Yuliang enjoys this routine – both the familiarity, and the novelty. It’s the hours after breakfast, however, that she cherishes the most. On Ocean Street there is no demanding ring of the telephone, no stream of couriers bearing chits and invitations. They spend every day together, taking rickshaws and carriages across the city. They fill the small house with things to write on, rest in, eat from: wall scrolls from Fouzhou Road, books from Liu and Co. Bookcases and kitchen tables on Nanjing Road. At the Golden Dragon Rug Company they find rugs brought in by loping camels from the desert. Fingering the colors – the rich brown-oranges, the ruby reds – Yuliang finds herself imagining the darkened fingers that made them, the image sparks something like longing.
On Zanhua’s last night, they invite Meng Qihua to the house for dinner. After they’ve eaten, the men lean back and light cigarettes. ‘Astonishing,’ Zanhua says, after a few companionable puffs. ‘The way things went last week in the war.’
‘At the Somme?’ his photographer friend says.
Yuliang looks up. That morning Zanhua had explained to her about the latest bloody battle covered by the Echo de Chine: twenty thousand men killed in less than an hour. Yuliang, who has seen death in ways many could never imagine, still has a hard time imagining this horrible scene. As Zanhua read the news, she’d been able to summon only its colors: a nauseating palette of grass green, mud black, vermilion blood. Now, unsettled, she stands and pours more of the French table wine Qihua brought to dinner. ‘It’s unthinkable,’ Zanhua is saying, ‘that technology has given man such power. Not only to better life, but to wreak such havoc on it.’ He stares up at the old ceiling beams. ‘They’ll have to enter it at some point now. They’ll have to.’
‘The Americans?’ Qihua leans back, his glasses glinting in the candlelight. He’s a slim man, and always quite fashionably dressed. He’s a good deal younger than Zanhua’s writer friend, Duxiu, and yet Yuliang finds him the more intimidating of the two. He somehow makes her feel both unschooled and low-class – a bit, in fact, the way the Hall’s men always made her feel.
‘Wilson can’t just stand by and watch this mess get worse,’ Zanhua says.
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’ His old friend shrugs. ‘At least the war keeps the yangguizi out of our hair. Let them fight over their own damned land for once.’
‘But there are still the Japanese,’ Yuliang points out.
Meng Qihua looks at her, faintly amused. ‘A good point, Madame Pan. What troubles me is how easily they dominate us. We’re the biggest nation on earth. We’ve thousands more years of battle experience.’
‘The problem lies in spirit,’ Zanhua says. ‘We need to think of ourselves that way. As a nation. As General Sun has been saying from the start.’ His eyes brighten a little, as they always do when he speaks of Sun Yat-sen, who even in exile remains his hero. ‘First, military rule. Expel the imperialists. Second, political tutelage. Teach the people to rule themselves. And then…’
‘And then – ah, yes. The grand dream of self-rule,’ says Qihua, waving his cigarette holder theatrically.
Zanhua looks at him levelly. ‘Of course. Just as we always said back in Tokyo. You did too. You no longer believe in the Three Stages?’
‘Perhaps I’m too old now to believe in easy answers of any sort.’ The photographer looks up contemplatively, blowing a series of rings that float up slowly in the damp, hot air. ‘Or perhaps it’s this city. Perhaps,’ he says, indicating the pooling custard his Napoleon has left on his plate, ‘all this Western decadence has addled my thinking. But one thing strikes me: China is not England. It is not America. It’s not even France. It has a vastly different past and problems.’
‘What’s the answer, then?’ Zanhua challenges.
‘It may be a lost cause.’
‘I never saw you as a pessimist.’
‘A pessimist would say China had no spirit in the first place. I say China has spirit. I just don’t think her leaders do. Or perhaps any leaders at all.’ He leans back. ‘Perhaps that’s the answer: no leaders.’
Zanhua studies him in surprise. ‘You’re advocating anarchism?’
His friend just smiles. ‘I don’t believe in isms. Have you forgotten that already?’
‘I have not. Just as I haven’t forgotten about the hundred yen you still owe me.’
‘From what?’ Qihua laughs.
