighbor. A wizened man pushing a cart. 

“You’re back”, he says.

Auntie nods. 

He seems to grip the handle even tighter for a moment. Then glances past her into the yard. A small glance, shorter than a breath.

“Do you have…people?”, he asks.

Another nod.

The man exhales. Just barely.

“This is good.”

The Girl chews on a piece of bird meat, listening to Auntie’s short exchange with Uncle Wang. She smiles, only slightly, at Chunlin for a small moment. But when Chunlin looks at her, the moment is passed.

______

By late summer, the rains loosen their grip. The Southern Capital stays thick with heat, wet air clinging to skin along the riverbanks. Without the rain, Chunlin risks a small fire. Water is boiled. Grub is warmed. These small things bring steadiness, even as the days remain heavy and close. As the days pass, Auntie begins to recover, standing more easily, her voice no longer strained.

Throughout the city, locals begin to settle. Some houses are seized and given to Qing bannermen. There are property disputes. The Taiping had burned records in the first year of occupation. Yet the small Xiao siheyuan remained untouched, barely noticed due to its ruined state and modest location.

One afternoon as Auntie squats in the courtyard sorting the edible grass from the weeds, the three hear voices outside the gate. It is a thin, small voice, academic and authoritative. 

“Who lives here?”

“Xiao House”

They hear Uncle Wang from across the lane. 

There is a knock at the gate and Auntie lets in a small man in robes. An official. He looks tired, sweating under his black cap. There is a red tassel that hangs from it, although it is just as worn as he is. He carries a small register booklet and a still-wet brush in his hands.

“Xiao Household?”

“Yes”

“How many mouths?”

“Three. Me, my niece, and —”

“Who is that?”

He looks suspiciously at Liu Chunlin. Chunlin stops sweeping and hunches further over. He opens his mouth as if to speak but his mouth hangs slack as if struck. 

“We call him Ah Chun," says Auntie. “He has been our servant since he was a boy. He is mute. Mute ever since—what those Taiping dogs did to him.”

She spits the words with disdain. The official nods and looks at Chunlin, carefully, for a long moment. 

Chunlin looks down. He feels a bead of cold sweat crawl past his neck. His leg wobbles.

“That will do. Carry on.”

After the official leaves, Auntie sits down. She wipes her forehead with a hand and breathes in one long exhale. 

______

Later in the evening, when Chunlin finishes repairing the roof of the main room, he barricades the gate. The Girl sits and gazes at the plum tree. She has been silent since afternoon. He sits beside her.

“Thank you”, he says.
The Girl looks away, after mumbling a small noise.

“I wanted to ask,” he says. “I know it is not my place, Plum Blossom but —”

“No.” she says, suddenly looking up.

He stops.

“That is not for you.” she said. “You will address me as Miss. Of the Xiao House.”

“Apologies, Miss.” he says. Lowering his head again, he inches over to the locked gate and sits against the wall.

Auntie gazes at Chunlin and attempts a warm smile. He looks away.

“Child,” says Auntie, “in difficult years it is mercy that keeps a house standing.”
She sits next to the girl, covering her hands.

“An honorable house,” she adds quietly, “does not spend its last possession without need.”

The Girl does not answer. 

______

1867 – Three Years Later

Liu Chunlin had repaired the gate. It does not look new; in fact, in some ways it looks even more broken than before, having been reinforced with two mismatched planks and covered with a reused door panel. However, it functions well, closing securely despite light leaking through the cracks. It is locked by a horizontal timber bar dropped into crude slots that Chunlin fashioned out of bits of found salvage — a clear signal that the siheyuan, however wrecked, is occupied.

In the past three years since the Xiaos have resettled, Chunlin had repaired as much of the courtyard home as he could. The wall is lower than before, fixed with bricks he had found from nearby collapsed houses, stacked unevenly, the gaps filled with packed earth, lime mixed with ash, and fragments of broken tiles. It looks a patchwork of uneven bits, crumbling in places. Chunlin’s work is never truly finished. At dawn and dusk he scavenges around the city for more material to use for the constant rebuilding of the Xiao home, a siheyuan in name only; still only one room, a courtyard, and pillars that surround what is a neatly organized junkyard. 

On this particular morning, there is a knock at the gate which Auntie promptly, but still cautiously answers. She opens it after seeing a neighbor through the crack. 

