The Embroidered Face

She is seventy-three this year, and the lamp is still lit. The embroidery frame lies open across her lap, its bamboo ring no wider than her own face, yet the ring holds no silk — not a single inch stretched. This is the first time in a life spent embroidering after-life faces that she has sat before an empty frame. The oil lamp is a dim yellow; beneath it the needle's shadow falls aslant across the back of her hand, and the needle's tip lifts a thread of plain white silk, cold as water drawn from a well. The frame's bamboo is old bamboo, and up close it carries the stale tang of seasoned wood, mixed with the scent of silk gum that has clung to her cuffs for years. When she embroiders a face for the dead, she never touches rouge; only ink thread to sketch the bone, white thread to fill the flesh. When it is done, that face comes alive on the silk, as if owing one last breath, waiting to find its way in the underworld. She has worked this craft for fifty-three years; the times her needle has passed through the plain silk outnumber the breaths drawn by all the living in town.

Her mother did this work too. She cannot recall her mother's face, only her mother's hands — thick at the knuckles, a crescent of indigo forever wedged beneath the nails, like ink that was never washed out. Her mother used to say: a person who dies without a face, when they reach the shore of oblivion, will not be known by Meng Po, will not be taken by the ox-head guards, but will only drift in the mist, faceless for all eternity. So one must embroider a face for the passage — dense stitches, correct bone — so the dead may wear it and go on to be reborn. From the age of seven she lay at the edge of the frame and watched: watched her mother draw the white silk taut, watched her mother's needle walk upon the water, watched one strange face after another rise from the silk, a little darkness pooled in each eye-socket, like unshed tears. What she remembers most clearly is how her mother would often rise at midnight, light no lamp, and in the dark carry the frame to the window, sitting half the night facing the pond outside. She would lie on the kang and watch, seeing only her mother's back, and a crescent of indigo nail, rising and falling in the grey light through the window paper. She was small then, and did not understand what her mother was looking at; she only thought her mother could not bear to leave those unfinished faces. Only now, sitting at this age herself, does she understand that her mother was not looking at faces, but at the pond — at the one sunk beneath it, whom her mother had never dared to acknowledge, never dared to finish embroidering. The year her mother died, she left the needle and the frame to her, and said: this trade soils the hands, but someone must do it.

She took it up. The first commission she handled alone was the drowned grandson of the Sun family at the east end of town. The child was only five; pulled from the water, he was bloated and white, his face so swollen the features could not be told apart. The Sun woman came weeping, the little body in her arms, begging Third Aunt to embroider a face so the child might pass on. She remembers that night was extraordinarily long; the lamp wick popped three times, and with each pop her fingertips went cold, as if someone had pinched them through the silk. When the last stitch was set, she looked up and found a small patch of color missing from her right cheek — a pale streak, as if scraped away by a fingernail. She thought nothing of it; blamed the late nights, the lamp's heat — a woman's complexion fails with the years, she told herself. She was only just past twenty then, her face full of red, and one missing patch showed little, so she let it go.

In the first few years, the townsfolk did not quite trust her — after all her mother had only just gone, a twenty-year-old girl with an unsteady hand. But when that first face was sent out, on the night the Sun child was buried, his mother dreamed the boy stood outside the threshold, his face proper and whole, and smiled at her, saying, Mother, I know the way now. The word spread, and those who came asking multiplied. By day she took commissions; by night she stretched the silk, burning the lamp past the third watch, her needle walking upon the plain cloth as if stitching the broken lives of others back together, seam by seam. Her face was still red then, her body full of inexhaustible vigor; she took the work for merit, and never imagined that pale patch would keep on growing.

