The Valley of Amazement (37 page)

And we would have done exactly that had Magic Gourd not fallen sick with Spanish influenza.

CHAPTER
7

A B
LUE
D
ISEASE

Shanghai
June 1918
Violet

I had never seen Magic Gourd rendered so helpless. She moaned that she wanted to return home rather than die in a stranger’s house. When she could not breathe easily, she stared at me with bulging eyes, shiny with tears.

Edward called for a doctor from the American Hospital, and an officious portly man with a beard, an Englishman, arrived wearing a white mask. He had the unfortunate name of Dr. Albee, which sounded like the Chinese words for “eternal suffering.” Magic Gourd said to him, “King of Hell, I am Chinese. Don’t take me to the fire pit where foreigners burn forever.” Later, she lied that she was a Christian and deserved to go to heaven. She listed the good deeds she had done, which consisted primarily of having to deal with my haughty attitude, teaching me well, and being patient when I did not follow her advice. I was full of remorse that she would leave this world thinking of me as an ungrateful charge. She further cut into my heart by saying I was her beloved little sister and she worried about what would happen to me after she was gone. That led to her
plea that he allow her to stay until I became one of the Ten Beauties of Shanghai.

Dr. Albee said there was nothing to do but encourage her to drink water and make her as comfortable as possible. He advised that everyone in the house wear a mask and, in parting, informed us that we were all under a two-week quarantine. No one was allowed to leave. Only then did I remember that I wanted to leave this house the moment I learned it belonged to Lu Shing. None of that mattered now. As the fever progressed, she confused me with her mother. Her face glowed and she explained why she had not returned to the village to see her sooner. I told her I was happy she had come back to me. I cried as she recounted in terrible detail her mistreatment by the husband of her mistress.

When the Chinese doctor arrived, I asked that he introduce himself to Magic Gourd by a Chinese name that sounded like “good health.” He gave her bitter soup and a plaster of camphor to place over her chest. She soon breathed more easily. I went to her side and said, “Mother is here. Now you have to get well and stay longer on earth so you can take care of me in my old age.” Her eyes rolled toward me and she frowned. “Have you lost your mind? You’re not my mother. Look in a mirror. You’re Violet. And why should I take of you? You should take care of me for all the trouble you caused me.” That was when I knew she would recover.

The Chinese doctor told the servants to wash the floors thoroughly with limewater each day so that the rest of us would not become ill. But that evening, I suddenly became feverish and cold at the same time. My bones felt as if they would break. The room floated, Edward shrank to the size of a doll. I awoke and saw a girl sitting next to the bed dozing. I did not recognize the room at first and thought Fairweather had kidnapped me again and dropped me off at another courtesan house. At least it was first class this time. And then I saw the Lu Shing painting and remembered where I was, and in an instant I was seized with fright. “Where’s Edward?” The slumbering girl sat bolt upright then ran out. Moments later, Edward arrived and petted my forehead, murmuring endearments as his tears fell onto my face. I told him not to touch me lest I infect him, and he assured me that I was no longer contagious. No one else had become ill. They had been drinking the bitter soup day and night. “I know how vile it is because Magic Gourd made me drink the same daily potion. I’ve concluded that if you don’t die from the awful taste, you won’t die of influenza.”

When I was well enough to sit, Edward carried me to the garden where a chaise longue had been placed in the shade of a tree.

“I already sent Lu Shing a letter excoriating him for his abandonment of you and his deceit in not telling me who he really was. I let him know that as soon as you had recovered completely from illness, we would leave. He sent back a reply.” I asked Edward to read it aloud, and I lay back, steeling myself.

“My dear Violet,” Edward began. “I claim no excuses that override immorality. I expect no forgiveness. I can never adequately make amends. I can only try to add to your comfort …” He said that I could stay in the house as long as I wished. He would provide for the expenses and the servants there. He wanted me to inherit the house, but it would require acknowledging that he was my father. If I were willing to do so, he would have the documents drawn up for his will. He closed by saying I should let him know if I ever wanted to meet him, even if it was only to vent my anger. But unless I said so, he would not return to the house and cause me further upset. The envelope showed the letter had been posted from Hong Kong. It was signed: “Yours, Lu Shing.”

