All the Flowers in Shanghai

by Duncan Jepson

  After a while the arrangement between Lu Meng and Yu began to make me angry; it was disrespectful. It seemed too intimate; they paid too much attention to each other. He would often gaze at her from a distance and ask anxiously if she was well. I studied them both more closely and noticed what seemed to be a strong affection forming between them. I saw that sometimes Lu Meng would wait for Yu to come from the servants’ quarters to accompany him to school. One day as I was waiting in the car at the back entrance, I watched them leaving and they were laughing together. I saw him help her make his bed, help her lift some books he had bought, help her clean his room of soil he had used to plant some seedlings. This was not what I wanted for my son, I wanted him to be with someone whom he would adore and would be adored by everyone else. Not a servant. This was not what I had planned. He was crippled and disadvantaged already. This would only cause him to suffer more.

  In the four years that had now passed since Xiong Fa and I had spoken to each other in the laundry courtyard, I had seen less and less of him. We spoke on friendly terms when we did see each other, perhaps at dinner or when I was needed for ceremonial duties as the First Wife of the family. I always performed these well and willingly, but I had long ago lost any interest in men and had not wanted him or anyone else since my son was born. Lu Meng had become all the world to me. Xiong Fa continued to visit the young maids of the house, which many men liked to do, but he also continued to be discreet, which saved my face and was acceptable to me. Before, I would have fought him; now, at nearly thirty-eight, I was too comfortable living in this house. As I had to do nothing to maintain my lifestyle, I took stubborn pride in mere phantoms and emptiness. I taught my son names I could not read; went into the city to buy expensive items and paraded them in front of people as if they were trophies won by my own hard work. I could hear myself talk too much, giving advice, making sure I got the final word even if I knew it was nonsense. I was making myself sick with my life of repetition, like a ghost haunting a house of mirrors, forced to watch itself repeat the same noise and gestures, every minute, hour, day, month.

  Ming had made my mind beautiful; with her I had become attentive and graceful, but now I was slipping back into ugliness. I could not help myself, because I was not able to see where change was needed until it was too late; I prized everything, not knowing what was of value and what was worthless.

  When I watched Yu with Lu Meng and felt such anger, I began to sense the depth of my own bitterness. Yu brought a happiness to my son’s life that I had forgotten. I sat in my room, in the chair that had witnessed everything, and became furious. I did not want change; I wanted my way, everything to be returned to the way it was before Yu came. I wanted Lu Meng to laugh only with me as he had done for so many years in his childhood. I wanted Ming to return. I sat alone and shouted for Yan but there was no reply, only silence. Rather than wait for her to return from her work, I walked alone to Xiong Fa’s apartment but as I drew nearer I saw him standing at the open door with Yu. He was smiling and guiding her inside his apartment, gently leading her by her left elbow. I saw his skin touch hers. She returned his smile anxiously but he nodded reassurance and she stepped inside. He closed the door. I wanted to scream. As I walked back to my apartment I grabbed a vase and hurled it over the balustrade, hearing it shatter on the hall floor below.

  Yan was already sitting outside my door. She was now nearly seventy years old and knew that, unlike before, if I were enraged now she could do nothing. She had also come to learn that she could not talk to me as freely as she once had. Our old conversations, which had once been so warm and soothing to me, had become an embarrassment.

  I walked past her and into my room.

  Inside, I screamed loudly, the noise rising from somewhere deep within me. I marched up to my dressing table and, grabbing my hairbrush, hurled it against the wall.

  “What is it, mistress?” Yan timidly asked. I knew she was only pretending. She recognized the problem as well as I did.

  “That girl is a whore! Sleeping with the father while trying to seduce the son . . . well, I will not stand for it. I am First Wife and this is my house!” I shouted. I was the fool and did not see it, even though I was sitting in front of the mirror with my own reflection staring back at me.

