Fifty won was more than twice as much as even that doctor would give, and the money could go a long way—a small plot of land from their landlord, a young rooster and healthy hens for a chicken run. They would never again go to bed without dinner. They could send the boys to school, and the younger girl could make a match with a respectable, landowning family. But only if no one in the village knew that Jade had been sold to a courtesan’s house.
Jade could almost see the same vision reflected in her mother’s dark eyes, too exhausted even for tears. Silver reached out and held her mother’s hand, and she didn’t pull away.
“In my experience, even a girl kept in a convent can grow up to be a courtesan if she’s meant to become one. The reverse is also true, and more often too. If Jade isn’t meant for this, she’ll find another path, even if she’s raised in a gibang.” Silver smiled gently. “I almost have no hand in it.”
*
JADE HAD NEVER SEEN HERSELF in a mirror before arriving at Silver’s house. The muted reflections she did glimpse on washing basins had not been a source of special vanity. She had a matte, smooth skin with a candle-wax yellow tinge. Her eyes were small but very bright under a pair of fluffy eyebrows like black feathers. By looking very closely, one could see that her left iris was positioned ever so slightly off-center, pointing outward—a fishlike tendency. Her lips were round and red, even without rouge. Her smile—twinkly, with an undertone of mischief—would have been considered charming had it not framed a few undeniably crooked upper teeth. There were other peculiarities to her physique that a more exceptional girl certainly would not have had. All told, Jade was the kind of young girl who stood exactly at the midpoint between plain and pretty. She hadn’t minded, since her mother was suspicious of beauty in general.
Her mother had also viewed too much schooling as poisonous to young girls. Jade had been allowed just a year of classes at the one-room school for all the village students ranging from ages five to twenty. Even amid that chaos, she’d learned more than just simple sums and rudimentary letters, which was all that her mother would have preferred. Because of school, Jade had stopped feeling like a dutiful part of the household like the furnace or the hoe. She both shrank and expanded with knowledge, and was startled by her own, hazy discontent. This was, of course, why learning was deemed so dangerous in the first place. If she’d said aloud what swirled inside her head, her mother would have pinched and slapped her far more often. This fear even subdued her tears at their farewell, for she didn’t know whether crying would please or anger her mother.
Jade remained silent and docile as she followed Silver along the first-floor porch. But the house called out to her in secret, and she longed to touch the columns made of fifty-year-old pines and painted red with cinnabar. When she passed by, silk lanterns danced under the eaves, somehow evoking both stillness and movement, artificiality and naturalness. That heady atmosphere could be felt all throughout the house, Jade thought as Silver led her down the hallway; but it was most noticeable in Silver herself. Jade had never seen anyone who glided so much as did Madame Silver—she looked barely capable of having such lowly body parts as feet and toes. And yet, Jade thought there was no one who better exemplified the naturalness of a woman. Silver smiled and spoke with the complete ease of someone who was born to be a female and knew it. She stopped gliding a few feet ahead of Jade and slid open a rice-papered door.
“This is the music classroom,” Silver said. All four walls of the large hall were decorated with lavishly painted screens. On one side of the room, there were a dozen very young girls learning a traditional song, repeating line by line after an older courtesan; on the opposite side, eleven-or twelve-year-old girls were practicing the gayageum.
“The girls who are singing are in the first year. In the second year, you begin learning the gayageum, daegeum, and different types of drums. So these are two of the five arts that a courtesan must master—song and instrument,” Silver explained. As she spoke, one of the singing girls jumped up from her seat and scampered toward them. Jade could almost hear Silver knit her brows in disapproval.
“Mama, who is this?” the little girl asked Silver, and Jade tried to hide her surprise. With a round face and undistinguished features, the girl looked nothing like her elegant mother.
“You should never leave class without your teacher’s permission,” Silver said sternly, and Jade was reminded of her own mother. She wondered whether there were any mothers in the world who didn’t greet their daughters with anger.