The Painter of Shanghai (23 page)

After studying some and sketching more, on most afternoons Yuliang ventures out to explore her new city. In the beginning she walks merely to try to strengthen her feet, which are slowly adjusting to their reknitting bones. Gradually, though, she becomes entranced by the city’s myriad cultures, and soon she’s walking with the determination of an explorer. She wants to see it – all of it. And for the first time in her life, there is no reason to be home by dinner.

She explores from the silvered antiquity of Ocean Street to the glossy offerings of Nanjing Road – which, as Zanhua predicted, twinkle even more brightly after dark. She strolls through coffee-scented alleyways in the French Concession, and the Japanese colony in Hongkou, with its hushed shops smelling of barley and green tea. She
paces the Bund, breathing in its heady scent of gasoline, fish, and sweat-slicked cash. She shades her eyes and watches steamers inch their way out of sight, trailing seagulls like white beads on windblown thread. The sight always moves her for some reason – something she considers one of her own peculiarities, until the day an entire art class arrives to sketch the scene.

The students – young men dressed in dusty robes and paint-splattered shoes – arrange themselves at the base of the bridge, around an older man wearing a cravat and a felt beret. They watch intently as he holds up his pencil, squints, and drops it back down to his page. ‘If you’ll note,’ he says, ‘that small steamer tug to the east takes up no more space than a third of my pencil. And now’ – a brief pause as he drops the pencil again – ‘I calculate it to scale on this paper. A third, gentlemen. No more.’

Continuing to sketch, he adds, ‘There are those, even at the academy, who believe this is too technical a method to use in art. Believe me, it is not. A painting lacking in perspective is a painting lacking in persuasion. Take the time to get size and distance right.’ The students nod and follow, lifting their pencils and sketching in unison like an awkward, silent orchestra.

The academy
, Yuliang thinks. The Shanghai Art Academy. And for some reason, she shivers.

She has passed the school often on her excursions to Bubbling Well Road, sometimes even going out of her way to wander by its gates. She studies the announcement board that stands outside.
Western Painting Lecture Postponed,
said one notice recently.
Life Study to Reschedule Due to Model Cancelation
, said another (
Is she knocked up
? someone had
scrawled beneath). There was also a list of materials for incoming students to obtain: plywood, hide glue, brushes and paints that could be purchased at a store two blocks down. Yuliang copied the shop’s name, meaning to go back and explore it, although in the past weeks this small goal was forgotten.

Now, creeping closer, she peers over the shoulder of one of the students, a strong young man with thick, long hair. He sits stooped, as though apologizing in posture for what Yuliang can tell, even when he is seated, is an unusually tall frame. His wrists and fingers are as strong as a farmer’s. But they hold the pencil with a delicacy that strikes Yuliang as oddly poignant. His big hand curls back and forth across his page, leaving an impressive billow of clouds in its wake.

‘Xudun,’ the teacher calls to him. ‘Draw with your arm, not your fingers. If you focus too tightly it constricts your image.’

The boy lengthens his strokes, deftly capturing a junk that waits just past the dock. As Yuliang watches, he embellishes the day’s weather, adding a black-bellied thun-derhead (nowhere on the true horizon) and an underlying shadow of approaching rainfall. Apparently unhappy with this last bit, he bends down for his eraser. Then his eyes catch Yuliang’s, and widen slightly. He smiles a large, easy smile.

The boy seated next to him sees his face and looks up as well. ‘Hey, sister,’ he calls. ‘Come closer. One thing we always need here is a model!’

His friend elbows him hard enough to dislodge his dusty fedora. ‘Bastard,’ he says affably. ‘Clamp it.’

Yuliang colors. There is little doubt as to the boy’s meaning: editorial sections are still seething over the Shanghai Art Academy’s continued use of nudes. Vocabulary permitting, Yuliang has followed the debate as intently as she does any news about the school, which has fascinated her ever since Zanhua first mentioned its existence. She has even fantasized sometimes about walking through those green French doors, along with the fashionably bohemian students she sees chatting and smoking outside. But never, obviously, to take her clothes off for them.

They’re all looking at her now, twenty blank male gazes. Yuliang’s throat tightens. In her mind’s distance she hears a thick voice:
Smile! Smile!

