The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Despite herself Yuliang stiffens, thinking of her mother. Her long, artful fingers, her glorious threaded gardens. It isn’t like assembling a Renault, she wants to tell him.

  ‘Of course,’ he says, misinterpreting her expression, ‘if that’s not what you want –’

  ‘No!’ Yuliang forces a smile. ‘It’s – it’s so much more than I deserve. I’d be so grateful…’

  He nods beneficently. ‘All I’d ask in return is that you keep me in mind if you happen to meet anyone useful.’

  ‘Useful?’

  ‘Oh, critics. Important painters. No picture dealers, though. If you ask me, their goal’s to squeeze the life from art as we all know it.’ Scanning the room, his face suddenly brightens. ‘Allo! Fujita!’ he shouts at a couple that’s just been seated. The darker and more diminutive of the women turns to face them, and it’s only then that Yuliang sees that it isn’t a woman at all. It is, rather, an Oriental with a severe haircut, owlish glasses, and glittering golden hoops in each ear. He waves back at Xu Beihong, then turns back to his companion. ‘Fujita Tsuguharu,’ Beihong offers, turning back to face her.

  ‘That’s Fujita?’ The man, Yuliang notes, is also wearing lipstick. Expensive lipstick, from the look of it.

  ‘In the flesh, as they say. He calls himself Leonard Foujita here.’ Xu signals the waiter. ‘His painting’s a bit bland for me. Lots of skinny girls and cats. But his lines are lovely. And of course he’s very well connected.’

  He is also clearly successful. As Yuliang watches enviously, the Japanese artist picks several tarts from a passing pastry cart. To her horror her own stomach growls. She crosses her arms over it quickly.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Xu Beihong is watching her with amusement.

  ‘What? Oh. Of course.’ She fights back a flush. ‘I was thinking about that old saying. About not being able to draw a cake and eat it too.’

  He grunts. ‘One of Biwei’s favorites. I heard it often in Berlin.’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  Xu Beihong pulls his fragile frame slightly straighter. ‘That if I give up my art, I’ll end up eating my dreams. And dead dreams are worse than hunger. They’re poison.’

  He holds her gaze for a moment. Then he licks his teaspoon, crunching its last granules of sugar with clear relish.

  30

  It is not quite eight-thirty, and the door to the Ampitheatre d’Honneur has been left very slightly ajar. Sounds of morning setup echo into the Cour Vitrée: easels clatter, stools shriek across the warped wooden floor. ‘Alors,’ someone scoffs. ‘That’s the boy? Looks more like a monkey.’

  ‘More like your sweetheart, you mean.’ The second voice is deep, full of soft consonants and silky vowels. Yuliang recognizes an Italian whom she often works beside in session.

  ‘Which sweetheart?’ says the Frenchman. ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Vaffuncuolo! Vai in culo!’

  Yuliang, standing outside with the other alternates, stifles a tired smile. She doesn’t know what the Roman said, of course. But it sounded quite satisfyingly like a curse. She senses that she would like Italy.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ A third voice now: it’s Vincent, the professor’s assistant, charged with collecting the monthly fees, calling out the rest and pose times for the models, and in general maintaining the atelier’s order. ‘If you insist on fisticuffs, please go over to Julian’s,’ he says, referring to the cheaper – and famously rowdier – atelier across town. ‘Otherwise, please shake hands and resume painting.’ He returns to roll call: ‘Baudin!’

  ‘Oui.’ Coins clink. The fee, three hundred francs, is a full three quarters of the allowance Zanhua sends her: paying it, Yuliang always feels a swell of frustration at how little it leaves her for the next four weeks. Even more frustrating is the fact that, as dear as the money is, it’s no guarantee that she’ll get into session – even though she’s usually first in the alternate line. Which is no easy task in itself: faced with reading assignments that often take her days to translate, as well as the embroidery assignments Xu Beihong’s wife passes over to her every few weeks, Yuliang frequently doesn’t sleep until three or four in the morning.

