The Painter of Shanghai (8 page)

In ‘love’ classes, the girls pull the pleasure beads strung on a stained silk cord through their fists. They study pictures in the seventeenth-century classic
Gold Plum Vase, or the Adventurous History of His Men and His Six Wives
, and puzzle over little statues of people portrayed at various intersects. The books are Godmother’s, the statues brought by the Taoist nun who teaches them about bedding matters. The girls drone the names of the positions like insects in summer: Dragon Turning. Tiger Slinking. The Rabbit Nibbling the Hare. ‘In Cicada Clinging,’ the nun instructs, ‘the woman lies on her stomach. The man stands behind her. He pulls her hips right into his. His jade stem is plunged so deeply within that it isn’t visible at all.’

‘If it’s Feng Yitmien’s jade stem,’ Suyin whispers to Yuliang, ‘then it’s barely visible to begin with.’ Feng Yitmien is a tea vendor who visits Mingmei. His hands and feet are as dainty as a woman’s.

‘Ideally,’ the nun continues frowning, ‘the man thrusts fifty-four times. Fifty-four brings mutual pleasure.’

Godmother, who has poked her head in to supervise, objects. ‘If he wants to push two thousand times, so be it,’ she says. ‘So long as you finish the job.’

It is one of her most frequent injunctions: no matter
how a job goes, you must finish. And it isn’t just advice. Those who don’t finish, who don’t have an excuse – and for Godmother, only bloodshed is an excuse – are beaten. Often (ironically) until they bleed.

In the evenings Suyin and Yuliang sometimes go on call with older girls. Their first job is to take the card and the required deposit from the runner bearing them. The deposit is generally fifteen percent of a night’s total, which can vary, depending on how elaborate the client’s demands are. The card comes originally from the girl herself, who will have left stacks of them at restaurants or with favored clients. On the front is the girl’s name and the Hall’s address. On the back the client will have filled in the location the girl is being summoned to: the opera, a banquet, a party for a birthday or a business achievement. Godmother will read them:
Zao Tong requests Lirong’s honorable presence at the Jade Garden Restaurant, the back courtyard. Hu Zinyang aks Dai to Yuan Shikai Hall.
The madam will carefully count out the deposit, mark it down, and give it and the card back to Yuliang or Suyin. The girls will then help the girl on call dress and powder, and then climb into one of the Hall’s two sedan chairs. Whichever of the virgins has been chosen to go along will follow her on the manservant’s shoulders.

On these nights, her feet interlocking like little charms under the manservant’s chin, her hands clutching his rough-cut, greasy hair, Yuliang snatches glimpses of life beyond the Hall walls. She sees mostly men, jostling their way through the streets, coming home from work, going to dinners or meetings. Occasionally she’ll see foreigners from one of the churches: pasty, large-limbed people in
dark clothing. One woman outside the foreign settlement has hair the color and texture of stiff wet straw, bunched awkwardly on the back of her head. A little girl with the woman has locks of almost the same color. They flow like a tangled mane down her back. The girl says something to her mother as Yuliang and the man pass. Her voice hisses like a little snake’s. Yuliang, intrigued by words that sound and seem so very different from her own, leans over enough to throw off the manservant’s balance.

Once at the event, Yuliang waters the older girl’s wine cup so she doesn’t get too tipsy as she talks and flirts. She keeps track of call-cards and is careful to keep them in order. She’s under strict instructions not to leave the manservant’s sight; Godmother doesn’t want her virgins ‘mingling’ or running off. So the man follows Yuliang everywhere, even on outhouse trips. He stands guard while she sits, hotly shamed, trying vainly to pass water without splashing.

Despite such humiliations, however, such nights feel like tiny escapes. Sometimes Yuliang even imagines slipping away unnoticed, off the man’s shoulders, away from the room. Cloakless, breathless, racing down the street despite her bound feet. Perhaps someone would help her. Or perhaps she’d just slip onto a houseboat docked by the shore. On the long journey down the gloomy, cowshit-brown river, she could show herself to the boat’s owners. They would be a real, proper family. A real mother, not a Godmother. A real father, not an uncle. Maybe even a little baby; Yuliang would love to play with a baby! She would appear like a genie to embroider tiny clothes and caps. She’d cook southern specialties she would magically
have mastered: fish-head casserole, clay-pot rice. She’d win the surprised family right over.
You’ve made our lives so much better,
the mother would say.
Please come home with us. Become our eldest daughter.

