The Devil of Nanking (9 page)

Naturally I resisted. And would have resisted to this day, had my mother not become ill. To my fury, my desperation, even as she drew close to death she refused to forsake her country beliefs, her distrust of new technology. Instead of travelling, at my fevered insistence, to the good modern hospitals in Nanking, she put her trust in the local quacks, who spent long hours examining her tongue, emerging from her sick room with declarations of ‘An impossible surfeit of
yin
. It is a mystery, a scandal, that Doctor Yuan did not comment on this earlier.’ In spite of their potions, their brews and prognostications, she grew sicker and sicker.

‘So much for your superstitions,’ I told her, as she lay in her sickbed. ‘You understand, do you, that you are destroying me by refusing to come to Nanking?’

‘Listen.’ She rested her hand on my arm. Her brown hand, weathered by years in the provinces, lying across the crisp sleeve of the western suit I wore. I remember looking at it and thinking, Is this really the flesh that gave me life? Is it really? ‘You can still make me happy.’

‘Happy?’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes were bright and feverish. ‘Make me happy. Marry the Wangs’ daughter.’

And eventually, out of nothing more than weary guilt, I capitulated. Really, the outrageous power our mothers have! Even the great Chiang Kai-shek was similarly swayed by his mother, even he submitted to an arranged marriage to please her. My qualms were terrible – what a disastrous match: the village girl with her
ri shu
almanacs, her lunar calendars, and me, the clear-eyed calculator, rapt in his logic and his foreign dictionaries. I worried intensely about what my colleagues would think, for I am, like most of them, a devout Republican, an admirer of the clear, forward-looking ideology of the Kuomintang, a cheerful supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, deeply sceptical about superstition, and everything that has held back China for so long. When the marriage took place, in my home town, I told no one. There were no colleagues to witness the rambling ceremony, no one to see me undergo the humiliating rituals – the token argument with the bridesmaids on the doorstep, caps of cypress, the tortuous procession avoiding wells or the houses of widows – every moment firecrackers making the entire ensemble jump like startled rabbits.

But my family were satisfied and I was regarded as heroic. My mother, maybe feeling she had been released from her earthly obligation, died shortly afterwards. ‘With a smile on her face that was marvellous to see’, if my dear sisters are to be believed. Shujin became a proper mourner, getting down on her knees herself to dust the floor of my parents’ house with talcum powder: ‘We’ll marvel at her footprints when her spirit comes back to us.’

‘Please don’t talk like that,’ I said impatiently. ‘It was these very peasant beliefs that killed her. If she had listened to the teachings of our president—’

‘Hmmph,’ said Shujin, getting up and dusting off her hands. ‘I’ve heard enough about your precious president, thank you. All this rubbish about New Life. Tell me, what is this marvellous New Life he preaches, if not exactly this, our old life, re-created?’

Now, still in mourning for my mother, with my business cards still printed on white paper, I find in her place, as if from the same bud, that a replacement has appeared, this troublesome, infinitely frustrating, fascinating wife. Fascinating, I say, because what is odd, what is wholly unexpected and improbable, is – and I quake to write this – that in spite of my impatience with Shujin, in spite of her backwardness, in spite of everything, she stirs something in me.

This embarrasses me intensely. I would not admit it to a soul – certainly not to my colleagues, who would challenge her ridiculous beliefs on every intellectual level! She can’t even be called beautiful, at least not beautiful as is commonly regarded. But, from time to time I find myself lost, for several minutes, in the habit of watching her eyes. They are so much paler than other women’s, and I notice this particularly when she studies something, because then they seem to open abnormally wide and soak up the light, igniting tigerish stripes in them. Even an ugly toad dreams of eating a beautiful swan, they say, and this ugly toad, this skinny, truncated, pedantic toad, dreams daily of Shujin. She is my weakness.

