by Nicole Mones
No one asked her about her skills, not even the leader of the temporary work unit she was assigned to the next day. They worked in the laundry, washing the linens and uniforms of the officers. She washed her own tunic and trousers down on the banks of the muddy Yan River with a lump of soap and a rock, but the officers got starch and steam ironing. She didn’t mind, and ignored the blisters that formed on her hands and only half healed overnight before opening again the next day.
Nights were the hardest. As soon as she crawled into her cot, beneath the blankets, her dreams were her own again, and she could close her eyes and be with him. Every night they had spent together unfurled in her, and she kept herself awake with it for hours before falling asleep. In the daytime, he receded, a pleasurable secret.
She soon realized that now she was thinking about him the way, in her old life with Du, she had thought about the Party; he had become her private world. As she looked around, she saw young men here, Chinese men, partisans like herself, but she was not drawn to any of them. Her private world was better.
Almost as a challenge to herself, she cut her hair short in the Party style, and let her face become sunburned for the first time ever. Some of the women with good figures could not resist cinching shiny leather belts extra-close around their waists, but Song wore her tunic loose and her hair stubbornly uneven.
In the evenings she attended a newcomers’ class at the Party’s informal school. There she expected to read Marx for the first time, or discuss Party ideology, but instead found herself pressed by questions about Shanghai. Everyone seemed suspicious of a city whose people all came from someplace else and thus had no real home, and would never commit. This was not exactly true, for almost all Shanghainese, including the wealthy elite, still identified emotionally with their clan seats in the provinces, and even made occasional nostalgic visits to their family tombs and lineage temples. Still, the other young recruits in her class all agreed that the city was a place of spiritual pollution, a da ran gang, or giant dye vat so powerful that even jumping into the Huangpu could not clean off the stain—this was the view of Shanghai in traditional China, and here in the class, she was Shanghai’s representative. She learned to say little. Such old-fashioned ideas showed Song that in their own way the Reds were just as fundamentalist as Du and Chiang and the Nationalists, only with a different orthodoxy.
At the same time, in other ways, the place was genuinely progressive. She was accepted, made welcome, and given work, even if it was in the laundry. She saw that the other women in her dormitory were grateful to be here too. They were young and, unlike her, mostly not well educated; all were first-timers who’d had no prior contact with the movement. As the days passed and she heard a little about their lives, she realized they were all running from something—one escaped an arranged marriage, another an enslaving mother-in-law, a third the Japanese. They were not so much true believers as girls who had made a dash for their freedom, and all of them, including Song, had found refuge.
One day in early spring she heard shouts and ran out to the side of the building. Singing! And then from around the corner marched a group of students, in step, twenty or thirty boys and girls wearing bright kerchiefs and rucksacks, all singing in three-part harmony.
“They have walked all the way from Chongqing,” said the girl standing next to her, drying her hands on a towel.
Song gasped. “That is at least a thousand li!”
“Plenty of time to practice,” the girl cracked.
As the students marched up the broad street toward the Liaison Office complex, they sounded to Song like a fleet of angels, pure and high. Everything felt squared inside her at that moment, sure and true. Even her feelings for Thomas did not seem to pose a problem.
Walking back into the laundry, still floating on her optimism, she was stopped by the head of her unit, who handed her an envelope. “Your orders,” he said.
Finally. Please make it Yan’an, the nerve center, the real headquarters—her fingers shook with anticipation as she tore it open, and then her brain seemed to stall. “Chen Lu Village?”
“Time for you to learn from the peasants,” he said.
Thomas had prepaid the rent on his studio until February 1, 1938, and then he lost the room. The piano had to go, since he could not pay to move it, and it felt almost like having an arm or leg taken off to close the lid on those keys for the last time. A piano had been there waiting for him, on the floral rug in the parlor, before he was even born, and now, for the first time, he would have to be without one.
As he would have to be without her. He had known she would go north, had been able to see it in the way her suitcase sat by the bed. But it left a hole in him that never closed.
