The Painter of Shanghai (2 page)

‘My dear,’ Yuliang says, ‘I have
work.
’

‘I’m sorry. I just…’ The girl’s voice is deferential but assured. She seems to know Yuliang will hear her out. Sighing, Yuliang sits back and waits, her eyes on the building across the street.

‘Since we met last week,’ Leanne begins quietly, ‘I’ve been feeling like it was more than… coincidence. The way you found me.’

‘You mean destiny.’

Yuliang says it wryly enough that the girl looks at her quickly. ‘Perhaps. Yes.’

You have much to learn
, Yuliang thinks to herself. But what she says is, ‘I didn’t find
you
, my dear. I simply saw a pretty face.’ Though what had stopped her, as Leanne emerged from a Quai de Bercy cake shop, her egg tart in hand and warm sweet smells uncoiling in her path, wasn’t so much the girl’s classic features – the wide red mouth, the sweeping brow. It was a sense that something elusive and yet brittle underscored them – an emotional veneer, left by sorrow or hardship.

‘At the girls’ school back home,’ Leanne is continuing (so Hanoi is still home), ‘we studied art. I loved it.’ She takes a breath. ‘I suppose that part of me had always hoped that someday –’

‘You want to paint,’ Yuliang interjects.

Leanne colors. ‘I’ve wanted to. I just haven’t known where to start.’ She plays with her jade bracelet, the one accessory she hasn’t removed today. ‘I can’t pay much. But I’ll model for free. I can help with washing, too.’

Her hope is raw enough to make Yuliang blanch. Tightening her lips, she turns back to the window. The tenement is a brick glow in evening lamplight. She watches a window brighten as a light within is switched on. A small silhouette – child? dog? – darkens the pane. Then vanishes.

It must seem so easy, just to shift positions. Cross the
studio, pick up a brush. And
voilà
, another Valadon. Unsurprisingly, Leanne is not the first model to ask this of her. They have no idea, these girls, of the pain – real pain – involved. The truth is that Yuliang’s purse may be in vogue but her work certainly isn’t. People don’t want girls and flowers right now. They want splashes and gashes. Inkblot tests. Fingerpaints… What was it that dealer from the avenue Montaigne said? ‘Our clients want work that goes beyond the figurative. They want’ – and this with a straight face – ‘metaphorical multivalence. Humor. Puns on form. You understand?’

In fact, Yuliang did not. In fact, she still doesn’t. The very thought of that term (she couldn’t find it in any of her six dictionaries) makes her want to laugh. But she understands one thing: If
multivalence de metaphor
is what is selling, she certainly can’t afford to offer lessons at a discount. Especially not to a beginner.

What she hears herself say as Leanne shrugs on her coat is, ‘You have drawings? Bring them next time.’

The girl’s eyes widen. ‘Thank you, madame.’

‘I haven’t said yes yet,’ Yuliang lies crisply, and turns away a second time. ‘Please don’t let the cat out,’ she adds to the mirror. ‘He’s something of a Houdini.’

A muffled
thunk
as the cat is tossed to a chair. Then – at last! – the door shuts. The high heels tap away down the stairs.

Still unsettled for some reason, Yuliang pours herself a glass of Bordeaux. She pulls out a cigarette, lights it.
I’m still too soft
, she thinks, exhaling haze over her lake.
It’s why I’m where I am: barely covering the cat food.
Lifting her enameled cup, she studies the painted phoenix that
glowers (faded now, but still proud) from its side. Then she studies her own hand. The gold band on her heart finger is scratched and tarnished. A mesh of blue veins and wrinkles stretches from cuticles to wrist: age is tightening its net. When the cat lands in her lap and begins kneading her leg, small needles of discomfort prickle through her thin skirt. The pain, like a winter draft, brings her back to herself. She drinks some more, strokes the cat’s white back. ‘You’re spoiled,’ she reprimands it, in Chinese. ‘You have had a very easy life. Do you know that? Do you, Master Cat?’

He slits his eyes sleepily. She follows his slow gaze to the picture. ‘I really should just start over,’ she tells him.

