The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  In the end, despite a small movement to have Yuliang terminated, Principal Liu asked only that she apologize. But by then Yuliang had had enough. Enough of politics, of tabloids. Enough of the endless scandal. Enough of sleeping alone every night. She’d even had enough of Shanghai: its ever-increasing construction, the tireless scream of the latest everything – cocktail, salon, Negro band. Not to mention the growing signs of Japan’s grim intentions.

  Thanks to the League of Nations, Hirohito’s soldiers patrolled the same foreign concessions they’d abruptly attacked in 1932, while China’s troops (which had fought them off for over two months) were barred from their own city. All in all, she’d decided, it was time to leave. And when the invitation came from Xu Beihong, the staid, broad streets of Nanjing seemed a welcome respite.

  Still, making her way across campus now, Yuliang can’t brush off a vaguely soiled and sticky feeling. Hurrying past the university’s athletic fields – filled now not with athletes, but with civilians maneuvering in obligatory combat training – she still feels it; as though she’s just pushed through a roomful of spiderwebs. Shutting her eyes briefly, she can all but see them: circular ladders of lethal silken strands. Studded with the crisp carcasses of insects.

  At home, she works in the room she’s staked out as both studio and second bedroom on nights when sleeplessness makes her a poor partner in bed. The large window offers glimpses of Nanjing’s tree-lined boulevards. In the east looms Purple Mountain, the resting site of both Sun Yat-sen and the ‘beggar king’ Zhu Yuanzhang, who rose from poverty to found the Ming Dynasty. To the south lies Yuhuatai Shan, Rain of Flowers Mountain. There, the story goes, a monk once chanted sutras so sweetly that the Buddha showered him with flowers. The heavenly blossoms transformed as they fell, into the rainbow-toned stones that now lie scattered across the summit.

  Since Chiang Kai-shek assumed the mantle of China’s leadership, however, the mountain has become famous for something else: it is (people whisper) where Communists and other radicals are taken and disposed of. The luckier ones, like Zanhua’s old friend Chen Duxiu, languish in Nationalist prisons. The luckiest of all, like Meng Qihua, have fled to the north with the few Communists whom the government has not yet purged.

  Still, despite such dark murmurings, Yuliang has painted prolifically in this bright little space, producing more than enough work for the two dozen exhibitions she’s been in since returning home nearly eight years ago. The last one, in Nanjing, included her very first political painting, inspired by the National 19th Route Army that fought so bravely against Hirohito’s troops.

  Yuliang is intensely proud of Our Heroes. She can’t look at it without remembering the shock of those first few weeks – the shriek of Japanese planes, the whistling mortars and roaring bombs. Entire buildings collapsed, as if Shanghai’s perpetual building boom has sudenly gone into reverse. After the all-clear sounded, Yuliang slipped outside, defying curfew to survey her wounded city. Outside, all was eerily quiet; the streets stripped of chatter and motor-purr and the jangle of worldly wealth. It smelled not of cash and coffee but of rubble and soot – and, somewhere behind that, seared flesh.

  Amid the temporary quiet, the Red Cross workers helped soldiers pull the corpses into the street. Survivors lined up on the sidewalks, awaiting the attention of foreign doctors. Pausing in the street, Yuliang stepped toward a wounded child who appeared to be lying in a patch of gasoline. The child, however, turned out to be the legless corpse of a small man, the gasoline his dust-darkened blood. It was an image that refused to leave Yuliang, even after she’d finished the painting – a mere twelve hours after she’d fled back to her little house.

  Her current project, Strong Man, was likewise launched in fury – though as much against her critics as against the Japanese. Five years ago, when Yuliang first returned from Europe, her work was greeted by critics as ‘fresh’ and ‘deftly Western,’ ‘rivaling Manet,’ and even ‘exuding the air of the Old Masters.’ Later, though, as the Generalissimo’s ‘New Life’ program cast its shadow, the tone began to change. ‘Why French countryside, Venetian bridges, and bare-breasted Negroes?’ asked Shenbao, in its review of her last show. ‘Is Madame Pan ashamed to paint things that suit Chinese taste and culture?’ The right-leaning China World went even further, calling her work ‘pure pornography’: ‘Come to see it if you must. But treat it as you’d treat a flower house: leave your wife and your daughter at home.’