Luckily, the need to find someplace cheap to live took his mind off her absence. He set himself to scouring the ads in the Shanghai Times, and there found a tingzijian, a pavilion room, which was really only a closed-off loft above some other room, an eight-by-ten box with a single small window.
He had learned about pavilion rooms a year before, his first winter in Shanghai, when he was walking during Chinese New Year with Lin Ming. They had met an acquaintance of Lin’s, and stopped for the two to have an exchange in Chinese before walking on.
“What did he say?” said Thomas.
“He said, ‘May you become a second landlord this year.’ Everyone says that at New Year’s.”
“What is a second landlord?”
“A man lucky enough to lease a house and carve it up and rent every room out to other people. Usually the second landlord will live with his wife and children in the kitchen, or the largest bedroom, or the main parlor. And every other corner will be rented, including the little lofts, which are always the cheapest places.”
Thomas’s new building lay in an alley off a leafy stretch of Route Louis Dufour, and his room hung above the kitchen, in which there lived a family of four, the Huangs, his “second landlords.” The loft-cubicle came with one meal a day, and just as he had done when he moved into the studio, he used a considerable part of the money he had remaining to pay his rent out far in advance, so he could guarantee at least his room and the one daily meal, because he wanted to wait here for Song.
Ensconced, he covered the city looking for work, and ate the rest of his meals on the street, parsing out his coins to the vendors who sold hot, sustaining soups of noodles and meat and vegetables, and the large pan-crisped, sesame-bottomed pork buns called sheng jian bao. Once a week he put on one of his useless suits and walked to Ladow’s Casanova to see Alonzo and Charles and Ernest. That was always a happy hour, talking with them while they set up.
But his cash was disappearing. He spared a few coins every Wednesday morning to get an early copy of the Shanghai Times on the day the new employment ads came out, but there were really no clubs left, at least not any that he could play in.
The Badlands, between Yuyuan and Jessfield and Great Western roads, could not even be considered. The Japanese had forced foreigners out of their mansions and then turned them into vice clubs, just as they had done with the Royal. They filled the ground floors with gambling tables and roulette wheels, constantly jammed with customers and patrolled by guards bristling with guns. Everything else was divided into curtained cubicles for smoking opium, or for sex. Thomas noticed the thick haze and the sweet-sick smell when he walked through midlevel places like the Celestial and the Good Friend. The smell hung in the air even at the top club, the Hollywood, a huge low-ceilinged labyrinth of drug dens and gambling halls into which ten thousand Shanghainese streamed every day and night, from motorcars and rickshaws that clogged the streets all around. But there was no serious music.
The rest of the city was unstable, even though the battle was well in the past. The resistance fighters and collaborationists were still attacking each other by bombing the offices of newspapers and magazines, and assassinating anyone who took too strong a position. One day in February, walking down Rue Chevalier, Thomas saw a human head hanging
from a lamppost, eyes wide in terror, staring right at the Frenchtown police station. He could not read the note beneath it, but soon learned that it said “Look! Look! The result of anti-Japanese elements,” and that the head belonged to Cai Diaotou, who edited a society tabloid. Policemen who investigated the decapitation received human fingers in the mail, and soon other severed heads started appearing around Frenchtown, with warning notes. Still, he had to go out, to look for work, or he would starve.
He tried the pit orchestras at the theaters, film studios, and recording studios, and answered ads for rehearsal and accompanist work. He went to every open call for a piano player, and found them crowded with applicants, classically trained like him, many of them very high level, and all of them Jewish refugees.
He waited for his turn on a long bench next to a man from Vienna named Eugen Silverman. “We came on the Lloyd Triestino Line from Genoa,” Silverman said, “and for one whole month we could not leave the ship. Bombay, Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong—all the other passengers could come and go, not the Jews. It’s like a punishment from God. No country will take us. Not even for a few hours.”
“Except Shanghai,” said Thomas.
