by Tan, Amy
CHAPTER 2
THE NEW REPUBLIC
Shanghai
1912
Violet
At half past noon on my fourteenth birthday, cheers broke out at the front of the house, and firecrackers exploded in the courtyard. Carlotta flattened her ears and flew under my bed.
It was not our custom to lavishly celebrate birthdays, but perhaps I had reached a special age. I ran to find Mother. She was standing in Boulevard, looking out the window at Nanking Road. Every few seconds, I heard rounds of firecrackers popping off in the distance. Then came the whistles of rockets, ripping the air, followed by booms in my chest. Hurrahs rose in crescendo and pitch, then fell, over and over again. So the hullabaloo was not for my birthday after all. I went to Mother’s side, and instead of greeting me, she said, “Look at those fools!”
Cracked Egg dashed in without knocking. “It’s happened,” he announced in a hoarse voice. “The news is all over the streets. The Ching dynasty is over. Yuan Shi-kai will soon step up as president of the new Republic of China.” He had a wild look on his face.
It was February 12, 1912, and the Empress Dowager Longyu had just signed the abdication on behalf of her six-year-old nephew, Emperor Puyi, on the condition that they could remain in the palace and retain their possessions. Manchu rule was over. We had been expecting this day since October, when the New Army staged a mutiny in Wuchang.
“Why would you trust Yuan Shi-kai any more than the emperor’s cronies?” Mother said to Cracked Egg. “Why didn’t they keep Dr. Sun as president instead?”
“Yuan Shi-kai got the Ching government to step down, so he won the right to step up to the presidency.”
“He was commander in chief of the Ching military,” she said, “and his imperial roots might still be in him. I’ve heard some of our customers say that given time, he’ll act just like an emperor.”
“If Yuan Shi-kai turns out to be corrupt, we won’t have to wait two thousand years for the Republicans to let go of our balls.”
MONTHS BEFORE THE abdication, the house had been abuzz over the coming overthrow of the Ching dynasty. The guests at Mother’s parties did not meet in the middle for several days. The Western men remained on their side of the social club, and the Chinese men remained in the courtesan house. They had talked separately and incessantly about the coming change and whether it would be to their advantage or result in the opposite. Their influential friends might no longer be influential. New associations would be necessary. Plans should be made now, in case new taxes were levied, or if the treaties affecting foreign trade were better for them or no longer in their favor. Mother had had to lure them back to the middle with promises that lucrative opportunities sprout out of the chaos of change.
The servants had also caught the fever of change. They recited a litany of tragedies under imperial rule: Their family land had been seized, and no land had been left to bury their dead. The ancestors’ obedience had been punished and the corruption of the Ching had been rewarded. Foreigners had become wealthy on the opium trade. Opium had turned their men into the living dead. “They’d sell their mothers for a gummy wad!” I heard Cracked Egg say.
Some of the maids were afraid of revolution. They wanted peace and no other changes, no new worries. They did not believe their lives would improve under a new military government. From all they had experienced, when there was change, there was suffering. When they married, their lives became worse. When their husbands died, their lives became worse yet again. Change was what happened inside the house, and only they had been there to suffer it.
Last month, on the first of January, we had learned that the Republic had been officially declared and Dr. Sun Yat-sen had been made the provisional president. Mother’s smarmy lover Fairweather had come by, unannounced, as usual. Of all the men she had taken to her bed, he was the one who remained in her life, as persistent as a wart. I hated him even more than I had when Mother used me as her pawn to meet him. Fairweather had sat in an armchair in the salon, a glass of whiskey in one hand, a cigar in the other. Between sips and puffs, he had made pronouncements: “The servants in your house have the fervor of heathens newly converted by the missionaries. Saved! Dr. Sun may be a Christian, but do your servants really believe he can perform God’s miracle and change the color of their yellow hides?” He had spotted me and grinned. “What do you say, Violet?”
