The Valley of Amazement (70 page)

At first, I was particular in selling only the books I would never read: the medical benefits of leeches, tide tables, the mechanics of musical instruments, the density of liquids. It turned out that they were the same books that no one else wanted to read. I then parted with the novels that would sell quickly among the American and British recent arrivals. Maritime history, historic accounts by British sea captains, and an atlas of maps were surprisingly popular. When the floors were cleared of books, I began with those on the shelves. I calculated how soon we would be broke: six months, less, if the remaining books proved unpopular reading. At bookshops, I always asked if a customer named Lu Shing had come by. I explained that I had found the book he was interested in. I always carried a pen with a sharp nib so if I found him, I would be ready to slash his face if he did not take me to Teddy. He should bear his shame publicly and forever.

Golden Dove and I made a list of all the possible routes for making money. She could teach English and Chinese. I could serve as a guide for Westerners wishing to explore “the mysteries of Shanghai.” We left leaflets in the American shops, at the clubs, along the walls near the American Consulate. In between, I went to art galleries, looking for paintings of dark rain clouds, a long green valley, and mountains. Every day we walked through the streets of the International Settlement to look for places where we might promote our services and vowed not to give up, despite the ever-growing number of people crowding Shanghai—a million, Danner had told me, double what it had been not that long ago. Many of the men around the Bund, along Nanking Road, and other parts of the International Settlement were rich Chinese men dressed in tailored suits and wearing Homberg hats like Lu Shing’s, and I would hurry to catch sight of their faces. I always returned home exhausted but never defeated.

After all that effort I had discovered one thing: No foreigners were interested in learning Chinese—all except the missionaries, and they had their own Chinese teachers. I found a few American men who were eager for a tour of Shanghai, but they also believed we were prostitutes who would provide a tour within the mysteries of female genitalia.

One warm day a man who watched me posting a notice of our sightseeing services asked if I knew where he could find a pub. I suggested the American Club. Too stuffy, he answered. I mentioned the bars along the Bund. Too boisterous and full of drunk sailors. He wanted a small-town pub that reminded him of the one back home.
”Everyone claims Shanghai has everything,” he said, “but I have yet to find a pub where a fellow can share a pint with friends, smoke a cigar, and sing old tunes around the piano.”

“If it’s homey you want, I know just the place. It will open its doors next week.” I wrote down the name and address: “Danner’s Pub. 18 East Floral Alley.” When I returned home and told Golden Dove the exciting news, she was elated. “At last!” she cried. Then she said: “What is a pub?”

“Whatever it is,” I said, “we can do it.”

Danner’s Pub took shape over the next few months through the suggestions and dissatisfactions of our early customers. We started our first week with a pitiful stock: beer, cheap cigars, and gut-smoldering whiskey. Our greatest asset turned out to be sentimental songs. I thanked Mr. Maubert for having my extra pinkies chopped off, thereby enabling me to take piano lessons. In the piano bench, I found piles of sheet music—sweet ballads for the most part. I wrote down requests the customers gave for favorite tunes. I told them to return the following night with a promise they would be able to sing it. The next morning Golden Dove and I would scour the secondhand shops for music. Sometimes we were successful. Our customers also named their preferences for whiskey, beer, and cigars. Each day we took the profits from the night before and bought the better liquors and cigars, which we sold at ever-higher prices. I used my mother’s technique of remembering the customers’ names, so I could personally welcome them each night. I chatted with them briefly, enough to be able to ask them the kinds of questions that made them feel at home: “Have you received another letter from your sweetheart?” “Has your mother recovered from her illness?” I offered sympathy, congratulations, and wishes for good luck. Those small gestures, I found, brought our customers back again the next day, and the day after that. Within six months, business overflowed. We found a house in another alley with rooms to rent on the lower floor. Abandoned pianos were plentiful and so were out-of-work musicians. We called our second pub “Lulu’s.”

