"The Ash Girl"

by William R. Stimson

The Moscow City Ballet was coming to Yuanlin to put on Cinderella.  My wife Shuyuan saw it announced her Taiwanese newspaper.  She ordered three tickets and invited her 72-year old mother.  

Her mother had never been to a ballet.  Shuyuan's brothers and sisters doubted she would understand.  They were afraid she'd fall asleep during the performance.  She grew up in the nearby countryside and had no more than an elementary school education.  She married a factory worker.  As a teenager, during the Japanese occupation, he'd been sent to Japan to work.  There, he learned to operate a metalworking machine.  After the war, when he returned to Taiwan, he got a job at a factory in Taichung operating that same kind of machine.  
When they married, she stayed living on the farm.  He came from Taichung on weekends.  They saved and in time had enough to make a down payment on a rice paddy.  Her family's rice paddy went to her brothers.  Because she was a girl she got none of it.  If she and her husband were going to have a life, they had to start with a rice paddy.  If you had a rice paddy, you never went hungry.  That was the mentality.  Already, the children had started coming.

They mortgaged her rice paddy to buy him one of those machines he operated at the factory.  He quit the job in the big city and set up his own machine in the small town of Yuanlin nearby.  He procured clients and operated the machine himself.  Often he came home late at night.  In time he could afford a second machine and hired another laborer to operate that one.  Then he got a third and a fourth.  Eventually he owned his own factory.  He was good at business.

The family bought a house in Yuanlin and moved off the farm and into town.  The children grew up.  The two older daughters married and move out to live with their husbands, the sons married and moved their wives in.  They needed a bigger house and so built a huge one for themselves on a piece of vacant land down the street.  
Amongst my wife Shuyuan's books in New York I found several Dr. Seuss and other children's stories.  "My mother never read me bedtime stories," she explained.  "And when I was a child, she never bought me any children's books."  There weren't any books at all in the house until Shuyuan's eldest brother went away to school and started bringing home the ones his classmates talked about.

Her eldest brother bought lots of the best books but he never read very many of them.  Shuyuan did.  Her share of the housework often went undone as she curled up in a chair poring through "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," "Pride and Prejudice," as well as tomes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, and anything else her brother brought through the door.  "Your two older sisters can sweep, why can't you?" her exasperated mother snapped.  

Without trying, Shuyuan did well in school.  Her mother never noticed her good grades.  "Your eldest sister dresses so nice.  Why can't you?" she demanded.  

Shuyuan qualified for an elite high school in Taichung and commuted by train.  She graduated from a good Taiwanese university and then announced she wanted to go to graduate school in America.  "It costs too much!" her mother said.  "You're lucky your father paid for your whole college education.  You shouldn't ask for more.  Most girls get a factory job right after junior high school."  Her father by then had started a second factory, then a third.  
Shuyuan went out and got a job.  For four years she held the dream of graduate school in her heart.  She worked and economized until she'd saved up enough to pay for the first year herself.  She took the exams, applied, got accepted, and paid her tuition.  "I'm leaving," she informed her mother.  Only then her mother came forward and paid for everything.
Years later, when Shuyuan informed her mother over the phone she was going to come home with an American husband, the woman was at a loss to understand why her daughter couldn't have chosen a local Taiwanese man, like her two older sisters did.

Shuyuan was the youngest in the family and in so many ways felt unable explain herself to her mother.  The two of them had fought, cruelly at times.  Always feisty, Shuyuan stood her ground and said biting things.  "When I was a child I always wanted to get rid of the big clunky old-fashioned bed that filled my whole room so I could have a desk there.  You would never let me," she accused hotly.  "And when I wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, you wouldn't allow it."

"You never remember the ten good things I did, but only the one bad one," her wounded mother blurted.

While in America, Shuyuan found during a routine physical that she had "coolie's anemia."  The doctor said this was a condition she had been born with and had all her life.  Next time her mother phoned, Shuyuan pointedly told her the diagnosis and informed her that one of the symptoms was the inability to exert oneself physically without becoming faint.  "You always accused me that my sisters could work three hours around the house without saying they were tired but after I worked only one hour I'd claim to be exhausted.  You called me lazy."
After Shuyuan returned from America with her Ph.D. to interview for a job in Taiwan, she came home one day from the bookstore with an armful of new purchases.  "You already have so many books.  Why are you buying more?" her mother demanded.

When Shuyuan landed a position at the university in nearby Wufeng, her mother seemed to take notice, for the first time, of a quality in her that her sisters didn't have.  Her mother fretted that Shuyuan's temper and sharp words would cost her the job, and then worried that she wouldn't have the right clothes to wear, and maybe couldn't do the work.  But then, as the months went by, a pride started creeping into the way she felt about her youngest daughter Shuyuan, who was the only one of her children who didn't work in the family business.  Even to salesgirls in the department store, she'd introduce Shuyuan saying, "This is my daughter.  She teaches at the university.  She's a professor."

When Shuyuan's eldest brother and second sister found out we were going to the ballet with their mother, they bought tickets too.  They opted for cheaper seats in the rear.  The sister and her family came in their own car.  Shuyuan, her mother, and I hopped into the back seat and came with the eldest brother and his wife in their Mercedes.  

