The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Beauty, she thinks. She looks again into the mirror.

  And perhaps it’s the timing. The sun is finally setting, touching everything in the room with orange and gold. But at that moment Mirror Girl strikes her as almost ethereal – as far from mere skin as a rainbow is from mere rain.

  Yuliang stares at herself: her thin thigh, her curving hip. And for the first time in years, she truly sees herself. She sees herself as finally free of the white ant’s probing fingers, of strange men’s hands. Of jewelry that binds it, chainlike, to debt…

  Picking up her palette, she hurriedly paints over the stiff first image. She cocks her head, takes a breath, and starts anew. She paints until the light outside has seeped away into the black sky; until the monks go home, and the mourners leave, and all that’s left is the soft click of the gamblers’ ivory.

  26

  ‘France,’ Zanhua repeats, setting his cup down. His voice is incredulous, humorless.

  ‘It would just be for two years.’ Yuliang is careful to keep her own voice casual. ‘But if I won, the scholarship would pay for everything. I truly think it would be easier…’

  His tension thickens the air between them. ‘Easier to live thirty days away by steamship, instead of three? Easier never to see your husband at all, instead of rarely?’

  ‘Easier for me to do my… work,’ Yuliang says. Which, of course, is precisely the wrong thing to say. She can see it in his face. Work? He is thinking. What work?

  She bites her lip. It isn’t (she reminds herself) that he’s not proud of her achievements. He sent her a telegram when she placed second in last year’s student-teacher exhibition. He’s visited her dorm space, her school studio, several teachers. He protested when one credited him with discovering Yuliang’s talent. ‘All I did was fall in love,’ he’d said, charmingly.

  Now he shifts his gaze back to his paper. Yuliang drops her eyes to her own reading, an article about a popular young modern artist named Xu Beihong. What she is thinking about, however, is Zanhua’s homecoming last night, the warm embrace he gave her. Followed by an announcement: ‘I’m being transferred back to Tongcheng.’ The news shocked Yuliang into a silence that completely overrode, for the moment, the subject of her own hope to travel.

  ‘Speaking of Paris’ – Zanhua rattles his paper – ‘there have been more demonstrations outside the Chinese legation there this week.’

  She doesn’t look up. ‘What about?’

  ‘The usual things. Conditions and pay for Chinese laborers.’ He snorts. ‘I’m beginning to think this is their idea of democracy – treating us all equally like cow dung.’

  ‘The laborers are on strike?’

  He shakes his head. ‘It’s those work-study students – the ones on that so-called government program.’

  ‘Is that the one where students work in French factories to pay for schooling?’

  The question is somewhat disingenuous, since Yuliang has several friends (including Xing Xudun) who have applied for the ‘Diligent Work/Frugal Study’ program. But she also senses that Zanhua wouldn’t approve of these friendships. It’s an impression confirmed by his next statement:

  ‘In theory. But everyone knows the program was founded by anarchists.’ He turns the page crisply. ‘By this point I’ll wager that this New People’s Society is behind it.’

  ‘Someone needs to defend Chinese interests abroad,’ Yuliang points out.

  He lifts a brow. ‘I see you’re thinking more about these things. That’s good.’ And then: ‘What is it?’

  She looks up. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You keep sighing. Something’s in your head.’

  Yuliang opens her mouth to say ‘Of course not.’ Then she shuts it again. As usual, he knows her too well. ‘It’s just… Principal Liu really thinks I have a good chance at winning that Lyon scholarship. He says I’m one of the most promising students he’s seen.’

  ‘So we’re back to that.’ Zanhua shuts his eyes briefly. ‘This is what comes from marrying a boar. You dig your tusks in. You don’t let go.’

  ‘You don’t believe in astrology,’ she reminds him. ‘And it isn’t just me. The truth is, all my teachers think the program would be good for me.’

  Now it’s his turn to sigh. ‘The program might be good for you if you were a man. Or if it were in Shanghai – say, at the French consulate. But the truth is, you’ve studied for two years here already. It’s enough.’

