Shanghai Girl (2 page)

A block away from our house was the entrance to Club Jingjiang, the former Cercle Sportif Francais on rue. Cardinal Mercier, now Maoming Road. Only occasionally would Father mention such facts to me at home, peppering our native Shanghai dialect with English and French words. He had, after all, been a student in New York City.

After the Cultural Revolution started, I never heard a foreign word from him again. Then one day, the changing tides of the Huangpu had flooded our home. The Red Guards from Shanghai’s Pujiang University where Father taught decided to "sweep” us out "like dirt on the floor." Nine proletariat families moved in and partitioned the house. In an act of mercy on the part of the university, a dormitory unit was assigned to us three. Father died in 1979. Mother remarried and moved out. I have lived here since.

It is the summer I turn twenty. Love is no longer a banned word on university campuses. I am nebulously in love. I met Lu Long during our first semester together at Pujiang. The closest physical contact we’ve had is fleetingly holding hands when nobody is around. A month ago, he received a scholarship and went to study in New York. A vacuum has since filled my heart. I am now in love with a vision, perhaps more that of America than that of Lu Long. I am lovesick yet lovelorn.

One man who truly loved me was Father. I keep his photo by my bed and think of him as he was in that photo: glasses were his most prominent feature; lenses as thick as the bottom of a soy sauce bottle rested on a soiled plastic frame. The right pad was long gone, replaced by adhesive tape stuck as a cushion against his nose. He is wearing a gray Lenin suit with the bottom button missing. The expression in his eyes through the lenses is disturbingly disinterested. The man in this faded, over-exposed color photo is my father, shortly after he left prison.

Father went to jail not long after our family was swept out of the former Avenue Joffre, during the nationwide Campaign to Purify Class Ranks. Father was accused of having been a spy. Of course, he never was a spy. He was a returning student from America: M.S., Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, Class of 1951. During the Cultural Revolution, that was enough for him to be accused and incarcerated for five years.

During the week I first began to menstruate, he was released and came home. I was thirteen and he, forty-three. The year was 1977. Two years later, Father passed away. Colon cancer, advanced stage. Someone who had known him well remarked that Father actually died of an ulcer in the heart.

On his deathbed I held his limp hand, gazing into his half-closed eyes and hollowed sockets and listening to his ebbing breath. My teenage life was on hold. Outside, beyond the four walls of the terminally ill ward, a different Chinese world was in the making. The Cultural Revolution was over. Selected foreign films were beginning to be shown. My favorite one chronicled the life of Ciprian Porumbescu, the 19th-century Romanian composer. In it, Porumbescu and his girlfriend danced in what appeared to be endless swirls, culminating in a deep French kiss. "I love you," he told her through the dubbing actor’s mesmerizing voice.
Wo Ai Ni
, the three words most Chinese are too embarrassed to utter.

At Father’s side, I daydreamed of being told
Wo Ai Ni
by a handsome and smart high school classmate who did not wear glasses. But I’d heard he took another girl out for a date, during which he bought a bowl of wonton soup and shared it with her. My
qingdou chukai
, the dawning of puberty was like the virgin budding of a love flower. But nobody asked me for a wonton date despite my large almond eyes and deep dimples. It was because I was the daughter of a "counter-revolutionary spy."

Tears rolled down my face as I watched Father and fantasized about him opening his eyes wide, sitting up on his bed, kissing me on the cheeks, and saying the as yet never spoken, "
Wo Ai Ni
!"

Two days before his death, Father held my hand and told me a secret: He had had a girlfriend named Marlene Koo in New York. Like Father, Miss Koo had come from a wealthy, Westernized Shanghai family, which sent her to Barnard after graduating from the McTyeire Methodist School for Girls, where Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her sisters had gone. She was named after Marlene Dietrich, her parents’ favorite Western actress. Father spoke of his heartbreak over losing Marlene, whom he had known as a family friend’s daughter in Shanghai and dated while both of them were in New York. "Marlene was quite spoiled and was a bit headstrong like you, Sha-fei," Father said with a faint smile of helplessness. "Uncertain about the new regime back in China, she refused to return with me. Of course our communication became impossible over time. I was so determined to contribute the knowledge I had acquired abroad to our motherland that I sacrificed my personal happiness . . ."

