The Painter of Shanghai (5 page)

‘Good,’ says Master Gao. He lets his fingers trace her ear. Then, abruptly, he steps away, throwing two coins on the table. ‘I’ll send a runner so he’ll know to expect your visit.’

After he leaves, her uncle sits back down heavily.
‘Jiujiu?’
Xiuqing asks quaveringly.

He stares into his cup. ‘Perhaps,’ he murmurs, ‘we should get started.’

He’s not speaking to her. But when Zheng
niangyi
puts a gnarled hand on Xiuqing’s shoulder, he says sternly, ‘Cooperate, niece.’

‘Obey your uncle,’ the woman caws as Xiuqing twitches herself free.

Wu Ding turns his back. He studies the sole piece of wall art, a strange painting done entirely in iron. Its blunt lines portray a man fishing in a stream. The woman drops to her knees with a grunt, as though preparing to perform the kowtow. Xiuqing fights back an unplanned giggle, though she doesn’t find it especially funny. The old fingers probe through Xiuqing’s flimsy shoes, measuring length and width. They insert themselves into the peachlike clefts, testing for depth and tightness. When she is finished, she clambers to her own big feet and unties Xiuqing’s shirtwaist. Xiuqing feels her hands again, cold this time, and hard, on her belly, her neck, her arms. She yanks her shirt back down. ‘Stop. Stop that!’

Zheng
niangyi
pauses. She looks at Wu Ding’s fixed back. Then she cuffs Xiuqing on the side of her head. Hard. ‘Stay put.’ She takes the soft flesh of the girl’s forearm and twists it like a key in a lock. ‘There’s nothing else for it – you’ll just have to endure. Try to think of something else.’

Xiuqing’s helplessness wells up from somewhere deep inside her. Her breath slows with the sheer rush of it. Her arms and lips are numb; the place where the blow landed tingles. She feels leathery fingerpads brush her neck and nipples.
Something else.
Feels the nipples harden like two copper coins.
Think. Something else. Think.
She searches for something to cling to, some idea or image
that will help, make it stop. She settles on flesh, its various tones and hues. The way it changes with touch. A slap mark glows red at first but fades slowly to peach-pink. Then to nothing at all. Pinches and punches, which she’s seen on Lina (her father beats her sometimes), darken the skin. They leave purple marks but gradually lighten into streaking blues, reds, yellows. They can be covered, Lina has shown her, by a mixture made up carefully at the apothecary’s. The ingredients are talcum powder and grease and rouge.

Oh, Lina.

Her uncle stretches a lazy finger out and touches the little iron man’s iron fishing rod.

‘Come,’ the woman says. ‘We’ll finish upstairs.’

They stand in Xiuqing’s rented room before the bamboo bed, the half-sorted clothes on top of it. The things that need washing lie heaped to the left. The still-clean things are folded flat on the right. The red shoes sit on top of the latter pile, where Xiuqing put them before breakfast. The catalogues are stacked neatly on the small, low table.

The woman picks up the shoes, turns them over. She leafs briefly through one of the catalogues. She looks at Xiuqing, puzzled. Then she shrugs and sweeps everything off the bed, onto the floor in a heap. Her good eye finds Xiuqing in the mirror. ‘Tell me, child,’ she says, pushing back her sleeves, ‘your uncle says you have yet to light the big candles. Is that true? I’ve seen enough opium-eaters in my time to know. I’ll bet this one lies every hour.’

Mirror Girl just stares back, as expressionless as a girl
in a poster. Xiuqing, in fact, studies the framed reflection as though she were merely considering a poster. Perhaps an advertisement for youth cream: an old woman and a young one. The way time molds our faces.

‘Your melon,’ the woman prompts. ‘He says it hasn’t been broken yet.’

Xiuqing’s mind presents melon: wet yellow-green flesh. Shiny, eye-shaped black seeds. Her uncle, in another of his peculiarities, hates the fruit. He says it takes too much work to eat.

‘
Aiyaa
,’ groans the woman. ‘Are you as empty-headed as a melon as well?’

She turns toward Xiuqing, positions her. Ungently, she pushes her down to the bed. She checks Xiuqing’s feet again, clucking in disapproval. Then she unties Xiuqing’s trousers and yanks them down, down around her little ankles.