In the forty years since, such hollow marks have multiplied, one seam after another. A stroke at the left brow, one at the right corner of the mouth, a fingernail-sized patch on the chin, a fine line at the temple, and then half a ring near the bridge of the nose, like a pinch. She tried to cover them with rouge. The rouge was old, and opening the box released a mildewed smell, like a rouge-case gone moldy in the damp against the wall. It covered the white well enough, yet could not cover the cold that seeped from beneath that skin — not the cold of skin, but the cold of something emptied out, as if that flesh had long been scooped away and only a shell remained. Her rouge box was her mother's; its wooden lid had long since rotted, the contents caked hard, yet every time she opened it, beneath the mildew lingered a thread of sweetness, like blood gone old. At first she thought she had smelled wrong; year after year she opened it, year after year she smelled, and that sweetness grew fainter, until she suspected the white on her own face had covered even the scent. She never threw it away; the rouge box rested at the corner of her frame, as if her mother still sat beside her. The village women who came to visit, seeing the white patches on her face, all said: Third Aunt, you have toiled too hard, burned the lamp too long, the years are not kind. She believed them. A embroiderer trades complexion for stitches, she thought; a lifetime under the lamp, it is only right to lose some color. Sister Chen from next door stared at her face a long while, then said suddenly: Third Aunt, this white of yours — why does it look as if someone has peeled it off piece by piece? Not sickness. Emptiness. She laughed it off at the time, but that night, facing the lamp, she went over those white patches with her fingertips one by one, and with each touch something inside her went hollow. She began to fear the water, afraid that beneath its surface she would see her own face missing a piece, and a hand reaching to peel away another.

The more she embroidered, the more she learned the craft's unwritten rules. For the old, let the needle fall slow, the bone loose, like wrinkles on dead wood. For children, the needle must be fine, the flesh full, catching that unopened softness. For those who died by violence, lock two extra dark stitches behind the ear, to press down the breath of unwillingness. Each face, when finished, she lifted to the lamp to see — whether the eyes on the silk had come alive. A living face pooled a little darkness in the eye-sockets, like tears held back, or like it was looking at her. Each time she would whisper to that face, go on, then unframe it, fold the silk, and place it in the mourner's hands. The mourners never knew that the face upon the silk was sometimes more like the person than the body in the coffin, down to the mole at the corner of the mouth.

One year, at the end of the twelfth month, a blind street-singer froze to death on the official road outside town; no one knew him. The village head came knocking again. When she went, the singer's face was blue and purple with cold, yet his brows and eyes were at peace, as if he had at last been freed from walking blind. As she embroidered, she took a few extra stitches upon his eyes, filling that empty black, so that on the other side he might for the first time see the light. When she finished, a ring around her own right eye-socket had emptied too, as if half the light of an eye had been borrowed from her. She glanced at herself in the water-basin — no, she never looked; only that white she could not cover no matter how much rouge she laid on, and the mildew scent drove into her nose, and she shivered.

Another year, Old Zhou at the east end passed. Old Zhou had been bedridden ten years, tended all that time by his wife, who had gone two years before — a face she had embroidered. Now that Old Zhou was gone, his children came asking: Father pined for Mother his whole life; Third Aunt, embroider him a face he can lie beside hers with. As she embroidered, she lifted a little smile at the corner of Old Zhou's mouth, the look his wife had loved best in life. When she finished, a patch at her own mouth had caved in too, as if that smile had been drawn out of her. She touched her face, and suddenly felt that what she had embroidered into these faces all these years was never only ink thread and white silk, but something living from her own face, moved stitch by stitch onto another's.

The foundling picked up in the west alley lived but half a day before his breath stopped, nameless. The village head brought him, saying, Third Aunt, this child needs a face. She looked at that tiny face, not yet opened, the brows and eyes like a blurred wisp of mist. Her hand trembled as she embroidered, as if she were stitching, ahead of time, a road for one who had not yet had the chance to live. When she finished, a small patch emptied on each of her cheeks, as if someone had pinched a baby's cheek from her and pasted it onto the child's face. She handed over the silk, but that night she dreamed the nameless child stood before the frame, his face proper and whole, smiling at her; and as he smiled, the smile grew onto her own face — no, it was the flesh from her face that had grown onto the child's.