Mother must have told him that my father was Chinese. I couldn’t stomach the sight of that worm and had left the room, nearly blind with anger. I had marched down Nanking Road. The sides of British tramcars had been plastered with newspapers that flapped like scales. Civil disobedience had come into fashion over the last year, a daredevil kind of patriotism that delivered symbolic slaps to the imperialists. My Chinese blood had surged, and I’d wanted to punch Fairweather’s face. The street had been flowing with students who ran from corner to corner to put up fresh sheets of news on the public walls. The crowds had rushed forward, and the literate ones had read aloud the article about the new president Sun Yat-sen. His words of vision and promise had sent the crowd swooning with optimism. “He’s the father of the new Republic,” I had heard one man say. I had scanned the wall for a picture of this revolutionary father. Golden Dove had once told me that you could recognize a person’s character by examining his face. I had stared at Dr. Sun’s photograph and seen he was honest and kind, calm and intelligent. I had heard that he also spoke perfect English from having grown up in Hawaii. If Dr. Sun had been my father, I would have been proud to tell everyone I was half-Chinese. That last thought had caught me by surprise, and I’d quickly tamped it down.
I was never able to talk to Mother about my feelings over having a Chinese father. We could not admit to each other what I knew. And these days, she held back her true feelings on just about everything. China was going through a revolution, and she acted like a spectator at the races—at the ready to bet on the probable winner. She claimed confidence that the new Republic would have no bearing on matters in the International Settlement, where we lived. “The Settlement is its own oasis,” she would point out to her clients, “under its own laws and government.”
But I could tell that her seeming lack of concern was to mask worry. She, in fact, had given me the skill to discern true feelings by noticing the great efforts used to conceal them. I had often overheard what she and Golden Dove had observed among their customers: bluster that had compensated for fear, a flourish of courtesy that had masked a cheat, indignation that had confirmed wrongdoing.
I, too, had been making great efforts to hide the half-Chinese part of me, and I was always on guard that I had failed to do so. Look how easily I had succumbed to my inborn mind. I had just wished that Dr. Sun had been my father. I had found the students’ passion to be admirable. It was increasingly difficult to contort my heart and mind to appear to be a foreigner through and through. I often studied myself in a mirror to learn how to smile without crinkling my eyes into an Oriental angle. I copied my mother’s erect posture, the way she walked with a foreigner’s assurance of her place in the world. Like her, I greeted new people by looking them straight in the eye, saying, “I am Violet Minturn and I’m most pleased to know you.” I used pidgin to compliment the servants on their obedience and quickness. I was more courteous with the beauties than I had been when I was younger, but I did not speak to them in Chinese, unless I forgot, which I did more often than I would have liked. I was not uppity, however, with Golden Dove or Cracked Egg. Nor was I cool-hearted with Snowy Cloud’s attendant, Piety, who had a daughter, Little Ocean, whom Carlotta liked.
Ever since my scuffle with Misty Cloud six years ago, no one in the house had mentioned anything that suggested I was of mixed race. Then again, they would not dare to do so after what had happened to Misty Cloud. Yet I was constantly aware of the danger of someone wounding me with the awful truth. Whenever I met strangers, I was shaken by any remarks about my looks.
It had happened not long ago when I met Mother’
s new friend, a British suffragette, who was fascinated to be in a “Pleasure Palace,” as she called Hidden Jade Path. When I was introduced to her, she complimented me on the unusual color of my eyes. “I’ve never seen that shade of green,” she said. “It reminds me of serpentine. The color changes according to the light.” Had she also noticed the shape of my eyes? I avoided smiling. My nervousness grew worse a moment later when she told my mother she had volunteered to raise money for an orphanage for mixed-race girls.
“They will never be adopted,” she said. “If it weren’t for the orphanage and generous women like you, it would have been the streets for them.”
Mother opened her purse and handed the woman a donation.
