by Amy Tan
I felt his hands caressing me, stroking me. I sighed. He unbound my hair and kissed my neck. I murmured the vulgar Chinese words and asked him to say them. He repeated them in an oddly polite voice. I laughed and said to take me to bed and show me what those words meant. When he helped me stand, I felt the water stream down my skin like a waterfall. I lay on the bed and watched Lu Shing undress. His body shimmered. He lay next to me and caressed my back. I laughed and uttered the harsh vulgar words. He quickly entered me, and a few moments later, I saw with wonderment that I had become him. I was the face looking at me, and it appeared to be terribly sad, yet I was euphoric. “Good little boat,” I said, and rowed against waves, and the ropes that had knotted his brow fell away. I watched myself in him as his eyes rolled back and he and I gave up fear. I repeated the vulgar words urgently, harshly, hearing those sounds also coming from him. Together our coarse words were scraping away his armor and mine, so we could reach more joy, more pleasure. I watched as the look on his face changed from desperate to ecstatic, and I felt victorious that I had conquered him and he was, at last, completely mine. I laughed that I had made this happen.
I AWOKE so thickheaded I did not know who I was. Gradually, my mind returned. The room looked faded and flat without shadows and gold light. All my clothes had been removed and were not on the sofa where I had left them. I recalled that I had been exquisitely happy last night—but not a bit of it remained. The air was heavy and smelled of summer mildew. The old worries and anger had returned. Where was Lu Shing? Had he abandoned me again?
I left the bed and saw my dress hanging in an armoire, along with other clothes. Who had done that? Before I could step forward, a girl dashed into the room, and out of modesty, I gasped and tried to cover myself. She held up a blue silk robe and turned her face away as I slipped my arms into its sleeves. Slippers magically appeared at my feet and I stepped into them. She gestured to a small area behind the screen. The bathtub had been emptied. It was plain white and not a painted soup tureen. Nearby was a porcelain basin on a tall stand, and it was filled with water. She pantomimed washing my face. I splashed the water onto my face to remove the bleariness of my mind. I kept throwing cool water on me, until the bowl was empty and the floor was wet, but only part of me had returned. She took me to a cupboard with drawers. My clothes had been placed inside. She opened another drawer. Chinese pajamas lay neatly folded—light silky clothes. I understood why Danner wore them. The air was heavy and humid.
Downstairs, I found Danner talking in English to a gray cat, who was just as animatedly talking to him in its feline language.
“I know that it is six in the evening, Elmira, dearest, but we cannot begin supper without our guest. Ah—voilà!—Lulu is here.”
How was it possible that I had slept for over twelve hours? I ate a supper of strange-tasting cold dishes: coin-size slices of beef and pigeon, eggs, salted raw cucumbers, and bright green vegetables. The cat stood at the other end of the table and ate from a china plate. Would all the meals be like this?
“I will not speak about your situation,” Danner said, “unless you care to. I will, however, tell you what you need to know about the Chinese, and that is this: You cannot change thousands of years of Chinese custom about shame in the family. We create our own laws in the Settlement and govern what a Chinese person can do. But there is no law you can use to disallow their philosophical outlook. Shame, honor, and obligation cannot be cast off. You will not be happy with your young man, or with Shanghai, if you think you can change that.”
I did not answer. I would not give up, and I would not return home.
“I can see your answer in your eyes, my dear. Hear my sigh. Every newcomer finds something disagreeable about the Chinese that they wish to change. I’ve heard all the complaints and have had some myself—their noisiness at odd hours, their standard of cleanliness, their selective understanding of punctuality, their inefficiency in doing something the way it has been done for a thousand years. They may alter it somewhat over much time, but they cannot change their fears, which govern much of what they do. And many a newcomer, like you, thinks she will succeed. It’s that American pioneer spirit that scouted the rivers and mountains, opened new frontiers, and conquered the Indians. So why not the Chinese?”
I pretended to eat, but I had little appetite for strange food on a warm night.