Incongruously set in a jumbled nondescript neighborhood right across from a big garish depot store, Yuanlin's modern new Performance Center was architecturally stunning.  It was a big cube of a theatre building faced in dark gray stone.  Overspreading the front entry, high up, was a massive horizontal beam.  The effect was to reproduce in a grandiose way the same sheltering overhang encountered along the streets throughout Yuanlin and all Taiwan cities.  As we walked up from the parking lot, the first drops began to fall.  By the time we reached its shelter, the colossal beam overhead protected us from the rain that quickly followed.  Floodlights on high illuminated the raindrops floating down through the night sky.  The result was striking, elemental, and served to efface in one stroke lesser quotidian considerations before the awe and immensity of art.  In the front atrium a large single white canvas sail-like sculpture strung on a twisted frame hung suspended by cables in mid-air.  Somehow this simple flourish of cloth in the otherwise stone structure admitted to the ephemeral delight as well as the enduring seriousness of what went on within. 
On the front steps, Shuyuan's brother and sister and their spouses were greeted by townspeople they worked with, knew socially or grew up with.  The volunteer checking tickets at the door had been Shuyuan's very best girl friend in elementary school.  

The Yuanlin Performance Center had cost six billion Taiwanese dollars, Shuyuan informed me proudly as we stepped into the marvelous interior.  

Shuyuan, her mother and I made our way down to our orchestra seats.  The others went up into the balcony.  The house was completely packed.  Shuyuan immediately started chattering away to her mother in Taiwanese.  "What are you saying?" I asked.  

"I'm telling her the story of Cinderella," she said.  "She never heard it before."  Her mother's grade school education had been entirely in Japanese.  By the time the invading mainlanders imposed Mandarin as the official language of Taiwan, she was already out of school.  She never read children's books to Shuyuan, or any of her children, because she couldn't read Chinese.  

I watched the expression of wonder on her mother's face as she was told for the first time in her life the story of "The Ash Girl", as Cinderella translates into Chinese.  
A cute boy seated in the row just in front of us kept turning around to stare at me.  An American in Yuanlin was an oddity.  To me it was an oddity to see a little boy at a ballet.  I noticed the seats in front of us were filled with children.  Looking around, I saw the whole audience was.  These people from this provincial factory town were investing in their children - bringing them to the Russian ballet to receive the touch of its magic wand.
The story of Shuyuan's family wasn't unique.  In prosperous Yuanlin, or out in the countryside nestled between the modern mansions and crude factories, you could still find old style houses, here and there, with their plain tile roofs and walls made of mud brick - tatters of Taiwan's past.  The bulk of adults in the audience, I was sure, had parents like Shuyuan's, from the countryside or some back alley who now owned factories and lived in big houses.  It was the story of Taiwan.  It didn't happen in the twinkling of an eye like in the fairy tale, but in a single generation, almost as amazing.

The lights dimmed and the first dancers appeared on stage.  The old king was waking up.  He had dreamed a dream of a ball to find his son a bride.  The movements of the dancers were as much mime as ballet and revealed outwardly the king's inward thoughts. 
The handsome young prince appeared in white tights that showed him to be virile and desirable.  He danced out a definition of himself as the dutiful son, discerning and delicate of feeling - beside himself for want of a princess.  Some small children from seats far in the back crept up the dark aisle to sit on the floor close to the stage and stare in wide-eyed wonder.

The scene shifted.  A sylph of consummate delicacy stepped up to an ashy fireplace cluttered with dirty pots.  Unschooled in dance, she moved with a simple naturalness - like the grass when a breeze blows through it.  Her sheer ragged garment clung provocatively to her attractive young body.  She kneeled down and dutifully began scrubbing pots.

Shortly, two other female dancers burst onto the scene in a cacophony of movement.  They had outlandish hair styles and were clothed in garish and ill-matched colors.  They mimed an altercation over some selfish trifle.  Shuyuan's mother leaned over and whispered something to Shuyuan in Taiwanese.  Shuyuan whispered something back. 

"What'd she say?" I asked.  

"She wanted to know if those were the two stepsisters," Shuyuan said. 
Phrase by phrase, each burst of dance unfolded the story until the fairy godmother made her entrance.  She and her handmaidens taught Cinderella how to dance and then dressed her in the beautiful gown and glass slippers.  The little girl seated to my left perched forward on the edge of her seat and clung with both hands to the back of the seat in front.
When the prince and the ash girl came together for their dance, a hush descended over the audience.  Just before midnight, Cinderella fled.  The prince found a single glass slipper on the stair.  Laughter broke out all through the theatre as the clownish ugly stepsisters struggled in vain to force the glass slipper to fit their big feet.  Then the shy ash girl stepped forward and was reunited with her prince.

When the curtain came down, we stood up to leave and Shuyuan took her elderly mother's arm to lead her through the crowd. 

When we got outside, the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared.  The evening was exquisite.  We walked back to the car.

"They dance up on their toes," her mother marveled in the back seat on the way home.  Next to me, mother and daughter sat side by side, arm in arm.