The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Pan-Yu-Liang

  That the buyer, if she finds one, probably won’t be able to read it means little. Yuliang doesn’t sign for him. She signs for herself, to bind her work to her. To tattoo it with a message: she has won.

  PART TWO

  The Journey

  My body is white; my fate, softly rounded

  Rising and sinking like mountains in streams.

  Whatever way hands may shape me,

  At center my heart is red and true.

  Ho Xuan Huong

  (an eighteenth-century Vietnamese concubine)

  1. Zhenjiang, 1913

  At noon she hears her uncle’s voice, buoyant, backed by velvet rain-patter:

  Flute and drum keep time with the rover’s song

  Amidst revel and feasting, sad thoughts come…

  The singing stops as he addresses the cat: ‘Hello, Turtle! Have you eaten yet?’ Xiuqing pictures him stooping, stroking. His thin fingers limp on the arched black back; his wan face filled with wonder, even though he’s had the cat for seven years now – a year longer than he’s had Xiuqing. Still, he greets them both the same way. As though they are treats unexpectedly encountered in the pantry.

  Cat patted, her jiujiu resumes his song. He’s back later today than usual, Xiuqing realizes. Usually he leaves the little house at dusk and returns with the pale seep of sunrise. Xiuqing senses rather than hears these returns: the heavy vibration of his step; the cloying whiff of smoke-soaked clothes as he passes her door. The wall between them quavering slightly as he drops to his rickety bed.

  Sometime after that, she’ll sit, then rise. Creep out to see what’s missing.

  What’s missing: it used to be things of scant consequence, things only Lina, their one young serving girl, would miss. The kitchen’s extra ladle, a rice pot. In the past year, though, as Wu Ding’s visits to the smoke houses near the All Heaven Temple have increased, it’s become items of more value. The hanging scroll of Heaven and Earth, which Xiuqing would stand and stare at for hours in those first bleak days after she was brought here (wondering, How do black brushstrokes become the Earth? How is an ink wash Heaven?). The little pig they’d been fattening in the courtyard disappeared too, right ahead of the New Year’s feast. And yesterday, Xiuqing found, even rice was missing: on her last trip to the storeroom there were three empty jars, mouths gaping. Xiuqing asked Lina about it. Lina said she didn’t know. But her eyes shifted a little, oblique and anxious. Xiuqing knew what the serving girl must be thinking: when rice is carried off in the night, it’s a sure sign that a house is headed for trouble.

  ‘Little Xiu,’ she hears now, in his sleepy, singsong tenor.

  ‘Yes.’ She puts down the doll that she’d been holding on her bent knees and giving a little ride to. The doll falls onto its back and stares blandly at the rooftop tiles. Its face is a dried-out pomelo rind her uncle carved two years ago, for Xiuqing’s twelfth birthday. Its dress is Xiuqing’s mother’s apron, wrapped twice and tightly tied. The apron smells like her mother did, of rice water, ash, and cedar. At least, Xiuqing thinks she can smell these things as she hugs the little toy each night in bed. She also thinks sometimes she hears her mother’s voice, although in truth she barely recalls now what it sounded like. Still, she wills herself to hear it in the presleep daze before dreams: mama. Singing her name softly: ‘Xiuqing.’

  The courtyard stones are slick and silvered with the rain. Xiuqing picks her way over them carefully. Her uncle sits beneath an awning, the cat a plush mound in his lap. Gray half-moons border his eyes. He straightens the spectacles he sometimes lets her try on (worn for show; their lenses are clear glass). ‘How are you?’ he cries, beaming. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘I thought river butterfish in creamy sauce. And some cabbage rolls.’ And small portions of rice, Xiuqing adds silently. She doesn’t ask where he’s been. She knows he’d only lie anyway. He lies to her often, just as he leaves her often. As long as he comes back, she doesn’t mind.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘I’m famished.’ Which is actually another lie: except for those few times he has tried to shake his smoking habit, Wu Ding eats with a sparrow’s stomach. But he likes it when Xiuqing and Lina cook as though for company. He likes the look and smell of a full table.

  ‘I brought you something,’ he adds, and reaches below his chair.

  Xiuqing takes the gift and sits on the ground to open it. She unwinds the dingy string. Inside the brown paper is a stack of Western catalogues. Their covers feature curvaceous, flush-cheeked yangguizi – white-ghost women – in Western clothes.

