Peking Story (14 page)

While Elder Sister packed, her eight sisters and two brothers, as well as aunts, uncles, and in-laws, gathered together in the mansion's main reception hall to decide what to do. Aimee had brought me along. The great room, generally unused during the winter, was very cold. Wearing coats and padded gowns, Elder Brother, Aimee, and several of her sisters sat huddled around a large, icy-looking marble-topped table under the weak illumination of two light bulbs hanging high overhead in a pair of ornate glass and wood lanterns. The rest of us sat on chairs against the wall.

Everyone seemed to be talking at once. “They can't do this to her,” someone was saying in a shrill voice. “It's unthinkable! Elder Sister was raised by old-fashioned standards. She knows nothing of these modern ideas.” I had already heard a good deal from my wife about how strictly Elder Sister had been brought up, in part because she had been the first daughter, but chiefly because, during her girlhood when a Manchu emperor still occupied the throne of China, young ladies of breeding were required, by a rigid Confucian morality, to remain secluded in the inner chambers of their homes practicing a vast heritage of female crafts and virtues, the most important of which were, perhaps, fine stitching and submissiveness.

“She's more like Mama than any of the rest of us,” one of the sisters went on. “Everyone said she was such a beautiful girl. She was as graceful as a Goddess of Mercy. Even Papa never found a man worthy to be her husband.”

“That's why I worry about her,” someone else said. “If she had married and understood these things I wouldn't mind so much, but she's a virgin.”

“And
completely
innocent!” someone else said. Although I saw nothing in Elder Sister's appearance to indicate that she had ever been a goddess or even a beauty, she did look very virginal indeed. The long blue cotton gowns she wore hung within a few inches of her ankles and her hair, parted in the middle, was always tightly drawn into a bun at the back of her neck in the manner of old-fashioned Chinese women. Except for talcum powder, she wore no make-up and, although her ears were pierced, I never saw her wearing earrings. Instead, her only and invariable decoration was a jade-tipped pin that she kept tucked into her bun of slickly oiled hair. Such a pin, it had been pointed out to me, was sharper and longer than one might expect, and could function in an emergency as an effective weapon of defense. And yet, despite appearances, I wondered if her innocence of worldly affairs was as complete as the family assumed, and if they were not underestimating her knowledge, accumulated however haphazardly through the years, of matters never openly discussed.

Her sisters made their decision. She must quit her job at all costs.

Only Elder Brother disagreed. He could not allow her even to try to resign, he said. It was too dangerous. This government, he reminded his sisters, did not allow workers to quit or even to change jobs without an acceptable reason. If Elder Sister insisted on resigning, she would undoubtedly be investigated by the police and might even be drafted into one of those new white-collar labor battalions that were being sent to China's hinterlands daily. There was no question about it — she would be far better off in a nearby brothel. He admonished his sisters to face the facts realistically and not indulge in useless emotionalism. Naturally, in the old days, he would never have considered allowing her to perform such a task, but it was obvious that his only proper duty under present circumstances was to help prepare her for what she would find in the South City.

The sisters, looking contrite, had reluctantly submitted to the logic of their brother's argument, when Elder Sister, carrying an overnight bag, appeared in the doorway. Everyone fell abruptly silent.

“I'm leaving,” she announced.

“Wait!” one of the aunts said. “Sit down a moment. We want to talk to you.” Elder Sister came in reluctantly and sat down in a chair at the end of the marble table. She took out a box of matches.

“Who has a cigarette?” she asked. Elder Brother gave her a Ruby Queen. After lighting it, somewhat amateurishly I thought, she drew an enormous quantity of smoke into her lungs and then exhaled it slowly into the air over the table. Cigarette smoking was Elder Sister's only modernism, but she had taken to it with a vengeance, smoking, I had heard her sisters complain, some forty cigarettes a day.

“You know,” the aunt continued, “you must take precautions in the South City against disease.” Apparently feeling this to be an overly mysterious remark, she added, by way of explanation, “All those women have diseases, you know.”