“Thanks to God. Even though they only let us leave with two hundred Reichsmarks, we are here.” Silverman’s name was called, and he went into the little room where they had heard the pianists play short excerpts, one by one.
His playing sounded exceptionally good to Thomas, bright and professional, and when he sight-read the selection they gave him—for every man was given two pages of some piece to test his reading—he played with assurance. Yet when he came out, his babyish face, with its soft round features and blond eyebrows, was long and gray.
“Truly?” Thomas said. “You sounded excellent.”
“Look what they have to choose from,” Silverman said, waving at the long line of pianists. He slumped back down in his seat, and even through his overcoat Thomas could see the hollowness in his upper chest, and the skin loosening beneath his chin, and in one of those intuitive instants he had come to trust, he knew the man had been going hungry.
“Thomas Greene?” said the woman in the doorway.
He gave Eugen a squeeze on the shoulder. “You’ll get the next job,” he said. “You play beautifully.”
Thomas did not do any better. When he was done, they crossed his name off and dismissed him.
To his surprise, Eugen Silverman was still outside, waiting. “No?” he guessed when he saw Thomas’s face. “Ach, they are looking for a God, not a man.” He stood and brushed at his overcoat, which Thomas saw was worn, and had been mended. I looked like that when I first came here. Now his clothes were handmade, of the finest cloth, but it meant nothing.
They left the studio and walked up Zhejiang Road toward the Grand Shanghai Hotel. “Come with me, Eugen. I know a street cart not far from here with very good noodle soup. I have a few coins. Let me buy you a bowl.”
“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to—”
“Come,” Thomas said again. He led him north to Taiwan Road, until they came to a small corner between two buildings where great puffs of steam rose into the air and a huddled mob of hungry patrons crowded the small tables, all eating noodles. “Sit,” said Thomas, “it’s restorative.” And he paid the vendor for two bowls.
Song’s orders took her to Chen Lu Village, to learn from the peasants. There, the peasants were all ceramics artisans, because Chen Lu was a village that “ate pottery”—in addition to farming the terraces on the repeating hills, everyone worked in clay. Even the houses were made of discarded pots, from whole urns stacked up, to shards and tiles cemented together; some houses were even built in hive shapes, like kilns. People told her she was lucky to be sent there in winter. With all the kilns running, she would at least be warm. She tried to feel swept up in it, but it was not why she had come north. She longed to go to Yan’an.
As she set out in a bouncing, clattering flatbed truck with a group of students from Zhengzhou, she reminded herself that she needed improvement. The students put her to shame with their joy and fervor, and after all, the job they were going to do—dig a new set of terraces on land that had slid in the rains of the previous autumn—was worthwhile.
By the time they came within sight of the town, belching wood-fired kiln smoke into a hazy sky from a string of denuded hilltops, the winter sun was sinking, and the temperature plummeting. As hunger ate at them, they passed houses tantalizingly strung with corncobs, or fronted with tall heaps of drying kernels on the ground, their color leaching away in the fading light. The truck stopped in front of two hives at the top of one of the hills, and was gone almost as soon as they had clambered down, clapping and stamping, into the cold. The hives, one for men and one for women, were as dark and cold as the outdoors, but they soon had the hearths blazing and a minimal meal of mush made from boiling dried corn and millet. The next day, they would approach the locals for vegetables and oil and salt, maybe some pork. The women slept in a huddled row that night, and Song lay on her right side, warm and safe within the accordion-line of bodies. When she woke up the next morning, someone was singing.
It took only a few days to see that there was no man in the group she cared to know any better, and she was embarrassed for having even thought of it. She would return to Thomas when the time was right. Now she had to learn from the peasants.
