CONTEMPLATING HER FUTURE FROM THE GARDENER’S back, May had not been unrealistic. She knew that she possessed more beauty than skill, more courage than stamina. Having experienced a husband, she would now adopt a clientele; and so, on each of the seven days she spent at the Astor House Hotel, she got up late, breakfasted at noon, lunched at dinner, and hired a rickshaw to take her slowly up and down Kiangse Road, where she could observe the traffic outside the brothels. She wanted to discover which among them attracted men whose rickshaw boys looked well fed, men whose clothing was elegant, whose faces were open, and whose eyes were raised and honest rather than downcast and ashamed.
Returned to the hotel, she sat in the lounge and watched the Europeans as they came in and out of the lobby’s wide doors: men, mostly, with dark suits and glittering watch chains, exotically barbered faces. But there were a few women as well, dressed in punitive blues and grays. What long strides they took, though. May listened to their heels strike the floor with the force of horses’ hooves. With her eyes closed she let her head rest on the chair back and listened. Despite their drab clothes, the Western women fascinated her, as might birds whose plumage was dull from one vantage, luminous from another.
May told herself that these were dangerous activities: brazen, bareheaded rides through the streets, leisurely long spells in the lobby. What if the silk merchant had had her followed? What if he’d contacted the chen chang, set police and spies on her trail? But try as she did, she couldn’t feel afraid; and she couldn’t forbid herself to sit in the lobby. She couldn’t not look at the women, and especially she couldn’t not hear the beautiful sound of them walking. And anyway, the silk merchant wasn’t a fool, and he wasn’t young. Probably he was grateful for the peace that returned once May had gone.
Upstairs in her room, May stood at the window, watching the dirty water of Soochow Creek spill into the Whangpoo. Light from the street touched on its surface, beckoning like lantern flashes. It wasn’t until long past midnight, when traffic on the Bund and the river slowed, that she could hear the water, the slapping and sucking of the current.
Jump! she thought each time she crossed the Garden Bridge, surprising herself with the idea. After all, the creek was so filled with boats that even though she couldn’t swim, someone would certainly pull her out before the water could close over her head. Besides, she wasn’t the type. She wasn’t a jumper.
On her last night in the hotel, in order to exorcise such thoughts, May held a funeral. For fear of setting her room on fire, she did it on the roof, to which she’d gained access by means of a bribe. The chambermaid who unlocked the attic door squatted and watched in silence as May, freshly bathed, wearing white, laid out what she had bought. As a compromise between mourner and mourned, she loosed her hair, she tucked her two pearls into her cheek.
“Do you want to help me?” she asked.
“Who has died?” the girl asked.
The chambermaid shook her head. “I’m from Hangchow,” she said. “We don’t do such things there.”
May shrugged. She kneeled by the plate of rice and pork she’d carried back from a street vendor. On a thick page of hotel stationery she wrote the name her mother had given her, Chao-tsing, or Morning Star, for she had been born just at dawn. Then she burned that name, along with a thick stack of spirit money, a bundle of joss sticks, a gold paper sedan chair, seven gold paper dresses, and seven pairs of gold paper shoes: all she could think of that her old self might need in its journey through the next world.
The sedan chair was not small, and she’d worried on her way through the hotel’s lobby that the concierge might stop her from taking it upstairs. But he’d barely looked up from his newspaper. He was a European; the idea of her setting it on fire must not have occurred to him.
On the hotel roof, the blaze lit May’s face. The characters of her name, painted large, the black ink not yet dry, hissed and burned green; then the page curled like a drying leaf. She watched the paper dresses, the shoes, and the chair ignite and collapse into ash. How quickly it was accomplished, the passage from one world to the next. She didn’t provide herself a paper house in which to live, a place for Chao-tsing to settle and shelter, but—never considering the possibility of her return—sent that girl traveling among the ghosts, ever away and away.
Sa. Pai. Jer. Sa pai jer. Sapaijer. May couldn’t stop the syllables from repeating in her head. One of the last rituals she’d performed with her mother was the spreading of porridge, or sa pai jer, on the night set aside for feeding hungry ghosts. All the household observed the seventh-month festivities, and each member, down to the lowliest servant, had taken a turn stirring the cauldron in the courtyard. They’d all walked through town with a steaming bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, and when they reached the outskirts of the cemetery they ladled porridge onto the ground. The townsmen lit incense and burned spirit money, and everyone called out to the ghosts to eat and to fill their pockets and then be gone for another year. Now Chao-tsing would be among them, separated from her father by a graveyard wall, he lying cosseted and splendid among ancestors, and she prowling alone in the dark.
