The Painter of Shanghai (6 page)

4

Xiuqing sits in the courtyard as Zheng
niangyi
discusses her contract with a fat woman in makeup heavy for so early. They smoke and haggle, cackle, argue. Then the broker departs, without so much as a backward glance at her former charge.

The fat lady turns to Xiuqing. ‘Well, that’s settled. That white ant certainly drives a hard bargain. I only hope you are worth it.’ She waddles in a small circle around Xiuqing as she speaks, looking at her. ‘Up,’ she adds, pleasantly enough. ‘I’ll adopt you officially next week. For now, though, you may call me Ganma.’
Godmother?
Xiuqing thinks.

When she neither rises nor responds, the woman steps closer. ‘Really, there’s no shame in what we do here. Lots of girls like you do it.’ She steps back, taps her tiny foot. Xiuqing hugs her knees harder.

‘It’s the virtuous thing,’ Godmother says, wheedling. ‘You’re just doing what any honorable daughter would do for her family.’ Xiuqing studies some ants at her feet: little creatures with shiny, tiny bodies. Not white, but tar black. They tug and pull at a flesh-colored worm as Godmother’s voice rises in agitation. ‘I’ve no time for this, you little cunt. I’m a businesswoman. Stand
up.
’

But Xiuqing keeps her eyes on the worm. It is, she observes, half flattened, presumably from where someone
stepped on it. The ants’ efforts make it shudder as though it were still alive.

It’s only after the woman leaves that Xiuqing dares to lift her eyes. One of the shutters from the second floor has swung open a little. Inside, she makes out a woman standing by a looking glass. She is brushing and brushing her long hair. Her red lips move; she appears to be counting the strokes. Absently, Xiuqing counts with her:
One. Two. Three.

By ten, Godmother is back with a leather whip. She beats Xiuqing – mostly on her back, although she takes one well-aimed swing at her feet. The blows are less painful than faintly sickening, and Xiuqing stays where she is.

Eventually Godmother shrills something and the manservant appears. ‘The little cunt is supposed to be a boar,’ she grumbles. ‘In truth she’s as obstinate as a horse. That’s probably why he got rid of her – no one marries a horse.’

‘Some men like them stubborn,’ the servant replies. ‘As they say, the harder the battle, the sweeter the victory.’ He picks Xiuqing up – casually, as though it’s something he does often – and slings her over his shoulder like a sack of corn. He smacks her bottom, makes another salty comment she doesn’t understand. Then he carries her to a dark room, where he throws her down amid oil urns and baskets of onions. When he leaves, he shuts and locks the door.

Xiuqing lies in the Hall’s pantry for several hours, motionless. She watches light from the one window make a single shifting square across the room. Sensation returns with its orbit: her feet hurt. Her eyes sting. Her skin smarts where
the woman’s leather whip landed. She becomes aware of smells; garlic, peanut oil, spicy beef. After dark, laughter bubbles through the walls. There are sounds of glasses clinking, of passing plates and girls complaining. A slap rings out like a firecracker. ‘I don’t care if he’s got every illness known under heaven,’ Godmother cries. ‘You borrowed the money, now you earn it back. You
always
finish the job.’

Later come the men’s voices. First the manservant’s, just inside the main gate. It drones a steady stream of names: Master Kai. Master Peng. Master Yao. Sometimes simply Honored Guest. Xiuqing identifies Master Gao, who for some unfathomable reason the girls here all seem to call Papa. Other men’s tones blend in slowly, adding banter and shouts. Shrieks merge with heavy footsteps, doors slammed and reopened. A zither sounds like the sobbing of a child. It is one of her favorite of Li Qingzhao’s
ci,
‘The Double Ninth Festival.’ Xiuqing mouths the words against the darkness:

Light mists and heavy clouds
Melancholy the long dreary day
In the golden censer
the burning incense is dying away.

Somehow, though, the very familiarity of the lyrics makes her feel even more displaced. It’s as though the meanings of even known things are shifting.

It’s well into the next day when Godmother unlocks the door. She asks if Xiuqing has come to her senses. Xiuqing replies quietly that she has.

Wordlessly, the young girl follows the older woman down the Hall’s tunnel-like corridors, past the room where she’d heard the men and music. Then there were the odors of incense, spicy beef. Now the smell is of stale plum wine and vomit.

Xiuqing follows Godmother to the bathing room and strips down as directed. She steps, shivering, into the cold tin tub. The water is filthy, full of strands of hair floating in dreamy squiggles, clumps of sloughed-off skin like dirty snow. But Xiuqing savors it anyway; it’s the first bath she’s had in nearly a week. She tries to disregard the way Godmother studies her naked body, though when she’s made to strut back and forth, dripping, she can’t help flushing.

‘A name,’ the madam says briskly.

‘What?’

