All the Flowers in Shanghai (23 page)

“Yes, it is better. If I tried for another heir in a few months, would it be too soon?”

She looked at me hard but did not say anything.

The stone flags of the interior courtyard were huge slabs of gray unpolished granite, forced tight together; over the years, the water dripping from the laundry had still managed to find its way into the narrow cracks between them. In one place, where the crack between the stones was wide enough, the shoots of a flower had burst through. It was only very small at that time but I recognized its leaves and perhaps the beginnings of a flower,
Rehmannia elata,
a sight that Grandfather would have greeted with a smile as one would an old friend returning from a long journey. With a little care it might blossom into pretty tubular pink flowers, but it was a long way from home. I remembered Grandfather telling me it was normally a mountain flower. Maybe that was why it felt secure between these harsh stones.

Yan joined me in looking down at the fragile sight. The sun was overhead and light bounced from the sheets, brightening the courtyard. The flower provided the only speck of color.

“Should I pick this for you, mistress?”

“No, no, we should leave it here. One day it may grow so mighty that it will dislodge this stone,” I joked.

“Perhaps it will bring this building down?”

I looked at Yan and smiled and she gave me a wide smile back.

“Would you like some congee, mistress?”

“Can you tell me another story of your husband?” I asked like a child.

“I think I have told you all of them, many times. But I can tell them again.” Her eyes searched my face for encouragement.

“I always like to hear them.”

I knelt down and touched the little flower while she spoke. No one else had noticed it. It must have bloomed very recently and the busy servants, running around maintaining the Sang household, probably only ever looked down when they were being scolded or sweeping the floor. I was the only member of the family to come here unless someone had a special reason to inspect the laundry hanging out to dry, like First Wife had. I decided I would come back and see how this little flower grew, whether it would survive this house or not. As I knelt down, Ah Meng, the head of the laundry, walked past.

“Aiii, mistress, mistress, you should not be down here. It’s very dirty,” he said urgently, hopping from one slippered foot to the other. He was a young man still, though older than me, and eager to show everybody that he was competent at his work. He was short and bony, but with a long thin nose above his long thin neck. His eyes were small. He was unusual-looking; maybe he was from the west, where I heard there were many different kinds of Chinese people.

“I’m quite happy here, Ah Meng.”

“Shhh!” He sucked his teeth. “This is no place for you. What are you doing?”

“I’ve just noticed this little flower.” I pointed to it.

“Wah! Oh, no, I will get rid of it . . .” He reached down to pull it out.

“No,” I shouted, and he froze in mid-action.

“But, mistress, it makes the courtyard unclean.”

If I had been a bird above us I would have seen the house, a huge stone building with an interior courtyard at the rear, surrounded by low gray-brick buildings for the servants to work in. There would be squares of brilliant white running diagonally across the courtyard and, roughly in the center, three people bending over a pink flower. It would have looked magical in a place so cold and bitter.

“Please just leave it, let it grow for me,” I asked him.

“I will, mistress.”

“If anyone, even Big Father Sang, says anything . . .” that was what the servants called him and the laundryman was surprised to hear me use this term, “ . . . please tell me before you are forced to remove it. I would like to keep it.”

“You can take it now,” he said enthusiastically.

“No, it is too small at the moment, it has barely started to grow,” I told him confidently.

“You know about flowers?”

Yan watched me proudly while I explained, “Yes, I learned some things before I came to live here.”

“Good, eh? Very good.” He looked at Yan and nodded. “You have a smart mistress.”

She nodded in reply.

“You should go and see Lao Tung, the gardener. He knows much. Lots of ancient knowledge we can never share.” He winked at us both.

“Perhaps I will, but for now I will return to my room to have some congee,” I finished.