  Worse than sleeplessness, though, is hunger. She survives on a pauper’s diet: coffee, day-old bread, the occasional bruised, discounted fruit. Thanks to soaring postwar inflation and the weakening yuan against the franc, Yuliang has even had to sacrifice her monthly Métropolitain rides. Now she walks to the Chinese legation, on shoes with soles that have given way to holes and patches made of cut-up canvases. It comes as little surprise, then, that exhaustion, like hunger, is mated to her; that she paints in a kind of giddy fog. Still, walking gives her time to look about her. And hunger adds a poignant glow to the city’s already ethereal beauty. The sheer number of styles and schools and eras of Paris’s famed architecture baffled her at the start. But at the same time it charmed her; the way each architectural thought seemed perfectly harmonized with its surroundings. It’s a marked contrast to Lyon’s low-lying urban sprawl. Or Shanghai’s Bund, where old and the new clash against the shoreline, bickering members of some enormous concrete clan.

  But most of all, of course, there is art.

  Art is everywhere here: sedately hung in the city’s musées, blaring in crowded color in galleries and exhibitions. It beckons from cathedral alcoves and dangles from café walls, its tones darkened by smoke and kitchen grease. In her first week in Paris Yuliang all but lived at the Louvre, sketching until her neck ached and her eyes smarted. Her feet and legs throbbed from all the walking and standing. But she tackled each style in turn: classic, Renaissance, realist. Romantic. She stared for hours at the brilliant blues and gilded ochers of Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin; at Corot’s frayed and tender Woman with a Pearl. In China, she wrote to Zanhua, such works would be locked away in the mansions and palaces. Here they are strung up like peppers drying for the winter! Anyone with five centimes can come see them, sketch them. Do anything, in fact, but touch them.

  She can see, too, how Teacher Hong was so tempted, as he’d told her, to reach out and connect with such wonders. And yet Yuliang doesn’t need to touch them. Just as she doesn’t need guides or teachers to articulate dryly why these works matter so supremely. Every time she copies from Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (admired by Cézanne, Matisse, and Titian) she comes away more in awe of the Umbrian’s skills, of his controlled lines, his expert shadows and blending. At two paces, the work embraces her as powerfully as any living man.

  Although of course she doesn’t write this to Zanhua. Not just because it would seem hurtful, but because she’s given up trying to communicate in writing the way such works make her feel. It’s like trying to define the undefinable: infinity, enlightenment. It’s like trying to put true words to love.

  Instead, she sketches him little pictures of vistas and monuments: the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré Coeur, the Luxembourg Gardens. She writes that she misses him, and this of course is true. There is no one here, she writes, who knows me as you do… I missed you at sunset last night, walking home. You would have enjoyed the sights… I spent last night reading the book of poetry you gave me and drinking wine. I very much miss playing our poetry game together… But even as she writes these things, and addresses the letters in two different languages, and carries them to the legation for expedited posting, another hangnail of guilt snags. For the bigger truth, the overriding truth, is that she’s not merely happy here.

  It is that she has never been happier.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Yuliang drops her gaze from the courtyard’s iron and glass rooftop. Her friend Fan Junbi is peering at her with concern. ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Why?’

  ‘You were swaying again. And your eyes look… odd. Red.’

  ‘I think I’m tired. I had to embroider until nearly two last night, and then translate that piece for art history.’

  ‘Oh, Yuliang. You know you could have read my translation. It takes
me half the time it takes you.’

  This is true. And yet Yuliang shakes her head. ‘I need to do it myself.’

  ‘You,’ Junbi pronounces, ‘are as stubborn as a water buffalo.’ She reaches into her bag. ‘What were you embroidering?’

  ‘Men’s silk cravats. Le Louvre, Paris, 1924.’ Yuliang holds up her fingers morosely: they are dotted with tiny sores. ‘I lost my thimble, too. I practically sewed it into my own skin.’

  ‘Eat this.’ Junbi pulls out a small package. Inside the folded newsprint is a croissant: the scent hits Yuliang like a waft from heaven. It is every bit as rich and light as one of Van Gogh’s glowing wheatfields. ‘The baker gave us a dozen of them at closing yesterday,’ her friend says.

  ‘But you should keep it,’ Yuliang protests. ‘You have more mouths to feed.’

  Junbi, who has been in France for nearly a decade, lives with her husband (a rising star in the Republican Party) as well as her young son and one surviving sister. The other, an early anti-Qing revolutionary, was beheaded during the first rebellion. ‘We have too many,’ she says. ‘I’ll bring another for you tomorrow.’

