The Painter of Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein Page A

ornaments, strings of gems to wind through the glossy wrap of her hair. Lacquered wine cups, as black as jet, emblazoned with gold-painted phoenixes. A lucky-ball locket she wears around her neck, and a key bigger than Yuliang’s thumbnail. The key fits Jinling’s three-tiered chest with the dancing crane on its cover. Yuliang adores this chest – its cunning inlay, its gleaming wood. But inside lies Jinling’s real treasure. She lays it out for Yuliang one evening: the diamond rings and emerald necklaces, the gold-dipped bracelet with intricate designs of flowers and fish, the jade pendant as pale as mutton fat, carved into a rooster – her sign, she tells Yuliang. Little stories accompany each piece: ‘This one’s from a wealthy magistrate back in Shanghai. He wanted to marry me, but his wife wouldn’t let him… This one’s from the son of a Mongolian prince. He wanted to take me to the plains, to make love on horseback… This one’s from one of the top lieutenants of General Sun Yat-sen – he’s fled to Japan. I’d like to see Japan. Wouldn’t you?’ And Yuliang says she would,even though traditionally (she knows) boars are supposed to dislike travel.
    All of this is Jinling’s dowry. It is her Shanghai legacy. She puts it all back reverently, save for two or three items she will wear. She disdains girls who dangle knickknacks from every hair, finger, and hole. No one in Shanghai was that unrefined: ‘It was more than just beds and money. We danced, and played pipa, and wrote poems. We learned the classic of taoism, the Tao Te Ching , by heart. There were nights when I didn’t have to sleep with anyone at all. I would just sit and chat and pour wine.’
    ‘Why did you leave?’ Yuliang asks. She is trying to ignore the noises filtering through the wall: a man snorting and thumping like a pig, Dai squealing oooh and eeeeee-eeeee and – sometimes – ow!
    Jinling studies her protégé. ‘You need to relax,’ she chides. ‘You’ll never survive here otherwise. I think I’ll ask Godmother about having a demonstration session for you. One of my customers likes to be watched.’ She lifts a filigree necklace to her breast, cocks her head. ‘What do you think?’
    ‘That one would be better.’ Yuliang points to the jade.
    Jinling shoots her a dubious glance: ‘Really?’ She tries it; frowns. Then smiles. ‘Well! Maybe you’re right.’
    She lifts her hair and bends her head so Yuliang can do the clasp. ‘Money,’ she continues. ‘I left Shanghai for the money. The old centipede paid a lot for my contract. And she gave me a bonus.’ By old centipede she means Godmother, whose puffy ringed hands seem to be everywhere at once: counting and recounting the girls’ earnings at dawn, feelinghems and robe linings for secret tips, squeezing fingers and elbows for lumps and swelling and other telltale sex-sickness signs, running down the red ‘moon’ book in which she records monthly cycles. Or the black book where she records her flowers’ debt – and where the numbers only seem to grow and grow and grow. All but Jinling’s – as the top girl, she brings in the most money. Xiaochen, a twenty-year veteran, brings in the least.
    ‘She has Guangzhou sores,’ Suyin confides a few days later.
    ‘Guangzhou…?’ Yuliang asks, baffled.
    ‘Big red welts. The fan kuei brought them with them when they first came to Guangzhou. They spread them among the singsong girls there.’ Suyin’s voice whistles around the clothespins in her mouth. The girls are hanging the weekly fine laundry of silk underthings and sheer linen robes.
    ‘Anyway, Xiaochen rarely has customers anymore. She says she’s sixteen. Everyone says they’re sixteen. But I think she’s actually closer to forty. Can you imagine?’
    She shakes her head, pulls a clip. She secures a pair of shoes to the line, and they dangle between the two girls like gaudy butterflies. ‘Godmother makes her take mercury sometimes. And I have to help