by Aimee E. Liu
“Oh!” whispered Sarah. “You’ll have them throwing spears at your back. The races are sacred in Shanghai, Dr. Mann. Fortunes are made and broken here—both financial and social.”
“Which did we come for?” asked Hope.
“We just came to give them all a tweak, which apparently, dear doctor, you did, too.”
“I’m a sheltered American, remember? I have no idea why they should be shocked at anything I say or do.”
They stepped out onto a tiled balcony with a view of the exercise fields adjoining the course. It was a gray day, the city spires obscured by drifting fog, but every now and then the sun would break through, gilding the nearby roofs and treetops. Against this uncertain backdrop, the doctor positioned his two subjects, then told them to bear with him while he fiddled with the cameras knobs and cranks. Hope was impressed by his confidence and even more by his ability to explain the mechanics of camera and film. She had accepted the assurances of the printed directions that arrived with the camera, and simply pointed the lens at subjects that interested her and clicked the shutter. She had attributed the disappointing results to the inexperience of Chinese developers, but Dr. Mann explained that the fault was most likely her own.
“Each variation of light, movement, or exposure requires its own adjustment.”
“You’re telling me that picture of the race will be nothing but a blur,” said Hope.
“You never know.” His free eye squinted. “Sometimes serendipity takes over when you ignore the rules. Cheers!”
They smiled. “Perfect,” said the doctor. “In this case, I know you have a keeper.” He handed the camera back to Hope. “Now I’m afraid you must excuse me. I have afternoon rounds to get back to.”
Sarah said, “I hope we’ll meet again, Doctor.”
His return glance went to Hope, not quite disapproving and not quite amused. He bowed gravely, and was off.
“What do you think you’re doing?” demanded Hope.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She tapped Sarah’s bejeweled wrist, lifted the fluting of lace at her throat, the egret plume on her velvet hat. “Your husband is a wealthy man.”
“The races are a sporting event,” said Sarah. “It’s all just good sport, Hope.”
“Well, I’ve had enough sport for one day. And Pearl’s waiting for me for our afternoon lesson.”
“You go ahead, then. I’m feeling lucky.” She smiled at Hope’s stricken look. “There aren’t many ways for an honorable woman to feather her own nest. But at least in Shanghai, this is one of them.”
Hope collected herself. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
But as she started off down the gallery Sarah called after her. “You’d best find your way, too, Hope. Fortune and love are as fickle as fate.”
“You will never believe who is here in Shanghai,” Hope said, when Paul returned the following week.
“And why not?” He was looking over the piles of chits and letters that had accumulated on his desk in his absence. Why hadn’t Yen sorted these?
“Because it’s too amazing. Here, I can’t tell you who without telling how I discovered him!”
“Him.” Now she had his attention. The bursting animation of her eyes and mouth, the way she was twisting and turning, excited as a child. “Sit down, Hope.”
Laughing at the still untold story, she pulled up a chair opposite his desk. “You see, I went to the racecourse with Sarah last week, and we ran into the doctor who examined Morris right after he was born. I had my camera with me, and he seemed to know quite a lot about photography, so Sarah suggested he take our picture, which he did. When I came home I finished the roll of film with some shots of the children, and next day took it down to Denniston’s for developing. But when I returned to pick up the prints, the clerk refused to give them to me. He said I had to wait for the new house photographer to return. I couldn’t imagine what was going on, when the door swung open, and who should walk in?” She looked at Paul expectantly.
“If I know, you would not tell this story.”
“Jed Israel!”
At the blankness of his answering look she tucked in the corners of her mouth, went to the low blackwood table in the corner, and picked up the framed photograph Paul kept there. The wedding picture with the traded hats.
“Our photographer! You remember. He had that painful stutter. Said he was going to enter our picture in some contest? Well, he did, and it won him a trip to Shanghai! Now he’s living here. Can you believe it?”
He took the picture and set it on his desk. The point of her story did not interest him, but its beginning did. “I heard about your outing to the racecourse.”
