The Painter of Shanghai

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  Finally, one day, while she is working on a still life in class – a teal vase filled with velvet-petaled roses – the room starts to reel in concert around her. When Yuliang drops her gaze the worn pine floorboards lurch toward her. Their age-old tape marks and splatters of ink black, Canton rose, Egyptian violet bleed and recede, then abruptly rush forward again, to blanket her in a rainbow of darkness.

  She wakes slick with sweat, in her own small bed. A metal pot of some sort has been left on her painting table. So has some wine, some bread and cheese, and a short note in French:

  The doctor said you simply need nutrition and rest. Please stay

  home Monday. I promise that you can make up the time later.

  Vincent

  Yuliang rises and lifts the lid on the pot. Fat has congealed like wax over the beans. But the mere smell of it – salt and meat, lard and garlic – cramps her stomach in anticipation.

  It’s not until she replaces the lid that she spots the letter lying next to it, in the familiar yellow envelope sealed with an Anhui Prefecture seal. A note is jotted directly on the envelope: Have sent your allowance, it reads. Check with funds manager at legation.

  For several moments she just stares at it. Then she picks up her jade letter opener and breaks the red wax of the seal. Carefully, she slides free Zanhua’s note.

  Its contents are nothing unusual: complaints about incompetent superiors, delayed paychecks and office intrigue; updates on the ongoing antiwarlord campaigns; musings over the power struggle between right and left that has emerged following Sun Yat-sen’s death. The latter, Zanhua writes, is largely the reason he was passed over for another promotion. Which was just as well, he adds. The supervisor is both corrupt and inept. And at least now I can focus on our new home and on Guanyin’s health.

  At the characters for Guanyin, Yuliang catches her breath: it’s the first time Zanhua has mentioned his first wife by name in two years. It is also the first concrete confirmation of something Yuliang has long suspected: that they are finally living together.

  Stunned, she traces the characters with her fingertip, remembering the expressionless girl in the matchmaker’s photograph. When Yuliang had first heard her name (Guanyin! Goddess of Mercy!), she’d actually laughed. Now, though, an emptiness seems to spread through her, bleak and damp-fingered, and utterly unrelated to her hunger.

  She fully realizes that the insertion of Guanyin’s name is far from casual. It is, rather, the iceberg’s tip; a tiny, deliberate hint of the enormous and icy discontent that lies just below the short letter’s blithe surface. And the picture it paints could not be clearer. Zanhua’s attempts to advance himself are being rebuffed. He can no longer afford a big house. The wife who doesn’t suit him is sick – apparently sick enough for clinic visits – which must be why he has finally moved her into his home. Moreover, Yuliang knows his son is attending an elite private school, adding yet more financial pressure. The note’s true message might just as well be scrawled on her own wall in large red characters: I need you, Little Yu. Come home.

  Yuliang reaches for the wine. Using the same jade opener, she breaks the red wax at its neck and uncorks the bottle. As she drinks, she thinks of her husband’s long fingers, his lush-lashed eyes. She feels the force of his longing – a husband’s longing. A reasonable longing. And she is deeply, unspeakably ashamed. For what she feels in return is not a reciprocal love or gratitude. It is something entirely different: apprehension.

  The sun is setting now. Outside shops are shuttered. Bells toll. A whore barters harshly with a client. Two of the unlikely foursome who live a floor up – a red-faced Russian who maintains two wives and one infant – burst into their nightly battle. The words, as usual, are unintelligible to Yuliang, but for a few French signposts: francs and vin, café and bébé. Eventually, the door slams, and the man’s feet pound heavily down the stairs. The woman weeps, her sobs harmonizing sourly with her child’s.

  After a long while and a full glass of wine, Yuliang replaces Zanhua’s letter, in its envelope. She allows herself a bite of stew, then another, straight from the pot. The salt and fat and spices merge so richly on her dried tongue that for a moment she almost thinks she’ll faint again.

  Forcing herself to pause, Yuliang refills her glass, watching Mirror Girl do the same. For an instant, that framed image seems inexplicably shocking. As though she were pouring herself a glassful of blood. And yet lifting the glass again, she can’t help but think that she’d like to fill a canvas with this color. With precisely this color, which is not cadmium or terra rose or even manganese violet but some uncapturable combination of them all – a tone both illicit and essential.