But strangely – and perhaps it is only the wine’s impact – her painting seems more redeemable. The sky at least works. Leanne’s apple-plump breasts are nice, too. And that sad, small smile that says nothing. Little Mona Lisa in Heibei. Yuliang thinks of the burnlike wound she saw on the girl’s back. A rash? A tryst? A battle with a masked attacker? She’s curious about this French Chinese girl from Indochina. Perhaps that’s why she agreed. If Leanne does end up joining her students (and she will, why deny it?), they’ll have a session. They’ll drink cheap
vin de table
, discuss what brought them here. Yuliang does it with all her new recruits. It seems only fair, since most come as much for the story as for the skill. What they want is a lusty fable: bordellos, brutish men, and, at the end, the magic brush that painted her escape, the way Liang’s did in the old story. Yuliang doesn’t give them that, of course. She paints around the dangerous parts of her past, ending
up with a dozen versions that tell only what is most important. She’s wise enough by now to know that history – especially her history – sells. And she needs the publicity. Having sworn off the dealers.

Outside, bells chime again. Just once: six-fifteen. A door slams; she hears the tread of Italian shoes on the stairwell. Yuliang looks longingly at her inkstone. Then she sighs.
I need the money,
she reminds herself.

Heaving herself to her feet, she checks her hair in the mirror, wipes an ultramarine paint fleck from her otherwise unpainted cheek. She thinks ahead to tomorrow, a day alone with her ladies and her lake. A light rain on the shutters further lifts her spirits. Yuliang loves painting in rain, loves how the rain makes the world feel close and safe. She’ll grind new ink to thicken Leanne’s hair, make grasstrokes glisten with the dawn. When it is done, she’ll triumphantly place her name. In Chinese:

Pan-Yu-Liang

That the buyer, if she finds one, probably won’t be able to read it means little. Yuliang doesn’t sign for him. She signs for herself, to bind her work to her. To tattoo it with a message: she has won.

PART TWO
The Journey

My body is white; my fate, softly rounded
Rising and sinking like mountains in streams.

Whatever way hands may shape me,
At center my heart is red and true.

Ho Xuan Huong

(an eighteenth-century Vietnamese concubine)

1. Zhenjiang, 1913

At noon she hears her uncle’s voice, buoyant, backed by velvet rain-patter:

Flute and drum keep time with the rover’s song
Amidst revel and feasting, sad thoughts come…

The singing stops as he addresses the cat: ‘Hello, Turtle! Have you eaten yet?’ Xiuqing pictures him stooping, stroking. His thin fingers limp on the arched black back; his wan face filled with wonder, even though he’s had the cat for seven years now – a year longer than he’s had Xiuqing. Still, he greets them both the same way. As though they are treats unexpectedly encountered in the pantry.

Cat patted, her
jiujiu
resumes his song. He’s back later today than usual, Xiuqing realizes. Usually he leaves the little house at dusk and returns with the pale seep of sunrise. Xiuqing senses rather than hears these returns: the heavy vibration of his step; the cloying whiff of smoke-soaked clothes as he passes her door. The wall between them quavering slightly as he drops to his rickety bed.

Sometime after that, she’ll sit, then rise. Creep out to see what’s missing.

What’s missing
: it used to be things of scant consequence, things only Lina, their one young serving girl, would miss. The kitchen’s extra ladle, a rice pot. In the past year,
though, as Wu Ding’s visits to the smoke houses near the All Heaven Temple have increased, it’s become items of more value. The hanging scroll of Heaven and Earth, which Xiuqing would stand and stare at for hours in those first bleak days after she was brought here (wondering,
How do black brushstrokes become the Earth? How is an ink wash Heaven
?). The little pig they’d been fattening in the courtyard disappeared too, right ahead of the New Year’s feast. And yesterday, Xiuqing found, even rice was missing: on her last trip to the storeroom there were three empty jars, mouths gaping. Xiuqing asked Lina about it. Lina said she didn’t know. But her eyes shifted a little, oblique and anxious. Xiuqing knew what the serving girl must be thinking: when rice is carried off in the night, it’s a sure sign that a house is headed for trouble.

‘Little Xiu,’ she hears now, in his sleepy, singsong tenor.

