Lust, Caution Read Free

nonchalantly back from her face, then allowed to hang down to her shoulders. Her sleeveless cheongsam of electric blue moiré satin reached to the knees, its shallow, rounded collarstanding only half an inch tall, in the Western style. A brooch fixed to the collar matched her diamond-studded sapphire button earrings.
    The two ladies— tai-tais —immediately to her left and right were both wearing black wool capes, each held fast at the neck by a heavy double gold chain that snaked out from beneath the cloak’s turned-down collar. Isolated from the rest of the world by Japanese occupation, Shanghai had elaborated a few native fashions. Thanks to the extravagantly inflated price of gold in the occupied territories, gold chains as thick as these were now fabulously expensive. But somehow, functionally worn in place of a collar button, they managed to avoid the taint of vulgar ostentation, thereby offering their owners the perfect pretext for parading their wealth on excursions about the city. For these excellent reasons, the cape and gold chain had become the favored uniform of the wives of officials serving in Wang Ching-wei’s puppet government. Or perhaps they were following the lead of Chungking, the Chinese Nationalist regime’s wartime capital, where black cloaks were very much in vogue among the elegant ladies of the political glitterati.
    Yee Tai-tai was chez elle , so she had dispensed with her own cape; but even without it, her figure still seemed to bell outward from her neck, with all the weight the years had put on her. She’d met Chia-chih two years earlier in Hong Kong, after she and her husband had left Chungking— and the Nationalist government—together with Wang Ching-wei. Not long before the couple took refuge on the island, one of Wang Ching-wei’s lieutenants, Tseng Chung-ming, had been assassinated in Hanoi, and so Wang’s followers in Hong Kong were keeping their heads down. Yee Tai-tai, nonetheless, was determined to go shopping. During the war, goods were scarce in both the unconquered interior and the occupied territories of the Mainland; Yee Tai-tai had no intention of wasting the golden purchasing opportunity offered by a stopover in the commercial paradise of Hong Kong. Someone in her circle introduced her to Chia-chih—the beautiful young wife of Mr. Mai, a local businessman—who chaperoned her on her shopping trips. If you wanted to navigate Hong Kong’s emporiums, you had to have a local along: you were expected to haggle over prices even in the biggest departmentstores, and if you couldn’t speak Cantonese, all the traders would overcharge you wickedly. Mr. Mai was in import-export and, like all business-people, delighted in making political friends. So of course the couple were incessantly hospitable to Yee Tai-tai, who was in turn extremely grateful. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong, Mr. Mai went out of business. To make some extra money for the family, Mai Tai-tai decided to do a little smuggling herself, and traveled to Shanghai with a few luxury goods—watches, Western medicines, perfumes, stockings—to sell. Yee Tai-tai very naturally invited her to stay with them.
    “We went to Shu-yü, that Szechuanese restaurant, yesterday,” Yee Tai-tai was telling the first black cape. “Mai Tai-tai hadn’t been.”
    “Oh, really?”
    “We haven’t seen you here for a few days, Ma Tai-tai.”
    “I’ve been busy—a family matter,” Ma Tai-tai mumbled amid the twittering of the mahjong tiles.
    Yee Tai-tai’s lips thinned into a smile. “She went into hiding because it was her turn to buy dinner.”
    Chia-chih suspected that Ma Tai-tai was jealous.
    Ever since Chia-chih had arrived, she had been the center of attention.
    “Liao Tai-tai took us all out last night. She’s been on such a winning streak the last couple of days,” Yee Tai-tai went on to Ma Tai-tai. “At the restaurant, I bumped into that young Mr. Lee and his wife and invited them to