by Nicole Mones
“Were your family slaves?”
“All that ended seventy years ago,” he answered, deliberately vague, because actually his ancestors had been free people of color, as far as he knew. But that was not a good story for Shanghai, where he was a jazz man; he should be from the crossroads, someplace cruel, preferably in the Deep South. The longer he was away from the U.S., the more detached he became from the actual facts of his life there, gaining the freedom to unfold himself anew in this city. Everyone in Shanghai had a story. It was that kind of place.
But Anya was eyeing him shrewdly. “I see why they love your music, the Chinese. To them you are marvelous, and also pitiable. They themselves are slaves—to the foreign powers in the Concessions, and now to the Japanese. When they see you, they feel better, because you were the same.”
“Not exactly.”
“In their eyes, yes. The Communists might feel something similar.”
“Anya, really—”
But she held her hand up. “I predict it! Has one approached you yet, a Communist?”
“No.” On this Thomas was emphatic, because he had not met even one. “People say one third of Shanghai is Communist—but I don’t know where they are, any of them.”
She snorted with laughter. “Don’t be silly, you have met them, they are right in front of you. They lie, they pass as law-abiding people, they are everywhere.”
“Really.” He sat back, unwilling to believe that he, the master of appearances, could be so completely fooled. “What are they like?”
“They are bandits,” she shot back, “crude and evil. They killed my parents and my little sister.”
“Where was that?” he said gently. He reached for her hands, but she pulled them away.
“Russia.”
“And then where did you go?”
“Mukden, in north China.” She let a tremor go through her, and then pushed the whole thing away, refashioning her face until it was bright and gay again.
She changed the subject to music, and would say no more of her family. She told him it was true, she sang in clubs sometimes, and she loved jazz, though when he asked her whom she enjoyed, she could not name a single group. He saw what she was doing, but it didn’t matter to him, he loved it, loved her, or at least loved spending time with her. It was a joy to be with a beautiful, educated woman who was here because she liked him, not because he was paying her.
The two of them talked and laughed until they seemed to be the only ones left in the restaurant, which had grown quiet around them as the night deepened. By the time they rose to leave, she had drunk so much she could barely stand, and was in need of a steadying arm. He bundled her into a rickshaw and climbed up beside her and together they swayed down Route Gustave de Boissezon beneath rows of trees, in a night-world washed of color. When they came to her front door, he bowed over her hand to say good night. She responded by rising on her toes to kiss his cheek, then took an uneven step and vanished inside, clicking the door behind her.
The light of infatuation was lit, but what Alonzo had said back at the theater about Lin needing to see him was still tugging at him as well. He decided to go by Lin’s place on the way home, this being the time when Thomas knew his friend usually came home from his nightly circuit.
He threw a few small pebbles at Lin Ming’s window, and sure enough, it opened up, the room’s occupant still fully dressed and wearing a scowl which fell away as soon as he recognized Thomas down below.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said when he got to the front door.
“Is something wrong?” Thomas followed him inside and up the stairs.
“Come inside,” Lin said, latching the door of his tiny two-room apartment behind them. “Sit.”
Thomas sank down on the couch and let his face sag into his hands. “I’ve been worried too. Solomon’s leaving. I’ve got ten men still, and all of them are anxious for me to tell them if it’s okay to stay here.”
Lin nodded his understanding, and for the first time Thomas could remember, he shrugged and gave no answer.
“So what’s going to happen?”
“As to that, no one knows, but—”
“Come on,” said Thomas.
“—but powerful people expect Japan to invade Shanghai.”
“What! When?”
“Who knows. Not immediately, but they are taking factories apart and moving them to the interior.”
Thomas felt the blood drain from his head. “And what does that mean for us? The Americans?”
Lin shrugged. “I would think, if they tried to avoid hurting anyone, it would be the Americans. The last thing they want is a war with you.”
“Would we be able to keep playing?”
Lin took a long, hesitant breath. “It is not a question of whether you and the Kansas City Kings can play. It is a question of whether Ye Shanghai will continue to exist at all. But Little Greene, right now we have a more immediate danger, concerning the new Japanese Admiral, Morioka. That’s why I was looking for you. To warn you.”
Thomas felt his eyes grow wide.
“First—swear to secrecy.” Lin swallowed nervously. “If anyone knows I warned you, my life will be forfeit. Do you understand? They will kill me. Swear to tell no one.”
“I swear,” he said softly.
Lin tightened his mouth. A perceptible shiver ran the length of his body. “Listen carefully.”
Through the next few days, Lin Ming could not shake the apprehension that he had crossed the line, and that retribution might come swiftly, at any time, and out of nowhere. He had disobeyed orders.
Lin was not so naïve as to think his physical parentage would be enough to protect him if he were caught; he was a son, but not a real one. Not that Du had ever denied having fathered him. Indeed he had acknowledged the boy as soon as he laid eyes on him, since he was childless then, his first wife, Du Taitai, having proved barren. Acknowledging Lin Ming was insurance, but the policy was never cashed, for Du was later to add wives who had more sons, sons of his line, born within his house and thus his legal heirs. But Lin Ming was conceived before all that, when Du himself was only fifteen and practically living in Lin’s mother’s room.
