The Valley of Amazement (66 page)

When Lu Shing apologized, he said the words so quietly, so weakly, they sent me into a fury. How could he protect me? Each time he explained what had happened, I became even more frightened that he had no mind of his own. I did not know this man. In San Francisco, he should have told me he had no feelings for me whatsoever. He should have physically prevented me from getting on the boat. He had warned me, but he had also said he had never loved anyone more, which, I realized now, may have meant little if he had never loved anyone at all. Each meager hope conquered obvious danger. Those warnings belonged to the future, and I lived from one precious moment to another, harvesting love that would sustain me, no matter what arose. And now I was listening to weak apologies and useless explanations about why he had to choose his family over me. He did not understand my fright and what I endured for him. I wanted him to listen to the American women on the
boat, saying that white girls had been beaten to death by Chinese mothers-in-law and no one had cared. I wanted him to starve and boil in the hot sun for love of me. I wanted him to destroy his family and his chances of ever going home, just as I had.

“Damn you! Damn your parents!” Out of exhaustion, I finally stopped shouting and simply cried. He lay my head on his shoulder, and I did not pull away from this small amount of comfort.

As we rode through the dark and humid streets, he explained he had spent all these past hours listening to his father shout at him about his responsibilities. His father had slapped him as he enumerated the names of all his ancestors over five hundred years, names that Lu Shing had memorized in his boyhood. His father cited his own position with the Ministry of Foreign Relations, to whom he owed duty and allegiance above family. People would wonder what moral defects he had passed along to an eldest son who would betray his family and destroy their reputation and future honor. His mother deserved a peaceful life in her old age, instead of his ushering her into a grave as fast as possible. She had taken to her bed, complaining of chest pains and a headache. His two younger brothers, the sons of his father’s concubines, rebuked him, something they had never done. They said he would cause people to wonder if they, too, would take up with foreign women and debauchery in all the Western ways. What chance did they have in achieving a good future if he tainted them?

They are an educated family, Lu Shing said, but that did not mean they cast off tradition and filial duty. If he left the house to live with me, he would be disinherited and banished forever from his family, removed from their history, and never mentioned again—not as if he had died, but as if he had never existed. He would never be able to change his mind and return like the prodigal son in the Christian Bible.

“I would risk fortune and being banished into nonexistence for you,” he said. “But I cannot destroy my family.”

“I destroyed mine,” I said. “I have nothing. And now you’re willing to place your family’s reputation over my life?”

“There was never a choice. You can’t understand that unless you have been raised with the weight of five hundred years of your family’s history. It was placed on my back the moment I was born as the eldest son. And I have to carry it forward.”

“You’re a coward. The moment you stepped off the boat you became a superstitious ghost-worshipper. If I had known that was who you were, I would never have come.”

“I told you in San Francisco that my beliefs lay in how I was raised. I can’t change that any more than I can my race or the family I was born to.”

“How could you have expected me to understand what that truly meant? If I had said that I was raised to listen to my parents, to be guided by their advice, would that mean I would follow those expectations?”

“I can help you return home if you can’t bear this.”

“You coward! Is that your answer? I destroyed my mother, my father, and their marriage. I destroyed any chance of ever returning home. They didn’t even come downstairs to say farewell. I’m already dead in their eyes. I have nothing to return to. I have nothing here, and you speak of reputation. You fail to understand how desperate I am. I have no bravery left. I’m falling and don’t even know what abyss I’m falling into, but it’s torment worse than death.” I cried when I ran out of words to say.

The rickshaw took us along the waterfront and then turned onto a smaller street. We turned again and were on a wider street with gated stone mansions. We drove past a park, then more modest houses, English in style and set behind walls.

“Where are you taking me? A home for pregnant girls?”

“The guesthouse owned by a friend, an American. I’ve paid the rent in advance. It’s not ideal, just the best I can do for now. And it’s in the International Settlement, so you’ll be among people who speak English. Rest there, and we can decide later what to do. But let me say now, Lucia, that if you stay, I will not abandon you. But I cannot abandon my family either. Although I don’t know what answer lies in between, I promise to be truthful to you and to them.”