“Some Americans give up and go home,” Danner continued in a cheerful voice. “The sojourners who are required to stay for a few years grumble a lot to each other. The Shanghailanders, like me, who’ve made China their home, adopt a Chinese attitude about most things. We don’t interfere. Live and let live. Most of the time, at least.”
I discovered later that he was originally from Concord, Massachusetts, “a bastion of praying Puritans,” he called it. While still young, he lived in Italy, where he began collecting paintings, which he sold at a good price when he returned to the States. He alternated between Europe and the East Coast and was known as a collector with a good eye for Eastern landscapes, traditional and, later, impressionistic. He moved to Shanghai nearly twenty years ago for undisclosed reasons. Many came to Shanghai with secrets, he said, or left them behind and developed new scandals. He brought trunks of paintings, kept the ones he liked, and sold the ones he did not in an art gallery, where homesick Westerners bought paintings that reminded them of familiar landscapes, where they had enjoyed quiet picnics in a land far removed from the cacophony of Shanghai.
Lu Shing had visited Danner’s gallery from the age of twelve, when he first became fascinated with Western painting. His family expected him to achieve a high level of scholarship and pass the imperial examinations, but secretly he had hoped to become a painter. He spent hours copying the paintings in Danner’s gallery—the popular landscapes with sheep and horses, the pretty cottages by the stream, the stormy seas with white boats. They were popular with Westerners.
“As you know,” Danner said to me, “his work is quite good, even though they are imitations of the works of famous artists.”
My head felt light. “He copied them? He wasn’t at those places in his paintings?”
“He copied them well enough that it was hard to tell the originals from his.”
I was afraid to ask about the painting that brought me to Shanghai. Would his answer make a difference? “Did you ever see one with thick rain clouds, a long valley, mountains in the background—”
“The Valley of Amazement. A favorite of his. I bought it in Berlin for pennies. Das Tal der Verwunderung, by an obscure artist who died young. Friedrich Leutemann. It hung in the gallery for years before I sold it. Lu Shing made many versions and added an element of his own. A golden vale in the distance. I have to say, I was not fond of the alteration. The original had a dark beauty, a quavering feeling of uncertainty. He took the uncertainty away. But he was a young artist then, searching for meaning.”
I had wanted certainty and that painting had made me feel I was on the verge of finding it. I was glad he changed it. The golden vale he had added was original.
Lu Shing sold his imitations in the gallery until he had enough money to go to America—against his family’s wishes. Danner sent a letter of introduction to one of his best clients: Bosson Ivory II, a collector of landscape paintings. The Bossons collected protégés as well, and he favored the idea of an Oriental one. For several years, Lu Shing lived in the Ivory house in Croton-on-Hudson, and in return, he presented Mr. Ivory with paintings. He wrote to Danner regularly and said that Mr. Ivory rolled up his unwanted paintings and put them away.
At the end of supper, Danner said that dinner would be served at midnight. Lu Shing would join us, along with the cat, Elmira, and, possibly, the guest on the third floor. She was a Chinese woman who tutored men to speak English, Danner explained. English lessons! That was the made-up story I had given those women on the boat. I told Danner about the coincidence.
“In a city with so many desperate women and so few opportunities, you will run across
many coincidences. Her choice is a common one, and it is not really English lessons she provides, although her conversational skills are quite good. The truth is, she has an arrangement with two men, one during the day, one at night. She keeps them company on a regular basis, and they provide a stipend on a regular basis.”
“How does she keep them company?”
“She is a lady of the night, my dear. Prostitute is too harsh a word. She is a professional mistress. Not mine.” He chuckled. “You’re shocked. I am not running a whorehouse, dear girl. The woman is an old friend, someone I’ve known since the days when she had a life that was quite respectable. But circumstances change quickly here, and a woman without a husband has few prospects. She could have become a rag collector, a washerwoman, a beggar. She could have gone to a cheap brothel or taken to the streets. She chose instead to take my offer to rent the rooms upstairs and take gentlemen callers. You will not be confronted with the comings and goings of her guests. They enter through the gate on the other side of the house, one alley over from ours. When you meet, you’ll find her interesting and likable. Everyone does. Her name is Golden Dove.”