But Yuliang doesn’t smile. What she does is spit – something she’s rarely done before, and certainly not in front of a group of men. The globule flies from her lips and lands with a small splat near the iron railing. She stares at it for a moment, in disbelief and self-horror.

Then, heart pounding, she turns on her heel and walks as quickly as her beaten feet will permit. Away from the men with their pencils and the departing steamships and gulls. Toward the gleaming safety of the nearest shopping street.

19

Zanhua arrives, at last, in March. Over the weeklong span of his visit, Yuliang lets him lead her through the international settlement, lecturing her on trade policy and extraterritoriality. They dine to the music of a flower-bedecked choir billed as the ‘best Hawaiian singers who ever left the islands.’ At night they delve deeper into memory and skin.

On their last day together, Zanhua takes Yuliang to one of the cinema houses that have sprung up around the city in the past two years. The film is American –
The Hazards of Helen.
Its blond heroine proceeds from feat to death-defying feat – commandeering a motorcycle, foiling a train robbery, and finally leaping lithely from a bridge. Not to kill herself (as a Chinese heroine would do) but to save the baby in her arms. Each act is lauded by the cinema’s narrator: ‘The hero sees Helen! He too rushes onto the bridge. Can he possibly reach her and the child before the train comes?’

Unlike some in the audience, Yuliang doesn’t leap to her feet in protest when the last reel runs to its end. But she too feels strangely desolate; as though the velvet curtains have closed not just on Helen’s life, but on her own.

She finds herself unusually quiet, both at dinner and later on. Even when she and Zanhua make love she feels distant; as if part of her has remained in the gray America
of the screen. Afterward, Zanhua pulls away and leans over her, staring down searchingly.

‘What’s in your head?’ Yuliang asks him half teasing.

He doesn’t smile back. ‘I’m just wondering whether this… arrangement was a wise one. Wondering if there would be some better place for you elsewhere.’

‘I won’t stay in one of those women’s lodges. They’re like – prisons,’ she says (though she almost said,
like the Hall
).

‘I’m thinking of somewhere else. Where you wouldn’t be alone so much.’

‘I
like
being alone,’ Yuliang says, before realizing how it sounds. ‘That is – I miss you. Certainly. Terribly. But I – I fill the time.’

‘That,’ he says, ‘is partly what worries me.’ His lips tighten. ‘This is a dangerous city, little Yu. There are many ways in which a young girl could be pulled into trouble. I’m wondering if we should perhaps move you back home.’

‘To Wuhu?’ she asks carefully.

If he hears her ambivalence, he doesn’t acknowledge it. He simply looks at her and says, ‘No. To Tongcheng.’

‘With… your wife.’

He nods. ‘That way I wouldn’t have to divide my time. I’d actually see more of you. Both.’

A short silence follows. Closing her eyes, Yuliang tries to picture it: scurrying out after his first wife, carrying a parasol to protect the flawless skin she’d seen in the matchmaker’s picture. But the worst by far would be nighttime. Yuliang imagines such a life, sleeping not in a master bedroom but in a smaller room off the same hall.
She imagines lying there alone, waiting for her lord’s footsteps. Then, perhaps, hearing them make their way not to her door but past it.

‘I can’t do that,’ she says softly.

‘Don’t you want to be with me? With your husband?’

‘Yes. But…’

‘But what?’

She feels his eyes on her, still deep in thought. After a moment he sighs and rolls onto his back. ‘If you only knew how you confuse me.’

She opens her own eyes. ‘How?’

‘Everything I’ve ever wanted in a marriage, I’ve found with you. No – more. I can talk with you openly, without fear or pretense. I am more myself with you than I’ve ever been with a woman. At times I believe that you are like me in that. That we’re the same. But then…’

Yuliang finds herself holding her breath. At last he continues. ‘You remember the city I told you of, in Italy? The one covered by the volcano centuries ago? Sometimes – tonight, for instance – you feel less like my wife than one of the bodies they’ve found. I feel as if I must chisel through layers of rock to reach you.’

