The Painter of Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein Read Free Book Online Page B

thinking. Yu-liang. Yu. Yu. Liang. Liang. The sounds feel alien and false; she wouldn’t even know what they look like on paper. She knows the characters for her own name. (Old name? No. It’s like renouncing her own arm.) Her uncle wrote them for her the day he brought her home. ‘See?’ Wu Ding said, carefully etching the sloping strokes. ‘That’s you. Xiu: clever. Qing: innocent. ’ It was the first thing, in the month since her mother’s sudden death, that had broken through the eight-year-old’s fog of loss. Beguiled, Xiuqing had taken the tallow-toned rice paper to her room. She practiced writing her name nearly until dawn.
    She has no idea, however, how to write Good Jade . She catches herself wishing suddenly for her jiujiu. To punish herself, she pinches her arm hard. ‘He’s dead,’ she mutters fiercely. It was one of the resolutions she made last night, in the dark: she will neither think nor speak of him. Even to herself.
    ‘What now ?’ asks Godmother over her shoulder. ‘Still nattering?’
    ‘No,’ Xiuxing says. ‘I just coughed.’
    It comes out unconvincingly; unlike her uncle, Xiuqing isn’t a particularly good liar. But this is another thing sheresolved to change last night. She will lie to them, and fight them, and in the end she will leave them. Boar or no boar, she will escape.
    In the kitchen Xiuqing is presented, as Yuliang, to two sullen-faced maids and the cook. The latter gives her hot tea, a bowl of fried rice with pork, and a small helping of the day’s lunch, shrimp with green tea leaves. Godmother waits impatiently while Xiuqing, suddenly ravenous, crams it all into her mouth. Then she gives her a fresh teapot and steers her through the screened doorway.
    Girls straggle into the dining room, rubbing eyes, limping, grumbling. Speaking of being tired, and sore. Godmother chastises some, pats others. She introduces Xiuqing as the new leaf . She calls the other girls my flowers , though at first Xiuqing can’t believe she uses the term seriously. With their tangled hair and peeling patches of slept-in makeup, the women seem singularly unfloral to her, and smell even less so.
    The one exception is Jinling, the girl Xiuqing had seen in the window. She sails in last, trailing scent like an elegant scarf, an exotic blend of gardenia and musk. Even half asleep she is as breathtaking as a girl in an old scroll painting: fashionably delicate and pallid, with a sweeping brow and eyes like calm black pools. Her mouth is little and red and full of small teeth that are charmingly and childishly uneven. Her hair is trimmed into long bangs that frame her face like the glossy feathers of an exotic bird. While the other girls jab at their food and jabber with full mouths, Jinling sits as straight as a sapling andpushes fan into her mouth with small, ladylike gestures. She looks for all the world as if she is hosting the meal.
    Godmother tells Xiuqing that Jinling is the Hall’s top girl. She came to the Hall from Shanghai’s French Concession. ‘From a real Flower and Willow Lane,’ she adds proudly. ‘You are very lucky. I’m making her your teacher here.’
    Xiuqing’s pulse leaps a little, despite herself. But Jinling just frowns. ‘Why should I teach anyone? It will take money and time from me. Two things I’m short of.’ She gazes at Xiuqing, cocks her head. ‘Such a sour face!’ she adds.
    The other girls titter. Godmother brushes off the protest with a tskkk. ‘Please,’ she wheedles. ‘Her hair-combing ceremony will be just after the New Year. And just look at her. She has more refinement than Suyin, I suppose. But there’s really not very much time.’
    At these words the other young girl who is serving pauses. She looks Xiuqing up and down, chewing her lip.
    ‘After New Year?’ interrupts one of the seated girls, Dai, who is rather fat – who looks, in fact, like she could be Godmother’s real daughter. ‘Where are you going to put her? There aren’t any rooms