Shanghai Girl
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Praise for Vivian Yang’s Shanghai Girl
“Shanghai Girl is superb literature ... one of the best of contemporary novels written by Chinese authors … (Yang is a) Shanghai success ... We eagerly await Yang's next literary feat.” -- EVE Magazine
“Shanghai Girl – a feat in itself … Yang puts a new, often lighthearted spin on frequently covered topics like Chinese identity, the U.S. immigrant experience and reverberations of the Cultural Revolution.”
-- HK Magazine
“A novel that is hard to put down once you’ve picked it up ... Yang masterfully transports the living onto the page in a way that is sure to make any writer jealous and any reader sit up and take notice.” -- Blogcritics.org
“Yang brings with her an expanded array of journeys and experiences, reflective of not only a changing America, but also of a world in transition.”
-- The Museum of Chinese in America
“Compelling story … Fiercely feminine voice … Great description … Inherently fascinating locale … Very likable narrator ... Strong language … A pleasure to read.”
-- The New Jersey State Council on the Arts
“Another ‘Tale of Two Cities’ … Paris and London played roles in Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. In Shanghai Girl, it is Shanghai and New York.” -- The Sampan (Boston)
“A new voice from Shanghai.”
-- The Hong Kong Standard
ALSO BY VIVIAN YANG
Memoirs of a Eurasian *
S. G. Shan Hai Gaaru
Status, Society, and Sino-Singaporeans
*A WNYC Leonard Lopate Essay Contest-winnning excerpt of Vivian Yang’s new novel Memoirs of a Eurasian
appears after Shanghai Girl
Vivian Yang
Vivian Yang is the author of the novels Memoirs of a Eurasian (2011), Shanghai Girl (2011 and 2001), S.G. Shan Hai Gaaru (2011 and 2002), and the nonfiction Status, Society, and Sino-Singaporeans.
Born and raised in Shanghai’s former European quarters -- often the setting of her fiction, Vivian holds an M.A. in intercultural communication from Arizona State University and taught English and journalism at Shanghai International Studies University. She was a Literature Fellow in Prose of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Publishing Project grantee from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, a Tuition Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Woolrich Writing Fund Scholar and a Writing Program Scholar at Columbia University, and a top winner of The WNYC Leonard Lopate Essay Contest, the entry of which is a chapter of Memoirs of a Eurasian.
Vivian has written for Business Weekly, China Daily, Far Eastern Economic Review, South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal Asia, and has published fiction in literary journals in the United States and in Asia. Her work has also appeared in the Opinion page of HK Magazine, The National Law Journal, and The New York Times.
Visit www.VivianYang.net, start a discussion on Amazon’s Vivian Yang Page (http://www.amazon.com/Vivian-Yang/e/B001S03LZM/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0), join the Shanghai Girl Page on Facebook, and follow Vivian on Twitter @ ShanghaiGirlUsa.
Shanghai Girl
A Novel
Vivian Yang
Copyright © 2001-2011 by Vivian W. Yang
All rights reserved
ISBN-ISBN-13: 978-1461123569
ISBN-10: 1461123569
Also available as a Kindle e-book
Designed by Katherine Wong
Contents
I Out Of The Misty Eastern Cave
1 SHA-FEI HONG: Exile from Avenue Joffre 1
2 GORDON LOU: Gentleman Avenger 15
3 SHA-FEI HONG: Great Red Fortune 29
4 EDWARD COOK: Connections and Recollections 48
5 SHA-FEI HONG: Bound to Meet On a Narrow Alley 55
6 GORDON LOU: Ninja Strategist 67
7 SHA-FEI HONG: The Revolutionary Help Exchange 70
8 EDWARD COOK: The Long March White Powder 80
II Over The Western Wave
9 SHA-FEI HONG: Sweet and Sour Big Apple 86
10 SHA-FEI HONG: Maiden Voyage Running Aground 97
11 EDWARD COOK: The Interlocution of an Interculturalist 108
12 SHA-FEI HONG: A Chinatown Prescription 111
13 SHA-FEI HONG: No More Sewing Others’ Trousseau 120
14 SHA-FEI HONG: Big Curvaceous Field 127
15 EDWARD COOK: Dig and You Shall Find 134
16 GORDON LOU: The Lofty Move 142
17 SHA-FEI HONG: Holy Matrimony 149
18 EDWARD COOK: Season’s Greetings 156
19 GORDON LOU: He Laughs Best 161
20 SHA-FEI HONG: Two Is a Pair 167
Epilogue
The Shanghai in the Girl 180
Appendix: A conversation with Vivian Yang, author of 184
Memoirs of a Eurasian and Shanghai Girl
An Excerpt of Memoirs of a Eurasian by Vivian Yang 187
Swiftly walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear, --
Swift be thy flight!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
I
OUT OF THE MISTY EASTERN CAVE
1 Sha-Fei Hong: Exile from Avenue Joffre
Upon first hearing, my name sounds commonplace enough for a Chinese girl: pretty and prosaic. Few have asked me why I am called Sha-Fei. People assume that I must have been born at dawn when the morning light, Sha, was glowing, and Fei, the rosy clouds, were floating. But I know I was named after the trendiest street in Shanghai’s former French Concession, Avenue Joffre. The Chinese translation for the onetime marshal of France was Sha-Fei.
