The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  When no one is listening, Jinhua talks some more about running away. “Like the two houseboys,” she tells Suyin. “They have been gone for eight whole days and no one can find them.” And then she says, “I have been watching for the boatman from my window. The one who brought me here. He has a lord and a god and a heavenly father, who protect him and make him strong. One day I will see him. I will call out to him, and he will remember me because of the kumquat that I gave him. He will remember me, and he will save us, Suyin, and help us run away from here.”

  Suyin keeps on sweeping, moving her body only a little. “This is just a story you are telling yourself, Jinhua,” she says, “and it is not real. I am a cripple, and because of the foot-binding sickness I cannot run a single step even with the help of your boatman. As for you, Jinhua, you are going to be Lao Mama’s best money tree now that you are twelve years old and your feet are small. If you run away Lao Mama will not give up until she finds you wherever you go, wherever you hide. The man with the hairy ear will not forget you, and she will not forget, and when she finds us, I will be punished and so will you. Remember, Jinhua, we don’t own ourselves. And there is one more thing—with money a person can command the devil. But without it, even a boatman cannot be expected to help.”

  The bruise on Suyin’s cheek matches the shape of Lao Mama’s sparkly emerald ring, the one for her middle finger that she never doesn’t wear. Sprinkles of dirt and dust gather in neat piles under Suyin’s broom, and the broom makes a slow scratching sound on the floor—and what Suyin has said is true and real. Jinhua waits, and she is remembering the boatman and the finger that he lost “facing down the enemy.” And she is remembering Baba telling stories, and crickets singing, and the stars in Baba’s eyes. And then she tells Suyin, who is more wise than anyone, and she feels better just saying these things: “My boatman is a strong and kind man, and when I find him he will protect us both, Suyin. He will carry you and me; he will carry us both, and after that we will own ourselves and each other for ever and for always.”

  12

  LIGHTING THE BIG CANDLES

  Jinhua

  “Is the virgin courtesan afraid of me—or not?”

  Jinhua’s every bone is tight with fear. It is hot in the room, and Banker Chang is looking at her hun shen shang xia—from head to shoe—and she is twelve years old or close enough, Lao Mama says. Banker Chang’s toady eyes are absolutely terrifying. He has bulging purses at his hip, seven of them that she can see; a thick girdle at his waist; a ring of oily mutton-fat jade on his thumb. He stands there swaying in his satin boots, his shoulders, his neck, and his large head moving in a circle. Jinhua doesn’t answer him. Her lips taste of bitter cloves; her hair smells of jasmine; her skin is scented with magnolia.

  It is the night for lighting the big candles—it is Jinhua’s first time to do bed business.

  “Do whatever he tells you to do,” Lao Mama said before he came. “Banker Chang is a rich man with a large appetite.”

  It is a grand occasion in the hall when a girl becomes a money tree, and Jinhua is dressed in watermelon red: a light silk tunic and a skirt embroidered with bits of sparkling thread that look like gold but aren’t. These are a bride’s clothes. The girls in the hall take turns wearing them, pretending to be brides even though they all know that there are no husbands for girls like them.

  Today it is Jinhua’s turn to wear these things that look real but aren’t.

  When Suyin had finished plucking Jinhua’s hair to widen her forehead like a grown-up lady and had painted her lips with full curves on the top and a large red dot the size of a cherry on her bottom lip, she said Jinhua looked beautiful. She put powder on Jinhua’s face, and paint on her cheeks, and a hint of gold across her forehead. She wiped the red mark from Jinhua’s throat very, very gently. “You cannot have this now,” she said. And then Suyin knotted Jinhua’s hair at the back of her head and dressed it with flowers, and she told her, “Tonight you must wear the pink shoes,” the shoes that were Aiwen’s. When she said this, she looked sad. Jinhua’s little-girl fringe and her braids were gone. Lao Mama made her walk and show all the other girls and even Old Man how beautiful she looked, and Cook came in from the kitchen to see. He clapped his hands. Jinhua felt proud for just a moment, and then it was embarrassed and strange that she felt. She was worried, too. Her life is changing. She has been worrying about this all day, all week, all month, and now she hardly recognizes her own face in the mirror.

