Impatient for heirs, her husband’s family urged him to take a concubine and get down to the job of producing sons. In fact, his grandmother recommended that the family forgo the dowry this time and find a woman of lower class and stronger loins, unlike our many-times-great-aunt,who was highly-bred, somewhat nervous, and melancholy of temperament. The matchmaker brought in a plump and soft-spoken girl from the village, and in due course babies began to appear with predictable regularity.

Great-aunt suffered even more now that she had been displaced by this fecund second wife. What made it even more demoralizing was that despite her humble upbringing, the once-servile village girl had begun giving herself airs; although officially only the second wife in rank, she was now being treated with great favor by her mother-in-law. During her pregnancies, expensive and nourishing foods were brought to the table especially for the mother-to-be. A little peasant girl was assigned as maidservant to keep the concubine company at all times, and to fetch and carry so that she would not tire herself out. Each new garment she appeared in was more embroidered than the last, and her hair ornaments, once cheap tortoiseshell and brass, were now inlaid with coral and tiny pearls.

There was worse to come: one day it was the concubine and not Great-aunt who was asked to take tea with her husband’s grandparents in the gazebo by the goldfish pond. With that, poor Great-aunt knew she had been demoted. Her only remedy was motherhood, and in her distress she turned to faith healers and priests for more drastic remedies. But potions, pilgrimages and prayers all came to naught for Great-aunt.

Finally, during one of her regular visits to the temple, she fell into conversation with an old nun. The wrinkled old woman told her of a solution: she needed to make a special offering to the Goddess of Mercy. If Great-aunt were to embroider an altar cloth with the images of a hundred baby boys, all in different postures and activities, then she would become pregnant and furthermore, the child would be a boy.

Great-aunt fell to this task with a desperation that drove her needle flashing through heavy silk like fish leaping in a lake. An assembly of laughing toddlers began to emerge beneath her thin fingers: playing with a ball, chasing butterflies, spinning tops, eating oranges. The images of the babies she longed for in her mind were painstakingly stitched in bright thread. The project took more than a year of concentrated effort and became the focal point of her life.

She presented the altar cloth to the temple and retreated home to await the promised miracle. After a year of waiting,Great-aunt fell further into despair and melancholy, and shamed her family even more when she was pronounced mad. What finally became of this many-times great aunt we do not know, because the family does not like to talk about unfortunate ancestors. Sometimes when we tell the story, we even add that really, she was only a very distant aunt.