Sha-Fei.
My life as a Shanghai girl began in the same gardened Western-style house in the heart of the Concession where my father had grown up in the 1930’s. Father named me. In 1964, Shanghai had already been liberated by the Party for fifteen years. Any sentimental display towards her colonial past would have been severely punished. Father used a pun in naming me and kept his genuine intent deep in his heart.
My earliest recollection of was the ambiance surrounding our neighborhood, the part of town known to the locals as “The Upper Section.” Images of our house remain in my head like snapshots -- the red tiles on tapered roof, the gray steel window frames shipped in from Lyons when the house was built, 14-foot ceilings, French windows opening to the verandah, the fenced in garden with Chinese parasol trees and a rosebush. There was the sound of crying cicadas on humid summer nights, when the ceiling fans ran all night long and the smell of the mosquito-repellent incense permeated the house. For reasons unclear to me, I was not allowed to enter two places in the house: the Ancestor Worshipping Hall and the servant’s quarters. My favorite indoor play area was the pantry adjacent to the kitchen where a giant GE refrigerator stood, its motor buzzing. The pantry had a small door opening from below the kitchen counter through which freshly prepared food was brought to the dining room. Just above the house’s top floor solarium, between the stucco overhangs, were the words 1928 A.D., in relief.
A block away from our house was the entrance to Club Jingjiang, the former Cercle Sportif Francais on rue. Cardinal Mercier, now Maoming Road. Only occasionally would Father mention such facts to me at home, peppering our native Shanghai dialect with English and French words. He had, after all, been a student in New York City.
After the Cultural Revolution started, I never heard a foreign word from him again. Then one day, the changing tides of the Huangpu had flooded our home. The Red Guards from Shanghai’s Pujiang University where Father taught decided to "sweep” us out "like dirt on the floor." Nine
proletariat families moved in and partitioned the house. In an act of mercy on the part of the university, a dormitory unit was assigned to us three. Father died in 1979. Mother remarried and moved out. I have lived here since.
It is the summer I turn twenty. Love is no longer a banned word on university campuses. I am nebulously in love. I met Lu Long during our first semester together at Pujiang. The closest physical contact we’ve had is fleetingly holding hands when nobody is around. A month ago, he received a scholarship and went to study in New York. A vacuum has since filled my heart. I am now in love with a vision, perhaps more that of America than that of Lu Long. I am lovesick yet lovelorn.
One man who truly loved me was Father. I keep his photo by my bed and think of him as he was in that photo: glasses were his most prominent feature; lenses as thick as the bottom of a soy sauce bottle rested on a soiled plastic frame. The right pad was long gone, replaced by adhesive tape stuck as a cushion against his nose. He is wearing a gray Lenin suit with the bottom button missing. The expression in his eyes through the lenses is disturbingly disinterested. The man in this faded, over-exposed color photo is my father, shortly after he left prison.
Father went to jail not long after our family was swept out of the former Avenue Joffre, during the nationwide Campaign to Purify Class Ranks. Father was accused of having been a spy. Of course, he never was a spy. He was a returning student from America: M.S., Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, Class of 1951. During the Cultural Revolution, that was enough for him to be accused and incarcerated for five years.
During the week I first began to menstruate, he was released and came home. I was thirteen and he, forty-three. The year was 1977. Two years later, Father passed away. Colon cancer, advanced stage. Someone who had known him well remarked that Father actually died of an ulcer in the heart.
On his deathbed I held his limp hand, gazing into his half-closed eyes and hollowed sockets and listening to his ebbing breath. My teenage life was on hold. Outside, beyond the four walls of the terminally ill ward, a different Chinese world was in the making. The Cultural Revolution was over. Selected foreign films were beginning to be shown. My favorite one chronicled the life of Ciprian Porumbescu, the 19th-century Romanian composer. In it, Porumbescu and his girlfriend danced in what appeared to be endless swirls, culminating in a deep French kiss. "I love you," he told her through the dubbing actor’s mesmerizing voice. Wo Ai Ni, the three words most Chinese are too embarrassed to utter.
At Father’s side, I daydreamed of being told Wo Ai Ni by a handsome and smart high school classmate who did not wear glasses. But I’d heard he took another girl out for a date, during which he bought a bowl of wonton soup and shared it with her. My qingdou chukai, the dawning of puberty was like the virgin budding of a love flower. But nobody asked me for a wonton date despite my large almond eyes and deep dimples. It was because I was the daughter of a "counter-revolutionary spy."
Tears rolled down my face as I watched Father and fantasized about him opening his eyes wide, sitting up on his bed, kissing me on the cheeks, and saying the as yet never spoken, "Wo Ai Ni!"