And Yuliang would. She’d sleep with the baby and the mother like a kitten in a snug litter. Safe from men. Blissful in the knowledge that the next day would start at six in the morning, and not six at night.

Six at night is when Hall life starts in earnest. In Jinling’s room Yuliang lines up her mentor’s accessories and appliances. She helps Jinling with her toilette, bringing water, mixing makeup. She now knows how to clean a downy upper lip with a taut piece of thread. She can redraw Jinling’s eyebrows with a charcoal pencil; can give her elegant spider legs or flying arches like bird wings. It makes her feel oddly powerful to be able to make such choices.

After makeup, she also helps choose Jinling’s first outfit of the night. Jinling is the only girl in the Hall who changes for each of her guests. The maids complain that it makes extra work, and Xiaochen mutters that it’s ‘uppity.’ But Jinling always makes sure to tip the maids a little extra. And no one pays attention to anything Xiaochen says these days. ‘Listen, Yuliang,’ Jinling instructs. ‘A fresh dress makes a guest feel special, welcomed. It makes him feel like he’s your first customer of the evening.’

Yuliang tucks this advice away along with Godmother’s promise of her own new wardrobe: six new dresses once her calyx has been opened. For now, she focuses on the colors and textures of Jinling’s trousseau. She learns
the characters embossed on jackets and scarves, and matches them up in what she imagines must be auspicious combinations: Luck and happiness. Happiness and good fortune. Good fortune with wealth with wisdom. She thinks of new ways to pair tones: the sea greens, sky blues, the starry silvers. At first Jinling eyes some of these choices dubiously. ‘I’ve never worn that dress with that shawl,’ she’ll say, and send out for a second opinion. But as the months pass and the opinions concur, the top girl stops her questioning. She even tells Godmother that Yuliang’s eye is becoming refined. ‘She’ll be good, this one,’ she says. And gives Yuliang’s knee a soft squeeze beneath the table.

By seven the manservant is announcing arrivals, using the Hall’s own special code.
A guest has arrived
means someone unknown, since return guests are always announced by name. If the guest has a preferred girl, her name is announced too.
Jinling, Yi Gan has honored you with a visit. He requests that you prepare him some tea.

By ten, the Hall is filled with smoke and liquored chatter. Voices rise in counting for the finger-game. Yuliang and Suyin ferry plates back and forth from the kitchen: the plump bodies of crabs doused with black beans and chili, shiny red pork and potatoes, bowls and more bowls of steaming rice. The girls weave around the gambling tables to the slick click of tiles. They pass the musician with her lined face and tired arias, fending off groping hands and twisting themselves away from ubiquitous, lumpy laps. (‘No laps!’ orders Godmother. She will beat them if she finds them there, even involuntarily.) They watch older girls rising, leaving, returning, smudged and flushed or bored, or simply tired.
Did the old buzzard get it up all right?
the men shout.
Did the old cannon manage to blast?

Godmother serves and observes, banters and barters. She writes sums owed and paid in her books. She samples food, waves it on, although sometimes she sends it back. She creeps up to the night wing, listening at closed doors for unsanctioned trysts, unreported tips and gifts, and sounds more alarming than the flesh-slap of a rough tumble. And occasionally cries of real pain do drift in:
Aiiiiiii. Stop it – stop it! Help!

The shrieks float like ghosts into the mirth and smoke, make little dents of silence amid the clamor. Usually it’s Godmother who heaves onto her little feet when this happens, and bustles heavily up the stairs into the night wing. A little commonplace beating is expected, she says. But killing or disfiguring her girls is not. It will result in surcharges and doctor’s fees. The very worst cases will go to court.

‘What are the very worst cases?’ Yuliang asks Jinling, early one morning after Mingmei is attacked. The soft-spoken girl from Suzhou erupted from the night rooms with red cords trailing from her wrists and ankles. Blood ran in a thick stream down her left leg. The cut was high on her thigh, nearly half a finger deep in some places. A soldier wearing the slapdash uniform of some warlord’s private army followed her out, smoking, smiling. Still tying his trousers. The knife had slipped, he said, shrugging. They were playing a game. He called the wound
a scratch
, Mingmei
an actress
. He threatened not to pay; he hadn’t had a chance to finish. But Godmother demanded and received payment – and well more than a single night’s price. She tacked on
an inflated estimate for the doctor’s fee, and a penalty for the scar Mingmei would have later. She demanded a fee for not taking the soldier to court, and a fee for cleaning the bloody footprints off the floor. In the end, with the help of the manservant and several guests (including a judge), she succeeded in emptying the man’s wallet. ‘Good iron is not used for nails,’ she’d said later, almost fondly. ‘Good men do not become soldiers.’