“早” she says. “Good morning”

“Madam Xiao, are you well today?”
“Well enough for this day”, answers Auntie. She turns her head slightly and coughs into her sleeve.

“Have you eaten?”
“We have. And your baby?”
“Coughed through most of the night. He slept at dawn.”

Sister Chen holds out a gray jacket that has seen many snows.

“The mending last winter held well.”

Auntie examines the jacket, lightly fingering the seams.
“I see this tear is new”

“Can it be repaired?”
“It will hold.”

Sister Chen hesitates, looking guilty.
“We don’t have much rice” she says, opening her palms, offering a little more than a scoop — enough for a day or so.

Auntie nods.
“This is enough.”

That morning, The Girl had been sewing in the room, listening. She pauses when payment is discussed but continues working until the neighbor leaves. At the sound of the gate closing, she comes out to inspect the coat, bringing water still warm from the morning boil. Auntie drinks slowly, sitting down as The Girl takes the coat back inside. 

The past three years, as Chunlin had spent time repairing the home, The Girl and her Auntie spent their time mending and repairing the clothes of others. It started with a shirt for Uncle Wang, and the clothes of other neighbors. The Girl had been adept at stitching and had always been a neat seamstress since childhood. Soon after, the craft quality of the Xiao women had spread and the sewing had become a humble, but stable source of grain for the three. 

______

The following morning, as Chunlin returns from the Qinhuai with two buckets of water, he sets them down near a pillar before bringing one of them to Auntie to boil. He adds more kindling to the small flame, close to dying out. Auntie begins to cough as she reaches for a pot.

The coughing does not stop and she covers her mouth with a rag. It is a gray bit of fabric that she puts away quickly, but not before Chunlin sees the spots of red. He freezes.

Auntie stops as well, looking at Chunlin for a while. 

Chunlin gets up and closes the gate. He looks over to the door of the room where The Girl is still asleep, having worked all night on a baby jacket for Sister Chen. 

“Don’t tell Plum Blossom” says Auntie.
Chunlin nods.

“Now start this fire,” she adds. “This old woman feels cold.”

______

A week after the passing of the new year, Chunlin fills some newly formed gaps in the wall with bits of tile and clay. The Girl sits near the plum tree, mending an old shirt. Auntie tends the water for the morning boil. With the closing of the old year’s misfortune and the reopening of fate comes an auspicious time when unresolved matters must be faced. It is now the new cycle of the Earth Dragon, a year that demands action over delay. Now is the time that broken orders are to be put back in place, she muses to herself as she watches the sparks crackle in the wood.

“Ah Chun — you have lived with Xiao House for three years now”, she says.

Chunlin stops and looks up, nodding, unsure of how to answer. He puts down his tools and comes closer to the old woman. He realizes with a jolt that she is looking much older than before, having thinned further the past winter. She coughs lightly into her sleeve before continuing. 

“Our blossom — twenty-five snows she has seen,” starts Auntie. The Girl stops her sewing, stiffens. “Xiao family’s door cannot remain empty.” 

The Girl puts down her work and looks at Auntie, not knowing what to say, as Chunlin wipes his hands on the front of his trousers. He is beginning to understand as well.

“We have only this line left”, says Auntie. She looks very serious. “If you do not object, I invite you to enter.”

Chunlin kneels and begins to stutter.
“I am but a son of farmers, of humble origin. I am not worthy”, he says. The Girl nods quickly, turning to Auntie.

“It has not been easy for him here. The burden has been laid heavy. I would not ask further.”
“This is not solely your matter.”

The Girl lowers her head, and looks only at her needles.
“This daughter did not presume to think,” she says.

Auntie looks at both of them with a soft gaze, pausing before a sigh.
“Think not of it” she adds, and goes to Chunlin, still kneeling.

She knocks him on the shoulder, sudden but not unkindly. “Get up”, she says under her breath.

Chunlin rises. Looks at both of them. He nods, and gets back to work.

______

At dusk, Chunlin starts the fire for the evening boil. This evening, Auntie has lain down even before the moon has appeared over the city wall. She seems more fatigued by the day. He crouches by the stove and arranges the tinder before striking steel against stone. When the spark catches, he thinks back to the events of the day. What would his mother and father say to his joining of another house? Would they rejoice at his survival, or mourn the loss of his name, the name his father had received from the fathers before him? 