Ah Meng continued to the laundry area and Yan took me back to my apartment where I sat gazing out of the window at swifts gathering in huge flocks above the houses opposite. The flocks must have been made up of several thousand birds. They looped and dived in a single huge mass yet never bumped into each other, never caused each other harm, and none of them ever seemed to race ahead in a bid to take the lead. The wheeling and soaring of the flock suddenly reminded me of sitting with Grandfather under the big trees in the gardens one day. During the very windy weather, when the branches would be violently shaken and all the thousands of leaves would stir up and down, rustling against each other to create waves of sound, it felt like the garden was calling us, urging us to leap up into the turbulent air and forget ourselves, simply be carried away as they were.

Chapter 14

M
y nighttime encounters with Xiong Fa continued, sometimes twice a week and sometimes not at all. I teased and mocked him and occasionally suffered the consequences of his humiliation. He did not beat me but tried to violate me as he had done on so many other nights before. His fingers, though, were familiar to me; I knew their movements, their angry reactions, but I wanted to torment him further.

Each night we were together I played my games, better and better, growing more confident with each turn. Watching his humiliation made me feel stronger and more powerful.

Yet I began to see he had no real appetite for abuse. His limbs and mouth repeated the same actions again and again, which I realized were learned from generations of Sang men, from somewhere not of his making. After a while, I found he would stop and look at me and at himself, his groin, or else look away entirely. Then his face would burn and he would scowl at me, but always leave.

Perhaps I was not torturing my jailer but another prisoner. He could not be provoked any further and so I simply started to refuse him my bed, which, to my surprise, he accepted. And finally he ceased coming to me.

We spoke very little during this time. It was nearly five months after Yan and I had seen the flower growing through the crack in the courtyard that we had a full conversation.

Xiong Fa suddenly came into my room one evening, still wearing his office suit. He found me just wearing my
du dou
and reading in bed and sat down in the chair beside me. He was already a little drunk.

He sat down heavily, tired from a busy day at the office, and stared down at his feet and then across at my breasts and up the line of my neck to my lips and eyes.

“My family wants an heir. It is time we tried again. Properly. Will you do this?” he asked me very directly, his voice not commanding but explaining that the need for an heir was pure fact and we must now oblige.

“Yes, I would like to try again. I would like to be a mother,” I replied. But I was already your mother: an unknown daughter left to sink among the mass of the poor in the vast unknown countryside.

“But you must do everything as it should be done this time. Will you do that?” Xiong Fa asked, his tone uncertain.

I had remained staring up at the ceiling but at this question I turned to look at him. I saw he had pursed his lips and was looking at my waist and hips, still faintly visible through the sheet.

“I must do it my way.” Once I had his full attention, I continued. “I did everything your family requested last time and we lost the child. It died because of your family’s foolishness.”

I turned my head away from him sharply and looked at the ceiling again.

“I am sorry . . .” He continued speaking, apologizing for his family’s crudeness, but I was not listening.

“. . . just make sure that if it happens again, if you are having a baby, that Yan looks after you. She knows what to do,” my husband finished.

“I don’t want any Chinese medicine,” I told him. “I want the doctors that the foreign people have. The doctors with the big bags.” I sat up and let the sheet slide away from my breasts.

My husband looked down and swallowed.

“Why? Master Ding has been our doctor and fortune-teller for nearly two generations. He was my bonesetter when I broke my arm cycling when I was six years old.” He shook his head and I watched his jowls tremble. “No, Father will never agree to this.”

“But you
do
want an heir?” I asked, making it clear this was a condition.

“Yes! Yes, of course I must have children . . . I want lots of them. There are many empty rooms in this house.” He smiled at me like an overgrown schoolboy. “Okay, but you must also follow what Yan tells you.”

“Yes, I will.”

He smiled at my acquiescence.

“We will go dancing tomorrow and then we will try!” He paused before asking me, “And you will make sure we have boys, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied, bemused.

He got up and walked across the room to the window, opening one of the shutters. He stared out into the darkness. There were fires in some of the streets and lights in the rooms of the surrounding houses.

“All those people living out there,” his voice was muffled as he spoke, “and soon we will add one more boy . . . maybe more. They will all be born with a fortune and into a well-known, powerful family. They will not be so unlucky and poor as all those others out there.”