His tone brought her up short. “From whom?”
“Hwang Yun-shu came to visit me in Peking. He said he and his wife saw you that day.”
“Yes, I saw Renata, but—”
“Hwang has much influence in many places. Eugene Chou also is well known. All Shanghai is aware that he has taken an American concubine. All Shanghai knows her name.” His hand had curled into a fist as they talked. They both now became aware of this, but he chose not to unfold it.
“You are not my concubine, Hope. No one must be allowed to think—even suspect such a thing.”
A liquid movement that he could not decipher rolled across Hope’s face. She sat down. After a long pause, she said evenly, “You know Renata Hwang invited me and Pearl to her home after she’d seen me talking with Sarah at the ball last winter. After that visit, I sent three invitations for her to come here. She declined them all without even offering an excuse. I don’t think we can blame that on Sarah.”
“You do not understand.”
She leaned forward. “Then make me understand.”
His gaze fell on the two sparring, fire-breathing dragons carved into the ebony highboy beside his desk. “You remember this letter my mother writes to me after we marry.”
“I hardly think I could forget.”
“In this letter, she writes of a bride.”
“Ling-yi.”
“So. I did not discover until I return to Wuchang from America that my mother has already paid the bride price, wedding gifts are exchanged between the families, and Ling-yi is performing her duties as my mother’s daughter-in-law.”
“What—” Hope’s voice caught in her throat. “But how could she … without you even knowing!”
“The news of the earthquake was very bad. When my mother hears, she thinks I cannot survive, or if I live, then I cannot be whole. When she does not hear from me for many weeks, she thinks she must act for herself. So she arranges a spirit wedding.”
“I don’t believe it.” Hope paced to the middle of the room. “To wish you dead!”
“Her wish is for a daughter-in-law. Perhaps with a bride waiting, the gods will preserve her son. This is her thinking.”
“But we wrote her that you were well and married and refused her wishes!”
“It was already done,” said Paul quietly.
She leaned against his desk, circling her thumb on the wooden surface. He touched her hand. “You are my only wife, Hsin-hsin. My chosen wife.”
“All these months,” she said. “Jin. And Mulan, that day at her house. How could you never tell me!”
An ugly twitching had taken hold of her left eye, and her lip curled. He let go of her. “I do not tell you because I know you cannot accept. But now you see that you must not go out with Sarah Chou. Surely you understand that.”
“I understand more than that.” Their eyes met but jerked away as if from an electric shock. Hope had her hand on the doorknob before she spoke again. “I will comfort myself with the belief that this woman stays in Wuchang.” She did not turn to face him. “But I would like to know for a fact if you—if you’ve lain with her.”
“Hope. She is nothing to me.”
“Have you slept with her, Paul?”
“No.”
December 1, 1912
I have lived
in this city of the damned for almost a year, but I am only now beginning to feel the true horror of the place. Oh, gay, yes, it is very gay, as Rome before the fall. The streets ring with laughter, hotel lobbies bounce with song, ballrooms throb with the music of twelve-piece orchestras and sigh with the world’s most accomplished dance hostesses. Meanwhile, in the darkened alleys, children are bought and sold and left to die, beggars lift up oozing stumps, and opium addicts lie in a stupor, prize patrons of the commerce that keeps the ballroom ladies in silk. And my own place in this world of false mirrors—ah, yes, my position as wife to the despised and mother of the despised, and then you flip the mirror over and it’s neither my husband nor children but I myself who am the vilest of them all.
4
Early in 1913 the family moved to a terraced row house on Pushi Road—brick, with three narrow stories and a small paved yard. Rented rather than borrowed, its modest dimensions reflected the limitations of Paul’s income.
“Hush,” Hope said when he started to apologize. “There are other families near, which is good for the children, and as renters we can feel free to make this a real home.”
