The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  ‘What about my own family’s name?’

  ‘Don’t you know that troubles come to those who are talkative? Especially here. Men don’t like it when women natter the nights away.’ Godmother wipes her dripping brow and glowers. Then, as though explaining the sky’s color to a small child, very slowly and simply, she says, ‘We’re your family now. We’re all our own family. We’re all that any of us need.’

  Xiuqing’s head reels as she is led, damp but dressed, to the kitchen. Zhang, she is thinking. Yu-liang. Yu. Yu. Liang. Liang. The sounds feel alien and false; she wouldn’t even know what they look like on paper. She knows the characters for her own name. (Old name? No. It’s like renouncing her own arm.) Her uncle wrote them for her the day he brought her home. ‘See?’ Wu Ding said, carefully etching the sloping strokes. ‘That’s you. Xiu: clever. Qing: innocent.’ It was the first thing, in the month since her mother’s sudden death, that had broken through the eight-year-old’s fog of loss. Beguiled, Xiuqing had taken the tallow-toned rice paper to her room. She practiced writing her name nearly until dawn.

  She has no idea, however, how to write Good Jade. She catches herself wishing suddenly for her jiujiu. To punish herself, she pinches her arm hard. ‘He’s dead,’ she mutters fiercely. It was one of the resolutions she made last night, in the dark: she will neither think nor speak of him. Even to herself.

  ‘What now?’ asks Godmother over her shoulder. ‘Still nattering?’

  ‘No,’ Xiuxing says. ‘I just coughed.’

  It comes out unconvincingly; unlike her uncle, Xiuqing isn’t a particularly good liar. But this is another thing she resolved to change last night. She will lie to them, and fight them, and in the end she will leave them. Boar or no boar, she will escape.

  In the kitchen Xiuqing is presented, as Yuliang, to two sullen-faced maids and the cook. The latter gives her hot tea, a bowl of fried rice with pork, and a small helping of the day’s lunch, shrimp with green tea leaves. Godmother waits impatiently while Xiuqing, suddenly ravenous, crams it all into her mouth. Then she gives her a fresh teapot and steers her through the screened doorway.

  Girls straggle into the dining room, rubbing eyes, limping, grumbling. Speaking of being tired, and sore. Godmother chastises some, pats others. She introduces Xiuqing as the new leaf. She calls the other girls my flowers, though at first Xiuqing can’t believe she uses the term seriously. With their tangled hair and peeling patches of slept-in makeup, the women seem singularly unfloral to her, and smell even less so.

  The one exception is Jinling, the girl Xiuqing had seen in the window. She sails in last, trailing scent like an elegant scarf, an exotic blend of gardenia and musk. Even half asleep she is as breathtaking as a girl in an old scroll painting: fashionably delicate and pallid, with a sweeping brow and eyes like calm black pools. Her mouth is little and red and full of small teeth that are charmingly and childishly uneven. Her hair is trimmed into long bangs that frame her face like the glossy feathers of an exotic bird. While the other girls jab at their food and jabber with full mouths, Jinling sits as straight as a sapling and pushes fan into her mouth with small, ladylike gestures. She looks for all the world as if she is hosting the meal.

  Godmother tells Xiuqing that Jinling is the Hall’s top girl. She came to the Hall from Shanghai’s French Concession. ‘From a real Flower and Willow Lane,’ she adds proudly. ‘You are very lucky. I’m making her your teacher here.’

  Xiuqing’s pulse leaps a little, despite herself. But Jinling just frowns. ‘Why should I teach anyone? It will take money and time from me. Two things I’m short of.’ She gazes at Xiuqing, cocks her head. ‘Such a sour face!’ she adds.

  The other girls titter. Godmother brushes off the protest with a tskkk. ‘Please,’ she wheedles. ‘Her hair-combing ceremony will be just after the New Year. And just look at her. She has more refinement than Suyin, I suppose. But there’s really not very much time.’

  At these words the other young girl who is serving pauses. She looks Xiuqing up and down, chewing her lip.

  ‘After New Year?’ interrupts one of the seated girls, Dai, who is rather fat – who looks, in fact, like she could be Godmother’s real daughter. ‘Where are you going to put her? There aren’t any rooms free.’

  ‘There will be.’

  Sleep-crusted gazes flick toward the table’s foot, where the woman named Xiaochen sits. Apart from the top girl, she’s the only one to appear in full makeup. But the pastelike layers of powder can’t hide the harsh lines by her eyes and lips. Her pupils are abnormally large and empty. Xiuqing sees them and thinks of Uncle Wu.

