The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  ‘I’d rather you buy me lunch,’ she says.

  They go to a riverside teahouse Yuliang went to with Jinling, on one of her bimonthly consultations with the palmreaders. The inspector orders tea, steamed fish with chilis, shrimp dumplings. He adds bamboo shoots to the list, although they’re expensive and out of season. The little hut teeters on the river, just feet from where the town’s poor thrust their dirty babies and clothes into the brackish flow. As the proprietor brings the teapot, sounds of laughter and splashing filter through the walls.

  ‘You look thoughtful,’ the inspector comments.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologize. What’s in your head?’

  A small thrill: it’s still such a new question to her. Yuliang pulls out her handkerchief, rubs a charcoal smudge on her nail, then the red crust left behind when she scrubbed off her nail polish last night. ‘The sounds,’ she says. ‘The laughter.’

  ‘What about them?’ When she looks up, his eyes are like newly turned earth.

  ‘My mother used to do washing like that.’

  ‘She did the washing herself?’ he asks, cracking open a shrimp.

  ‘We had been well-off at one point. My parents were very skilled at their work – her embroidery was among the best in the whole county. But my baba couldn’t read, and was tricked in business. We lost everything.’ She picks up a shrimp and begins peeling it. ‘He’d hoped for a son who would become a scholar and support him in his old age. My mother said his spirit was broken.’ She pauses. ‘I don’t remember having any servants until I went to my uncle’s house.’

  ‘Ah. The scholar who fell from the boat.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, wiping her hands carefully on her handkerchief.

  ‘And when he died, you came here… how?’

  ‘A man whom Uncle knows – knew – arranged it. There were debts.’

  He just nods, then picks up the handkerchief she’s just put down. ‘Very fancy,’ he comments, examining the rumpled field of flowers and birds.

  Yuliang nods self-deprecatingly. ‘My mother was much better at it. Although I thought when I came here that I was coming to make a living at it.’

  ‘Perhaps you could have,’ he says, looking at her intently. ‘Perhaps you still can. Perhaps that’s one of your tools.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t have,’ she says, with so much vehemence that he blinks. She snatches the bright square from his hand. ‘Here, look. I made a mistake – see? This petal’s too small. I didn’t plan them properly. And here, the same problem. And here. And here too. You see? I’m just a woman – so stupid. I keep doing the same things wrong. I can’t learn.’ The words keep flying, like bees angered by a shaken nest. ‘Here I ran out of purple thread, had to finish it in red. It looks terrible.’

  He pulls his hand back. ‘You’re right. It’s woman’s work,’ he says quietly. ‘Men don’t understand these things.’

  They eat for a while, not speaking. Eventually the man comes to clear the dishes. He sets down a plate of pomegranate: soft white wedges jeweled with garnet. The tiny seeds glisten from their wounds. ‘I’m sorry,’ Yuliang says quietly, handing Pan Zanhua a section. ‘It’s just… I’m very tired. I haven’t been sleeping properly.’

  He takes the fruit, avoiding her fingertips. ‘I didn’t sleep last night myself. Perhaps it was something in the banquet food.’ He smiles. ‘The abalone the old Dragon Lady loved so much.’

  Their eyes meet, part. He spits out a pip. ‘Where to from here?’ he asks.

  ẓ

  As the afternoon lengthens they leave chair and carriers and walk the last block to the cathedral. For a few moments they simply stand outside, gazing at it. Workmen scramble and holler. A Jesuit shouts in Beijing-accented Chinese to a man sitting sullenly on a barrow. The two-barred Christian symbol rises sternly above neighboring rooftops, a stretched-out number ten pointing at heaven.

  Yuliang knows the cross is meant to represent the frame on which the Christian god died. She’s received several pamphlets on the subject, both from a Christian client and from streetside evangelists. Most people throw the cheap booklets away, although the very poor use them as winter shoe insulation. Yuliang saves them sometimes, though. Their reproductions of foreign paintings interest her, though Yi Gan maintains they’re in bad taste. ‘All that blood and pain!’ he once said, tsking. ‘Who wants to see it? A good painting – say, that one – should leave you with a sense of peace, not disgust.’

