by Jade Lee
She folded her arms across her chest, her manner defiant even though she still trembled with fear. "Could it be that it is not right to lock a woman in a cage and use her for your pleasure?"
He looked at her, considering her words, unwilling to admit the possibility and yet unable to deny it. "Slaves are a fact of life in China. It is unfortunate for the poor, but they are treated fairly and given tasks suited to their ability."
"I am not a slave. I am a free Englishwoman."
He almost smiled. "You are my white pet, and you will remain with me until I choose to release you."
She stiffened, then softened and looked away, defeated. "Just so long as you do release me."
He frowned, surprised that the thought of releasing her did not please him. Up until now he had looked forward to the time when he would be rid of her expense, rid of the need to draw white yin from her. Yet now he disliked the thought, felt a stirring of unease at the idea that he would not see her each morning and evening.
Perhaps her yin had helped him more than he thought. Perhaps he simply needed more of it. He sighed. He did not know enough about this situation, about what he had begun. He had to learn more about these ghost people.
So thinking, he tossed the parchment aside, then ushered her firmly back into her bedroom. As always, they sat upon her bed. And though he felt the absence of Fu De most keenly—he still feared that she might escape him in a moment of surprise—she gave no indication that she intended to try.
Until, of course, she glanced at the door. Her expression lightened. "It will be better without Fu De here. More private."
He frowned. "Private? Do you understand the meaning of that word?"
"Of course I do! Why would you think I wish for an audience every time I bathe or dress or... or whenever we..." Her voice trailed away, but her meaning was clear. She was obviously insulted. In truth, he got the impression that she felt abused by the presence of Fu De in her chambers.
"But the English have great drawing rooms where people gather to view one another as the women dress. They have no desire for privacy." He shifted, completely baffled.
"We most certainly do!" But then she hedged, clearly forced to admit the truth. "I am told that the wealthy women dress themselves in their bedrooms, then come out to another room—a kind of parlor—for their closest friends. They chat there while she finishes her toilette. Her cosmetics and jewelry. But I most certainly do not do..." She gestured vaguely toward the bed. "These things with others."
He shook his head, knowing that it was not true. "I have heard of great gatherings of Englishmen and women alike for the purpose of copulation. Indeed, the Chinese talk often of such activities." He straightened. "You are like monkeys, living all together in a colony. The women are most comfortable with such scenes."
"We most certainly are not!" She was clearly agitated, jumping up from the bed to pace about the room. "How could you think that? It's disgusting!" She spun on her toe, turning to glare directly at him. "I do not know where you get these ideas, but I cannot believe that every Englishman in China has behaved with such... such... debauchery!"
He did not understand this word. Debauchery. But he guessed her meaning. She truly was upset, and her reaction verified one of his fears: that the Chinese has grossly misrepresented the nature of these foreign barbarians.
But before he could believe such a strange thought, he had to find out more. Leaning back against the cushions of her bed, he folded his arms. "I wish to know more about you Englishmen. How do you live?"
She stopped, clearly frustrated by his question. "What do you mean, how do we live? We live as people live. In houses. With our families."
"Families? What kind of families?"
"The normal kind! A mother, a father. Their children."
It was as he feared. His leaders were misinformed. But just to make sure, he leaned forward on his elbow, studying her face carefully for any type of deception. "But you live in colonies. Isn't that the word? A group of English people all living together."
She shook her head. "Not like a monkey colony! The very idea is preposterous!" She stepped forward. "We have separate houses. A colony is merely a group of families living in the same area. Each in their own little house."
He nodded. "Because you learned from the Chinese."
"No!" She was becoming more exasperated, her anger clearly vibrating through her. "I assure you, the English have been living in homes for many, many hundreds of years."
He frowned. "That cannot be possible. Surely some of you live like monkeys."
"We most certainly do not!"
"But the emperor has said—"
"Then he is wrong!" she spat.
"You are barbarians!" he returned, startled to realize his tone had risen along with hers.
"We most certainly are not! You are!"
"Don't be ridiculous." He was angry, but he made no effort to modulate his tone. "You English people came to us—to China—seeking our goods. We want nothing from you, and yet you come, begging for silk, for jade, for all our good things."
"We came seeking trade. To sell our goods to you in return for your things. Trade."
"But all of your things are of inferior quality. You have no silk, no ivory. You do not even posses the ability to lacquer wood. You are uneducated." He wasn't even sure why he was arguing with her. He knew the truth of his words. Perhaps he was merely being kind, giving her the truth.
Except she had no wish to understand. Instead, she turned and glared at him. "Our machinery is infinitely superior to yours. You have no clockworks similar to ours. Your culture is still rife with superstition. And worst of all..." She drew out her tone, obviously wishing to make her point excruciatingly clear. "We do not buy and sell people as if they were no better than cattle."
"Then do your poor starve when they have too many children?"
She opened her mouth, no doubt to argue with him, but she shut it with a snap. Eventually she sighed. "Every country has its poor. But we do not sell our children."