  ‘New republic,’ her uncle says, beaming, ‘new look. This is what modern girls will start to wear now.’ A self-declared intellectual despite his artisan background, he considers himself an authority on both the old and the new China. ‘I found them at the mission. I know how you like pretty pictures. You can look at them on our journey.’

  ‘Journey?’ Xiuqing looks up. She doesn’t go out much. Aside from the physical discomfort of walking on her folded feet, her mother believed that proper women remain indoors. And since bringing her here, Wu Ding, for all his talk of modern girls, has more or less abided by his sister’s wishes. He hired Lina to teach Xiuqing cooking and household skills and to take her to a neighbor’s house to embroider. Other than these brief trips, though, Xiuqing has left her uncle’s little house exactly twelve times: five festivals, three operas, and four New Year’s trips to the Zhenfeng Pagoda. Plus one surreptitious, teetering trip up the street, just to prove she could do it; though as a boar by birth, Xiuqing knows she’s destined to stay close to home.

  Darting down the street after dark is one thing, however. Taking a journey is quite another. The only trip she’s really taken was the three-day sail here from Yangzhou after her mama’s funeral. All she recalls are her own white mourning clothes, slowly growing gray with soot. ‘What… what about Lina?’ she asks now with a quaver. ‘What about the housekeeping?’

  ‘Don’t worry about these things, little Xiu. Your life is about to change.’ He lets the words linger, pleased by their prescience. Then he breaks into song again: ‘ “All is quiet. The moon lingers, and the emerald screen hangs low…”’ He pauses, quirks a brow.

  ‘Li Qingzhao?’ It’s a little game they have: he recites, she identifies. Modern girls, her jiujiu says, should have a grasp of the classics.

  ‘Right!’ He beams. ‘And she was…’

  ‘A ci poetess, of the Song, Dynasty.’

  ‘Not just a poetess, little Xiu. One of the best our nation has ever seen, though many dismiss her poems as women’s work. She lost everything at one point – her husband, home, wealth. But her misfortune didn’t break her. She bent, like bamboo. She turned her grief into verse so pure and true that nearly a thousand years later she is still revered…’ He drifts off for a moment, staring at his knobby knuckles. Then he pulls out a cracked pocket watch. ‘We need to leave,’ he adds, ‘in just about… oh, seventeen hours.’ He snaps the watch shut, an emphatic snick. ‘Why don’t you go pack?’

  ‘Pack?’ He is serious.

  ‘Yes. Pack a lot. Warm things too.’ He looks skyward. ‘And one nice outfit. Perhaps the red cheongsam I bought you to wear for New Year’s.’ He makes a kiss-kiss sound at the cat and lifts his feet to the table to form a spindly bridge. Turtle eyes it, leaps, lands. He circles on his master’s thighs and lies down. Xiuqing kicks a heel against her chair, faintly panicked. When she looks up, Wu Ding’s eyes are shut: he is going to sleep.

  Back in her room she lays the catalogues out so they overlap, a slick secondhand fan. She flips through them distractedly as two or three raindrops tap on the papered window, testing for a downpour. From the kitchen comes the sound of Lina’s butcher’s knife, sparking thoughts of the green frost of cabbage. I hope she cuts it finely enough, Xiuqing thinks.

  And, almost as afterthought, I hope we can pay her this month.

  In his more capable modes her uncle letter-writes for the illiterate and
peddles the shoes and handkerchiefs Xiuqing embroiders. But since she took over the household accounts (last year, after one of his longer clinic visits coincided with bill collectors carting off most of the little house’s furniture), Xiuqing is well aware of the sword’s-edge dance of their finances. It’s only thanks to Lina’s connections – and her fishing skills – that the household is eating at all.

  Sighing, Xiuqing opens her pine chest, one of the few items she convinced the bill collectors to leave, and begins making a pile:

  Two thick-weave cotton tunics.

  Two pairs of cotton trousers.

  A woven sash for holidays and special occasions.

  The cheap, knee-length cheongsam her uncle bought her to wear on their few New Year’s visits this year.

  A padded winter jacket (warm things too).

