All the Flowers in Shanghai (29 page)

“When are you coming back?” I asked. I could feel my neck and shoulders becoming tense, and my cheeks turning pale.

Her smile vanished and she clasped her hands together in her lap.

“We’re not coming back.”

I felt angry with her then. Blood rushed to my head, making me giddy; my hands clenched into fists.

“How can you abandon me? This is so unfair! How long have you known?”

“Please, Feng. Don’t make this more painful for me,” she pleaded quietly. “I feel very sad already. We started thinking of moving a year ago but it is so difficult for Chinese to go to America now. There are things happening here that don’t look good and the Americans know it . . . the rest of the world knows it. We’re the last to know.”

She had barely finished speaking when I replied. I was so angry with her; I felt I deserved more than this rushed good-bye.

“What things? There is nothing happening here.”

Ming stood up and went toward the window.

“Feng Feng, please don’t shout. There are many changes . . . big political changes that could ruin everything for people like us. So we’ve decided to take what we have and move. Our life there will be much poorer than the one we enjoy here, but we think we should take the gamble.”

I stood up but did not step away from the edge of the chair. I realized I was so angry I was shaking.

“How could you not tell me? How could you?” I demanded.

“What was the point? It could not be changed,” she responded quickly but with resignation. Ming raised her face to mine. She looked older today, her lovely face drained white, brows furrowed. “I must go.”

“I thought we would be friends forever.” I looked up as I spoke, saw that dead flies had collected in the glass light fixtures in the center of the ceiling. It would be difficult to clean them out, I found myself thinking—while the best friend I had in the world was telling me we wouldn’t see each other again. I breathed out and looked at her through my tears. She folded her arms and frowned; her lips were lovely even when she was sad. She stood up and held both my hands, shaking them a little.

“Feng, I need to go.”

She brought my hands to her lips and gave them each a little kiss.

“You are abandoning me,” I reproached her. Then: “Do you really think it will become that bad? Will it be worse than the war?”

She let our hands drop to waist level, still clasped together.

“Many people think so. The Nationalists lost and many think people like us will be persecuted eventually,” she said. “We have all lived well while others . . . I’m sorry, I must go.”

She thrust an envelope into my hand.

“This is my address in America. I’ll keep you updated if I move. Write to me, too. I want to know how Lu Meng grows up.”

She took a last look at me, from head to toe, and smiled. Then she let go of my hands, which swung empty at my sides. She reached up and tried to touch my face but I flinched away from her. Ming bit her lower lip and smiled again, then turned to the door.

“Good-bye. Take care of yourself.” She took two steps away then turned back to me. “Don’t let yourself get trapped in all this. Forget everything we were once taught . . . it is too easy to become lost in five thousand years of history.”

“What does that mean?” I shot back.

But she was already gone. I sat down and clenched my fists. I banged them on my knees and then on the arms of the chair. Her footsteps along the wooden floor of the hall below were loud, echoing through the house. I heard her reach the front door and then she was outside, walking to her car. I quickly went to the window to watch her leave, my hands flat against the windowpane and my breath steaming up the glass. The engine was already running. I saw her head bob down, and her long legs fold as she stepped into the back—my best friend, more to me than any sister. And then the door slammed shut and she was driven away forever.

Chapter 20

P
erhaps I had lived in this house too long, like all the older members of the family, slowly drifting toward death, fed by others, unseen and forgotten. I had become blind and deaf, a lumpen creature of mud living in a cave, which had lost its senses because they were never used. When I suddenly needed them they failed me and I was only able to sense fragments of the world beyond, which I foolishly believed made up the whole.

At the end of each day, after dinner, Lu Meng sat in his room with me and learned his Latin names. He remembered them easily and quickly, at first studying five a day then seven or eight, exactly as he’d said he would. Yu would come in after a while, and she would ready his bed for him and I would leave once it was his bedtime. She would wake him early for his
gong fu
practice then serve him breakfast. Then she would walk with him to school and be waiting for him when he finished. After they arrived back home, he would study and she would sit outside his apartment waiting, sometimes talking to Yan, who would be sitting outside mine.

After a while the arrangement between Lu Meng and Yu began to make me angry; it was disrespectful. It seemed too intimate; they paid too much attention to each other. He would often gaze at her from a distance and ask anxiously if she was well. I studied them both more closely and noticed what seemed to be a strong affection forming between them. I saw that sometimes Lu Meng would wait for Yu to come from the servants’ quarters to accompany him to school. One day as I was waiting in the car at the back entrance, I watched them leaving and they were laughing together. I saw him help her make his bed, help her lift some books he had bought, help her clean his room of soil he had used to plant some seedlings. This was not what I wanted for my son, I wanted him to be with someone whom he would adore and would be adored by everyone else. Not a servant. This was not what I had planned. He was crippled and disadvantaged already. This would only cause him to suffer more.

