All the Flowers in Shanghai

by Duncan Jepson

  During these six months, I saw that Xiong Fa had also adjusted to his new life. He had started visiting the rooms of certain maids. He had to satisfy himself and so he did what many of the other Sang men had done before him. He was discreet, though, and never disrespected me by taking them out or making any of them a proper mistress. I could tolerate such behavior, because I didn’t care. As I had said to his mother in Tailor Street, I was now the First Wife. That was all that mattered to me.

  When you were born, I made sure that only Yan was present. She helped me with your birth as I pushed and suffered, splitting open old scars from my nights spent with Xiong Fa. It was so painful, and I used this pain to hate you as much as I could so that immediately after your birth I had the strength to give Yan her orders. She had her ointment. Soon I would feel better again.

  Yan told me the birth had been bloody but that you were healthy and beautiful. I lay on my bed and closed my eyes. I could not help but try to visualize you, but I let my head fall back on the pillow against the headboard and kept my eyes firmly closed as I spoke to Yan, slowly and clearly. I would not let myself see you. The room was cold, as it was early in the evening. The chill of the end of November had already crept inside. I had thrown all the blankets from me and was shivering, though I did not notice this for hours.

  I wish I had seen you. Your face was wrapped in a blanket and Yan held you close to her chest, which helped muffle your tiny cries.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter, you must love all your children,” Yan replied, softly and slowly.

  “Answer me?” I screamed.

  “You’re very angry. You’ve been through so much and are still so young. But you must make yourself care. You must force yourself to want this baby.”

  “Just tell me, is it a boy or a girl?” I demanded through clenched teeth.

  “A girl,” she whispered.

  I refused to open my eyes and in the darkness I saw Ma again, smiling stupidly as I entered the palanquin. I saw Sister, dressed like a whore in those cheap clothes cut from expensive cloth. I had learned to see them more clearly during the last year of living with this mighty family who believed so strongly in themselves and their destiny that others believed in it, too. My parents and Sister had fallen under the Sangs’ spell yet had never known exactly what had captivated them. To imitate them, they had opted for clothes, manners, Society, and displays of wealth. But these people could also be poor, uneducated, and stupid like anyone else, as some of the relatives in this house were. My family had never understood that it was all-consuming pride, arrogance, and self-righteousness that kept the Sang family in their exalted place rather than merit. I had sworn I would be the last girl of my family. This would be the end of Ma’s and Sister’s dreams, of Ba’s and Grandfather’s weakness, the end of our family.

  I kept my eyes closed; the flickering light from the candles washed a strange redness over my closed eyelids, which danced unnaturally in my eyes. I never saw you.

  As I said before, “You now need to go into the backstreets and find a peasant couple. A couple who’ll need a child to take care of them in old age. Give them the baby and don’t tell them whose it was. When the family asks, tell them I had a stillborn son, which was very bloody and had to be taken away immediately.”

  “We may never find her again,” Yan interrupted me.

  “Yes, I know. Tell the peasants she is unwanted and unloved.”

  Yan interrupted again, “But you must try—”

  “Shut up!” I screamed. You cried then and I screamed louder so I could not hear you. I wanted no memories of you. “Stop saying that. It is better she is with someone who needs a daughter.” I calmed myself a little but I could still hear you. “Quickly, go to the top drawer in my dresser and you’ll find some jewelry in a red velvet bag. Give it to them so they can sell it. Please, go.”

  She hesitated to leave the room and remained at the foot of the bed. When I remember this night, I realize Yan waited, giving me a chance to change my mind and the course of my life: not to pursue those years of bitterness and anger that followed. I could not recognize in her silence the invitation for me to turn back. I remember shouting at her, snarling for her to move. I would have slapped her and pushed her away if I had not been in so much pain. She stood there for a few seconds longer. I ordered her to put a small silk cloth in your mouth to stop your crying and wrap you up in some of the soiled sheets, as if you were laundry; no Sang would touch laundry. I heard her do this then take the jewelry and leave. The door closed quietly behind you.