Despite what Danner said, I was disturbed by the presence of the woman. I had a sickening feeling that my circumstances were already too similar to hers. I, too, had a gentleman caller and he paid my rent.
Lu Shing’s coolie brought a note that Lu Shing would come that evening, and, as promised, he arrived just before midnight. Danner had many freshly cooked dishes laid out for dinner. I had no appetite. Lu Shing and I went immediately to my room and I searched his face to guess what had transpired. Failure and despair. I told him about the woman above me. If he abandoned me, her fate would be mine. He said I should not torment myself with terrible thoughts that would never come true.
“Did you try harder?” I cried. “Did you tell them about me?” Danner had said it was impossible to change a Chinese family. But I wanted Lu Shing to be as persistent as I was—and to be just as miserable. We lay on the bed facing each other.
“I am hesitant to give you too much hope,” he said. “But I have thought of one possibility. It is to soften my mother’s heart first, which will provide a path to my father’s heart. If our baby is indeed a boy, he will be the first son of his generation. And because I am the eldest, his birth will have significance. I cannot guarantee they would accept him, since he would not be purely Chinese. But if he is the first, he cannot be ignored.”
This possibility was my opium. The sweetness in the air returned. Gloom had vanished. So there was a way! The eldest son of the eldest son. I was so swept up with this answer that I did not consider that my baby would be anything other than a boy. I made plans for my new life within a Chinese family. Among the first things, I would learn to speak Chinese.
I introduced myself to the woman upstairs, Golden Dove, who was indeed likable. She was around twenty-five and pretty, although the two halves of her face were slightly askew, the cheek on one side being higher than the other. The right side of her upper lip appeared to curl under. I was happy to find she spoke English, not as perfectly as Lu Shing, but with enough ease that she and I could converse. She was open in talking about her life, guessing what I would want to know. She had been abandoned as a baby and raised in an American mission school. She fell in love with a handsome man and ran away from the school when she was sixteen, and after a year, he abandoned her, and she went to work in a courtesan house. It was not a terrible life. She had many admirers. She had freedom. She met Danner in a bookshop and they often had tea. But two years ago, she made the mistake of taking a lover, and this so enraged one of her suitors that he broke her jaw and nose. She healed in Danner’s house and had remained ever since. “The life we receive is not always what we choose.”
I did not ask about her gentlemen. In part, I was afraid I would find similarities to Lu Shing—a well-to-do family, a son who would not take her for his wife or concubine. Whatever similarities we had now would not remain. I was an American with more opportunities, although what those might be was not clear. In the meantime, I would improve my prospects. I asked if she could give me lessons in Chinese.
“You have elevated me to the status of a teacher!” she said. “At one time, I had hoped to be one.”
Lu Shing came to visit me at unpredictable times. I waited every day for his coolie to come with a note telling me whether Lu Shing could come that day or the next. The coolie was the same man who had taken care of me the first day. I would hear him running through the gate shouting, in Chinese, “It’s here!” and my heart would race. Lu Shing’s message was written on cream-colored paper, enclosed in a matching envelope and placed in a silk bag so that dirty hands would not soil it.
“My dear Lucia …” they always began, and what followed was the same elegant handwriting, perfectly executed, whether he conveyed regrets or an announcement of his time of arrival, as if he had written it in a leisurely manner, unhurried, while enjoying his afternoon tea. His visit might be early in the morning or in the late afternoon or late at night. He never came during the hour for the midday meal or dinner. I tried to appear cheerful during his visits, aware that I had more recently fallen into moods like my mother’s—angry and critical. But it was hard to stifle what I felt when Lu Shing seemed unbothered by the arrangement. I could not hide it when pink splotches spread over my chest and neck.
Rather than allowing me to sulk, Danner became my happy guide to Shanghai. Because of his enormous size, we had to take two rickshaws, and the pullers who saw him approach were always glad. Danner paid them extra. We ate at French restaurants, visited curio shops, attended a vaudeville show put on by Russian Jews, and took a boat ride on Soochow Creek. Shanghai provided endless diversions, and I strung them together to try to forget about my predicament and the absence of my lover. But as soon as our outing was over, I returned to fretting.
