The Binding Chair (9 page)

A L
ONG
-H
ANDLED
S
POON

C
ONTEMPLATING 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.

“I have.”

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.

“S
HE 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.

F
OR 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.

M
AY 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.