After Jinhua said this, the silence was like thunder. “Please, Lao Mama.” Jinhua was on her knees. After a long, long time, Lao Mama said, “You came here alone and with nothing.” Her eyes and her emerald ring glittered with one hard light, and Jinhua knew that it delighted Lao Mama to see her weak and on her knees, and even so she stayed there just like that, begging. “You will leave in the same way,” Lao Mama said. “Alone, taking not a single thing from here. Especially not,” she added, “Suyin, who is my daughter.” “It is not the worst thing,” Suyin is saying now. “In fact it is the very best thing that could happen to you, Jinhua, and the thing has been done. Madam Hong has paid the money, and you will be a concubine in a great house with three black gates and six stone lions, just as you have described to me—a great house with ancestor paintings and high walls and a courtyard all of your own.