Father gave me a most unusual look and said haltingly, "I know it’s ridiculous of me to think so, but if you ever make it to America and see Marlene, tell her that she won our debate. She was right to stay on. I just wish I’d listened to her."

Not until then did I realize the truth behind the lurking tension that seemed to have existed between my parents. Father was eleven years older than Mother and had a life of his own before they met in a Shanghai factory workshop in 1961. He was the engineer in charge for a technological innovation project initiated by the University, and she was an innocent and attractive apprentice fresh out of middle school. She offered him daily drinks of green tea in an enamel mug. At the end of the project, he asked for her hand . . .

Father’s last words to me were: "Remember, my child, life is hard. Be strong and resourceful. Don’t be an idealistic intellectual like me. Survive first. Then, thrive in this world."

Before I insert the key to my apartment door, I always look around. Everyone in the neighborhood watches a young college student if she lives alone. Just to make sure she’s respectable.

Something on the other side of my door makes me stop. It’s the odor of cigarettes seeping through the keyhole. My heart starts to thump. I glue one ear to the door and stick a finger into my free ear to block out the neighborhood noise.

As the door flings open, I fall against the torso of my stepfather. Before I can scream, he pulls me in. "I heard your footsteps already, Sha-fei," he says, laughing, his two gold-capped front teeth glaring. "I opened the door for you so you wouldn’t be startled."

"You just did. I didn’t know anybody else had the key besides Mother. What wind has blown you here?" I throw out the familiar greeting in an effort to appear calm.

"I’m here on business,” Stepfather announces in an official tone. After almost three decades as a cadre, he is used to talking as if lecturing. "It’s the 80’s now and China is opening up to the world. Even government functionaries like us are thinking of making money. That’s why I’m in Shanghai for a few days."

I nod but don’t know what to say. This is the first time we are together without Mother. Mother married him during my freshman year and went to live with him in Nanjing, where he was a ranking cadre. I had seen him three or four times during Mother’s visits. I know little about the man except that he blames Mother for not bearing him a son. Instead, Mother had a baby girl last year. Stepfather’s clout made it possible for him to bypass the “one child” policy. After obtaining the quota for another child, my 43-year-old mother is pregnant again. This one, the sonogram has confirmed, will be a boy to carry on Stepfather’s family lineage.

Stepfather takes a deep draw on his "Panda" cigarette and sinks down on my bed like a big bag of rice, next to his lumpy army coat. Pieces of peeling plaster hang from the low ceiling like pages from an old newspaper. I move away from him to a corner of the room under my only window.

Stepfather clears his throat and takes a folded envelope from the breast pocket of his Mao-style tunic. "Since I’d be in town anyway, I told your mother I’d bring this to you. Saves her a trip to the post office, especially with that tummy the size of a land mine planted by the Eight Route Red Army to blow up the Japanese devils.
Ha-ha-ha!"

"Thank you very much," I say. Stepfather provides my monthly living expenses. I don’t have to pay university tuition. The government takes care of that.

Pointing at the chair next to my bed, he orders, "Don’t stand there like a statue. Come sit here and we’ll talk.”

I sit down.

“
See what I’ve brought for you from the market?" He dangles a bunch of bananas in front of me. "Come on. Take one," he urges.

I shake my hand and say, "Thanks, but no. You don’t have to bring me anything. Why don’t you take these with you to eat later?"

Stepfather’s thick black eyebrows knot in displeasure. "Nonsense! I bought them especially for you. I want to see you eat one right now." He snaps one off from the bunch, peels off its top, and thrusts it into my hand.

Without a word, I begin to eat.

"You eat like your mother, pouting your little cherry mouth," he says, gazing at me.

My mouth ceases moving. I stare back at him.

