The Painter of Shanghai (3 page)

‘Pack?’ He is serious.

‘Yes. Pack a lot. Warm things too.’ He looks skyward. ‘And one nice outfit. Perhaps the red cheongsam I bought you to wear for New Year’s.’ He makes a kiss-kiss sound at the cat and lifts his feet to the table to form a spindly bridge. Turtle eyes it, leaps, lands. He circles on his master’s thighs and lies down. Xiuqing kicks a heel against her chair, faintly panicked. When she looks up, Wu Ding’s eyes are shut: he is going to sleep.

Back in her room she lays the catalogues out so they overlap, a slick secondhand fan. She flips through them distractedly as two or three raindrops tap on the papered window, testing for a downpour. From the kitchen comes the sound of Lina’s butcher’s knife, sparking thoughts of the green frost of cabbage.
I hope she cuts it finely enough
, Xiuqing thinks.

And, almost as afterthought,
I hope we can pay her this month.

In his more capable modes her uncle letter-writes for
the illiterate and peddles the shoes and handkerchiefs Xiuqing embroiders. But since she took over the household accounts (last year, after one of his longer clinic visits coincided with bill collectors carting off most of the little house’s furniture), Xiuqing is well aware of the sword’s-edge dance of their finances. It’s only thanks to Lina’s connections – and her fishing skills – that the household is eating at all.

Sighing, Xiuqing opens her pine chest, one of the few items she convinced the bill collectors to leave, and begins making a pile:

Two thick-weave cotton tunics.

Two pairs of cotton trousers.

A woven sash for holidays and special occasions.

The cheap, knee-length cheongsam her uncle bought her to wear on their few New Year’s visits this year.

A padded winter jacket (
warm things too
).

After a moment’s hesitation she adds a pair of plain cotton slippers, passing over another pair that is newer but too big for her now. When she last wore them her feet were freshly bound, the pain a raw shock, a silent scream. The soles are clean because she’d crawled on hands and knees for four months. Still, the training shoes prompt her to remember something else. Turning, she pulls out a pair of shoes wrapped in yellowing tissue. These haven’t touched the ground either. In fact, they’ve never been worn at all. The red silk is intricately embroidered, with rows of Beijing knots plumping out magpies’ breasts. Delicate stem and split stitches outline hills full of peonies. In places the technique is so delicate and skilled that the bare silk is itself a motif. But there is one
small patch by the back of the left heel that is blank in a different way. Unintentional; unfinished. A small mouth, crying.

Xiuqing holds the shoes in her palms. Lifts them a little: one, two. They were made for her wedding day, to flutter over floor and ground. Her mama spoke of this someday wedding nearly every day toward the end, half reclining on her bed. Sewing, knotting, biting. It took Xiuqing a long time to realize that her mother was stitching more than just shoes. She was stitching her daughter a promise: after the binding, the finding. The making of a good match.
Your uncle improved his lot with his mind: he learned to read. But a girl’s feet are her best chance to better herself. If we make them small enough, we’ll get our fortunes back. When you’ve grown, when your feet are perfect lilies.

But Xiuqing’s feet never were perfect lilies. Her mother died before the bones had fully broken to the midwife’s specifications, and she’d lacked the strength, at the end, to make Xiuqing walk upon them properly. By the time Xiuqing reached Zhenjiang, her feet had grown by three full fingers, and she’d lacked the determination to break them back again. The result is that now, when she is fourteen, her feet are even bigger than those the neighborhood grandmothers scornfully call ‘Yangzhou style’ – six inches long, twice the size of the tiny lilies favored by Souzhou’s famed beauties. Bigger feet make for easier walking, of course. But her mother would have been aghast. ‘Sea bass,’ she would have called them. Xiuqing tries not to think about it.

She can’t help wondering now, however, whether this journey might be about the long-awaited making of a
match. Is it possible? Has her odd old uncle actually found someone for her to marry? Xiuqing can’t imagine him living on his own, without her. But she also can’t imagine living here forever. As her mama always said, girls are raised for others…

In the end she sets the shoes on the ‘pack’ pile, just in case. If she can’t wear them, then at least they’ll bring her luck.