  Jinling sniffs. Her chopsticks hover over the main dish. Xiuqing watches the red-tipped hands as though they speak a silent code. ‘He never puts enough yams in,’ Jinling says, pouting.

  ‘He puts in as many as we can afford,’ Godmother retorts crossly.

  ‘Tea!’ someone else squeals. ‘What’s her name again? Hey, Yuliang!’ And then, because Xiuqing keeps forgetting that her name is now Yuliang, ‘New girl! Little idiot! More hot water!’

  Obediently, Xiuqing takes the pot into the kitchen. It’s empty at the moment, and she edges over to the stove. She eyes the contents of a pan for a moment. Then, quickly, she slides an extra bowl from a shelf.

  Back in the dining hall, she puts the bowl by Jinling’s elbow, just close enough to be within reach. The other young girl, Suyin, looks at Xiuqing curiously. She catches Xiuqing’s eye and slowly parts her lips. A little orange tongue emerges, flickering. It takes Xiuqing a moment to see that it’s actually a prawn tail. Xiuqing gazes, entranced, until a small breathy yelp pulls her attention back to the table. She realizes she’s just missed Jinling’s cup entirely with the tea. The spill cuts a watery brown path across the table.

  Jinling picks her arm up quickly, strokes it like a hurt cat. Xiuqing waits for a rebuke, or another blow.

  But when she looks up, Jinling’s not looking at her. She is frowning at the bowl of yams Xiuqing has just set before her. And when she lifts her hand, it is just to produce a handkerchief and mournfully dab at her silk sleeve.

  Then she looks up. ‘You certainly need training,’ she says.

  5

  In the end Yuliang acclimates to this harsh and glittering new name, much as she acclimates to her harsh and glittering new life. It is Jinling who helps her with both tasks. In fact, just tumbling from the courtesan’s red lips (‘Ai, Yu Liang!’), the words seem less punishment than a playful new song.

  The top girl guides her new charge through the nightly schedule of primping, preparing, and cleaning up. She shows Yuliang how to pare the end of her kohl eye pencil so it makes a clean line. She shows her how to refill her rouge locket for the nights when she is summoned out on call. She shows her how to brush her hair with just the right number of strokes – one hundred and sixty-eight, for prosperity.

  It’s Jinling who explains the rituals that must be performed, the incense that must be lit, the prayers that must be chanted. The gold paper ingots that must be tucked monthly under her mattress, to ensure guest satisfaction and healthy tips. She shows Yuliang the store of seed pearls that she keeps locked in her drawer, and she teaches her to steam them in a white cloth, and to grind up the moistened gems with a pestle and some sugar. Jinling eats the gritty paste in three or four small bites, grimacing. No one else in the Hall can afford to eat pearls. But Jinling says the custom pays for itself in her luminous skin. Plus, it helps with her digestion; regularity, she explains delicately, is key to maintaining one’s balance and womanly composure. ‘It’s like when chickens eat sand,’ she says. And then giggles, because chicken, as she has also taught Yuliang, is another term for whore.

  The Hall’s top girl shows Yuliang the other fruits of her years of labor: nearly two dozen dresses, stiff with gold trim and brocade that, while not quite as skillfully created as Yuliang’s mama might have done, is nevertheless impressive. She has so many scarves that when she opens up their drawer they burst out in a gauzy, jewel-
toned gust. She has boxes of hair ornaments, strings of gems to wind through the glossy wrap of her hair. Lacquered wine cups, as black as jet, emblazoned with gold-painted phoenixes. A lucky-ball locket she wears around her neck, and a key bigger than Yuliang’s thumbnail. The key fits Jinling’s three-tiered chest with the dancing crane on its cover. Yuliang adores this chest – its cunning inlay, its gleaming wood. But inside lies Jinling’s real treasure. She lays it out for Yuliang one evening: the diamond rings and emerald necklaces, the gold-dipped bracelet with intricate designs of flowers and fish, the jade pendant as pale as mutton fat, carved into a rooster – her sign, she tells Yuliang. Little stories accompany each piece: ‘This one’s from a wealthy magistrate back in Shanghai. He wanted to marry me, but his wife wouldn’t let him… This one’s from the son of a Mongolian prince. He wanted to take me to the plains, to make love on horseback… This one’s from one of the top lieutenants of General Sun Yat-sen – he’s fled to Japan. I’d like to see Japan. Wouldn’t you?’ And Yuliang says she would, even though traditionally (she knows) boars are supposed to dislike travel.

