MAY SPENT MANY HOURS IN THE COURTYARD, but rather than contemplating the disobedience that had brought her to her knees, embracing a stone, she looked around herself and plotted her escape. At suicide she’d been a failure. Perhaps, for the time being anyway, she’d have to make her way in this world. If she couldn’t die, she’d have to live; what she was doing now was neither. The silk merchant’s grounds were kept by three gardeners: one was old and wizened; one was burdened by a wife and twin daughters; and one was a huge strapping lout named Ahng-wah. On this last one’s broad back May rested her plans.
After a month of decorous, almost imbecile docility—the purpose of which was to blend in, smiling and bowing, with the silk drapes and cloisonné vases, transformed from troublesome concubine to pretty possession—May gathered all her jewels into a purse and hid them under her mattresses. A simple swoon after the midday meal rewarded her with an afternoon undisturbed in her bed; after allowing curtains to be drawn and cool compresses applied, she dismissed her maid.
Then, once the household had settled into the usual postprandial stupor, May sat up; she threw off covers and compresses, and retrieved her jewels. Ignoring the pain in her feet occasioned by haste, she slipped past the kitchen and into the back garden, where she found Ahng-wah alone, asleep and snoring in the shade of a maple tree, sitting with his back to its trunk, his head lolling and his bottom lip falling forward in a loose pout. Having made certain that no witnesses were lurking, she poked him awake. He opened his eyes to see a soft white palm filled with pearls and jade, around which delicate fingers slowly closed. “I am going to Shanghai,” May whispered. “If you help me, these will be yours.”
Ahng-wah sucked in his lower lip and nodded, and so at nightfall, as they had planned in the scattered shade of the maple leaves, May ran away on the big feet and strong legs of the gardener. En route from Ch’ang-shu to Shanghai she made one stop, in the town where she had grown up.
May knew her grandmother’s habits as well as her own and arrived at Yu-ying’s gate before dawn of the second Tuesday of the month, the day when her grandmother was sure to go out to play mah-jongg and gossip with her sisters. She hid herself and the big-footed gardener where neighbors and servants wouldn’t see them, inside the small shed where the spare rickshaw was stored alongside baskets of apples and onions and crates of eggs, which Ahng-wah broke into his mouth and swallowed, one after another, while they waited. It was nearly dusk before Yu-ying’s sedan chair departed, and May could creep through the courtyard to the house. She resisted her mother’s door, from under which beckoned a blue finger of opium smoke. At the family ancestor shrine she paused only as long as it took to spit on the soul tablet of her father.
In a special chest in her grandmother’s boudoir, in a perfumed drawer lined with black silk, Yu-ying kept her sleeping shoes. Having secretly explored its contents many times, May knew where to find the key; and the brass lock turned with well-oiled ease. May had barely to touch the drawer’s handle for it to slide out toward her like a thing enchanted, a fairy-tale casket inside which were pair upon pair of red silk shoes: favorites saved from all the years of her grandmother’s marriage. Shoes decorated with birds and flowers, with symbols for life and health and fecundity. Shoes embroidered with gold thread and pearls. Shoes bearing little bells on their pointed toes. Shoes Yu-ying had worn when May’s father and his brothers were conceived. Shoes in which Yu-ying had kicked and writhed and curled into the damp wall of her husband’s lust.
Shoes that had been squeezed and bitten and licked, whose linings had been wet with tears and with wine and with semen. Shoes that had been wiped and mended and perfumed and carefully put away.
From the small purse hanging around her neck, May withdrew the knife she used to groom her feet, and with it she cut up all of her grandmother’s sleeping shoes. She used its sharp point to rip out characters for life and for happiness. She ground little pearls under her own wooden heels, crushed bells until they were silent. When she was through cutting and destroying, she squatted over the heap of torn fabric and glinting gold threads and urinated on it. Then she refastened her trousers, picked up the wet red silk and replaced it in the drawer, feeling how heavy and warm her defilement had made it, like something recently killed. May closed the drawer, crying as she did so without noise, because it was long ago that she had forgotten how to cry out loud.