Sitting back, Xiuqing scans the room for anything else she might need, her gaze coming to rest on her broken looking glass. Her most steadfast companion here, the Mirror Girl, gazes back at her blankly. Her face is pale and slightly square, with a broad forehead and a strong chin. Her eyes are large, heavily lashed, her lips full and fresh, if slow to smile. Xiuqing knows she’s considered pretty. Still all she sees now is a tight-faced, tired-looking girl. ‘We’re going to be fine,’ Xiuqing tells her. ‘This will be an adventure.’

The girl just stares back, her lips tense with unease.

At the Royal Britannica Steamship Company’s ticket office the signs are in Roman characters, with smaller Chinese characters beneath and even smaller characters and letters beneath that. All, for Xiuqing, are equally unreadable, although her uncle claims to differentiate between the five foreign languages (in order: English, Japanese, German, French, and ‘possibly American’).

The
yangguizi
themselves queue at a window manned by another white devil, and Xiuqing studies them with some interest. The two women in line look nothing like her buxom magazine ladies; they are older, fatter, distinctly
less fashionable. One of them returns Xiuqing’s gaze with annoyance. Xiuqing stares right back, with all the impunity of a visitor to a zoo.

Her uncle edges toward the crowd’s shoreline, describing how they’ll travel. ‘Like the foreigners – like gentry. Two beds, one great window. A lovely view of the water.’ Xiuqing looks at the water, where the stripped hull of an old steamship serves as the landing for the newer one they’ll be taking – the
Crying Loon.
To Xiuqing, the ship, with its myriad windows and mysterious lack of sails, looks like an enormous honeycomb. Passengers line the railings like indolent bees. Stark-naked coolies tow the huge hulk through the shallows to the makeshift landing, hemp ropes sawing at the sun-darkened skin of their backs. When they’d first arrived, Xiuqing had tried to make out what they looked like from the waist down. She got one glimpse of a purplish, wormlike stretch of dripping flesh before her
jiujiu
, following her gaze, primly hustled her off toward the office.

Now, facing her fellow travelers, Xiuqing shifts from foot to foot, trying to ease the cutting itch of her bindings, which she wound extra-tight this morning. ‘Will we really have a window, Uncle?’

‘A window!’ he reiterates grandly. ‘The silvery river. The blue of the sky.’ He lights a cigarette, adding, ‘The fresh green face of the new nation.’

Both the Yangtze and the sky are gray, almost the same color as the pigeons that make feathery lumps both inside and outside the office. To Xiuqing, all three grays are beautiful, in different ways. The cloudbank is blue, white, and black furled together. The Yangtze is a thick flow of
gray-gold. Even the pigeons hint at gleaming rainbows: aqua, violet, jade green, as though their drab feathers hide jewels.

Uncle Wu stands and stares at the three lines, fingering his spectacles. Finally he throws back his shoulders and leads them into the crowd, which sucks them in. Everyone seems to be shouting, a dozen dialects melding into a single singsong wail:
Walawala, wa-la.
Xiuqing feels elbows, backs, ribs pressing against her. The man behind her has just eaten salted fish, perhaps with old beer. She breathes through her mouth and looks at him from the corner of her eyes. It’s a soldier, just a few years older than she. Perhaps the age of her soon-to-be fiancé. He is wearing a khaki vest cut in a Western style but the pigtail and ballooning pants of the old imperial army. Xiuqing wonders whether he is being called to Nanjing. Her uncle has told her about the fighting there. One side fights for China’s provisional premier, Yuan Shikai, whom Uncle Wu hates. The other is fighting for something called either
parliamentary procedure
or
electoral outcome
, terms her
jiujiu
won’t clarify because as an opium addict he was barred from voting.

When the soldier catches Xiuqing’s eye and grins, Xiuqing feels herself flush. She pushes ahead to escape his stare, but the surging crowd pushes him forward right along with her. Soon she feels his hand brushing her back. Then dropping a little bit lower. Then lower still. Then – he does it so quickly and assuredly that at first she’s not even sure she’s reading her own body correctly – it’s deftly nestled between her thighs.

There.

He doesn’t leer; doesn’t even acknowledge her shock. He acts as though this were simply ticket-crowd custom.
Is it?
Xiuqing wonders. What do people do in situations like this? If she were Washing Silk Woman from the
Tales of Honorable and Virtuous Women
, she would throw herself in the river. But then again, the river looks very dirty. And while the ancients may have lauded Washing Silk Woman’s chasteness (for the soldier merely spoke to her; he never even touched her!), Xiuqing senses somehow that her uncle wouldn’t feel the same way.

