The Painter of Shanghai Read Free Page A

But he likes it when Xiuqing and Lina cook as though for company. He likes the look and smell of a full table.
    ‘I brought you something,’ he adds, and reaches below his chair.
    Xiuqing takes the gift and sits on the ground to open it. She unwinds the dingy string. Inside the brown paper is a stack of Western catalogues. Their covers feature curvaceous, flush-cheeked yangguizi – white-ghost women – in Western clothes.
    ‘New republic,’ her uncle says, beaming, ‘new look. This is what modern girls will start to wear now.’ A self-declared intellectual despite his artisan background, he considers himself an authority on both the old and the new China. ‘I found them at the mission. I know how you like pretty pictures. You can look at them on our journey.’
    ‘Journey?’ Xiuqing looks up. She doesn’t go out much. Aside from the physical discomfort of walking on her folded feet, her mother believed that proper women remain indoors. And since bringing her here, Wu Ding, for all his talk of modern girls, has more or less abided by his sister’s wishes. He hired Lina to teach Xiuqing cooking and household skills and to take her to a neighbor’s house to embroider. Other than these brief trips, though, Xiuqing has left her uncle’s little house exactly twelve times: five festivals, three operas, and four New Year’s trips to the Zhenfeng Pagoda. Plus one surreptitious, teetering trip up the street, just to prove she could do it; though as a boar by birth, Xiuqing knows she’s destined to stay close to home.
    Darting down the street after dark is one thing, however. Taking a journey is quite another. The only trip she’s really taken was the three-day sail here from Yangzhou after her mama’s funeral. All she recalls are her own white mourning clothes, slowly growing gray with soot. ‘What… what about Lina?’ she asks now with a quaver. ‘What about the housekeeping?’
    ‘Don’t worry about these things, little Xiu. Your life is about to change.’ He lets the words linger, pleased by their prescience. Then he breaks into song again: ‘ “All is quiet. The moon lingers, and the emerald screen hangs low…”’ He pauses, quirks a brow.
    ‘Li Qingzhao?’ It’s a little game they have: he recites, she identifies. Modern girls, her jiujiu says, should have a grasp of the classics.
    ‘Right!’ He beams. ‘And she was…’
‘A ci poetess, of the Song, Dynasty.’
    ‘Not just a poetess, little Xiu. One of the best our nation has ever seen, though many dismiss her poems as women’s work. She lost everything at one point – her husband, home, wealth. But her misfortune didn’t break her. She bent, like bamboo. She turned her grief into verse so pure and true that nearly a thousand years later she is still revered…’ He drifts off for a moment, staring at his knobby knuckles. Then he pulls out a cracked pocket watch. ‘We need to leave,’ he adds, ‘in just about… oh, seventeen hours.’ He snaps the watch shut, an emphatic snick. ‘Why don’t you go pack?’
    ‘Pack?’ He is serious.
    ‘Yes. Pack a lot. Warm things too.’ He looks skyward. ‘And one nice outfit. Perhaps the red cheongsam I bought you to wear for New Year’s.’ He makes a kiss-kiss sound at the cat and lifts his feet to the table to form a spindly bridge. Turtle eyes it, leaps, lands. He circles on his master’s thighs and lies down. Xiuqing kicks a heel against her chair, faintly panicked. When she looks up, Wu Ding’s eyes are shut: he is going to sleep.
    Back in her room she lays the catalogues out so they overlap, a slick secondhand fan. She flips through them distractedly as two or three raindrops tap on the papered window, testing for a downpour. From the kitchen comes the sound of Lina’s butcher’s knife, sparking thoughts of the green frost of cabbage. I hope she cuts it finely enough , Xiuqing thinks.
    And, almost as afterthought, I hope we can pay her this month.
    In his more capable modes her