The Painter of Shanghai (31 page)

She is just brushing back up to fill out the hair some more when a clamor erupts outside. A funeral is in progress on the street. At first Yuliang tries to work through it, but it’s no use. The mood is broken.

She sets her brush in her jar and throws on her shawl against the cold. Walking to her desk, she uncorks the wine she has taken to sipping as she works. She pours a glass. Then she walks to the open window.

The coffin is set out just outside the house across the street – the deceased must have died away from home. But there is no shortage of mourners. The daughters are dressed in black, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in blue. The sons-in-law wear stark white and bright yellow. Underscoring this colorful chorus of bereavement is the clicking of the
pat-cha
dice. The mourning gong, hung to
the right of the house’s doorway, signifies that the departed is a woman. The presence of great-grandchildren means she was probably quite old. But Yuliang is too far away to make out the portrait propped on a stool by the coffin, amid layers of flowers and other offerings. She tries to recall the grandmothers who greet her sometimes when she comes home. One has a face like a withered pumpkin and a sweet and oddly young voice. She sometimes calls to Yuliang: ‘Going to your school, little daughter? When are you going to paint my picture?’

Yuliang imagines the same woman now, lying still in her coffin with her face and body covered by yellow and blue cloth. What would it be like to paint
that
in life study – a body that has no life in it at all? Her anatomy class works from textbooks and an old medical skeleton, donated by the mission clinic because it is missing two ribs. But Leonardo is said to have learned from the actual dead, spending hours in darkened morgues, dissecting, peeling back. Sketching. Her classmates, raised to see death as the ultimate contaminant, were openly horrified by this. Yuliang, though, merely shrugged – at least inwardly. She couldn’t help but think that if the Italian master had taken up the flesh trade, he’d have gained just as firm a sense of human physiology.

Now she studies her model again – the hardened nipples, the goose-bumped skin. The sight of her like that – stripped, alone – hurts her heart. Yuliang shuts her eyes, then berates herself in silence:
Stupid whore. You can’t paint her if you can’t see her.

And then, just like that, it hits her:
I can’t see her.

Electrified, she opens her eyes, Teacher Hong’s words
coming back with new meaning.
Try to see the skin as more than simply skin,
he had said.

As advice, it is directly and fully at odds with that Jinling once gave her:
It’s just skin.
And yet studying her model again now, Yuliang suddenly realizes that her troubles, then and now, arise from her own failure to see skin as either more or less than itself; to see it outside a spectrum of pain. In her old life it was a liability, a soft surface waiting for wounds. As such at the academy it inspires not creative passion but a wave of remembered revulsion. And in both places she’s been unable – hard as she might try – to see it as beautiful. As somthing
worth
painting… Outside the mourners wail:
‘Aiiiiiiiiii.
Come back, Mother. Come back!’ Heart racing, Yuliang shuts her eyes once more. She thinks of Jinling, not in death, as she was the last time Yuliang saw her, but in those impossibly early days when Yuliang first began to attend to her. Before she fully understood a body’s worth in monetary terms, and could value it only in the currency of beauty. She thinks of the way Jinling’s skin had looked in the early morning. Sheened in perspiration, stretched out in sheer joy. Limned in the early light of a sunrise.

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.