The daughter of the Wang family in the south of town hanged herself; by the time they cut her down her face was already purple, her tongue protruding, a frightful sight. The Wangs came begging, and she went, first layering the garish purple away with white thread stitch by stitch, then embroidering a little tranquility at the corner of the mouth, as if she slept. Halfway through, she suddenly felt that someone at the far side of the frame was embroidering too — not her hand, but another, cold, beneath the water, following her needle stitch for stitch, never falling behind. She looked down at the thread; that thread of dark red was thicker than before, like a slender blood-vessel driving straight from her fingertip into the crack of the floor. She dared not stop. When she finished, a patch at her own mouth had stiffened too; that tranquility seemed to have been taken first by the hand beneath the water.

The bride who drowned at the west of town was her thirty-seventh face. The bride's surname was Liu; married only half a month, she was crossing the pond to visit her mother when the boat overturned. When they pulled her up, half her face had been taken by fish and shrimp. The Liu family came to ask, and she stretched the silk and sat a long while before the empty cloth — half a face must be imagined, and that is the hardest. She embroidered three nights, completing the right half inch by inch, spending her own complexion entirely. That time a patch at the tail of her left eye emptied too; washing her hands, she caught it in the water's waver, and layered rouge seven times before it was barely hidden. Later the Liu family sent word that at the bride's grave, on certain nights, came the fine sound of a needle moving, as if the face in the silk had turned over, at peace. She listened, and only answered softly.

Some years after, a peddler from out of town fell ill and died at the inn, with no one to claim the body. The village head knocked at her door: Third Aunt, this man needs a face. She went, and found the peddler waxen, his features otherwise comely, but his brows locked, as if he had died with his eyes unclosed. As she embroidered, she took two extra stitches between his brows, to unwind that knotted fierceness. When she finished, she found the furrow between her own brows had loosened too — she had once carried a frown-line there, but after, a flat white seam opened above her left brow. She touched it; it did not hurt, only that patch of skin felt no longer her own.

She cannot say how many faces she has embroidered. Three hundred? Five hundred? Every household in town with a violent death, a drowning, or an unnamed body by the road, came to her. She took no coin, only three feet of plain silk, a skein of thread, sometimes a bowl of glutinous rice. Her skill was good, her name traveled, and even outsiders came carrying coffins. The more she embroidered, the thinner she grew, and the white marks on her face spread; by the end her whole face was like an old silk eaten by moths, color faded in patches here and there. Washing her hands, she would sometimes catch her own reflection in the water-basin — no, she would not let herself think on that; she only felt that a place on her face stood empty, as if a face that should have grown there had been peeled away before its time, as if this world had held a face meant for her, taken early by someone else.

When she was forty, she went once to the pond to rinse silk. The water was cold in the twelfth month; she crouched on the stone steps, and as the silk spread upon the water, something cold brushed her ankle — light as water-weed, yet not water-weed, for water-weed has no fingers. She jerked her foot back and looked down; the surface lay still and plain, only her own face wavering upon it, whiter than others'. She said nothing, wrung the silk dry, and went home. But for many years after, on every rainy night, she dreamed a face pressed against the water's surface beneath the pond, looking up at her — no brows, no eyes, only white. She would wake, and the cool of that touch still lingered at her ankle. She took it for rheumatism, pasted on a plaster, and went on embroidering as before. After each face she finished, she would dip the thread's end into water, as if to greet the one beneath. At first only absent-minded, it grew into a craving — she hoped that thread of dark red would thicken, so she might see who was on the other side. Yet the thicker the thread, the emptier her face; and the emptier, the less she dared to look. The thought was like a worm; by the time she had embroidered her fiftieth face, it had eaten its fill of her heart.