  “Keep your eyes lowered,” Lao Mama said, “the way I have taught you. Take tiny steps and let your hips sway. Don’t forget.” Lao Mama was frowning, but Jinhua knew she was happy because of what she said next. “Today you are a money tree, Jinhua. Banker Chang will be the first of many; I feel this in the marrow of my bones. You are a beautiful child. You are young. The customers remember you and desire you—and this is good for wealth and profit.”

  Lao Mama loves money more than anything. More than her own life—more than anyone else’s.

  When she had finished dressing Jinhua, Suyin prepared the room. She brought tea and snacks and an opium tray for Banker Chang. She arranged the bed, and then she lit the big red candles, and as she was leaving Jinhua called out, “Will you be here when he comes?” And she asked this even though she knew the answer.

  Suyin shook her head. “You must do this by yourself,” she said.

  Suyin is not wrong. Banker Chang has paid the money. He took it coin by coin by coin from one of his purses and put it coin by coin onto the table. Some of the pieces were blackened, and some were shiny, and some were neither black nor shiny. Lao Mama was smiling in the parlor, showing that gold tooth in her mouth, and she did not leave the pile of money on the table as Timu did when the go-between paid to buy Jinhua, not even for a moment. She scraped the coins into her purse and kept her hand there guarding them.

  Banker Chang is such a big and heavy man.

  “Well, you haven’t answered. You are a virgin, aren’t you?” The red candles are as tall as fence posts. The flames are hot, and Banker Chang is speaking in a sticky way. He has been downstairs at the round banquet table playing the finger game—winning only a few times—and drinking wine from the bowls that Jinhua filled every time he lost while the other customers laughed and cheered and told stories that Jinhua didn’t understand—or even listen to.

  Jinhua considers now how she might answer Banker Chang’s question: with a small laugh that isn’t a real one, with a hand lifted to cover her mouth, a tilt of her head, and a turn away from him as though she were bashful. She has seen the other girls do these things. She can do them too, but she doesn’t. She feels suddenly cold although the room is hot.

  “I am not afraid,” she lies, and she is looking straight into Banker Chang’s sweating face because she forgot for just a moment about lowering her gaze. This is not the answer that he wants; she sees this right away and worries about Lao Mama, who said more than ten times today that she will get the beating of her life if Banker Chang is not pleased. And Lao Mama said that she would beat Suyin as well. If need be, she said, until every bone is broken.

  “Are you sure?” Banker Chang is giving her a second chance. He is fiddling with the big clasp on his girdle. It is made of ivory and seems to be stuck, and Jinhua knows that he will be naked soon and doesn’t want to see this. She knows he will do things to her and these things will hurt, of course, because this is what men like.

  “May I offer the venerable gentleman a drink of tea?” she asks, instead of answering his question. She won’t help him take his girdle off although she knows that Lao Mama would say, Help our guest, you little cunt. Banker Chang nods—he will have tea—and now the clasp has come unstuck. “Ah,” he says, and his waist is growing before her eyes now that the girdle is not holding him together. He drops the girdle on the floor, and a tiny whistling noise comes from his nose.

  The tea is fortified with chunyao, a brown medicine that can make the yangqi of a man get very, very strong in no time at all.
Lao Mama sprinkled it into the pot and stirred it so well that you can’t even see that it is there.

  Jinhua holds out her hand and leads Banker Chang to a seat by the table. Her fingernails are tinted pink with balsam oil, and she likes the way they shine, and the teapot is full and heavy and decorated with naked men and girls with white skin, and they are wrapped around each other, the naked men and the naked girls, laughing. The medicine has twenty-two ingredients. “Suitable for summer,” Lao Mama said this morning when she sent Old Man to buy it. “To make his jade spear firm for all the night and half the next day,” Old Man said in a loud voice. Lao Mama corrected him. “To make the banker spend his money here and not there for the rest of time,” she said. In this Lao Mama had the last word, of course, the way she always does.