I asked Danner one evening if we could detour on our way home and go by Lu Shing’s family house. Danner said he did not know where it was.
“I am not lying,” he protested. “One day, I will indeed lie and you will see how poorly I do it. This city has many liars. You would think I would have learned to do it better. But I’ve never had a reason to be dishonest. I have no past as a criminal. I am not here to cheat people of money. But those who come to Shanghai always have a strong reason to do so. To make fortunes—that’s a common one. You see in opium houses many who failed. In my case, I came with a dear friend whom I had known since our days at university. He was an artist and considered himself an Orientalist by aesthetic influence. We had a wonderful life together. He died of pneumonia nine years ago. So long ago, so recently.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
He gave a slight laugh. “I’ve grown to the size of the two of us. We were as inseparable as twins, like Gemini, compatible in all ways—except for the tassels. They were his doing.”
He was a homosexual. I thought of my father and his sorties with both men and women. I had been angry that he had given away his love to so many others but not to me. My father, however, had never spoken about any of them with any affection—none at all, not even Miss Pond. He never loved them any more than he loved me. I might have become incapable of being loved or loving anyone had I not met Lu Shing. Unlike Danner, I could not say we had a wonderful life together.
“What was your friend’s name?” I asked.
“Teddy,” he said.
Whenever we went to curio shops, I asked Danner what Teddy would have thought of this carving or that painting or those porcelain bowls.
“Teddy would have thought the gilded knickknacks were hideously pretentious. And these objets d’art are not art but vulgar imitations. He would have liked the coloration of these bowls.” In time, I was able to guess what Teddy might have liked with uncanny accuracy, Danner said.
Whenever I was weepy or angry or frightened about the uncertainties of my new life, Danner would comfort me. “I feel so alone,” I said.
&n
bsp; “Teddy once told me that it’s natural that we feel alone, and that’s because our hearts are different from others and we don’t even know how. When we’re in love, as if by magic, our different hearts come together perfectly toward the same desire. Eventually, the differences return, and then comes heartache and mending, and, in between, much loneliness and fear. If love remains despite the pain of those differences, it must be guarded as rare. That’s what Teddy said and that’s what we had.”
LU SHING BROUGHT his paints over. He wanted to do my portrait. “How we see ourselves is never how others see us,” he said. “So I will show you what I see and what I feel. I’ll paint you as Lucia, the woman I love.”
He seated me in an armchair and arranged the lamp so that it illuminated my face. I wore nothing to cover my breasts, even though the painting would depict me only from the shoulders up.
“I want the painting to emanate your sensuality, your free spirit, your love for me. Without clothes you are freed to be yourself.”
“With this belly, I am hardly myself.” I was a bit cross, because he had come late two nights in a row.
“I have always said it was impossible for me to capture an immortal moment,” he continued. “But you once said I had. So I’m inspired to try.” When I asked to see those immortal moments emerge, he said I had to wait until it was finished. “A moment is not the same as time.”
On those nights when he was able to come to me, he painted for an hour or two. I simply stared into his eyes when he looked up from the canvas. His expression was somber, studied, and I felt at times that he had no more emotion for me than he did for the chair I was seated in. But then, he would put his brush down, finished for the night. His face would be flush with adoration and desire, and he would take me to bed.
I was impatient to see the portrait and know what he saw, who he thought I was. He had captured my immortal spirit in The Valley of Amazement. I remembered the surprise when I recognized myself in that long green valley and my soul in the golden vale. Who I was supposed to be had nothing to do with a neatly combed appearance, manners, or superior opinions of my parents. I didn’t have to hide my faults. I had none, because I no longer had to compare myself to others. I held knowledge, the certainty of something important—but now I could not recall what it was. It had eluded me again. If I had it, I would not be tormented by doubt, whether I was loved, if I should stay or leave. I hoped the new painting would restore that sense of certainty.