Golden Dove, I discovered, was insatiable for success. She sold increasingly better brandy, port, and special liquors, charging ever-higher prices. The pubs made plenty of money, but Golden Dove never felt it was enough. There were other opportunities, she said. Those who jumped quickly made fortunes. She knew this, because in the pubs, she often overheard Western men talking about new businesses. She had a talent for eavesdropping. Our customers did not suspect that a Chinese woman spoke English well enough to understand their plots. She had mastered the ever-smiling face of a woman who understood nothing and thus was invisible among them.

Through overhearing their conversations, she came up with the idea to start a small social club where businessmen could meet in an atmosphere that was fancier and quieter than a pub. It would also be more discreet than the American Club, and other places where your business was everyone’s. We rented rooms in a statelier house—and there were many, made vacant by businessmen who came with schemes and had gone bust. We furnished the rooms with settees, small round tables with tablecloths, palm trees, gleaming brass, and marble floors. The best of Danner’s paintings decorated the walls. The others were being sold by a dealer, a former friend of Danner’s, an honest man who helped us sell them one at a time and at a fair price. We named our club The Golden Dove. In addition to fine liquor, we provided a tea service. Instead of favorite sing-along tunes on the piano, we hired a violinist and cellist who played Debussy. We offered small private rooms, where men could conduct business and make deals. As the hostess of a sophisticated club, I wore simple fashionable clothes. As I had done in the pubs, I greeted our “guests”—as we called them—by name. Golden Dove hired the waiters and trained them well. She monitored how much liquor was poured in a glass, one ounce and a splash more. And she watched and noted what each man’s preferences were and what he had ordered, so that I could offer the returning guest the same table and ask if he would like what he had ordered the last time.

Golden Dove took her station standing at the ready in the private rooms. She whisked away empty cups and returned with clean ones that were filled. Among these well-to-do customers, the secrets were more lucrative. We heard which new businesses had immediately leapt onto waves of success, and which had quickly sunk, and we knew the reason why. We learned that certain banks had information ahead of time how to control the lion’s share of the profits. We knew how they did it. We also gained knowledge of illegal plots, one involving men from four different companies who had inflated sales figures to a gullible investor. We knew how to recognize crooked deals.

“We know more about making money than most,” Golden Dove said. “We just need to decide which business to start, so we can use it.” It did not take long to find it.

In Shanghai, the same goods might be bought by both Chinese and Westerners, but not in the same shops. A well-known barbershop for Westerners soon had a counterpart for well-to-do Chinese men. A salon de coiffure for Western women was matched by a salon de coiffure for well-to-do Chinese women. In other words, whatever was popular and fashionable with Westerners could find a ready clientele among the wealthy Chinese. When we opened The Gold Club for Chinese clientele, we discovered that Golden Dove no longer held the same secret advantage: The Chinese guests knew she spoke Chinese and avoided talking about their secrets in front of her. And I did not know enough Chinese to gather the secrets—until I learned the art of
momo
—to be silent and write from memory. Golden Dove would greet the guests and I had to listen and later recite to her what I could
recall. The first day I repeated the oft-used phrases: “When did you get back?” “When do you leave?” “That’s bullshit.” Within the year, I could understand the entirety of almost any conversation that concerned business, and I had a special vocabulary for animals, flowers, and toys, gleaned from Violet, who at age four spoke English and the Chinese learned from her amah, as if they were one language.

If a guest sought a foreign trade alliance with an American company, Golden Dove would mention to our Chinese clients a possible “new friend relationship.” I would do the same for our Western clients. The twin clubs became purveyors of the jigsaw puzzle pieces needed in foreign trade. With small successes, we received a small gift. With larger ones, we drew handsome rewards. Eventually we charged fees and took a percentage of the profits. Golden Dove continued to be restless, and she passed her restlessness on to me. The richer the client, the more exciting the business, the more money we would make. “If we want to attract richer men,” she said, “we should open a first-class courtesan house. And I know one with a very good reputation and whose madam is willing to sell.”

Two years later, we opened a place that combined the two sides of our business: a social club for Westerners, a courtesan house for men. We named it The House of Lulu Mimi in Chinese and Hidden Jade Path in English. The path was where both sides met in the middle.

