His lips tighten. ‘It’s more difficult for some of us than for others.’
The Duchess lets loose another blast – the final warning call. ‘Lady!’ the boatman grumbles. ‘If you’re not getting in, then take your bags back. I’ve got a business.’
Yuliang takes another deep breath, then stands on tiptoes again. She gives her windblown husband one last kiss: French-style. On each cheek.
But as she’s pulling away, he catches her back. Framing her face hard with his fingers, Zanhua presses his mouth forcefully against his wife’s. His lips hurt her. But Yuliang doesn’t pull away. And when he releases her, it’s as though he has dropped her from some small height.
‘I’ll – I’ll be on deck as we go,’ she whispers. She seats herself stiffly, gives a last, numb wave, then turns away, afraid that if she looks back even once, all her resolve will disappear. (Don’t think.)
It’s as the sampan driver plants his pole that she hears Zanhua call again. ‘Yuliang,’ he says. ‘Yuliang. Wait. I forgot to give you this…’
When she turns back, he’s waving something at her, though it’s too small for her to see. ‘I’ll throw it,’ he calls over the widening distance.
‘No, wait –’
But it’s too late. He casts his arm, releases his fingers. The object arcs over gray water and bounces off the boat’s rim. For a breathless moment Yuliang thinks the river will take it. But it tumbles in the other direction, rattling to the wet floor at her feet.
She leans over to pick it up. Wiping it on her trousers, she holds it up in disbelief: it’s the little jade boar she lost on their last trip here.
‘The hotel had it,’ he’s shouting. ‘They found it under one of the beds.’ He shouts something else, but the sampan’s clatter covers his words.
‘What?’ she shouts back, her voice cracking with the effort.
He shakes his head, takes a breath. He cups his mouth with his scholar’s hands. And this time she makes out the words, just barely: ‘It’s for luck.’
Yuliang nods, clenching the tiny token so tightly her knuckles whiten.
She keeps her gaze on her husband as the sounds of the steamship overtake them – the shouted farewells, and one last, cryptic horn blast. She watches him as the sounds of Europe wash out onto the Huangpu. Until her bags are aboard and the sampan driver is finally casting off. Until the ship’s loudspeaker announces the time, and the concierge standing by to help her leans over and inquires, in the oddly flattened French of North America, ‘Venez-vous à bord, mademoiselle? ’
Yuliang turns and looks at him. ‘C’est madame,’ she whispers.
‘Pardon,’ he says. He switches to Chinese. ‘You’re coming aboard?’
Yuliang looks down at the little boar. It gazes up with green eyes, as stony and as stubborn as ever. She gives it one last squeeze before slipping it into her pocket.
Epilogue
On July 13, 1937, the Japanese attacked Shanghai a second time, launching a bloody and grueling battle that, thanks to the determination and perseverance of both Chinese troops and Shanghai’s own fearless citizens, lasted well over three months (and left tens of thousands of casualties) before the city was taken. By December 1937, Japan had taken Nanjing, launching a six-week orgy of rape, looting, and slaughter that took up to a half-million more lives. Chiang Kai-shek and his Republican government fled inland to Chongqing, where they again formed a shaky alliance with the Chinese Communist Party. That truce collapsed with Japan’s surrender in 1945, plunging China into bloody civil war for four more years.
In December 1949, the last Republican stronghold of Chengdu fell, and Chiang’s government fled again, this time to Taiwan. Following its establishment in October 1949, the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China settled on social realism as the ideal art form for the new nation. Specifically formulated against more romantic Western movements, social realism focused on the ugly realities of modern life, particularly the plight of the poor. Traditional nudes were emphatically discouraged.
Some of Yuliang’s former colleagues tried to adapt to the new aesthetic. Xu Beihong became president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and as such pioneered the effort to integrate realism into traditional painting, but he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953. Following liberation, Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Art Academy was combined with two other art schools to form the East China College of Art, and ultimately was moved to Nanjing. Liu himself painted intensely throughout the 1950s and 1960s, slowing only temporarily after being declared an enemy to the Cultural Revolution and confined to house arrest. He died in 1994, painting indefatigably until the end.
Pan Zanhua died in 1959.