“I will do whatever you wish,” Edward said.

“Bastard. He said nothing about my mother. He did not say whether she or he knew I had been alive all these years.” I was quickly overcome with exhaustion and Edward took me inside so I could sleep. The next morning, Edward told me he had written a letter to Lu Shing demanding he tell me the answer to those questions. He often found ways to show me he loved me and would protect me, just as he had promised he would. I put my arms around him and clung to him like a child.

“I don’t really want to know the answers,” I said. “I’ve already gone through every possible reason and circumstance why my mother did not return to save me, and none would be adequate to explain why, unless he said my mother had died before she ever set foot on American soil. And even if he told me that, I could not be certain if he was telling the truth. All that pain consumed me for so long. I don’t want its hold on me again. If I change my mind later, I will ask you to read me what the coward says.” In keeping with my wishes, when Lu Shing’s second letter arrived, Edward put it away.

I waged a small war with myself over what to do with the house. My immediate impulse was to leave and also to refuse the inheritance. I tried not to think of the comfort we had settled into. Of course, one of the first things I did was to remove the loathsome painting from the bedroom. By necessity, we stayed on, so I could recover fully from illness. And then it was because I had daily morning sickness and the upheaval of moving might be harmful to the baby. I was already worried that my illness might have affected her health. I finally made peace with living there for reasons of fear: If Edward’s parents ever tried to cut off his funds, as they once had, we would be cast into poverty, without a roof over our heads. I told Edward we would stay.

He later admitted that he was relieved because of worries he had for our future child. If anything happened—if he became ill and he was not around—where would the baby and I live? We went to the lawyer for the Ivory Shipping Company to ask for general advice. He was an odd-looking man with a bushy head of hair, and an equally bushy beard and eyebrows that were as thick as squirrels’ tails. Edward introduced me as his wife, “Mrs.
Ivory,” and explained that I had an eccentric American uncle in Soochow who had sent me a letter saying that he wished to leave his house to me.

“We don’t want to appear avaricious and ask that the bequest be placed in his will,” Edward said. “Would his letter be sufficient when the inevitable comes to pass?”

The lawyer believed a will was best, but he said that the letter might be sufficient if it was dated, in his handwriting, and there were no descendants, like some ne’er-do-well son. When we returned home, we found that Lu Shing’s two letters were indeed dated, and Edward put them in a safe place where no one but he could find them.

We lived in our little world, in the cozy intimacy of married life. When the weather turned cold, we lay quietly in each other’s arms in front of the fireplace, knowing what the other was thinking, about happiness now and in the future and the luck that we had found each other. We read to each other in the library—from the newspaper, a novel, or Edward’s favorite book of poems. On rainy days, we played the Victrola and danced while Magic Gourd watched. Edward would always gesture to her to take a few whirls with him. She, in turn, would always refuse the first request, and only after Edward had pointed to me and gestured that my stomach was too large to dance to such a fast song, would she happily relent. It was amusing to watch them communicate in a guessing game of gestures and facial expressions, which often led to hilarious misunderstandings. Edward once pantomimed licking and biting into ice cream on a stick and our walking to the new shop down the road that sold the confection. Magic Gourd thought a stray dog had been eating food on his plate and ran off with it when he saw Edward coming. I wound up having to translate. We found boxes with various games and amusements, including table tennis. Magic Gourd proved to be quick and agile, and Edward was surprisingly clumsy and slow. He did not mind that we often broke into laughter. I learned later that he was actually quite skilled, but he had loved seeing us so happy. We took walks twice a day to reach the cafés where customers discussed the latest news about the war. Victory was drawing near and we all felt impatient for war to be over. We talked in bed about our childhoods, recalling everything we could, so that we would feel we had known each other all our lives and more deeply than other people had. We debated whether it was Chinese Fate or American Destiny that had brought us together. Our meeting each other could not possibly be as random as two leaves from two trees being blown together.

