The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Her uncle is rolling up a jacket, plumping it with small blows. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Isn’t this nice? It will make a comfy pillow. Give me your jacket, little Xiu. I’ll make one for you too.’

  Xiuqing hands him the padded silk coat she’s brought. Her jiujiu rolls it up as well. ‘You see, this isn’t so bad!’ He looks up, pleased. ‘What is it, little Xiu?’

  She asks the first thing that comes to her mind: ‘I was just wondering whether you’ve thought at all. About my – about my future. What I want to know is, are you finding me a –’ This was a bad choice, she realizes. How does one bring up what one isn’t supposed to bring up? ‘My mother always said,’ she goes on, carefully, ‘that marriage is the most important thing. She said every woman must have children. She said…’

  Drifting off, she looks up from her feet. Her uncle’s face has abruptly emptied of mirth. For a moment he just licks his lips. Then he shakes his head. ‘Marriage!’ he thunders, so loudly that the family next to them turns to stare. ‘Are you some simpering little fool who has no value without a husband?’

  Xiuqing pulls her hands into her sleeves. It makes her feel less conspicuous.

  ‘No, my girl, noooooo,’ he says, still loudly enough to elicit disapproving glares two rows over. Oblivious to them, he settles back on his mat, cross-legged. He is winding up for a lecture. Xiuqing heaves a silent sigh of relief. ‘I’m giving you an opportunity that goes beyond marriage,’ he goes on. ‘I’m sending you into the workforce, niece. You’re headed to Wuhu. To work.’

  It takes a moment for the meaning of the words to settle. Work? Xiuqing pictures the straining coolies, their corded muscles, their backs covered with rope-wide welts. She pictures Lina scrubbing the floor by the stove, killing a chicken by calmly snapping its neck. ‘Work,’ she says, trying to associate herself with the concept.

  ‘You’re going to work,’ he replies, beaming. ‘You’re going to be your own woman.’ He closes his eyes, sings softly, but with feeling:

  The moon setting, heaven’s mirror in flight

  Clouds build, spreading to seascape towers.

  ‘Li Bai,’ guesses Xiuqing.

  ‘Correct again,’ says her uncle. ‘You see? You’re very smart. You could be just about anything. A lady poet. A teacher.’

  ‘I’m going to work as a teacher?’ Xiuqing asks, incredulous. She’s always thought teachers were men. Old men. With long beards, and canes they use to beat misbehaving schoolboys.

  Her uncle scratches his head. ‘Well, no. The place I’ve gotten for you is – well, you’ll be doing something else first. But the money’s good. The money’s very good.’ He sucks a tooth contemplatively. Almost to himself, he adds, ‘And after a while, after you’ve saved, you can move on to something else.’

  ‘Am I going to be doing embroidery?’

  His hesitation is beat-quick; Xiuqing barely registers it before he slaps his thigh energetically in approval. ‘Yes!’ he cries. ‘Embroidery! It’s just as Masters Hume and Emerson tell us. It’s about realizing your own potential.’ Shutting his eyes, he recites with bravado: ‘“Man is his own star. And the soul that can render an honest and a perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate.”’

  Xiuqing nods – purely from reflex, since her uncle still has his eyes closed, and she has no idea at all who the masters ‘YuMee’ and ‘AyMah Soon’ are. He enjoys bringing up such foreign names, especially after visits to his mission clinic and its reading room. Xiuqing is never certain he has them straight in his mist-filled head. But for now it’s enough: her jiujiu is pleased with her. He isn’t leaving. And the soldier is nowhere in sight.

  Embroidery, Xiuqing thinks, settling back a little on her new pillow. Of course there’d be money in that. Her parents had made a good living at it. Until, that is, the bad men came. Mama never said exactly what they did – the subject sewed her red lips together almost as tightly as her expert seams. But Xiuqing gathered it involved things like characters and written contracts, and the fact that her baba couldn’t read. It is one of the reasons that Xiuqing has promised herself that one day, like her uncle, she will learn.

  The boy from the ticket window sticks his head through the doors. ‘Anyone who doesn’t have a ticket, off,’ he calls. ‘Next stop, Wuxi.’