‘Yes.’ She puts down the doll that she’d been holding on her bent knees and giving a little ride to. The doll falls onto its back and stares blandly at the rooftop tiles. Its face is a dried-out pomelo rind her uncle carved two years ago, for Xiuqing’s twelfth birthday. Its dress is Xiuqing’s mother’s apron, wrapped twice and tightly tied. The apron smells like her mother did, of rice water, ash, and cedar. At least, Xiuqing thinks she can smell these things as she hugs the little toy each night in bed. She also thinks sometimes she hears her mother’s voice, although in truth she barely recalls now what it sounded like. Still, she wills herself to hear it in the presleep daze before dreams: mama. Singing her name softly:
‘Xiuqing.’

The courtyard stones are slick and silvered with the
rain. Xiuqing picks her way over them carefully. Her uncle sits beneath an awning, the cat a plush mound in his lap. Gray half-moons border his eyes. He straightens the spectacles he sometimes lets her try on (worn for show; their lenses are clear glass). ‘How are you?’ he cries, beaming. ‘What’s for dinner?’

‘I thought river butterfish in creamy sauce. And some cabbage rolls.’
And small portions of rice
, Xiuqing adds silently. She doesn’t ask where he’s been. She knows he’d only lie anyway. He lies to her often, just as he leaves her often. As long as he comes back, she doesn’t mind.

‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘I’m famished.’ Which is actually another lie: except for those few times he has tried to shake his smoking habit, Wu Ding eats with a sparrow’s stomach. But he likes it when Xiuqing and Lina cook as though for company. He likes the look and smell of a full table.

‘I brought you something,’ he adds, and reaches below his chair.

Xiuqing takes the gift and sits on the ground to open it. She unwinds the dingy string. Inside the brown paper is a stack of Western catalogues. Their covers feature curvaceous, flush-cheeked
yangguizi
– white-ghost women – in Western clothes.

‘New republic,’ her uncle says, beaming, ‘new look. This is what modern girls will start to wear now.’ A self-declared intellectual despite his artisan background, he considers himself an authority on both the old and the new China. ‘I found them at the mission. I know how you like pretty pictures. You can look at them on our journey.’

‘Journey?’ Xiuqing looks up. She doesn’t go out much. Aside from the physical discomfort of walking on her folded feet, her mother believed that proper women remain indoors. And since bringing her here, Wu Ding, for all his talk of modern girls, has more or less abided by his sister’s wishes. He hired Lina to teach Xiuqing cooking and household skills and to take her to a neighbor’s house to embroider. Other than these brief trips, though, Xiuqing has left her uncle’s little house exactly twelve times: five festivals, three operas, and four New Year’s trips to the Zhenfeng Pagoda. Plus one surreptitious, teetering trip up the street, just to prove she could do it; though as a boar by birth, Xiuqing knows she’s destined to stay close to home.

Darting down the street after dark is one thing, however. Taking a journey is quite another. The only trip she’s really taken was the three-day sail here from Yangzhou after her mama’s funeral. All she recalls are her own white mourning clothes, slowly growing gray with soot. ‘What… what about Lina?’ she asks now with a quaver. ‘What about the housekeeping?’

‘Don’t worry about these things, little Xiu. Your life is about to change.’ He lets the words linger, pleased by their prescience. Then he breaks into song again: ‘ “All is quiet. The moon lingers, and the emerald screen hangs low…”’ He pauses, quirks a brow.

‘Li Qingzhao?’ It’s a little game they have: he recites, she identifies. Modern girls, her
jiujiu
says, should have a grasp of the classics.

‘Right!’ He beams. ‘And she was…’
‘A
ci
poetess, of the Song, Dynasty.’

‘Not just
a
poetess, little Xiu. One of the best our nation has ever seen, though many dismiss her poems as women’s work. She lost everything at one point – her husband, home, wealth. But her misfortune didn’t break her. She bent, like bamboo. She turned her grief into verse so pure and true that nearly a thousand years later she is still revered…’ He drifts off for a moment, staring at his knobby knuckles. Then he pulls out a cracked pocket watch. ‘We need to leave,’ he adds, ‘in just about… oh, seventeen hours.’ He snaps the watch shut, an emphatic
snick.
‘Why don’t you go pack?’