He leans close and breathes as the ember flutters. Chunlin’s father had taught him to make fire. The flame and the warmth were all that remained of the peasant from Anhui who raised him. He begins to add twigs. The fire grows, blazing to life. The Girl crouches beside him, warming her hands.

I am now betrothed to her, thinks Chunlin as he sees the warm orange light move across her face. “Yet I know nothing about her.” 

He attempts a question.

“Your father —” he asks before he is cut off.
“— you already know what happened to him.”

She glares at him before continuing.
“He died the year the city fell. The first time the city fell. When your people entered our gates.” 

Chunlin forgets to breathe for a moment. He feels absurd, wondering why he is just now noticing the color of her eyes. Dark. Steady. Not blinking. His face becomes as hot as the embers in the stove and he looks down before he speaks again.

“I was never a part of the killing bands. I never raided houses.” he says, feeling smaller by the moment. “I was only a runner, just a boy —”

“But you stood with them,” she says. “Or was it someone else’s head I shaved?”

He winces. The wound stings worse than death by a thousand cuts. 

“Please, Miss, understand. My village starved. My mother died in winter and the rest followed — and the Qing, those Manchus —”
“Enough.” 

He does not stop.

“— they just kept on taxing us of our grain!” he says, remembering himself. “They said I would get rice — how — how can you ever understand —”

The Girl raises her voice. Her mother had taught her temperance and dignity. None of it had mattered in the bad years. 

“You think I lived as some highborn?!” She is standing now. “Look around!”

She storms off. 

Chunlin stares into the flames for a while longer before going after her. He finds The Girl sitting in the alley behind the main room, face buried in her knees. She repeats the fragment of a poem, over and over again.

He sits beside her. They do not speak for a long time.

“I’m sorry” he says at last. She looks up.

“What was that poem you were reciting?” he asks.

“I don’t know” she answers. “It’s just something I say sometimes. My father taught it to me. It’s the only thing I remember of him.”

She hesitates, then whispers softly as if speaking to the dead.

“天地… 方坤乾, 家声… 继… 翔…”
She stops at the last word. She looks embarrassed, like a child who has forgotten her lines.

“What comes after xiang?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”

“It was the clan poem of Xiao house,” says Auntie. “Our 字輩.”

The two look up, having not heard Auntie wake.

“I heard yelling,” she says. “My own father only taught the words to my brother. But brother was resourceful enough to give them to his daughter it seems”

“What is a clan poem?” asks Chunlin. He forgets The Girl’s anger for the moment.

“A song,” says Auntie. “A song that keeps the names of our generations, past and future.”

“What comes after xiang?” asks The Girl.
“I don’t know. One can only hope.” says Auntie. “Come now you two. It does not befit an honorable house to fight where others can hear.”

______

The Girl walks briskly through the market square of the Confucius Temple, with Chunlin following behind. She had been sewing through the night for weeks, taking on extra mending work, even from former soldiers, to afford the dried tangerine peels and loquat leaves they had just purchased with precious rice. 

In the years following the river city’s devastation, shops had been slow to reopen. First came the granaries and vegetable stalls, then the food vendors. Only recently did she and Auntie hear of small apothecaries with limited supply. The two had waited since morning in a line with other customers, to be charged an inflated price of three scoops of rice — almost a week’s worth of food. 

Over the past weeks, Auntie’s cough has become worse. Chunlin does not tell The Girl what he knows and what he has seen before, but as he watches The Girl’s footsteps in front of him, he feels a heaviness he cannot place. As he begins to contemplate telling her, the crowd suddenly falls unusually silent.

They stop. A pebble’s throw to their right, they see a haggard man kneeling on a crudely built wooden platform. The man looks like a normal laborer. He has his hands tied behind his back and a wooden sign strung around his neck. The placard was made of rough wood, with the characters 供贼食 written hurriedly in smeared black ink. On one side of the man stands a government official. On the other, a soldier with a saber drawn.

The Girl looks again at the condemned man. She looks at her betrothed. She looks at the man again. She wants to run, but remembers running can get them killed. 

The official reads from a small booklet, sounding almost bored. 

“By imperial order,” he says. “You are charged with colluding with rebels, supplying food to rebels…”

There are murmurs in the crowd.

“He was a cook”
“Serves him right”

“...you will meet swift justice.”

The soldier raises his saber. The Girl looks away. She hears a thud. She hears a soft roll.

The crowd begins to disperse, after an exhale. 