  32

  A month later classes at the École des Beaux Arts have ended, and Yuliang sits in a Latin Quarter café. Studies are scattered on the marble tabletop; poses charcoaled, considered, and then rejected as themes for her submission painting to the salon. In fact, Yuliang has just decided that she despises them all. But when a breeze skates one off to a neighboring table, she leaps after it in a panic.

  The man who retrieves it, however, gives it little more than a glance. ‘Vous êtes étudiante?’ he asks, and when Yuliang nods, he says, ‘C’est très bien.’

  Sitting down again, she finds herself smiling. In Shanghai, the picture (which of course shows her own, nude form) would at minimum raise a few eyebrows. In more conservative Nanjing, where she’s expected by summer’s end, it could quite possibly get her arrested.

  Anchoring the errant sketch beneath her saucer, Yuliang tips her chair back and lights a fresh cigarette. She scans the insipid urban stars for the celestial lovers of Mama’s stories: Weaver Girl, her Heavenly Shepherd. As usual, though, they remain overwhelmed by the battling neon of Montparnasse, or else disguised in new and foreign positions. The only constellation she vaguely recognizes is the Celestial Mansion of Emptiness, although she’s used to seeing it in the north. Everything else is out of place.

  Then again, she muses, perhaps it is she who is out of place. Perhaps Zanhua is right; she should go home. At the very least she should finish the letter she started to him two weeks earlier, which still hasn’t progressed beyond : Beloved husband.

  Dispiritedly, she begins gathering up her sketches, glancing around for a waiter. Spotting a tall figure in dark clothes, she lifts her hand. Then she drops it again, stunned.

  Xing Xudun stands just outside the terrasse area. Seeing her at almost the same moment she spots him, he breaks into a broad smile; that beloved, beaming smile that seems to touch every feature on his large face.

  ‘Madame Pan!’ he calls.

  He makes his long-limbed way toward her table, bumping and apologizing, finally beaming down at her from what seems an almost unearthly height. The café lights are behind him, and for a moment he looks to Yuliang the way Klimt might have rendered him: silk-skinned. A limpid, body outlined in gold.

  Without preamble he leans over and, grasping her shoulders, plants kisses on each of her cheeks. That’s new, Yuliang thinks blurrily, and, almost simultaneously, He still loves me. The thought passes through with as little surprise as a note on the weather (the sun is out) before she throws it away.

  ‘Sit!’ she says breathlessly.

  ‘You aren’t waiting for someone?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I come here to work.’

  ‘Lucky for me. May I?’ He folds himself onto a seat and, setting down the journal he’s carrying, reaches for Yuliang’s sheath of papers.

  ‘No!’ she exclaims, hastily sweeping them into her purse. ‘They’re all just awful.’

  He looks her in the eyes again. ‘I doubt that anything from your pencil could ever be awful.’

  Smiling again, he turns toward the group of Chinese and Indochinese students who often gather here by the window. He waves at one, mouthing something. Studying his profile, Yuliang finds herself thinking, He’s changed. But she can’t quite put her finger on what exactly is different. His gaze seems steadier, perhaps; his
lips a little harder. She spots a dozen or so white hairs as well: They look like sleet cutting through a tousled night.

  ‘You look well,’ he says, picking up the menu. ‘A bit skin-and-bones. But that’s what’s in fashion here, I hear.’

  She lifts an eyebrow. ‘I can’t afford many chocolates.’

  ‘It suits you. When I first saw you, I thought you were a French girl.’

  ‘You didn’t!’ She laughs; it feels like the first time in weeks.

  ‘I did. I thought, “How on earth does that chic French girl know my name?”’

  Yuliang assesses herself mentally. Her scarf is frayed; her hemline pinned and pinned again to hit the ever-moving mark of Parisian fashion. The only truly chic thing about her is her lipstick: she recently bought a gleaming tube of Arden’s Scarlet Sauvage from a Gypsy vendor, a block from the Rue de la Paix salon from which it was very likely stolen, and applies it in a pouty bow at her lipline’s center. Suitable, perhaps (she thinks skeptically). But chic?