ON THE DAY of the abdication, I welcomed being part of the hated lot of foreigners. Let the Chinese despise me! I ran to the balcony on the east wing of our house. I saw the sparks of firecrackers and shreds of wrappers floating in the air. The paper was imperial yellow and not the usual celebratory red, as if to signal that the Ching dynasty had been blown to pieces.
Throngs were growing by the second, a sea of people with victory banners, their fists punching upward, showing black armbands painted with antiforeign slogans. “End the port treaties!” A chorus of cheers broke out and echoed the words. “No more tra-la-la boom-dee-ay! “The crowd roared with laughter. “Kick out those who love the foreign!” Jeers followed.
Who still loved us? Golden Dove? Did she love us enough to risk being kicked out of China?
The streets were so clogged the rickshaw pullers could no longer move forward. From my perch, I spotted one with a Western man and woman who waved madly to their puller to run over the people blocking their way. The rickshaw puller let go of the handles, and the cab suddenly fell backward and nearly bounced the couple out. He threw his fists up, and the people leapt off. I could not see their faces, but I knew they must have been terrified as they were bumped and pushed about in the mob.
I turned to my mother. “Are we in danger?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. She had a knot between her eyebrows. She was lying.
“The greedy ones didn’t wait a minute to change colors,” Cracked Egg said. “You can hear them everywhere in the market square. Two bottles of New Republic wine for the price of one! And then they joke: Two bottles of Ching wine for the price of three.” He looked at me. “It’s not safe right now for you to go outside. Listen to me, ah?” He handed my mother a packet of letters and the North China Herald. “I was able to get them from the post office before the streets closed. But if the riots go on, it may be days before we receive anything else.”
“Do what you can to get the newspapers, English and Chinese ones. They’ll probably be littering the streets later in the day. I want to see what cartoons and stories appear in the mosquito press. That will give us some idea what we’re facing before things settle.”
I searched through the house to see if anyone else was worried. Three of the menservants and the cook were smoking in the front courtyard. Confetti from yellow paper littered the ground. They were the ones who had set off the firecrackers, and they were now gloating over the powerlessness of the little Manchu emperor and his haughty eunuchs. No longer would the empress and her Pekingese dogs be more important than starving people!
“My uncle became a Boxer after half our family starved to death,” said one servant. “It was the worst flood in a hundred years—maybe even two hundred. It came over us quick as swamp fog. Then came the dry year. Not a drop of rain. One disaster after another.” They took turns with a match to light their pipes.
The cook chimed in: “If a man has lost everything, he fights back without fear.”
“We’ve kicked out the Ching,” another man said, “and the foreigners are next.”
The cook and servants gave me smug looks. This was shocking. The cook had always been friendly, had always asked if I wanted him to make me American lunch or dinner. And the servants had always been polite, or, at least, patient with me when I was making a nuisance of myself. They once scolded me gently when I was a child and had knocked over the platters of food they carried. All children are naughty like that, they had said to my mother. They never openly complained. But I heard them do so in the hallway near my window late at night.
Today they acted as if I were a stranger. The expressions on their faces were ugly, and there was also something odd about their appearance. One of them turned to reach for a flask of wine. They had cut off their queues! Only one man had not, Little Duck, the manservant who opened the door to the house and announced visitors who came in the afternoons. His queue was still wrapped around the back of his head. I once asked him to show me how long it was. As he unwound it, he had said that it was his mother’s greatest pride. She said the length of it was a measure of respect to the emperor. “It was just below my waist when she told me that,” he said. “She died before it grew this long.” It was now nearly to his knees.
The cook snorted at Little Duck. “Are you an imperial loyalist?” The others laughed, baiting him to cut it off. One handed him the knife that they had used to cut off their own queues.
Little Duck stared at the knife and then at the grinning men. His eyes bugged out, as if scared. And then he walked swiftly toward the part of the wall next to an abandoned well. He loosened the coil and stared at his beloved pigtail, then hacked it off. The other men shouted. “Damn!” “Good for him!” “Wah! He looks like he just cut off his balls and became a eunuch!”