  ‘Plenty of men study here first and then go abroad to finish. You yourself told me that foreign study is an essential part of China’s new culture. And you’ve always said that women have the same capabilities as men.’

  ‘They do. And you’ve shown that admirably.’ He’s beginning to sound impatient. ‘But there are also some capabilities women have that men don’t. Particularly inside the home.’

  ‘But someone needs to represent Chinese interests outside the home.’ Despite herself, Yuliang’s voice is rising now, too. ‘What would have happened at Versailles, if those students hadn’t barred the Chinese delegation from going to sign the treaty?’

  ‘Exactly what happened regardless,’ he says dryly. ‘They would have objected. Quite eloquently, I’m sure. And then our so-called allies would have given our land to Japan anyway.’ He jabs the paper with his finger again. ‘If you’d pay the same attention to national events as you do to your “work,” you’d know no one gives a dog’s fart about what we think. All they want is to suck more money out of us.’

  ‘We’ve a better chance of being heard, at least, over there.’

  He laughs shortly. ‘Heard on what subject? Your still lifes? Your country landscapes? Your thoughts on the color gradations in a peony?’

  Yuliang looks away, stung.

  ‘Face the truth, my Lady Guan,’ he continues. It’s a new nickname for her: Guan Daoshen is China’s most famous woman painter, best known for her renditions of bamboo and evening mist. ‘You don’t paint for politics. You don’t even read the newspapers unless they’re covering your beloved Principal Liu.’

  Yuliang shuts her magazine, coloring slightly. ‘I love my country as much as the next person. More, in fact, than most men I know. And besides, you can’t separate it like that. Kang Youwei himself wrote that everything – industry, commerce, money – is intertwined with art. That modernizing art is as essential to China’s future as modernizing the economy. Or the navy.’

  He looks taken aback. ‘Did I read you that?’

  Yuliang stifles a dry smile. ‘I read it myself. For our class on political painting.’

  ‘And you, of course, are taking it upon yourself to further this great cause.’ He waves at Ahying to clear. ‘Very well. Tell me more about this new development. Your newfound sacrifice. Painting pretty pictures in the name of your country.’

  Ahying slips Yuliang’s bowl from her place, eyes dutifully downcast. But her ears are flushed like those of Sargent’s buxom white-skinned ladies. Yuliang feels her own cheeks flush too. Not with embarrassment, but with outrage.

  ‘You know nothing of my work,’ she tells Zanhua angrily. ‘Or my life. Nothing!’

  He slams his fist on the table. ‘Precisely! Which is why I want you in Tongcheng, with your husband and your family.’

  ‘Your family! Not mine!’

  ‘My family, therefore yours,’ he counters harshly. ‘We’re all the family you will ever have.’

  The words hit like a blow to bruised skin. Startled by their sting, Yuliang shuts her eyes. We’re your family now, Godmother whispers within her head. We’re all our own family. We’re all that any of us need.

  When she opens her eyes again, it’s as though Lady Guan’s delicately depicted mist has cleared from her own vision. For the first time she sees how little the titanic changes Zanhua himself set in motion have registered with him until now. How everything – her hard-won literacy, the burgeoning political awareness fed by friends like Guifei, the unanticipated success at school, even her newly bobbed hair and chic strappy shoes
(with the latest leather-covered French heel) – is as invisible to Zanhua as the emperor’s clothing. As far as he is concerned, she’s the same girl he rescued. Ingénue. Protégée. Presumed bearer of his next son.

  Zanhua nods. That’s settled, the gesture says. He returns complacently to his paper. Yuliang finishes off her wine, still fuming. ‘I – I want to show you something,’ she says, when she at last summons her voice.

  He still doesn’t look up. ‘What?’

  She rises to her feet. ‘Come and see.’

  Zanhua frowns. But he folds his paper, and follows.

  At the threshold to her studio, Yuliang watches him take in its state: the paint-splattered tarp that protects the floor from splashes, the bookshelves filled with thinner and varnish, a variety of glass mullers gleaming dully by the window. The smell of turpentine is all but overpowering: for a moment, Yuliang almost feels faint. But she regains her balance and walks wordlessly over to the easel. Slowly she turns it toward him.

