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the universal ideals of loyalty and filial piety. The Manchus were still our enemy, but they used my grandmother, and the other women who had sacrificed themselves during the disaster, to win our respect and bring back order to the women’s chambers.
    I placed offerings of flawless white peaches on her altar.
    “Do I meet him or not?” I whispered, hoping she would guide me. “Help me, Grandmother, help me.” I dropped my forehead to the floor in obeisance, looked up at the portrait to let her see my sincerity, and dropped my head again. I rose, smoothed my skirt, and left the room, my wishes floating to my grandmother on trails of incense smoke. But I felt no surer of what I should do than when I’d entered.
    Willow waited for me outside the door.
    “Your mother says you’re late for breakfast in the Spring Pavilion,” she said. “Give me your arm, Little Miss, and I will take you there.”
    She was my servant, but I was the one who obeyed.
    By now the corridors bustled with activity. The Chen Family Villa was home to 940 fingers: 210 fingers belonged to my direct blood relatives, 330 fingers to the concubines and their children—all girls—and another 400 fingers to our cooks, gardeners, wet nurses, amahs, maids, and the like. Now, with the Double Seven festival, we had many more visiting fingers. With so many people in the household, our compound was designed to keep each of those fingers in its appropriate place. So this morning, as every morning, our household’s ten concubines—and their twenty-three daughters—ate in their own hall. Three cousins, who were at critical points in their footbinding, were confined to their rooms. Otherwise, the women in the Spring Pavilion sat according to rank. My mother, as the wife of the eldest brother, had the position of honor in the room. She and her four sisters-in-law sat at one table, five little cousins sat at another table with their amahs, while the three cousins my age and I had a table to ourselves. Our guests were also grouped by age and station. In the corner, amahs and wet nurses cared for the babies and girls under five years old.
    I swayed with a flawless lily gait, moving gently across the floor, careful with my steps, my body shivering from side to side like a flower in the breeze. When I sat down, my cousins didn’t acknowledge me, conspicuously leaving me out. Ordinarily I didn’t mind too much. I was already engaged to be married, I would tell myself, and had only five more months of their company. But after my encounter in the Riding-the-Wind Pavilion last night, I questioned what lay ahead of me.
    My father and my future husband’s father had been boyhood friends. When they were matched to their wives, they vowed that one day the two families would be united through their children. The Wu family had two sons right away, I took longer to arrive, and before long my Eight Characters were matched to the younger son. My parents were happy, but it was hard for me to be excited, especially now. I had never met Wu Ren. I didn’t know if he was two years or ten years older than I was. He could be pockmarked, short, cruel, and fat, but I would receive no warnings from my mother or father. Marriage to a stranger was my fate, and it wasn’t necessarily a happy one.
    “Today the jade maiden wears the color of jade,” Broom, the daughter of my father’s second brother, said to me. She had a flower name like the rest of us, but no one used it. She had the misfortune of having been born on an unlucky day when the Broom Star was most prominent, which meant that whatever family she married into would have its home swept of its luck. Second Aunt was softhearted, and as a result Broom already had the roundness of a woman past childbearing years. The other aunts, my mother included, all campaigned to keep her from eating too much, hoping that once she married out her bad luck would be removed from our compound.
    “I don’t know that this color is good for your