"Then you doom them to the same misery and torment the parents suffer. At least in the service of a great family, the child will be well cared for. Some even gain a degree of refinement and education."
She frowned and began to speak, but he had heard enough. "No more of this," he snapped. The English were indeed an inferior species. Though perhaps they were not as barbaric as he had at first supposed. "I wish to begin drawing out some of your yin."
Her expression was mutinous, but she slowly complied. "Do you treat all women this way? Or just your white slaves?"
He didn't think she expected an answer, but he gave her one anyway, his yang fire burning in his tone. "I have done everything I can to make you comfortable. I cannot afford silks and gold. My mother never had those things—why would I lavish them on you? You will have to make do with what a mere shopkeeper can afford."
She gaped at him, her jaw slack with astonishment. But not for long. Indeed, she apparently had more yang than he had previously guessed, because she spit back her answer with an equal amount of venom.
"I have never wished for silks or jewelry, nor do I expect them now. I am talking about something to do, Ru Shan. I have no books to read, no colors to paint with, and now you have taken away my sponge brush and teacher so I cannot even practice Chinese."
He frowned, completely stunned. It was as he'd suggested to Shi Po. "You wish for something to do? Something that occupies your mind?" He could not believe it. Not one of the ghost people he had ever met would want such a thing. Flashy jewelry, costly silks, that was all the foreign devils cared for.
"Of course, I do! Look about you, Ru Shan. Would you be content here?"
Of course not. But he was a well-educated Chinese. He understood the finer aspects of life. How could a ghost person—and a woman at that—ever enjoy such things? Or despair at their lack? And yet, looking at Li Dee, he realized that she did indeed wish for a way to occupy her mind.
He squinted at her
; seeing once again her round flat eyes, her golden hair. She appeared to be as English as the most ghostlike of the other barbarians. And yet, she was nothing like he expected. "Do you have Chinese in your lineage?"
"Don't be ridiculous. It is becoming abundantly clear that your race despises mine. Even here in Shanghai, don't you live in entirely separate quarters?"
He nodded. There was indeed strict separation of the races, with large walls meant to keep the foreigners out. It was only because of his shop that he had any exposure to the ghost people at all. And Li Dee, of course.
And his mother, as well. But that was another topic altogether.
"Your mother did not meet a Chinese man somehow? Fall in love with him perhaps?"
"My mother married an English boy she met in the veterans hospital when she was barely eighteen. They married and lived happily together. She has never met a Chinese man nor does she ever wish to. Indeed, I wish I could say the same!"
He listened to her impassioned speech, seeing the flash of yang in her eyes, the anger in her tone. She certainly thought she spoke the truth. But for all that, he still could not believe her. She was too intelligent, too capable. To think that she was even learning Shanghainese from Fu De.
He could not credit that the ghost people could spawn so capable a creature on their own.
"You must be thought a rare genius among your people." She frowned. "I am considered bright, but no more so than many others."
He shook his head, still confused. Sometimes his countrymen were not ashamed at having sexual relations with barbarian women. Perhaps that was how Li Dee came by her intelligence. Or perhaps she was just one of nature's rarest creatures.
"Was that why you came to China? Because you were not accepted at home?"
She huffed in disgust, dropping onto the edge of her bed in clear annoyance. "I came because Maxwell Slade—"
"Your fiancé. Yes, I remember." She turned, pinning him with her gaze. "Then why do you not return me to him?"
He smiled then. He did not know what prompted it, but he did not stop himself, because he liked the unaccustomed feeling of pride.
"I keep you, Li Dee, because you are mine." Then he tugged her around to face him, his hands already untying the belt of her robe. "No more talk now. It is time to release your yin."
From the letters of Mei Lan Cheng
2 July, 1873
Dearest Li Hua—
I have met him! I have met the ghost captain, and it is worse than I feared! He is as thin as a snake and has the hungry eyes of a starving mongoose. And he bellows at me! He thinks I do not understand him, and truthfully, I pretend this is so, but that makes him angry. He thinks if he yells louder, then I will suddenly understand his words. All it does is make me angry.
Sheng Fu is angry, too. I try to tell him this ghost person is evil, but he will not listen. He calls me stupid and superstitious and has sent me to a tutor—at my age!—to learn more English. Meanwhile, this terrible captain has gone away, taking only a few bolts of cloth at a very cheap price. Normally, Sheng Fu would not have sold the fabric so cheaply, but I think he is a little afraid of the Starving Mongoose Captain and wished to see him go away happy.
It is very bad, Li Hua, very bad to do business with the ghost people. But my family wants the ghost gold too much now for me to stop them.
Oh, I must go now. I have much work to do now before I go to my lesson!
—Mei Lan
P.S. I forgot to say that there is one good thing about my lessons. I must take Ru Shan with me. Sheng Fu hopes our son will soon be able to translate instead of me, so he lets me take him along. We have a lovely time, Ru Shan and I, walking to the mission and back. That is where we take our lessons, because no one speaks better English than the priests. But I am surprised by how wonderful my son is—attentive and fun as we walk. We laugh often and have the best of times, him and I. For that reason alone, I hope it takes a long, long time for me to learn English.