In her day it was the fashion for girls such as herself in the houses behind Avenue Édouard VII to claim to be from Suzhou, since that charming town of canals and gardens was known for its lovely and sweet-voiced girls—yet Lin’s mother truly had been born and raised there. In Shanghai she was called a “one-two” because a man could drink with her for one dollar and pierce her for two. One-twos were not the lowest—those were the Cantonese saltwater sisters, who worked the docks, and the alley girls who let themselves be had against a wall for thirty cents—but they were far from the highest. A step up from them were the two-threes, and many tiers above them were the city’s premier courtesans, perfectly formed, gorgeously dressed, able to sing, play, and hold their own in games of poetry and calligraphy with the very rich.
Lin Ming’s mother was nothing like them. But Du was hardly more than a boy himself when he met her, and little better than she. He never paid for her; they were friends. That was another reason why, years later, when he heard about the tall, thin boy who looked so much like him, being raised in the Suzhou brothel to which Lin’s mother returned after giving birth, Du decided to have himself driven to that peaceful garden town so he could see the child up close.
Lin Ming’s whole world then was the brothel, with its successive courtyards, its butterfly flock of aunties, its vermilion Gate of Coming and Going. Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo. All around were the lilting strands of Suzhou dialect. If it was Third Month, he would use the coins in his pocket to buy green dumplings stuffed with
lotus root. In the autumn, at the festival of the weaver and the cowherd, he would eat the special coiled, sugary cakes. The world was his, and it passed in front of him in the stream of faces, the scudding clouds above the roofs, the crisp flapping banners of merchants. Back then he never thought about the future.
That changed the day his father came.
He remembered the way his mother entered his tiny room at dawn to awaken him. Normally she herself never arose before noon. “Get up, Sprout,” she said; he remembered because she used his milk name. He yanked away from her.
“Bathe,” she told him. “Put on your new blue gown.”
“It’s scratchy. I bathed last night.”
“Put it on.”
“Why?”
“Your father is coming.”
He went still. She might as well have said the sun and the moon had changed places, for he had no father.
“Get on the horse,” she said, smoothing the bedclothes as if she could take away all the bumps in the road ahead. “Time to be a man.”
A clamor rose in the lane, the squawks of chickens, cries of children, rumble of a motorcar. He pulled on his clothes and ran to stand in the courtyard between Jiang Ma, the proprietress, and his mother.
The big square automobile puttered in and crunched to a long and extravagant stop. A knot of bodyguards climbed out, followed by a tall man with a shiny shaved head and a long loose gown that swung with his steps. He had crossbow cheekbones and big ears. Ears like mine. A hot knife of panic slid into Lin’s middle.
The man looked at him for a long time without expression and then turned to talk to his mother. They had not seen each other since she left Shanghai during her pregnancy, but a wisp of affection was still evident between them as they turned away from Lin without a glance and walked toward the reception hall, already negotiating. A few days later he was sent to Hankou.
Much later Lin Ming understood that it was an investment. Du had enrolled him in Hankou’s Lamb of God Missionary School so that someone in his sphere might understand the language and thoughts of the foreigners. That Lin had repaid the Gang’s investment through profit was undeniable, for the jazz he arranged brought people into the clubs to dance and drink and dine, and many of them went on to spend even more money in the brothels and opium dens just outside, from which profits also flowed straight to the Qing Bang’s coffers.
Yet this success was due less to his parentage than to the fact that he had grown up in a foreign boarding school, with Western music. Every day there had started in chapel with the other pupils, singing hymns and learning their tempered twelve-note scale with its chords and intervals. Their music became another of his languages, and later his ticket to the night-world. Some rival agents around Frenchtown sniped that his success was due only to his proximity to the throne. A waterfront pavilion gets moonlight first, they liked to whisper. They were wrong. It was all because he and his jueshi jia listened to the same songs as children, hymns, the bedrock of the church. His ear was like theirs. They were brothers beneath the skin.
In his world, there had never been room for a wife. That was why Zhuli was the perfect girl for him, Beautiful Pearl, all his in the moment and yet after, not his responsibility. They understood each other. And walking through the brass-studded gate of the Osmanthus Pavilion in Stone Lion Lane, he felt the familiar flutter of anticipation.
Inside, high ceilings and flickering gas lamps might have signaled any fussy, old-fashioned city mansion, except for the fact that it was full of girls lounging in loose robes with free, unbound breasts moving for anyone to see. “Lin Xiansheng lai le!” they trilled when he came in, at ease, childish, for they knew he would never choose one of them. He came here for Zhuli, and her alone. When she was busy, he waited.
Tonight she signaled her presence at the top of the steps with a delicate cough, her hair freshened, her lips moist, her gray silk skirts rustling beneath a close-fitting vest of red brocade.