  There’s some stirring, some pocket-patting. No one leaves. Wu Ding grunts and lowers himself back onto the mat. ‘We’re off.’ He pulls his hat over his eyes. Xiuqing lies down on her own mat and thinks of her mother. Long, fragrant hair. A face as round and pale and essential as the moon. Soft, strong hands pulling thread through the metal embroidery frame. Full lips chanting the last line of Li Qingzhao’s poem:

  I caress the withered flower, fondle the fragrant petals

  Trying to bring back the lost time.

  2

  ‘Why did he fall?’ Xiuqing asks three days later, and gives a little push with her toes. She’s leaning over the ship’s railing, tipping forward, almost to the limit of her balance.

  Her uncle doesn’t answer: He seems to have lost the slim thread of his lecture about Li Bai. Not on the poems of the itinerate bard, but on his death: He fell from a boat more than a thousand years ago. Perhaps near here, or even on this very stretch of gold-gray water somewhere between Tongling and Wuhu.

  Xiuqing pulls her jacket tight around her waist. After three days on the water she feels wind-whipped and shrunken, smaller inside her clothes. For a moment she imagines that that’s all she is: clothes. Creased and dust-streaked pants, a top. Rumpled cotton soaked in boat smells, hung on a railing to air. As her eyes reach the level of her thighs, she sees oily shadows of sloshed butterfly noodles. If they were home she could tell Lina to do laundry today, to soak their things in river water and pine ash. To spread it all on a boulder to dry. Little on earth, her mother used to say, is as sweet as sun-dried laundry. In the days before her foot-binding, Xiuqing would go along, chasing tadpoles and minnows while her mother beat clothes against a rock. That’s far enough, Xiuqing! her mama would shrill when Xiuqing strayed too far. Stay where I can see you!

  ‘That’s far enough, little Xiu,’ Uncle Wu says now. ‘Any farther and you’ll fall right off.’ He crushes his fifth cigarette of the morning under one of his heels. ‘He fell the same way you very well might, if you don’t start acting your age.’

  Just for a moment she defies him, testing gravity’s tug and tumble. She looks past her legs to where they’ve just been. The boat leaves bile-colored pleats in the river’s wake.

  ‘Little Xiu.’ Her uncle’s voice is beginning to tighten. With a small grunt, Xiuqing pulls herself upright. ‘He fell,’ Wu Ding resumes, ‘in the middle of an evening cruise. He was reaching for the moon.’

  ‘The moon?’

  ‘It was under the boat. Underwater. The old bastard had had too much to drink.’ He lights a sixth cigarette, fingers dancing a little. He’s beginning to reach his limit. Xiuqing does a quick mental calculation: It’s been two days since she spied him squatting in the ship’s soiled stern patio, sharing a pipe with a second-class merchant. They ran into the merchant this morning, strolling on deck. Her uncle gave him an ingratiating greeting and then hustled Xiuqing off. ‘Not a very refined man,’ he murmured vaguely. ‘Best to avoid him, in such small quarters.’ And Xiuqing knew without asking that he now owed this man too, just as he owed all the lenders and pawnshops back home.

  ‘He drowned,’ he says now, firmly, as though settling a debate. ‘The man couldn’t swim.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem very sensible. Reaching for the moon in the water.’

  ‘Artists aren’t interested in sense. They’re interested in the senses.’ He coughs, the sound harsh and wet in the wind. He pats himself for his handkerchief, comes up empty. ‘They’re after life’s reflections, not life itself.’

  Xiuqing hops back on one foot, tries to balance again. She contemplates this gap: things and reflections. Objects and images. She stares at the sinking sun, its rays chipping gemlike off the rive
r. The moon – Li Bai’s mirror – is a silver disk to the east. She’d like to string it on a silken cord around her neck.

  Her uncle breaks into another round of coughing. Xiuqing hands over her handkerchief, watches him shudder into it. He glances at the blood flecks before hastily tucking the cloth into his pocket.

  ‘I could get you some water,’ she offers worriedly. ‘I could go looking for the tea man.’

  ‘Ahhh, Xiuqing,’ he says softly, as he always does. ‘Little Xiu. What would I do without you?’

  A gull slopes toward them, its wings stiff and still. Its cry is a raspy echo of Wu’s cough. Below them, a swarm of coolies strip down and prepare to wade out to meet the boat. Her uncle watches them, the wind whipping a tear from his left eye. Then, abruptly, he looks up. ‘Wuhu awaits,’ he exclaims, as though this were a long-awaited surprise. ‘Let’s get ready.’