‘From that wager you lost in Tokyo, over Marx….’
The men talk into the night, discussing the old days in Japan and their high hopes for China when the New Republic was born. When Qihua leaves at last, it is late. Dishes lie scattered on the table like lard-layered pieces of some chaotic mosaic. But when Yuliang stands to clear them, Zanhua stops her. ‘The girl can do it.’
‘I sent her home at midnight.’
‘In the morning, then.’
She starts to protest. But he cuts her off gently, merely saying ‘Come,’ and leading her to the staircase.
Upstairs, his lovemaking is almost like an attack: he covers every inch of skin with his lips, hands, and tongue. Later, he covers her body like a blanket or a net, pressing down on her torso, her legs and arms and even fingers, his ring cutting into her slim knuckles. Afterward they lie together, staring up at the ceiling and the drifting smoke from his last cigarette of the day.
‘I don’t know how to do this,’ he says, at last.
‘Do what?’ She traces the one black curl that falls onto his smooth brow.
‘Leave. Live. Without you.’ He sighs. ‘I feel like I need you with me to breathe.’
Yuliang opens her mouth, then closes it again, unsure of what she wants to say. What she feels for him is not the sort of visceral and thick dependence of which he speaks. She hasn’t felt that for anyone except her mama. Turning over on her back, though, she realizes too that he is right – it is a little like the need for air, such love. You aren’t aware of it until the air is removed. And suddenly, you realize you are suffocating.
She takes a deep breath. ‘Six months is no time at all, really. You lived far longer by yourself before we met.’
‘I wasn’t myself before we met.’ He interlaces their fingers again. ‘What – what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to go back to “before we met”…’ His voice cracks slightly. ‘Promise me. Promise me you won’t leave.’
‘Leave?’ She laughs. ‘Where would I go?’
‘I’ve had terrible dreams of waking up one morning and finding you gone.’ He smiles self-consciously. ‘I know it’s foolish. But the city’s dangerous. There are gangs here that grow more powerful every day. Even the police are corrupt. Little Yu…’ He turns his eyes. ‘Promise me that you will stay safe.’
Safe, she thinks. She recalls her first night with Yi Gan. She thinks of the Hall, the beatings and ‘discipline sessions.’ And the men – night after night after bleak night. These things are now a part of her, so hopelessly ingrained that even in her happiest moments she knows she will never forget them. She may be able to deny them, even to wipe them out – at least, from the spoken story of her life. But they will always mark her spirit. Like scars.
‘Yuliang?’
When at last she turns to face him, she still can’t say the words he so clearly wants to hear, and the shame over this shakes her voice. She comes as close to it as she can manage without betraying herself:
‘I promise,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay safe.’
18
The wet Shanghai summer dries into a slightly crisper autumn, before sliding down in fits and starts to the cooler moistness of the Jiangsu winter. Yuliang unpacks her warm things, shutters the windows against the cold. She marks Zanhua’s next visit on the calendar she has hung in her study, and settles in as a woman alone.
In the beginning, life seems disorientingly loose, as unspun as the silk ticking in her comforter. She wakes at night in a vague but forceful panic, certain she’s lost or forgotten something valuable – her wedding ring, her purse, her copybook. It takes several minutes of
lying there, her heart tapping its frantic beat, before it dawns on her that what is missing is Zanhua.
The pain inflicted by the lack of him almost startles her sometimes. When he writes, after three months, that his next planned visit has been delayed, she at first is uncertain that she’s read the note properly. When Qihua confirms it for her – ‘You’re making good progress!’ he says, condescendingly – she returns home and goes directly to bed. She remains there through the afternoon and the evening, reciting Li Qingzhao’s poetry to herself.
