The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Yuliang sits back on her heels, listening dully as the two secure a rickshaw, which then trundles off toward Beijing Road. Then, carefully, she folds and tucks the yellowed papers back in place in the book, which she carries back to her easel with her. Clearly she’ll need to find a new hiding spot.

  Still all but in a trance, she picks up the paper Guanyin dropped. She pages past the incriminating review, perusing and dismissing photograph after grainy photograph before stopping in front of one that vaguely catches her interest. It is of Chiang Kai-shek, commending a KMT general who seems both suitably strong and anonymous. Yuliang taps it with her finger, then slices it free with her box knife. She tapes it to the top of her canvas.

  Don’t think, she thinks. But as she lays on the first wet strokes, a soft grief returns. For a moment Xing Xudun stands before her as he did on that last morning. She feels the broad, warm muscles of his back against her palms. She sees him turn to her, exhausted. Overjoyed. Meet me in one week, he tells her. I’ll be waiting at the Cluny again, at noon.

  Yuliang sits very still. Don’t think, she thinks again. Instead, she reloads her paintbrush. She hesitates for just a moment. Then, with a small, tight breath, she paints him out of her frame.

  37

  A day before the exhibit Yuliang enters the dining room to find Guanyin at the breakfast table. ‘Good morning, elder sister,’ she says politely.

  Guanyin merely inclines her head. But Yuliang, sensing watchfulness in those near-sightless eyes, is immediately suspicious. She’s planning something.

  At first glance, nothing appears amiss. The food looks unappealing – most food does when she is nervous, and Yuliang is always nervous before shows. Her teacup and spoon are in their proper places, as is the herbal supplement (a blend of ginseng, tang-kuei, and peony) prescribed by the doctor she and Zanhua visited last week. Zanhua has also left the Shenbao for her to read in its usual place, squarely in front of her chair.

  It isn’t until Yuliang picks up the paper that she sees it: the conservative China World has been placed neatly underneath. Opened to the arts section, it is folded to the lead story: ‘“NOVA” Exhibit Seen as Travesty; Lack of Ticket Sales Forces Early Closure.’

  Ah, she thinks.

  She pretends to skim the article casually while emptying the wax-paper packet into the water and stirring. Secretly, though, she homes in on every word.

  The show, which was promoted by her own gallery, was made up primarily of Tokyo-trained painters, working in schools that baffled even some Westerners: neo-fauvism, magic surrealism, neoplasticism. The exhibition’s goal, as voiced by its curator, was ‘to do away with the manacles of figurative form and representation and set viewers’ minds free to follow their dreams.’ According to this article, though, the result was more of a nightmare. ‘I’ve never understood futurism,’ one attendee was quoted as saying. ‘If anything, these works make me nostalgic for the old art of the past.’ Another man was more straightforward: ‘My dog could have done better with his ass, his tail, and some paint.’

  Even more disturbingly, two paintings were apparently defaced. Defaced? Yuliang thinks, grimacing as she tosses back the glass’s bitter contents. Setting the cup down, she pulls the paper over and reads the piece again more thoroughly.

  Across the table, Guanyin smiles triumphantly. ‘I had the master read that to me yesterday. I thought perhaps you’d be interested.’

  ‘The NOVA exhibit was based on a different style of painting from mine,’ Yuliang says coldly, swirling her teapot.

  ‘Aren’t you a futurist?’

  ‘That term means nothing. The uneducated use it to describe anything they don’t immediately understand.’

  Guanyin tightens her lips. Though she’s never displayed an interest in learning beyond Confucian classics like Xiao Xue, the Book of Moral Training, she bitterly resents Yuliang’s extensive schooling. Or, perhaps more accurately, their shared husband’s spending on these things. ‘Education,’ she says now, with a sniff, ‘is given too much importance these days. Even the most learned woman in the world is useless if she’s unable to bear her husband sons.’

  She watches Yuliang through her dark lenses, clearly expecting her to protest. But Yuliang has made this mistake before. All it has done is given Guanyin an excuse to note the scores of barren months that have passed since Yuliang moved in, marked by menstrual rags that Guanyin somehow always contrives to have seen. It’s a tense and bloody vigil, eerily evocative of the Hall, and at Godmother’s dreaded red book.

