The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  ‘I may have said that,’ he says, clearly pleased by this evidence of the weight of his own words. ‘Although this city’s reporters are often even greater fabricators than its painters.’ He tosses his cigar to the ground. ‘The truth, though, is that today’s results aren’t about revolution. They’re about history. There are those on my staff who claim that women students are more distraction than boon here. They take criticism badly and drop out the minute they marry or decide to have a baby. In fact, the last one here left for no better reason than that she was upset by the nude models. Even more than the boys were.’ He snorts. ‘Which is saying quite a lot.’

  Yuliang pulls herself up stiffly. ‘I’m not like that.’

  He looks at her closely. ‘Tell me how you’re different.’

  Because, she thinks, it will take more than a pair of bare breasts or a jade gate to make me weep. And because I’ve seen more nudes, in more positions and indignities imaginable, than you or your precious boys will see in their whole lives. Even if they are lucky.

  But what she says is simply, ‘I’m better.’

  Is she imagining it, or do his eyes take on a keener gleam? ‘Better than the women who’ve come before you?’

  ‘Better than most students. Men or women.’

  It is an indefensible show of arrogance. But as Yuliang watches Liu Haisu react – thinking, looking her over, then finally nodding – she knows again that she has played the moment correctly. Tapping his chin, the principal glances back at the bulletin board, then at the place where the Bentley was parked. ‘We certainly have space for one more now,’ he says at last, a little ruefully. ‘And though I’m younger than many here, I am still principal.’

  ‘So…’ Yuliang hardly dares push her luck further. But he still hasn’t answered her question. ‘So I’m in?’

  He looks her in the eye, then bows a sweeping, theatrical bow. ‘You are welcome, Madame Pan, at my poor little school. May you not live to regret it.’

  PART SIX

  The Academy

  Renoir is vulgar, Cézanne is shallow, Matisse is inferior.

  Xu Beihong

  24

  The women recline in postures of rest and gossip, bodies gleaming with scented oils and soaps. Yuliang, huddled behind a bath bench, surveys them tensely, a huntress stalking her quarry.

  She sizes up the young girl who stands as slimly straight as a sapling, as well as the stooped grandmother scrubbing her skin six shades of pink. She examines the two middle-aged women who chat in the corner, rubbing rough spots on their heels and elbows with rice cloth. One is thin and sinewy. The other’s twice as broad. Her thighs, breasts, and belly are textured with accumulated fat. Put together and divided evenly (Yuliang ungenerously thinks), they’d both be of average size and weight. Then there’s the girl with the slim wrists and the serious gaze who smiled at Yuliang in the dressing room. She seems young, and has brought a book in with her despite what the steamy air must do to the pages.

  Trying to choose just one suddenly seems harder than doing the drawing itself. Why? Yuliang wonders, pulling her pencil out from its hiding place. They’re all women, after all. So what makes them seem so different? And why does she automatically think of one version as pretty and the others plain or even ugly? And does she – in the end, merely another woman – really have the power to change that perception, with little more than her bare, damp hands?

  Liu Haisu clearly thinks so. ‘It’s your job,’ he told students during his commencement speech for this, Yuliang’s second year at the Shanghai Art Academy, ‘to challenge the assumptions of your viewers. To take a dead flower and show us its hidden life. To take an ugly woman and show us the beauty in her ugliness.’ He neglected to talk about painting men – presumably because he, like everyone else, seems to think it’s somehow even more scandalous to paint them naked than women. At least for women. Male-study classes, therefore, are open to male students only. As annoyed by this as Yuliang is (though she can hardly say so in public – they whisper enough about her as it is), she knows that it’s not purely an Eastern phenomenon. Caillebotte’s Man at His Bath, after all, shows just the barest dangle of scrotum, yet was considered so shocking in Belgium that it was first exhibited in its very own closet.

  Now, keeping her motions quiet, Yuliang unwraps the rest of her materials from the towel in which she’s smuggled them. Then she turns, surveying the women again. The easy thing, of course, would be simply to pick someone randomly and draw her – quickly, accurately, coldly. The way she always draws her nudes. But today she’s after more than mere accuracy and form. She’s here to capture something Teacher Hong calls the life force – which, for all her skill, seems to elude Yuliang in the classroom. Session after session, she has thrown herself into her nude sketches. But while her nudes are anatomically correct, something is missing.