  Gratefully, Yuliang rewraps the little parcel. She’s hungry enough to eat it now, but food isn’t allowed in session. And she certainly doesn’t want to jeopardize her hard-earned position in line by greeting Vincent with a mouthful of crumbs.

  At 8:45, Vincent appears with his clipboard and his hat. ‘Alors,’ he says. ‘Many people are under the weather again today, it seems. Pay November’s masse, and you all get to work.’ To Yuliang, he says, ‘Ahead of the crowd again, Mademoiselle Pan.’

  ‘Madame,’ Yuliang reminds him. ‘I get up early out of habit,’ she adds, trying both to summon and to translate that old saying about rice fields and dawn, before deciding that she’s too tired. Instead she hands over her handful of mixed bills and coins.

  To her surprise, however, Vincent pulls the tin away. ‘Vous savez,’ he says quietly, ‘if you need the money you can hold off. Pay me later.’

  Yuliang looks at him warily, wondering whether he’s taunting her – or, worse, trying to seduce her, as he tried to once last term. This time, though, his gray eyes reflect only honest sympathy. ‘Maître Simon gives me license to help those who need it. But don’t worry. We keep a record.’ He grins. ‘You can repay us when you become rich and famous.’

  For a moment, Yuliang actually lets herself consider it. Three hundred francs would mean the new tube of cadmium green she’s been putting off buying. She could replace her easel, which has lost several screws and totters slightly when she strokes too heavily on the right. And of course there’s the new winter hat she’s wanted. Perhaps a felt derby with a feather or sparkling brooch. She would wear it low, to accent her self-trimmed fringe, and to keep her ears warm in the winter wind…

  But even as she weighs the option, a thick and oversweet voice seems to breathe into her inner ear: Pretty, isn’t it? You can buy it. I’ll just add it to the black book.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says curtly. And drops the money in the tin.

  Inside the amphitheater the mood has settled. Students work in an absorbed semicircle around the nude’s block, their easels lined up against worn tape marks on the floor. Sunlight spills through the high windows, illuminating tin cans of brushes and flat glass palettes as well as the impressive frescoes on the walls – life-sized portraits of seventy-five of the West’s greatest figures in art. All (Yuliang noted immediately) are men; the only females are those depicted by Delaroche as the four great art periods: Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Renaissance. There is also la Génie des Art, buxom and bare-breasted, distributing laurel crowns to the men who flank her. The painting, rendered in wax, still bears the mark of a fire eighty years earlier, which melted the genie’s navel and streaked Renaissance’s face with glutinous, soot-toned tears.

  Still, as always when setting up, Yuliang finds her spirits rising. She devours these hours as she once devoured the sweets her uncle splurged on, usually after an unexplained absence. ‘Your veins must be filled with sweet bean paste instead of blood,’ her jiujiu would joke. ‘I’ve never seen such a greedy little demon.’ She never told him, of course, that such bingeing stemmed not from greed but practicality: too many of Wu Ding’s gifts vanished, once sobriety and debt cast their long shadows in the daylight.

  Now, using her brush, Yuliang checks her angle against the model, whom Vincent pokes and prods so his member falls as it did yesterday. In the beginning, such sights so mortified one other Chinese student that she actually fled the room. Yuliang, though, feels less discomposure than sheer sympathy for the boy. He can’t (she reflects) be here by choice – he’s no more than fourteen, an age at which (as Yuliang knows only too well) offering up one’s body for inspection isn’t easy. His slumped form, the shoulders newly broad but the chest still bare of manly hair, strikes her as a study in conflict; like the full lips shadowed with the mocking down of adolescence. It is these contrasts, she decides now, that she wants to capture in her painting: the battling forces of vulnerability and manhood. The simultaneous dread of and longing for adulthood.

  Unsheeting her palette, Yuliang takes a moment – only one – to reflect on the fact that she herself never harbored such conflict. That her childhood was stripped away with such brutal efficacy that she barely noticed that her wounds had left her a woman. She doesn’t, however, linger on this. As she once told her husband, we are rooted in the present. And at this particular present, for better or for worse, there is no place she would rather be.

  She dips her brush in Venetian red, and begins.

