The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  ‘I saw everything,’ Yuliang says. ‘It was…’ But she doesn’t know what it was. She twines her hands in her lap.

  The merchant’s eyes stroke her face as he reaches down, adjusts something. ‘I’m glad you found it so edifying.’ He sits up, stretching his long arms toward the ceiling. His big hands flop about as though sloppily sewn to his wrists.

  Jinling sits up too, with an exasperated grimace at Yuliang. She caresses her client’s neck, croons. ‘Don’t pay any attention to her. You are formidable. You almost pierced me!’ She darts another look at Yuliang, who obediently stores the term with the other expressions Jinling has taught her: You’re as hard as iron! I almost died in your arms! It’s the first time she’s actually seen a man’s cock up close, and she understands now why it’s sometimes called a turtle. Merchant Yi’s shrinks and shrivels shyly under her open gaze. His testicles look like plucked chicken skin.

  ‘Washing,’ Jinling prompts softly, arching one perfect brow. Yuliang stands quickly, a line of sweat trickling down her knee. As she goes to the basin, carrying the little Buddha bowl, her thoughts return to the picture of Lady Guanyin. It was done by a local artist, with Jinling as its model. In merchant circles she is something of a celebrity. She’s almost always included in the Merchant Guild’s yearly flower calendar, which features a different local beauty for each month.

  The merchant stands up. Yuliang kneels before him. The perfumed water meets the fish-sweat smell of sex. Yi Gan’s hand absently plays with her hair as she washes his flaccid member. His thick fingers pull small strands from the bun that signifies her virginity.

  After he has left the room, Yuliang refills the little Buddha bowl. She adds a half-teacup of salt and carries it over to Jinling. The brothel cat, Money, who is always either deeply in heat or asleep, winds urgently around her ankles. ‘Out,’ Jinling intones. Yuliang dutifully picks up the animal and drops it in the hall, where it tucks a leg behind its ear like a festival contortionist and begins animatedly to lick itself.

  When Yuliang returns Jinling is examining her breast, which has been bitten. ‘That old bastard deserves a thousand cuts,’ she says, pouting. ‘It’s the second time he’s done this. I should tell Godmother. I never want to see him again.’

  ‘You should,’ Yuliang agrees. But she knows that Jinling won’t. Yi Gan is head of the Merchant Guild. He’s the kind of client the girls here call a ‘bean curd’: ever-present, easy to squeeze money from. Offending him would hurt everyone: girls, servants, Godmother. Especially Jinling herself.

  But it’s the thought of offending Jinling that sends a shiver down Yuliang’s neck. ‘You’re not really angry with me, are you?’

  Jinling hoists her leg onto a chair. ‘Angry?’ She holds out her hand for the cloth.

  ‘For not watching.’

  Jinling fingers herself a moment, then gets to work. ‘Oh, that. No. Not really.’ She winces. ‘It may even tempt him into the bidding. You know: “This one’s so innocent, she can’t even bear to watch!” Men like that in a virgin.’ Her white fingers deftly delve the pink folds the merchant has just purchased. Yuliang watches beneath her lashes, both ashamed and entranced. ‘Later, though,’ the top girl adds, ‘you’d better learn to be more jolly. No one wants to bed a corpse.’

  She grits her teeth as the salt goes to work. ‘Well, almost no one,’ she adds. And giggles.

  6

  In the following months, Yuliang seeks safety in small tasks, little rituals. She forges armor out of routine. At the Hall, the ‘leaves’ sleep at two or three and are roused promptly at seven. They take turns perching on the chamber pot’s chipped rim, behind the screen that screens nothing but their bodies. They wash up with water from a pitcher on the bureau, rub and rebind their sore feet. They put on their ‘chore’ clothes. Yuliang saves the cheongsam Wu Ding gave her for the dirtiest work – floor-scrubbing, collecting chamber pots for the night-soil man. She thrills at each rip and slop, revels in the spreading stains. As the fabric unravels, she pictures it as her uncle’s frayed spirit. Disintegrating.

  After eating the girls sweep the courtyard, attacking bottle shards and crumpled call-cards. As winter approaches, lines of snow fill in the spaces between stones, creating an illusion of checkered smoothness. Yuliang sweeps the snow out, along with used matches that look like twisted and burned little bones. Though she’s not supposed to she sweeps the trash into the gutter. She defiantly hopes it will cause a flood when spring comes.