I listened, studying his chubby shoulders and the back of his head. He was so happy. Your father was happy that night. I had never seen or heard him like this before. He sounded like Grandfather talking to himself about the flowers and the seasons.

He pulled his head inside and saw the pink flower standing in its pot on the windowsill.

“That is pretty. Where did you find it?”

He was too excited to wait for me to tell him that it had been growing unobserved under the noses of his family all this time.

“But what about a daughter as well?” he was saying. “A pretty little girl. That would be very good. Yes, it would be something! A boy could play with my trains . . . I have many of them. But with a little girl, we could walk in those gardens you mentioned a long time ago. My parents want boys, heirs, because it is traditional, but I would like a daughter. It would be good, wouldn’t it?”

He touched a petal of the pink flower and it quivered slightly under his large finger.

He stood in the center of the room, resolutely straightened his jacket as if readying himself to make a formal declaration, smiled, and said good-bye to me. Until tomorrow.

I wanted to scream after him then. Tell him he already had a daughter. Tell him that he and his family had killed you. They had sent you out into the world, to suffer, to work and barely to survive among all the poor and unlucky ones. He should know what he had done; what he had caused. They should all know.

But I had realized, over these last few months of taunting Xiong Fa, that he alone was not responsible.

O
ne evening, at a dinner for thirty people, I sat next to Ming again. We had not seen each other since that first tea dance and she looked at me curiously, trying to decide who it was that she recognized under the makeup and hair styling.

“Is that you, Feng? The shy little girl who married into that crazy Sang family.” I remembered her bluntness, which I now found refreshing rather than frightening, as I had then.

“Yes, it is. How are you and where have you been?” I asked with a wry smile as I knew how much I had changed and that she would find it fascinating.

“I’ve been living in Beijing and just returned, thankfully. But what about you? You look beautiful but where is that shy little girl, the one who blushed so readily?”

“Alas, she grew up,” I responded ruefully.

“She truly did,” Ming declared to everyone around us, none of whom knew either of us.

“So tell me what has happened? Old man Sang still eating the same food? I guess you learned how to use rouge.” She leaned forward, her beautiful dark eyes teasing me. “Managed to give them an heir yet?”

Instinctively I paused for a moment and noticed her smile faded a little. Perhaps she could see my secret because she had a secret of her own.

“Did you lose one?” she asked quietly.

I did not know how to answer. She noticed.

“It’s all right. It happens more often than we would ever speak about. It’s terribly, terribly sad and you want to cry forever and no man understands . . . to them it is just a thing to be replaced with a new one.” It was her turn to pause. “Maybe they’re right, we Chinese have seen so many killed and lost so many children that we think them replaceable. Traveling in northern China, up to Beijing, I saw how many Chinese people there are in the world, and I saw how many are lost. We don’t want to understand why so many die, why there are so many starving children, we just want to live for ourselves, swallowing all the bitterness and ignoring it.”

We were both quiet for a while after that.

“Anyway, what have you got in store?” she asked me brightly after a while.

“We’re planning to have another child. And,” I said, slightly less confidently, “Xiong Fa and I are considering throwing a party. I’ve wanted to do this for a while.”

“Aiii, you
have
grown up!”

We laughed loudly together.

“Good, but where will you host it?” she continued.

“I don’t know. Where do you think? Xiong Fa would like it to be in our family dining room,” I said gloomily.

Ming pulled a face and then smiled for both of us. She was so very beautiful. I couldn’t stop looking at her long lashes. Under them, her guileless eyes met mine, shining with perfect confidence. Her skin was supple and soft yet remained taut, revealing the most perfect of cheekbones. But it was her natural grace that I marveled at the most; it was not simply a matter of the perfect posture like Ma had drilled into Sister, more the easy way with which she was able to win over anyone she spoke to. Hers was the grace that Sister and Ma had never even known existed: they would have realized the folly of their work if they had. Her movements were not forced and learned through repetition; she moved as naturally and easily as the air, and when she spoke her voice was a delight.