She loved many things about Chen Lu Village, the way the sun rose red over the hills, as if lifted by the screaming of roosters; the perplexed gratitude of the older potters when the students restored their families’ grain fields; the warm feel of the women’s hive at night; and the faces of the students by firelight, singing the songs they had learned. It was always in choral style, always about “we” and “us,” marching forward. Song recognized it as the same sound made popular by the moving picture soundtracks that had come out of Shanghai’s film studios all through the magical time of Night in Shanghai. It was in the left-wing style of composers like Nie Er, who had written the popular “March of the Volunteers.” This was the music of the movement, and it was while singing and shoveling dirt all day on the terraces of Chen Lu Village that Song first really heard it and understood it. From the earliest years of her piano lessons with her tutor, to the rapture she had felt hearing Thomas play, she had always loved the music of the West. When she left Shanghai to come north, she had consciously put at least this one foreign-tinged part of her away. But there in Chen Lu Village, digging in the fields and singing beside her fellow believers, she felt music come back to her, in a different way. She added her voice, high and soaring, and they liked it. Thomas would approve. When they came to the end, the others smiled and congratulated her, and she thanked them, but she never forgot that he was the root of her scale. Many nights, she lay thinking of this.
During their last week in the village, one of the men, a dominating personality named Zhu Hongming, moved uncomfortably close to her as they were digging a terrace. He was a leader; she had seen how the other students deferred to him, and how he preened in response. “I have been watching you, Little Sister. You have promise.”
Even to Song, who had little experience with men, it was offensive. She emitted a polite monosyllable.
Mistaking her reserve for self-effacement, he pushed ahead. “It’s so. Your political statements show intelligence.”
She stared. Not a single political statement had escaped her lips. It had taken only a short time in the north for her to see that the safest thing, especially while doing manual labor, was to keep her head down, say nothing, and attract no attention.
“I can help you advance,” said Zhu Hongming, his face dotted with blemishes which he had picked at until they bled. “I am well connected.” He touched her leg.
She winced and pulled back.
“I know a lot of important people in Yan’an. I am high level. I can help you”—his hand came back to her thigh—“or I can block your way.”
She snatched up her shovel and held it
poised, point down, above the offending hand, which instantly vanished. How dare he speak to her as an inferior? He was a mere child, no more than twenty-one, while she, an old woman of twenty-four, had already been bought, sold, and reborn. “Don’t ever do that again,” she spat, and took her shovel with her to another row. Effortlessly, without even having to think about it, she had made a decision: enough of trying to climb on her own. Her first day back in Xi’an, she would write Chen Xing a letter.
By May, Thomas was down to his last few Shanghai dollars. For weeks he had been allowing himself only one small meal a day in addition to his dinner with the Huang family, perhaps a bowl of noodles like the ones he had shared with Eugen Silverman, or a large bun like a sheng jian bao. He went on combing the ads, moving quickly from the newspapers and magazines that had been bombed out of existence to new ones, and taking himself to every open call. He failed every time, sometimes even fumbling notes. He never practiced anymore, never played, never touched a piano except to audition while faint with hunger. But there was no help for it, especially after he had spent his last coin. When not at tryouts, he passed most of his time either walking or stretched out in his room, not wanting to impose too often on Alonzo and Keiko.
It was the rituals of the Huang housewife below him that became his clock and kept him tethered to life. First thing in the morning, she did not cook, but went out to the sesame cake store, that fundamental fixture of the Shanghai neighborhood, and brought back fried dough sticks, glutinous rice cakes, soy milk, and sesame cakes, which she had once told him were the “four Buddha’s warrior attendants” of a local breakfast. He watched entranced as they consumed these wonders. She bought everything fresh, all day long, buying just enough noodles and wrappers at the rice store, or sending an older child out to buy one or two cents’ worth of hot pepper or vinegar at the soy sauce store. She never kept any kind of food. She bought briquettes and coal dust almost every day, and used a paste made from water and coal dust to seal the smoldering fire in after warming the room and making tea with it in the morning, in this way keeping it alight until the evening meal. His loft cubicle was pleasantly warm as a result, though he knew with its one tiny window, it would be unbearable in the heat.