Bracelet Shadow Chamber

Qiu Xing Ge (Autumn Star Garret) and Chuan Ying Lou (Bracelet Shadow Chamber) are two pen-names I have used often. I once operated a small bookshop in Shanghai under the name Qiu Xing Ge, but that is not what I am going to talk about here. Chuan Ying Lou is the name I used most frequently. I have several seals engraved with this name. People might consider the three characters Chuan Ying Lou a bit feminine. There is also a suspicion that Chuan Ying Lou seems to carry an erotic undertone—does it in any way reflect my romances? The truth is I have used this name in remembrance of an act of great benevolence by my mother.
It was Chinese New Year's Eve that day. I was five or six years old. My father was a businessman at that time and we were relatively well off. It was our custom to have New Year dinner on the evening of New Year's Eve. The New Year dinner then did not at all resemble the kind of festivities that go on among friends and relatives nowadays, because everybody went home for it. It was a family reunion, a time when members of the family gathered together. For those big families and clans in Suzhou, it was not uncommon to have scores of or even over 100 members, women and children included, gathering together on that day. However there were only six of us sharing the New Year dinner in my family, namely grandmother, father, mother, my sister an I and cousin Gu who had always lived with us.
It was already past ten at night when New Year dinner was served, since we had to make sacrificial offerings to our ancestors first. This was what Lu You referred to as the family sacrificial rite. It was observed with great ceremony by the Suzhou families. There were altogether six of these occasions in a year—Grave-sweeping Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Ghost Festival, Ancestor Day, Winter Solstice and New Year's Eve, with New Year's Eve being the most steeped in ceremony.
The rite could only commence when father got back from the shop. New Year's Eve being the busiest day for any shop, it would be nine or ten o'clock already when father, having squared up his accounts, came home. It was the custom to have a hot pot piled high with food at the dinner table on New Year's Eve, plus numerous cold dishes. Everybody laughed and joked together, sipping wine at the same time. By the time we finished, it was nearly twelve. Some people stayed up all night on New Year's Eve, but we children would just doze off.
Mother usually stayed up. There were various things to attend to late in the night, like sealing up the well (in Suzhou, there was a well in each house which had to be sealed up from New Year's Eve until the fifth day of the New Year); receiving the kitchen god (after sending the kitchen god off to heaven, it was necessary to receive him back on New Year's Eve); hanging up the portraits of God of Happiness (portraits of the deceased ancestors which had to be hung up during New Year; people coming to pay New Year calls had to pay their respects to these portraits as well); and arranging the fruit trays (lighting the New Year candles in her room, preparing fruit trays as offerings as well as for entertaining guests). Besides, she had to get ready the new outfits for us two children to wear on New Year's Day. Father would not go to bed either. He would work on the family and his personal accounts to find out how much had been spent in the year. On the occasion in question it was already past two o'clock in the early hours of New Year's day when suddenly there came the sound of urgent knocking on the door. Who could it be? It was true that there could be an endless flow of debt collectors in the streets on New York's Eve, and even when morning had broken, they could still go after you for payment as long as they had a lantern in hand. But once it was undeniably New Year's Day, there was nothing they could do but to wish you a Happy New Year. However, we had already settle our accounts a few days earlier. We did not owe anybody anything!
When the door was opened, there stood Mr. Sun Baochu, an old acquaintance of my father's. he was extremely pale and drawn, very dejected looking and had an air of desperation about him. When asked what it was all about, he just shook his head and sighed, saying that it would be the end of him because he had incurred a loss on the accounts he managed, to the tune of approximately four to five hundred dollars. Four to five hundred dollar was quite a substantial amount in those days. Mr. Sun, no being a very senior member of staff himself, couldn't be earning more than a hundred odd dollars a year. It was an established practice among the traditional Chinese banks that any money overdrawn by the staff had to be repaid in full by the end of the year. Otherwise employment would be terminated in the following year.
Yet it was New Year's Eve—the last day of the year—and Mr. Sun still wasn't able to repay the sum of money. At the most, he could only manage to raise 100 dollars or so by borrowing or pawning. If he should lose his job the next year, what would his family live on? What was more, he had an eighty-year-old mother and three young children too! Another thing was the banks in Suzhou had connections with one another. If you should come to that, you were doomed.
Obviously he was coming to my father for help. But how could he have overdrawn such an enormous account? It was all due to the losses he had suffered in "dewing" (a kind of speculative financial dealing). Since he was only in the middle management, his meager salary was not sufficient for him to make ends meet. Therefore he was tempted to make something on the side. Little did he realize that this "dewing" business was like gambling—when you win, you want to win more; when you lose, you want to win back what you have lost. And ultimately he ended up in deep waters.