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Shuang Ren Fang

Please excuse my poor rooms. As a daughter-in-law-in-waiting, so to speak, I am given the smallest, darkest and coldest rooms in the house. At least I have two of them. I don't know how I got so lucky. My future husband, Xing, is the only living son of the house. The other two boys died as infants, and there never were any girl children, so his mother is very happy that this marriage has been arranged, since she can now order me to wait on her, hand and foot, even before this becomes my official duty. I was promised to Xing, whose name means prosperous by the way, when I was eight years old. Now that I am 24, I am getting awfully old to be unmarried, but my fiance was very successful at the Imperial Exams, and they have sent him off to some town in the west. I've only seen him the once, back when I was eight, and he was 12. He stared at me, I stared at him, and that was that. He does write me, sort of, little polite notes at the end of the long letters he pens to his parents. My intended's father is actually my cousin, and he owns the famous Zhang Family Pancake Shop, you know, the one to the southwest of the Zhou Bridge which leads into the Inner City? So what I get to do is to help him out in there, all day long. Of course, that's after I get my future mother-in-law her breakfast, and whatever else she wants. She can't help him because she got trapped by a falling roof beam during the last flood and now she's a cripple. I do feel sorry for her, sort of. If she just wasn't so grumpy all the time. Of course, if I were as messed up as she is, I guess I'd be grumpy too. But still, it's not my fault. My parents and my sisters died during that flood, and that's why I'm living in this house before my marriage. It's not the normal arrangement, but I suppose I should be grateful to at least have a roof over my head. So many do not these days. I do miss my family though. Oh well, they're gone, and I'm here. I must make the best of it all. When I'm not making pancakes or waiting on the old cripple, I relax by dyeing and painting silk. My uncle Shi owns the very successful Yehuda Silk Mill, and I learned my dyeing skills from him, but the painting is something I seem to have been born knowing how to do. Despite that the factory produced textiles are cheaper, there is still some call for hand dyed and painted fabrics. My specialty is nature paintings. I sell my creations at the market Wa Market at the Great Xianggou Monastery on the one day I am allowed to go out on my own a month. My in-laws try to take a cut, but I manage to hide most of the money I make, so that I have a nest egg, just in case Xing never comes back. Xing might be becoming prosperous, but I don't know if I'll ever benefit from it. And no matter how much work I do around here, the Zhangs aren't going to be leaving anything to me if Xing doesn't marry me. Not that they will if he does, but my children would have it and presumably they'd like me enough to not put me out on the street. I've got plenty of cousins though, if it comes to that. We all do here, seeing that there aren't all that many of us Jews in Kaifeng, relatively speaking, and no self respecting Jew will be letting one of their own become homeless. Or at least, I hope that's the case. Anyway, do stop by the Zhang Family Pancake Shop, and be sure to tell them I sent you. Maybe that will get me some small bit of gratitude, or maybe not. It's hard to tell with these people. And on the second weekend of every month, visit my stall at the Wa Market and take a look at my silk paintings. There might just be something that would appeal to you. Notes: The Zhang Family Pancake Shop was actually there. You can see the establishment on this map. (You have to click through to page 87, it's #1 on the map legend) So was Wa Market and the Zhou Bridge, which crossed the Bian River and was also known as the Heavenly River Bridge. It was one of the few stone bridges in Kaifeng and linked the Imperial Avenue with Inner City. Eateries were concentrated on the south side of the bridge. Shuang Ren Fang means two rooms. I think. The rest of this is but a figment of my imagination. The main image here is not my own silk painting but one by the great master, Li Song, and is in the public domain.

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