  Yuliang reaches for the hot water. ‘I would be happy with a girl,’ she says.

  ‘I had a dream you had one.’

  ‘Really?’ Yuliang glances at her again. For all of her and Zanhua’s banter about ‘fate,’ she’s increasingly superstitious about her womb. When she first returned to China, her barrenness had seemed a kind of reprieve, a period to rediscover her husband, her nation. Herself, here. As the years have passed, though, what has taken root – in lieu of a child, it seems – is a dense sense of culpability. As though her own flesh is punishing her for all the years she’s abused and deprived it.

  ‘It was a girl,’ Guanyin says slowly. ‘But she wasn’t Chinese. Or at least she didn’t look fully Chinese. She looked…’

  ‘Looked what?’

  ‘Well, older, for one thing. I can’t remember it exactly. It was just a dream, after all.’ She laughs self-consciously. ‘And either way, it doesn’t matter, does it? Girls are girls. You bear and raise them for others.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  Guanyin blinks behind her glasses. ‘Surely you’re not too modern to let your daughter marry?’ she says indignantly, as though Yuliang has proposed not letting her daughter eat.

  ‘If she chose to, of course. But I’d have no complaints if she decided to do something more with her life.’

  ‘What more could she do?’

  ‘Anything at all. Look at what I do.’

  Guanyin makes a dismissive gesture, underscoring how little she knows or cares about what Yuliang does. ‘I suppose you’d waste thousands of yuan to send her here and there. To fill her head with frivolous things for which she has no need.’

  ‘I’d give her as much schooling as any boy,’ Yuliang returns. ‘And yes, perhaps we’d take her to Paris and Rome too. Weiyi too. Someday.’

  Guanyin wrinkles her nose. ‘Whatever for?’

  Yuliang smiles. ‘We wouldn’t force you to go along, if you didn’t care to.’

  For a moment she can almost see it: herself and her daughter, together at the Louvre. Yuliang would reveal the secrets she’d discovered in those gilded halls: Solario’s morose self-portrait, embedded like a bleak gem in the tray’s stem in Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist. The ghostly customer in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergères. The artful array of tricks and jokes in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. Its nonsensical picnic, with its mismatched fruits and muddy bread loaf… ‘She should know about the world,’ she says quietly. ‘To teach her wifely ways alone will bind her soul. It’s like blinding her.’

  For once, the slight is unintended. Still, Guanyin’s shoulders droop a little. ‘It’s probably pointless to discuss it anyway,’ she snaps, swallowing the last bit of her breakfast. ‘What time does your train depart?’

  ‘Six,’ Yuliang says. She looks at her watch. It’s only eleven, but she hasn’t picked out her outfit or begun packing. Strong Man still needs to be wrapped and taped for his journey. There are those papers, too, she’d intended to pick up in order to read and grade them on the train…

  ‘A shame the master can’t join you,’ Guanyin says.

  Yuliang merely nods. Zanhua, in fact, is meeting her in Shanghai, as he almost always does when she has an exhibit. The last time they informed Guanyin of a similar plan, however, Yuliang returned to a subtly destroyed studio. Some of her brushes had been snapped in half, the others plucked free of their boar and fox hairs. Her oil tubes had been opened and squeezed into a monochromatic mes
s. Now they make up cover stories. This time Zanhua has supposedly been sent to a Wuxi Merchant’s Guild meeting.

  ‘You’re traveling second class, I hope,’ Guanyin goes on.

  ‘Third,’ Yuliang says accommodatingly, although in fact she is traveling first – Zanhua insisted that she needs the rest. ‘Do you have anything you’d like me to take to Weiyi?’ she adds, eyeing her first lady from the corners of her eyes.

  Predictably, Guanyin’s face closes up like a book. ‘Don’t bother him. He’s written that he is very busy right now.’ Which is doubtless true. Yuliang knows from her own letters (for Weiyi writes her regularly too) that her stepson belongs to both the Society for China Reconstruction and, partly at her urging, the Society for the Resistance of the Japanese. Recently he has also explored an Ibsen reading group. If he didn’t have his father’s intellect, Yuliang might find it a minor miracle that he has any time for his studies at all.