The only blemish in our perfect life was Lu Shing. My rage toward my mother and him used to consume me. They could never sufficiently compensate me. How could they return the life I should have had? But now I had the life I always would have wanted. I would never forgive Lu Shing. But while living so blissfully in his house, I no longer dwelled on his despicable actions that had changed my life.

T
HE EPIDEMIC WAS
over by the summer of 1918. And when the war ended in November, we had a second reason to celebrate. Although the International Settlement had claimed its neutrality during the war, now the flags of different nationalities flapped their colors to signal the world was at peace. Westerners broke out the French champagne they had been saving, and people on the streets exchanged kisses with strangers. They also exchanged germs, and those kisses were later blamed when a new wave of influenza broke out—and it was worse in strength than the last. Shanghai was not as affected as other places in the world. That was the report we read in the newspaper, which also noted that, similar to the last time, the greatest toll was on young men and women. Oddly enough, those who were the most physically fit were the most likely to be struck down.

Magic Gourd and I had already suffered influenza and were no longer at risk of infection. But Edward had escaped the first round. I was more than seven months pregnant, and out of fear for our coming baby, we had everyone in the house practice strict hygiene. If Edward and I went outside of the house, he wore a mask and we avoided crowded cafés and restaurants. Despite those precautions, Edward fell ill, and I flew into action, having already read up on all that was needed to treat the patient. We boiled water sprinkled with camphor and eucalyptus. We made him drink hot tea and a broth of bitter Chinese herbs. We had at the ready wet towels to cool the fever, most of which was rejected by Edward, who said his symptoms were so mild they suggested he had been too much a weakling to qualify for the endangered category of the physically fit. He was in bed for only a day and bragged that influenza was no worse than the common cold. He recovered quickly, easing our worries. Now that he, too, was protected from ever getting the flu again, we would not have to worry about passing it on to our baby.

On a frigid bright day in January, our baby girl was born. The Paris Peace Conference started the same day, and we took this as a sign she would be a calm baby. That proved to be true. She was fair-colored and resembled Edward more than me. Her eyes were hazel and she had tufts of light brown hair. I claimed the whorl on the back of her head was mine, as well as the faint blue birthmark on her rump, which many Chinese babies had. The curves and lobes of her delicate leaflike ears matched Edward’s. I claimed her rounded chin. Edward said that when she frowned in her sleep, she looked like me when I was worried. I said that when her nostrils flared, she looked like him when food arrived on the table. Edward pronounced her “the most perfect replica of the most perfect woman in all eternity.” And upon receiving that love-soaked endearment, I asked him to choose our baby’s name. He thought for two days. The name would be part of our new family legacy, he said. Bosson would not be her inheritance.

”Her name shall be Flora,” he said at last. “Violet and Little Flora.” He cradled her and brought his face close to her sleeping one. “My little Flora.”

I was secretly stricken. In courtesan houses, we were known as “flowers.” I had had mixed feelings all my life about my name. Violets were the flower my mother loved, a meager-faced one, easily trampled, that grew with little care. I had changed my name over the years, from Violet to Vivi and Zizi, and many nicknames in between. Now it had returned to me as Violet. It was like fate. I could not permanently change it. In the library the other day, I had been listening to an opera aria, the loveliest of them all. I read the accompanying pamphlet tucked into the sleeve of the record. It was sung by the character Violetta, a courtesan, it said, and then added “and at this stage of her life, a fallen flower.”

Edward was singing sweetly in his tenor voice—”Flora! O Sweet Little Flora! Dewdrop in the morning. Rosebud in the afternoon … Look at her eyes!” he said. “See how alert they’ve become when I say her name. She recognizes it already. Little Flora, Little Flora.” How could I ask him to choose another name?

We could not bear to have Little Flora away from our sight and decided she would remain with us rather than in the nursery with the amah. In the middle of the night, I woke to her soft complaints and grunts, and lifted her from the bassinet by my side of the bed, and put her to my breast. I sang softly to her: “Flora, O Sweet Little Flora, dewdrop in the morning, rosebud in the afternoon.” She quieted and her eyes drifted until she found mine and there she remained. In that small moment of recognition, I found my greatest joy.