  As their launch bobs toward shore, Xiuqing squints ahead into the gathering darkness. She makes out the tiled tops of the riverbank shops, the flickering winks of new streetlamps. A single, soaring spire rises before the mountains, its point brushed into softness by dusk. The cathedral, her uncle tells her, was built by Europeans who were part of Wuhu’s small community of foreign traders and missionaries. When antiforeigner feeling ran highest during the Boxer Rebellion, they had to hide in their building. They boarded up the candy-colored windows, nailed the elaborate doors shut. The townsfolk, goaded on by the Boxers, stood outside shouting Hairy devils! and Mother-sexers! They called the Europeans washed-out ghosts and eaters of our babies. Eventually they destroyed most of the structure. The foreigners and orphans fled down the river.

  ‘The foreigners eat babies?’ Xiuqing says now, horrified.

  ‘No,’ her uncle says. ‘But people thought they did. They thought when they took the children in, they were planning a holiday feast. It didn’t help that they were feeding them pig food. Cow’s milk. Boiled potatoes and corn.’

  Xiuqing shudders. Chewing wax, she thinks, would have more flavor.

  The launch is being hailed by bobbing lights. A swarm of sampans approach like vengeful bugs, all eyes and wriggling arms. As they draw nearer, Xiuqing sees that the eyes are just paint: white-and-black dots with the sharp points of bows as noses. The arms belong to people, whole families shouting urgently as though they’re coming to put out a fire:

  Three yang for baggage and transport, good deal! Good deal!

  No, no; that dog-fart is lying. He’ll steal you blind. Don’t listen to him!

  Come with me – my boat is brand-new! You’ll ride in the lap of luxury!

  When the boats reach them, a riverman with an egglike nose grabs their bundle and smiles a foul-smelling smile. Another takes Xiuqing’s arm, his hand squeezing around it in a greasy clamp. The launch rocks, water spilling over both sides. The navigator shouts, ‘Who are you pushing, snout-face! Were you born in the year of the boar? You’ll drown us!’

  ‘I was born in the year of the boar,’ Xiuqing murmurs. But no one pays any attention.

  Somehow her uncle manages to negotiate through the chaos, and soon Xiuqing finds herself sitting beneath the arched bamboo of a boat. The riverwoman who steers has big shoes with strange, sharp points and smells of sweat, salt, and drying fish. When she sees Xiuqing, she smiles and says something in a tongue as incomprehensible as that of the gulls, still crying overhead.

  3

  In the morning she awakens from thick, disturbing dreams to the sound of her uncle’s knuckles on the door: crack, crack, crack. ‘Up, up, little Xiu! An inch of time is an inch of gold.’

  Xiuqing opens her eyes. The door opens a sliver. Her uncle peers in, pupils swollen from smoking.

  ‘Why don’t you put on your dress?’ he says. ‘Brush your hair. Look pretty for breakfast.’ He shuts the door with a bang.

  Xiuqing stands and stretches. She pushes back the window’s shutters. Outside, two sparrows bathe, twitching and fluttering in a puddle by a pump. Xiuqing thinks, Come on, walk. Lina says that when sparrows walk, it’s good luck.

  One of the birds bobs its head, takes a drink. Droplets fly from its beak like flung diamonds.

  Downstairs, her jiujiu sits at a cluttered table across from a man in an emerald-green silk coat. The man looks up as Xiuqing stands in the doorway. He takes in the red cheongsam, her carefully combed hair. The directness of his gaze shames her slightly.

  ‘There you are. Join us. Have some tea.’ Her uncle pats the seat next to him.

  ‘This is the niece,’ the green-coated man says blandly.

  ‘It is.’

  Xiuqing spends the short silence that follows rubbing her teacup’s rim against her lips. The man studies her some more, his jaw wagging from side to side like a goat’s as he chews. Crumbs of prawn paste stick pinkly to his mustache.

  ‘This is Master Gao,’ her uncle eventually says. ‘He’s helping us to secure your position.’

  ‘There are still some details to settle,’ Master Gao says, and spits something onto the floor.

  This is a practice Uncle Wu condemns as outmoded, unsanitary, and uncultured. But he doesn’t say so now. What he says, very mildly, is, ‘We understand that.’

  Xiuqing fixes her eyes on the little teapot, on its picture of the Yellow Mountains in indigo. Pinnacles soar toward the handles; narrow rivers wend their way up the spout. When she pours, it’s as though the yellow river water comes to life and splashes into her cup.