  I was alone. I opened my eyes and saw the red-brown of blood and shit from your birth spread across the sheet between my legs. It was smeared on my inner thighs and legs, and as I looked at myself, in pain, I felt no connection to my own body, as though it was simply something to be cleaned and put away, to be used later. I sat back and breathed in the aftermath of childbirth, using the stench to block out any trace of you that might linger and fix you in my memory.

  Xiong Fa had not yet come back to the house but First Wife had sent Ah Cheuk to fetch him. By the time he returned, First Wife knew what had happened and immediately told him that his son had died at birth. The loss of a son would be unbearable to them all but they were practical and would move on.

  When Yan returned I had passed out. I had contained the pain for so long that when I finally let it flood back, it overwhelmed me. She brought me around and I fully expected her to resume her duties and bathe me. Yet at first she did not help me move, only looked me hard in the eye. She took in my cracked lips and ragged hair, damp with sweat. She looked down at my body and the foul state of the sheets. She was so direct in her expression that for a moment I accepted her reproof and did not react. Then her hold on me was broken and our usual relationship was restored. I demanded that she help me move and then clean me.

  I had been lying in one position so long that my muscles had cramped. I could not remember what I had done in the hours that had passed since she left on her errand. I knew I could not have moved at all, because my muscles had seized up, but I could not remember what I had been thinking or seeing. I was only angry.

  Yan massaged my legs so that I could move but still she would not speak to me, and the only words that passed between us were to tell me of Xiong Fa’s request to see me. In reply I told Yan to tell him he could come and see me sometime the following day, but he had to make an appointment first.

  Yan bathed me and changed the sheets. Blood enough for First Wife here, but no heir. She would demand that Xiong Fa make me pregnant again, but I had learned now that I held the power. An heir was still needed. Until then the promise of the Sang future remained unfulfilled, and First Wife’s duty to Father-in-law still unobserved. I had decided to blame the supposed death of this baby on her attack on me in Tailor Street: such ferocious behavior had clearly brought bad luck on the heir and caused him to suffer during the pregnancy and delivery. And now he had died.

  I woke up late in the day to find Yan sitting by my bed watching me. Her skin hung loosely from her face and her eyes were raw and bloodshot. When she saw me open my eyes she got up.

  “You need some soup. I’ll be back soon,” she whispered, so quietly it was as if raising her voice would confirm the truth of what we had done during the night. Perhaps until Xiong Fa came we could live our lie and pretend I had not asked her to betray her own unfulfilled maternal instincts. I lay still and pulled the sheet around me. I could still smell the blood and shit that Yan had wiped from me. I ached and was desperately tired yet I wanted to wait here for her return, so we could understand each other and settle how we would continue living together after this. I remained lying on my back with my eyes closed. In the blackness, the strong smells filled my nostrils and mouth, reminding me of the dark that had filled me last night as I lay back against the bed with my eyes closed, as Yan held you tight in her arms, and I tried to mask your new smell with my own stink. I had not dreamt it, everythi
ng was true.

  Yan came in and brought me a bowl of strong fish soup to accelerate my recovery. She put the tray on the bedside chair and helped me sit up straight. She brought the bowl to my lips and the fish stock cleared my nose and mind. I sipped, and coughed. Then my hunger returned and I swallowed the soup quickly.

  “I also brought you some mantou. You should try to eat more, to be strong again.” Having left the steamed buns on the bed for me, she started to leave again. “Mistress, you should sleep. I think I should ask them to bring you a doctor.”

  “No,” I shouted, “no doctors!”

  She stopped and looked at me, startled mostly that I had suddenly regained my strength.

  “I’m sorry, Yan. No, doctors, please. I don’t want any doctors because they cannot help. Just sit near me, please, sit near me. But first tell my husband that I will come to see him on the third day. Tell him that I will come at eleven in the morning to drink tea with him.”

