The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Laughter booms. Tears burn Yuliang’s eyelids, and she is suddenly grateful for her hot red curtain. She drops her head and waits for Merchant Yi’s shadow. But it shifts in the other direction, flinging something away – cloak, hat? When it calls for a glass of maotai Jinling rises obediently from her seat.

  For ten minutes or more Yuliang is ignored again. The hot rice wine heats and loosens the cramped space between her ribs. She feels warmly distant, sealed in red wax. She can smell her own wine-tart sighs. She is just reaching to scratch her nose when the red sea vanishes, replaced by a thousand red faces. She blinks in the flickering gaslight. Merchant Yi is holding her veil in one hand, a bony chicken foot in the other. ‘A man pays a small fortune. He should at least be permitted to examine the goods.’ He steps closer. ‘Stand up, little Yu.’

  He plucks the glass from her hand. His fingers brush hers, just lightly, and without thinking Yuliang lifts her gaze. She stares into his face, his drink-sheened eyes. And somehow, the rage from last night reignites. She hates this man. She loathes him! ‘Yuliang,’ Jinling whispers sharply, sensing the shift in her mood, ‘stop it. Smile at him. He’s your master.’

  But the merchant’s eyes are intent, newly interested. ‘Well,’ he says, his voice thoughtful. ‘Well, well. Our little flower seems to have been hiding some thorns.’ He reaches out, chucks her under the chin. ‘I believe it’s true, what they say about orphans and hot blood. I’ll bet this one doesn’t even need a quilt tonight.’

  ‘What quilt? She’ll have you!’ someone hoots.

  ‘She looks like she can’t wait,’ another calls out. ‘She’ll be on the bridal bed before you are!’

  ‘You’ll have to be careful in the morning, though – with feet that size, you might put on her shoes by mistake!’

  The table titters, enjoying the game – the Hall’s version of the old tradition of jibing and taunting a new bride to test her composure. Merchant Yi ignores them, sitting heavily in the empty chair next to hers. ‘Here,’ he says, indicating the scattered plates, the jumbled food. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  The next hour passes like a magic lantern show Yuliang once saw at the market. Action feels interrupted. Faces are masklike, frozen in odd movements and garish expressions. Later she’ll remember Godmother’s head thrown back in a laugh, the fat pad of her double chin stretched and flattened. She’ll remember Jinling’s eyes, locked on hers for a moment before the top girl is called away to the night wing. She’ll recall red-tipped fingers pushing more food – squab slices, fried rice, well-greased butterfly noodles – onto her plate. But Yuliang doesn’t eat. She looks, listens. She sips wine. She watches the men drinking, the women flitting, serving. Watches their fluttering march to and from the night wing like butterflies from a farmer’s field. She savors the sweet heat of the alcohol on her tongue, the slow glow of her lingering fury. Suyin takes her untouched dinner plate and replaces it with four more, each one filled with sweets. Yuliang ignores them, reaching for her cup.

  ‘I thought all girls liked sweets,’ Yi Gan says, sinking his yellow teeth into a mooncake filled with black-purple bean paste. Then, more quietly, almost as if he actually cares, ‘Are you unwell?’

  The question is so unexpected, and so utterly unanswerable, that Yuliang laughs – a high, sharp yelp that almost hurts. She sips some more wine, finally finding her voice: ‘I’m just a little tired. We all woke so early.’

  But by that point he is already gone. And when she looks up in confusion, the feasters are on their feet.

  Perspiration traces a line down her spine. It is the same line Jinling’s finger sometimes covers – bump, bump, bump. Jinling, she thinks. ‘Where is she?’ she murmurs to Suyin.

  ‘In the night wing,’ Suyin whispers, without asking whom she means. ‘With Actor Peng. She said to do what they say.’

  ‘What who say?’ Yuliang turns. Then she sees Godmother and Papa Gao before her. Their lips smile, but their eyes are as hard as coins. Godmother leans and unhooks Yuliang’s dangling earring, which has caught on the fabric of her shoulder. ‘You little fool,’ she hisses, jerking the trinket. ‘I hope you can walk.’

  Yuliang tries to shake her off. ‘Let me go.’ But they each take one red elbow and walk her past the kitchen and pantry and up the stairs. The feast fades into giggles and shrieks behind her. Mingmei’s lute sobs, the last lines of her song fading with the rest:

  At fourteen, I married you, my lord

  I never laughed, being bashful…

  They near Jinling’s room. The door is shut tight, and as they pass there’s an urge to fling herself on it: Jinling. Jinling! As if sensing the instinct, Godmother tightens her grip and hurries Yuliang down to her own door. She knocks, and a shout comes from within: ‘Who the hell is it?’