Pan Yuliang never returned to China. In the decade following her self-exile, she exhibited in the salon, the French National 53rd Art Exhibition, the Salon des Indépendants, and the 51st Salon Art Show. In 1945 she won a gold award for her entry in the Salon des Indépendants, and in 1958 she exhibited there again. In that same year her work was exhibited in Paris’s Museum of Modern Art. Unwilling to change her painting style or overcome her aversion to dealers, she never became more than modestly successful in the commercial sense, and by most accounts lived out her last days in poverty and illness. She never relinquished her pride in her nationality, however, choosing to hold on to her Chinese citizenship until her death in 1977. She was buried in Paris’s Cimetière du Montparnasse, in traditional Chinese robes.
Pan Yuliang’s remarkable legacy includes more than four thousand works of art, including sculptures, sketches, oil paintings, and watercolors. Many of these can be found in her home province of Anhui, at the Anhui Museum.
Inevitably, it also includes controversy: in 1993, an exhibition of her work in Beijing caused enough concern that several of her nudes were removed.
Selected Bibliography
Ayscough, Florence. Chinese Women: Yesterday and Today. New York: Da Capo, 1975.
Baum, Vicki. Shanghai, ’37. New York: Oxford Universit Press, 1987.
Birnbaum, Phyllis. Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita: The Artist Caught Between East and West. New York: Faber & Faber, 2006.
Brassaï. The Secret Paris of the 30’s. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Pantheon, 1976.
Brettell, Richard. Modern Art, 1851–1929. London: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Clark, David, et al. Shanghai Modern: 1919–1945. Ostfildern, Germany: Hadje Cantz, 2005.
Dong, Stella. Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000.
Dunand, Frank, ed. The Pavilion of Marital Harmony: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Between Tradition and Modernity. Chicago: Art Media Resources, 2002.
Evans, Richard. Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Gronewald, Sue. Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China, 1850–1936. New York: Harrington Park, 1985.
Hamilton, William Stenhouse. Notes from Old Nanking, 1947–1949. Canberra: Pandanus, 2004.
Hansen, Arlen J. Expatriate Paris: A Cultural and Literary Guide to Paris of the 1920s. New York: Arcade, 1991.
Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984.
Hershatter, Gail. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Ho, Lucy Chao. ‘More Gracile Than Yellow Flowers’: The Life and Works of Li Ching-chao. Hong Kong: Mayfair, 1968.
Huddleston, Sisley. In and About Paris. London: Methuen, 1927.
Levine, Marilyn A. The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe During the Twenties. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993.
Liao, Jingwen, and Ching-wen Liao. Xu Beihong: Life of a Master Painter. Translated by Zhang Peiji. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1987.
Lu, Hsun. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Translated by Yang Hsien-yi
and Gladys Yang. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Lucas, E. V. A Wanderer in Paris. London: Methuen, 1909.
Mason, Caroline Atwater. The Spell of France. Boston: L. C. Page, 1912.
Rose, June. Suzanne Valadon: The Mistress of Montmartre. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Shinan. Huahun (Painter’s Spirit: The Biography of Pan Yuliang). Shanghai: Wenhui News/Wu Wenhuan, 1983.
Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Stein, Gertrude. Paris, France. New York: Liveright, 1996 (reissue).
Sullivan, Michael. Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Wakeman, Frederick. The Fall of Imperial China. New York: Free Press, 1975.
Wang, Ping. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. New York: Anchor, 2002.
Wheeler, K. W., and V. L. Lussier, eds. Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Paris and New York. New York: Transaction, 1982.
Yang, Benjamin. Deng: A Political Biography. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998.