Liu Chunlin does not move. He is still staring at the now vacated platform, a wooden man in a moving crowd. The Girl beckons him to leave but he does not see.

She touches his hand, delicately, before holding it. She pulls.

“Let’s go. Come on.” she says. “Let’s leave this place.”

______

The Girl marries Liu Chunlin a week after the Mid Autumn Festival, the Earth Dragon year. It is a simple wedding, a small gathering of a single elder and two friends in the morning, barely a ceremony. 

Despite the suggestion of a union being made by Auntie, they had needed to designate a formal matchmaker, a mediator between two houses. Sister Chen fills the role, standing at the makeshift altar between man and woman, being a neighbor they trust and a local woman of good standing. 

Uncle Wang enters the room, holding the marriage contract written by one of the temple scribes in exchange for a handful of millet. It looks dense, with black text that Chunlin cannot read. The paper intimidates him. At that moment he wishes he could read. He wishes he knew how to write his own name.

The two had changed into clean clothes that morning, washing their hands in the basin behind the wall. Chunlin wipes his hands on his sleeves, not accustomed to their cleanliness. He looks once at The Girl. She has circles under her eyes. She attempts to smile but her eyes do not change. 

“Today at the Xiao household’s request, I serve as matchmaker,” says Sister Chen. She speaks the ritual language haltingly. “Liu Chunlin enters the Xiao household and takes their daughter as his wife.”

Uncle Wang begins to read from the marriage contract, to Chunlin’s relief. He pauses, seeing the next line.

“...children of this union will carry the Xiao surname.” He stops and looks at the groom. “Ah Chun — do you understand this matter?”

Chunlin nods. He feels the tightness in his heart give way to more relief. He breathes out. Against his will, a smile escapes him. Uncle Wang guides his hand toward the paper, motioning him to leave a firm thumbprint. The ink stains red.

“Both sides have agreed,” says Sister Chen. “proceed with the rites.”

The bride and groom bow together. Three times. They bow once to heaven and earth. They bow once to their ancestors. But there is no longer an ancestral tablet at the altar. The Girl tries not to think of her father. Chunlin tries not to think of his mother. 

They bow a third and final time, to each other. Chunlin bows lower than The Girl. He meets her gaze as they rise. Her black eyes are moist. They are also stained with red.

Auntie Xiao rises from her seat. She also makes a thumbprint, signing her name with black ink over the red.

“The rite is complete,” says Sister Chen. Her voice softens and she looks at Chunlin. “From now on, you are one family.”

“We do not have rice wine,” says Uncle Wang. “and we do not have tea. I can only offer the newlyweds a toast of hot water. It will be enough.”

The two take the small cups. They each take a small sip. Carefully.

Auntie clasps both of Chunlin’s hands in hers. She raises her head to look at him.
“Hereafter, you are Xiao.” she says. Chunlin only nods.

That night, Auntie sleeps in the home of Sister Chen. She sleeps a slumber more peaceful than she has in a decade.

She whispers to whatever is left of her brother in the dark.
“It is done.”

______

1869 – Another Year Later

The child begins to arrive, a few days before dongzhi, the Winter Solstice. The Xiao family is fortunate that Uncle Wang has a cousin who is a competent midwife. In those old days, still dark in more ways than one, midwives were often expensive, overworked, and sometimes unreliable. 

By now, thankfully, the single room of the siheyuan has a wooden bed platform that Chunlin had built some months before. But Chunlin is not in the room at the moment. Instead he is pacing in the courtyard outside of the door, hands in his sleeves, rubbing his arms for warmth. Sitting on the steps is Uncle Wang, calm but ready.

Uncle Wang sits with his eyes closed, conserving himself. He tries to stay relaxed. Chunlin’s pacing and ragged breathing make it difficult to. The two have been outside since before the gray sun peeked behind the city walls. Chunlin checks the fire again. He has kept the flame going since the previous night, next to the numerous water buckets Uncle Wang had asked him to fill.

“Water! Hot water!” yells a voice from inside the room. “Now! Hurry!”

Chunlin runs to the boiled water, grabs and returns to the door. He almost spills when he forgets the stone steps. He looks away as Madam Wang’s strong hands reach out. She snatches the basin before slamming the door shut.

The men are presently excluded from the room, half-temple, half-battlefield of womanhood. Chunlin tries not to think. His imagination conjures images he does not want to see. Foreign images beyond anything he has known. Even more terrifying than what he has endured over the years.