  ‘She’s ready,’ Godmother calls. She turns to Yuliang, her smile flattening to a frown. ‘Remember, whatever he wants. Anything. No scenes.’ Her eyes narrow. ‘And remember, finish the job.’

  She pushes the door open. Two men explode from behind it, along with the smell of opium, alcohol, tobacco. ‘She is come!’ one sings in an operatic falsetto. He pauses, looks Yuliang over. ‘Not bad.’ He turns to Godmother. ‘How much?’

  Godmother gives a small smile. ‘I’ll get my book after.’

  Then Yuliang is inside her room, and the door is shut and locked behind her.

  For an instant she just stands there, disoriented and faintly sick. She makes out a red shape roughly her size, leaning weakly against the far wall. She squints. Mirror Girl squints back, rubs her eyes.

  From the bed, Merchant Yi guffaws. ‘Such vanity. You don’t need to worry about your looks. Why, you’ve always been as pretty as a picture.’

  He rolls onto his back. ‘Come here.’

  ‘Take down your hair. No, not like that. Do it slowly.’

  Endless pins. Jinling’s pearls, woven so carefully through her new matron’s knot, drop to the floor like popcorn. Yi Gan lights his cigarette, leans back reflectively. ‘Take that off too,’ he says, and points.

  Her fingers pluck at one button, the next. She peels herself free of the dress. A draft from the window licks her bare arms. For a moment it almost feels good.

  ‘Come.’

  In the corner of her eye, Mirror Girl walks with her as far as the edge of the glass.

  ‘You know I’m not looking for another wife,’ he says. ‘But if I like you, I may clear some of your debts. I’ve done it for others.’ When he reaches for her, Yuliang winces. But he just fingers her earlobe, lifting the earring up and down. ‘Like catty weights,’ he comments. ‘Don’t they hurt?’

  She lies on top of him, feeling precarious, unbalanced. Her face is pressed into the smoky damp of his tunic. His hips rise and fall, rise and fall, the movement even and yet somehow utterly without rhythm. His hands are warm, tracing the band of her drawers, her under-top. Pressing down, down. Up, down. Up, down. No pain yet, just a little discomfort. As though he were a rock she were napping on. She’d like to reach down, remove the lump. She’d like to sleep. That’s what she’d really like.

  ‘How is that?’ he murmurs.

  His eyes are shut: he can’t see how lost she is for a response.

  He kicks his trousers and drawers free. She’s supposed to be helping: Jinling said so. But she suddenly feels unable to move her arms. He rubs himself, eyes half shut, lips flaccid and half open. He looks dead. But his breath is quick and moist and hot. Sweat falls in streams from his hair. His legs push, opening hers and encountering no resistance. He hits her lightly anyway: ‘Don’t fight.’ Jinling has told her he likes to be the aggressor.

  He groans, reaches down, finds her in the place where she is as dry and as rough as wood. Jinling gave her an oil of some sort. Put this on first. But it’s too late now. He is arching, pushing. She grits her teeth, anticipating the pain. Of course, she knew there’d be pain. Nothing good comes without pain, her mama often said. But surely she didn’t mean this. Did she?

  ‘Oh, y
es,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  Something sticky and slippery; the pain giving way to something deeper; a slow ache as though she is swelling inside. Yuliang grips the bed’s edge. Yi Gan’s eyes are like moon slivers, pure white as the pupils roll back. His dock-weathered face knots up with pleasure. Yuliang blinks, and suddenly he looks old, enormous, frenzied. Like Chung Qai, the black-faced keeper of Hell’s gates…

  It hurts!

  But Yuliang won’t cry. No scenes, they said. And besides, she has cried enough: when she woke this morning, her eyes were so swollen that Jinling had to layer cold tea dregs on them to soothe them.

  He shifts slickly against her skin, and she suddenly panics: her torso is sticky with blood. But no, she’s just wet; his sweat smears her face and breasts. That’s why it’s called wetting the sheets… A slow rip.

  Oh. Oh. No.

  You don’t have to let them into your head, Jinling said. Think of something else. Mama’s eyes. Godmother’s garden. The moon on a still night. The feeling she got when she finally stitched a perfect flower… He pushes, two, three, four times. ‘Ahhh. You are sweet, girl. So sweet…’ His throat is a black tunnel, a dangling glob of glistening pink. She shuts her eyes. She is a melon, and he’s splitting her open. She will break.