On her way back through the courtyard, she paused again at Chu’en’s door, but she reminded herself that she couldn’t stand the sight of her mother after she had been smoking, the terrible stupidity in her eyes, and she returned to Ahng-wah, now eating onions in the shed. She climbed on his back, wrapped her legs around his waist, and tucked her feet into his belt. Reaching over his shoulder, she held her jade beads out and let them swing before his eyes on their string.
“It’s fourteen miles more to Shanghai,” May said. “We must continue to travel by night, but I’ll give you all of these and more if we arrive safely.” As they left, she tore down the military citation that hung on the outer door, the one proclaiming her father’s home that of a man of glorious deeds.
AHNG-WAH, WHO WAS three times the size of May, had a large, irregularly shaped mole on the back of his thick neck. As they made their uncomfortable way toward the city, creeping not along roads but on paths near roads, all of May’s distaste for him centered on that blemish. The gardener was a coarse man, and the mole, too, was coarse. He smelled of onions and of perspiration, and it seemed to May’s nose, just inches from the mole, that it was this brown and black blot which released the unpleasant odor. With her arms and legs aching, stretched across Ahng-wah’s broad back, the mole too seemed to stretch wider and wider; it made her eyes ache as well.
Peering around the gardener’s shoulder, May looked everywhere for a wheelbarrow they might steal, chastising herself for running away too quickly to plan, but all the houses and farms they passed in the dark were guarded by dogs, and Ahng-wah was frightened of dogs; May could feel his body stiffen under her as they came within earshot of barking. In fact, the gardener was frightened of all animals, and of the noises they made. The whinny of a horse or the rustle of a nocturnal rodent moving through the grass would make him quicken his lumbering pace.
On the third night, made even more clumsy than usual by the sounds of some local skirmish, the eye-smarting smell of campfires, Ahng-wah fell as he was carrying May. He tripped on a root and plunged heavily forward on to his hands, pitching her over his head. As May reached out to break her own fall, the string of the purse in which she had safeguarded her jewels and her knife broke, and the little silk bag fell out of her reach. Ahng-wah snatched it up.
“That’s it,” he said, scowling at her maliciously. For, naturally, just as she detested him, so did he detest her. As he walked, Ahng-wah had come to regard May as the literal burden of his greed, a chafing weight not only on his sullen back but on his soul. And just as she thought he stank and mentally recoiled from the body that she was forced to hold, so did May offend Ahng-wah’s nose. With her legs open against his damp, filthy shirt, she smelled to him like a whore: a confusing mixture of sickening rich woman’s perfume and the sharp, briny odor of her sex. Ahng-wah spat, calling May an ugly bitch in heat.
In his twenty years, the gardener had had two women, his village chief’s cretin daughter, whom everyone had had, including the chief (all of them considering this barely just compensation for the village’s supporting so otherwise useless a being), and the girl he’d allowed to sleep in the shed where his uncles stored chilies. She, too, was running away from someone or something.
“Give me my purse,” May said.
Ahng-wah looked at May. Why shouldn’t she be the third? Having carried her this far, feet and knees and back aching, he considered a handful of jade inadequate payment.
“Wait,” May said, seeing that he was unfastening the belt in which for eleven miles she had tucked her feet. If she convinced him that rape was too risky, that she would turn him in, perhaps he’d decide to murder her. And if anyone was going to take May’s life, it would be May herself, not this bone-headed lummox. Fury more than danger hastened May’s thoughts. Ahng-wah was strong, but he was stupid and his fears were the fears of a stupid person.
“Careful!” May said, suddenly inspired. “Careful of the foxes!” Ahng-wah looked around wildly.
“What fox!” he said. May willed any expression of triumph from her face. What a blessing that he was frightened of animals.
“Surely you know about the fox girls,” she went on, alluding to local legends that told of bands of female grave-robbers, able to transform themselves into foxes who dug swift, deep holes in which they hid themselves and their loot. “How do you think I came to own so many necklaces?” she asked. “You don’t think I’d run away from a husband who gave me so many jewels?”