Sincerely, Mei Lan
You see! That is how the English sign their names. Looks ugly, doesn't it? Going side to side instead of up and down. And the shapes are all wrong. They don't even use a brush to write but little wooden logs with charcoal inside. But Ru Shan likes it, and he can make their writing look pretty. Even the English teacher says Ru Shan is very smart.
Oh! I really must go now. I must give more money to the monks today, in addition to my other tasks.
Li Bai when young did not show well in learning, and so he decided to give up his studies halfway. On the way home, he saw an old woman grinding an iron rod. In wonder, Li Bai asked her what she was doing. "Making a needle," she answered curtly. Feeling ashamed at his own lack of perseverance, Li Bai went back to learning and finally acquired great scholarship.
—Qian Que Lei Shu
~
Chapter 7
The Chinese were strange creatures, Lydia thought with a languid stretch. Or perhaps, more accurately, she should say Ru Shan was a strange creature. On the one hand, he thought nothing of buying her, locking her up in a ten-by-ten-foot room and then daily milking her for her yin. On the other hand, he had shown her unexpected kindness and respect. He still always bowed when he entered and left her presence, thanking her for their time together. He spoke honestly, and had even begun to give her sketching paper and painting supplies to fill the long hours between his visits. Sometimes she wondered if Maxwell would have done as much. Plus, Ru Shan had begun closing the door so that Fu De could not watch. And all because she told him she did not like the young man staring.
As best as she could understand, Ru Shan thought of her as a treasured pet—like a monkey or cow that one cared for, played with, even spoke secrets to, but would by no means release into the outside world. And, apparently, this was an attitude that was shared by most of his countrymen: that the white man was no more than an advanced monkey.
She wondered briefly what Maxwell would think of such an attitude. Probably he would scorn it as nonsense. Especially as he considered the Chinese were in turn, beneath him. He could no more imagine that they thought of him as a monkey than he could imagine being bested in a competition by a woman. Maxwell, like many of his friends, believed himself superior to all he surveyed.
And perhaps therein lay the problem, she realized as she stood to pace her tiny chamber. Not the difference between the English and the Chinese, but between men and women. Men thought themselves superior—over animals, over women, over other men. It made no difference whether the man was white or yellow or purple or green. Men believed themselves kings, and no amount of reason or logic would sway them.
No, it was not surprising that the Chinese men thought themselves more civilized than the English, or that the Englishmen believed themselves smarter than the Chinese. And both were completely wrong.
Who would have thought that her entire problem would boil down to misguided male ego? Or that she—a woman—was the only one who seemed to see reality? It was a very odd thought, given that she was locked in a tiny concrete cell.
Odd as it was, she still planned to find a way to escape. But how? She had very few leverage points, as her father would call them. She was a woman locked in a room. She had managed to parlay her charm into a working understanding of Shanghainese, thanks to Fu De. She had even convinced Ru Shan that she was heartily sick of her silk robe and wished some real clothing. He had given her soft but serviceable peasant clothes. She had a tunic made of soft brown cotton and matching pants with an unsewn crotch. Apparently, according to Fu De, peasants could not be bothered to leave the fields to visit a water closet. They simply squatted in the field, fertilizing the ground wherever they stood.
And they thought the English barbaric!
No matter. At least now when she finally escaped, she wouldn't be running through the streets of Shanghai in a silk robe.
Which brought her back to the problem of escape. Since Ru Shan's explosion of a few days earlier, Fu De had been extra vigilant during the time they
spent together. They only conversed in Chinese (for her) and English (for him), which was wonderful, but never worked on the written languages. Which meant he never had his hands full and always maintained a strict focus on her face. It was hardly an easy escape environment.
At this point, she'd decided her best bet was to develop a relationship with Ru Shan. The more he saw her as a real person, the more likely he would see caging her was wrong.
She knew her chances were slim at best. No man liked admitting that he was wrong, and even fewer men liked giving up a possession that brought them joy. But it was her only plan, and so for the moment she decided to devote herself to becoming friends with her captor.
Strangely, the idea did not upset her. She found herself beginning to forget she was a prisoner. After all, until her father had grown ill, she had lived her entire life in London. True, there were excursions into the city, but only well supervised visits to family and friends. There was little money for entertainments or pleasure. So, for the most part, she had lived within the confines of her home, making her entertainment inside those walls. She had helped her mother with the cleaning, she had read, and she had painted. Indeed, the entire household had revolved around her father's coming and going, his pleasures, his needs.
All in all, life was not so very different here. Except, of course, that Ru Shan's needs were very, very different from her father's. And therein lay the difficulty.
She was beginning to like Ru Shan's needs. She was beginning to like them very much indeed. She truly did not want to think of herself in that manner, but she refused to fall into the same mistake as the men: She would face the truth, no matter how painful.
She knew Ru Shan thought of her as little better than a monkey. She knew he kept her as one would keep a pet, using its assets as one might milk a cow. But when he put his lips on her breasts, the yin flowing hard and fast into him, she truly did not care.