  ‘Stop thinking of them as just skin,’ Teacher Hong suggested last week in a turn of phrase that brought Jinling suddenly and stingingly to Yuliang’s mind. And Yuliang has tried to stop. And yet even her best nudes seem to come out as just that – skin. Stiff, flat forms, devoid of spirit and life.

  The thought of the bathhouse struck last week, when Teacher Hong brought in a sketch to show the room. ‘I found this in Paris last year,’ he told them. ‘Note the lines, both strong and alive. Always remember that it’s lines, not detail, that are the key. The great Spaniard Picasso once spent months sketching just one cow. Not embellishing it, mind you, but stripping away. In the end the cow was no more than three or four strokes. But it was far more striking than it would have been were it drawn in the detailed style of, say, the Victorian animal artist Landseer.’

  ‘Is this a Picasso?’ someone asked.

  ‘Do you think I could afford Picasso? On the dogshit they pay me here?’ Teacher Hong retorted. As the chuckles subsided, he added, ‘No. It’s a woman’s work. A Valadon. I found it at a little gallery in Montmartre. Was there a question, or were you ladies just exchanging cooking tips?’

  He looked pointedly at the two other girls in the classroom, who as usual were whispering together. One of them rolled her eyes. The daughter of a wealthy comprador, she frequently boasts about her Western travels. She also makes pointed comments about ‘decent women.’

  ‘Apologies, teacher,’ she said now. ‘But isn’t it true that Valadon was a whore?’

  ‘It is true that she is untutored and was once very poor. But these things don’t make her a whore.’

  ‘Then she was just a pretty woman who used her wiles to seduce her teachers. And salon judges.’

  Around the room, a chorus of smothered laughter. Yuliang felt eyes dart to her, then back. She has no idea how many here know anything of her past, but it seems clear that rumors about it abound.

  The teacher, however, frowned. ‘On the contrary. In many ways she shows us the truth of Lao Tzu’s philosophy: she turned her weaknesses into strength. She used the one asset she could to enter the art world – her beauty. In modeling, she earned the friendship of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, who saw past her body to her significant talent. She also worked extremely hard – something some at this school clearly don’t put much stock in… Madame Pan.’

  He’d reached Yuliang’s desk by this point. Much to her surprise, he put the Valadon squarely before her. ‘You in particular might benefit from a closer look at this. Go ahead,’ he prompted as Yuliang hesitated. ‘Take a good look.’

  Yuliang looked. The Frenchwoman’s charcoal had captured a young girl in a tin tub, half kneeling, as Christians do in prayer. But in this case the pose seemed openly sensual: the curve of the girl’s shoulder, the wet tendrils of her hair seemed to beckon the viewer to come closer, to touch her. Tracing the strong lines with her finger, Yuliang realized Teacher Hong was right. The portrait’s strength wasn’t its physical accuracy; it was something more elusive. The way the artist had created not a picture but a girl. A girl utterly unaware of her portraitist or viewers.

  A girl simply… taking a
bath.

  ‘You’ll have to lift your head. I’ll never get this horse’s mane clean otherwise.’

  The girl obeys, squeezing her eyes shut as the grandmother ladles water over her head. The liquid transforms the hair into a shining sheet of black, reaching smoothly to the backs of the young woman’s knees. She waits quietly through the subsequent lather and rinse, one hand draped over her bare breasts.

  Watching from her hiding spot, Yuliang feels her breath catch. It’s not just that the girl is lovely, or that her slender shoulders remind her of Jinling. It’s that as a subject, she is perfect. Perfect. Her skin is smooth, her pose natural and youthfully assured. She’s like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. In a bathhouse.

  The sketchbook paper is now pulpy with steam. Still, Yuliang draws quickly, her lines as simple and firm as they are in her calligraphy. She works for perhaps a half-hour, oblivious of the women’s chatter and banter, eventually even of her own location, so that when water splashes her pad she ignores it at first.