  All of this is Jinling’s dowry. It is her Shanghai legacy. She puts it all back reverently, save for two or three items she will wear. She disdains girls who dangle knickknacks from every hair, finger, and hole. No one in Shanghai was that unrefined: ‘It was more than just beds and money. We danced, and played pipa, and wrote poems. We learned the classic of taoism, the Tao Te Ching, by heart. There were nights when I didn’t have to sleep with anyone at all. I would just sit and chat and pour wine.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’ Yuliang asks. She is trying to ignore the noises filtering through the wall: a man snorting and thumping like a pig, Dai squealing oooh and eeeeee-eeeee and – sometimes – ow!

  Jinling studies her protégé. ‘You need to relax,’ she chides. ‘You’ll never survive here otherwise. I think I’ll ask Godmother about having a demonstration session for you. One of my customers likes to be watched.’ She lifts a filigree necklace to her breast, cocks her head. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That one would be better.’ Yuliang points to the jade.

  Jinling shoots her a dubious glance: ‘Really?’ She tries it; frowns. Then smiles. ‘Well! Maybe you’re right.’

  She lifts her hair and bends her head so Yuliang can do the clasp. ‘Money,’ she continues. ‘I left Shanghai for the money. The old centipede paid a lot for my contract. And she gave me a bonus.’ By old centipede she means Godmother, whose puffy ringed hands seem to be everywhere at once: counting and recounting the girls’ earnings at dawn, feeling hems and robe linings for secret tips, squeezing fingers and elbows for lumps and swelling and other telltale sex-sickness signs, running down the red ‘moon’ book in which she records monthly cycles. Or the black book where she records her flowers’ debt – and where the numbers only seem to grow and grow and grow. All but Jinling’s – as the top girl, she brings in the most money. Xiaochen, a twenty-year veteran, brings in the least.

  ‘She has Guangzhou sores,’ Suyin confides a few days later.

  ‘Guangzhou…?’ Yuliang asks, baffled.

  ‘Big red welts. The fan kuei brought them with them when they first came to Guangzhou. They spread them among the singsong girls there.’ Suyin’s voice whistles around the clothespins in her mouth. The girls are hanging the weekly fine laundry of silk underthings and sheer linen robes.

  ‘Anyway, Xiaochen rarely has customers anymore. She says she’s sixteen. Everyone says they’re sixteen. But I think she’s actually closer to forty. Can you imagine?’

  She shakes her head, pulls a clip. She secures a pair of shoes to the line, and they dangle between the two girls like gaudy butterflies. ‘Godmother makes her take mercury sometimes. And I have to help give her boiled milk injections in her buttocks.’ She rolls her eyes, exasperated by Yuliang’s confusion. ‘Sickness,’ she shouts. ‘You get it from the night rooms. From men. You don’t even have to touch them to get it. You can just sit down after someone gets up.’ She pulls a pink petticoat flat with her hands. ‘You get it,’ she says, ‘from the cushion.’

  ‘If that’s true, then almost everyone must have it. The sickness. Do they? Do we?’

  Suyin just shrugs. ‘You’ll know if you do. But most keep it a secret.’

  Suyin seems to know a lot of secrets. She knows that Lirong, for example, paints herself every night with red lipstick.

  ‘So what?’ Yuliang asks. ‘Doesn’t everyone paint their lips?’

  ‘Not those lips, idiot,’ Suyin says. She spits the last pin from her mouth as she doubles over, laughing. It’s only eleven o’clock; her titters stream through the quiet of the back courtyard. ‘She thinks her overhanging cliff is too dark,’ she finally explains. ‘She thinks painting it makes it look younger.’

  And though it isn’t particularly funny, Yuliang finds herself laughing too. Soon she’s laughing so hard that her stomach knots in pain. And when voices rise crankily from the sleeping quarters (‘Haiii! Keep it down, you little cunts! We need sleep!’), the two girls use bright qipao sleeves and satin drawers as gags. Trying, with very little success, to sop up the spilling giggles.