  He’d waved at Jinling’s old scroll sketch of a lotus and a frog. Yuliang didn’t point out that one could find identical works in every room of the Hall, or that she liked the feelings the pamphlet paintings gave her. Their very visceral nature – the blood and bone and blue veins – seemed strangely vital. Almost refreshingly rude.

  ‘Is there only one church here?’ the inspector asks now, bringing her back to the moment.

  She shakes her head. ‘But this is the biggest. Actually, it’s a replacement. They’ve been working on it forever.’

  ‘What happened to the first one?’

  ‘The Boxers burned it down. They say the government gave the French a hundred and twenty thousand silver taels to rebuild it. Otherwise they’d have declared war.’

  He gazes up at the steeple. ‘A hundred and twenty thousand taels. At a time when twenty million of our own were dying of famine.’ Abruptly he gestures toward the door. ‘Shall we go see what such riches can buy?’

  Yuliang hesitates. She’s been inside only one church, in Zhen-jiang: the one her uncle went to when trying to break his habit. He did this every few years, resolve gradually capturing him like sleepy net. He’d pace back and forth a little, then take a rickshaw to the church clinic, where he’d take belladonna and something else called sacrament. He’d come back with foreign proverbs and a full appetite, and would eat two or three enormous meals. But within weeks, sometimes days, he’d be back at the dens.

  Now together, they climb the marble steps and push past the enormous wooden doors. Inside the light is cool and dim, richly stained by Spanish glass windows. Yuliang had half expected to find the church packed with milky-skinned yangguizi, but the huge hall is almost empty. A Chinese handyman sweeps around the carved wooden altar. A woman in a gray headdress kneels, her hands bound by wooden beads similar to those Yuliang’s mother had held for her prayers. She whispers almost soundlessly, a soft reply to the clanging construction outside.

  ‘Do you know much about him?’ Pan Zanhua murmurs, indicating the statue of the foreign god on his cross.

  Yuliang shakes her head. She knows his name – Jesus. And that he’s very different from Chinese gods like the Jade Emperor and the First Principal. This god looks like a man, died like a man. He is dying in almost all the depictions she’s seen – except for those in which he’s just been born. The sculptor has tried to capture his pain and humiliation. But with his curled toes and eyes rolled up toward the room’s high, arched ceiling, Jesus looks more like he’s in ecstasy. ‘A missionary tried to explain about his being not one god but three.’

  ‘A father, a son, and a ghost.’

  She darts him a glance. ‘Are you Christian?’ The thought, which hadn’t dawned on her before, suddenly strikes her as not unlikely. Many forward-thinking, high-up families are these days.

  But he shakes his head. ‘I studied Western religion and thought in Tokyo. It’s where I read Self-Reliance.’

  Yuliang nods, eyes dropping absently to the statue’s barely covered privates. Sheathed by a chiseled rag, they nevertheless give the impression of a sizable manhood. She stares at them, suddenly fascinated – not by the hidden stalk, but by the way the stone’s been shaped into such a delicate semblance of linen. Then she feels his eyes on her and looks away.

  ‘How does a son become his own father?’ she asks quickly. ‘I’ve heard of fathers who are also grandfathers to their children. This certainly isn’t something people should worship, though. Don’t you agree?’

  He laughs. ‘I’v
e never thought of it in that way. But I don’t think you’re supposed to understand it. You’re just expected to believe.’ He points to another sculpture, the mother with the baby. ‘You’re also to believe that she never… had relations. Before giving birth.’

  ‘He’s fatherless?’

  ‘Yes. And no.’

  Yuliang studies this statue too: the curving maternal arms that seem to exude both delicacy and strength. The pudgy yet strangely adult infant. She finds herself thinking of babies; then, almost too easily, of her mother. Not the mother who lied to her and then left, but the mama who raised her. Who crooned her to sleep. The mama who sang her songs and told her stories. Closing her eyes, Yuliang can almost hear her speaking of the celestial Weaver Girl, of the Heavenly Cowherd. Of the Emperor of Heaven, first joining and then parting them, because their love led them both to cease their duties…

  A pigeon explodes from a rafter, a flurry of purple and white tail feathers. Then the bell in the half-finished steeple chimes.