  Jinhua is careful now not to spill the tea even though her hands aren’t steady at all, even though she is afraid and nervous and wants to run away. Banker Chang’s eyes are only half open, as though he needs to sleep. He has had a lot of wine to drink. He slurps his tea. His face is shiny. The cup looks small in his wide and clumsy fist, and watching him, Jinhua thinks of an ox coming to her bedroom, sitting in a chair, drinking tea with its legs spread wide apart to make room for its belly. Banker Chang throws his head back now. He slams the empty teacup down. Jinhua pours a second cup, and the giant figure of a man’s jade spear is right there on the table next to the snacks that Suyin put out for Banker Chang to eat. The jade spear is actually made of bronze and not jade, and Lao Mama calls it The Virgin’s Torture, and Jinhua cannot imagine any man having such a large thing between his legs. Not even an ox of a man like this one.

  Banker Chang is looking now at the snacks: plates of melon seeds and spiced fruits and sweet walnuts with papery shells that even Jinhua can crack with just her hand. He takes a yellow plum, then changes his mind and puts it back on the plate. He grabs a handful of melon seeds. He takes one between his thumb and finger, and his lips pull back to show his teeth.

  “Describe what you see.” Jinhua is thinking now about all the times Lao Mama grabbed her hair and forced her eye to the crack in the wall. “Use the words that I have taught you,” she would say. Fishes Eye to Eye. Silkworms Tenderly Entwined. White Tiger Pouncing. Lao Mama would pull Jinhua’s hair, and so she had to watch the other girls do these things called bed business.

  “One day you will have to do this too,” Lao Mama said. Now Jinhua can see light from the hall that is blinking through, and the chink in the wall is as long as a hairpin and as wide as Jinhua’s smallest finger. She is wondering suddenly, Is Lao Mama there, watching from the other side?

  Banker Chang cracks a seed in his mouth; he spits the shell onto the floor and takes another. His mouth makes wet, sucking noises when he chews. Hungry noises like the gatekeeper’s dog gnawing his bone, like a pig gobbling in his trough—like a demon snorting. He takes a walnut and makes a huge and fleshy fist to crush it. Jinhua is hungry too, but she is too afraid to eat, and she must worry—is she pleasing him? Her face feels heavy with powder and heavy with rouge and heavy with knowing what is about to happen. She glances back at the chink in the wall. A cracking sound is Banker Chang’s knees, and he is on his feet, not swaying anymore, dropping bits of walnut shell. She would bend down; she would pick them up, but he is coming closer. It will happen soon, what she has seen so often with her eye to the crack. Her feet won’t move. Her face is frozen, and she is thinking about more things that please a man according to Lao Mama: Roaming Tiger, Cranes Entwined, Rabbit Bolts. Banker Chang’s lips are beside her ear. His voice is low and strange. “Call me Baba,” he is saying. Jinhua doesn’t understand; how can he be saying this? He says it over and over: “Call me Baba. Call me that. Say that I am your Baba.”

  Lao Mama never said that this would happen. “Do whatever he tells you to do,” is what she said. But not this. And now Banker Chang’s hands are on Jinhua’s waist, her hips, her back, her bottom. He is big and rough and strong, and she cannot do what he is telling her to do. He is stronger than anyone who has ever touched Jinhua before. Stronger than Lao Mama. His bean-curd face is close. She smells his breath, which stinks of oily food. His cheeks are turning red like plums. He grabs her wrists. His lips are close to hers, and light twinkles through the place where Lao Mama’s eye is watching. “Call me Baba,” Banker Chang is saying again and again, holding her tightly, whispering, growling, snarling. His lips are covering Jinhua’s lips. She holds her breath; she worries about the red dot that Suyin painted on her lower lip; that Banker Chang will smear it and tear her dress and step on Aiwen’s shoes. She worries that she will scream out loud, that Lao Mama’s eye will see everything, that her ears will hear, that Lao Mama will beat her to a rotting-no-head-dead-body-corpse—and that she will beat Suyin as well until every bone is broken. “Be careful,” she says to Banker Chang. “Please, please be careful.” The silk of her tunic roars, and now Jinhua is naked, and Banker Chang is dumpling white with two dark nipple circles on his chest. She turns her head away from him. Across the room the candles are burning, flicking light onto the god of wealth, who is smiling as he always does with his wide, pink lips.

  Lao Mama will be angry.

