The Valley of Amazement (2 page)

With me, Carlotta was different. When I carried her in my arms, she was tender and limp. At night, she purred in my arms, and in the morning, she chirped at me. I kept bits of sausage in my apron pocket for her, as well as a green parrot’s feather tied to a string, which I used to lure her out of hiding from under one of the many sofas in the salon. Her paws would poke out of the fringe as she batted at the feather. Together we raced through the maze of furniture, and she vaulted onto tables and chairs, up curtains, and onto the high lips of the wainscoting—to wherever I wanted her to go. That salon was Carlotta’s and my playground, and that playground was in a former ghost villa that my mother had turned into Hidden Jade Path.

On several occasions, I heard her tell Western newspaper reporters how she secured the place for almost nothing. “If you want to make money in Shanghai,” she said, “take advantage of other people’s fear.”

Lulu

This villa, gentlemen, was originally built four hundred years ago as the summer mansion of Pan Ku Xiang, a rich scholar and a renowned poet, for what lyrical merits no one knows because his inscribed thoughts went up in smoke. The grounds and its original four buildings once stretched over one-half hectares, twice what it is now. The thick stone wall is the original. But the west and east wings had to be rebuilt after they were consumed by a mysterious fire—the same flames that ate the scholar’s poetic thoughts. A legend has been handed down over four hundred years: One of his concubines in the west wing started the fire, and his wife in the east wing died screaming in a circle of flames. Whether it is true, who can say? But any legend is not worth making up if it does not include a murder or two. Don’t you agree?

After the poet died, his eldest son hired the best stonemasons to carve a stele that sat on a tortoise and was crowned by a dragon, symbols of honor reserved for a high official—although there was no record in the county that he had ever been one. By the time his great-grandson was the head of the family, the stele had fallen and was nearly obscured by tall prickly weeds. Weather wore down the scholar’s name and accolades into unreadable indentations. This was not the eternal reverence the scholar had had in mind. When his descendants
sold the place a hundred years ago for a cheap price, the curse began. Within a day of receiving the money, his descendant was seized with a firelike pain and died. A thief killed another son. The children of those sons died of one thing or another, and it was not old age. A succession of buyers also suffered from unusual maladies: reversals of fortune, infertility, insanity, and such. When I saw the mansion, it was an abandoned eyesore, the grounds a jungle of choking vines and overgrown bushes, the perfect haven for wild dogs. I bought the property for the price of a Chinese song. Both Westerners and Chinese said I was foolish to take it at any price. No carpenter, stonemason, or coolie would ever step across that haunted threshold.

So, gentlemen, what would you do? Give up and count your losses? I hired an Italian actor—a disgraced Jesuit with the dark looks of an Asiatic, which became more pronounced when he pulled back his hair at the temples, the way Chinese opera singers do to give the eyes a dramatic slant. He donned the robes of a feng shui master, and we hired some boys to pass out leaflets to announce that a fair would be held on the grounds just outside of the haunted villa. We had stalls of food, acrobats, contortionists, and musicians, rare fruits and a candy machine that pulled saltwater taffy. By the time the feng shui master arrived on a palanquin, along with his Chinese assistant, he had a waiting audience of hundreds—children and amahs, servants and rickshaw men, courtesans and madams, tailors and other purveyors of gossip.

The feng shui master demanded that a pan of fire be brought to him. He pulled out a scroll and threw it into the flames, then chanted a concoction of Tibetan gibberish while sprinkling rice wine over the fire to make the flames leap higher.

“I shall now go into the cursed mansion,” the actor told the crowd, “and persuade Pan the Poet Ghost to leave. If I don’t return, please remember me as a good man who served his people at the cost of his own life.” Forecasts of mortal danger are always useful to make people believe your fabrications. The audience watched him enter where no man dared to go. After five minutes he returned, and the audience murmured excitedly. He announced he had found the Poet Ghost in an inkwell in his painting studio. They had a most enjoyable conversation about his poetry and his past renown. This led to the poet’s laments that his descendants had cast him into early obscurity. His monument had become a mossy slab where wild dogs peed. The feng shui master assured the Poet Ghost he would erect a fine stele even better than the last. The Poet Ghost thanked him and immediately left the once-haunted mansion to rejoin his murdered wife.