  The inspector pulls out his watch. ‘Is it really five o’clock? Astonishing. This must be the fastest day to pass by me in months.’ He shakes his head. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll have to go. I’m due at the magistrate’s.’

  He’s walking toward the door before the words fully settle. When they do, Yuliang feels blood draining from her face. Over the past few hours she hasn’t given a second thought to the day’s end – to what will happen when it is time to complete their tour. Now she hears Godmother’s voice again, as oil-smooth and cruel as ever: If you come back without his seed inside you… ‘I – I’ve enjoyed it as well. Must you go so soon?’ It comes out a squeak.

  He turns back, surprised. ‘Believe me. I’d prefer to remain home with my poems. Or with you.’ Her pulse skips. ‘Unfortunately, that’s not what they sent me here for.’ He smiles. ‘Where shall I take you? Back to – to your home?’

  It’s not home. ‘No,’ she says sharply. ‘That is… I can take a carriage.’ Think. Think. Think. ‘I’ve heard the magistrate is a very generous host,’ she blurts. ‘Would he mind if you – if you brought a guest?’

  It’s an absurd proposition: him, the incorruptible, showing up at a prominent home with a well-known prostitute. Yuliang knows this even as she hears herself put it forward. When he looks at her, he does no more than shake his head. But she reads his embarrassment on his features. ‘I’m afraid,’ he says quietly, ‘it’s a very small gathering.’

  He begins walking again, more quickly this time. Wretchedly, Yuliang follows. She will, she realizes, simply have to tell them that it can’t be done. He’s not the type. It was a foolish idea from the start. Still as she passes the grimacing Christ, she is thinking again of Mingmei, the blood soaking her ruined dress.

  Eyes fixed on her companion’s back, she tries telling herself that this is what she fears most: the punishment. But she knows really that it’s much more than that. It is leaving him now, leaving this peerless day. It’s going back to her room and bed and bountiful jewelry box, and knowing that the next time she sees him – if she sees him – they’ll be back to their assigned roles: stiff official, preening whore.

  Almost of their own volition, her steps slow as she walks. But not enough to keep her from following him.

  Outside, he hails the sedan chair without further comment. Yuliang makes her way toward it, fighting the urge to turn back and beg him for a reprieve. I’ll live through this, she thinks. It’s just skin. It’s no more than I deserve. Foolish to think there’d be anything else. Ever… It’s just then, with sickening suddenness, that the sky tilts and the world inverts itself, tossing her to the ground like a sack of rags.

  Pan Zanhua turns just in time to catch her. ‘Aiyaaaa. Did you hurt yourself?’

  And then somehow she’s in his arms and, even more appallingly, crying, even though she’s done no more than trip on a piece of lumber. Nor are they the childlike sniffles she’s learned to use on stingy clients. These are enormous, heaving sobs. They hurt her as they tear free.

  ‘Here. Come here. Sit down,’ he says, obviously distressed. ‘Sit down with me. Here.’ He instructs the chair to wait.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Do you need a doctor? Are you – are you unwell?’ There’s real trepidation in his voice, and it occurs to her that he thinks she’s with child. For some reason this strikes her as very funny. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I’m also a virgin, she pictures herself saying.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong? Really. You can tell me.’

  She’s hysterical now, covering her mouth with her hands. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Yuliang takes a deep breath. ‘I can’t… just leave.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘Not like this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There will be consequences.’

  ‘What consequences? Why?’ He seems honestly mystified. ‘You spent time with me. The guild got its wish.’

  How can a scholar be so stupid? ‘No, it didn’t. They said not to come back if I didn’t finish.’

  ‘Finish what?’

  Suddenly all she wants to do is get away from him, from this place. From the hope she’s felt without knowing it, simply by being with him all day. She will walk home if she has to. It will hurt her feet, but that is fine. It will prepare her for the far worse pain she’ll face later.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, standing.