Ahng-wah said nothing, but he studied her face, the exaggerated widow’s peak and long eyeteeth that had always encouraged May herself to believe that she looked a little more like an animal than a woman should.
“Well,” she said. “Shall I call my sisters? Shall I show you my tail? The hair on my hands?” She thrust them forward.
“No!” he cried. This was not the chief’s cretin daughter.
“Then give me my purse!”
But Ahng-wah was running, running, and May was sitting, dirty, in a ditch, watching her jewels vanish. She touched the one necklace she still wore to make sure it was there, around her throat.
Five miles to Shanghai—not even a night’s walk, but that was for someone like Ahng-wah, a person with feet, real feet. May sat and listened to the sound of her own heart, cursing her luck. The cruelty of the silk merchant, it seemed to her, lay in not allowing her to die. If he had, she wouldn’t be hiding from him in a ditch, she wouldn’t be bruised and hungry and frightened, forced to draw bitter solace from the one comforting thought available to her: that of the shoes she’d ruined. May fell asleep watching silk divide under the blade of her knife, an image she would resurrect on subsequent bleak nights of her life.
WHEN THE SUN came up, the road filled with traffic heading toward the city: carts of peppers and leeks and eggs, men staggering under yokes to which forty chickens were bound upside down by their feet, flapping, squawking, shitting. Afraid to beg a ride, sure that her husband was hunting her, May stayed in the ditch, listening and waiting, hidden by high weeds. Another night passed, another day.
On the third night, as she was falling asleep, aching head filled with visions of torn wet silk, a strange, howling clatter raked the calm. May startled. She got to her feet, dizzy with hunger, and peered over the edge of the ditch at a boisterous crowd approaching under the light of torches, shadows leaping ahead with the flames. It was the clamorous dance of a local bandit-king’s triumphant all-night parade, his dusty, grinning cohorts dragging devices of war of every conceivable vintage: cannons and crossbows and catapults; a string of stolen, filthy donkeys stumbling under equestrian battle gear; the carapace of a rusted, armored carriage pulled by twisted, fraying ropes. The bandit-king, immensely fat and nearly naked, sat atop this astonishing conveyance in a loincloth and an untied robe that fell open to reveal a gleaming, greasy belly from the center of which popped a strangely protuberant, almost childlike nipple-navel, which gave all of him the aspect of an enormous breast, one with limbs and a head, larger than life, male and female at once. Here, May thought, was someone who would not be afraid of her husband. The intoxicated parade moved forward so slowly that she had time to shake out her clothes and smooth her hair before scrambling out of her ditch.
At the sudden sight of a woman in the road before them—a beautiful one if torches and moonlight could be trusted—the rabble came to a halt. “What are you?” the bandit-king said, as if addressing a ghost. His voice was slurred; his eyes strained for drunken focus. At his feet, one of the men pulling the carriage dropped his rope, put his hands on his knees and vomited an extravagant quantity of wine in the road.
“I am …” Given the confused state of the men before her (and still proud of her success with Ahng-wah; apparently old stories were good for something), May considered announcing herself as a messenger from the god of prosperity but decided not to test what appeared to be a glimmer of good fortune. “I am on my way to Shanghai,” she said, “and if that is your destination, I humbly inquire if I might accompany you in your victorious march.” She bowed, very low and not at all obsequiously.
The bandit-king contemplated her. Beautiful girls were a feature of his celebration that he’d saved for Shanghai, but when a sylph stepped into the road, was there sense in saying no? Could harm follow from arriving in the city with one bird already in hand? It might even be advantageous in luring others.