  “Don’t you agree, Yan, that something must be done?” I raged. I looked around and caught sight of my belt, a Western belt with a large metal buckle. I snatched it by one end and ran out of my apartment. The girl was back, sitting outside Lu Meng’s room.

  “Whore!” I screamed.

  I ran up and grabbed her by the hair. I forced her to the floor and thrashed whatever part of her I could reach with the flailing belt. Twice . . . five times . . . perhaps once more, I did not count. Lu Meng came out of his room then. Seizing the belt from me, he threw it behind him on the landing. He picked Yu up and helped her to stand. I saw deep red run through her long black hair.

  “Lu Meng, let her go! She is a whore, trying to catch you and your father. Throw her out of this house!” I howled and screamed like a devil. “Lu Meng, do as I say, I’m your mother,” I shouted at him.

  He did not move but stood and looked at me, his light brown eyes darkening and his lips parting slightly as he breathed defiance. He stood in front of Yu to create a barrier between us.

  “Lu Meng. Lu Meng. Do as I say! I’m your mother, you must respect my wishes.” I breathed harder. “You make me lose face in front of this servant whore. Move out of the way!”

  Only silence.

  “Move!” I screamed.

  He didn’t lower his arms, which remained in front of Yu, protecting her.

  Xiong Fa arrived then. He stepped between his son and his wife, but his attention went first to Yu. He brushed the girl’s hair aside and we saw that she had a long gash across her right cheek, starting below her ear and ending halfway along her jaw. Blood flowed freely. It was already dripping onto the floor, leaving a stain. I watched it settle and was reminded again of the water marks left by this family, my family, visiting Ma’s and Ba’s house for the first time on that stormy day when Grandfather and I had been told to stay away.

  For a moment I was lost.

  “Yan, get a cloth to stop the bleeding. Lu Meng, take Yu to the People’s Hospital,” Xiong Fa instructed them, and they left. “This is crazy. Why do you do this to a harmless servant?” he rebuked me.

  “She is not. She is sleeping with you! Maybe even your son.”

  “What? That is madness.” He shook his head.

  He looked at me and I stared back as hard as I could, my nostrils flaring and my eyes bulging. I could not believe he was denying what he had done. He cleared his throat to talk while mine was tight, almost suffocating me; I watched him look down at the blood and then he said, very softly, “I am sorry for everything but it can’t be undone.” He paused and looked at me with such sorrow on his face then. His skin was sagging and he had put on much more weight. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and I saw scars on it from where he had been tortured and beaten by the Japanese soldiers. “Feng, there is so much anger in you. I can’t do this anymore. Please, will you stop?” he asked.

  We stood in the corridor alone but knowing the whole house was watching and listening.

  “Feng, please. Please think clearly.” He looked at the floor and then up and across the balcony to the unseen faces listening. “We have been through so much. There has been war, hunger, and now people all over the country are demanding huge changes. We have hurt each other and many years ago we lost a child.”

  I looked hard at him and suddenly thought he may know. He may have learned what I had done. That night felt so close to me again. My nostrils again filled with the smell of blood and shit of that evening. I stood still and firm on the wooden floor but my legs felt as they did that night, dead and paralyzed.

  “Lu Meng would not be alone. And you and I would have another child. Another baby. Lu Meng is happy with Yu and in all that is happening around us it is some
thing to be joyful about.”

  He looked directly into my eyes. It had been so long since I had seen them, they were now softer and more watery, there was now a longing that had washed out his parents’ pride and arrogance, which I had not noticed before.

  “Please think about this.”

  He stepped forward, now closer to me than in years. I could see the lines of his face, years of hardship endured for us, I thought back to the day we stood outside the door of the banquet hall during our wedding, his face shiny and plump like that of a glazed pig. I thought of what had happened since that day and in my anger I could not understand what he was trying to explain, this old man standing in front of me.

  I remember taking a half-step back.

  I brought my right hand up and slapped him. His head moved slightly but barely flinched.

