The Painter of Shanghai (49 page)

PART NINE
The Departure

Another word for creativity is courage.

Henri Matisse

45

A week into the Western new year of 1937, Madame Pan Yuliang stands with her husband on the Canadian Maritime steamship pier. A sampan has been selected, vetted, and bargained down to two thirds the man’s initial offering price. The weathered boatman, anxious to make the trip in time enough to come back for another late-arriving passenger, is busy loading Yuliang’s two trunks, one carpetbag, and two well-wrapped portfolios – all of her work that is left – into the square stern of his craft. Yuliang herself carries her paintbox and her purse.

‘You have your travel papers?’ Zanhua asks.

‘You’ve asked me four times.’

‘I suppose I keep hoping you’ve forgotten them.’ He smiles wanly.

Yuliang smiles back, although for a moment it feels as though her heart has already cracked, just a little.

Over the past week they’ve barely mentioned the looming specter of her departure. Instead, they’ve spent all the compensatory money from the disastrous exhibition. They’ve lived as though life starts and ends here in Shanghai; eating out virtually every meal, traversing the town’s offerings from English pubs to French haute cuisine to the famous Yangzhou-style restaurant on Nanjing Road.

They’ve bought shoes and stockings at Wing On, hats
at Grigorieff and Co., and undergarments at the China Tai Underwear Co. Yuliang has had four new dresses made at Madame Muriel’s on Avenue Joffre. They’ve had tea at the Cathay, wine at the Palais, and gin at the Vienna Ballroom. On a whim, they’ve even joined the well-heeled throng at the annual New Year’s Race Meeting at the posh Shanghai Race Club. Yuliang had never been to the races. But she found herself surprisingly swept up by them, as entranced by the sleek and thundering Mongolian ponies (on which a young Xu Beihong once honed his horse-sketching skills) as by the women sporting hats bedecked with moving still lifes: silk flowers and false fruits, birds and bows. They cheered and shouted themselves hoarse when the horse Zanhua called for second actually came in as predicted.

Even their lovemaking has had an air of frantic abandonment; as though it’s just one more way they’ve deliberately put off this moment. On their last night they lay together, their bodies slick with sweat and one another, and there was no mention – not at all – of the dire event that was just hours away. Zanhua simply kissed her forehead, as he always does before sleep. Then he wrapped his arms around her and closed his eyes. Yuliang, for her part, stayed up nearly until dawn. But she didn’t move; she was very, very careful not to wake him.

Standing here now, though, on the edge of their greatest divide yet, it suddenly strikes her as surreal that they could have existed in such a vacuum.
Then again
, she reminds herself,
this is Shanghai.
The entire city seems to live in a gay haze of denial, even as war grows more inevitable by the day. Nationalist planes screech through the skies, and
Japanese soldiers swagger through Hongkou with impunity. They line China’s northern borders, skirmishing for now but plotting ‘incidents’ that will give them the excuse to invade in full force. Shanghainese, for their part, respond by shouting for another round. The drinks flow faster; the skirts grow shorter, the hours later, the dancehall dances longer and closer and more insinuating. Even now, recovering from what she senses will be the last hangover for at least a month, Yuliang sees among the scores of steamers, sampans, junks, and cargo ships the multirayed
Hi no Maru
flying from two destroyers against the horizon. The warships are well outside the League of Nations’ ‘no sail’ zone. But their presence is as sharply honed as two steel fangs.

‘We should go now, madame,’ the boatman says gruffly, readying his oar in the boat’s rear. The
Duchess of York
sits staunchly beyond him in the Huangpu. Its tiered decks are already lined with doll-sized figures waving and shouting, hefting cameras. Tossing food and dollars to the ever-present swarm of beggars below. The ship is scheduled to set sail in less than half an hour, and even now the huge horn on the upper deck lets loose its second-to-last warning blast. On the pier, other lastminute boarders hastily wrap up their own sampan negotiations and hug their loved ones one last time.

‘You must hurry, madame,’ prompts Yuliang’s ragged captain.

‘I’m coming,’ she tells him. But she doesn’t move.

‘You
should
hurry,’ Zanhua says. ‘Or those papers won’t even matter.’