  Gazing up at Strong Man now, Yuliang reassures herself that even the staunchest neo-Confucianist couldn’t find anything to malign in this painting. Granted, the subject is shirtless. But so are most of the fieldhands she has spent past weeks sketching as they drive their buffalo through the fields for spring seeding. And surely – surely no one will miss the significance of the rich earth the man carries in his hands. Yuliang has put hours into those hands, struggling to make them both broad and gentle. Hands that, on the one side, will allow China to flourish, and on the other keep it from crumbling apart.

  She holds her filbert brush vertically against the figure, then loads it with newly mixed brown ocher. For twenty minutes she scrapes and mixes, dabs and brushes and paints, allowing no thoughts beyond the buttery blending of one tone into the next. She is just wetting her bright brush when she hears a distinctive creaketty-creak of wood-soled shoes, followed by the banging of the studio door.

  Guanyin appears, her face half covered by dark glasses. She scans the room with vague fury, blind Justice seeking a fugitive. Which, Yuliang reflects, in some ways she is: the law, after all, still prohibits concubines.

  ‘Xiao taitai!’ Guanyin shouts, using the term Zanhua loathes. ‘Second lady!’

  ‘Yes,’ Yuliang answers quietly. Guanyin’s doctors claim that her eyesight is failing rapidly; in a year or two, she might be blind. Yuliang suspects it’s partially a front: the first lady’s eyes were sharp enough, after all, to spot the delicate gold earrings Zanhua bought Yuliang for her birthday this past year.

  ‘Did you need something, elder sister?’ she asks now, setting down her brush.

  ‘I came to see if you’ve preferences for dinner. I’m sending Cook to market.’ Guanyin steps in. ‘I was thinking of snapper with mushrooms. But the price of both has gone up. And he needs a new pan, too – the one he’s using now has cracked.’

  Yuliang suppresses a smile. The last time Cook ‘needed’ a new pan was a month back, and Yuliang dutifully handed over the requested sum. Two weeks later, the pan on the stove remained cracked and tarnished. Guanyin, however, sported a new qipao of Nanjing silk.

  But the last thing Yuliang wants now, with so much work ahead of her, is to argue. Besides, she’s promised Zanhua she’ll try her best to keep the peace. ‘I have no preferences,’ she says shortly. Picking up her purse, she counts out three crisp new Nationalist bills.

  Guanyin accepts them with a nod, tucking them into her waistband. Instead of leaving, though, she wanders around the room. She lifts books to the sunlight. She leafs through Yuliang’s sketchbooks. Eventually she makes her way over to Yuliang’s canvas.

  ‘This is for the Shanghai show?’ She squints over Yuliang’s shoulder.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When do you leave?’

  ‘In a week and a half.’

  ‘All this shuttling about.’ Guanyin sighs, as though she honestly would prefer to have Yuliang stay at home. ‘And it’s such a long trip.’

  ‘The government has laid down new tracks to the north. It’s smoother even than a motorcar nowadays.’

  ‘Still. You’ll have to settle down at some point, if you truly want to be with child.’ Guanyin sucks her teeth portentously. ‘It’s hard enough to coax a pearl from an old oyster.’ She steps back on the tiny feet she still refuses to let Zanhua liberate, and squints behind her glasses. ‘Is it a boy?’

  ‘A man.’

  ‘Naked?’

  ‘Dressed.’ And then – defensively – ‘Mostly.’

  ‘So you didn’t need to sne
ak in anywhere to paint him.’

  ‘No,’ Yuliang replies shortly. She recently made the papers by dressing up in men’s clothing to slip into one of the men-only male-figure-study seminars. As she did this mostly to make a point (about the university’s rules on decency) it didn’t bother her that she was recognized. Zanhua, however, seemed less than amused. Particularly when the incident appeared in the Nanjing Daily (‘Famous Woman Painter Turns Brush on Nude Male’).