  She will break…

  ‘Aiiiiiiiighhhhh,’ he says. ‘Aiiighhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ He gives two more calls, shudders as though shot. His eyes are wide; his lips are a rictus of ecstasy. Then he crumples over her, stops moving entirely. Is he dead? For this happens. It happens with old men, and very fat ones. Lirong says it happened to her once. But Suyin says she’s lying…

  His foot twitches against her calf. It feels oddly plush, oddly pointed. It takes a moment for her to understand: he never even took off his shoes.

  9

  Few girls who enter this world survive it. Many end up like Xiaochen: skeletal, scarred by abuse, addiction, and sex-sickness. Some, like the girl from Wuhu Lake, are either killed or kill themselves. Others ‘demote’ from flower to some other tangential position: musician, teacher, a top girl’s maid. A select few, however, triumph over Fate’s glum intentions, and Jinling plans to be among these.

  Between Merchant Yi’s assistance and her cache of jewelry, the top girl claims to be mere months from buying out her Hall contract. Yuliang tries, under her tutelage, to follow suit. The passing months and men are marked by a slow accumulation of glitter: a gold pendant in the shape of a boar. A butterfly hairpin of Cantonese filigree, with antennae that tremble at the slightest of movements. A Japanese doll in a gold-threaded kimono, her skin wax-white, like chrysanthemum petals. The most valuable gift Yuliang receives is a golden dragon, fashioned into a heavy bangle. Her patron pulls it from its tissue-paper lair on the eve of Yuliang’s seventeenth birthday – the two-year anniversary of her hair-combing.

  ‘I’m not worthy,’ Yuliang says, twisting the beast on her wrist. It stares balefully at its backside, biting its tail with its diamond-chip teeth. Its scales are waves of molten metal. Yuliang savors their scrape on her skin as Yi Gan takes her to bed.

  Later he sleeps and she studies the beast again, wondering what artisan’s fingers made it so lifelike, and how. The dragon itself gives nothing up. Its coral eyes glow derisively. But no matter which way she turns the trinket, they won’t meet her own.

  Later, after he’s gone, Jinling tries on the piece before the glass. Naked, she steps back to see how it looks. Yuliang catches her breath at the sight of her like that – flushed and smooth, the golden monster twinkling at her wrist – and stores the image away to fall back on later.

  ‘What do you think?’ Jinling cocks her head thoughtfully.

  ‘It suits you,’ Yuliang says. And laughs, because everything suits Jinling.

  Her friend (and her only prized bedmate) smiles indulgently before returning to herself. She sucks in her cheeks and juts her hips, trying to look like a modern girl in a magazine. She shakes her arm, making the grumpy beast dance.

  ‘It’s my birth sign,’ she remarks.

  Yuliang looks at her quickly. ‘Didn’t you say you were a rat?’

  ‘I’m too young to be a rat!’ Jinling replies indignantly. ‘I’m a dragon, through and through.’ And in truth, Jinling, with her fiery spirit, her intense charm, her way of slipping past all the rules, does seem like a dragon. And yet Yuliang is almost certain her friend told her she was born in the year of the rat. Rat and boar, she recalls her saying one night, as they lay intertwined and panting. The astrologers say they’re destined for each other. Then again, she also remembers something about her being a rooster…

  ‘Can I borrow this for today?’ Jinling is asking now. ‘It would go beautifully with my dragon jacket.’

  Yuliang agrees. She decides not to question further. Hall girls don’t have many rights. But one of the few they do have is this: everyone is granted her own version of her story, which, like her name, she can change at will. Though Yuliang has sworn she won’t change her name again. She needs one thing, at least, that she can hold on to for good.

  Later that night a tap comes on the door. Jinling pushes her head in. ‘Here’s your dragon bracelet.’ She slides the piece from her wrist. ‘Can I borrow a wrap? None of mine match this new dress.’

  Yuliang studies her friend’s slim curves and shadows, sheathed in a dress of plum-blossom lavender planted with silver flowers and butterflies. Yuliang helped to design it with the dressmaker. Seeing how well Jinling wears it still gives her a faint glow of ownership.

  ‘Where’s the call?’ she asks, standing and rifling through her silks.

  ‘At the teahouse. The deputy customs officer has been promoted to Beijing. Yi Gan didn’t mention it to you?’