Making a home had taken on new importance for Hope in light of Paul’s revelation. No matter that he had always assured her he did not want a Chinese wife; now he had one, and Hope could not help but view her as a threat. If Paul felt a foreigner in his own home, wouldn’t Ling-yi, with her familiar ways, inevitably tempt him? Hope knew he had felt out of place in that Mediterranean villa—so had she! But the new house gave her a chance not just to balance (as Sarah advised) but to integrate East and West, with comfort as the moderator. To this end, she bought a Western-style easy chair for Paul, but upholstered it in the same celadon Jacquard she had noted on his mother’s reception hall chairs. She ordered a sofa made for the parlor with the classic Chinese blackwood frame—but very un-Chinese springs and soft pillows. She laid rush matting over the bare and otherwise drafty tile floors, Oriental carpets in the bedrooms, and from Antique Street hauled a rosewood headboard carved with two magpies (“symbolize married bliss,” the dealer had informed her) for the new four-poster. She had Yen hang a swing for Pearl from the Chinese elm that shaded the backyard, bordered the front walk with pots of vibrant red geraniums, and, at either side of the gate, planted night-blooming jasmine.
As the house took shape Hope noticed the children becoming more boisterous, the servants more relaxed. Paul smiled more, joked, and seemed less inclined to work late into the night. Nothing more was said of his mother’s other daughter-in-law, as Hope now thought of her, nor did he issue further prohibitions against her fraternizing with Sarah Chou, though he knew she did continue to see her friend discreetly, inviting Sarah to bring young Gerald to play with Pearl or arranging to meet at French Park (as opposed to the British playgrounds, where their “half-breed” children were not allowed). Hope had no other women friends, and Paul was well aware how difficult it would be to make any. For the moment, however, she was happy.
One afternoon toward the end of March, after weeks of fog and rain, spring arrived in a blast of sunshine. Hope had just finished shooting a series of photographs of the house for her father and Mary Jane. Joy had taken Pearl up the block to play with some Danish neighbor children, and Paul was not due back from Peking until later that afternoon. Plenty of time, Hope decided, to put Morris in his pram and walk downtown to the photo shop.
The sky, as they set off, was a joyous blue. Plum and cherry blossoms drifted like snow. The girls from the mills, packed nine to a wheelbarrow, sang as they went by, and on Nanking Road, electric billboards shimmered, horns tooted, and Gramophone marches blared from loudspeakers outside Robinson’s Piano Company. When they arrived at Denniston’s, Jed Israel greeted Hope warmly, coming out from behind the counter to help her bring in the pram.
Jed’s appearance had changed little in the seven years since Evanston. He still looked a gentle cross between boy and man with a stiff handle of cayenne-colored hair falling into his eyes. He had not surrendered to the typical young man’s compulsion to facial hair but was smooth-shaven and freckled, with sea-green eyes staring voraciously over wide, sharp cheekbones. He reminded Hope of her young foster brother Jimmy Wayland, always eager, fearless, and incurably merry. At seventeen Jimmy had followed Doc to Oregon in search of gold and was crushed in a mine cave-in.
“He’s p-p-p-pretty,” said Jed, studying the sleeping Morris.
Hope smiled.
“I g-g-g-g-guess you’re not ssss-posed to say a boy’s p-pretty,” he apologized, twisting his mouth as if to unscrew his speech impediment.
“It’s all right.” Hope lowered herself into a corner chair and rubbed her tired ankles. There was no one else in the store. “I think he’s pretty, too. Not many men even look at babies.”
“I l-l-l-look at everything.”
“I suppose you do. Is that a natural instinct for a photographer, do you think? Or is it a skill you cultivate?” She gave a laugh and straightened up. “Or is it just an excuse to snoop?”
Jed continued to watch the baby. “I’d c-c-call it a p-privilege.”
Hope peeled off her gloves, at once chastened and envious of the young man’s passion. “Well.” She drew the rolls of film from a pouch inside the pram. “I’m almost afraid to let you see what’s on these.”
“M-m-m-m-missus Leon, don’t s-say that. You’re just l-l-learning. Kodak lies—that ‘You press the button, w-we do the rest’—not if you want to make a real sta-statement.”