  “But he will be at work with his father.”

  “If he wants to see me then he will have to be late to work or return home.”

  “Very well. I will also draw you a bath tomorrow,” Yan said heartily, encouraged by my willingness to visit my husband.

  “Yes, that will be good.”

  She left me with the smell of the steaming bread to tempt my appetite. I closed my eyes and thought of the huge flat bamboo baskets that the cook used to stack up on the oven in the kitchen of my old home. I would sit with Grandfather and wait for them to be ready. And just as they were done, and smelling so warm, Ba would appear from his study, and the three of us would eat the buns with thick sauce. The cook would pour it into a bowl for us to dip in our torn pieces of bread. The little pieces of white bread would slowly soak up the thick brown-red liquid. When each piece had become completely saturated with sauce, and there was no white left, we would place it in the center of our tongues and our mouths would fill with the hot bread and salty chili flavors.

  When I awoke, the bread was gone and Yan had lit a few candles in the room and was ready to bring me more soup, but first I needed to piss.

  “Yan, please help me up. I need the chamber pot.”

  I had not stood up since last night and she had to pull me from the bed. With my arm hoisted over her shoulder, she dragged me up and I shifted my weight toward the mirror. In front of it I let the blanket fall from me and looked at my body for the first time since giving you life. My stomach was sagging and I had been bleeding; there were lines of dried blood down my thighs. Yan had tied padding to me where I had split and torn myself, wrapping it thickly around my waist and between my legs. The pain was deep and still very intense; as I moved I felt I was ripping myself open again. She brought in the pot and took the padding off me. I looked again at my waist, hips, and thighs, soft white skin surrounding a mound of slack flesh and blood. I looked as though I had been ripped from something, rather than something from me. Yet I felt whole; one mind and one body. I did not think of the second body that should have been cradled next to mine.

  Yan came up behind me and placed her hands gently on my shoulders to lower me onto the pot. As the piss flowed, it burned me and I bit into my lip. When I’d finished, Yan put back the padding between my legs and secured it around my waist.

  “Yan, when you take the pot out, please empty it immediately,” I instructed.

  “But, mistress, both the doctor and the fortune-teller downstairs have asked to see this.”

  “I know.” I fell back into bed and pulled the blanket around myself. Facing the wall, I followed the rough outline of my shadow on the wall cast by the candles Yan had lit.

  “They are all downstairs. All waiting, desperate to blame me, to tell Xiong Fa to get a second wife,” I murmured, watching the flickering lights throw multiple versions of my silhouette onto the wall, lending my body different shapes and layers. “Don’t let them see . . . empty it out of the window at the end of the landing.”

  I closed my eyes to sleep.

  “Mistress, I’ll wake you tomorrow for a bath. We’ll clean you up properly then.”

  “No, Yan. Please come back in a minute. I want you to tell me again about your husband and your garden. I’m tired and want to sleep, but I want to hear your voice and the stories of your home. I’m sorry for everything I have asked you to do, but it was necessary.”

  I heard Yan leave, the patter of her footsteps down the corridor, and then she stood still. I heard liquid hit the courtyard below and her footsteps returning. She quietly opened the door and slipped inside then sat down on the chair beside my bed. I heard her talking as I drifted away.

  Maybe an hour had passed since I had fallen asleep; there was a knock at the door and Yan went to answer it. She told the servant they were too late, everything had already been thrown away. How many must have waited with Xiong Fa, his father, and First Wife? Other members of the family coming up to its three most prominent elders, offering false sympathy while relishing their pain and upset. I imagined Xiong Fa, his Western trousers and shirt covered by a long traditional silk robe, and his father wearing full traditional clothes, his stomach pushing tight against the sash. Father-in-law’s face would show little emotion as usual, just narrow eyes beneath bushy gray eyebrows, made narrower still by the swell of cheeks and jowls below. His silver hair was always slicked back tight against his scalp. I would never see beyond this unchanging facade and, unlike all the other women in the household, I would not try. Xiong Fa would be sitting next to his father, but he would not be still. I imagined him getting out of his seat and walking up and down the room, speaking to the doctor and the fortune-teller about what might happen next. Whether there would ever be a son? Men and more men. What Xiong Fa needed was an heir. I would have to provide one in time.