I arrived at the guesthouse an hour before dawn. The gaslights were blazing. An enormous man named Philo Danner greeted us with much enthusiasm. He looked to be fifty. I thought he had sacrificed his sleep to welcome us. But he assured us that he slept during the vampire hours of rest between dawn and noon.

“You must call me Danner,” he said as he led me to the sitting room, “and I will call you Lucia, unless you prefer something else. You can change your name quite easily in Shanghai.”

Lucia was what Lu Shing called me, the name that fated us to be together. “I prefer to be called Lulu,” I said in front of Lu Shing.

Danner was, in a word, flamboyant. He wore a light gold Chinese jacket over loose blue pajama pants. His hair was a dark mass of long angelic ringlets. His eyes were large and rimmed with long lashes. His nose was shapely, the patrician Roman nose of the English. Rolls of doughy flesh draped from his chin to the bottom of his neck. As he walked, his body rolled side to side, and he often ran out of breath and wheezed between words.

He owned this Yankee garden house, he said. It was a three-story building on East Floral Alley, in a good area of the International Settlement. It was built of thick stone walls that kept out the heat in summer and the cold in
winter. Every inch of wall in his sitting room, dining room, and halls was covered with framed oil paintings of Western landscapes or scenes of Plains Indians. His tables and mantel held primitive masks, which gave the effect of other tenants staring at me, the interloper. Waist-high stacks of books stood in the middle of the sitting room, like a miniature Stonehenge. Danner maneuvered through the labyrinth with surprising gracefulness. I noticed tassels on the cushions of chairs, and then everywhere—purple, red, navy, and gold ones along the top of the sofa, on the tiebacks of curtains, on the door pulls, along the edges of sofas, at the corners of doorways, on top of the piano, on table scarves, at the corners of mirrors—an infestation.

Danner sat me on the sofa and murmured that he could see in my face that I had suffered a terrible shock. He looked at Lu Shing in an accusatory way. “What have you done to this poor girl?” I liked him immediately. A houseboy brought us tea and butter biscuits. When I quickly finished those, Danner told the houseboy to bring butter, ham, and bread. The food had a calming effect on me, and soon, Danner brought out a pipe.

“Let your troubles vanish into smoke,” he said. “Opium.”

Lu Shing murmured that I should not partake of any, and this caused me to enthusiastically accept Danner’s offer. As Danner talked, the houseboy performed elaborate preparations with a dark brown paste. Danner handed me the pipe and said to inhale just a light puff. It was harsh at first and then my throat was instantly soothed. The taste was like pungent earth, then musk. It quickly changed into a sweet scent. The fragrance was at first like licorice and cloves, then chocolate and roses. Soon it was not simply a scent or a taste but a sensation, a silkiness, which enveloped me in its luscious sweetness. I was about to ask Danner a question but instantly forgot what it was because I was now conscious that Danner had the face of a genie. He was playing strange music on the piano. It sounded like heavenly voices.

I noticed Lu Shing sitting on the other side of the sofa, a sad gray figure in a colorful room. I was not angry anymore. He seemed lost. After another puff, I was ecstatic to find that the light from the lamps also made me feel weightless. The sweeping of my hand through the air made a thousand hands. The sound of Lu Shing’s voice calling my name left sparkles before my eyes. His voice was beautiful, musical, so full of love. In looking at him again, he was in a halo of light, which emanated sexual desire. I yearned to have him touch me as he had the first night in the turret when everything surprised me. I had never known it was possible to feel peace and joy so deeply. I recalled memories of happy times as flat and thin, easily torn. In this marvelous smoky cloud of mind, I had no worries, only a glad sense that I would always feel as I did now. I had been awakened!

“Take me to bed,” I said to Lu Shing, and the words floated out one at a time and reached him slowly. Lu Shing looked dazed as my words bounced on his face. Danner laughed and urged Lu Shing to do as I said.

We floated up the stairs. The lamp was lit and the light swirled around the bed like golden beads. Through a glowing doorway, I saw a bathtub that resembled a porcelain soup tureen painted with flowers inside and out. The water was shiny and still. The moment I dipped my hand in and paddled it like an oar, the painted flowers—tiny roses and violets—became real and swirled and scented the air. I quickly freed myself of my itchy clothes and slipped into the cool water, jubilant to feel its silkiness on my naked skin. Lu Shing kneeled behind the bathtub and kissed my neck.