Elder Sister looked uncomfortable and concentrated on the end of her cigarette. “What diseases?” she asked.

Elder Brother cleared his throat. “White mud and plum poison,” he said. “Those two.”

“Oh,” Elder Sister said. “Those two.”

“Don't drink or eat out of their cups and dishes,” Elder Brother said. “And don't pick up anything they've touched.”

“All right,” Elder Sister said.

“Don't talk to them,” the aunt said, “and if they speak to you, don't answer.”

“And wear your nose mask when you're in the same room with them,” someone else told her. Elder Sister, as did many Chinese, often wore a gauze surgical mask on the streets, the theory being that it not only filtered out dust and germs but, in winter, warmed the nose as well.

“All right,” Elder Sister said, “I'll wear it.”

“And most important of all,” one of the sisters said, “don't smoke any of their cigarettes — even if they offer you one out of a fresh pack.”

“It doesn't matter,” Elder Sister answered, “I can't smoke, anyway. The office asked me not to as a good example to the girls.”

“You'll still want to smoke in secret,” the aunt insisted, “so promise not to smoke
their
cigarettes.”

“I promise,” Elder Sister answered in a subdued tone, apparently bringing her catechism to an end since no one had anything further to say.

We accompanied her to the main gate where she strapped her bag to the handlebars of her bicycle before pedaling off. “I'll try to phone tomorrow,” she called back.

“Good-bye,” the family called. “And remember,” someone shouted just before she passed out of earshot, “don't smoke their cigarettes.”

During the following days, we all thought and talked about nothing but Elder Sister and the prostitutes and, as a matter of fact, I had a little more to think about, I suspected, than anyone else in the family because I had actually been to the brothel in which Elder Sister was housemother. I kept this fact to myself, at the time, although I was sorely tempted, in the face of so much family speculation as to just what she must be facing in the South City, to describe to them, as well as I could remember, The House of Flowering Willows.

I had seen it late one winter evening some two years before in the company of four foreigners, one of them Hetta Empson. The five of us had been to a performance of Peking Opera in the South City and, from there, had gone to a noisy four-storied restaurant where, on the top floor, we drank yellow wine and ate crisp fatty slices of roasted duck rolled with black bean sauce, and leeks in pancakes as thin and pale as powdered skin. One member of our party, an Englishman named John Blofeld, who had lived many years in Peking, had been obliged to answer a great many questions about the city. Toward the end of the meal, someone asked if Peking had a red light district, and John answered that the present district was quite close by, having been settled there some fifty years ago when its old quarters in another part of the city were burned out during the Boxer Uprising. “Isn't it true,” someone else asked, “that Chinese brothels are really no more than teahouses compared to what we have in the West? I mean,” he went on, “the women are more like entertainers, aren't they?”

John laughed. “I think you'd better go and have a look for yourself,” he said.

“Well, naturally,” Hetta said, “you men would know more about this sort of thing than I, but I
do
think it's unfair that men have
all
the fun. I've never even seen a brothel.”

“In that case,” John answered, “I think we'd all better go and have a look. It's quite safe, you know.”

And so it was that we all went off to have a look at brothels, but not before John, who was to act as guide, explained that the brothels were divided into first-, second-, and third-class houses, and that, in order to complete our education, he would take us to one of each.

We hired pedicabs and arrived some ten minutes later at a cross street in what looked to be an unfrequented section of the South City. After dismissing the pedicabs, our guide peered first up one dark street and then down another before striking off southward. All the gates in the walls along both sides of the street were shut and dark, but it seemed to me that for such a late hour more people were lurking in the shadowy doorways and walking on the street than might be normally expected. Our guide suddenly turned about. He thought it must be the wrong street, he said. Back at the intersection, we struck off westward on another street, which looked much like the one we had just left. After walking some way along this one, he stopped again. “I'm afraid I'll have to ask someone,” he said. “Do you mind?” We all assured him that we didn't mind at all, and Hetta said she was having great fun.