As May had no flute, no funeral drum, she made her own music. Pursing her lips, she whistled and felt her last two pearls click against her teeth. The girl from Hangchow watched her. She’d seen many peculiar things at the Astor House Hotel; here was another.
The new name was the one May would use from now on: May-li. May-li meant beautiful, and she’d chosen it while still smarting from the gardener’s telling her she was ugly. What it lacked in imagination it would make up for in suitability. Could there be a better name with which to begin her new life? May: In English, she’d discover, May was the warmest month of spring. The word meant possibility, if not exactly hope. It meant permission to go ahead.
When the sun rose over the river, she was at her open window, watching. She hadn’t slept but had sat there, waiting for the light. She washed and bound her feet, put on her best shoes, not those in which she had run away, but the only other pair she’d brought, those in which she’d been hastily married. Dressed in a new embroidered silk blouse and matching trousers, she breakfasted in the second-floor lounge, at a small table set for one person, and at eleven o’clock she took not a rickshaw but a carriage to Madame Grace’s. The only brothel in Shanghai to employ girls of any nationality, Grace’s was a cooperative venture between two madams, one English, the other Chinese. It was the one place, May imagined, where she might make a life among Europeans, among women who walked with strides as long as men’s.
“SHE HAS A BEAUTIFUL FACE, but an unlucky one,” cautioned Grace’s Chinese partner, who had interviewed and examined May.
“Beauty makes luck,” Grace said.
The partner snorted. “I hope you are right. She’s intact, anyway. That’s worth something.”
“It’s worth quite a lot. Who’s that Beardsly or Bromly—the one from the customs office? He wanted a native girl. ‘An untouched one,’ as he put it.”
The partner nodded, silent, her eyebrows drawn. There was something peculiar about a virgin who didn’t disrobe with a virgin’s timidity. This May-li had a haughty look, the look of a girl who’d come from wealthy circumstances, and yet she had unbuttoned her blouse as efficiently as if she’d never relied on a maidservant. And she did it with practiced vacancy. “These too?” she’d asked, indicating her foot bindings.
“No,” the partner said, shocked. What Chinese woman, even a paid woman, ever offered to show her feet?
Without hesitating, May lay on the couch and opened her legs. Most novices to the trade, despite—or because of—their vulgar ambition, covered their faces with their hands. One young Cantonese had closed her eyes and stuck her fingers in her ears, as if expecting an explosion rather than a quick exam.
“What are you running from?” the partner wanted to know when May was dressed.
“Fate,” May said, after a silence.
The partner raised her eyebrows. “Good luck,” she said. “No one before you has escaped.”
May smiled, said nothing. Silence didn’t seem to make her uncomfortable—nothing did—and this, too, worried the partner. Just how inexperienced was the heart hidden inside that cool silk bodice?
The partner called down the stairs for a kitchen maid to bring a tray with teapot and cups. Watching May, she poured two and offered May one. May set the vessel down without drinking from it.
“A third of what you bring in is yours. Out of it you must pay a room tax, a laundry fee. ‘Accidents,’ visits from the physician, these also are your responsibility. Board is provided, but you must buy your own clothes, or receive them as gifts—if you inspire such affection.” The partner paused. She licked her lower lip. “One day off each week, and one afternoon. If after a year you’re still with us, you get half of what you earn.”
After a calculated silence—she didn’t want to appear eager—May nodded.
“Do you have any questions?”
“A provision,” May answered.
The partner raised her eyebrows. “What is that?”
“I won’t … I’ll do anything for na guo ning”—a foreigner—“English, French, Russian. A black African, for all I care. But”—May reached forward, as if to pick up her tea, withdrew her hand before her fingers were around the cup—“Chinese I won’t touch.”
“Well,” said the partner after a pause, a frown. “If you can afford it, that is your business.” They stood, the table and the steaming cups between them, and bowed.
FOR THE FIRST WEEK, May watched. This was Grace’s established means of educating a prostitute, and at no loss of revenue; there were always customers who paid extra for an audience, especially one so beautiful, so seemingly rapt. As her exemplar, May was given an American woman, Helen, from San Francisco. Until she’d earned enough in her capacity as voyeur to pay the tax for a room of her own, she would sleep on the other side of a yellow curtain strung across a corner of Helen’s.
