Shanghai (65 page)

Jiang was caught off guard, being unaware that anyone had taken note of the time she spent with the Confucian. She managed to say, “I have no idea where his sexual preferences lie.”

“Well, what's he doing in a whorehouse?”

Yin Bao was one of very few persons who referred to Jiang's as a whorehouse.

“Perhaps you're overlooking the obvious, Mother.”

“And that would be?”

“That he is one of those who prefers old women like yourself?”

There was not another person in all of Shanghai from whom Jiang would allow such rudeness, but the girl reminded her of the man who had sired her, and it melted her heart. She cared deeply for her youngest—and brashest—daughter. She worried how this one would fare if she named the middle daughter Jiang. Then she dismissed the thought. It had been thus with her and her older sister. Once Jiang surrendered her
name to one of the girls she surrendered her power—in return for which, Jiang needlessly reminded herself, the daughter named would also have to assume the full responsibilities of the Jiang family in the Ivory Compact.

And those responsibilities seemed to be finding a focus. It was now clear to Jiang that there were already three strong candidates for the Man with a Book. There were many, many men with books in Shanghai, but very few with enough power to enact change at the Bend in the River. Gangster Tu, Charles Soong, and strangely enough the
Fan Kuei
Silas Hordoon. Years ago she had seen Richard Hordoon, night after night, writing his strange opium journals, and when she was told they had been passed on to his son Silas, he became a candidate for the Man with a Book. One of those men might well become the responsibility of the daughter who was given the name Jiang. Responsibility to do what, exactly, Jiang was unsure.

She took Mai Bao's hand and looked her up and down. She saw in her strong features the well of time from which their entire clan had come. This girl, unlike her younger sister, was not modern. Although she embraced
The Dream of the Red Chamber
costumes, she was devoted to the old ways. She shunned newspaper reporters and never spent her time with merchants. She was a fine classical dancer and storyteller, and her arhu playing was famous. Mai Bao offered men an access to the “other world,” the Flower World, and was a denizen of that profound place. And like all true denizens of the Chinese demi-monde her true love—just as in the classic literature—was a poor scholar or poet. In this case the penniless scholar had a large wine stain birth mark covering much of his left cheek.

The scholar made Jiang feel uneasy. “Why him, particularly, dear?” Jiang demanded.

The girl hung her head in the classic pose used by great painters to depict women of royalty in mourning and murmured, “Love is the gift we offer and only seldom receive.”

Jiang could recite the rest of that poem by heart. She had heard it many times from foolish girls in her employ who had at first risked, then thrown away, all their prospects for the idle dream of the love of a penniless and often shiftless scholar.

“It's just books you're responding to, Mai Bao,” Jiang claimed.

“No, Mother, he is my heart's completion. Together we are whole.”

Jiang stared at her tall, smart daughter. The girl's scholar pauper was probably waiting for her, even now, in the inner courtyard beneath the sweet olive trees. Jiang sighed.

“Don't be sad for me, Mother. He makes me happy.”

“And what does he think of your life here?”

“He understands that if I am named, I will stay here.”

“And what will he do then?”

“As scholars have always done, love me in the quiet hours, alone and in peace.”

Jiang wondered about that. About exactly how that would work. Her great love, Yin Bao's father, could not bear the idea that anyone else could be with her. Even before he'd asked her to marry him, she knew, because of the Ivory Compact, that she could not leave her post as the head of the most prosperous brothel in all of Shanghai. So they had met late at night and always in the fury of passion. They had coupled and re-coupled and awoken often adhered to each other by the sweat of their
ardour. But she knew it could not last. And it did not last. And one night she waited until sunrise for him—and he did not come. In the dawning light she acknowledged that it was not him “not arriving” that ended their love affair—it was her “not leaving” that had driven him away.

At least he left me with a child,
she thought. She turned to Mai Bao. “And what about children? Does this man believe in children, or are children too pedestrian for his lofty tastes?”