Little Duck wore such a painful grimace you would have thought he had killed his mother. He lifted the lid from the well and dangled his former glory over it. He was shaking so hard the pigtail wiggled like a live snake. Finally he let go and then immediately looked down the well and watched it drown. For a moment, I thought he would jump into the well after it.
Cracked Egg ran into the courtyard. “What’s going on? What’s happening with the food? Why is the water not boiled? Lulu Mimi needs her tea.”
The men sat there, smoking.
“Eh! When you cut off your queues, did you slice out part of your brains as well? Who do you work for? Where will you go if this house shuts its doors? You’ll be no better off than that beggar by the wall with one leg.” They grumbled and stood up.
What was happening? What would happen next? I walked throughout the house and saw the abandoned kitchen with water sitting cold in vats, the vegetables half chopped, the washing tubs with clothes half in, half out, as if people had fallen forward and drowned.
I found Golden Dove and the Cloud Beauties seated in the common room. Summer Cloud was shedding rivers of tears for the end of the Ching dynasty, as if her own family had died.
“I heard that the laws of the new Republic will soon shut us down,” she said.
“The politicians want to show they have higher morals than the Ching and foreigners.”
“New morality. Pah!” Golden Dove said. “They’re the same ones who visited us and were happy the Westerners let us be.”
“What will we do instead?” Summer Cloud said in a tragic voice. She held up her soft white hands and stared at them sadly. “I’ll have to wash my own clothes, like a common washerwoman.”
“Stop this nonsense,” Golden Dove said. “The Republicans have no control over the International Settlement. The Ching did not, and that won’t change.”
“How do you know?” Summer Cloud shot back. “Were you alive when the Ming dynasty was overturned?”
I heard my mother calling for me. “Violet! Where are you?” She came up to me. “There you are. Come to my office. I want you to stay close to me.”
“Are we in trouble?”
“Not at all. I just don’t want you to go wandering into the streets. There are too many people running around and you could be hurt.” Her office floor was strewn with newspapers.
“Now that the emperor is gone,” I said, “will we suffer? Will our house close down?”
“Come here.” She took me into her arms. “It’s t
he end of the dynasty. That has little to do with us. But the Chinese are overwrought. They’ll settle down soon.”
By the third day, the streets were passable, and Mother wanted to pay a visit to some of her clients to encourage them to return. Cracked Egg said it was dangerous for a foreign woman to be seen out of doors. Drunken patriots roamed the streets with scissors in hand and lopped the queues off any man who still possessed one. They had also bobbed the hair of a few white women just for fun. My mother had never been one to give in to fear. She put on a heavy fur coat, called for a carriage, and equipped Golden Dove and herself with croquet mallets so they could bash the heads of anyone who approached them with shears and a grin.
All of her clients stayed away during the first week after the abdication. She sent the servants out with messages that she had taken down the sign in English that said HIDDEN JADE PATH. But they were still reluctant. The name Hidden Jade Path was too well known, as was the House of Lulu Mimi. The Western clients did not want to show their faces. The Chinese ones did not want anyone to know they had been doing foreign trade with Westerners.
On Sunday the eighteenth, Chinese New Year arrived, reigniting the prior week’s furor, and doubling the noise with a cacophony of firecrackers, gongs, drums, and chants. When the rockets shrilled in flight, my mother would stop speaking, clench her jaw, and twitch when the inevitable bang and ka-boom came. She snapped at anyone who spoke to her, even Golden Dove. She was angry over the stupid fear her clients harbored. The clients were slowly returning, five one night, then a dozen, and they were mostly the Chinese suitors whose favorite courtesans had written pining letters to them. No one, however, was in a mood for frivolity. In the salons, the men stood in separate clusters of Westerners and Chinese. They spoke somberly about the antiforeign protests being a bellwether for the future of foreign businesses. One groused, “I heard that many of the student ringleaders were educated in the United States. The Ching government gave them those damn indemnity scholarships, and they returned with knowledge on how to make a revolution.”