‘I don’t know,’ says Jinling grimly now, as young sunlight seeps through the window. ‘I don’t know what the worst cases are.’

She grimaces as Yuliang yanks at a pearl-sized frog button on her
qipao
, one of the dozens that run from knee to nape. The top girl can never undo them all herself. When she’s drunk or tired she sometimes rips them right off.

Her dark eyes meet Yuliang’s in the faint light of the mirror. She is lavender, gilded by the nascent light. Yuliang thinks:
She looks older.
It’s not a criticism, for she’s not a man, or Godmother. She just forgets sometimes how tired even Jinling, flawless Jinling, can get here.

She lets her fingers descend to her mentor’s neck, then from there to her shoulders. She shapes softly descending circles with her thumbs, then her forefingers. She presses tentatively at first, then – as Jinling shuts her eyes and leans her head back into Yuliang’s belly – with more force. She leans forward to massage the spare flesh shielding the top girl’s lungs, her heart. Her own pulse quickens. ‘Is this all right?’ she murmurs.

Jinling opens her eyes. She looks confused, as though she’s torn between two answers. But all she says is ‘Yes.’ And, sighing, shuts her eyes again.

7

The holidays end in a whirlwind of prayers and bright light. Over Yuan Shikai Hall, fireworks etch flaming fish and dragons into the sky. At the other Hall – of Eternal Splendor – those who are able clear their debts and begin racking up new ones.

The girls, for their part, are well rested for the first time in the year. They’ve passed the past week – spent by most clients with family and friends – gambling, gossiping, and eating. All, that is, but Xiaochen, who has finally been sent away. It’s said she’s been sold (for little more than a single smoke) to the ‘nail shed,’ the meanest of Wuhu’s brothels. It sits behind the railroad depot, a dirty shack with no entrance fee and no amenities. Customers – rickshaw runners, dockhands, even the occasional beggar – pay a pittance for its offerings. In some rooms there’s not even a bed.

The disappearance of the Hall’s oldest whore is a relief in some ways. In the weeks past, Xiaochen’s appearance was disheveled, her face and neck layered with makeup which, however thickly mixed, couldn’t hide her deep wrinkles and scarred skin. Her dresses were out of fashion, their colors and cuts dating back to the long-gone days when she still had credit. Everyone knew she hadn’t had a ‘wet’ guest, one who stayed and stripped and spent the night, since the dragon-boat races. Sometimes men let
her sit with them, and warble a token song or two. Most buzzed off like swatted flies at the sight of her.

‘They were afraid,’ Suyin speculates one day, as she and Yuliang are shelling peanuts. ‘They thought she was like that girl who told her husband never to look at her at night. But he did once, soon after she had his son.’

‘What did he see?’ Yuliang asks. But warily: Suyin enjoys shocking people. She embellishes stories with far-off relatives and friends to lend them a patina of credibility.

‘He discovered that she was only flesh-and-blood up above,’ her roommate says, sure enough. ‘From the waist down she was a rotting skeleton.’

‘How could they have done it to begin with, if she didn’t have any skin?’ Yuliang objects. ‘And how could she carry the baby without its falling out? He would have known. He would have had to.’

‘Some men are so self-centered they wouldn’t know if they were thrusting into a teapot,’ offers Dai helpfully. The plump flower has been put on a vinegar diet to lose weight, but she often noses in for a snack during Godmother’s naptime.

‘It happened,’ Suyin retorts firmly, handing her a handful of nuts to crunch. ‘My uncle’s wife’s sister knew the man.’

‘Well, then,’ says Dai, chewing. ‘Show us. Go to the nail shed and get Xiaochen to lower her trousers. I dare you.’

Yuliang eyes her fellow ‘leaf ’ in amusement, half expecting her to take the challenge, just for show. Before she can, though, Godmother materializes in the doorway.
Dai squeals and swallows simultaneously. But it’s not her the madam is seeking.

‘Yuliang,’ she says. ‘Suyin will finish your kitchen duties this afternoon. You are to go pull together your things.’ As the girls stare at her in surprise, she adds, ‘You’re a lucky girl. You’re getting your own room.’