The girl looked away. Her lover talked of revolution, not children. In fact he railed against having children, saying, “Once you have a family it is impossible to remain a revolutionary. Impossible to bring down this stinking old regime. Impossible to bring justice to the peasants. Children should be outlawed until the revolution is complete and the world is scourged of its tyrants. Until there is real justice in this world I want nothing to do with bringing children into it.”

“Mai Bao, she who is named Jiang must produce at least two daughters—one to eventually become Jiang and the other to marry into the Zhong clan. You understand that, surely?”

Mai Bao nodded, for the first time wondering whether she cared for her scholar just because of books she had read. She didn't know for sure, but she suspected her mother might be right.

“Then fool him, girl. You are more than smart enough to do that. Get pregnant, or all you see around you will belong to your younger sister before the
Fan Kuei
's millennium comes.”

It was December of 1897 by the
Fan Kuei
's counting. That left her just over two years to bear a child—a girl. Two years to claim her rightful heritage from her frivolous younger sister.

1898

It occurred to Tzu Hsi, the Dowager Empress of China, that she had been very old for a very long time. She was perfectly aware that many of her retainers referred to her now as “the old Buddha.” As well she knew that a British general had reported to his superiors that she was the only real man he had met in all his time in the Middle Kingdom.

She was born sixty-three years ago, in 1835. Although she was the daughter of a lowly Manchu official, by sixteen her striking beauty had brought her to the attention of the court, and Emperor Hsien Feng had chosen her as a concubine, third class. Whether by luck, as popular belief would have it—or trickery, a fact
known to only a few—she was the first of the concubines to bear the Emperor a son, and so was immediately promoted to the rank of concubine, first class, second only to the Empress herself.

She easily outlived Hsien Feng, the man she openly referred to as “her First Emperor,” who died when he was twenty-six. After his death she manoeuvred the court into naming her Regent until her son, Tung Chih, was of age to take the throne. In 1873, Tung Chih became Emperor, but despite his best efforts to take control of the court, all official business of the Middle Kingdom continued to go directly to his mother. The Dowager Empress governed without so much as a nod of approval from her son, the Emperor. In 1875, two years after Tung Chih became Emperor, the young man suddenly, after a particularly spectacular sexual debauch, came down with a virulent case of smallpox and quickly died.

My only son died,
she mused. Then she added a second thought,
Though who really noticed?

By then the Dowager Empress dominated everything and everybody in the Forbidden City, so she found it simple to have her three-month-old nephew, Kwang Hsu, named as her son's successor to the Heavenly Throne. That allowed her to reign uncontested for another sixteen years—until the boy came of age.

When the boy turned sixteen and took the throne it didn't concern the Dowager Empress even a bit—but then he began to challenge her authority. And now, in 1898, there was this nonsense the young whelp had proclaimed: “A Hundred Days of Reform.” He wanted to include western studies in all Chinese education, adopt a public school system, have elected local assemblies leading to a national parliament, remove the Civil Service examination system and replace it with a western-style
bureaucracy, and some nonsense about reforming the army—and a thousand other ridiculous plans.

“Where did he come up with these strange ideas?” she demanded of her Head Eunuch, Chesu Hoi.

“Perhaps the newspapers, Your Grace.”

“I never permitted him newspapers!” she exclaimed. “Can he read?”

“Indeed, ma'am, and he is both inquisitive and resourceful.”

She harrumphed. “Never should have allowed those tutors to get access to him. Why did you permit such silliness?”

Chesu Hoi bowed his head slightly. He had not allowed any such silliness. The Dowager Empress had been deep in one of her periodic bouts with opium and had signed permissions that had been sent directly to her by the young Emperor.

“A hundred days of
de-
form is more like it,” she snapped. “What's wrong with the old ways? I ask you that?”

Chesu Hoi knew better than to answer rhetorical questions, so he simply smiled.

“Well, what are we going to do about this inanity?”

“What you already requested we do, Your Majesty—undermine, subvert, avoid, and malign all One Hundred Days of Reform.”

