Chapter 34 #2
I can feel my hand twisting the knob on that final door as my skin breaks out in goose bumps.
What if we were wrong? What if the fifth daughter’s power isn’t to call true love?
What if it’s your heart’s desire? Not a soulmate, but the thing that completes your soul?
It might be a person…but could it also be breathing the fresh air of a cute villa in the Italian countryside?
A collaboration with a nonprofit that helps you save the world?
Freedom? The child you wanted but never thought you could have alone? A new business or education?
Ridiculous. I shake my head.
Maybe?
I scramble the book open with shaking hands, wanting to reread exactly what Aiai said about the Peony Goddess.
She wrote: My gift was to make hearts become whole.
I chew on this for a minute. This isn’t the same as true love, is it?
We’ve been interpreting it as romantic love and assuming that’s the only thing that can make one’s heart whole.
But why? And why did we believe it for a millennium?
It’s possible I’m the only person this has happened to, and all the other fifth daughters really could call true love.
I keep reading and pull together the pieces.
The first clue is from Aiai herself, and the maid they tested the moli on after Aiai’s dream of the Peony Goddess.
When the maid and manservant fell in love, Aiai’s mother declared that to be Aiai’s power.
What if love was simply what that specific maid wanted?
Another maid could have wanted something else, such as wealth or health or anything.
I go to the next fifth daughter’s chapter, and the next, reading through all the stories.
It looked like enough people truly wished for love to reinforce the assumption of the fifth daughter’s power.
There are other comments sprinkled through I didn’t notice.
One Qing dynasty woman took Xinyue’s moli and thanked her “because with a husband who loved her, she could be safe.”
She didn’t want true love but the safety she thought it could bring her.
Of those clients who wanted true love, how many of them considered it a conduit to what they desired most?
Children, or power, or wealth. For the women of the past, how much of that could have been possible without a man?
Many would have been sure they needed a husband as an intermediary to achieve the things they truly wanted, and a loving husband was better than a cruel one.
While I wanted my ancestors to all have been proto-modern feminists, with hidden classes to teach literacy to their girls, and earning their own money from their moli, it would be ridiculous to ignore that the environment in which they lived was one that discounted, devalued, and disrespected them. Their clients lived in the same world.
The three obediences instructed women to obey their fathers, then husbands, and for widows, their sons.
Did all women follow those, or believe them?
Of course not. Did enough of them? I’m sure of it.
The same went for the men who went to my grandmothers for help.
Many of them would also have been trapped, unable to envision their dreams outside of what had been presented to them as the life they were expected to lead.
Some may have wanted love. Some may have wanted the stability that came with marriage, or children, or companionship.
I drop down on the couch and close my eyes. My heart’s desire. My moli won’t work on me—but as a thought experiment, what did I want more than anything?
I want my moli, but it’s more than that. Oh, I do not like this poking around in the deepest recesses of my own desires. My most secret yearnings.
My moli is only my surface wish. I go a step deeper.
I want to be accepted as a Hua.
Deeper.
I want my mom.
There’s more, and I reach down and yank it up.
I don’t want to be alone.
This is my most secret longing, hidden beneath layers of what I told myself I wanted. It’s what I was too scared to admit to myself while I was absorbed with escaping the pressure of my family.
It drops on me like a downpour. My power is not to call only one form of true love.
True love, a heart’s desire, comes in different shapes for all of us and might not look like what you think.
Ms. Kang thought she wanted a partner, but what she really wanted was a child.
Similar things probably happened for the others, including Kelsey’s luxury-gift-bag clients.
Maybe the woman with the new dog told herself she wanted love, but it was actually companionship and loyalty she craved. She found that through my perfume.
Kelsey’s clients with canceled engagements might have found love, but once the ghost scent hit, it slowed the impact.
I could only hope those couples could slowly rebuild what they thought they found, and on their own.
At least they knew their love. That’s more than many in the world had.
On the positive side, Ms. Kang had Holly.
Xiaolan had freedom. Evelyn had a way to change the world, and Henry, his villa.
I shut the book and sit there, stunned. Somehow, I know it’s true. There is nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with my moli. I’ve had it all along. For all those years that I thought I was broken, I was complete.
I have no one to share this discovery with. Rafe isn’t talking to me. Mom… I can’t reach out to her. Ana doesn’t know. Like always, I’m alone.
I wish more than anything that the power of the fifth daughter would work on me. I wish I could simply spray on the scent and, poof, my life would work out, like it did for Ms. Kang and Evelyn and Henry and Xiaolan.
But no Hua has been able to do that, and in this, I am the same.