She twitches her hips tentatively, but the hand just wedges further into the split of her buttocks. Finally she puts her own small hand behind her and presses back. A gruff chuckle; another blast of salty fish-breath. Eventually the hand moves away. But her backside quivers with shame.

‘Almost there,’ her
jiujiu
calls back encouragingly. ‘First class awaits!’

In the end, however, both first and second class prove too expensive. ‘They’ve raised it,’ huffs her uncle. ‘Must be all these rich foreigners.’ They travel third class, deep within the steamer’s windowless hull, boxed in like steaming dumplings. Their only access to the water is a small rear deck barely the size of a small courtyard, its floor coated with hardened phlegm and ossified seagull excretions. ‘Perfect,’ Wu Ding mutters, staking out their small space on the floor. ‘Room to breathe here. Near the water. More than fine.’ He rolls out a blanket and anchors it with shoes. One of the pairs is his. The other is Xiuqing’s. Not the wedding slippers, of course. Xiuqing
knows little of opium, but she knows enough about her uncle to know that he wouldn’t see what she does: a mother’s failing fingers, the lush thread-gardens they’d tended. He’d see pellets of opium balls, stacked up like a stagnant black mountain.

Even now, in fact, Wu Ding’s eyes rove the crowd restlessly: he must not have much opium left. It occurs to Xiuqing that she may lose him for the night. The thought terrifies her even more than that of sleeping beside him directly, without their customary wall between them. In this room full of mostly men, she feels like a peach without its skin.
Get him to talk
, she thinks. ‘
Jiujiu
. I’ve a question.’

Her uncle is rolling up a jacket, plumping it with small blows. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Isn’t this nice? It will make a comfy pillow. Give me your jacket, little Xiu. I’ll make one for you too.’

Xiuqing hands him the padded silk coat she’s brought. Her
jiujiu
rolls it up as well. ‘You see, this isn’t so bad!’ He looks up, pleased. ‘What is it, little Xiu?’

She asks the first thing that comes to her mind: ‘I was just wondering whether you’ve thought at all. About my – about my future. What I want to know is, are you finding me a –’
This was a bad choice
, she realizes. How does one bring up what one isn’t supposed to bring up? ‘My mother always said,’ she goes on, carefully, ‘that marriage is the most important thing. She said every woman must have children. She said…’

Drifting off, she looks up from her feet. Her uncle’s face has abruptly emptied of mirth. For a moment he just licks his lips. Then he shakes his head. ‘Marriage!’ he
thunders, so loudly that the family next to them turns to stare. ‘Are you some simpering little fool who has no value without a husband?’

Xiuqing pulls her hands into her sleeves. It makes her feel less conspicuous.

‘No, my girl, noooooo,’ he says, still loudly enough to elicit disapproving glares two rows over. Oblivious to them, he settles back on his mat, cross-legged. He is winding up for a lecture. Xiuqing heaves a silent sigh of relief. ‘I’m giving you an opportunity that goes beyond marriage,’ he goes on. ‘I’m sending you into the workforce, niece. You’re headed to Wuhu. To work.’

It takes a moment for the meaning of the words to settle.
Work?
Xiuqing pictures the straining coolies, their corded muscles, their backs covered with rope-wide welts. She pictures Lina scrubbing the floor by the stove, killing a chicken by calmly snapping its neck. ‘Work,’ she says, trying to associate herself with the concept.

‘
You’re going to work
,’ he replies, beaming. ‘You’re going to be your own woman.’ He closes his eyes, sings softly, but with feeling:

The moon setting, heaven’s mirror in flight
Clouds build, spreading to seascape towers.

‘Li Bai,’ guesses Xiuqing.

‘Correct again,’ says her uncle. ‘You see? You’re very smart. You could be just about anything. A lady poet. A teacher.’

‘I’m going to work as a teacher?’ Xiuqing asks, incredulous. She’s always thought teachers were men. Old men.
With long beards, and canes they use to beat misbehaving schoolboys.

Her uncle scratches his head. ‘Well, no. The place I’ve gotten for you is – well, you’ll be doing something else first. But the money’s good. The money’s very good.’ He sucks a tooth contemplatively. Almost to himself, he adds, ‘And after a while, after you’ve saved, you can move on to something else.’

‘Am I going to be doing embroidery?’