  Then another drop falls, and another. She finally looks up to see that a muscular woman with deep frown lines is standing over her.

  ‘Hey!’ the woman says loudly. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Behind her, the chatter stops abruptly. ‘What is it, sister?’ someone asks.

  ‘This steaming ox vagina is drawing us, is what!’ the woman retorts. ‘Naked!’

  Pulling Yuliang up roughly by her arm, she snatches the sketchbook away. The other women clamber from their baths. ‘Where?’ they cry. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Here!’ The woman thrusts the sketchbook forward, tightening her grip on Yuliang’s arm with the other hand. ‘She was probably planning to sell it down the block.’

  Yuliang tries to shake herself free. ‘I wasn’t –’ she starts. She doesn’t get further before the women congregate around her. With their bath brushes and prunelike fingers, they point and scrabble. ‘Take her towel!’ shrieks one. ‘She’s probably a man in disguise!’

  ‘Or a white ant,’ hisses the grandmother, thrusting her pretty granddaughter behind her. ‘That’s how it starts. Dirty pictures first. Then the brothel! I’ve seen it happen myself.’

  ‘This is crazy.’ Pulling her towel around herself more tightly, Yuliang begins edging toward the changing quarters. But the women block her, jostling her instead toward the reception area.

  ‘Lao Chen!’ calls the mannish woman. ‘Help! An attacker!’

  ‘Please,’ Yuliang says, watching her precious sketchbook pass from hand to dripping hand. ‘I’m a student at the art academy. I was just trying to practice –’

  ‘The art academy!’ The first woman reaches for her towel, tugs it. ‘Tell me, should I draw you naked now?’

  ‘No – no! Take her photograph! We could sell that for a pretty cent!’ shrills another.

  Most of the women fall back as they approach the beaded curtain that marks off the front entrance. But the short-haired woman, now Yuliang’s self-appointed warden, marches right on and hustles Yuliang out into the front room. ‘Lao Chen!’ she calls again. ‘If you please! I’ve got her!’

  ‘What? What’s this now?’ The clerk, a burly man, stands up.

  ‘Dirty pictures!’ the woman crows, thrusting Yuliang’s sketchbook at him. ‘Look! She drew Sumei without a stitch of clothing!’

  ‘I didn’t! Or at least…’ Yuliang clutches her towel as it slips. ‘Please, sir. I keep telling them. I meant no harm. I’m a student at the art academy. I was just trying –’

  The man looks Yuliang up and down suspiciously. ‘I thought it was just boys there,’ he says darkly.

  ‘There are three girls now,’ Yuliang mumbles (thinking, Unless they expel me.) ‘Please. I – I didn’t think anyone would mind.’

  ‘I think perhaps the constable would mind,’ snaps the woman. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Shall I fetch him?’ asks the clerk eagerly. ‘You’re – you’re not quite dressed for it, Chung Ma. If you’ll pardon my saying this.’

  ‘No!’ Yuliang blanches. She can already see Zanhua, reading the headlines. ‘Please,’ she says, her voice climbing now, ‘you can’t do this. I meant no harm…’

  The beaded curtains part again, this time for the young girl Yuliang had noticed earlier. Like the others, she has a towel wrapped around her slight form now. But she still holds her damp red book in one hand. ‘Hold on a moment, Chung Ma,’ she says to the older woman. ‘I’d like to speak with her first.’

  The short-haired woman hesitates. ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘I was a student there too. At the academy. So I’ll know if she’s telling the truth.’ The girl puts a hand on the woman’s shoulder. Her towel slips precariously. But if she notices this, she doesn’t care. ‘Chung Ma, don’t you recognize me? I was the one who helped you last month. With the constable.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the woman says stiffly.

  ‘When your boy was almost arrested for stealing?’ the girl prompts. ‘And you needed someone to read the charges against him? The New People’s Society sent me.’

  ‘He didn’t steal!’ the older woman says hotly. ‘That coal dropped from the cart, fair and square. It was ours to sell.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ the girl says soothingly. ‘And we told the police that together, didn’t we?’ The woman nods grudgingly. ‘Just think,’ the girl goes on. ‘What if you call the constable now and our sister here is telling the truth as well? What if she truly meant no harm and you have her sent to jail? You know what that feels like. To be wrongly accused.’