Our house is small but it is modern. It is one of the two-storey lime-plaster whitewashed houses that have sprung up just north of the intersections of Zhongshan and Zhongyang Roads. The front door opens into a small, walled piece of land and from there into a tar-paved alley; at the back, past the kitchen, is a small plot of scrubland with pomegranate and teak trees and a disused well that becomes stagnant in the summer. We don’t need the well, we have running water: astonishing for this part of Nanking where you can still see shanty-like shacks constructed from only tyres and wooden crates. And we have not only water but electricity, too, a lightbulb in each room, and imported flowered wallpaper in the bedroom! This house should make Shujin the envy of the neighbourhood, yet she prowls the place like a hunter, seeking out all the crevices and gaps that bad spirits could creep through. Now in every room there are altars to the household gods, separate cloths and brushes set aside to clean them; a spirit wall at the front door and blue
ba-gua
mirrors facing the interior doors. A carving of a
qilin
has appeared over our bed to help us conceive a son, and there are small yellow mantras tied to all the doors and windows, even to the trees outside.

‘Really,’ I say. ‘Can you not see how this sort of behaviour has held our nation back?’

But she has no concept of nation-building, or moving forward. She is afraid of the new and the unfamiliar. She still wears trousers under her
qipao
and thinks the girls in Shanghai, with their silk stockings and short skirts, are scandalous. She worries that I won’t love her because her feet aren’t bound and has somehow contrived to be the owner of an old pair of clogs with embroidered tops that are rather Manchu in style and give her feet a pointed appearance as if they had been in bindings since she was a child. Sometimes she sits in bed looking at her feet, pressing them and wiggling the toes as if natural, unrestrained feet are something she feels a mild disgust for.

‘Are you sure, Chongming, that these feet are pretty?’

‘Don’t speak nonsense. Of course I’m sure.’

Only last night when I was preparing for bed, oiling my hair and pulling on my pyjamas, she started again with her petitioning. ‘Are you? Quite sure?’

I sighed and sat on the small stool, taking a pair of ivory-handled scissors from the chest. ‘There was nothing,’ I clipped my thumbnail, ‘absolutely nothing, lovely about tortured feet.’

‘Oh,’ Shujin gasped behind me. ‘Oh, no!’

I dropped my hand, and turned. ‘What is it now?’

She was sitting upright, utterly distraught, a little band of red breaking out over her cheeks. ‘What is it? It’s
you
! What in heaven’s name are you doing?’

I looked down at my hands. ‘I’m cutting my nails.’

‘But –’ she put her hands to her face, horrified ‘– Chongming, it’s dark outside. Haven’t you noticed? Didn’t your mother teach you anything?’

And then I recalled a superstition from my childhood: to cut your nails after dark will certainly bring demons to the house. ‘Well, really, Shujin,’ I said, in a teacherly voice, ‘I do think you’re taking this a little too far—’

‘No!’ she insisted, white in the face. ‘No. Do you want to bring death and destruction on our house?’

I looked at her for a long time, not knowing whether to laugh. At length, when I could see no good reason to antagonize her, I abandoned my nails and returned the scissors to the box. ‘Really,’ I muttered, under my breath. ‘Really, a man has no liberty in his own home.’

It wasn’t until later that night, when she was asleep and I was left alone to stare at the ceiling and wonder, that her words came back to me. Death and destruction. Death and destruction, the last things that should be on our minds. And yet sometimes I wonder about this peace, these long days when Shujin and I lie in our cheerful disagreement under the sullen Nanking skies. Are these days too quiet? Too dream-filled? And then I wonder, Why does last week’s terrible sunrise return to my thoughts hour after hour after hour?

All through my teens, in the hospital and at university, whenever I thought about my future it didn’t have wealth attached to it, so I really didn’t know what to do with money. That night, when I put together the tip and my evening’s wages, and worked out that it was the equivalent of a little over a hundred and fifty pounds, I stuffed it into the bottom of my holdall, zipped it up, hurriedly pushed it into the wardrobe and stood back, my heart pounding.
A hundred and fifty pounds!
I stared at the bag on the floor.
A hundred and fifty pounds!