Accustomed to servants, to lacquered tables, silk-hung walls, and cloisonné dishes, now May had only her one new blouse and trousers, a silk tunic and shawl, and the stained clothes in which she’d traveled. Her shoes. Two pearls. A borrowed blanket. The wall beside her bed was clean but unadorned. In the morning, a crack of sun came through the curtain and crept across its plaster surface. When the angle grew sufficiently extreme, the light picked out and shadowed imperfections. Awake but not up, May touched the wall; with her fingertips she felt the otherwise invisible blemishes.
Helen knew enough Mandarin that she and her apprentice could converse, if simply; and May learned English. She learned it with the speed of a prodigy. When the older woman entertained a client, it was her mouth that May watched attentively, more interested in the forms of language than of copulation. Sitting on her cot, the curtain open, she listened to the foreign words as they emerged from Helen’s lips, short ones like arm and take and longer ones, absolutelydarling. Silently, May formed the sounds with her own mouth, ignoring the rest. She’d seen enough of the silk merchant with her maid to understand what intercourse would demand of her. As her employer suspected, her virtue was only technical.
Helen told May that afterwards men sometimes asked if she had been praying, if prayers were what she mouthed, and May smiled. How stupid men could be, how bullying. Prayers. They would like to inspire such fear.
At the end of a night, Helen wanted to sleep, but May cajoled until she agreed to sit at her table under the window and name all the objects at which May pointed: shutter and sill and doorknob, water and soap, hairbrush, bust bodice, shoe, slip, buttonhook, playing card, ribbon. May put a pen in Helen’s hand and Helen wrote English words on a paper until, too tired to keep her eyes open, she shoved the page aside and went to bed, burying her head under her pillow to block out the early light, the noise of Shanghai streets waking. While Helen slept, May sat on a creaking chair and copied the words out, ten times each. As she wrote, she tried quietly to say them.
If she was to capture what already she understood was the prostitute’s dream, a wealthy patron who would set her up for himself in an apartment with servants, kitchen, clothes, and jewels; and if that man was to be English (French would do, or German, but the English seemed to have all the money in Shanghai), then May would have to learn to speak his language. But-ton-hook. Play-ing-card. She whispered the words and imagined the place she would live—high above the street in rooms painted blue, a low lacquer table set with white cups, porcelain so thin the light shone through.
In return for the English lessons, May offered to teach Helen Chinese characters, but the American woman shook her head and gave May’s shoulder a nudge as if to say Come on!
“No,” May agreed soberly. “Not, uh … Not, um …” She didn’t have the word.
“Useful,” Helen said. “Not useful.”
May nodded. “Not useful,” she repeated.
MAY GOT HER place high above the street. Grace and her partner moved her to a room five flights up. It wasn’t blue, but it was her own, for as long as she earned its tariff, anyway; and in it she worked every night except Thursday. Eight hours after moving upstairs she sold her virginity to Mr. Barnes from the customs office, grinding shyly against him and mewing in a way calibrated to suggest innocence, pain, and the awakening of pleasure—whimpers privately inspired by visions many times retrieved and refined: visions of bitten, gashed, and fouled red shoes.
On top of the surcharge for an unspoiled maidenhead, Mr. Barnes rewarded May’s diligently manufactured responses by tipping her generously. The next morning, banknotes hidden between shoe and bindings, May pulled the linen from her bed, considered the smear of blood, no longer red but an abashed, almost apologetic shade of brown, and concluded that she had arrived somewhere that offered if not justice, then recompense. In a few days, she’d have the afternoon off, and she knew already where to go to buy a dictionary.
Each day she got out of bed by noon and used whatever time she could to read. She taught herself English grammar, she taught herself French and European history. If she remained as “native” as her profession encouraged, a seemingly traditional singsong girl, still she forsook the traditions and even the memory of her family. When Chinese intruded, May pushed it aside with English or French. When thoughts of Chu’en or Yu-ying beckoned, she banished them with another chapter of The Middle Kingdom. She traded dumplings for toast, green tea for black, bean paste for marmalade. She taught herself to forget her star god and the festival days marked by her mother and grandmother. Of her father’s death day she made no observance; her ancestors she declined to worship. And when the New Year arrived, she hid from the fireworks and the lion dancers; she didn’t light so much as one stick of incense to celebrate it.
