The Painter of Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein Page B

give her boiled milk injections in her buttocks.’ She rolls her eyes, exasperated by Yuliang’s confusion. ‘ Sickness ,’ she shouts. ‘You get it from the night rooms. From men. You don’t even have to touch them to get it. You can just sit down after someone gets up.’ She pulls a pink petticoat flat with her hands. ‘You get it,’ she says, ‘from the cushion.’
    ‘If that’s true, then almost everyone must have it. The sickness. Do they? Do we ?’
    Suyin just shrugs. ‘You’ll know if you do. But most keep it a secret.’
    Suyin seems to know a lot of secrets. She knows that Lirong, for example, paints herself every night with red lipstick.
    ‘So what?’ Yuliang asks. ‘Doesn’t everyone paint their lips?’
    ‘Not those lips, idiot,’ Suyin says. She spits the last pin from her mouth as she doubles over, laughing. It’s only eleven o’clock; her titters stream through the quiet of the back courtyard. ‘She thinks her overhanging cliff is too dark,’ she finally explains. ‘She thinks painting it makes it look younger.’
    And though it isn’t particularly funny, Yuliang finds herself laughing too. Soon she’s laughing so hard that her stomach knots in pain. And when voices rise crankily from the sleeping quarters (‘ Haiii! Keep it down, you little cunts! We need sleep!’), the two girls use bright qipao sleeves and satin drawers as gags. Trying, with very little success, to sop up the spilling giggles.
    A week later, Godmother schedules Yuliang’s first official appearance, after the yearly Burning Road ceremony. The maids pile oranges and paper money around a golden bodhi-sattva. Candles form a flickering path to his feet. After the ritual comes a banquet to which the most honored clients are invited, though what they’re really invited to do is come and spend their money. Jinling takes it upon herself to groom her protégé for display. She lends Yuliang an eyecatching blue jacket, and long earrings, and an orchid clip for her hair. She gives her her very first makeup application.Her tongue pokes out like a plum tip as she lines Yuliang’s blinking eyes in black and powders her nose and forehead smooth and white. Yuliang wrinkles her face, sneezes at the tickle. She fights the urge to wince as Jinling coaxes her lashes around a little metal rod.
    ‘Stay still,’ Jinling says. ‘You need to look your best. Some wealthy man may see you today and make a big bid for your hair-combing. It’s how it happened for me.’
    ‘In Shanghai?’
    The top girl gives her a hard look as she rubs in rouge. ‘Of course, in Shanghai.’
    Yuliang’s scalp still tingles from where Jinling combed, twisted, and pinned her hair. She knows what hair-combing is supposed to mean here. It’s not the rite Mama described to her so often, in the days when marriage still beckoned in the future: The night before, I’ll comb your hair for you. For prosperity.
    How many times, Mama? Xiuqing would ask, although she already knew the answer.
    Three times, her mother would answer, although she knew Xiuqing knew. The first comb is for longevity. The second comb brings love and respect until your old age. The third comb will make sure that you –
    Have lots of children! Xiuqing would interrupt. And I will!
    And her mother would laugh and say, And with luck they’ll be sons, who will make your life easy in your old age.
    At the Hall no one cares if a flower has longevity or not. Certainly no one expects love or respect. As for children – well, Yuliang already knows what bitter lengths Godmother’s girls go to to quell their fertility. There are teas and potions,oversized foreign coins. When those fail, there are adoptions and abortions. There is depression, infection. Sometimes – often, even – there is death. One girl, Linyao, has died already since Yuliang arrived. Four months pregnant, she hurled herself from the top of Zheta Pagoda when her lover failed to make her his concubine. ‘How ridiculous,’