The Painter of Shanghai (7 page)

All of this is Jinling’s dowry. It is her Shanghai legacy. She puts it all back reverently, save for two or three items she will wear. She disdains girls who dangle knickknacks from every hair, finger, and hole. No one in Shanghai was that unrefined: ‘It was more than just beds and money. We danced, and played
pipa,
and wrote poems. We learned the classic of taoism, the
Tao Te Ching
, by heart. There were nights when I didn’t have to sleep with anyone at all. I would just sit and chat and pour wine.’

‘Why did you leave?’ Yuliang asks. She is trying to ignore the noises filtering through the wall: a man snorting and thumping like a pig, Dai squealing
oooh
and
eeeeee-eeeee
and – sometimes –
ow!

Jinling studies her protégé. ‘You need to relax,’ she chides. ‘You’ll never survive here otherwise. I think I’ll ask Godmother about having a demonstration session for you. One of my customers likes to be watched.’ She lifts a filigree necklace to her breast, cocks her head. ‘What do you think?’

‘That one would be better.’ Yuliang points to the jade.

Jinling shoots her a dubious glance: ‘Really?’ She tries it; frowns. Then smiles. ‘Well! Maybe you’re right.’

She lifts her hair and bends her head so Yuliang can do the clasp. ‘Money,’ she continues. ‘I left Shanghai for the money. The old centipede paid a lot for my contract. And she gave me a bonus.’ By
old centipede
she means Godmother, whose puffy ringed hands seem to be everywhere at once: counting and recounting the girls’ earnings at dawn, feeling
hems and robe linings for secret tips, squeezing fingers and elbows for lumps and swelling and other telltale sex-sickness signs, running down the red ‘moon’ book in which she records monthly cycles. Or the black book where she records her flowers’ debt – and where the numbers only seem to grow and grow and grow. All but Jinling’s – as the top girl, she brings in the most money. Xiaochen, a twenty-year veteran, brings in the least.

‘She has Guangzhou sores,’ Suyin confides a few days later.

‘Guangzhou…?’ Yuliang asks, baffled.

‘Big red welts. The
fan kuei
brought them with them when they first came to Guangzhou. They spread them among the singsong girls there.’ Suyin’s voice whistles around the clothespins in her mouth. The girls are hanging the weekly fine laundry of silk underthings and sheer linen robes.

‘Anyway, Xiaochen rarely has customers anymore. She says she’s sixteen. Everyone says they’re sixteen. But I think she’s actually closer to forty. Can you imagine?’

She shakes her head, pulls a clip. She secures a pair of shoes to the line, and they dangle between the two girls like gaudy butterflies. ‘Godmother makes her take mercury sometimes. And I have to help give her boiled milk injections in her buttocks.’ She rolls her eyes, exasperated by Yuliang’s confusion. ‘
Sickness
,’ she shouts. ‘You get it from the night rooms. From men. You don’t even have to touch them to get it. You can just sit down after someone gets up.’ She pulls a pink petticoat flat with her hands. ‘You get it,’ she says, ‘from the cushion.’

‘If that’s true, then almost everyone must have it. The sickness. Do they? Do
we
?’

Suyin just shrugs. ‘You’ll know if you do. But most keep it a secret.’

Suyin seems to know a lot of secrets. She knows that Lirong, for example, paints herself every night with red lipstick.

‘So what?’ Yuliang asks. ‘Doesn’t everyone paint their lips?’

‘Not
those
lips, idiot,’ Suyin says. She spits the last pin from her mouth as she doubles over, laughing. It’s only eleven o’clock; her titters stream through the quiet of the back courtyard. ‘She thinks her overhanging cliff is too dark,’ she finally explains. ‘She thinks painting it makes it look younger.’

And though it isn’t particularly funny, Yuliang finds herself laughing too. Soon she’s laughing so hard that her stomach knots in pain. And when voices rise crankily from the sleeping quarters (‘
Haiii!
Keep it down, you little cunts! We need sleep!’), the two girls use bright
qipao
sleeves and satin drawers as gags. Trying, with very little success, to sop up the spilling giggles.

A week later, Godmother schedules Yuliang’s first official appearance, after the yearly Burning Road ceremony. The maids pile oranges and paper money around a golden bodhi-sattva. Candles form a flickering path to his feet. After the ritual comes a banquet to which the most honored clients are invited, though what they’re really invited to do is come and spend their money. Jinling takes it upon herself to groom her protégé for display. She lends Yuliang an eyecatching blue jacket, and long earrings, and an orchid clip for her hair. She gives her her very first makeup application.
Her tongue pokes out like a plum tip as she lines Yuliang’s blinking eyes in black and powders her nose and forehead smooth and white. Yuliang wrinkles her face, sneezes at the tickle. She fights the urge to wince as Jinling coaxes her lashes around a little metal rod.