  ‘Western or Chinese?’ Guanyin persists, now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The clothes he will be wearing. Will they be Western or Chinese?’

  Yuliang rolls her eyes. ‘Truly, da taitai, what does it matter?’

  ‘People pay attention to such things these days.’ The older woman shakes out a newspaper she’s picked up on her stroll around the room. ‘When a newsman writes that your paintings lack national spirit or womanly decency, it reflects on the honor of us all.’

  ‘Your eyesight certainly seems to be improving,’ Yuliang observes dryly.

  Guanyin just shrugs. ‘Of course, I don’t know if that’s exactly what it says.’

  ‘What newsmen know of art could be inscribed on a grain of rice,’ Yuliang says, turning back to her painting. ‘Some of them,’ she adds pointedly, ‘might as well be blind.’

  ‘Some of those blessed with sight can’t see past their noses,’ Guanyin snaps back. ‘They paint things no good or decent person wants to buy.’

  It’s not a new insult – and not even particularly unfair. Yuliang can’t argue that both sales and commissions have dropped these past months. Still, she swivels angrily on her stool. ‘You seem, first lady, to forget that my work pays for Weiyi’s university fees. It’s what keeps our social position in Nanjing intact. Lately, it even keeps us in this house. ’

  Guanyin’s eyes narrow. ‘What I remember,’ she says malevolently, ‘is that you have worked in many houses. In many positions.’

  You old ox-fart. For an instant Yuliang actually lifts her arm to strike the woman. It takes tooth-gritting will to redirect it to her paintbox: keep the peace. Jaw clenched, she sweeps up her painting knife. ‘I’m very sorry, taitai,’ she says, as levelly as she can manage. ‘Thank you for your concern about me. But have Cook make whatever you think is best.’ She stabs the knife into a pot of obsidian, then layers it roughly on her background.

  Guanyin, however, is not quite through. ‘Was he the one, then?’ She jerks her head toward the huge canvas.

  Sighing, Yuliang turns around again. ‘Who?’

  ‘The one whose face you drew in your fancy books.’

  ‘I don’t understand your meaning.’

  Guanyin smiles – a slow, crocodile smile, which reveals the two gold teeth with which she replaced her last two incisors. ‘And yet they call you a professor.’

  Her unfocused eyes gleam for a moment behind the dark glasses. Then she turns on her heel, and creaks off down the hallway.

  36

  After Guanyin has left Yuliang remains motionless, her eyes glued to her newly blended palette. It can’t be, she thinks. She is even madder than I thought.

  But even as this thought’s completed she is already on her feet, making her way to the small bookcase beneath the window. She runs her fingertip across the neat row of textured spines, with their titles in myriad languages and shades of ink: Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life; Colette’s Chéri. Her own two-book set, a limited edition of her prints published at the height of her public acclaim. Wedged in at the end are a few copies of L’Gazette du Bon Ton, still warped and spotted with dried seawater.

  At first, whether by accident or some protective sleight of her subconscious, Yuliang skips over the text she wants. She finds it on the second run – the soft green spine and flaked gold paint of What Is Art? Pulling it out gently, she passes her thumb over the inscription that so embarrassed her a decade ago: I thought of our first conversation when I found this, and am overjoyed at the thought of you holding it in your beautiful artist’s hands. The characters swim before her for a moment. Blinking, Yuliang pushes past them to the once-blank inserts in the back.

  It’s all there: the large, square jaw; the hand-raked hair; the boyishly round cheeks. All reproduced a dozen or more times, in a style more tentative and overtly Western than the way she would paint him now. Still, it is inargu-able that it’s all her work. Even Guanyin – near-blind Guanyin – can see that.

  Sinking to the floor, Yuliang studies the images. In the first one Xudun is sleeping, his face free of lines, his lips slightly parted. In the next he sits, a sheet draped across his waist. In another sketch he stretches his arms toward a night sky. Then he’s against the Seine, his hair dark against the water.