So that took care of the first obstacle. I then had to overcome skepticism that a social club could ever succeed when it catered to both Western and Chinese men. Who would come? As you know, most Westerners view the Chinese as their inferiors—intellectually, morally, and socially. It seemed unlikely they would ever share cigars and brandy.

The Chinese, by the same token, resent the imperious way foreigners treat Shanghai as their own port city and govern her by their treaties and laws. The foreigners don’t trust the Chinese. And they insult them by speaking pidgin, even to a Chinese man whose English is as refined as a British lord’s. Why would the Chinese conduct business with men who do not respect them?

The simple answer is money. Foreign trade is their common interest, their common language, and I help them speak it in an atmosphere that loosens any reservations they might still hold.

For our Western guests, I offer a social club with pleasures they are accustomed to: billiards, card games, the finest cigars and brandy. In that corner, you see a piano. At the end of every night, the stragglers crowd around and sing the anthems and sentimental songs of their home countries. We have a few who imagine they are Caruso’s cousin. For our Chinese guests, I provide the pleasures of a first-class courtesan house. The customers follow the protocols of courtship. This is not a house of prostitution, which Western men are more accustomed to. We also offer our Chinese guests what are now the expected Western amenities of a first-class courtesan house: billiards, card games, the finest whiskey, cigars in addition to opium, and pretty musicians who sing the old Chinese chestnuts and encourage the men to join in. Our furnishings are superior to those in other houses. The difference is in the details, and as I am an American, that knowledge is in my blood.

And now we’ve come to where East meets West, the Grand Salon, the common ground for businessmen of two worlds. Imagine the buzz of excitement we hear each night. Many fortunes have been made here, and they all began with my introduction and their exchanging their first handshake. Gentlemen, there is a lesson here for anyone who wants to make a fortune in Shanghai. When people say an idea is impossible, it becomes impossible. In Shanghai, however, nothing is impossible. You have to make the old meet the new, rearrange the furniture, so to speak, and put on a good show. Guile and get. Opportunists welcome. Within these doors, the path to riches is revealed to all who have a minimum of ten thousand dollars to invest or whose influence is worth more than that. We have our standards.

A
PPROACHING THE GATE
of the mansion, you would know at a glance that you were about to enter a fine house with a respected history. The archway still held the carved stone plaque befitting a Ming scholar; a bit of the lichen had been left on the corners as proof of authenticity. The thick gate was regularly refreshed with red lacquer and the brass fittings polished to a gleaming richness. On each of the pillars was a panel with the two names of the house:
HIDDEN JADE PATH
on the right side, and
THE HOUSE OF LULU MIMI
in Chinese on the left.

Once you entered through the gate and into the front courtyard, you would think you had stepped back into the
days when the Poet Ghost was master of the house. The garden was simple and of classical proportions, from fishponds to gnarly pines. Beyond it stood a rather austere house: the face a plain gray plaster over stone, the lattice windows showing a simple cracked-ice pattern. The gray-tiled roof had eaves that curved upward, not excessively so, but enough to suggest they were the wings of lucky bats. And in the front of the house was the poet’s stele, restored to its rightful place, sitting on a tortoise, topped with a dragon, and proclaiming the scholar would be remembered for ten thousand years.

Once you stepped into the vestibule, however, all signs of the Ming vanished. At your feet was a colorful pattern of encaustic Moorish tiles, and facing you was a wall of red velvet curtains. When they were drawn back, you were borne into a “Palace of Heavenly Charms,” as my mother called it. This was the Grand Salon, and it was entirely Western. That was the fashion in the better courtesan houses, but my mother’s sense of Western fashion was authentic and also daring. Four hundred years of cold echoes had been muffled by colorful tapestries, thick carpets, and an overabundance of low divans, stiff settees, fainting couches, and Turkish ottomans. Flower stands held vases of peonies the size of babies’ heads, and round tea tables were set with lamps that gave the salon the honeyed amber glow of a sunset. On the bureaus, a man could pluck cigars out of ivory humidors and cigarettes out of cloisonné filigreed jars. The tufted armchairs were engorged with so much batting they resembled the buttocks of the people who sat in them. Some of the decorations were quite amusing to the Chinese. The blue and white vases imported from France, for example, were painted with depictions of Chinese people whose faces resembled Napoleon and Josephine. Heavy mohair curtains covered the lattice windows, weighted with green, red, and yellow tassels and fringe as thick as fingers, Carlotta’s favorite toys. Chandeliers and wall sconces illuminated the paintings of rosy-cheeked Roman goddesses with muscular white bodies, who cavorted next to similarly muscled white horses—grotesque shapes, I heard Chinese men say, which depicted, in their opinion, bestiality.