  The afternoons are devoted to more formal training, which Yuliang and Suyin receive in the spare pantry. They’re taught music, deportment, ‘love.’ The music teacher has a face that droops as though made out of warming wax. She picks out songs on her three-stringed pipa, teaches the girls popular tunes about the moon’s reflection on water, on icy lakes. Yuliang sings these back without missing a note, and is oddly strong with the male verses. The teacher tells Godmother that she has an ‘unusual talent’ and that she holds ‘great promise’ in entertainment. The truth, of course, is that Yuliang already knows most of the pieces. It’s one of her uncle’s few and sad little legacies.

  In ‘love’ classes, the girls pull the pleasure beads strung on a stained silk cord through their fists. They study pictures in the seventeenth-century classic Gold Plum Vase, or the Adventurous History of His Men and His Six Wives, and puzzle over little statues of people portrayed at various intersects. The books are Godmother’s, the statues brought by the Taoist nun who teaches them about bedding matters. The girls drone the names of the positions like insects in summer: Dragon Turning. Tiger Slinking. The Rabbit Nibbling the Hare. ‘In Cicada Clinging,’ the nun instructs, ‘the woman lies on her stomach. The man stands behind her. He pulls her hips right into his. His jade stem is plunged so deeply within that it isn’t visible at all.’

  ‘If it’s Feng Yitmien’s jade stem,’ Suyin whispers to Yuliang, ‘then it’s barely visible to begin with.’ Feng Yitmien is a tea vendor who visits Mingmei. His hands and feet are as dainty as a woman’s.

  ‘Ideally,’ the nun continues frowning, ‘the man thrusts fifty-four times. Fifty-four brings mutual pleasure.’

  Godmother, who has poked her head in to supervise, objects. ‘If he wants to push two thousand times, so be it,’ she says. ‘So long as you finish the job.’

  It is one of her most frequent injunctions: no matter how a job goes, you must finish. And it isn’t just advice. Those who don’t finish, who don’t have an excuse – and for Godmother, only bloodshed is an excuse – are beaten. Often (ironically) until they bleed.

  In the evenings Suyin and Yuliang sometimes go on call with older girls. Their first job is to take the card and the required deposit from the runner bearing them. The deposit is generally fifteen percent of a night’s total, which can vary, depending on how elaborate the client’s demands are. The card comes originally from the girl herself, who will have left stacks of them at restaurants or with favored clients. On the front is the girl’s name and the Hall’s address. On the back the client will have filled in the location the girl is being summoned to: the opera, a banquet, a party for a birthday or a business achievement. Godmother will read them: Zao Tong requests Lirong’s honorable presence at the Jade Garden Restaurant, the back courtyard. Hu Zinyang aks Dai to Yuan Shikai Hall. The madam will carefully count out the deposit, mark it down, and give it and the card back to Yuliang or Suyin. The girls will then help the girl on call dress and powder, and then climb into one of the Hall’s two sedan chairs. Whichever of the virgins has been chosen to go along will follow her on the manservant’s shoulders.

  On these nights, her feet interlocking like little charms under the manservant’s chin, her hands clutching his rough-cut, greasy hair, Yuliang snatches glimpses of life beyond the Hall walls. She sees mostly men, jostling their way through the streets, coming home from work, going to dinners or meetings. Occasionally she’ll see foreigners from one of the churches: pasty, large-limbed people in dark clothing. One woman outside the foreign
settlement has hair the color and texture of stiff wet straw, bunched awkwardly on the back of her head. A little girl with the woman has locks of almost the same color. They flow like a tangled mane down her back. The girl says something to her mother as Yuliang and the man pass. Her voice hisses like a little snake’s. Yuliang, intrigued by words that sound and seem so very different from her own, leans over enough to throw off the manservant’s balance.

  Once at the event, Yuliang waters the older girl’s wine cup so she doesn’t get too tipsy as she talks and flirts. She keeps track of call-cards and is careful to keep them in order. She’s under strict instructions not to leave the manservant’s sight; Godmother doesn’t want her virgins ‘mingling’ or running off. So the man follows Yuliang everywhere, even on outhouse trips. He stands guard while she sits, hotly shamed, trying vainly to pass water without splashing.

