The Painter of Shanghai (22 page)

‘It’s not just the house. You’ll need someone to continue the treatments.’ He looks meaningfully at her feet. ‘Unless, of course, you think you don’t need those either.’

This stings too. Despite all Zanhua’s chatter about ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberation,’ Yuliang still sees her unbinding as an act of supreme sacrifice, one that has replaced her less-than-elegant lilies with
da jiao
: big, warped feet that are ugly by any standards.

When Zanhua first showed her the Heavenly Foot Society pamphlet two months ago, it seemed like altogether too much work for such unsightly ends: thrice-daily soaks in hot rice wine followed by ‘brisk rubbing and massage
of the emancipated member.’ Excruciating walks to help the bones settle back in place. Qian Ma, not surprisingly, had thrilled in these painful ministrations, gleefully pounding, rubbing, and banging at Yuliang’s unfolded lilies, then yanking her young mistress through the house. On the steamship, though, Zanhua himself did it for her, and at first the sight of him gazing at her naked, battered toes all but made her want to hurl herself overboard. Gradually, though, embarrassment softened into a kind of indebted awe. For what other man on earth would do this – gently rub her warped arches and deformed digits, quietly rinse away pus and callus, without comment?

The memory defuses Yuliang’s anger slightly. ‘I’ll have a maidservant, then,’ she says grudgingly. ‘But she doesn’t stay overnight.’

Zanhua turns away from her, jaw working. ‘I suppose,’ he says at last, ‘we can find someone to come in for those times.’ He sighs. ‘The solitude at least will be conducive to studying.’

In the morning comes a lone rooster’s call, and the plaintive howl of a southbound locomotive. Soon after comes the calm clip-clop of horses making deliveries, and then the irate honks of automobiles and calls of passing vendors. After a week or so, Yuliang has grown accustomed to the four American tenors who serenade her each morning from a nearby Victrola. Their owner (who sings with them while he shaves) provides her first English lessons, after a fashion:
I’ve got my tickets,
she finds herself humming later.
My train is leaving here at half-past four. Ohhhh, my beautiful doll, goodbye.

With Zanhua still here, mornings remain much the same as they were in Wuhu. The serving girl Qihua finds comes each day for the first week, creeping in a little after sunrise to prepare breakfast. Zanhua reads the papers to Yuliang, jotting down new words for her copybook. They’ve agreed upon a system for her to send her work home to him, for him to critique and then send back.

Yuliang enjoys this routine – both the familiarity, and the novelty. It’s the hours after breakfast, however, that she cherishes the most. On Ocean Street there is no demanding ring of the telephone, no stream of couriers bearing chits and invitations. They spend every day together, taking rickshaws and carriages across the city. They fill the small house with things to write on, rest in, eat from: wall scrolls from Fouzhou Road, books from Liu and Co. Bookcases and kitchen tables on Nanjing Road. At the Golden Dragon Rug Company they find rugs brought in by loping camels from the desert. Fingering the colors – the rich brown-oranges, the ruby reds – Yuliang finds herself imagining the darkened fingers that made them, the image sparks something like longing.

On Zanhua’s last night, they invite Meng Qihua to the house for dinner. After they’ve eaten, the men lean back and light cigarettes. ‘Astonishing,’ Zanhua says, after a few companionable puffs. ‘The way things went last week in the war.’

‘At the Somme?’ his photographer friend says.

Yuliang looks up. That morning Zanhua had explained to her about the latest bloody battle covered by the
Echo de Chine
: twenty thousand men killed in less than an hour.
Yuliang, who has seen death in ways many could never imagine, still has a hard time imagining this horrible scene. As Zanhua read the news, she’d been able to summon only its colors: a nauseating palette of grass green, mud black, vermilion blood. Now, unsettled, she stands and pours more of the French table wine Qihua brought to dinner. ‘It’s unthinkable,’ Zanhua is saying, ‘that technology has given man such power. Not only to better life, but to wreak such havoc on it.’ He stares up at the old ceiling beams. ‘They’ll have to enter it at some point now. They’ll have to.’

‘The Americans?’ Qihua leans back, his glasses glinting in the candlelight. He’s a slim man, and always quite fashionably dressed. He’s a good deal younger than Zanhua’s writer friend, Duxiu, and yet Yuliang finds him the more intimidating of the two. He somehow makes her feel both unschooled and low-class – a bit, in fact, the way the Hall’s men always made her feel.

‘Wilson can’t just stand by and watch this mess get worse,’ Zanhua says.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’ His old friend shrugs. ‘At least the war keeps the
yangguizi
out of our hair. Let them fight over their own damned land for once.’

‘But there are still the Japanese,’ Yuliang points out.

Meng Qihua looks at her, faintly amused. ‘A good point, Madame Pan. What troubles me is how easily they dominate us. We’re the biggest nation on earth. We’ve thousands more years of battle experience.’

‘The problem lies in spirit,’ Zanhua says. ‘We need to think of ourselves that way. As a nation. As General Sun has been saying from the start.’ His eyes brighten a little, as they always do when he speaks of Sun Yat-sen, who
even in exile remains his hero. ‘First, military rule. Expel the imperialists. Second, political tutelage. Teach the people to rule themselves. And then…’

‘And then – ah, yes. The grand dream of self-rule,’ says Qihua, waving his cigarette holder theatrically.

Zanhua looks at him levelly. ‘Of course. Just as we always said back in Tokyo. You did too. You no longer believe in the Three Stages?’