When she was sixty-eight, the pond at the west of town drowned another outsider, and as ever she embroidered the face. That night, at the very end, she suddenly felt the far side of the frame sink a little, as if someone beneath the water had given the thread a gentle tug. She looked down and saw that the plain white silk thread had, at some point, leaked a thread of dark red, running from her needle's eye all the way past the frame's ring, winding around the table leg, then down the leg to the floor, and vanishing into the black beyond the threshold. She took it for oil flung from the popping wick, and wiped with a cloth, but it would not come off. That thread of red stayed upon the line like a slender tendon of blood, cold against her palm.

After that, every time she embroidered, the tail of the thread ran out the door. She stopped wiping it, and let it be. Sometimes waking at midnight she heard in the main room a very faint sound of dripping water — plip, plip — as if someone had come up from the pond and stood by her frame to watch her stitch. She dared not turn her head, only hurried her needle the faster. Gradually she came to feel that what the thread's tail held was something very light, light as if never quite grown solid, yet it pulled at her, heavy, drawing nearer with every passing time.

This year, at seventy-three, no one comes to ask for her anymore. Not that her hand has grown clumsy — the town has simply begun to sense that something is wrong. Third Aunt's face is white in a way no living person's should be, and up close that white carries the stink of pond water. The households for whom she had embroidered began, on certain nights, to hear at their dead's grave the fine sound of a needle moving, as if the passage-face in the silk had turned over. Talk spread, and the commissions grew few. She did not argue; she laid the frame across her lap and waited. By day she still set the frame out as usual, the bamboo ring scrubbed bright, the plain silk cut neat, as if someone might come at any moment. Yet the stone steps before her door grew cold day by day, and no one came panting at her door with silk in hand. Sometimes she would fall asleep mid-sit; she would wake with the needle still in her hand, the frame empty, the lamp-oil burned dry lamp after lamp. She touched her own face; the white patches were like places marked upon a map, and she knew them all — this one is the Sun child's, this the smile of Old Zhou, this the tranquility drawn from the Wang girl. There was little left on her face that was her own.

What came was not a client, but an empty frame. This day she stretched the silk as usual and sat, and only then realized: this time no one had brought a body, no one had given a birth-hour, no one had said whose face to embroider. The ring held only bare silk, waiting for her first stitch. She held the needle and suddenly understood: this empty frame had never waited for another — it waited for herself. A face of seventy-three, a face about to die, to be embroidered by her own hand, so she might wear it and go on to walk that road. She looked down at the silk; it was white as a face just lifted from the water.

The needle's tip hung above the silk, and she thought of her mother's last words — someone must do it. She had not understood then; now she did. This trade passes from one to the next, and what is passed is not a craft but a debt. Her mother embroidered a lifetime and embroidered away half a face, leaving the other half to her daughter; she embroidered a lifetime and has nearly embroidered away what remained. The color that left her was never the lamp's doing; it was fed stitch by stitch, through needle and thread, to the one beneath the water who had never been given a face.

She suddenly wanted very much to see who held the far end of that thread. She followed the dark-red thread out the door, barefoot over the bricks of the main room, over the mud beyond the threshold, all the way to the pond at the west of town. The pond water was black and thick; a layer of mist that would not quite disperse floated on its surface. She crouched and let the thread's end rest lightly upon the water. The thread did not sink; instead it drew taut, running straight toward the pond's heart, as if someone below the water gripped the other end. She bent to look, and the mist parted a little, and she saw beneath the water a face — no brows, no eyes, no mouth or nose, only a blank white expanse, tilted upward, waiting. That face was very white, white in exactly the same way as the empty patches on her own face. She suddenly could not tell whether the one tilted up beneath the water was her sister, or the many faces sunk by her mother long ago and brought one by one to life beneath her needle, all layered together, waiting for her to embroider herself in as well.