  Still, like everything Xudun says, he appears to mean it – emphatically. Even perusing the menu, he still strikes her as so pure in purpose that she can all but see him standing heroically at the helm of some great ship. ‘I wanted to see you sooner,’ he is saying, wistfully eyeing the café’s offerings. ‘But I had no idea at all where you were living.’ He looks at her reproachfully. ‘You didn’t write to anyone with your new address.’

  ‘I – I was a little overwhelmed,’ she tells him. Which is true. What she can’t bring herself to tell him is that since coming to Paris, she’s had an almost superstitious fear of writing home. As though reminders of the past might somehow break the magic spell of her life here.

  ‘Overwhelmed by school?’

  ‘Yes. It’s been very busy.’ She finishes her noisette.

  Xudun watches her a moment, his eyes as warm and rich as she remembers. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘we’re finally doing it.’

  ‘Doing what?’ she asks, faintly alarmed.

  ‘Having that coffee. S’il vous plaît.’ He puts the menu down. ‘Although actually what I’d really like is beer.’

  He thrusts his arm up for a waiter. No one takes any notice but a bushy-browed southerner just inside the door. ‘Comrade Xing!’ the boy shouts. ‘I heard you’d come back. Come over here! Catch us up on Moscow!’

  ‘In a moment,’ Xudun calls back. ‘I’ve got a prior engagement.’

  ‘Don’t waste much time, do you?’ The boy hoots.

  Xudun turns back to Yuliang. ‘Don’t mind him.’

  ‘Why do you always choose such rude friends?’ she asks dryly.

  He laughs. ‘That one’s Zhou Enlai. He’s our minister of mimeography. Does most of our printing.’

  Yuliang throws the boy a stiff smile before turning back to Xudun. ‘Were you really in Moscow?’

  ‘Stalin’s set up a school there. You haven’t heard of it? The University of the Toilers of the East.’ He says it both in Chinese and in Russian, the words rolling from his tongue in rich mystery.

  ‘You speak Russian now?’

  ‘More now than I did at the start, anyway.’

  Yuliang sets down her cup, genuinely impressed. She herself recently attempted an exchange of language lessons with Perelli, the Italian painter in her class. She stopped after their third session, when he pulled her into his lap. ‘Is it much harder than French?’ she asks, honestly curious.

  ‘It won’t be when they come out with a Sino-Russian dictionary. We had to make do with a Japanese jiten.’ He frowns. ‘Which, I might add, caused a problem at first.’

  ‘Because no one spoke Japanese?’

  ‘Because the only one available is put out by a Japanese publisher. No one wanted to put money into their pockets.’

  Yuliang laughs. ‘Surely a publisher isn’t to blame for Hirohito’s crimes.’

  For once he doesn’t return her smile. ‘You can’t blame the fox’s head and not its legs, Madame Pan. They’re all part of the same enemy.’

  She looks at him, curious. ‘You say enemy as though we were already at war.’

  ‘It will come soon enough. And don’t let China’s greater size lead to complacency. If we don’t rid ourselves of old ways, we will lose.’

  Yuliang ponders this. She can’t help recalling one of Xu Beihong’s recent comments: with typical bravado, he declared that no art painted after 1880 was worth emulating. She remembers, too, Zanhua, on that long-ago day in the Lotus Gardens: The traditional ways don’t have to resist newer ones.

  ‘Can’t the old and the new exist together sometimes?’ she asks. ‘In harmony?’

  ‘Perhaps. But don’t forget that we lost Formosa to Japan twenty-five years ago because the empress built up her summer palace instead of her navy. Sometimes you must strip off the old in order to rebuild a sounder structure.’

  ‘I’m not saying we shouldn’t modernize, or strip away corruption,’ Yuliang says. She’d forgotten how she enjoys arguing with Xudun. The way he hears her out – not indulgently, as Zanhua sometimes does, but as though she might actually have something to teach him. ‘If you carve away all of China’s old ways, then what do you have left?’

  ‘You still have the roots. Land. People.’

  ‘Yes, but at what point do you stop? What’s to keep you from continuing to change and change until there’s nothing of your true self left inside?’