‘You’ll need a new name.’ And as Xiuqing blinks at her blankly: ‘
Aiyaaa.
As stupid as a wooden chicken.’ Covering her eyes, she heaves an injured sigh. ‘I pay too much. I
trust
people…’

When Godmother removes the hand, her eye makeup, dislodged by her palm’s pressure and the room’s steam, drips a single black tear. Xiuqing waits, hiding her privates with her palms.

‘I think,’ Godmother says finally, ‘we’ll start with Yuliang. Good Jade.’ She cocks her head thoughtfully. ‘Zhang Yuliang. Yes. It suits you well.’ She looks balefully downward. ‘Your feet are too big, of course. But we can work on the rest. Yes, certainly. Zhang Yuliang.’ She hands Xiuqing her clothes.

‘What about my own family’s name?’

‘Don’t you know that troubles come to those who are talkative? Especially here. Men don’t like it when women natter the nights away.’ Godmother wipes her dripping brow and glowers. Then, as though explaining the sky’s color to a small child, very slowly and simply, she says, ‘We’re your family now. We’re all our own family. We’re all that any of us need.’

Xiuqing’s head reels as she is led, damp but dressed, to the kitchen.
Zhang,
she is thinking.
Yu-liang. Yu. Yu. Liang. Liang.
The sounds feel alien and false; she wouldn’t even know what they look like on paper. She knows the characters for her own name. (Old name?
No.
It’s like renouncing her own arm.) Her uncle wrote them for her the day he brought her home. ‘See?’ Wu Ding said, carefully etching the sloping strokes. ‘That’s you. Xiu:
clever.
Qing:
innocent.
’ It was the first thing, in the month since her mother’s sudden death, that had broken through the eight-year-old’s fog of loss. Beguiled, Xiuqing had taken the tallow-toned rice paper to her room. She practiced writing her name nearly until dawn.

She has no idea, however, how to write
Good Jade
. She catches herself wishing suddenly for her
jiujiu.
To punish herself, she pinches her arm hard. ‘He’s dead,’ she mutters fiercely. It was one of the resolutions she made last night, in the dark: she will neither think nor speak of him. Even to herself.

‘What
now
?’ asks Godmother over her shoulder. ‘Still nattering?’

‘No,’ Xiuxing says. ‘I just coughed.’

It comes out unconvincingly; unlike her uncle, Xiuqing isn’t a particularly good liar. But this is another thing she
resolved to change last night. She will lie to them, and fight them, and in the end she will leave them. Boar or no boar, she will escape.

In the kitchen Xiuqing is presented, as Yuliang, to two sullen-faced maids and the cook. The latter gives her hot tea, a bowl of fried rice with pork, and a small helping of the day’s lunch, shrimp with green tea leaves. Godmother waits impatiently while Xiuqing, suddenly ravenous, crams it all into her mouth. Then she gives her a fresh teapot and steers her through the screened doorway.

Girls straggle into the dining room, rubbing eyes, limping, grumbling. Speaking of being tired, and sore. Godmother chastises some, pats others. She introduces Xiuqing as
the new leaf
. She calls the other girls
my flowers
, though at first Xiuqing can’t believe she uses the term seriously. With their tangled hair and peeling patches of slept-in makeup, the women seem singularly unfloral to her, and smell even less so.

The one exception is Jinling, the girl Xiuqing had seen in the window. She sails in last, trailing scent like an elegant scarf, an exotic blend of gardenia and musk. Even half asleep she is as breathtaking as a girl in an old scroll painting: fashionably delicate and pallid, with a sweeping brow and eyes like calm black pools. Her mouth is little and red and full of small teeth that are charmingly and childishly uneven. Her hair is trimmed into long bangs that frame her face like the glossy feathers of an exotic bird. While the other girls jab at their food and jabber with full mouths, Jinling sits as straight as a sapling and
pushes
fan
into her mouth with small, ladylike gestures. She looks for all the world as if she is hosting the meal.

Godmother tells Xiuqing that Jinling is the Hall’s top girl. She came to the Hall from Shanghai’s French Concession. ‘From a real Flower and Willow Lane,’ she adds proudly. ‘You are very lucky. I’m making her your teacher here.’

Xiuqing’s pulse leaps a little, despite herself. But Jinling just frowns. ‘Why should I teach anyone? It will take money and time from me. Two things I’m short of.’ She gazes at Xiuqing, cocks her head. ‘Such a sour face!’ she adds.

The other girls titter. Godmother brushes off the protest with a
tskkk.
‘Please,’ she wheedles. ‘Her hair-combing ceremony will be just after the New Year. And just
look
at her. She has more refinement than Suyin, I suppose. But there’s really not very much time.’

At these words the other young girl who is serving pauses. She looks Xiuqing up and down, chewing her lip.

‘After New Year?’ interrupts one of the seated girls, Dai, who is rather fat – who looks, in fact, like she could be Godmother’s real daughter. ‘Where are you going to put her? There aren’t any rooms free.’