“Make a statement,” Hope repeated. Jed’s crippled talk made her head hurt, yet she genuinely liked the boy, admired the ambition that had brought him halfway around the world. And, as she followed his gaze now through the shop window to a red-turbaned Sikh performing a ballet of traffic direction atop his crossroads pedestal, she suspected Jed had a good eye.
“You know S-s-s-stieglitz?” He beckoned her to a shelf of books on the opposite wall and opened a volume of Camera Work to a photograph called The Steerage. It showed an immigrant ship from the upper deck, with nattily dressed men in boaters and suits looking down on the kerchiefed women and children, the hanging laundry and squall of the steerage class. The image started a knot in Hope’s stomach as she remembered the steamer trips to and from Kiukiang, with Paul forced down below, and that despicable Brit on the ship coming over …
She heard the door swing open behind her, Jed move to help another customer. A moment later Hope glanced up to find Stephen Mann peering over her shoulder. “Looks like young Mr. Israel is turning you into an aficionado. Good to see you again, Mrs. Leon.”
“Dr. Mann.” To her annoyance she felt herself coloring.
The doctor blithely turned to the pram, running a practiced eye over Morris. “He looks well.”
“I’ve been taking him to the Native Hospital,” she lied, “for his examinations. You were right, they are most humane.” She was gratified by his answering wince.
The doctor pulled out the film he had brought for Jed to develop. “It’s a personal project,” he explained, as if she had inquired. “The hospital doesn’t know and wouldn’t approve if they did.”
“Oh?” Hope pretended only polite interest.
“The street children. Almost all of them are diseased or crippled or maimed, but no one knows how much of the damage is inflicted intentionally, either by themselves or their parents.”
“Intentionally!”
“A god-awful sore can increase a street urchin’s income dramatically.”
Hope cringed at the thought of the little girl who often stood waving her fly-covered stump outside the house, how readily she would dole a tael to the mother to make them go away.
“And then there are the girls who are left to starve, or whose deaths are helped along before they’re abandoned.” Dr. Mann spoke around the stem of his pipe, his brow furrowed and his eyes stern. He had an air of quiet solidity that made him impossible to dislike but also difficult to penetrate.
“So you’r
e documenting the damage. What good can that do?”
“The Chinese authorities refuse to see what’s under their noses, and as long as they’re allowed not to see, they won’t begin to do anything about it. Understand, it suits them to let the beggars do themselves in. They pretend the numbers aren’t there, the problem is a trifling—”
Hope checked her watch. Paul should be home soon. Not that she objected to Mann’s noble goal, but it seemed to her classic missionary posturing—the benevolent white man stepping in to show his yellow brothers the way. What were Paul and Sun and the rest all doing if not to turn this society around, in Sun’s words, to “give people livelihood.” She smiled at Jed, who had been listening with interest, and said in a tone that addressed both men, “I’m sorry, but my husband’s train is due in shortly. I didn’t realize it was so late.”
“Could I walk with you?” Dr. Mann replied.
For some reason that she couldn’t identify, this offer irritated Hope. Instead of answering, she began maneuvering the pram toward the exit. The men were moving to help her when the door flew open and a young Chinese hospital attendant summoned the doctor.
“Shooting at North Station! I think is important senator.”
Hope froze. “Which senator?” she managed to ask.
“We do not know—”
Before he could finish, Hope had wrenched herself away from the doctor, was scooping the baby into her arms. “I’m coming,” she said, in a voice that permitted no argument.
The attendant had two rickshaws waiting, and Dr. Mann quickly hailed two more, for Jed insisted on coming, too, closing the shop behind him. But the day that only minutes ago had struck Hope as cause for celebration now pained her. The light seemed blinding, the air caustic, the throngs of shoppers and beggars and vendors suffocating.
After what seemed an eternity they crossed over Soochow Creek, and were proceeding with speed along Honan Road when the traffic pulled to a halt. Sikh policemen waved batons. Outraged foreigners shouted from rickshaws.