‘Stay still,’ Jinling says. ‘You need to look your best. Some wealthy man may see you today and make a big bid for your hair-combing. It’s how it happened for me.’

‘In Shanghai?’

The top girl gives her a hard look as she rubs in rouge. ‘Of course, in Shanghai.’

Yuliang’s scalp still tingles from where Jinling combed, twisted, and pinned her hair. She knows what
hair-combing
is supposed to mean here. It’s not the rite Mama described to her so often, in the days when marriage still beckoned in the future:
The night before, I’ll comb your hair for you. For prosperity.

How many times, Mama?
Xiuqing would ask, although she already knew the answer.

Three times,
her mother would answer, although she knew Xiuqing knew.
The first comb is for longevity. The second comb brings love and respect until your old age. The third comb will make sure that you –

Have lots of children!
Xiuqing would interrupt.
And I will!

And her mother would laugh and say,
And with luck they’ll be sons, who will make your life easy in your old age.

At the Hall no one cares if a flower has longevity or not. Certainly no one expects love or respect. As for children – well, Yuliang already knows what bitter lengths Godmother’s girls go to to quell their fertility. There are teas and potions,
oversized foreign coins. When those fail, there are adoptions and abortions. There is depression, infection. Sometimes – often, even – there is death. One girl, Linyao, has died already since Yuliang arrived. Four months pregnant, she hurled herself from the top of Zheta Pagoda when her lover failed to make her his concubine. ‘How ridiculous,’ Jinling scoffed later. ‘Killing herself. Over a
man
.’ It was her same verdict on Washing Silk Woman: ‘What a waste. She was quite pretty, from the way I’ve heard the story. She could probably have made a good match.’

Now, frowning in concentration, she finishes coloring Yuliang’s lips. ‘Rub,’ she commands.

The lipstick tastes like greasy soap. But when Yuliang looks into Jinling’s jade-handled looking glass, Mirror Girl looks lovely. Her eyes are larger and clearer than Yuliang has ever seen them. Her nose looks less like a button. Her lips seem to smile without her even moving them. Jinling, gazing at her over her shoulder, reaches out and strokes Yuliang’s cheek. ‘Won’t Godmother be pleased,’ she says softly. ‘You hardly look like your old self at all.’

And in fact Yuliang does feel different – almost separated from herself. As though Mirror Girl has finally taken over. It’s a new sensation, a little dizzying. Yet unlike so many other new things here, she doesn’t fight it. The disconnection feels strangely like freedom.

Two weeks later, when all’s back to normal, Yuliang sits stiffly in a fraying bamboo chair. She is staring at a portrait, a portrait of a woman. The woman’s face is a smooth moon of calm, her arms a pale nimbus around the boy in her lap. The smile on her lips is a mirage: when Yuliang
looks at it with her left eye, it vanishes. When Yuliang closes the left and peers with the right, however, it reappears, clandestine, tempting. It’s the implication of emotion rather than its actual expression. It is the perfect womanly smile.
When you smile,
her mother used to say,
don’t move your lips. When you walk, don’t move your skirts.

A woman’s keening call breaks into her thoughts: ‘Ahhhh, ahhhhhhhh, ah-ah-ah.’

‘Is she watching? Is she?’ Wood creaks and wheezes. A long, drawn-out groan. Then the man speaks again. ‘I don’t think that she
was
watching.’

‘Yuliang,’ Jinling chides. Yuliang pretends to hear.
Smile-smile.
It’s occurred to her that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the picture. She finally realizes what it is: the blank little spot above the goddess’s lip. A real woman would have something there, a subtle double line. A soft flesh-furrow to the nose.

‘Yu-
liang
! Look at me! Are you deaf as well as blind?’

Sighing, Yuliang finally lets her eyes slide: down the wall, past the small, shuttered window, directly to the bed below. Jinling is lying on her side. Merchant Yi is behind her, his big arm heavily clamping Jinling’s neck. ‘She was watching,’ Jinling says. ‘You were watching, Yuliang, weren’t you?’ She pants a little as she speaks.

‘I saw everything,’ Yuliang says. ‘It was…’ But she doesn’t know what it was. She twines her hands in her lap.

The merchant’s eyes stroke her face as he reaches down, adjusts something. ‘I’m glad you found it so edifying.’ He sits up, stretching his long arms toward the ceiling. His big hands flop about as though sloppily sewn to his wrists.