In her room they fell together, struggling from their clothes. He knew how many men she had here, and he did not mind. She was like him, a fellow traveler, able to give her heart freely to no one. He knew she would never ask any more of him than what they had together, never ask for his money or his protection; knowing this freed him. War was in the air, and it was all he could do to keep himself and his men safe.
They joined happiness and afterward lay back in the sheets. He always paid for the night, which meant he could sleep until noon.
She turned him over and began a soft kneading of the muscles in his back with a touch that was expert, professional, but also intimate. She understood where he hid his anger and his fear, surrounded it with gentle fingers and drew it out until all under heaven was peaceful. Was this love? he wondered, deep in the profound state of rest he always felt under her hands. Was this the feeling? She finished and lay beside him.
He had been conceived just like this, in a room not far from here, in a brothel. Lin always made a prideful point of insisting that he was nothing like his father, but here he was the same, and he knew it. He felt for Pearl just as his father had felt for his mother, though unlike his father, he knew he would feel that way always. With her, all his cares, even the fact that he had just broken ranks to warn Little Greene, melted away.
“What is it?” she said, turning.
“Nothing.” He put her head back down, loving her. “Sleep a while.”
That night, while Lin Ming lay twined with Zhuli, Admiral Morioka crisscrossed Frenchtown in the back seat of his curtained chauffeured car, looking for music. In his previous China postings, Peking and Tianjin, he had always been able to find some club where a jazz group, Japanese, Chinese, sometimes even American, was playing. And neither of those cities could compare to Shanghai.
Yet in his short time here, it already seemed to Morioka that the Chinese government tolerated Shanghai like a man tolerates a boil on his skin. Night in Shanghai made money, and so was allowed to exist, but what the Chinese government really wanted was to ban foreign music, not just jazz but all of it. Hopeless. A more useless goal for China’s future Morioka could hardly imagine. It proved once again that the Chinese were not mature, strategic thinkers. Ban music? What next, forbid moving pictures? Yet this notion, of the toxicity of foreign culture, was promoted by both Nationalists and Communists alike. Amazing.
Morioka never ceased to marvel at China’s two parties and the way they squabbled and fought each other, especially as Japan carved their country away from them bit by bit. Clearly, they need us.
He had his driver roll slowly past the Ambassador, the Canidrome, the Casanova, and the Palais, all the nearby places where jazz could be heard. His secretary had made a list for him, but so far, he had not ventured into any Shanghai ballroom. Tonight was the night that would change.
He consulted his list one last time. “Driver,” he said, deciding. “Take me to the Saint Anna.”
Song Yuhua walked down Nanjing Road, the most famous shopping street in Asia and a patchwork of Shanghai’s international influences: Parisian bakeries, Balkan dairy shops, and Austrian-style cafés competing with shops dispensing nuts and dried fruits from central Asia. Her eyes always lingered on the international places, not the Chinese establishments like the Wing On and Sincere department stores. The foreign names were music in her mind as she read them off against the clicking of her spool heels on the sidewalk.
As a lonely child in a rural household, learning English from her tutor, she had sustained herself with fantasies fed by foreign books. She imagined herself a woman, grown, beautiful, traveling the world, speaking foreign languages. She had believed in love, in the kind of connection she had never observed in her clan compound in Anhui, and the language of this hope was always English. Now that she believed in the cause, she spoke English only when commanded, and otherwise kept it to herself. She did not really know what to do with her feelings about things foreign.
She stopped at the edge of the Bund, next to the Cathay Hotel with its gree
n copper pyramid roof, and in front of her, along China’s most celebrated boulevard, rolled a convoy of trucks filled with weapons and supplies, marked with the red sun of Japan. Her fists bunched and her eyes stung, not at this blatant show of fattening up the Japanese Army warehouses, but at the expressions on the soldiers’ faces, placid, impervious, already sure of their victory.
Turtle eggs. Of course we ought to distrust all foreigners. She left the Bund and hurried up Sichuan Road to Avenue Édouard VII, the boundary street between Frenchtown and the International Settlement, with a number-three redhead Sikh on the pedestal in the center of the intersection, directing traffic. She watched him send motorcars, pedicabs, and buses through the intersection with his hand signals, and when a lull in the traffic cleared the avenue, she was startled to see the new American piano player from the Royal. He stood on the corner looking east, toward the river, which gave her time to study him. Though his renown in the city had already put ten thousand pairs of eyes on him, as people liked to say, he did not seem to stand out. His face was reserved, and did not announce him.
When the Sikh gave a burst on his whistle and signaled with stiff-stretched arms, she started across with the knot of pedestrians who had accumulated around her. She was within a few feet of him and was opening her mouth to speak when he turned and saw her.
“I almost walked into you,” she said.
“What?” His mouth went slack. “You speak English!”
“Song Yuhua.” She touched the tip of her nose with her forefinger in the Chinese style rather than extending her hand.