One of the few things that helps to distract her is work; Yuliang crafts a study schedule from breakfast straight through until lunch, staunchly writing out row after row of radicals and character combinations. At week’s end she surveys the pages and tears them out, tucking them into prepared envelopes she seals with Zanhua’s official seal. Ahying runs them out to the mail courier, who passes at noon and at three, surrounded by his ‘red-headed rascals’ or Sikh guards. Yuliang studies as scrupulously as ever. But she also finds herself drifting more and more to her little scribblings, sometimes even drifting from pictograph to picture without realizing she has made the transition. The character for imperial (), with its regal-looking crown radical, is unthinkingly transformed into a regal head. The three trees of forest () give way to a dead leaf, its crinkled skeleton drifting on a lake. Fengtai (), the site of the famed battle between the Qin and Jin kingdoms, becomes phoenix (), which in turn gives way to a dreamy sketch of Jinling’s phoenix wine cups, which perch on Yuliang’s bookshelf, bone dry.
After studying some and sketching more, on most afternoons Yuliang ventures out to explore her new city. In the beginning she walks merely to try to strengthen her feet, which are slowly adjusting to their reknitting bones. Gradually, though, she becomes entranced by the city’s myriad cultures, and soon she’s walking with the determination of an explorer. She wants to see it – all of it. And for the first time in her life, there is no reason to be home by dinner.
She explores from the silvered antiquity of Ocean Street to the glossy offerings of Nanjing Road – which, as Zanhua predicted, twinkle even more brightly after dark. She strolls through coffee-scented alleyways in the French Concession, and the Japanese colony in Hongkou, with its hushed shops smelling of barley and green tea. She paces the Bund, breathing in its heady scent of gasoline, fish, and sweat-slicked cash. She shades her eyes and watches steamers inch their way out of sight, trailing seagulls like white beads on windblown thread. The sight always moves her for some reason – something she considers one of her own peculiarities, until the day an entire art class arrives to sketch the scene.
The students – young men dressed in dusty robes and paint-splattered shoes – arrange themselves at the base of the bridge, around an older man wearing a cravat and a felt beret. They watch intently as he holds up his pencil, squints, and drops it back down to his page. ‘If you’ll note,’ he says, ‘that small steamer tug to the east takes up no more space than a third of my pencil. And now’ – a brief pause as he drops the pencil again – ‘I calculate it to scale on this paper. A third, gentlemen. No more.’
Continuing to sketch, he adds, ‘There are those, even at the academy, who believe this is too technical a method to use in art. Believe me, it is not. A painting lacking in perspective is a painting lacking in persuasion. Take the time to get size and distance right.’ The students nod and follow, lifting their pencils and sketching in unison like an awkward, silent orchestra.
The academy, Yuliang thinks. The Shanghai Art Academy. And for some reason, she shivers.
She has passed the school often on her excursions to Bubbling Well Road, sometimes even going out of her way to wander by its gates. She studies the announcement board that stands outside. Western Painting Lecture Postponed, said one notice recently. Life Study to Reschedule Due to Model Cancelation, said another (Is she knocked up? someone had scrawled beneath). There was also a list of materials for incoming students to obtain: plywood, hide glue, brushes and paints that could be purchased at a store two blocks down. Yuliang copied the shop’s name, meaning to go back and explore it, although in the past weeks this small goal was forgotten.
Now, creeping closer, she peers over the shoulder of one of the students, a strong young man with thick, long hair. He sits stooped, as though apologizing in posture for what Yuliang can tell, even when he is seated, is an unusually tall frame. His wrists and fingers are as strong as a farmer’s. But they hold the pencil with a delicacy that strikes Yuliang as oddly poignant. His big hand curls back and forth across his page, leaving an impressive billow of clouds in its wake.
‘Xudun,’ the teacher calls to him. ‘Draw with your arm, not your fingers. If you focus too tightly it constricts your image.’
The boy lengthens his strokes, deftly capturing a junk that waits just past the dock. As Yuliang watches, he embellishes the day’s weather, adding a black-bellied thun-derhead (nowhere on the true horizon) and an underlying shadow of approaching rainfall. Apparently unhappy with this last bit, he bends down for his eraser. Then his eyes catch Yuliang’s, and widen slightly. He smiles a large, easy smile.
The boy seated next to him sees his face and looks up as well. ‘Hey, sister,’ he calls. ‘Come closer. One thing we always need here is a model!’
His friend elbows him hard enough to dislodge his dusty fedora. ‘Bastard,’ he says affably. ‘Clamp it.’