Shading his eyes he looks out at the ship, which will
make port at Saigon, Singapore, and Colombo. It will round the great Horn of Africa, cover Djibouti’s cobalt waters and coral reefs, and inch up the Suez Canal to Port Said before reaching its final destination: Marseille. It’s Yuliang’s third trip along this route – she has sketched these port towns from the deck. Suddenly, though, she hasn’t the faintest recollection of what any of them look like. All she registers is the beloved, doomed city beyond the pier. That, and her husband’s drawn face.

For an instant she’s almost tempted to renounce her decision.
I have changed my mind
, she imagines saying. Instead, she takes his hand.

‘I have a challenge,’ she says quietly.

He smiles weakly. ‘Very well. What are my clues?’

‘Spring. Skiff. Heavy load.’

His lips move in silence as he shuts his eyes. Then he opens them again.

They say that at the Twin Brooks, spring is still fair
I, too, wish to row a boat there.
But I am afraid that the little skiff on the Twin Brooks
Could not bear the heavy load of my grief…

His voice breaks on the last word. Jaw tightening, he looks away.

Lifting herself on tiptoe, Yuliang clasps her arms around his shoulders. ‘I
am
afraid,’ she whispers shakily. ‘I shouldn’t leave you like this. Not now.’

‘You speak as though there might be a time that you
should
leave.’ He wraps his arms around her. His ridiculous cane pokes into her shoulder blade.

‘It’s just – I don’t trust them to protect you.’

‘Who?’

‘You know who.’ Her eyes are tearing – the wind, possibly. She dashes at the tears angrily. The last week has brought news of kidnappings and releases, of Japanese spies, contingency plans, backroom dealings. A new CCP-KMT alliance has been brokered – some say by Zhou Enlai himself, which might explain Zanhua’s sudden welcome back to work (although certainly word of his scandalous concubine’s departure didn’t hurt). But Yuliang still doesn’t trust them – not any of them. ‘I feel,’ she says, ‘like I’m leaving you to the tigers.’

‘Then stay. Protect me.’ Zanhua attempts another smile. ‘I don’t know anyone more qualified to bargain with tigers.’

‘That’s a lie.’ She wipes her eyes with her sleeves, laughing. ‘If I were brave I wouldn’t be leaving in the first place.’

‘Why not? One needs to take holidays from fighting tigers.’

This isn’t just a holiday
, she wants to say. But she doesn’t. She follows their old rule, leaving the most painful things unsaid.

‘Yuliang,’ Zanhua says. ‘Really. Perhaps you can still stay. Things here are on the verge of change. I feel it.’

As she touches his cheek Yuliang knows this is the truth: that for all his bitterness, Pan Zanhua’s faith in China is as ardent as it’s ever been. Even if Guanyin and Weiyi weren’t part of his picture, he would never do what she’s doing: he wouldn’t just leave.

‘Then be part of the change,’ she tells him. ‘Find your
friends. Hold fast to them. Don’t worry about how you will be seen by others.’

His lips tighten. ‘It’s more difficult for some of us than for others.’

The
Duchess
lets loose another blast – the final warning call. ‘Lady!’ the boatman grumbles. ‘If you’re not getting in, then take your bags back. I’ve got a business.’

Yuliang takes another deep breath, then stands on tiptoes again. She gives her windblown husband one last kiss: French-style. On each cheek.

But as she’s pulling away, he catches her back. Framing her face hard with his fingers, Zanhua presses his mouth forcefully against his wife’s. His lips hurt her. But Yuliang doesn’t pull away. And when he releases her, it’s as though he has dropped her from some small height.

‘I’ll – I’ll be on deck as we go,’ she whispers. She seats herself stiffly, gives a last, numb wave, then turns away, afraid that if she looks back even once, all her resolve will disappear. (
Don’t think
.)

It’s as the sampan driver plants his pole that she hears Zanhua call again. ‘Yuliang,’ he says. ‘Yuliang. Wait. I forgot to give you this…’

When she turns back, he’s waving something at her, though it’s too small for her to see. ‘I’ll throw it,’ he calls over the widening distance.

‘No, wait –’

But it’s too late. He casts his arm, releases his fingers. The object arcs over gray water and bounces off the boat’s rim. For a breathless moment Yuliang thinks the river will take it. But it tumbles in the other direction, rattling to the wet floor at her feet.