Xiuqing feels the woman’s hands fumbling at her thighs. She registers air from the window washing her skin.
I will need to remember this,
she thinks numbly.
I’ll need to tell them everything. When they come for me.
And yet, who will come for her? Lina? Her mother’s hungry ghost? The fiancé she’d imagined a lifetime earlier? Besides, what’s happening isn’t something she’ll ever have words for. It will simply be shame – the head-splitting shame of it.

It’s the shame that makes her throw back her head back and call: ‘Uncle! Please!
Jiujiu!
’ And then: ‘Mama!’

The scream rings through the stillness; a child’s voice, cracked and broken. A chair shifts abruptly against a floor somewhere. There is no further response.

∗

Ages later, it seems, the fingers pull stickily out. Xiuqing hears steps, then splashing from the washbasin. The woman’s voice seems to travel from some faraway point: ‘All’s in order. I’ll go have him draw up the papers.’ Her footsteps pad heavily off down the hallway.

Two images float past: of sparrows not walking, of Mirror Girl lying here on the bed. In her head the girl lies still, barely breathing. Her pulse has slowed to almost the same still pace as that of the catalogue ladies, staring blithely at the ceiling.

When Xiuqing finally returns downstairs Wu Ding sits at the breakfast table, just as he did when she first came down. Now, however, it’s Zheng
niangyi
who sits across from him, face-to-face. Like a man. The papers they both hold are slightly wet; her uncle has just copied them out with his pen. The woman squints at her version with the tense overfocus Xiuqing quickly recognizes as illiteracy. Wu Ding reads:

The sale being effected, she can be taken away, her name
changed, and when she is grown up she shall abide by the will of
the purchaser who may make use of her for any purpose he
pleases, whether the same be respectable or otherwise. In the case
of disobedience, she may be disposed of without hindrance. By
this consignment her relations have yielded up all interest in her,
and intercourse between her and her relations will cease forever
and she shall not be redeemed. In the case of death, which is
mutually to be regarded as the order of heaven, no complaints
are to be preferred.

A shuffling pause.

‘What was that part about relatives?’ Zheng
niangyi
asks.

‘I have a grandmother,’ Xiuqing announces abruptly. She is speaking loudly, in the same little-girl voice that emerged from her, unsummoned, upstairs. ‘I have a mother, too. Back home, in Yuangzhou. They’ll both be very angry –’

‘Hush!’
roars her uncle, and pounds the table.

Xiuqing hushes.

Slowly, as though it takes tremendous effort, her uncle relaxes each finger.

‘I,’ he says, ‘am her last living relative.’ When the woman looks dubious, he adds, ‘My mother died seven years ago. My sister a year later.’ He puts down the papers, neatens them with his fingers. Aligns the corners and edges.

‘How did they die?’ the broker asks suspiciously.

‘My mother was simply old. My sister died of disease with the blossoms. There was another sister, but she died as a child. When this one was still a baby.’

‘How?’

‘Of the water sickness.’

‘Water,’ repeats the innkeeper reflectively. ‘And the father?’

‘Threw himself into the river when this one was two.’ He says it flatly, as though the words mean nothing to him. ‘They say he’d lost all his money.’

‘And she is how old, you said?’

‘Fourteen.’ He smiles, a little sadly. ‘Year of the boar. Which, as you know, means she’ll never stray too far from home.’

‘But is she stubborn?’

Xiuqing stares at him beseechingly. ‘Not at all,’ he says, meeting her eyes directly for the first time this morning. ‘She is strong, but like bamboo. She’ll bend if the wind forces her to. But she will not break.’

He holds her gaze a moment longer. Then he clears his throat and looks away.

The next time the old woman gives Xiuqing a blow, Xiuqing isn’t thinking about the colors of her skin. She is thinking about her feet, how they must be red with blood now. She has never, ever walked this far before.

The broker hits her again. ‘Hurry up. Are you a girl or a log with legs?’ The hitting hurts, yet there’s something oddly affectionate, almost half-pat, to it. As though they share some sort of camaraderie.
We’ll make it
, the light blows seem to say.
We’ve been through a hard time together.
Xiuqing forces herself to walk faster, if only to avoid the woman’s touch.