He hears sounds of low moaning that make him think of the animals in the fields when he was a little boy. He tries to shut his ears. He does not shut his ears. He has deserted a village, deserted an army. He will not desert his family.

“Bite down on this! Bite!” comes Madam Wang’s booming voice.

There is a sharp cry from inside. 

“留点力气,”
He hears Auntie’s voice. “Save your strength, my blossom”

“Where is that water?! More! Now!”
Chunlin is glad for the command, jumping to his feet again and sprinting for another bucket.

This goes on for hours still until well into the night. The warm orange light leaks through the covered windows. Chunlin can still hear his wife gasping. 

At the sound of another cry, Chunlin stands up to open the door before Uncle Wang stops him. Chunlin feels the warm hand on his shoulder. He thinks of his father again. How old would his father be now if he had lived? He turns away, wiping the freezing sweat from his brow, shivering in the biting winter.

At least he hears the shrill unmistakable wail of an infant. He tears the door open, leaping to the bed.

Madam Wang passes Chunlin the baby before turning back to The Girl, now collapsed. Her hair is wild, forehead matted with sweat. Chunlin looks at his son. The boy’s face is still caked with what looks like milky powder. The kind that Chunlin would have used to fix gaps in the wall. His eyes are closed. Chunlin cannot decide if the boy looks like himself, his father, or his uncle.

The Girl wakes. Madam Wang takes the boy from Chunlin and places him in the arms of his mother. The baby opens his eyes, lets out another wail.

“活着就好,” says Auntie. “Alive is enough.”

“乾...” says The Girl, in a voice quieter than a breath. 

“The clan poem,” says Auntie. “Qian will be his generational name.”

“‘Dry’?” asks Chunlin.
“No,” says Auntie. “It can mean many things. Maybe ‘heaven’, maybe the origin of a river. Perhaps the rebirth of a line.”

“His name is 乾泰,” says The Girl. “Xiao Qiantai.”
“Yes, that is a good name. One that yearns for stability.” Auntie smiles at the name, before sitting down and drying her forehead with a rag. 

“Feed the child,” she says. “And rest. You must do the month, Plum Blossom”

______

In the days that follow, Chunlin makes many mistakes. The first occurs when he opens a window for his wife, wanting her to have fresh, clean air. Auntie stops him at once, reminding him that the new mother has to “do the month”. Later, he brings water throughout the day, only to be told it must be boiled again. When he suggests going outside, Auntie’s refusal is firm.

“The month after birth is for guarding what had been torn open,” says Auntie. “A woman who had crossed death must not meet the wind or cold.”

He decides at first to step back and allow Auntie to step in, but he can see she has become quite thin. Chunlin pretends not to notice the rags stained with red that Auntie keeps from him, coughing into them whenever she steps out of sight. He makes sure that she can see him as he cares for The Girl, letting her correct him throughout the day. “There is so much I do not know” he thinks. Yet caring for his son comes naturally.

Chunlin begins to see his father in the face of this little life. He sees the warmth and the fire behind the little eyes that have yet to see. And he sings again songs from a village he has forgotten. Chunlin hears himself sing songs of harvest, simple joys, jasmine flowers that he cannot remember. Yet they gush forth like bamboo shoots after a winter snow.

The Girl cannot mend and sew at the same pace as before. Not when she is busy stitching herself back together. Yet the Xiao family did not want for rice during this month. Uncle Wang gave an entire bag of rice for an easy repair to a torn shirt. Sister Chen visited unannounced, gifting a small satchel of ginger. The month of healing requires warmth in more ways than one. And The Girl begins to heal in more ways than many. 

Rice and ginger make a ground and roof. Yet, the addition of red dates can build walls that warm the body and calm the mind. Auntie thinks this to herself, as she hears of a vendor in the temple market who had procured a small supply of dates. Together, the three ingredients can make a nourishing porridge for a new mother.

At dawn, as early as the rooster crows, Auntie sets out to the Confucius Temple square. The stalls are just beginning to set up, at this early hour. Soldiers still patrol the streets, but the night shift is ending, they yawn and sigh waiting for the changing of rank. Auntie walks past these soldiers, avoiding their gaze. Old habits die hard. They do not notice an old woman, especially not someone as frail and slow as her.