  The last image, drawn while she waited for Xing Xudun at the Cluny, shows Yuliang’s one lover in a simple upright pose. Devoid of detail, he’s composed primarily of smudged crosshatch; it is impossible to tell whether he is coming toward the viewer or leaving. Coming to her now, the thought makes her shiver slightly. For the fact is that as she waited on the appointed day of their reunion, and the next, and the one after that, this was precisely how she came to see Xudun; as a vague and dreamlike figure who was either racing through Paris to meet her or who had already lied to her, and then left.

  Sitting there, that day, at their appointed meeting place, Yuliang had had no way of knowing that Xing Xudun was not in Paris but in Marseille; betrayed to the police by the same PJC he’d once ridiculed. He and a dozen other CCP members would soon be marched aboard an overcrowded steamship and carried east, where, simmering in ever-mounting resentment, they would only bring their revolution home that much more vehemently.

  Yuliang, both wounded and vaguely relieved, eventually moved to Rome. There she lost herself in her own revolution – the one she and Mirror Girl had started together. She took no more lovers. But over the next four years she gave herself to the Vatican, to Leonardo and Rembrandt, to the Gentileschis. Her hurt she treated simply much like a sculpting mistake – something to smooth over, to chip away at.

  Yuliang takes one last look at the book. Then, bracing herself, she turns her face to her easel. Confirmation of her suspicions crashes down on her, all but emptying the room of air: the man she’d sketched then and the man she’s just painted are identical.

  Winded, Yuliang drops her head into her hands: how did this happen? She hasn’t thought of Xing Xudun in months. Like other painful parts of her life, she keeps him locked in a black box, in her memory’s deepest recess. And the model for Strong Man was someone else entirely – a beefy first-year student she tutors sometimes. It’s true she made some alterations to the face, but only because the boy had risked enough to pose for her.

  Furious with herself, she throws the book to the ground. As she does, two notes flutter from its pages. One is a news article, torn jaggedly along the edges. The other is a letter, yellowed and curling at the edges.

  Yuliang smoothes them each out in turn against her knee. But she doesn’t read them; she doesn’t need to. She knows them word for word:

  MOBSTERS LAUNCH PREDAWN ATTACK ON

  UNIONISTS; SOVIET SYMPATHIZERS

  Hundreds killed, scores jailed. Death toll still rising, officials say.

  Shanghai, April 13, 1927: The city was rocked yesterday by word that hundreds of union organizers and leftists were rounded up before sunrise and summarily executed.

  The news comes in advance of the long-awaited arrival in the city of General Chiang Kai-shek with his Northern Expedition forces, which until now have been allied with the Communists. The surprise crackdown – supposedly organized by the city’s notorious ‘Green Gang’ crime syndicate – also interrupts a widely advertised general strike being planned by unionists and Communist sympathizers around the city.

  Sources close to the attacks claim that Shanghai’s own law enforcement agencies were aware of the planned purge. A government spokesman, however, denied this charge, calling it ‘absurd.’

 
The letter is dated September 1929.

  My dear friend:

  It is with great grief that I confirm that our friend Xing

  Xudun was indeed lost on the night of April 13. He was

  staying at the Lucky Chan Boarding House in Hongkou, and

  that house was raided by the Green Gang. Only two of my

  colleagues are known to have survived. Everyone else was

  executed in the street.

  I am very sorry to greet your return from Europe with such

  terrible news. But as you are no doubt aware, these have been

  hard times for those in our party. We lost more than five

  thousand members during that one week alone. I consider myself

  lucky I wasn’t injured again – or worse.

  I will give this note to my mother to pass along to you.

  Perhaps, if things improve, we’ll have a chance to meet again in

  happier circumstances – both for ourselves and for our poor and

  abused nation.

  Guifei

  For a long time Yuliang sits, the notes and book in her lap. It’s not until the sun’s rays are slanting dangerously close to the floor that she realizes how late it has become: there’s barely enough time and light left to remix her face tones. The truth is, the last thing she wants to do is paint. She wants nothing more at this moment than to allow herself the luxury of despair.

  As she is thinking this, however, a door slams shut downstairs. She hears two voices in the small courtyard outside. One is Guanyin’s. The other belongs to the amah she takes with her to go shopping sometimes – not Qian Ma (who has long since died) but an equally crotchety niece.