  Zanhua approaches the painting cautiously, as if it’s some animal he’s never seen. ‘What is this?’ he asks stiffly.

  ‘My submission for the student-faculty exhibit in May.’ She smiles dryly. ‘I call it Bathing Beauty.’

  She follows what he is seeing: the rippling hair, the wet limbs and features that have taken up hours and appetite. Yuliang has shown herself stepping from her morning bath, captured in a shaft of yellow-white sunlight. Her thighs glisten with heat and steam. Her breasts are fully exposed, as is the belly rounding whitely below them. Below it, she has outlined the faint patch of her pubic hair with almost calligraphic brushwork.

  When Zanhua finally tears his gaze back to the real Yuliang, dry and clothed before him, his face is startlingly devoid of color. ‘It looks unfinished.’

  ‘I still have two weeks left to work on it before submitting it to the panel.’

  ‘What – what must you do, to finish?’

  She ticks it off on her fingers. ‘The legs are off. The shading around the tub’s base isn’t quite right. And the background is incomplete. I want to put more into it – a small red table, perhaps. Or another towel. In the corner.’

  He says nothing.

  ‘In brown,’ she adds, as though this matters.

  ‘And the face?’

  She looks at him blankly. The face is nearly complete. It’s all she’s worked on these past several days. She has gone to sleep dreaming of her own eyes, lips, and cheekbones.

  ‘The face,’ Zanhua presses. ‘You are keeping it.’

  Only then does she understand: he expects her, quite literally, to save her face. To replace it with someone else’s.

  For it is her face, after all – her own face, untouched by shame or makeup – that makes the painting so outright revolutionary. Yuliang has taken Manet and outdone him by a step: she stares down the tabloids, the whispers, the academy, dressed only in the nude truth of her talent. ‘Yes,’ Yuliang says.

  Zanhua repeats it slowly, as though she hasn’t understood the question. ‘Your face. Staring out at everyone with… that look.’

  ‘It’s a self-portrait.’

  ‘It’s a naked self-portrait.’

  ‘A nude self-portrait.’

  The look he gives her is so pained her heart almost hurts for him. ‘Zanhua,’ she starts, stepping toward him. ‘When Yuan Shikai betrayed the republic, many people were too cowed and old-fashioned to protest. But you picked up your sword. It’s part of why I admire you so. Don’t you see that this is like that – that this is my battle?’

  ‘Don’t you dare compare that to this.’ He jerks away. ‘And don’t touch me.’

  Stunned, she drops her hand. Outside, a dog bursts into a furious round of barking, then quiets just as abruptly.

  Zanhua’s jaw is working in silent fury. He doesn’t move until Ahying, stuttering abashedly through the closed door, asks if she may leave. ‘Yes,’ he says, far too sharply.

  Several moments pass before he speaks again. ‘I cannot,’ he says at last, ‘comprehend why you have done this. After all the opportunities I’ve given you. All the chances to better yourself.’

  ‘I have bettered myself!’ Yuliang cries. ‘I’m the top student in my class!’

  ‘If this is your idea of bettering yourself, you’re more misguided than –’ His voice breaks. He shuts his eyes. ‘Get rid of it.’

  Yuliang jerks her head up. ‘What?’

  ‘Get rid of it. Or I will. I will not permit you to – to do this to yourself. Again.’

  That one word, again, has the weight of a slap. Very quietly, she asks, ‘Do what again?’

  Zanhua opens his eyes. ‘Make a whore of yourself.’

  It’s what she knew he’d say – perhaps, even, all he could say. Still, she barely manages to whisper the words: ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘You!’ Zanhua shouts. ‘You have the impertinence now to tell me what I shouldn’t do! You! Who…’ He steps toward her, his fists clenched, and Yuliang wonders if he’ll finally strike her now. There’s an odd satisfaction in the thought: if he does, it will almost certainly hurt him far more than her.

  But instead, he lunges the other way, and does the one thing that hurts her more at this moment: lifting his arm, he strikes the painting from the easel.