  Despite such humiliations, however, such nights feel like tiny escapes. Sometimes Yuliang even imagines slipping away unnoticed, off the man’s shoulders, away from the room. Cloakless, breathless, racing down the street despite her bound feet. Perhaps someone would help her. Or perhaps she’d just slip onto a houseboat docked by the shore. On the long journey down the gloomy, cowshit-brown river, she could show herself to the boat’s owners. They would be a real, proper family. A real mother, not a Godmother. A real father, not an uncle. Maybe even a little baby; Yuliang would love to play with a baby! She would appear like a genie to embroider tiny clothes and caps. She’d cook southern specialties she would magically have mastered: fish-head casserole, clay-pot rice. She’d win the surprised family right over. You’ve made our lives so much better, the mother would say. Please come home with us. Become our eldest daughter.

  And Yuliang would. She’d sleep with the baby and the mother like a kitten in a snug litter. Safe from men. Blissful in the knowledge that the next day would start at six in the morning, and not six at night.

  Six at night is when Hall life starts in earnest. In Jinling’s room Yuliang lines up her mentor’s accessories and appliances. She helps Jinling with her toilette, bringing water, mixing makeup. She now knows how to clean a downy upper lip with a taut piece of thread. She can redraw Jinling’s eyebrows with a charcoal pencil; can give her elegant spider legs or flying arches like bird wings. It makes her feel oddly powerful to be able to make such choices.

  After makeup, she also helps choose Jinling’s first outfit of the night. Jinling is the only girl in the Hall who changes for each of her guests. The maids complain that it makes extra work, and Xiaochen mutters that it’s ‘uppity.’ But Jinling always makes sure to tip the maids a little extra. And no one pays attention to anything Xiaochen says these days. ‘Listen, Yuliang,’ Jinling instructs. ‘A fresh dress makes a guest feel special, welcomed. It makes him feel like he’s your first customer of the evening.’

  Yuliang tucks this advice away along with Godmother’s promise of her own new wardrobe: six new dresses once her calyx has been opened. For now, she focuses on the colors and textures of Jinling’s trousseau. She learns the characters embossed on jackets and scarves, and matches them up in what she imagines must be auspicious combinations: Luck and happiness. Happiness and good fortune. Good fortune with wealth with wisdom. She thinks of new ways to pair tones: the sea greens, sky blues, the starry silvers. At first Jinling eyes some of these choices dubiously. ‘I’ve never worn that dress with that shawl,’ she’ll say, and send out for a second opinion. But as the months pass and the opinions concur, the top girl stops her questioning. She even tells Godmother that Yuliang’s eye is becoming refined. ‘She’ll be good, this one,’ she says. And gives Yuliang’s knee a soft squeeze beneath the table.

  By seven the manservant is announcing arrivals, using the Hall’s own special code. A guest has arrived means someone unknown, since return guests are always announced by name. If the guest has a preferred girl, her name is announced too. Jinling, Yi Gan has honored you with a visit. He requests that you prepare him some tea.

  By ten, the Hall is filled with smoke and liquored chatter. Voices rise in counting for the finger-game. Yuliang and Suyin ferry plates back and forth from the kitchen: the plump bodies of crabs doused with black beans and chili, shiny red pork and potatoes, bowls and more bowls of steaming rice. The girls weave around the gambling tables to the slick click of tiles. They pass the musician with her lined face and tired arias, fending off groping hands and twisting themselves away from ubiquitous, lumpy laps. (‘No laps!’ orders Godmother. She will beat them if she finds them there, even involuntarily.) They watch older girls rising, leaving, returning, smudged and flushed or bored, or simply tired. Did the old buzzard get it up all right? the men shout. Did the old cannon manage to blast?

  Godmother serves and observes, banters and barters. She writes sums owed and paid in her books. She samples food, waves it on, although sometimes she sends it back. She creeps up to the night wing, listening at closed doors for unsanctioned trysts, unreported tips and gifts, and sounds more alarming than the flesh-slap of a rough tumble. And occasionally cries of real pain do drift in: Aiiiiiii. Stop it – stop it! Help!

