The Painter of Shanghai Read Free

softly rounded
Rising and sinking like mountains in streams.
Whatever way hands may shape me,
At center my heart is red and true.
Ho Xuan Huong
(an eighteenth-century Vietnamese concubine)

1. Zhenjiang, 1913
    At noon she hears her uncle’s voice, buoyant, backed by velvet rain-patter:
Flute and drum keep time with the rover’s song
Amidst revel and feasting, sad thoughts come…
    The singing stops as he addresses the cat: ‘Hello, Turtle! Have you eaten yet?’ Xiuqing pictures him stooping, stroking. His thin fingers limp on the arched black back; his wan face filled with wonder, even though he’s had the cat for seven years now – a year longer than he’s had Xiuqing. Still, he greets them both the same way. As though they are treats unexpectedly encountered in the pantry.
    Cat patted, her jiujiu resumes his song. He’s back later today than usual, Xiuqing realizes. Usually he leaves the little house at dusk and returns with the pale seep of sunrise. Xiuqing senses rather than hears these returns: the heavy vibration of his step; the cloying whiff of smoke-soaked clothes as he passes her door. The wall between them quavering slightly as he drops to his rickety bed.
    Sometime after that, she’ll sit, then rise. Creep out to see what’s missing.
    What’s missing : it used to be things of scant consequence, things only Lina, their one young serving girl, would miss. The kitchen’s extra ladle, a rice pot. In the past year,though, as Wu Ding’s visits to the smoke houses near the All Heaven Temple have increased, it’s become items of more value. The hanging scroll of Heaven and Earth, which Xiuqing would stand and stare at for hours in those first bleak days after she was brought here (wondering, How do black brushstrokes become the Earth? How is an ink wash Heaven ?). The little pig they’d been fattening in the courtyard disappeared too, right ahead of the New Year’s feast. And yesterday, Xiuqing found, even rice was missing: on her last trip to the storeroom there were three empty jars, mouths gaping. Xiuqing asked Lina about it. Lina said she didn’t know. But her eyes shifted a little, oblique and anxious. Xiuqing knew what the serving girl must be thinking: when rice is carried off in the night, it’s a sure sign that a house is headed for trouble.
    ‘Little Xiu,’ she hears now, in his sleepy, singsong tenor.
    ‘Yes.’ She puts down the doll that she’d been holding on her bent knees and giving a little ride to. The doll falls onto its back and stares blandly at the rooftop tiles. Its face is a dried-out pomelo rind her uncle carved two years ago, for Xiuqing’s twelfth birthday. Its dress is Xiuqing’s mother’s apron, wrapped twice and tightly tied. The apron smells like her mother did, of rice water, ash, and cedar. At least, Xiuqing thinks she can smell these things as she hugs the little toy each night in bed. She also thinks sometimes she hears her mother’s voice, although in truth she barely recalls now what it sounded like. Still, she wills herself to hear it in the presleep daze before dreams: mama. Singing her name softly: ‘Xiuqing.’
    The courtyard stones are slick and silvered with therain. Xiuqing picks her way over them carefully. Her uncle sits beneath an awning, the cat a plush mound in his lap. Gray half-moons border his eyes. He straightens the spectacles he sometimes lets her try on (worn for show; their lenses are clear glass). ‘How are you?’ he cries, beaming. ‘What’s for dinner?’
    ‘I thought river butterfish in creamy sauce. And some cabbage rolls.’ And small portions of rice , Xiuqing adds silently. She doesn’t ask where he’s been. She knows he’d only lie anyway. He lies to her often, just as he leaves her often. As long as he comes back, she doesn’t mind.
    ‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘I’m famished.’ Which is actually another lie: except for those few times he has tried to shake his smoking habit, Wu Ding eats with a sparrow’s stomach.