Above, the first snow begins to fall, drifting down from the gray sky like ash returning to a flame. Auntie allows herself just this moment to daydream, imagining a time when her family was numerous. She sees the square and also sees her niece chasing her nephew through the stalls as her brother looks on. She sees a peddler set down his bamboo baskets, just beyond the corner, near the stairs that descend to the Qinhuai. He is a gray haired fellow, and seems quite pleased with himself. The baskets are half filled with red dates, dried, but unmistakably pristine. A cold wind cuts through the alley.

Auntie coughs. Coughs for several minutes. She begins to feel dizzy. She sees spots of color, flurries of snow. Then she falls.

The locals of the Southern Capital are no strangers to tragedy. They do not step on the old woman. But they do not help her. They walk past, giving an invisible space to the fallen neighbor, looking ahead as if memory itself might cut them. Auntie hears footsteps hammer past. She hears the creaking of a cart. She hears the stopping of a cart.

Uncle Wang has just finished a morning delivery of cabbage when he sees Auntie Xiao. He waves to her, but she does not see him, instead, looking past his ear at a corner stall near the alley. He is about to head to his next customer when he sees the old woman fall. He hurries over, motioning to the morning shoppers to make way. 

He picks her up, without difficulty. She is not heavy. He places her on his empty cart, calling for her to wake. She stirs, just barely.

“Madam Xiao,” says Uncle Wang with a nervous smile. “Are you tired? Shall I take you home?”

“I’m quite fine” she rasps, in a manner that suggests otherwise.
“I just want to buy some jujubes for my niece.”

______

From the newly built platform bed, The Girl hears commotion outside as she feeds her son. She hears the shrill creak, then the bang of the gate slamming open. She hears shouting outside. She recognizes Uncle Wang’s voice. It echoes past the lane and into the courtyard. He is yelling for Sister Chen.

“快来啊！萧家出事了” he yells.
“Get in here! Xiao House needs help”

Outside, Uncle Wang and Sister Chen half-support, half-carry Auntie across the courtyard. Chunlin closes the gate behind them. Auntie quietly protests that she is fine.

The Girl opens the door. Her hair is wild. She is weak. She is about to leap to help the old woman before Auntie wrenches herself from Sister Chen and Uncle Wang’s grasp with unusual strength.

“不许出来!” she shrieks, forgetting all dignity. “Do not come out! Not into the cold!”
Auntie tries to run, reaching out to close the door. She trips on the stone step. Chunlin catches her.

He places her gently on the bed. Sister Chen holds the infant. But it is not the baby who cries. 

The Girl runs her hands through her hair, half-crazed. Her eyes are warm summer rains raging in winter. She reaches for Auntie, mouthing old words her father taught her. 

Auntie places a hand on The Girl’s arm. 

“未知生...” she says.
“...焉知死?” answers The Girl. She regains composure, remembering who she is. 

Auntie smiles.
“We all must face our day,” she says.

Auntie beckons Chunlin closer.

“I’m here,” he says.

“Protect —” says Auntie, in barely a breath. “Protect my Plum Blossom.”
“I’m here — I’m here —” 

Chunlin no longer knows what he can say. He repeats himself until he feels a small slow push from his wife.

The Girl is calm now. She checks Auntie’s breathing. Twice.
She reaches out and closes Auntie’s eyes. She straightens Auntie’s clothes. 

Chunlin sees her hand hesitate. Just once. 

Xiao Qiantai wakes, and begins to cry.

______

Later in the afternoon, Chunlin brings his wife hot water. Their son is asleep in a basket. Uncle Wang had left to find funeral helpers, while Sister Chen helped The Girl wash Auntie’s face and hands. That was hours ago. 

Dusk falls soon, quiet as the snow piling in the courtyard.

The home is oddly quiet. The silence builds and consumes like a hungry flame. Chunlin places the water beside the bed. As he gets up to leave, The Girl hangs onto his sleeve, like a child. But she does not look at him.

She is staring at the makeshift altar, where they burn a single oil lamp. It was the altar they had bowed to in the wedding rites years ago, in place of the shattered ancestral tablet. She stares at that wall for a long time. Chunlin sees a single tear linger on her cheek.

He inches closer, cautiously placing a hand on her back. Then sits down.

Chunlin places her hand in his.

The snow continues to fall outside. They know the ruined siheyuan will remain just a one roomed hovel for many more years. They do not know that the burnt plum tree in the courtyard listens.

Outside, the plum tree begins to bloom.

Brian Xiao
January 2026