Ye, Zhaoyan. Nanjing 1937: A Love Story. Translated by Michael Berry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Acknowledgments
This has been a long-term, engrossing, and quite possibly far too ambitious project. That it succeeds to any extent is largely due to the people who have helped and supported it along the way, who include (but are certainly not limited to) Alan Ziegler and the Columbia School of the Arts Writing Division, for support and encouragement and for understanding the limits on a writing mother’s time and finances; Helen Schulman, for helping me find my way early on; Binnie Kirshenbaum and Mary Gordon, for holding my feet to the fire and keeping me walking. Jeesoon Hong, Kailin Huang, Yeewan Koon, and Wei Zhong have all provided essential researching, translating, and proofreading help on the Chinese side of things, while Andrea LaFleur, Julia Lichtblau, Denis Bonnet, and Hillary Jordan have been equally helpful with the French. Tim Brewer and Erica Hope Charpentier suffered through my woeful attempts in the oil painting world. I’m indebted to Kuiyi Shen at the University of California, San Diego, who curated the exhibit that first brought Pan Yuliang’s work to my attention. Borhua Wang at the Pratt Institute also provided early thought and insight into Pan’s work, and Madeleine Zelin, of Columbia University’s East Asian Languages and Culture Department, pointed the way for reading, classwork, and further consultants. Suzette Cody traipsed tirelessly through Singapore, seeking out Pan Yuliang paintings; Tom Cody trolled the back streets of Shanghai for clues into Pan’s life and formative influences. Liang Luo of the University of Michigan, Antonia Finnane of the University of Melbourne, and Anik Fournier of the Montréal Museum of Contemporary Art were all generous in sharing research, images and thoughts. I owe the Art Students League of New York – particularly Frank Mason and his talented class – great thanks for allowing me to intrude on their world for a day. Thanks, too, to the Art Retreat Museum in Singapore and to Sotheby’s for access to and information on Pan Yuliang’s amazing paintings
Between workshop colleagues and literature-loving friends, there are scores of people who have critiqued this novel for me as it’s grown. I am especially grateful to Alison Bogert, Halle Eaton, Michael Epstein, Joanna Hershon, Hillary Jordan, Amy Sirot, Ellen Umansky, Josh Weil, and Michelle Wildgen for taking extra time to read, reread, and advise. My fabulous agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman, cheered me on at a courageously early point in this venture, and editors Jill Bialosky at Norton and Mary Mount at Viking UK made for an unstoppable duo; it has been a privilege to work with them. Copyeditor Liz Duvall made more life-saving catches than I can count. I’d also like to thank those who offered their homes, offices, and quiet spaces as my own little apartment filled with toys, joys, and tantrums; Marcy Lovitch, Susan Chaddick, and Andrea Reiff were especially generous.
Finally, and most importantly, my husband, Michael, deserves (even if he doesn’t always receive) undying gratitude for spotting a good idea, daring me to try it, and offering truly heroic support, honest feedback, and continued marriage to me while I did. You are the Fire Horse of my soul. My daughters, Katie and Hannah – Dragon and Monkey, respectively – have been an endless (if sleepless) source of inspiration, mirth, and wonder. This, as everything, is for you all.
Permissions
The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following material:
Martin Bernal, Chinese Socialism to 1907. Copyright © 1975 by Martin Bernal. Published by Cornell University Press. Used with permission of the author.
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit. Copyright © 1923 by J. P. Lippincott Company. Copyright renewed 1951 by Violet Organ. Reprinted by permission of the Perseus Books Group.
Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Copyright © 1997 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of The University of California Press.
Ho Xuan Huong, ‘The Floating Cake’ and ‘The Lustful Monk,’ translated by John Balaban, from Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Copyright © 2000 by John Balaban. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.copper-canyonpress.org
Li Po, ‘At Ching-Men Ferry,’ ‘Avoiding Farewell in a Chin-Ling Wineshop,’ ‘Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon: Part 3,’ and ‘Night Thoughts at Tung-Lin Monastery on Lu Mountain,’ translated by David Hinton, from The Selected Poems of Li Po, copyright © 1996 by David Hinton. Reprinted by permission of the New Directions Publishing Corp.
John Sloan, ‘The Gist of Art.’ Copyright © 1977. Reprinted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc.
Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China. Copyright © 1996 by Michael Sullivan. Reprinted by permission of The University of California Press.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Painter of Shanghai
PART ONE: The Atelier
Montparnasse, 1957
PART TWO: The Journey
1. Zhenjiang, 1913
2
3
PART THREE: The Hall
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
PART FOUR: The Concubine
14. Wuhu, 1916
15
16
PART FIVE: The House
17. Shanghai, 1916
18
19
20
21
22
23
PART SIX: The Academy
24
25
26
27
28
PART SEVEN: L’École
29. France, 1923
30
31. Paris, 1925
32
33
34
PART EIGHT: The Wives
35. Nanjing, 1936
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
PART NINE: The Departure
45
Epilogue
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Painter of Shanghai
PART ONE: The Atelier
Montparnasse, 1957
PART TWO: The Journey
1. Zhenjiang, 1913
2
3
PART THREE: The Hall
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
PART FOUR: The Concubine
14. Wuhu, 1916
15
16
PART FIVE: The House
17. Shanghai, 1916
18
19
20
21
The Painter of Shanghai Page 38