  After a moment’s hesitation she adds a pair of plain cotton slippers, passing over another pair that is newer but too big for her now. When she last wore them her feet were freshly bound, the pain a raw shock, a silent scream. The soles are clean because she’d crawled on hands and knees for four months. Still, the training shoes prompt her to remember something else. Turning, she pulls out a pair of shoes wrapped in yellowing tissue. These haven’t touched the ground either. In fact, they’ve never been worn at all. The red silk is intricately embroidered, with rows of Beijing knots plumping out magpies’ breasts. Delicate stem and split stitches outline hills full of peonies. In places the technique is so delicate and skilled that the bare silk is itself a motif. But there is one small patch by the back of the left heel that is blank in a different way. Unintentional; unfinished. A small mouth, crying.

  Xiuqing holds the shoes in her palms. Lifts them a little: one, two. They were made for her wedding day, to flutter over floor and ground. Her mama spoke of this someday wedding nearly every day toward the end, half reclining on her bed. Sewing, knotting, biting. It took Xiuqing a long time to realize that her mother was stitching more than just shoes. She was stitching her daughter a promise: after the binding, the finding. The making of a good match. Your uncle improved his lot with his mind: he learned to read. But a girl’s feet are her best chance to better herself. If we make them small enough, we’ll get our fortunes back. When you’ve grown, when your feet are perfect lilies.

  But Xiuqing’s feet never were perfect lilies. Her mother died before the bones had fully broken to the midwife’s specifications, and she’d lacked the strength, at the end, to make Xiuqing walk upon them properly. By the time Xiuqing reached Zhenjiang, her feet had grown by three full fingers, and she’d lacked the determination to break them back again. The result is that now, when she is fourteen, her feet are even bigger than those the neighborhood grandmothers scornfully call ‘Yangzhou style’ – six inches long, twice the size of the tiny lilies favored by Souzhou’s famed beauties. Bigger feet make for easier walking, of course. But her mother would have been aghast. ‘Sea bass,’ she would have called them. Xiuqing tries not to think about it.

  She can’t help wondering now, however, whether this journey might be about the long-awaited making of a match. Is it possible? Has her odd old uncle actually found someone for her to marry? Xiuqing can’t imagine him living on his own, without her. But she also can’t imagine living here forever. As her mama always said, girls are raised for others…

  In the end she sets the shoes on the ‘pack’ pile, just in case. If she can’t wear them, then at least they’ll bring her luck.

  Sitting back, Xiuqing scans the room for anything else she might need, her gaze coming to rest on her broken looking glass. Her most steadfast companion here, the Mirror Girl, gazes back at her blankly. Her face is pale and slightly square, with a broad forehead and a strong chin. Her eyes are large, heavily lashed, her lips full and fresh, if slow to smile. Xiuqing knows she’s considered pretty. Still all she sees now is a tight-faced, tired-looking girl. ‘We’re going to be fine,’ Xiuqing tells her. ‘This will be an adventure.’

  The girl just stares back, her lips tense with unease.

  At the Royal Britannica Steamship Company’s ticket office the signs are in Roman characters, with smaller Chinese characters beneath and even smaller characters and letters beneath that. All, for Xiuqing, are equally unreadable, although her uncle claims to differentiate between the five foreign languages (in order: English, Japanese, German, French, and ‘possibly American’).

  The yangguizi themselves queue at a window manned by another white devil, and Xiuqing studies them with some interest. The two women in line look nothing like her buxom magazine ladies; they are older, fatter, distinctly less fashionable. One of them returns Xiuqing’s gaze with annoyance. Xiuqing stares right back, with all the impunity of a visitor to a zoo.

  Her uncle edges toward the crowd’s shoreline, describing how they’ll travel. ‘Like the foreigners – like gentry. Two beds, one great window. A lovely view of the water.’ Xiuqing looks at the water, where the stripped hull of an old steamship serves as the landing for the newer one they’ll be taking – the Crying Loon. To Xiuqing, the ship, with its myriad windows and mysterious lack of sails, looks like an enormous honeycomb. Passengers line the railings like indolent bees. Stark-naked coolies tow the huge hulk through the shallows to the makeshift landing, hemp ropes sawing at the sun-darkened skin of their backs. When they’d first arrived, Xiuqing had tried to make out what they looked like from the waist down. She got one glimpse of a purplish, wormlike stretch of dripping flesh before her jiujiu, following her gaze, primly hustled her off toward the office.