  For a moment the woman hesitates. Then she nods. ‘All right. She can go back in with you. But I go too. And if she’s lying…’

  ‘I’m not lying!’ Yuliang protests, as the woman takes her arm and marches her back in (as if that had been her plan all along).

  Back inside the bathhouse, the other bathers form a small ring around the trio: Yuliang, her accuser, her unexpected defender. ‘You say you’re from the academy,’ the latter starts, picking up the sketchbook. ‘Who are your teachers?’

  ‘Teacher Hong has been my adviser. I’ve had Teacher Li for landscapes, Teacher Jiang for still life. This term I’m studying with Professor Hong for life study.’

  The girl’s eyes narrow. ‘Life study,’ she repeats. ‘And Teacher Hong. He told you to come here and draw naked women?’

  ‘He told me I needed practice.’

  The girl waves her sketchbook. ‘Practice in this sort of exploitative, bourgeois art form.’

  Behind them, Sumei whispers in a frightened voice, ‘What’s bourgeois, Nainai?’ Yuliang blinks. ‘It’s not exploitative.’

  But the girl shakes her head. ‘Of course it is. Real art shouldn’t just be about soothing the senses, or heating the blood with images of pretty naked girls. It should further the plight of the poor. The oppressed.’ She eyes Yuliang skeptically. ‘Something I doubt you know much about.’

  ‘I know more than you think,’ Yuliang says coldly.

  ‘This misses the point!’ someone shouts. ‘Why not just draw at the school?’

  ‘I do. But there are just not enough models.’

  ‘So why not sneak into the men’s bathhouse?’ A small wave of titters.

  ‘Anyway, she is being truthful.’ The former academy student turns to the group, sketchbook in hand. ‘Although she certainly isn’t being clever. Sisters, how about a deal? If she tears up the drawing, will you let her go?’

  ‘What if there are more?’ the grandmother asks. ‘She was over there long enough.’

  ‘She didn’t get a chance to do more.’ The girl holds up the sketchbook.

  ‘She could have,’ Chung Ma insists. ‘She could have drawings of all of us.’

  ‘Where?’ Yuliang cries. ‘Under my towel?’

  The woman just juts her chin. With an apologetic shrug, the girl turns back to Yuliang. ‘You’ll have to show them.’

  Sighing, Yuliang parts her towel, subjecting hersel
f to their scrutiny until they’re satisfied. The girl hands Yuliang her sketchbook. ‘Just the one page,’ she murmurs. ‘Rip it up so they can all see it.’

  ‘Wait!’ It’s Sumei. Timidly, the young girl steps forward. ‘Can I…’

  ‘Little Su!’ the grandmother hisses.

  But Yuliang has already handed the book over. She waits with odd anxiety as subject studies image. A vision comes: herself, shivering nude in another bathing room. But when the girl looks up again, she seems less frightened than awed.

  ‘I look like that?’

  ‘You look even better,’ Yuliang says gently. ‘That’s why I need more practice.’

  The girl’s eyes widen. ‘If you need practice, I could –’

  ‘Enough,’ the short-haired woman bellows. ‘Sumei, seal your lips. And give me that filth.’ She twitches the sketch away and hands it to Yuliang. ‘Get rid of it. Now.’

  I’m sorry, Yuliang tells the girl silently. And without looking away, she rips the smudged paper in half. Then into quarters.

  A short, damp silence follows. Then the former art student nods. ‘That’s it,’ she says. ‘Let’s all get back to our business, shall we?’

  The women disperse to their buckets and benches. Before leaving, however, the short-haired one leans over. ‘Fortune was with you today,’ she hisses. ‘But if you ever come back here, you’ll be sorry your mother – whom you’ve so unspeakably shamed – went through the misery of having you at all.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what you were thinking.’

  Back in the changing room, the girl unfolds her high-necked jacket and trousers. ‘They’re good women. And honest. The short-haired one was a farmer. Prosperous once, too. Since the famine hit, though, she’s made her living begging and selling coal her sons sneak away from the railroad companies.’

  ‘So they did steal!’