Jinling sits up too, with an exasperated grimace at Yuliang. She caresses her client’s neck, croons. ‘Don’t pay any attention to her. You are formidable. You almost pierced me!’ She darts another look at Yuliang, who obediently stores the term with the other expressions Jinling has taught her:
You’re as hard as iron! I almost died in your arms!
It’s the first time she’s actually seen a man’s cock up close, and she understands now why it’s sometimes called a turtle. Merchant Yi’s shrinks and shrivels shyly under her open gaze. His testicles look like plucked chicken skin.

‘Washing,’ Jinling prompts softly, arching one perfect brow. Yuliang stands quickly, a line of sweat trickling down her knee. As she goes to the basin, carrying the little Buddha bowl, her thoughts return to the picture of Lady Guanyin. It was done by a local artist, with Jinling as its model. In merchant circles she is something of a celebrity. She’s almost always included in the Merchant Guild’s yearly flower calendar, which features a different local beauty for each month.

The merchant stands up. Yuliang kneels before him. The perfumed water meets the fish-sweat smell of sex. Yi Gan’s hand absently plays with her hair as she washes his flaccid member. His thick fingers pull small strands from the bun that signifies her virginity.

After he has left the room, Yuliang refills the little Buddha bowl. She adds a half-teacup of salt and carries it over to Jinling. The brothel cat, Money, who is always either deeply in heat or asleep, winds urgently around her ankles. ‘Out,’ Jinling intones. Yuliang dutifully picks up the animal and drops it in the hall, where it tucks a leg behind its
ear like a festival contortionist and begins animatedly to lick itself.

When Yuliang returns Jinling is examining her breast, which has been bitten. ‘That old bastard deserves a thousand cuts,’ she says, pouting. ‘It’s the second time he’s done this. I should tell Godmother. I never want to see him again.’

‘You should,’ Yuliang agrees. But she knows that Jinling won’t. Yi Gan is head of the Merchant Guild. He’s the kind of client the girls here call a ‘bean curd’: ever-present, easy to squeeze money from. Offending him would hurt everyone: girls, servants, Godmother. Especially Jinling herself.

But it’s the thought of offending Jinling that sends a shiver down Yuliang’s neck. ‘You’re not really angry with me, are you?’

Jinling hoists her leg onto a chair. ‘Angry?’ She holds out her hand for the cloth.

‘For not watching.’

Jinling fingers herself a moment, then gets to work. ‘Oh, that. No. Not really.’ She winces. ‘It may even tempt him into the bidding. You know: “This one’s so innocent, she can’t even bear to watch!” Men like that in a virgin.’ Her white fingers deftly delve the pink folds the merchant has just purchased. Yuliang watches beneath her lashes, both ashamed and entranced. ‘Later, though,’ the top girl adds, ‘you’d better learn to be more jolly. No one wants to bed a corpse.’

She grits her teeth as the salt goes to work. ‘Well, almost no one,’ she adds. And giggles.

6

In the following months, Yuliang seeks safety in small tasks, little rituals. She forges armor out of routine. At the Hall, the ‘leaves’ sleep at two or three and are roused promptly at seven. They take turns perching on the chamber pot’s chipped rim, behind the screen that screens nothing but their bodies. They wash up with water from a pitcher on the bureau, rub and rebind their sore feet. They put on their ‘chore’ clothes. Yuliang saves the cheongsam Wu Ding gave her for the dirtiest work – floor-scrubbing, collecting chamber pots for the night-soil man. She thrills at each rip and slop, revels in the spreading stains. As the fabric unravels, she pictures it as her uncle’s frayed spirit. Disintegrating.

After eating the girls sweep the courtyard, attacking bottle shards and crumpled call-cards. As winter approaches, lines of snow fill in the spaces between stones, creating an illusion of checkered smoothness. Yuliang sweeps the snow out, along with used matches that look like twisted and burned little bones. Though she’s not supposed to she sweeps the trash into the gutter. She defiantly hopes it will cause a flood when spring comes.

The afternoons are devoted to more formal training, which Yuliang and Suyin receive in the spare pantry. They’re taught music, deportment, ‘love.’ The music teacher has a face that droops as though made out of warming wax. She
picks out songs on her three-stringed
pipa,
teaches the girls popular tunes about the moon’s reflection on water, on icy lakes. Yuliang sings these back without missing a note, and is oddly strong with the male verses. The teacher tells Godmother that she has an ‘unusual talent’ and that she holds ‘great promise’ in entertainment. The truth, of course, is that Yuliang already knows most of the pieces. It’s one of her uncle’s few and sad little legacies.