  Xudun digests this for a moment, his big thumbs tapping the table. ‘There will always be something,’ he says at last. ‘You choose to wear French lipstick and French dresses.’

  Yuliang purses her lips. ‘Actually, the lipstick is American.’

  He waves impatiently. ‘Either way. Does the fact that you wear it make you less Chinese?’

  ‘No,’ Yuliang says immediately. ‘It’s obvious here that I’m Chinese.’ Too obvious, sometimes, she notes wryly. She thinks of all the schoolboy taunts she’s endured here, of the old man who, mistaking her for Indochinese, harassed her recently at the Louvre. Dirty native, he’d sputtered. Go back to Hanoi!

  ‘Whether I like it or not,’ she goes on, ‘my skin will always tell the truth. And unlike my clothes, I can’t take it off.’

  She fights back a blush at the unintended implication. But Xing Xudun just presses on. ‘Say you could. Say you were dead, soon to be buried. The dress you wear into your coffin will be your outfit for eternity. Would a French dress make you any less Chinese?’

  Yuliang chews a thumbnail: the thought is surprisingly complicated. On the one hand, it would seem hypocritical to say yes, given that she’s worn nothing but Western clothes these past few years. At the same time it is faintly disturbing; the idea of the coffin door closing on her own form. Resplendent in her short skirt, silk stockings, and sheer blouse. ‘I don’t know,’ she says at last, honestly.

  He grins as though he’s won a point for himself. ‘All right, then. Listen. Say this is China.’ He holds up his journal. ‘By peeling back a few layers’ – he bends back one page, then another – ‘you’re not changing its true nature. What remains in my hands is still land.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s a journal.’

  Yuliang smiles again, to show him that she’s teasing. But the look he gives her is unexpectedly sober. ‘I have missed you,’ he says, simply.

  Another silence unrolls between them. Inside the café, the minister of mimeography curses his bridge partner. When Xudun speaks again it’s an enormous relief for some reason. ‘And when,’ he says, ‘are you going home?’

  Yuliang clears her throat. ‘I – I haven’t quite decided. There’s a scholarship that would pay for me to study in Rome. I want to study sculpture there, too.’ She scrapes at the small heap of sugar crystals at the bottom of her cup. ‘It may be nothing but a dream. In any event, I’m not done here. I have to finish up one last painting.’

  ‘Self-portrait?’

  Yuliang nods.

  ‘Nude?’

  She nods again, though she can’t meet his eyes. Thankfu
lly, at that moment the waiter finally chooses to notice them, and Xudun orders his beer.

  ‘So,’ he says as the man saunters away, ‘Paris in the past, Italy in the future. Where is it you are living now?’

  ‘A place a friend found. It’s not much.’ Which, of course, is an understatement. The alley Xu Beihong found for her, off the rue St. Denis is actually a small brothel district, though it’s fine for Yuliang’s purposes. During daylight, in fact, it may well be one of the quietest streets in the city. Still, anxious to change the subject, she reaches for his journal – though seeing the title, she grimaces. Red Light.

  ‘What’s ECCO?’ she asks, pointing at the acronym at the bottom of the page.

  ‘European branch of the Chinese Communist Organization.’

  ‘Do you write for this, then?’

  ‘I do the artwork. But Zhou over there wrote the piece about the labor corps. That is, the workers the British brought over to dig trenches and graves during the war.’ He nods. ‘Page fifteen.’

  Yuliang flips through to see a striking woodblock print: a band of stick-thin men crammed into a barred box. ‘Were they really kept in cages?’

  ‘Technically, they were “camps.” But the men were locked in at night. Many did not live to see their real homes again.’ He leans back, stretching his long, long legs before him. ‘They were shot at the front or died from disease. The governments that paid their way here wouldn’t even ship the bodies back. Around two thousand of them are still buried in France.’ His beer comes. He lifts it grimly: ‘Ganbei.’

  Yuliang toasts back, suddenly sheepish about her own goals in this country: a few tubes of paint, meat, a more fashionable hat. She skims ahead a few more pages, stopping at a grainy photograph of a familiar scene these days: Chinese youth, marching. ‘This is Shanghai?’