"Keep eating. Don’t stop," he urges. In a gentler tone, he asks, "So how’s school?"

"Fine."

"Graduating soon, eh?"

"Yes, in the summer."

"You have to write a paper to graduate?"

"Yes."

There are also the Comprehensive Examinations to pass. But what does he know? As for the paper, I cannot be more frustrated. The topic I chose, a preliminary study of the father of political science Machiavelli, was turned down by the teacher.

"Sha-fei Hong, I’m disappointed you chose such a despicable person who advocated the notion that ‘The ends justify the means.’ Remember, we should always put revolutionary politics first, as Chairman Mao taught us. We should stick to the principles of Marxist-Leninist and Mao Zedong thought."

I glance at Stepfather. The teacher’s words sounded like something he might have said to me.

Stepfather extinguishes his butt on a section of the banana skin and hits the front of his leg with excitement. "You’re mother-fucking lucky. You’ll be graduating from the Political Science Department at just the right time. Trade with the West is booming. Our motherland needs young people like you who know how to build up our socialist economy with Chinese characteristics. Chairman Mao said that we should critically assimilate foreign practices to serve China." He pats me heavily on the shoulder as he speaks, our first physical contact ever. I stiffen but do not move.

"How’s my old subordinate doing?" Stepfather continues, referring to Mr. Chen, the number one man at the University. To Stepfather, Chen is just a small potato.

"I haven’t seen him on campus for a while. I imagine he’s fine."

"Good, Sha-fei. Now you study hard. Come graduation time, I’ll give that dog a call, get you a decent job assignment, and make your mother happy. How’s that?"

"Thank you very much. I’d certainly appreciate it."

My objection to Mother’s marrying Stepfather notwithstanding, I’m fully aware of the benefits he’s brought me. He supports me financially, since Father left almost nothing. One reason I believe Mother agreed to marry Stepfather is that she was sick and tired of living on a meager income and with ample fear. She hated being powerless. In a different way, I hate being powerless, too.

I knew I would not be staying in this dormitory had it not been for Stepfather’s intervention. The property belongs to the University, which assigned the unit to Father as a professor. When he died and Mother moved away, the apartment technically should have been returned to the school, since I was beyond the legal age of eighteen. Our neighbor the Chengs had been coveting our unit for years. Their family of four -- the couple and a grown son and a daughter -- only has one room, so the son sleeps on the floor of the narrow corridor. The daughter has registered for marriage for over a year now but still lives at home because her husband’s home is equally small and they are on the waiting list for their work unit to assign them a room. Mrs. Cheng, whom I respectfully address as Aunt Cheng, has the benefit of being a secretary at Mr. Chen’s office. She begged Mr. Chen to assign our apartment to her family. It was only after Stepfather mentioned the case to his old comrade-in-arms, Mr. Chen, that the apartment was salvaged for me.

In a rare instance when Mother mentioned Father and Stepfather in the same sentence, she said, "He is a very different man from your father. Your father was an honest man who didn’t know how to play the game of life, a pampered son of the wealthy who was naïve and vulnerable. But your stepfather has been a revolutionary all his life. He is a success despite the fact that he remains a rough and ready type of man, a
Da Lao Cu,
” (literally: Big Old Thick.) Mother added, "With all our sufferings brought on by your father, you should really be grateful to your stepfather for who he is."

Stepfather rises from my bed and stands in front of me. He puts his hands on his belt and searches around as if looking for the bathroom. I’m glad he’s finally ready to leave.

"The men’s room is outside the apartment, down the hallway," I tell him. Our building only has two communal bathrooms, one for each gender.

Stepfather laughs in a way that betrays his peasant origins, his gleaming teeth reflecting the rays from the setting wintry sun. Suddenly, he drops his navy khaki pants before my eyes. "No!" I cringe and turn my head away -- he has no underwear on! His appendage hangs out like the neck of a Peking duck on display in a deli window. A pile of flesh shaped like two used green tea bags sag under the duck neck, dangling.