  ‘Stop!’ Yuliang leaps forward.

  Zanhua pushes her away with enough force to send her spinning toward the wall. When she launches herself back at him, he shoves her again. Then he sweeps up the jade letter-opener from her desk. Blade in hand, he whirls back toward her painted image, his face so contorted that it looks like a stranger’s. ‘Don’t, Zanhua,’ she cries, terrified now. ‘Please…’

  ‘I won’t have it,’ he hisses. ‘You’re my wife. I order you to stop this.’ Holding her off with one hand he lifts the green blade over the canvas. ‘Stay there.’

  But Yuliang doesn’t. Instead, using a Hall-learned technique she has no recollection of learning, she aims a flat-palmed punch at her husband’s neck. When he staggers back, she hurls herself to the floor, shielding her painting.

  Zanhua recovers. An awkward dance ensues as he tries to stab past the clothed body to the undressed one. ‘Stop.’ She claws at his hand. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘I’m doing something I should have done long ago. I’m putting a stop to this insanity.’

  ‘You’re hurting our child.’

  He laughs harshly. ‘You dare to compare this – this filth to a child?’

  ‘I’m not talking about the painting!’

  A stunned silence. Slowly he rocks back on his heels. ‘What did you say?’

  Yuliang blinks at him, squeezing her belly with her arms.

  ‘This is true?’ he asks, quietly.

  And the astonishing thing is, it is.

  Yuliang nods numbly, checking off the telltale symptoms as dispassionately as she’d checked off her remaining work for him: the mood swings, extreme even for someone of her extreme nature. The bloating and belly twinges. The nausea and indigestion, which she’d attributed to the fact that she always eats badly when she’s working. The soreness in her breasts that came and went two weeks ago. And then, more obviously – and how in heaven could she have ignored this? – the menses that simply did not come.

  As if that weren’t plain enough, there is the abrupt way that paint and turpentine and even coffee have become noxious to her. There are the frequent trips to the outhouse, which until this very moment she’d told herself were from drinking extra tea in an attempt to fend off her growing fatigue.

  Over the past week Yuliang has attributed all these symptoms to nerves. It’s only now, with him here, with her naked image behind her and her clothed body tingling with fear, that Yuliang finally allows the colossal truth to dawn on her.

  Moving very carefully, Zanhua puts the opener back on the desk. ‘How far along is it?’

  ‘Nearly – nearly three months, I think.’

  ‘It’s almos
t rooted, then,’ he says. His voice barely contains his excitement. ‘It happened on my last visit.’

  She nods bleakly. She vaguely recalls an empty box of the Six Fairies tea she buys from Lin’s apothecary on Fouzhou Road (‘Ideal for cleansing the system of unwanted seeds’). And thinking, Just one day. And I probably can’t conceive anyway. She made the classic mistake Jinling often warned against: putting faith in her flailing cycles.

  ‘You shouldn’t be on the floor.’ He is holding out his hand. Hesitantly, Yuliang lets him pull her to her feet. Once there, she immediately bends to study the painting.

  Behind her he’s pacing, planning. ‘You’ll go to Tongcheng when the term ends. I see no point, in fact, in staying on.’

  She looks up at him. ‘I have exams!’

  ‘All the more reason to leave,’ he counters. ‘You should be somewhere safer, quieter. Healthier for the child.’ He moves toward the door. ‘You can tell Principal Liu tomorrow. Do you have much to pack?’

  Yuliang bends down again, dazedly retrieving her work. She locks gazes with herself. ‘No,’ she says softly.

  ‘Good.’ He begins walking toward the door. ‘We’ll find some movers before I leave. I’ll put a call through to Qihua.’

  ‘No,’ Yuliang repeats.

  ‘You don’t want movers?’

  ‘I am not moving.’

  He frowns. ‘But you just said…’

  ‘I am staying through the student-teacher contest.’

  He lets out a short laugh. ‘You’re not serious. What’s the point?’

  She turns to him slowly. ‘I can’t just leave. What would Principal Liu say?’