  Now, facing her fellow travelers, Xiuqing shifts from foot to foot, trying to ease the cutting itch of her bindings, which she wound extra-tight this morning. ‘Will we really have a window, Uncle?’

  ‘A window!’ he reiterates grandly. ‘The silvery river. The blue of the sky.’ He lights a cigarette, adding, ‘The fresh green face of the new nation.’

  Both the Yangtze and the sky are gray, almost the same color as the pigeons that make feathery lumps both inside and outside the office. To Xiuqing, all three grays are beautiful, in different ways. The cloudbank is blue, white, and black furled together. The Yangtze is a thick flow of gray-gold. Even the pigeons hint at gleaming rainbows: aqua, violet, jade green, as though their drab feathers hide jewels.

  Uncle Wu stands and stares at the three lines, fingering his spectacles. Finally he throws back his shoulders and leads them into the crowd, which sucks them in. Everyone seems to be shouting, a dozen dialects melding into a single singsong wail: Walawala, wa-la. Xiuqing feels elbows, backs, ribs pressing against her. The man behind her has just eaten salted fish, perhaps with old beer. She breathes through her mouth and looks at him from the corner of her eyes. It’s a soldier, just a few years older than she. Perhaps the age of her soon-to-be fiancé. He is wearing a khaki vest cut in a Western style but the pigtail and ballooning pants of the old imperial army. Xiuqing wonders whether he is being called to Nanjing. Her uncle has told her about the fighting there. One side fights for China’s provisional premier, Yuan Shikai, whom Uncle Wu hates. The other is fighting for something called either parliamentary procedure or electoral outcome, terms her jiujiu won’t clarify because as an opium addict he was barred from voting.

  When the soldier catches Xiuqing’s eye and grins, Xiuqing feels herself flush. She pushes ahead to escape his stare, but the surging crowd pushes him forward right along with her. Soon she feels his hand brushing her back. Then dropping a little bit lower. Then lower still. Then – he does it so quickly and assuredly that at first she’s not even sure she’s reading her own body correctly – it’s deftly nestled between her thighs.

  There.

  He doesn’t leer; doesn’t even acknowledge her shock. He acts as though this were simply ticket-crowd custom. Is it? Xiuqing wonders. What do people do in situations like this? If she were Washing Silk Woman from the Tales of Honorable and Virtuous Women, she would throw herself in the river. But then again, the river looks very dirty. And while the ancien
ts may have lauded Washing Silk Woman’s chasteness (for the soldier merely spoke to her; he never even touched her!), Xiuqing senses somehow that her uncle wouldn’t feel the same way.

  She twitches her hips tentatively, but the hand just wedges further into the split of her buttocks. Finally she puts her own small hand behind her and presses back. A gruff chuckle; another blast of salty fish-breath. Eventually the hand moves away. But her backside quivers with shame.

  ‘Almost there,’ her jiujiu calls back encouragingly. ‘First class awaits!’

  In the end, however, both first and second class prove too expensive. ‘They’ve raised it,’ huffs her uncle. ‘Must be all these rich foreigners.’ They travel third class, deep within the steamer’s windowless hull, boxed in like steaming dumplings. Their only access to the water is a small rear deck barely the size of a small courtyard, its floor coated with hardened phlegm and ossified seagull excretions. ‘Perfect,’ Wu Ding mutters, staking out their small space on the floor. ‘Room to breathe here. Near the water. More than fine.’ He rolls out a blanket and anchors it with shoes. One of the pairs is his. The other is Xiuqing’s. Not the wedding slippers, of course. Xiuqing knows little of opium, but she knows enough about her uncle to know that he wouldn’t see what she does: a mother’s failing fingers, the lush thread-gardens they’d tended. He’d see pellets of opium balls, stacked up like a stagnant black mountain.

  Even now, in fact, Wu Ding’s eyes rove the crowd restlessly: he must not have much opium left. It occurs to Xiuqing that she may lose him for the night. The thought terrifies her even more than that of sleeping beside him directly, without their customary wall between them. In this room full of mostly men, she feels like a peach without its skin. Get him to talk, she thinks. ‘Jiujiu. I’ve a question.’