  I thought of Bi then, my imagination racing through a hundred little moments we had shared on the riverbank or walking alone together in the gardens. Watching the shadows I returned to a moment we had spent, lying side by side on our backs, under the huge willow tree by the riverbank, staring up into its branches. They fell to the ground around us like a canopy bed and I tried to trace their origins back to the trunk as they crisscrossed each other. I turned my head to look at Bi and after a few seconds he must have heard my breathing, or maybe sensed my gaze, and met my eyes. We were holding hands for the first time. It had started tentatively with his fingers finding the backs of my hands and following my knuckles down to the fingertips. I had never before had someone caress me, even in this most tentative way. His fingers crept into mine as I opened them wider, and once they were entwined I immediately squeezed them tight, binding us together. I thought then we would never be broken apart. When we met each other’s eyes a few moments later, we both looked down at our fingers and slowly smiled. Together we looked into the water, watching it run endlessly past.

  The images faded and I opened my eyes to see the shadows on the wall flickering restlessly.

  In the morning Yan woke me for a bath. She had brought enough water for two and had ordered the male servants from the lower quarters to bring up two tubs. Within a few minutes of my sitting in the first tub, the water turned red with the clotted blood and after some scrubbing Yan helped me move to the second, in which she bathed me properly and applied oils and lotions.

  I felt hollow; everything around me had no substance, only colors and shapes. It was as if with your birth all my organs had been ripped from me as well, leaving a shell. I felt nothing but an emptiness that I knew I would eventually need to fill.

  After three days of rest, Xiong Fa came to visit me. He knocked quietly and opened the door slowly. He moved carefully across the room though he barely managed to get a few steps away from the open door. Yan was sitting next to me and on seeing Xiong Fa enter she stood up and started to excuse herself.

  “Yan, sit down again. I am very pleased that you have looked after Feng during this difficult time. Feng, I am sorry that we lost our first child, I wanted this very much.”

&
nbsp; He stood at the corner of the bed uneasily. I watched him fumble his words and look around the room avoiding me.

  “I . . . I . . . I hope you can get better soon. I think it would have been fine if . . .”

  Whatever he was to say he stopped himself. He looked at Yan and then his eyes rushed from her past me and to the wall behind me.

  “I will see you when you are ready. Rest and become healthy again.”

  For nearly four weeks I slept. Sleep punctuated only by meals and reading, I remained in my room letting the hours and days rock slowly forward like an ancient riverboat propelled by a single oarsman. I listened at the window to the world outside. Only a year ago, before I was pregnant, I had longed to visit it but now it had lost all excitement and color for me.

  I remembered what Ming had said to me, that First Wife needed to give her husband a grandson and she could never rest until it had happened. Ming understood everything, I wished I could see her again. I had only met her briefly and not seen her since that dance a year ago. I heard she was traveling with her husband, working to further his career in politics and business. I had learned also that she was an exception: educated and confident, a woman with her own opinions and ideas. Many of the older women, like First Wife, hated her because she threatened everything that underpinned their existence. As she had advised, I read whatever books I could find though they meant little to me then. I seemed to exist only in the narrow spaces between the strokes and characters, the columns and the rows, a life with no form, substance, or meaning. Surrounded by all three, I could grasp none for myself.

  I had excused myself from family meals by claiming that I was very weak after losing the baby and needed time to recover. First Wife had sent a doctor to check me but he knew nothing and simply agreed with me, telling Father-in-law, First Wife, and Xiong Fa that if I were to try again then I would need rest. So it was, day after day, until one morning Yan rushed into my room. It was just before half past ten and I was still in bed.