Embroidering Mountains and Rivers: Bones of Embroidery

When I was seven, my mother took her own life with an embroidery needle, a smile on her lips. The only thing left in her coffin was an unfinished embroidery titled Spring Unfinished. The withered plum tree had no leaves, yet every spring equinox, one more flower would appear on it, an eerie sight. I am Ye Shuying, the most unremarkable illegitimate daughter of the Ye family. Until the night I touched my mother’s bloodstained needle and the bloody truth exploded before my eyes: My maternal grandmother was a master of soul embroidery. Her masterpiece, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains, was stolen by foreigners, and concealed within it was a complete map of China’s dragon-vein mineral deposits. My mother was her illegitimate daughter. To record the bloody massacre of 1898, she embroidered the hundred-and-first forbidden piece, and thirty-eight officials joined forces to drive her to her death. And my biological father was the mute embroidery saint whom the Ye family had supposedly “let die of illness.” The true head of the Ye family was the “blind” woman who had spent thirty years in a wheelchair: Grandmother Lin Wanzhao. A mute embroiderer came from the deep mountains of western Hunan and said to me: “You are the Peach Blossom Heir the soul-embroidery lineage has awaited for thirty years.” “Learn embroidery, and you’ll shorten your life. Refuse, and you’ll die tonight.” I bit my fingertip and let my blood fall onto the Wall of Insight. Hundreds upon thousands of faces of our ancestors opened their eyes at once: “No one can embroider more than a hundred souls. Each piece costs you a year of your life.” “With those hands, you must embroider the truth they dare not show.” From then on, I took needle for pen, thread for ink, and blood for color: At the Shanghai embroidery competition, my double-sided, multicolored embroidery, Moon Over the Sea, shook Jiangnan: the front showed the concession’s prosperous nightlife, while the back showed dockworkers bent beneath their burdens. During the Wuchang Uprising, the mute embroiderer and I worked through the night on a giant Iron-Blooded Eighteen-Star Flag. On its reverse were the smiling faces of Qiu Jin and Xu Xilin as they went to their deaths. When the May Fourth Movement erupted, students carried my Tears of Shandong through the streets: the front showed the magnificent Temple of Confucius, while the back revealed a mining railway dismantled by Japanese invaders.