Yuliang colors. There is little doubt as to the boy’s meaning: editorial sections are still seething over the Shanghai Art Academy’s continued use of nudes. Vocabulary permitting, Yuliang has followed the debate as intently as she does any news about the school, which has fascinated her ever since Zanhua first mentioned its existence. She has even fantasized sometimes about walking through those green French doors, along with the fashionably bohemian students she sees chatting and smoking outside. But never, obviously, to take her clothes off for them.
They’re all looking at her now, twenty blank male gazes. Yuliang’s throat tightens. In her mind’s distance she hears a thick voice: Smile! Smile!
But Yuliang doesn’t smile. What she does is spit – something she’s rarely done before, and certainly not in front of a group of men. The globule flies from her lips and lands with a small splat near the iron railing. She stares at it for a moment, in disbelief and self-horror.
Then, heart pounding, she turns on her heel and walks as quickly as her beaten feet will permit. Away from the men with their pencils and the departing steamships and gulls. Toward the gleaming safety of the nearest shopping street.
19
Zanhua arrives, at last, in March. Over the weeklong span of his visit, Yuliang lets him lead her through the international settlement, lecturing her on trade policy and extraterritoriality. They dine to the music of a flower-bedecked choir billed as the ‘best Hawaiian singers who ever left the islands.’ At night they delve deeper into memory and skin.
On their last day together, Zanhua takes Yuliang to one of the cinema houses that have sprung up around the city in the past two years. The film is American – The Hazards of Helen. Its blond heroine proceeds from feat to death-defying feat – commandeering a motorcycle, foiling a train robbery, and finally leaping lithely from a bridge. Not to kill herself (as a Chinese heroine would do) but to save the baby in her arms. Each act is lauded by the cinema’s narrator: ‘The hero sees Helen! He too rushes onto the bridge. Can he possibly reach her and the child before the train comes?’
Unlike some in the audience, Yuliang doesn’t leap to her feet in protest when the last reel runs to its end. But she too feels strangely desolate; as though the velvet curtains have closed not just on Helen’s life, but on her own.
She finds herself unusually quiet, both at dinner and later on. Even when she and Zanhua make love she feels distant; as if part of her has remained in the gray America of the screen. Afterward, Zanhua pulls away and leans over her, staring down searchingly.
‘What’s in your head?’ Yuliang asks him half
teasing.
He doesn’t smile back. ‘I’m just wondering whether this… arrangement was a wise one. Wondering if there would be some better place for you elsewhere.’
‘I won’t stay in one of those women’s lodges. They’re like – prisons,’ she says (though she almost said, like the Hall).
‘I’m thinking of somewhere else. Where you wouldn’t be alone so much.’
‘I like being alone,’ Yuliang says, before realizing how it sounds. ‘That is – I miss you. Certainly. Terribly. But I – I fill the time.’
‘That,’ he says, ‘is partly what worries me.’ His lips tighten. ‘This is a dangerous city, little Yu. There are many ways in which a young girl could be pulled into trouble. I’m wondering if we should perhaps move you back home.’
‘To Wuhu?’ she asks carefully.
If he hears her ambivalence, he doesn’t acknowledge it. He simply looks at her and says, ‘No. To Tongcheng.’
‘With… your wife.’
He nods. ‘That way I wouldn’t have to divide my time. I’d actually see more of you. Both.’
A short silence follows. Closing her eyes, Yuliang tries to picture it: scurrying out after his first wife, carrying a parasol to protect the flawless skin she’d seen in the matchmaker’s picture. But the worst by far would be nighttime. Yuliang imagines such a life, sleeping not in a master bedroom but in a smaller room off the same hall. She imagines lying there alone, waiting for her lord’s footsteps. Then, perhaps, hearing them make their way not to her door but past it.
‘I can’t do that,’ she says softly.
‘Don’t you want to be with me? With your husband?’
‘Yes. But…’
‘But what?’
She feels his eyes on her, still deep in thought. After a moment he sighs and rolls onto his back. ‘If you only knew how you confuse me.’
The Painter of Shanghai Page 17