  ‘No, wait.’ He jumps up with her. ‘What are they? What are the consequences?’

  The workmen squat as their emptied supper pails are picked up by an old woman, who slings them onto a pole. When Yuliang takes a step toward the street, he follows. ‘Please,’ he says quietly. ‘Please talk to me.’

  It won’t change anything. But again, the novelty of the request – talk to me – fills her with a strange gratitude.

  ‘There was a girl,’ she begins, slowly sitting back down. ‘At the – at my house. The madam tied her to the bed, facedown.’ She pauses. ‘Her back and arms bled for half a day. They had to throw the sheets out.’

  The foreman puts his thick hands on his haunches and heaves himself to his feet. Yuliang realizes suddenly that until now he hasn’t looked at her twice. In her sober clothes, with this sober man, she’s looked that decent. That ordinary.

  ‘They beat her?’ Pan Zanhua is asking.

  ‘Yes,’ she says dully. ‘Until she’d all but stopped breathing. Then Papa Gao – that’s the owner – and his friends, they went in. They locked the door. They…’ She pauses, takes a breath. ‘They said it was compensation.’

  Yuliang drops her eyes to the marble entrance to the church. The mica flecks embedded in it twinkle deceptively, like little stars. She’d like to stay here and stare at them until the real stars have risen. But when the foreman shouts again, calling the workers back to work, Yuliang stands along with them.

  At first the inspector doesn’t move. Then he’s beside her, touching her arm again. ‘Zhang xiaojie. Please wait. I’d like to help you.’

  ‘I’ll find a rickshaw,’ she says, and tries to smile.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not that way. I’d like for you to come with me.’

  She shakes her head. ‘It’ll be worse if they see us like that.’

  ‘I don’t care what they see. I care what’s right. Haven’t you understood that?’ He takes a breath. ‘I want you to come to my house.’

  She struggles to keep the relief from cracking her voice. ‘I can sleep on the floor tonight. Then I’ll find some way to explain it to them tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant either,’ he says, signaling his sedan-chair carriers.

  Suddenly she is very tired, almost too tired to care. Still she asks, ‘What do you mean?’

  He blinks a few times, as though readying himself. When he finally speaks, his tone is formal, as though making a public proclamation.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ he says. ‘I’m going to take you out.’

&n
bsp; PART FOUR

  The Concubine

  At fourteen I married My Lord you

  I never laughed, being bashful.

  Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

  Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

  Li Bai

  (Ezra Pound translation)

  14. Wuhu, 1916

  ‘It has been a long time,’ Godmother says.

  It is not a nicety, although the brothel manager’s voice is as sweet and oily as ever. She is talking about money: Yuliang is certain that every missed appointment has been entered in the madam’s merciless black book.

  As though confirming the thought, Godmother flicks her red-tipped fingers against the table. Calculating on an invisible abacus. It’s hot. Beads of sweat cling to her inky hairline. Yuliang watches one drip down, tinged lightly with gray.

  ‘Six weeks,’ retorts the lawyer negotiating Yuliang’s release. ‘No longer than it takes most girls to recover from the clap.’ He says it easily, inspecting and smoothing the lapels of his heat-wrinkled suit.

  The madam sniffs. ‘Believe me, I’m not complaining. This one’s been nothing but trouble from the day I bought her.’

  In her years at the Hall Yuliang was beaten less than any other flower there, and she draws a sharp breath to say so. Then she feels Zanhua’s hand on the small of her back. Following the silent hint, she keeps her lips sealed. Wen had warned them earlier. She’ll try to upset you. Make you lose face, as she has. Whatever you do, don’t let her do it.

  ‘You paid cash?’ the attorney asks now blithely, as though referring to the madam’s myriad bangles and not the girl seated across from her.

  ‘A turn of phrase,’ Godmother snaps. ‘She’s my daughter. I have papers.’

  Wen looks down at his documents, adjusting his spectacles with fingers as thin and dry as twigs. Slavery, they all know, was outlawed since the Republicans took over. Adoption is just one way around the prohibition.