  The shrieks float like ghosts into the mirth and smoke, make little dents of silence amid the clamor. Usually it’s Godmother who heaves onto her little feet when this happens, and bustles heavily up the stairs into the night wing. A little commonplace beating is expected, she says. But killing or disfiguring her girls is not. It will result in surcharges and doctor’s fees. The very worst cases will go to court.

  ‘What are the very worst cases?’ Yuliang asks Jinling, early one morning after Mingmei is attacked. The soft-spoken girl from Suzhou erupted from the night rooms with red cords trailing from her wrists and ankles. Blood ran in a thick stream down her left leg. The cut was high on her thigh, nearly half a finger deep in some places. A soldier wearing the slapdash uniform of some warlord’s private army followed her out, smoking, smiling. Still tying his trousers. The knife had slipped, he said, shrugging. They were playing a game. He called the wound a scratch, Mingmei an actress. He threatened not to pay; he hadn’t had a chance to finish. But Godmother demanded and received payment – and well more than a single night’s price. She tacked on an inflated estimate for the doctor’s fee, and a penalty for the scar Mingmei would have later. She demanded a fee for not taking the soldier to court, and a fee for cleaning the bloody footprints off the floor. In the end, with the help of the manservant and several guests (including a judge), she succeeded in emptying the man’s wallet. ‘Good iron is not used for nails,’ she’d said later, almost fondly. ‘Good men do not become soldiers.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Jinling grimly now, as young sunlight seeps through the window. ‘I don’t know what the worst cases are.’

  She grimaces as Yuliang yanks at a pearl-sized frog button on her qipao, one of the dozens that run from knee to nape. The top girl can never undo them all herself. When she’s drunk or tired she sometimes rips them right off.

  Her dark eyes meet Yuliang’s in the faint light of the mirror. She is lavender, gilded by the nascent light. Yuliang thinks: She looks older. It’s not a criticism, for she’s not a man, or Godmother. She just forgets sometimes how tired even Jinling, flawless Jinling, can get here.

  She lets her fingers descend to her mentor’s neck, then from there to her shoulders. She shapes softly descending circles with her thumbs, then her forefingers. She presses tentatively at first, then – as Jinling shuts her eyes and leans her head back into Yuliang’s belly – with more force. She leans forward to massage the spare flesh shielding the top girl’s lungs, her heart. Her own pulse quickens. ‘Is this all right?’ she murmurs.

  Jinling opens her eyes. She looks confused, as though she’s torn between two answers. But all she says is ‘Yes.’ And, sighing, shuts her eyes again.

  7

  The holidays end in a whirlwind of prayers and bright light. Over Yuan Shikai Hall, fireworks etch flaming fish and dragons into the sky. At the other Hall – of Eternal Sp
lendor – those who are able clear their debts and begin racking up new ones.

  The girls, for their part, are well rested for the first time in the year. They’ve passed the past week – spent by most clients with family and friends – gambling, gossiping, and eating. All, that is, but Xiaochen, who has finally been sent away. It’s said she’s been sold (for little more than a single smoke) to the ‘nail shed,’ the meanest of Wuhu’s brothels. It sits behind the railroad depot, a dirty shack with no entrance fee and no amenities. Customers – rickshaw runners, dockhands, even the occasional beggar – pay a pittance for its offerings. In some rooms there’s not even a bed.

  The disappearance of the Hall’s oldest whore is a relief in some ways. In the weeks past, Xiaochen’s appearance was disheveled, her face and neck layered with makeup which, however thickly mixed, couldn’t hide her deep wrinkles and scarred skin. Her dresses were out of fashion, their colors and cuts dating back to the long-gone days when she still had credit. Everyone knew she hadn’t had a ‘wet’ guest, one who stayed and stripped and spent the night, since the dragon-boat races. Sometimes men let her sit with them, and warble a token song or two. Most buzzed off like swatted flies at the sight of her.

  ‘They were afraid,’ Suyin speculates one day, as she and Yuliang are shelling peanuts. ‘They thought she was like that girl who told her husband never to look at her at night. But he did once, soon after she had his son.’

  ‘What did he see?’ Yuliang asks. But warily: Suyin enjoys shocking people. She embellishes stories with far-off relatives and friends to lend them a patina of credibility.

  ‘He discovered that she was only flesh-and-blood up above,’ her roommate says, sure enough. ‘From the waist down she was a rotting skeleton.’