I had made the money I needed for rent and there was no need for me to go back to the club, but something odd had happened. Those customers listening to me had made a tiny part of me open like a flower. ‘I can always tell when a woman’s enjoyed herself,’ Jason said wryly, at the end of the night when we all stood in the lift together. ‘It’s all about blood.’ He held the back of his hand to my face, making me shrink against the glass wall. ‘The way the blood flows to the skin. Fascinating.’ He dropped his hand and gave me a sly wink. ‘You’ll be back tomorrow.’

And he was right. The next day my instinct was to go to Shi Chongming, but how could I approach him after yesterday’s angry scene? I knew I’d have to be patient and wait out the week. But instead of waiting at the house among my books and notes, I went to Omotesando and got the first dress that wasn’t above my knee and didn’t show my cleavage. A tunic in a kind of stiff black bombazine, with three-quarter sleeves. It was smart and didn’t say anything much except ‘I am a dress’. That night Mama Strawberry gave it one cursory look, and nodded. She wetted her finger and pasted aside a strand of my hair, then tapped my arm, pointed to a table of customers and sent me straight out into service, into a whirl of lighted cigarettes, drinks poured and countless ice cubes tonged into glasses.

I can still picture myself that first week, sitting in the club and staring out over the city, wondering which of the lights was Shi Chongming’s. Tokyo was in the grip of a heatwave and the air-conditioner was kept on high, so the hostesses all sat in cool pools of light, their shoulders in their evening dresses bare and silvery like moonlight. In my memory I see myself from outside the building and it’s as if I’m suspended in nothingness, my silhouette bright and blurred behind the plate-glass window, my expressionless white face obscured every few moments by Marilyn swinging past, no one suspecting the thoughts that flit crazily across my mind.

Strawberry seemed to like me, and that was a surprise because her standards were legendary. She spent thousands and thousands of dollars a month on flowers: crab-orange protea flown in refrigerated cartons from South Africa, amaryllis, great ginger lilies and orchids from mountain peaks in Thailand. Sometimes I’d stare at her openly because she held herself up so straight and seemed to love being sexy. She was sexy and she knew it. And that was that. I envied her confidence. She loved her outfits so much: every night it was something different: pink satin, white crêpe-de-Chine, a dress in magenta, roped with sequined straps ‘From
How to Marry a Millionaire
,’ she said, dropping her arm, pushing out her hip and turning to pout over her square shoulder at the customers. ‘It’s “charmeuse”, you know,’ as if it was a name everyone should recognize. ‘Strawberry can’t walk nice if she not dressed like Marilyn.’ And she’d waggle her mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder at anyone who’d listen. ‘Marilyn and Strawberry same build. Only Strawberry more petite.’ She was short-tempered, always snapping at people, but I didn’t see her really upset until the fifth night I was there. Then something happened that revealed an entirely different side of Mama Strawberry.

It was a hot night, so hot that steam seemed to be coming off the city, a kind of condensation that rose above the top of the buildings and blurred the red sunset. Everyone moved languidly, even Strawberry, drifting round the dance floor, gleaming in her full-length, sequined ‘Happy birthday, Mr President’ gown. She would stop occasionally to murmur something to the pianist, or to place her hand on the back of a chair and throw back her head at a customer’s joke. It was about ten p.m., and she had retreated to the bar where she was sipping champagne, when something made her put down her glass with a terrible clatter. She sat up straight on her stool, and stared stonily at the entrance lobby, her face white.

Six enormous heavies in sharp suits and punch perms had come through the aluminium doors and were looking round the club, snapping cuffs over the wrists, running fingers between collars and thick necks. In the centre of the gang was a slim man in a black polo-neck, his hair tied in a ponytail. He was pushing a wheelchair, in which sat a diminutive insectile man, fragile as an ageing iguana. His head was small, his skin as dry and crenulated as a walnut, and his nose was just a tiny isosceles, nothing more than two shady dabs for nostrils – like a skull’s. The wizened hands that poked out from his suit cuffs were long and brown and dry as dead leaves.