Two days before his death, Father held my hand and told me a secret: He had had a girlfriend named Marlene Koo in New York. Like Father, Miss Koo had come from a wealthy, Westernized Shanghai family, which sent her to Barnard after graduating from the McTyeire Methodist School for Girls, where Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her sisters had gone. She was named after Marlene Dietrich, her parents’ favorite Western actress. Father spoke of his heartbreak over losing Marlene, whom he had known as a family friend’s daughter in Shanghai and dated while both of them were in New York. "Marlene was quite spoiled and was a bit headstrong like you, Sha-fei," Father said with a faint smile of helplessness. "Uncertain about the new regime back in China, she refused to return with me. Of course our communication became impossible over time. I was so determined to contribute the knowledge I had acquired abroad to our motherland that I sacrificed my personal happiness . . ."
Father gave me a most unusual look and said haltingly, "I know it’s ridiculous of me to think so, but if you ever make it to America and see Marlene, tell her that she won our debate. She was right to stay on. I just wish I’d listened to her."
Not until then did I realize the truth behind the lurking tension that seemed to have existed between my parents. Father was eleven years older than Mother and had a life of his own before they met in a Shanghai factory workshop in 1961. He was the engineer in charge for a technological innovation project initiated by the University, and she was an innocent and attractive apprentice fresh out of middle school. She offered him daily drinks of green tea in an enamel mug. At the end of the project, he asked for her hand . . .
Father’s last words to me were: "Remember, my child, life is hard. Be strong and resourceful. Don’t be an idealistic intellectual like me. Survive first. Then, thrive in this world."
Before I insert the key to my apartment door, I always look around. Everyone in the neighborhood watches a young college student if she lives alone. Just to make sure she’s respectable.
Something on the other side of my door makes me stop. It’s the odor of cigarettes seeping through the keyhole. My heart starts to thump. I glue one ear to the door and stick a finger into my free ear to block out the neighborhood noise.
As the door flings open, I fall against the torso of my stepfather. Before I can scream, he pulls me in. "I heard your footsteps already, Sha-fei," he says, laughing, his two gold-capped front teeth glaring. "I opened the door for you so you wouldn’t be startled."
"You just did. I didn’t know anybody else had the key besides Mother. What wind has blown you here?" I throw out the familiar greeting in an effort to appear calm.
"I’m here on business,” Stepfather announces in an official tone. After almost three decades as a cadre, he is used to talking as if lecturing. "It’s the 80’s now and China is opening up to the world. Even government functionaries like us are thinking of making money. That’s why I’m in Shanghai for a few days."
I nod but don’t know what to say. This is the first time we are together without Mother. Mother married him during my freshman year and went to live with him in Nanjing, where he was a ranking cadre. I had seen him three or four times during Mother’s visits. I know little about the man except that he blames Mother for not bearing him a son. Instead, Mother had a baby girl last year. Stepfather’s clout made it possible for him to bypass the “one child” policy. After obtaining the quota for another child, my 43-year-old mother is pregnant again. This one, the sonogram has confirmed, will be a boy to carry on Stepfather’s family lineage.
Stepfather takes a deep draw on his "Panda" cigarette and sinks down on my bed like a big bag of rice, next to his lumpy army coat. Pieces of peeling plaster hang from the low ceiling like pages from an old newspaper. I move away from him to a corner of the room under my only window.
Stepfather clears his throat and takes a folded envelope from the breast pocket of his Mao-style tunic. "Since I’d be in town anyway, I told your mother I’d bring this to you. Saves her a trip to the post office, especially with that tummy the size of a land mine planted by the Eight Route Red Army to blow up the Japanese devils. Ha-ha-ha!"
"Thank you very much," I say. Stepfather provides my monthly living expenses. I don’t have to pay university tuition. The government takes care of that.
Pointing at the chair next to my bed, he orders, "Don’t stand there like a statue. Come sit here and we’ll talk.”
I sit down.
“See what I’ve brought for you from the market?" He dangles a bunch of bananas in front of me. "Come on. Take one," he urges.
I shake my hand and say, "Thanks, but no. You don’t have to bring me anything. Why don’t you take these with you to eat later?"
Stepfather’s thick black eyebrows knot in displeasure. "Nonsense! I bought them especially for you. I want to see you eat one right now." He snaps one off from the bunch, peels off its top, and
thrusts it into my hand.
Without a word, I begin to eat.
"You eat like your mother, pouting your little cherry mouth," he says, gazing at me.
My mouth ceases moving. I stare back at him.
"Keep eating. Don’t stop," he urges. In a gentler tone, he asks, "So how’s school?"
"Fine."
"Graduating soon, eh?"
"Yes, in the summer."
"You have to write a paper to graduate?"
"Yes."
There are also the Comprehensive Examinations to pass. But what does he know? As for the paper, I cannot be more frustrated. The topic I chose, a preliminary study of the father of political science Machiavelli, was turned down by the teacher.
"Sha-fei Hong, I’m disappointed you chose such a despicable person who advocated the notion that ‘The ends justify the means.’ Remember, we should always put revolutionary politics first, as Chairman Mao taught us. We should stick to the principles of Marxist-Leninist and Mao Zedong thought."
I glance at Stepfather. The teacher’s words sounded like something he might have said to me.