Furtively approaching a figure in a darkened doorway, he asked in Chinese, “Excuse me, but can you direct me to one of the brothels of this area?” The man in the doorway spat and, waving his arms in a circle, said in a hoarse voice, “They're all brothels.”

“Oh, is that so? Then could I trouble you to point out a third-class house?”

The man stepped to one side and pushed open the gate behind him. “They're all third-class on this side of the street,” he said. Beyond the gate, we found ourselves in a long tunnel-like passageway dimly illuminated along either side by lights glinting through windows, which appeared to be curtained with odd bits of old bedspreads and discarded underwear. “Old Aunty,” someone called, “guests have come!” A fat old woman dressed in a black cotton padded gown appeared around a corner at the end of the passage. “Come in. Please come in,” she called, waddling up to us on bound feet, an increasingly rare sight.

“We are tea guests,” John said, using a phrase that, he later told us, meant that we had come prepared to pay a modest charge for the privilege of drinking tea and, at the same time, looking over the girls. This was an age-old custom, we were told, presumably enabling the discriminating customer to choose something fairer, plumper, or younger than he might otherwise hope to get. We were shown into a room at the passageway's far end where it opened onto a tiled courtyard. This court was completely surrounded on all four sides by galleries of rooms to the height of three stories and looked, in fact, rather like the restaurant we had just left.

The room we were ushered into contained a table, chairs, a coal stove, a kettle of boiling water, a dressing bureau, and a bed. In the middle of the table, on a tin tray, sat a tea canister, a cheap porcelain teapot, and several cups. The madam opened the canister, tossed some tea leaves into the pot, and poured it full of boiling water. With an air of having done the same thing many times before, she then distributed the cups in front of us and sat down herself to wait for the tea to steep. In the meantime we all looked at the bed.

Like most Chinese beds, it was large, had a wooden bottom, and was spread with quilts. There were more quilts, looking none too clean, neatly rolled at the foot of the bed, and there were two small pillows at the head, filled, I could guess, as were most cheap pillows in China, with the husks of grain. Tucked under the ear, this versatile pillow will produce, at even the slightest movement, the sound of crackling flames, the splatter of rain on leaves, or the sinister crunch of a booted foot.

While we were drinking our tea, the girls began to arrive. They passed, one by one, pausing for only a moment before the open door of our room. As each new girl appeared, the madam called out a name, “Jade Excellence,” “Precious Purity,” “Delightful Jar,” “Fragrant Hairpin,” and so on.

Although the girls passed too quickly for us to gain much of an impression, except that they all wore heavy make-up and seemed to have had their foreheads stenciled with the same pair of soaring, winglike eyebrows, we complimented the madam on their beauty, paid, and left.

Finding the next brothel, a second-class one, was much easier, and in a very short time we were sipping tea again while a new string of beauties passed our door. They looked much the same as the other girls. In fact, the only detectable difference between this brothel and the last was that our room here had a cover on the table and some blue peacocks embroidered on the bed quilts. Having thanked the madam for her tea and remarked on the beauty of her girls, we moved on to a first-class brothel.

The room where tea was served in this establishment, although by no means a luxurious one, displayed a bed containing enormous mirrors set into its head and foot. “Oh, look! It's just like a barber shop,” exclaimed Hetta, leaning over to inspect her reflection, both fore and aft, in the mirrors.

“For God's sake,” said John, “come and sit down!”

Apart from the mirrors, the
pièce de résistance
of this house was an English-speaking girl who, after being introduced to us, sat down and proceeded to display her linguistic proficiency by confessing, all in English, that she had had a G.I. boy friend, that he used to write her letters, but not any more, and that her name was Lily. “I very like American,” she finished, leering at John. Lily was by no means a beautiful girl. Her mouth was too big and her eyes too small, and every inch of her thick and shining shoulder-length hair had been crimped into symmetrical zigzag waves as barbarically splendid as Nebuchadnezzar's beard and, as if that were not enough, spit curls framed her face. She was, in short, grotesque and yet mysteriously, even compellingly, attractive.