  31. Paris, 1925

  May arrives overnight, touching the Luxembourg Gardens with soft shades of pink and violet and green. But while fresh blooms materialize, Yuliang’s monthly allowance does not.

  The last she’d heard from Zanhua was a telegram in late March, sent shortly after Sun Yat-sen’s sudden death: The loss of the general is a disaster. Am being reassigned to Nanjing. Will send details and monies when settled.

  But that was more than five weeks ago. There has been nothing since. And there have been no further notes from Xu Beihong’s wife, offering work. Down to her last few centimes, Yuliang waits – and worries: she has only one month left in the Beaux Arts program, but even if Zanhua’s allowance arrives, she’ll barely make masse. The heel on her Mary Janes has broken, forcing her to buy cheap new shoes. At twenty francs, they all but clean out her grocery budget.

  She eats the last of her canned sardines and peaches, her boiled eggs and dried macaroni, before resorting to a stealthier subsistence: secreting away hors d’oeuvres at art openings. Collecting bruised apples left behind by the vendors at day’s end. Sometimes, even rescuing brioches left for pigeons in the parks. Yuliang has always been a selective eater, if for no other reason than that she’s had so little choice in other matters. Now, though, sheer hunger drives her to eat anything. Her mouth even waters at the crumbling gray cheese that looks like plaster and smells of used foot-bindings.

  Happily, the warming weather makes at least a few things easier. It nullifies the need for charcoal at night, and graces her easel with longer, richer light. The outdoor diners who flock to the Rues Montparnasse and Vavin often leave bread and scraps on their tables. Following Xu Beihong’s example, Yuliang spirits these away, always keeping a sharp eye out for waiters. She still rebuffs Vincent’s offer to defer paying masse. But she does allow him to give her food left over from the still-life displays. She makes the orange an appetizer. The pear is the main dish; she cuts into sheer slices with her palette knife.

  As the days drag by, the hunger worsens. But she tries to tell herself that it’s no worse than a cold or a headache. That there will be plenty of time to eat later, when she’s back home. She reminds herself of her mama’s tales of eating bark, and dust. She tries to treat the sensations of starvation – the dull ache replacing her gut, the blurred vision, the starlike sparks that perpetually seem to orbit its periphery – as a luxury: as sensat
ions, after all, they are far preferable to many she was forced to live through at the Hall. And besides, there are so many other things to fill her attention: her slow mastery of painting with the tip of her knife, and of pointillism. Of fauvist coloration. The endless array of masters waiting at the Louvre. Most encouragingly, there is Lucien Simon’s recent and unexpected encouragement for her to submit to the Salon d’Automne.

  The maître, a known champion of both women and foreign students, stopped by her easel recently on one of his leisurely ambles around the room, during which he critiques each student’s work in turn. With most he corrects and counters; picking up a paintbrush or a maulstick to highlight an eye or a dark pleat. But when he arrived at Yuliang’s painting, a sober-toned Mary Magdalene based on a plaster cast of the Michelangelo sculpture, Lucien Simon simply watched, his long fingers stroking his carefully trimmed goatee.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked at last, pointing to one of Yuliang’s three central colors.

  ‘Cadmium yellow, mixed with white and phthalo green.’

  He nodded. ‘Not so far off. And where will the cheekbone be?’

  She indicated a slanting line just beneath one of Mary’s sad eyes.

  ‘Excellent. You must always be looking for the bone.’

  With a nod, the maître moved on to the next student. After class, however, he pulled Yuliang aside. ‘Your work is quite distinctive. Have you considered submitting it to the salon?’

  ‘Me?’ she asked, astounded.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so surprised. Your paintings have exoticism, a fresh face. They are looking for such things these days.’

  Yuliang left the seminar that day in an even greater haze than usual. But despite his encouragement, she can’t settle on a subject. Every idea that comes seems neither exotic nor fresh enough to satisfy her, let alone the salon judges. More disturbingly, her mind and eyes are beginning to betray her. In class, she has difficulty distinguishing between the simple tones on her palette. Her productivity drops. She can’t concentrate in session. She sits through lectures and seminars in a fog, penciling in notes – sensi-bilité moderne, le fruit defendu dans le paradis, les ouvriers se font passer pour des bourgeoises – in a blurring mélange of French and Chinese which later confounds her completely.