  A week later, Godmother schedules Yuliang’s first official appearance, after the yearly Burning Road ceremony. The maids pile oranges and paper money around a golden bodhi-sattva. Candles form a flickering path to his feet. After the ritual comes a banquet to which the most honored clients are invited, though what they’re really invited to do is come and spend their money. Jinling takes it upon herself to groom her protégé for display. She lends Yuliang an eyecatching blue jacket, and long earrings, and an orchid clip for her hair. She gives her her very first makeup application. Her tongue pokes out like a plum tip as she lines Yuliang’s blinking eyes in black and powders her nose and forehead smooth and white. Yuliang wrinkles her face, sneezes at the tickle. She fights the urge to wince as Jinling coaxes her lashes around a little metal rod.

  ‘Stay still,’ Jinling says. ‘You need to look your best. Some wealthy man may see you today and make a big bid for your hair-combing. It’s how it happened for me.’

  ‘In Shanghai?’

  The top girl gives her a hard look as she rubs in rouge. ‘Of course, in Shanghai.’

  Yuliang’s scalp still tingles from where Jinling combed, twisted, and pinned her hair. She knows what hair-combing is supposed to mean here. It’s not the rite Mama described to her so often, in the days when marriage still beckoned in the future: The night before, I’ll comb your hair for you. For prosperity.

  How many times, Mama? Xiuqing would ask, although she already knew the answer.

  Three times, her mother would answer, although she knew Xiuqing knew. The first comb is for longevity. The second comb brings love and respect until your old age. The third comb will make sure that you –

  Have lots of children! Xiuqing would interrupt. And I will!

  And her mother would laugh and say, And with luck they’ll be sons, who will make your life easy in your old age.

  At the Hall no one cares if a flower has longevity or not. Certainly no one expects love or respect. As for children – well, Yuliang already knows what bitter lengths Godmother’s girls go to to quell their fertility. There are teas and potions, oversized foreign coins. When those fail, there are adoptions and abortions. There is depression, infection. Sometimes – often, even – there is death. One girl, Linyao, has died already since Yuliang arrived. Four months pregnant, she hurled herself from the top of Zheta Pagoda when her lover failed to make her his concubine. ‘How ridiculous,’ Jinling scoffed later. ‘Killing herself. Over a man.’ It was her same verdict on Washing Silk Woman: ‘What a waste. She was quite pretty, from the way I’ve heard the story. She could probably have made a good match.’

  Now, frowning in concentration, she finishes coloring Yuliang’s lips. ‘Rub,’ she commands.

  The lipstick tastes like greasy soap. But when Yuliang looks into Jinling’s jade-handled looking glass, Mirror Girl looks
lovely. Her eyes are larger and clearer than Yuliang has ever seen them. Her nose looks less like a button. Her lips seem to smile without her even moving them. Jinling, gazing at her over her shoulder, reaches out and strokes Yuliang’s cheek. ‘Won’t Godmother be pleased,’ she says softly. ‘You hardly look like your old self at all.’

  And in fact Yuliang does feel different – almost separated from herself. As though Mirror Girl has finally taken over. It’s a new sensation, a little dizzying. Yet unlike so many other new things here, she doesn’t fight it. The disconnection feels strangely like freedom.

  Two weeks later, when all’s back to normal, Yuliang sits stiffly in a fraying bamboo chair. She is staring at a portrait, a portrait of a woman. The woman’s face is a smooth moon of calm, her arms a pale nimbus around the boy in her lap. The smile on her lips is a mirage: when Yuliang looks at it with her left eye, it vanishes. When Yuliang closes the left and peers with the right, however, it reappears, clandestine, tempting. It’s the implication of emotion rather than its actual expression. It is the perfect womanly smile. When you smile, her mother used to say, don’t move your lips. When you walk, don’t move your skirts.

  A woman’s keening call breaks into her thoughts: ‘Ahhhh, ahhhhhhhh, ah-ah-ah.’

  ‘Is she watching? Is she?’ Wood creaks and wheezes. A long, drawn-out groan. Then the man speaks again. ‘I don’t think that she was watching.’

  ‘Yuliang,’ Jinling chides. Yuliang pretends to hear. Smile-smile. It’s occurred to her that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the picture. She finally realizes what it is: the blank little spot above the goddess’s lip. A real woman would have something there, a subtle double line. A soft flesh-furrow to the nose.

  ‘Yu-liang! Look at me! Are you deaf as well as blind?’

  Sighing, Yuliang finally lets her eyes slide: down the wall, past the small, shuttered window, directly to the bed below. Jinling is lying on her side. Merchant Yi is behind her, his big arm heavily clamping Jinling’s neck. ‘She was watching,’ Jinling says. ‘You were watching, Yuliang, weren’t you?’ She pants a little as she speaks.