  And yet she knows Guanyin well enough to know that the warning wasn’t made out of concern for her son’s study habits. As her health has declined, what was once mere possessiveness of Weiyi has become a kind of vicious territorialism. It is, Yuliang suspects, at least part of the reason Guanyin won’t let Zanhua bring him home from Shanghai, as many other families did after the Japanese attacked. ‘He’s no safer here than he is there,’ Guanyin said staunchly. ‘Who says the island dwarves won’t attack the capital as well?’ In truth, though, she’s less worried about a Japanese attack on the city than a concubinal attack on her son’s loyalties.

  Now as if to underscore just this point, she turns suspiciously to Yuliang. ‘He’s not coming to your exhibit tomorrow, is he?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Yuliang says, standing. ‘You know I wouldn’t go against your wishes.’

  ‘You’ve never cared about my wishes.’ Guanyin turns her vague gaze to the plate before her. ‘Neither of you have,’ she adds.

  Something in her tone makes Yuliang turn to face her – this woman who would be only too contented to see her die. Who has waged a continual war against her since the very day Yuliang arrived here, insisting she perform the traditional kowtow of subservience. Not wanting to begin things badly, Yuliang complied with that demand, touching her forehead three times to the dusty front hall floor. Inwardly, however, she’d imagined poking out those bitter, shielded eyes with her sculpting awl.

  Looking at Guanyin now, though, what Yuliang remembers most clearly is Zanhua’s first words about her: It is not a true marriage. And what she feels is a stab of sympathy – not just for this ill, aging, and unloved wife, but for a world seemingly structured to pit its weakest members against one another. Perhaps for no better reason than to keep them weak.

  ‘You’re right,’ she says softly. ‘We haven’t.’

  Guanyin stares at her. For the first time in recent memory, she actually removes her glasses. ‘What?’

  Her eyes, in the late morning light, are wide and dark, and just as lovely as they were in the matchmaker’s photo Yuliang saw long ago. They are also wet, though whether this is from sadness or the illness there is no way of knowing. Still, Yuliang has the urge to step over. To offer her Louvre ’24 handkerchief, or her shoulder, almost the same way she sometimes offered her fellow flowers solace after a particularly bad night. Or a beating.

  The feeling lasts just a minute, though. Until Guanyin covers her eyes again.

  ‘You’d better leave soon. You can’t afford to be late.’ She holds out the newspaper, smirking again. ‘You can take this for the train.’

  38

  The Blue Steel Express pulls into Shanghai the next morning with an efficient chorus of clangs and sighs. Yuliang, dressed and, while not particularly rested (she never sleeps well before shows), fueled by two cups of excellent coffee, descends its metal steps, kicking her carpet bag before her. Strong Man, however, she holds, swaddled in blankets and brown paper. Once on the platform, she looks for a porter. Instead her gaze runs straight into two young Japanese soldiers. The pair is standing off to the track’s side as though they have every right to be here.

  For the barest of instances there’s an urge to step right back on the train. At least Nanjing, for all its stuffiness and screeching Nationalist planes overhead, is still free of those hated khaki uniforms.

  When she reaches Tianmu Street a few minutes later, however, Yuliang’s mood brightens. She always forgets just how much she misses her life here, the color and chaos that are so completely lacking in the orderly capital. After paying the porter she takes a moment to simply stand here, in the city she still thinks of as her true home. It is (Yuliang thinks) like a shot of good whiskey: the noise and glitter, the endless energy. A rickshaw passes, its bony runner pulling a priest easily three times his own weight. As they reach the intersection a Duesenberg leaps toward them, causing the boy to stop short. Runner and rider join in a chorus of salty insults. These are promptly returned by the sedan’s driver, a peroxide-blond taitai.

  Observing the exchange, Yuliang has to laugh. Heaven help Hirohito, she thinks, hailing her own rickshaw. If the Japanese do attack Shanghai again, they will be in for a far worse fight than they expect.