For a slow five miles, punctuated by innumerable stops and detours in order to seize every opportunity for further drinking and revelry, May sat next to the bandit-king; and the bandit-king required nothing of her but that she listen to the details of his recent triumphs, a matter of forcibly seizing control of a network of roads by routing out their formidable (if not so formidable as he) ruler. According to the fat king—whose name she didn’t ask for fear of seeming impolite, and which he didn’t tell, assuming she knew it already—his recent battles had required great cunning and courage, and May quickly learned which of his pauses she should answer with an amazed ahhhh, and which should elicit And then what? In this way, she so satisfied his desire for an awestruck audience that he forgot to take further advantage of her, and the jolting slow hours passed in an almost companionable tedium. By the time his parade had reached the outskirts of Shanghai, May was leaning drowsily against the bandit-king’s flank, but at the sight of so many houses all crowded together, she sat up. Was this at last the infamous city of danger and opportunity? The familiar architecture of the Chinese countryside had given way to avenues of immense structures bearing mansards and gables and cupolas and balconies, each brazenly tall and visible—no high walls around these houses, for apparently their occupants didn’t need such protection. They were favored by the gods; either that or they were unafraid, they were untouched by celestial plots. May stared as a woman with hair as yellow as the yolk of an egg came out of a black door with a shining brass knob and knocker. The parade hesitated to let an ox cart cross, and she slipped down from the armored carriage, to be fully awakened by her feet.
“Hey!” the bandit-king cried. But she waved and hurried determinedly away, stiffening her back with false courage, willing herself to ignore what felt like broken glass and molten lead, spikes, salt, boiling oil—any and every torment imaginable—devouring her broken feet. She walked away, and the king made no move to stop her, perhaps realizing that the amount of wine he had drunk would have unmanned and embarrassed him.
MAY SAT ON a curb, feeling the ache in legs that for two nights had been spread across a gardener’s broad back, then folded in a ditch and jounced on an armored carriage. She had crept as far as she was able—barely a quarter of a mile—and so she broke the string of her last necklace. A triple strand of pearls, it had been a wedding gift from her mother, and she’d never yet taken it from her throat, not even on the day she’d tried to hang herself. The pearls were large and of obvious value, and for one of them she hired a spot on a wheelbarrow, wedged between two girls heading for work in a cotton mill.
As they drew nearer to the center of the city, the houses grew larger and grander and then abruptly disappeared. Now everything was commerce, and commerce of every description. On the corner of Ningpo and Honan roads, May saw a large red sign offering her the opportunity to pawn the remains of her necklace, and she called for the barrow to stop. She got off stiffly, ducked under the banner, and went inside, watched two transactions before stepping up to where the broker sat. The shop’s counter was five and a half feet tall; May had to reach over her head to lay all but two of the pearls on its sticky surface, two that she’d hastily unknotted from the string in a spasm of sentiment. Then she backed up several feet to see the broker behind his cage. With one eye he peered through a magnifying glass at what she offered, tested several of the pearls against his stained teeth, and gave her a receipt and less money than she had hoped. She counted it twice, folded it, and hid it in her clothes before going outside.
Using a discarded laundry pole as a cane, she limped slowly toward the river, clotted with barges and ferries and junks. A ship was moored at every jetty; customs houses larger than temples, and banks far more grand, looked down as goods were unloaded. May had never seen so many people, nor so many different kinds of people. Tall people, from the tall buildings, with hair that was brown, red, yellow. And people with skin burnt black. All of them walked through and past the crowds of natives, Chinese who seemed busier than those May had left behind in the villages. Squatting and washing clothes in the creek, eating as they walked, quarreling as they worked, beating dogs, plucking chickens, hurrying, hurrying. The nervous trill of Shanghai, its frantic restlessness, as if a wind of desire passed through all its denizens, making them itch and jig with anticipation—although May was tired, the city made her stand at attention.
With her money she bought one week at the Astor House Hotel, a smug and substantial pile of stone and mortar that overlooked the Whangpoo just north of the point where the Soochow Creek poured its silt into the river’s clouded yellow waters. She considered the expense of her small room not so much an extravagance as the necessary cost for a period of consecration. What good would come to her from a month in a cheap inn? Her plans required a good hotel, a perch from which she could watch the kind of people from whom she could learn what she needed to know.
Upstairs, resting with her elbows on her windowsill, she could see the Garden Bridge, and on it a coolie hurrying over the creek with a harp on his back—a gilt harp six feet tall. May watched the man jog on under his fantastic burden and understood that she had come to a place where anything was possible.