Yuliang bites her lower lip. She remembers talking about this city, seeing pictures of the bodies that had been uncovered. The faceless forms of women and children who’d been caught by death, only to be redelivered into the world centuries later – as contorted white ghosts. She’d been both repelled and intrigued by how these sad sculptures had been created: the scientists had drilled through the hardened rock, filled the hole with plaster of Paris. The casts worked because the bodies themselves
had long been vaporized by heat and time: they existed only because of that wrenching, tragic emptiness.

‘Are you saying I’m empty?’ she asks now, softly. She is surprised at just how much the thought hurts her.

‘Not empty. Just… distant. Sealed off from me sometimes. And when I feel this, I feel unspeakably lonely.’

For an instant she can’t respond; she is too overcome by guilt. For how could she let him feel this, after all he’s done? ‘I’m not sealed off. Not from you, at least. You know me better than anyone.’ Yuliang curls herself around his stiff form. Putting her lips close to his ear, she adds, almost without thinking about it, ‘And I don’t have to be empty.’

He looks at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We could have a child. A son. For you.’

She doesn’t know why she says it – she certainly hasn’t been thinking of childbearing. In fact, unbeknown to him, she’s continued the few preventative practices she can manage outside the Hall. She doesn’t dare ask Ahying to find her tadpoles. But she still uses coins tucked into secret places, and furtive, heavily salted douchings. She marks the bated-breath wait for blood every month. Not as good wives do, in hope, but in anxiety.

And yet at this moment, seeing his misery, having him all but hand her his heart, Yuliang vows she will be better. She reminds herself again that he deserves it: if not the dozen sons that the old blessing prescribes, at least one. Just one. She knows it is something he wants. And if in her own mind a spark of doubt flickers (
What about what
I
want?
), she quickly suppresses it, kissing his nose, his chin, his ear. Reveling in the strange sensation of, for once, giving him something of value too.

20

A year after Yuan Shikai dies (from heartbreak, some say, over the collapse of his imperial dreams), a northern warlord charges into the Forbidden Palace and reinstates Puyi, the boy emperor, on the throne.

The news sends shock waves through Shanghai: special editions materialize on every newsstand, in Chinese, French, Russian, German, English, Yiddish. Students take to the streets with mixed déjà vu and disgust. On Ocean Street, the neighborhood grandmothers smoke their pipes and debate the new monarchy, while the
New Youth
staff scrambles a crisis issue to press. Setting out on her daily walk one day, Yuliang almost bumps into a tall young man bustling past with a carton of cartoon-embossed leaflets, several of which slide off the top as he stops short. Looking up, she recognizes the boy she’d watched at the academy’s sketching outing to the Bund.

Yuliang blanches. But the boy just smiles at her. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, and steps back.

Yuliang kneels to gather the dropped leaflets, hoping desperately he hasn’t identified her. But as she stands to hand them back, his large eyes light up. ‘Say,’ he says, in his deep, sleepy voice. ‘You’re that girl from the Bund – I
thought
I’d seen you before.’

‘I…’ On top of being one of the few that has ever seen her hawk like a fisherwoman at the market, he has
to be the tallest man she’s ever met. Looking up at him requires her to tilt her head back, almost uncomfortably.

‘I must apologize for that day,’ she begins.

‘No.
I
should apologize,’ he interrupts. ‘My friend was unpardonably rude. I’m afraid he doesn’t see many pretty girls at the academy.’

Not according to the papers
, she thinks, recalling the latest anti-nude essay to appear in the
Shenbao
’s editorials. But what she says is, ‘Don’t you go to the academy?’

‘I did. And I still tag along for the
plein air
sessions sometimes. But I’ve decided to put my efforts into more important causes.’

‘What’s more important than art?’

The question comes out unprompted. Yuliang drops her eyes in embarrassment. The boy’s heavy brows lift in surprise. Then he gives another grin. ‘That’s a very good question,’ he says. ‘Here’s another I’ve been thinking about: what, in the end,
is
art?’

Yuliang stares back for a moment. Then, despite herself, she laughs.

A call comes from the
New Youth
office: ‘Hey, Lao Xing! Are you here to work or to impress girls?’

‘Your friends here aren’t much more polite than those at the academy,’ she notes.

‘I suppose not. But manners don’t get you far in politics. Yesterday’s news more than proves that, doesn’t it?’ Still smiling, he turns away. Then he turns back again. ‘Wait. I still don’t know your name.’