“In ten more years,” I teased Golden Dove, “you will have bought ten countries, and in twenty years, it will be forty. You are insatiable. It’s the sickness of success.” She was pleased to hear it. “I have enough now,” she said. “I needed to go back to my past and change it. Ten years ago, I had to leave a courtesan house with a smashed-up face. Now I own one of the finest in Shanghai, and to be truly successful, I must become a lady of leisure, never in a hurry, always calm, maybe even a little lazy.”

I was neither calm nor leisurely. I had to take over her share of the work. After a week, when she saw my eyes were sunken hollows from lack of sleep, she said she would be a little less lazy. I think she wanted me to appreciate how hard she had been working, and I remarked on this often from then on.

Between the afternoons and parties at night, I played games with Violet, read stories, bathed her while singing songs in English and Chinese, and told her how much I loved her as I tucked her into bed and waited for her to fall asleep. Those were our habits of love. She could depend on me. Her amah took care of her in the morning while I was still sleeping. On occasion, I took a lover, and I was careful to choose one who was my inferior in money, or power, or intellect. I auditioned them, as I had my young men when I was sixteen, keeping those who were experienced, discarding those without wit. I used those men selfishly, greedily, without regard to their feelings. I allowed myself the exciting preambles of lust, the satisfaction of urges, but not the heady infatuation, nor any prelude that could be mistaken for love. My love belonged to Violet. By the time she was four, she had become a willful child. I was glad. She would not be confined in her thoughts.

Around this time, I discovered that the heart can also be like a willful child. It does behave according to expectation. If my heart quickened, I knew it was time to take out the hated paintings Lu Shing had left me. I would stare at the portrait he painted of me when I had already felt uncertainty but had still hung on to trust. Or had that merely been foolish hope? I would look closely and enter those large dark pupils, the portal to a mindless girl who loved the painter. Within those shiny black pupils, he had seen a mirror of his desires, my willingness to satisfy them, to be whoever he believed I was. I would then study the second painting,
The Valley of Amazement,
always with a sick feeling that I had once believed in the illusion of a Pure Self-Being, which required me to preserve my original qualities. I had not known what they were, but I had been determined that they not be altered or influenced. I let Lu Shing alter them. How easily I had discarded myself. I had let infatuation guide me and choose my direction in life—toward a golden vale that did not exist, toward a city at the other end of the sea. I went to that imaginary place and suffered the near demise of my mind, heart, and soul. I returned with the knowledge that I would be smarter than love. I was still determined to find Teddy. He was rightfully mine, but whenever I thought of him, I felt murderous rage, and not the heartache of having once cradled a baby who had recognized me and smiled. I tried to recall what he looked like. Instead I saw Lu Shing’s face as he stared at his son, and I pushed his memory out of my mind.

The only being I would give myself freely to was Violet. I was her constant, the one who set the hours of dawn and dusk, who made the clouds by pointing to the sky, who warmed the day by removing her sweater, who turned it cold by donning her coat, who thawed her chilled fingers with the magic of my breath, who made violets sweet by twirling them under her nose, who clapped her hands as I declared her loved, at every hour, in every place, so that she would feel as I did: She was the reason I lived.

O
NE OF OUR
earliest guests at Hidden Jade Path was a charmer named Fairweather, a name, I told him, that was fair warning that I should avoid him. It was an affectionate nickname given to him by his many friends, he said. They invited him to dinners and parties and knew that had it not been for his finances he would have reciprocated their generosity and would yet one day do so twofold when his Shanghai ship came in. He confessed early on to me that he had been a brash young man who was disinherited from his wealthy family. He hoped to either make a fortune or win back the good graces of his father. Both would be ideal.

At first, I saw Fairweather as reminiscent of my first young man—the blue-eyed, dark-haired Greek god. But he was clearly more charming than men in my recent past. For one thing, he admitted from the start that he wanted to make me moan in the dark of night and laugh during the light of day. And from the start I did laugh—at his braggadocio.