  She arrives at the Exhibition Space a little before noon, just as the workmen finish installing her name on the marquee. Shading her eyes, Yuliang reads over their shoulders: pan yuliang: famous western-style woman painter. ‘Idiots,’ she mutters. No matter how often she requests otherwise, they insist on inserting that word: woman. Though as Liu Haisu has reminded her on countless occasions, ‘Be happy they stop at woman. They’d put up naked too, if they thought it’d sell tickets.’ And grinned. ‘Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.’

  Inside the main gallery all signs of the disastrous NOVA show have vanished. The walls are clean and whitewashed, studded with new hooks and nails. The gallery director stands amid a cluster of assistants. As Yuliang’s heels click across the room his face breaks into a wide grin, and Yuliang reluctantly inclines her head. In terms of facial expression, the little curator is completely and fully her opposite: a compulsive smiler. Matching him tooth for tooth hurts her face.

  ‘Ah, Madame Pan,’ he says now, beaming. ‘You look very well indeed. Have you by any chance put on some weight?’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ she replies (musing that in France this would be the height of insults). ‘But thank you. I must say, by the way, that I noticed the marquee on my way in.’

  ‘New characters!’ he announces brightly. ‘Multicolored, as you doubtless observed. And a full six millimeters larger than the ones from last year.’

  She nods. ‘But I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve done it again.’

  His brow creases very slightly. ‘Done what?’

  ‘Called me a “famous woman painter.”’

  He beams. ‘So you are.’

  Yuliang stifles a sigh. ‘May I ask – again – why it’s necessary to insert “woman”? Does anyone honestly think at this point that I’m a man?’

  He appears to ponder this, teeth still bared. ‘I wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Is it too late to remove it?’

  ‘Unfortunately, I’m afraid it is. You see, we’ve already printed it on the posters and programs.’ Reaching into his pocket, he hands one over. ‘I truly am sorry. I completely forgot our conversation on the topic. The unfortunate truth is, there have been a number of things on my plate recently.’

  He is still smiling. But Yuliang also detects – or thinks she does – a note of uncertainty in his voice. She waits a moment. But when he doesn’t elaborate, she changes the subject. ‘Is that the hanging order I sent you?’ she asks, pointing to the list. ‘May I?’

  She studies the hastily scribbled little chart, then turns back to study the wall. ‘I’m going to make some changes,’ she announces.

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Of course.’ Well accustomed to Yuliang’s obsessive involvement in her exhibitions, he normally gives her free rein. Today, though, is different. Still grinning staunchly,
he trails after her, smoking with quick, fraught puffs. He wrings his hands as she unwraps Strong Man, taps his foot when she puts it on the central wall. But it isn’t until Yuliang has turned to leave that he makes his move.

  ‘Madame Pan.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘A word, please?’ Inevitably, he’s still smiling. Only a twitching eyelid betrays his agitation. ‘I was just wondering about the positioning of that – that one.’ He points at Dreaming Nude.

  Yuliang looks at the work. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. It’s just, I wonder if it might work a bit better elsewhere. For instance, there.’ He points toward an alcove that is more or less hidden behind the western wall. It is where Yuliang has placed her recent guohua pieces, traditional watercolors she’s completed to strengthen her Chinese lines. She’s less happy with the results than she might have been – which, of course, is precisely why she put them there.

  She frowns. ‘But it would have no visibility there.’

  ‘Well, yes. I merely think it… that is, that we perhaps…’ He chuckles mournfully. ‘It might be safer.’

  ‘Safer than what?’

  He wrings his hands together. ‘I’m sure you’ve read of the NOVA show. The reaction was, shall we say, somewhat more volatile than we’d expected. The incident prompted the board to consider the need to adhere more firmly to certain… ah, standards.’

  She tries to suppress her irritation. ‘Surely my work still meets your artistic standards.’

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly, madame. You are, after all, China’s famous Western-style woman painter.’ He chuckles again.

  Yuliang stares back, unamused. ‘What standards do I now not meet?’

  ‘Well – and this isn’t my thought, of course – but there are certain new breezes, that is to say, new moods in Shanghai. Even among its more modern gallery goers. In light of what happened, we are simply wondering whether we should make the more… ah, shall we say forceful pieces a little less, ah, salient…’