‘There will be.’

Sleep-crusted gazes flick toward the table’s foot, where the woman named Xiaochen sits. Apart from the top girl, she’s the only one to appear in full makeup. But the pastelike layers of powder can’t hide the harsh lines by her eyes and lips. Her pupils are abnormally large and empty. Xiuqing sees them and thinks of Uncle Wu.

Jinling sniffs. Her chopsticks hover over the main dish.
Xiuqing watches the red-tipped hands as though they speak a silent code. ‘He never puts enough yams in,’ Jinling says, pouting.

‘He puts in as many as we can afford,’ Godmother retorts crossly.

‘Tea!’ someone else squeals. ‘What’s her name again? Hey, Yuliang!’ And then, because Xiuqing keeps forgetting that her name is now Yuliang, ‘
New girl!
Little idiot! More hot water!’

Obediently, Xiuqing takes the pot into the kitchen. It’s empty at the moment, and she edges over to the stove. She eyes the contents of a pan for a moment. Then, quickly, she slides an extra bowl from a shelf.

Back in the dining hall, she puts the bowl by Jinling’s elbow, just close enough to be within reach. The other young girl, Suyin, looks at Xiuqing curiously. She catches Xiuqing’s eye and slowly parts her lips. A little orange tongue emerges, flickering. It takes Xiuqing a moment to see that it’s actually a prawn tail. Xiuqing gazes, entranced, until a small breathy yelp pulls her attention back to the table. She realizes she’s just missed Jinling’s cup entirely with the tea. The spill cuts a watery brown path across the table.

Jinling picks her arm up quickly, strokes it like a hurt cat. Xiuqing waits for a rebuke, or another blow.

But when she looks up, Jinling’s not looking at her. She is frowning at the bowl of yams Xiuqing has just set before her. And when she lifts her hand, it is just to produce a handkerchief and mournfully dab at her silk sleeve.

Then she looks up. ‘You certainly
need
training,’ she says.

5

In the end Yuliang acclimates to this harsh and glittering new name, much as she acclimates to her harsh and glittering new life. It is Jinling who helps her with both tasks. In fact, just tumbling from the courtesan’s red lips (‘Ai, Yu
Liang
!’), the words seem less punishment than a playful new song.

The top girl guides her new charge through the nightly schedule of primping, preparing, and cleaning up. She shows Yuliang how to pare the end of her kohl eye pencil so it makes a clean line. She shows her how to refill her rouge locket for the nights when she is summoned out on call. She shows her how to brush her hair with just the right number of strokes – one hundred and sixty-eight, for prosperity.

It’s Jinling who explains the rituals that must be performed, the incense that must be lit, the prayers that must be chanted. The gold paper ingots that must be tucked monthly under her mattress, to ensure guest satisfaction and healthy tips. She shows Yuliang the store of seed pearls that she keeps locked in her drawer, and she teaches her to steam them in a white cloth, and to grind up the moistened gems with a pestle and some sugar. Jinling eats the gritty paste in three or four small bites, grimacing. No one else in the Hall can afford to eat pearls. But Jinling says the custom pays for itself in her luminous
skin. Plus, it helps with her digestion; regularity, she explains delicately, is key to maintaining one’s balance and womanly composure. ‘It’s like when chickens eat sand,’ she says. And then giggles, because
chicken
, as she has also taught Yuliang, is another term for
whore
.

The Hall’s top girl shows Yuliang the other fruits of her years of labor: nearly two dozen dresses, stiff with gold trim and brocade that, while not quite as skillfully created as Yuliang’s mama might have done, is nevertheless impressive. She has so many scarves that when she opens up their drawer they burst out in a gauzy, jewel-toned gust. She has boxes of hair ornaments, strings of gems to wind through the glossy wrap of her hair. Lacquered wine cups, as black as jet, emblazoned with gold-painted phoenixes. A lucky-ball locket she wears around her neck, and a key bigger than Yuliang’s thumbnail. The key fits Jinling’s three-tiered chest with the dancing crane on its cover. Yuliang adores this chest – its cunning inlay, its gleaming wood. But inside lies Jinling’s real treasure. She lays it out for Yuliang one evening: the diamond rings and emerald necklaces, the gold-dipped bracelet with intricate designs of flowers and fish, the jade pendant as pale as mutton fat, carved into a rooster – her sign, she tells Yuliang. Little stories accompany each piece: ‘This one’s from a wealthy magistrate back in Shanghai. He wanted to marry me, but his wife wouldn’t let him… This one’s from the son of a Mongolian prince. He wanted to take me to the plains, to make love on horseback… This one’s from one of the top lieutenants of General Sun Yat-sen – he’s fled to Japan. I’d like to see Japan. Wouldn’t you?’ And Yuliang says she would,
even though traditionally (she knows) boars are supposed to dislike travel.