  Yuliang shakes her head, studying her friend beneath her lashes. They still haven’t discussed the fact that the merchant now visits Yuliang more often than he does Jinling – or that for all of his earlier protests, he recently offered to make Yuliang his third concubine. It’s the sort of arrangement flowers are supposed to yearn for: a simplifying of life, sex, expenses. A promise of a future, perhaps children. Somehow, though, the thought of being slowly nibbled down like one of four sweets makes Yuliang shudder. She’s relieved that he hasn’t pressed her on the matter.

  For her part, Jinling said she didn’t care. ‘Aiya,’ she said, shrugging. ‘You need him more than I do.’ Still, the subject makes Yuliang uneasy. Jealousy is like a sex-sickness in the Hall. It can hover in the blood for months, or even years, before infecting even the closest friendships.

  Scarf in hand, Jinling moves to the mirror. ‘Are you sure this matches?’

  ‘It’s very pretty. You look like a candle.’

  Jinling quirks an eyebrow. ‘You put things oddly sometimes, little sister.’

  Embarrassed, Yuliang tries to make the comment a joke. ‘It’s the orange silk,’ she says, stepping over, running her hands down Jinling’s arms. ‘That’s the flame. See? And the purple is smoke. Take off the shawl, and poof.’ She blows lightly in Jinling’s ear. ‘You’ve blown yourself out.’

  The top girl giggles and squirms. ‘I’ll be late tonight,’ she says. ‘But wait for me – I want to see you.’ She turns once more to leave, then pauses. ‘I’ve an errand to do tomorrow after lunch. Come with me?’

  Yuliang is actually looking forward to washing her hair tomorrow. But she hears herself saying, ‘All right.’ Just as she always does when Jinling asks her for a favor: Can I borrow the dragon? or Can you embroider this bag with a lotus? She watches her friend’s figure flicker around the corner. What, she wonders, will it be this time? A new dress she needs advice on? An unplanned trip to the palm-reader? Or perhaps, for once, a surprise for her – for Yuliang?

  From downstairs the call comes: Master Feng for Miss Yuliang. Yuliang winces and twists the ring on her finger. Feng Yitmieng comes once a month, when his business is good. A small man with thin white legs he saws over hers, he reminds her of a cricket in mating season.

  ‘He�
��s very down-to-earth, for gentry,’ Jinling says the next day, as they zip along on their appointed errand. ‘He comes out with all sorts of things that surprise me.’

  ‘Like what?’ Yuliang asks. She grasps her seat as the rickshaw swerves to avoid what appears to be a pile of rags. But as they pass, bits of flesh and shriveled limbs take shape in it, and a head turns toward her weakly. The face is as dark and as crisscrossed with cracks as old leather. With a jolt, Yuliang also sees that it looks a bit like Xiaochen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the boy calls. He doesn’t look more than twelve, but his bare back is a mosaic of scars and dirt. His jacket is rolled under the girls’ feet as an added amenity. Yuliang and Jinling splay their legs to avoid it: it is crawling with lice.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Yuliang asks.

  ‘See what?’

  But the woman is already behind them. And to mention her breaks an unsaid rule: when girls disappear, you act as though you never knew them. So Yuliang just shakes her head and turns her gaze back to the street.

  At least she knows where they’re going now: they are riding to Jinling’s jeweler. The top girl has her jewelry box in her little blue bag. She wants to sell some things and to have others appraised. She hasn’t told Yuliang

  why, although Yuliang has a sinking sense that she knows already. Moodily, she lets her friend babble on about the new client she’s cultivating, the second son of a high-up family from town.

  ‘The way he talks, for example. He comes up with the funniest curses.’

  ‘Really.’ Yuliang can’t keep the skepticism from her voice. She doesn’t enjoy it, she tells herself. She never really enjoys it. After all, isn’t that what Jinling herself says? You’re only really a whore if you enjoy it… At least, with the men.

  ‘I think he’s a populist,’ Jinling adds, and frowns. ‘Or was it anarchist?’

  ‘There’s a difference,’ Yuliang says. ‘Populists are for the people. Anarchists are for nothing at all.’

  It’s something Yuliang’s uncle explained to her once, although, as with many things Wu Ding explained, she’s never been sure of its accuracy. Still, Jinling slaps her arm with feigned annoyance. ‘You always make me feel like such a simpleton. How on earth do you know these things?’ She laughs. ‘Anyway, it’s all only about fashion in the end, isn’t it? About word fashion. It’s strange, isn’t it?’ she adds thoughtfully. ‘Men can change what they’re called. They can say, “I’m a populist,” and people will call them that. And yet we can call ourselves anything – singers, entertainers, taxi dancers. In the end, they’ll always call us whores.’