Her dreams, though, remained stubbornly Chinese, filled with all the old superstitions. In them, the Emperor of Hell made frequent appearances, sitting on a throne, a pile of books in his lap. He looked benign, avuncular, and he tweaked her rouged cheek with such relish that she knew his desire for her. Consulting a text, he explained that the laws of the next world ordained that in death a woman be divided among the men who were her earthly partners. He showed May the passage and the sword he used to effect its directive. But what, he asked, am I to do with you?
Well, she said, shrugging, you’ll just have to chop me into bits. He nodded.
Such a shame to defile your beauty, he lamented playfully, and he stroked the cheek he’d pinched.
Who is doing the defiling? she thought. You or I? But she said nothing.
May felt no fear in the dream, no regret. It was as if the two of them, she and the Emperor of Hell, were considering a plucked chicken and how best to dismember it.
FOR SEVEN YEARS May worked without finding her benefactor. “It’s your own fault,” Helen told her. “It’s because you won’t go with a Chinese.”
The problem, of course, was Chineseness, May’s own. For Westerners, she was an exotic dish, one they weren’t sorry they’d tasted, but why choose her for a steady diet? Not that May didn’t have loyal clients, men who were happy to visit her once or twice a month, to sit with her afterward and help her with her English or her French, to make her gifts of books instead of bonbons—but even those men didn’t want a Chinese woman for a mistress. Not any more than they wanted to eat braised eel every night, or noodles slippery with hot pepper oil.
And now what could May do? She’d traveled even farther from herself.
Seven years. Seven Shanghai winters, raw and gray with dreary, dirty snowfalls. Seven damp springs and oppressive summers. Seven falls. One year, a painful rash on her thighs and a case of the grippe that hung on and on. The next, a pregnancy and a visit from the doctor—so expensive she wouldn’t have any new clothes that season.
May lay in bed for a week, then two, three, no longer in pain. Not exactly. “For pity’s sake, it’s happened to us all,” Helen said, sitting on the end of her bed. “A little miscalculation.” She moved to squeeze May’s foot through the bedclothes, a friendly gesture, but feeling the bandaged lump, she stopped herself. “You’ll get up tomorrow?” she said. “Promise?”
May nodded.
How to dismiss the long, efficient spoon, horribly like the instruments with which they ate? They? She. She was almost one of them now. Year by year she was becoming a foreigner, stranger even than they.
With what chilling swiftness it had been accomplished, the “procedure.” A little morphine, then, as the doctor said, “a nice, nice nap.” The only problem was waking up, swimming to the surface of the dark lake of sleep. Taking a breath. Unable to drown the memory of Yu-ying’s prescription for motherhood, to surface without humiliation scraped newly raw by the long curette. How had she borne it—so ignominious, so pathetic—her attempts to harvest the silk merchant’s seed?
“It’s not so horrible a thing as all that.” Helen was perplexed, watching May retch into a basin. Knowing nothing of May’s previous life, she shook her head. “With most girls, they’re sick before and it cures them.”
May looked up, face as white as the bandages on her feet. “You’ll lose your looks if you go on like this,” Helen said.
But she didn’t. Somehow she summoned her talent for transforming despair into rage. And rage was good, it was tonic, it picked a person up. Besides, the whole wretched thing, the “miscalculation,” presented what Helen would call a silver lining: two new forms of solace and escape. Opium, May discovered, was almost as good as morphine, although the first time she smoked the drug, it provoked a fit of weeping, so pungently did it remind her of her mother.
Novels were more reliable. Especially one, Madame Bovary, which seized hold of May with a force equal to that of a narcotic. Not so much on account of Emma, who didn’t interest her after the heroine’s own spell of infatuated reading gave way to more reckless passions, but because of Charles: the botched foot surgery. Many nights, aching for sleep but stubbornly conscious, May imagined herself married to a doctor such as Bovary; and in her dreams (the kind, when at last they came, characterized by the dreamer’s sense of paralysis, suffocation) she endured his ill-advised attempts to repair her as Bovary had the hapless clubfoot Hippolyte. May’s doctor-husband boxed her deformities in little wood and metal caskets; he tightened the screws, sending her toward delirium and death. A death that only amputation might spare her.
It was, May knew, her feet that held her between one world and the next. On her red shoes she balanced between East and West, China and Europe, misery, happiness. Even her regulars, men who licked her face with the sloppy enthusiasm of dogs, who kissed her eyelids and murmured as they made love, and who after years of assignations still arrived bone hard with lust—even they refused to acknowledge a matter so troubling as May’s feet. In her company, their eyes avoided the floor, the end of the bed. And if ever she suggested unbinding, they changed the topic, or they left.