On the right and left sides of the Grand Salon were doorways that led to smaller, more intimate rooms, and beyond them were covered passageways through courtyards that led to the scholar’s former library, painting studio, and family temple, all cleverly transformed into rooms where a businessman could host a dinner party for friends and be entertained by ladylike courtesans who sang with heartbreaking emotion.

At the back of the Grand Salon, my mother had installed a curved carpeted staircase with a red-lacquered wooden banister, which took you up to three curved, velvet-lined balconies modeled after those found in opera houses. They overlooked the Grand Salon, and from them I often viewed the festivities below as Carlotta strolled back and forth on the balustrades.

The parties began after sundown. Carriages and rickshaws arrived throughout the night. Cracked Egg, the gatekeeper, would have already memorized the names of those who were coming, and they were the only ones allowed to enter. From my perch, I saw the men burst through the red curtains and into that palatial room. I could tell if a man was a newcomer. He would gaze at the scene before him, scanning the room, incredulous to see Chinese and Western men greeting each other, speaking with civility. The Westerner would have his first glimpse of courtesans in their habitat. He might have only seen them passing by on the thoroughfare in carriages, dressed in their furs and hats. But here, they were within reach. He could speak to one, smile with admiration, although he learned quite emphatically that he was not allowed to touch. I was delighted to see my mother inspire awe in men of different nationalities. She possessed the power to render men speechless from the moment they walked into the room.

Our courtesans were among the most popular and talented of all the girls working in the first-class houses of Shanghai—elegant, seductively coy, tantalizingly elusive, and skilled in singing or the recitation of poems. They were known as the Cloud Beauties. Each had the word
Cloud
in her name, and that identified the house to which she belonged. When they left the house—whether to marry, join a nunnery, or work in a lower-class house—the cloud evaporated from their name. The ones who lived there when I was seven were Rosy Cloud, Billowy Cloud, Snowy Cloud, and, my favorite, Magic Cloud. All of them were clever. Most had been thirteen or fourteen when they arrived and would be twenty-three or twenty-four when they left.

My mother set the rules over how they would conduct business with the guests and what share of their earnings and expenses they would pay to the house. Golden Dove managed the courtesans’ behavior and appearance and ensured they upheld the standards and reputation of a first-class courtesan house. Golden Dove knew how easily a girl’s reputation could be lost. She had once been one of the most popular courtesans of her time until her patron knocked out her front teeth and broke half the bones in her face. By the time she mended, with her face slightly askew, other beauties had taken her place, and she could not overcome speculation that she must have greatly wronged her patron to have incited violence in such a peaceable man.

As comely as those courtesans were, every guest, whether Chinese or Western, hoped to see one woman in particular—my mother. From my perch, she was easy to spot by the springy mass of brown curls that graced her shoulders in a careless style. My hair was very much like hers, only darker. Her skin had a dusky tinge. She told people proudly that she had a few drops of Bombay blood in her. No one would have ever honestly described my mother as beautiful, neither Chinese nor foreigner. She had a long angled nose that looked like it had been
roughly sculpted with a paring knife. Her forehead was tall and wide—the telltale sign of a cerebral nature, Golden Dove said. Her chin bulged like a pugnacious little fist, and her cheeks had bladed angles. Her irises were unusually large, and her eyes lay in deep, dark sockets, fanned by dark lashes. But she was captivating, everyone agreed, more so than a woman with regular features and great beauty. It was everything about her—the smile, the husky and melodious voice, the provocative and languorous movement of her body. She sparkled. She glowed. If a man received even a glance from her penetrating eyes, he was enthralled. I saw that time and again. She made each man feel he was special to her.