She leans over to pick it up. Wiping it on her trousers, she holds it up in disbelief: it’s the little jade boar she lost on their last trip here.

‘The hotel had it,’ he’s shouting. ‘They found it under one of the beds.’ He shouts something else, but the sampan’s clatter covers his words.

‘What?’ she shouts back, her voice cracking with the effort.

He shakes his head, takes a breath. He cups his mouth with his scholar’s hands. And this time she makes out the words, just barely: ‘
It’s for luck.
’

Yuliang nods, clenching the tiny token so tightly her knuckles whiten.

She keeps her gaze on her husband as the sounds of the steamship overtake them – the shouted farewells, and one last, cryptic horn blast. She watches him as the sounds of Europe wash out onto the Huangpu. Until her bags are aboard and the sampan driver is finally casting off. Until the ship’s loudspeaker announces the time, and the concierge standing by to help her leans over and inquires, in the oddly flattened French of North America, ‘
Venez-vous à bord, mademoiselle?
’

Yuliang turns and looks at him. ‘
C’est madame
,’ she whispers.

‘
Pardon
,’ he says. He switches to Chinese. ‘You’re coming aboard?’

Yuliang looks down at the little boar. It gazes up with green eyes, as stony and as stubborn as ever. She gives it one last squeeze before slipping it into her pocket.

Epilogue

On July 13, 1937, the Japanese attacked Shanghai a second time, launching a bloody and grueling battle that, thanks to the determination and perseverance of both Chinese troops and Shanghai’s own fearless citizens, lasted well over three months (and left tens of thousands of casualties) before the city was taken. By December 1937, Japan had taken Nanjing, launching a six-week orgy of rape, looting, and slaughter that took up to a half-million more lives. Chiang Kai-shek and his Republican government fled inland to Chongqing, where they again formed a shaky alliance with the Chinese Communist Party. That truce collapsed with Japan’s surrender in 1945, plunging China into bloody civil war for four more years.

In December 1949, the last Republican stronghold of Chengdu fell, and Chiang’s government fled again, this time to Taiwan. Following its establishment in October 1949, the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China settled on social realism as the ideal art form for the new nation. Specifically formulated against more romantic Western movements, social realism focused on the ugly realities of modern life, particularly the plight of the poor. Traditional nudes were emphatically discouraged.

Some of Yuliang’s former colleagues tried to adapt to the new aesthetic. Xu Beihong became president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and as such pioneered the effort to integrate realism into traditional painting, but he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953. Following liberation, Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Art Academy was
combined with two other art schools to form the East China College of Art, and ultimately was moved to Nanjing. Liu himself painted intensely throughout the 1950s and 1960s, slowing only temporarily after being declared an enemy to the Cultural Revolution and confined to house arrest. He died in 1994, painting indefatigably until the end.

Pan Zanhua died in 1959.

Pan Yuliang never returned to China. In the decade following her self-exile, she exhibited in the salon, the French National 53rd Art Exhibition, the Salon des Indépendants, and the 51st Salon Art Show. In 1945 she won a gold award for her entry in the Salon des Indépendants, and in 1958 she exhibited there again. In that same year her work was exhibited in Paris’s Museum of Modern Art. Unwilling to change her painting style or overcome her aversion to dealers, she never became more than modestly successful in the commercial sense, and by most accounts lived out her last days in poverty and illness. She never relinquished her pride in her nationality, however, choosing to hold on to her Chinese citizenship until her death in 1977. She was buried in Paris’s Cimetière du Montparnasse, in traditional Chinese robes.

Pan Yuliang’s remarkable legacy includes more than four thousand works of art, including sculptures, sketches, oil paintings, and watercolors. Many of these can be found in her home province of Anhui, at the Anhui Museum.

Inevitably, it also includes controversy: in 1993, an exhibition of her work in Beijing caused enough concern that several of her nudes were removed.

Selected Bibliography

Ayscough, Florence.
Chinese Women
:
Yesterday and Today.
New York: Da Capo, 1975.

Baum, Vicki.
Shanghai, ’37.
New York: Oxford Universit Press, 1987.