  When Banker Chang has finished, the candles are half the size they were, and Jinhua has done it all wrong. She couldn’t help her body going stiff. She grabbed the bedding in her hands. She didn’t move her hips in the way that she has learned. She screamed and told him to stop and felt afraid, and then she was angry and ashamed.

  She didn’t call him Baba.

  Banker Chang gasped and named her feet—“delicious, tiny lotus blooms. Fragrant golden lilies.” She tried to kick him, felt his hands force her knees apart, his skin slick with sweat, the weight of him crushing her, slicing her, splitting her insides open. His jade spear was an ugly, angry pink.

  He wouldn’t stop for even a moment. It was the Flying Dragon position. Then the Jumping Monkey. Jinhua couldn’t breathe. She turned her head and watched hot red wax dripping from the candles. They got smaller and smaller while Banker Chang did what he did, and then suddenly he shuddered and stopped.

  Now his arm is the trunk of a tree, felled across her chest, fat and white and hairless, and Banker Chang is snoring like a hog. Jinhua takes small, careful breaths. She doesn’t want to wake him, and she doesn’t want to die, and she doesn’t want ever again to do this thing with Banker Chang—or anyone.

  Suyin

  Suyin’s back aches. It aches from standing hunched over so that her eye meets the peeping hole. If she could look away she would, but she cannot, and the ache continues. She has seen everything and listened, and Suyin wishes Banker Chang a dark and agonizing death.

  Now she worries. When he wakes, he will want more.

  But Banker Chang is sleeping; the sound of a deep, slow hu hu is coming from his throat. Suyin watches Jinhua struggle to move his arm, using two hands and doing it carefully. She watches Jinhua wriggle to the edge of the bed, sees her two bare legs ease over the side, and it is now that Suyin sees the blood. There is lots of it, and the pink shoes are lying on the floor as though Aiwen’s ghost had dropped them there.

  These are the last things Suyin sees through the hole in the wall.

  “The bride dress is ruined. Banker Chang has done this, and I couldn’t stop him.”

  She is startled by the voice. She didn’t hear the door open. Jinhua is standing naked in the hall. The color Suyin painted on her lips so carefully has blossomed onto her chin and one cheek; her eyes are black smudges, her hair a mass of tangles. The flowers Suyin pinned at the nape of her neck hang there, drooping like fish caught in a net.

  Jinhua’s face is small and much too pale—and now she is a huaniang, a flower girl, a money tree who is for sale, who will be harmed again and again, night after night, until she is old and no one wants her anymore.

  “The dress can be mended,” Suyin says. The lamp she is holding sputters but doesn’t go out, and she looks down at her twisted feet. She has witnessed be
d business before; she knows that the customers are often rough and often cruel, but she has never seen such a thing as this—a man who ravages a child who has lost a father and demands that she call him Baba. The red-and-gold bride dress in Jinhua’s hand drops to the floor. Blood is running down the insides of her legs. She looks younger than she did just hours ago, and Suyin knows that she is waiting for comfort.

  “Are you all right?” Suyin asks. A question only a porridge head would ask. There is so much blood on Jinhua’s legs.

  “The candles have all gone out,” Jinhua answers, as though this were the one thing that mattered more than the torn dress and more than anything else. And then she lifts her small hand, palm upward, stained red with what Banker Chang has done. “It is blood,” she says. “I am bleeding on my bottom.”

  Downstairs the bell clangs; the guard dog—chained at the front gate and always angry—starts his barking. Jinhua turns her head, quick like an animal. Full of fear—spurred by a new kind of instinct. The gate opens with a slow, wide, yawning sound. More men coming. Lao Mama’s silk purse will get fatter and fatter.

  Jinhua has begun to sob. “Is this—is this why Aiwen killed herself?”

  The dog is still barking, and the gatekeeper tells him, “Bi zui”—shut up—and Suyin sees the red marks on Jinhua’s breasts where Banker Chang has bitten her, and she remembers the fishtail crinkles at the edge of Aiwen’s eyes and the stain of opium on her lips—and how can she answer this question now? A stray giggle ripples from a man’s throat somewhere down the hall, and a girlish voice gurgles back at him. It is Sibao, who has the room at the end of the hall—and Suyin can think of nothing at all to say out loud.