‘Perhaps I’m too old now to believe in easy answers of any sort.’ The photographer looks up contemplatively, blowing a series of rings that float up slowly in the damp, hot air. ‘Or perhaps it’s this city. Perhaps,’ he says, indicating the pooling custard his Napoleon has left on his plate, ‘all this Western decadence has addled my thinking. But one thing strikes me: China is not England. It is not America. It’s not even France. It has a vastly different past and problems.’

‘What’s the answer, then?’ Zanhua challenges.

‘It may be a lost cause.’

‘I never saw you as a pessimist.’

‘A pessimist would say China had no spirit in the first place. I say China has spirit. I just don’t think her leaders do. Or perhaps any leaders at all.’ He leans back. ‘Perhaps that’s the answer: no leaders.’

Zanhua studies him in surprise. ‘You’re advocating anarchism?’

His friend just smiles. ‘I don’t believe in
isms
. Have you forgotten that already?’

‘I have not. Just as I haven’t forgotten about the hundred yen you still owe me.’

‘From what?’ Qihua laughs.

‘From that wager you lost in Tokyo, over Marx….’

The men talk into the night, discussing the old days in Japan and their high hopes for China when the New Republic was born. When Qihua leaves at last, it is late. Dishes lie scattered on the table like lard-layered pieces of some chaotic mosaic. But when Yuliang stands to clear them, Zanhua stops her. ‘The girl can do it.’

‘I sent her home at midnight.’

‘In the morning, then.’

She starts to protest. But he cuts her off gently, merely saying ‘Come,’ and leading her to the staircase.

Upstairs, his lovemaking is almost like an attack: he covers every inch of skin with his lips, hands, and tongue. Later, he covers her body like a blanket or a net, pressing down on her torso, her legs and arms and even fingers, his ring cutting into her slim knuckles. Afterward they lie together, staring up at the ceiling and the drifting smoke from his last cigarette of the day.

‘I don’t know how to do this,’ he says, at last.

‘Do what?’ She traces the one black curl that falls onto his smooth brow.

‘Leave. Live. Without you.’ He sighs. ‘I feel like I need you with me to breathe.’

Yuliang opens her mouth, then closes it again, unsure of what she wants to say. What she feels for him is not the sort of visceral and thick dependence of which he speaks. She hasn’t felt that for anyone except her mama. Turning over on her back, though, she realizes too that he is right – it is a little like the need for air, such love. You aren’t aware of it until the air is removed. And suddenly, you realize you are suffocating.

She takes a deep breath. ‘Six months is no time at all, really. You lived far longer by yourself before we met.’

‘I wasn’t myself before we met.’ He interlaces their fingers again. ‘What – what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to go back to “before we met”…’ His voice cracks slightly. ‘Promise me. Promise me you won’t leave.’

‘Leave?’ She laughs. ‘Where would I go?’

‘I’ve had terrible dreams of waking up one morning and finding you gone.’ He smiles self-consciously. ‘I know it’s foolish. But the city’s dangerous. There are gangs here that grow more powerful every day. Even the police are corrupt. Little Yu…’ He turns his eyes. ‘Promise me that you will stay safe.’

Safe
, she thinks. She recalls her first night with Yi Gan. She thinks of the Hall, the beatings and ‘discipline sessions.’ And the men – night after night after bleak night. These things are now a part of her, so hopelessly ingrained that even in her happiest moments she knows she will never forget them. She may be able to deny them, even to wipe them out – at least, from the spoken story of her life. But they will always mark her spirit. Like scars.

‘Yuliang?’

When at last she turns to face him, she still can’t say the words he so clearly wants to hear, and the shame over this shakes her voice. She comes as close to it as she can manage without betraying herself:

‘I promise,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay safe.’

18

The wet Shanghai summer dries into a slightly crisper autumn, before sliding down in fits and starts to the cooler moistness of the Jiangsu winter. Yuliang unpacks her warm things, shutters the windows against the cold. She marks Zanhua’s next visit on the calendar she has hung in her study, and settles in as a woman alone.

In the beginning, life seems disorientingly loose, as unspun as the silk ticking in her comforter. She wakes at night in a vague but forceful panic, certain she’s lost or forgotten something valuable – her wedding ring, her purse, her copybook. It takes several minutes of lying there, her heart tapping its frantic beat, before it dawns on her that what is missing is Zanhua.

The pain inflicted by the lack of him almost startles her sometimes. When he writes, after three months, that his next planned visit has been delayed, she at first is uncertain that she’s read the note properly. When Qihua confirms it for her – ‘You’re making good progress!’ he says, condescendingly – she returns home and goes directly to bed. She remains there through the afternoon and the evening, reciting Li Qingzhao’s poetry to herself.

One of the few things that helps to distract her is work; Yuliang crafts a study schedule from breakfast straight through until lunch, staunchly writing out row after row of radicals and character combinations. At week’s end
she surveys the pages and tears them out, tucking them into prepared envelopes she seals with Zanhua’s official seal. Ahying runs them out to the mail courier, who passes at noon and at three, surrounded by his ‘red-headed rascals’ or Sikh guards. Yuliang studies as scrupulously as ever. But she also finds herself drifting more and more to her little scribblings, sometimes even drifting from pictograph to picture without realizing she has made the transition. The character for
imperial
(
), with its regal-looking crown radical, is unthinkingly transformed into a regal head. The three trees of
forest (
)
give way to a dead leaf, its crinkled skeleton drifting on a lake. Fengtai (
), the site of the famed battle between the Qin and Jin kingdoms, becomes phoenix (
), which in turn gives way to a dreamy sketch of Jinling’s phoenix wine cups, which perch on Yuliang’s bookshelf, bone dry.