She looked at him closely. She didn't remember ordering such a thing, although maybe she had. She'd certainly meant to. “Good,” she said, “very good.” She paused for a moment to scratch the side of her nose. “And how does our plan proceed?” she asked, anxious to sound in control but having trouble finding the right words. Was the opium serpent still in her blood? Finally she resorted to an old, reliable standby command and shouted, “Report!”

“Excellently, Your Majesty. Just as you had predicted, the Mandarin class has refused every suggestion.” Chesu Hoi was hardly surprised by this, since the young Emperor's very first reform was to close down the entire civil service examination system and replace it with a western-style system based upon skill, not the knowledge of literary classics.

The other reforms, having to do with taxing persons of wealth, redistribution of land to peasants from absentee landlords, and taking away the privileges of Mandarins, were easily subverted by the Manchu authorities at every turn. Rumours of anarchists behind the proposed changes—rumours that Chesu Hoi had slipped into his trusty gossip channels in the Forbidden City—simply helped sell the reason for the cancellation of the entire program.

As Chesu Hoi completed his report to the Dowager Empress, she sat back in her satin chair and smiled. She wondered when her next pipe would arrive. Then she thought of her nephew and swore one simple oath: “He will not outlive me. He will
not
.”

Then she looked at her Head Eunuch. He was still talking. He had nice lips. She watched them part and round as they formed words. She liked eunuchs' lips—she always had.

Then she said, “Have you found it yet?”

Chesu Hoi averted his eyes.

“Have you?” she screamed.

He'd hoped she had forgotten about the Narwhal Tusk, as she had about so many other things.

“If you wish to keep what little manhood you have left, I would suggest you find the Tusk before the year is out.”

“And you haven't seen him for how long?”

Mai Bao stared at the police officer.
He must be in his late thirties or early forties
, she thought.
And tallish for a Han Chinese—and clearly attracted to me.
It was his third visit, and she suspected there was more to his questions than seeking information about her ex-lover, the scholar.

“Almost seven months,” she answered.

“And was there anyone with him?”

“Besides myself?”

“Yes, besides you. Were there tradesmen with him?”

“No. We met in private.”

“And was he acting oddly at the time?”

Mai Bao nodded but did not answer. She remembered her last meeting with her scholar.

She had rolled off her birth-marked lover and was sitting on the side of the bed. His interest in actual intercourse had lessened over the years, and now it was almost of no interest to him at all. He would accept other forms of bringing on the clouds and rain from her, but he showed no interest in bringing her to the clouds and rain—and naturally these kinds of lovemaking precluded any possibility of producing a child, let alone the two daughters that she needed.

But Mai Bao was a strong-willed woman, and she was not going to be easily denied her mother's full legacy.

Mai Bao's young scholar rolled over on the bed and stretched a lank arm over her hip. She gently but firmly pushed his arm aside and said, “Sleep.” Without much protest he turned over, hiding his wine-stained cheek from her, and shortly she heard his breath slow and the soft whisper of slumber slip from his lips. For a moment she wondered what had happened to the young, romantic lover he had been. Where his violence had come from. Why he seemed to want to hurt her as she brought on the clouds and rain.

She turned to the police officer and said, “He once mumbled in his sleep, ‘Where are the two barbers?'”

“Two barbers?” the detective asked.

“Yes, that's what he said, Officer, and I haven't seen him since.”

“The man's a fool to have left you.”

Mai Bao looked up into the haunted eyes of the man in front of her. “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

That interview was six weeks ago, and now he was her new lover—hopefully the father of her baby girl—and he awaited her in the back of the Yipin Lou Storytelling Theatre on Shanxi Lu.

As she descended the two steps of her carriage, Mai Bao noted the newspaper headlines on a nearby street kiosk. Another Chinese merchant, the sixth in a month, had been murdered—found in his shop with the characters for “Murdered Collaborator” inked on his forehead. Mao Bao shivered.