  “Shut up. It was you and your family. Always your family. Now it is your family again.”

  “Feng.”

  He pleaded with me but I couldn’t understand.

  “Go back to that little whore.”

  He looked down, shook his head, and left me standing alone in the deserted corridor. The belt still lay on the floor where Lu Meng had thrown it, its buckle covered in blood.

  It was I who had lost face.

  I had been wronged and my son stolen from me. Xiong Fa and Lu Meng told me that this was not true, Yu just wanted to be a good servant, they said. But I was certain I knew how good she was being, and ordered that if he could not be a dutiful son he should move from the apartment next to mine. To my shock, he did. Xiong Fa arranged for an apartment to be made ready near to his and I requested that I did not see Yu again.

  I had been betrayed by my own son in exchange for the favors of a young stupid whore. Yan told me that she’d been put to work in the laundry room but I had seen her, with my own eyes, walking to school with Lu Meng and slipping into Xiong Fa’s apartment again in the middle of the day.

  I cut them all off as they deserved. They would never be allowed into my life again. My days were spent with Yan. I slept late, went alone to the Cathay Hotel for tea in the afternoon, and shopped in the few remaining places that still stocked foreign goods. Shanghai was changing; it had once been the most cosmopolitan of Chinese cities but now the foreigners were largely gone and with them the opulence and luxury that the Sang family had enjoyed for the last hundred years.

  I lived alone again, in hatred and anger.

  The city I knew was very small. I had only experienced the gardens, my school, the backstreets full of peasants and the poor, places to eat and buy beautiful things, this house, my apartment, my window, my dressing table, and my bed. After losing Lu Meng, I withdrew even further. Yan accompanied me at a distance, wary of my narrowing focus. She knew that my world had now become so small, so finely balanced around me, that any alteration to it could be upsetting. My days became locked into a pattern, like a beautiful spiderweb, trembling at the slightest breeze—the smallest truth. Too close and I would not hesitate. I was too frightened not to attack.

  Every morning in my apartment I would wear the same clothes, a cheongsam and a shawl; I would hold the same conversations, eat the same lunch in the same restaurants, repeat the same walks and visits, greetings and genuflections, again and again, the same feelings, gestures, vocabulary, breaths, colors, the same light, the same darkness . . . all repeated until I felt my muscles and senses could continue without my volition or even the beating of my heart. Each strand of my life was carefully held in place by the others.

  Then . . . change.

  Suddenly, a flood of new thinking and new demands, millions of minds and bodies commanded by one man, would disassemble my world, piece by piece, without my even noticing at first. They, too, chose to wear the same clothes: not traditional like mine, but of red, black, white, green, and dark blue . . . but all gray nonetheless, because there was no longer any trace of individuality allowed. They repeated the same vocabulary and gestures; they were as unerring in their devotion to their life as I was to mine. Closing their businesses, they gave up their livelihoods, setting aside their own interests for the good of everyone else. They stopped being respectful to their betters, like the Sang family. Red was now the national color; the red of rage. People talked of politics I did not understand; even waiters in the few remaining tearooms and the servants employed by the Sang family held strong views. Our household workers left and could not be replaced. It was all ending. But I was still First Wife of the Sang family, what did I care? Politics was for people who had to work every day to earn their living; for people whose hearts still beat and minds imagined something better.

  Increasingly as Yan and I went into the city, even just for a walk on the Bund, people would openly stare at me and my clothes: traditional cheongsams and elegant Western styles made by the best tailors. They would call out names I did not understand. Shanghai was busy but newly hostile, the things I remembered long gone. I returned to the backstreets where I had once strayed with Grandfather, but they seemed dirty and vulgar to me and I could not understand what I had seen in them that had made me enjoy them so much and want to keep returning. Posters were plastered on walls, calling for change; students were going from door to door, rousing the people to think and believe in something new.