‘You know,’ her captor says, scurrying now to keep up, ‘you are actually very lucky. My mother died too. I was around your age.’ Her withered lips purse around her little silver pipe, making small kissing sounds as she sucks out smoke. ‘I got a good-for-nothing husband. An opium-eater, like your uncle. He didn’t talk or dress as fancily. But they are all the same, such men.’

Xiuqing thinks of her
jiujiu
waving gaily from the door at the inn. Reciting – as Xiuqing’s innards turned to stone – the final stanza of his steamboat verse:

Poor waters of home. I know how it feels:
Ten thousand miles of farewell on this boat…

‘As for me,’ the woman is continuing, ‘I couldn’t keep anything in the house. He sold my pots, my sewing things. He even sold my daughters – all but the baby. When that money ran out he leased me to Old Man Cao. For six years I cleaned his dog-fart kitchen by day, slept with the old prick by night. My husband, he spent three years on his back in a better state.’ She spits spitefully.

Xiuqing looks up, curious despite herself. ‘What happened then?’

‘My husband died. Old Man Cao sent me back but kept my son. I came home to a daughter who didn’t know me.’ Her face creases, at first in pain, then into something that almost looks like a pride.
See,
it seems to say,
I’ve endured.

The streets have thickened with activity as they walk. Merchants hustle by, wheeling barrows of wheat flour, kerosene. A blacksmith with a portable forge almost runs Xiuqing over, his face a black smudge of soot and sweat. The forge’s breath is like dragon’s fire on her neck, doubly hot in the midsummer swelter. Xiuqing welcomes it as though it could burn the morning’s filth right off her. She thinks of leaping on the man’s cart, and pressing herself hard against his anvil.

‘What you’re doing will be better,’ the woman is saying. ‘And at least you’ll get a variety of men. Not just one old prick over and over.’

‘They have
men
? Doing the embroidery?’

The
niangyi
looks at Xiuqing as though she’s just offered up a bad joke. ‘He didn’t tell you anything, did he?’

‘He did,’ Xiuqing says, defensive again. ‘He told me about manifest destiny. And about how a perfect man commands all light, and influence, and – and all fate.’

The verse rolls from her tongue, as elegant and opaque as anything Wu Ding ever recited. And for a moment, as the older woman squints in incomprehension, Xiuqing feels she has won something. But triumph dissipates with Zheng
niangyi
’s next words: ‘My little seamstress. Let me tell you something. This house is all about men and their needles. And they won’t be poking them into your fine wedding shoes, either.’ She chuckles. ‘Or at least, not just into the shoes… But you’ll find out for yourself soon enough.’ She shades her eyes. ‘You see that green roof? That’s it. That’s the Hall of Eternal Splendor.’

Xiuqing looks. What she sees is somewhat short of splendid: a two-story house, its shutters painted a garish jade. Its doorway is crowded with elaborate signs, sculptures, and hangings, sprawling latticework, gold and red paint. Slips of paper hang on cords over the door, the print on them thick and stylized, the words winking in and out of view in the breeze.

As Xiuqing gazes, a moment comes to her unbidden: not just the sight, but the sounds and smell of summer. It was a morning two years back, maybe three. Hot and white like this one, the crickets sawing out a rasping chorus. She’d been scouring the courtyard jasmine trees for beetles with iridescent shells. She captured close to a dozen and then tried something she’d once heard of: tying linen threads around the insects’ hairy hind legs, flagging the threads with slips of paper, and adding porcelain
shards from a broken teacup for ballast. Then she released them on their leashes.

Weighed down by the shards, marked by fluttering confetti, the beetles flew in circles around her. She’d been thrilled with herself, thrilled with her power. She could make blizzards, she thought. Put nature on a leash… But by the third day all the beetles were dead. They lay like luminous beads on the dirt, their little legs crabbed and still. Xiuqing buried them in a mass grave in the back courtyard.

They reach the fancy door. Woman Zheng raps on it sharply. It opens. ‘It’s me,’ the woman says. ‘I’ve brought a harbor lily. A nice one this time. Well-shaped nose and chin. Fine hands.’ She doesn’t, Xiuqing notes, mention the feet.

The manservant looks her up and down without apparent interest. His hair looks like it’s been cut with a knife.

‘Welcome,’ he says.

PART THREE
The Hall

Don woman’s skirt and hairpin
Bright purple flowers open
Heart takes fire
Peony flowers open
Study stringed instruments, singing ah!

Chinese folk song