Her mother had never spoken of it. Her mother had only ever said, twins bring misfortune to kin, and told how she had been born a pair; the other had come half an hour before her, born silent, face the color of iron. The old folk said the child carried a curse and could not be kept; in the night they capped it in a bamboo basket and sank it in the pond at the west of town. It was given no name. She who lived never even knew she had a sister, only that her mother's hands were always colder than others', indigo wedged beneath the nails, as if for that nameless child her mother too had embroidered something, yet could not bring it to voice.

Later she turned out her mother's chest and found half a length of unfinished plain silk, upon it only two faint strokes of ink, as if a face had been begun and then stopped. At the corner of the silk her mother had stamped a small mark in indigo — her mother's sign. She suddenly understood: her mother too had embroidered that child — embroidered halfway, and could not go on, because to embroider a face is to move a piece of one's own away. Her mother moved half a face, and then could move no more; she sank the child, basket and all, into the pond, and left her own half-face forever upon that half-length of silk. So this craft, handed down, handed down never joy but a debt that can never be repaid.

So all those years, every passage-face she embroidered was never for the dead to find their way. It was fed, face by face, down that thread, to the faceless sister beneath the pond. The dead wore the finished face to be reborn, but the sister took into herself, inch by inch, the very complexion she had embroidered in — so that in the water she need not be a faceless ghost. The white upon her own face was the flesh of her sister's face; the color she had lost was the look her sister grew upon her own. The one her mother sank long ago had never let go of the wish for a face, and for forty years it was she, stitch by stitch, who took the face of her living self and unstitched it for the dead to see.

She thought of one thing. These years, every household in town for whom she had embroidered a face heard at the grave, by night, the sound of a moving needle, and all said their dead were "at peace." She had taken it for her own skill; only now does she understand — that was no peace; those faces were never the dead's to begin with, but borrowed by her sister. She embroidered one, the sister took one; the dead of this town for decades past wore upon them none other than her sister's face, none other than the complexion she had moved over, bit by bit. Her whole life, she had not been embroidering faces for the dead — she had been hoarding, for a sister sunk in the pond, a lifetime of faces.

She thought of her own birthday. Every year on that day her mother had never given her a bowl of long-life noodles, only silently taken two extra stitches, as if, for that nameless child and for herself, to repay a little of what was owed. Now it is her turn. The empty frame lies across her lap; the cold bamboo ring presses against her leg, like her mother's hand. The thread at the pond's heart drew taut once more. In the mist that faceless face drifted closer, as if to recognize her, or as if waiting for her to pass down the needle. She understood the last thing: this empty frame waits for her own face, and when it is embroidered, she too will be of the pond — not a dead soul, but a companion. The sister has waited seventy-three years, waiting for her to finish herself and then come down, two faceless ones lying side by side in the black water, never to part again.

She did not set the needle down. But neither did she cut the thread. The needle is still in her hand, the silk still stretched in the ring, the far end at the pond's heart still gripping. The night is deep; the lamp burns in the main room; the frame is empty, waiting for her first stitch, and waiting also for her to stitch no more. She stood slowly, barefoot, and walked back. Behind her the pond water sounded softly, as if someone had turned over.

She came to the main room and set the frame once more across her lap; the lamp wick popped again. She looked down at her own hands — thick at the knuckles, a crescent of indigo wedged beneath the nails — exactly like her mother's. She suddenly could not be sure whether the one sitting at the frame tonight was herself or her mother; whether this needle had been hers for seventy years, or her mother's that was never laid down. Through the window came the pond wind, carrying a mildewed smell, like rouge long kept. She set the needle's tip to the empty silk and held it there, and did not let it fall.

The thread is still connected. At its far end, the water at the pond's heart is rising, little by little.

Ziye Lu notes: The embroideress gives faces to the dead, and her own face empties by degrees; only in old age does she understand that the empty frame awaited her own dying face, and that the thread's far end is the twin sister, unnamed, sunk in the pond at birth. When the face is done, the person is done; the thread is not cut, the pond does not run dry.