  Gestures, vocabulary, and manners—all had suddenly changed. People openly showed that they did not respect me.

  “Capitalist roaders, greedy pigs!” a young woman shouted at me as I passed. “You should be ashamed, wearing those fine clothes when others are struggling. Who was exploited so you could live like this?”

  I stopped. The streets were so narrow here that when I turned around she was almost upon me. Her face was pretty and delicate, her hair neatly arranged in pigtails. Her lips were thin and her skin almost translucent; a beauty that would have attracted Father-in-law, Xiong Fa, and their friends. But her eyes were full of hatred, and she brought her left hand up and brandished her fist in front of my face.

  “Your days are running out,” she shouted at me. “Get out of here! You don’t belong here . . . get out of our country.”

  She was not part of the world I controlled. I was frightened. Yan took hold of my hand as I looked at the young girl. My maid had not held my hand for years. Our fingers instinctively entwined. She pulled me through the crowds of onlookers. As we left the backstreets, my mind was blank. Faces faded in and out of my vision. We reached the main road and the car was waiting. Yan quickly opened the door for me to get in. Behind the curtains of the car I was able to breathe and felt safe. Yan pushed the cloth aside and looked outside to check no one had followed us and then asked the driver to take us home.

  I was still upset when we arrived at the back entrance to the house.

  I had hidden you away in the back of my mind since Xiong Fa had confronted me in the corridor, again pushing the possibility of your existence to a place where you would be lost to me.

  I got out of the car to see Xiong Fa with Yu and an old couple standing on the steps to the back door.

  The old couple looked so happy to see Yu. She smiled, the scar framing one side of her smile, making her face slightly misshapen. It had been beautiful before. I knew every detail of it. I had been extremely jealous of her high cheekbones, curved lips, deep brown eyes, and her youth.

  As I stood by the open car door still barely out of the backseat, Yan took my hand urgently. It had been years since she had held me like this and I looked at her sharply but her look silenced me.

  “Mistress, that couple. I gave the baby to them. I need to tell you mistress.”

  I was not listening.

  “But when I gave the baby away I gave them a drawing of the family seal so they would know and it would be recognized.”

  I looked at Xiong Fa and, seeing me, he smiled sadly, showing me he understood and he waved me to come to them. I could not move. He had known for so long. I had hit you, scarred my own daughter. I thought he had been with you. I wanted to close my eyes but I
needed to watch those two loving people throw their arms around you. The old woman put her hand to your right cheek. She touched the scar, her finger gauged its depth. I looked behind me. The gate was still open.

  Xiong Fa started to walk toward me. He shouted at me.

  “Feng, come here.”

  I could not face any of you, even Yan, my maid, who had disobeyed me to do what was right.

  I turned to look at the gate again and the open road behind it, full of traffic and crowds of people. I looked at your face. My face as a young girl. You said something to the old couple, these strangers who were your parents. They turned and looked at me. They must have been angry but they knew they could not do anything to me. I was a Sang. My mother had married me so well that nothing was sacred; I could treat my own daughter as a creature, to beat and scar.

  I stepped backward. My heart raced but everything else slowed. These poor people who had raised you in the countryside, who had done everything to help you survive, embraced you with such love.

  Xiong Fa continued to walk toward me, beckoning me to join them.

  Everything crashed together in my mind and I stumbled backward. My left hand caught the side of the car to steady me. I looked again at the deep scar on your face, the pained expression of the woman, your mother, hurt as she touched your cheek . . . and I turned around and ran through the gate and out into the road.

  As I ran I shouted, telling myself that none of this could be possible; screaming that I could not be held responsible. I stopped and thought of turning back then but I could not face that house again, with its endless corridors, balconies, and impenetrable darkness. I couldn’t let any of you see me. I thought of Lu Meng, and what my beloved son would think I could not imagine. I walked on, ran, tripped and fell, and was picked up by passersby. I had torn my clothes and scraped myself.