“Lucia, I apologize—”

“Shhhh.” I laughed.
Shhh
became the sound of rain drowning out his voice. “Shhhh.” I was bobbing in waves of flowers and sprinkled by rain.

I felt his hands caressing me, stroking me. I sighed. He unbound my hair and kissed my neck. I murmured the vulgar Chinese words and asked him to say them. He repeated them in an oddly polite voice. I laughed and said to take me to bed and show me what those words meant. When he helped me stand, I felt the water stream down my skin like a waterfall. I lay on the bed and watched Lu Shing undress. His body shimmered. He lay next to me and caressed my back. I laughed and uttered the harsh vulgar words. He quickly entered me, and a few moments later, I saw with wonderment that I had become him. I was the face looking at me, and it appeared to be terribly sad, yet I was euphoric. “Good little boat,” I said, and rowed against waves, and the ropes that had knotted his brow fell away. I watched myself in him as his eyes rolled back and he and I gave up fear. I repeated the vulgar words urgently, harshly, hearing those sounds also coming from him. Together our coarse words were scraping away his armor and mine, so we could reach more joy, more pleasure. I watched as the look on his face changed from desperate to ecstatic, and I felt victorious that I had conquered him and he was, at last, completely mine. I laughed that I had made this happen.

I
AWOKE
so thickheaded I did not know who I was. Gradually, my mind returned. The room looked faded and flat without shadows and gold light. All my clothes had been removed and were not on the sofa where I had left them. I recalled that I had been exquisitely happy last night—but not a bit of it remained. The air was heavy and smelled of summer mildew. The old worries and anger had returned. Where was Lu Shing? Had he abandoned me again?

I left the bed and saw my dress hanging in an armoire, along with other clothes. Who had done that? Before I could step forward, a girl dashed into the room, and out of modesty, I gasped and tried to cover myself. She held up a blue silk robe and turned her face away as I slipped my arms into its sleeves. Slippers magically appeared
at my feet and I stepped into them. She gestured to a small area behind the screen. The bathtub had been emptied. It was plain white and not a painted soup tureen. Nearby was a porcelain basin on a tall stand, and it was filled with water. She pantomimed washing my face. I splashed the water onto my face to remove the bleariness of my mind. I kept throwing cool water on me, until the bowl was empty and the floor was wet, but only part of me had returned. She took me to a cupboard with drawers. My clothes had been placed inside. She opened another drawer. Chinese pajamas lay neatly folded—light silky clothes. I understood why Danner wore them. The air was heavy and humid.

Downstairs, I found Danner talking in English to a gray cat, who was just as animatedly talking to him in its feline language.

“I know that it is six in the evening, Elmira, dearest, but we cannot begin supper without our guest. Ah—voilà!—Lulu is here.”

How was it possible that I had slept for over twelve hours? I ate a supper of strange-tasting cold dishes: coin-size slices of beef and pigeon, eggs, salted raw cucumbers, and bright green vegetables. The cat stood at the other end of the table and ate from a china plate. Would all the meals be like this?

“I will not speak about your situation,” Danner said, “unless you care to. I will, however, tell you what you need to know about the Chinese, and that is this: You cannot change thousands of years of Chinese custom about shame in the family. We create our own laws in the Settlement and govern what a Chinese person can do. But there is no law you can use to disallow their philosophical outlook. Shame, honor, and obligation cannot be cast off. You will not be happy with your young man, or with Shanghai, if you think you can change that.”

I did not answer. I would not give up, and I would not return home.

“I can see your answer in your eyes, my dear. Hear my sigh. Every newcomer finds something disagreeable about the Chinese that they wish to change. I’ve heard all the complaints and have had some myself—their noisiness at odd hours, their standard of cleanliness, their selective understanding of punctuality, their inefficiency in doing something the way it has been done for a thousand years. They may alter it somewhat over much time, but they cannot change their fears, which govern much of what they do. And many a newcomer, like you, thinks she will succeed. It’s that American pioneer spirit that scouted the rivers and mountains, opened new frontiers, and conquered the Indians. So why not the Chinese?”