  Master Gao wipes his hands, then climbs to his feet. ‘If all is as you say, I believe we can use her. The Hall used to take only younger ones. But recently we’ve changed our policy. Too much money invested. Girls of this age – how old is she?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  The man nods. ‘A bit old, but still young enough to learn. If she’s obedient.’

  Xiuqing waits for her uncle to tell the man that she’s already learned what she needs to embroider. But he just says, ‘Oh, she’s very obedient, my niece.’

  He begins folding and unfolding his newspaper, and Xiuqing watches ink spread like soot over his fingers. The man indicates the serving woman with a jut of his chin. ‘Zheng niangyi can handle the details and contract. If everything’s in order, she’ll take her over this afternoon.’

  The woman looks up at the sound of her name. An eye skims Xiuqing, narrow and assessing. The other is cloaked in a moist white veil that fits the cornea like a shield.

  Master Gao scratches himself between his legs, strolls around the table. ‘More loans,’ he reads over Uncle Wu’s sloping shoulder. ‘They’re yanking at their own balls, this fancy Western-style government. Why do we need wider streets?’

  ‘I suppose for the automobiles.’

  The man snorts. ‘No one’s going to be able to afford even a jackass if this keeps up. We’re going to owe everything to the damned long-noses.’ He frowns. ‘I hear, by the way, that we share a friend.’

  ‘Yes. Master Fang,’ her uncle says in a tight voice. ‘I did mention that he sends his greetings.’ Xiuqing looks up. Master Fang, she knows, owns Uncle Wu’s favorite opium den and the house that adjoins it, where men buy girls (‘Buy them for what?’ she asked Lina once. But the maid just pressed her lips together).

  ‘I’m thinking of someone else,’ Master Gao says. ‘Merchant Deng? From Chibi.’

  Her uncle blanches. ‘Ah yes. We met aboard the Crying Loon.’ He stands reluctantly, wringing his hands in a smudging self-caress. ‘We had a very interesting discussion.’

  ‘He’d very much like to finish it,’ Master Gao says meaningfully.

  Xiuqing sees her uncle swallow hard. Then – stunningly – the other man reaches out and puts his hand on her shoulder. Easily. As if she’s his daughter. Or a wife.

  Xiuqing looks to her uncle. She waits for him to speak. But he just shifts from foot to foot like a nervous schoolboy.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Master Gao says, rubbing Xiuqing’s neck gently, ‘you can stop by and see him. On your way back home.’ His fingers smell like smoked
fish. Xiuqing stares at her uncle, so wide-eyed that her lids ache. Help. Help me.

  But Wu Ding is looking at his hands; he seems finally to have noticed the inkstains. ‘Certainly,’ he says, accepting a hot, damp towel from the old woman. ‘I was planning to do that. In fact, I was going to go buy my ticket tonight.’

  Tonight? Xiuqing’s pounding heart skips again. Her uncle said he’d stay here for a few days. They would see the town together. Make her introductions. Then he’d take her to a fine, final meal before he went home. Just for a few weeks…

  ‘Good,’ says Master Gao. He lets his fingers trace her ear. Then, abruptly, he steps away, throwing two coins on the table. ‘I’ll send a runner so he’ll know to expect your visit.’

  After he leaves, her uncle sits back down heavily. ‘Jiujiu?’ Xiuqing asks quaveringly.

  He stares into his cup. ‘Perhaps,’ he murmurs, ‘we should get started.’

  He’s not speaking to her. But when Zheng niangyi puts a gnarled hand on Xiuqing’s shoulder, he says sternly, ‘Cooperate, niece.’

  ‘Obey your uncle,’ the woman caws as Xiuqing twitches herself free.

  Wu Ding turns his back. He studies the sole piece of wall art, a strange painting done entirely in iron. Its blunt lines portray a man fishing in a stream. The woman drops to her knees with a grunt, as though preparing to perform the kowtow. Xiuqing fights back an unplanned giggle, though she doesn’t find it especially funny. The old fingers probe through Xiuqing’s flimsy shoes, measuring length and width. They insert themselves into the peachlike clefts, testing for depth and tightness. When she is finished, she clambers to her own big feet and unties Xiuqing’s shirtwaist. Xiuqing feels her hands again, cold this time, and hard, on her belly, her neck, her arms. She yanks her shirt back down. ‘Stop. Stop that!’