In the four years that had now passed since Xiong Fa and I had spoken to each other in the laundry courtyard, I had seen less and less of him. We spoke on friendly terms when we did see each other, perhaps at dinner or when I was needed for ceremonial duties as the First Wife of the family. I always performed these well and willingly, but I had long ago lost any interest in men and had not wanted him or anyone else since my son was born. Lu Meng had become all the world to me. Xiong Fa continued to visit the young maids of the house, which many men liked to do, but he also continued to be discreet, which saved my face and was acceptable to me. Before, I would have fought him; now, at nearly thirty-eight, I was too comfortable living in this house. As I had to do nothing to maintain my lifestyle, I took stubborn pride in mere phantoms and emptiness. I taught my son names I could not read; went into the city to buy expensive items and paraded them in front of people as if they were trophies won by my own hard work. I could hear myself talk too much, giving advice, making sure I got the final word even if I knew it was nonsense. I was making myself sick with my life of repetition, like a ghost haunting a house of mirrors, forced to watch itself repeat the same noise and gestures, every minute, hour, day, month.

Ming had made my mind beautiful; with her I had become attentive and graceful, but now I was slipping back into ugliness. I could not help myself, because I was not able to see where change was needed until it was too late; I prized everything, not knowing what was of value and what was worthless.

When I watched Yu with Lu Meng and felt such anger, I began to sense the depth of my own bitterness. Yu brought a happiness to my son’s life that I had forgotten. I sat in my room, in the chair that had witnessed everything, and became furious. I did not want change; I wanted my way, everything to be returned to the way it was before Yu came. I wanted Lu Meng to laugh only with me as he had done for so many years in his childhood. I wanted Ming to return. I sat alone and shouted for Yan but there was no reply, only silence. Rather than wait for her to return from her work, I walked alone to Xiong Fa’s apartment but as I drew nearer I saw him standing at the open door with Yu. He was smiling and guiding her inside his apartment, gently leading her by her left elbow. I saw his skin touch hers. She returned his smile anxiously but he nodded reassurance and she stepped inside. He closed the door. I wanted to scream. As I walked back to my apartment I grabbed a vase and hurled it over the balustrade, hearing it shatter on the hall floor below.

Yan was already sitting outside my door. She was now nearly seventy years old and knew that, unlike before, if I were enraged now she could do nothing. She had also come to learn that she could not talk to me as freely as she once had. Our old conversations, which had once been so warm and soothing to me, had become an embarrassment.

I walked past her and into my room.

Inside, I screamed loudly, the noise rising from somewhere deep within me. I marched up to my dressing table and, grabbing my hairbrush, hurled it against the wall.

“What is it, mistress?” Yan timidly asked. I knew she was only pretending. She recognized the problem as well as I did.

“That girl is a whore! Sleeping with the father while trying to seduce the son . . . well, I will not stand for it. I am First Wife and this is
my
house!” I shouted. I was the fool and did not see it, even though I was sitting in front of the mirror with my own reflection staring back at me.

“Don’t you agree, Yan, that something must be done?” I raged. I looked around and caught sight of my belt, a Western belt with a large metal buckle. I snatched it by one end and ran out of my apartment. The girl was back, sitting outside Lu Meng’s room.

“Whore!” I screamed.

I ran up and grabbed her by the hair. I forced her to the floor and thrashed whatever part of her I could reach with the flailing belt. Twice . . . five times . . . perhaps once more, I did not count. Lu Meng came out of his room then. Seizing the belt from me, he threw it behind him on the landing. He picked Yu up and helped her to stand. I saw deep red run through her long black hair.

“Lu Meng, let her go! She is a whore, trying to catch you and your father. Throw her out of this house!” I howled and screamed like a devil. “Lu Meng, do as I say, I’m your mother,” I shouted at him.

He did not move but stood and looked at me, his light brown eyes darkening and his lips parting slightly as he breathed defiance. He stood in front of Yu to create a barrier between us.

“Lu Meng. Lu Meng. Do as I say! I’m your mother, you must respect my wishes.” I breathed harder. “You make me lose face in front of this servant whore. Move out of the way!”

Only silence.

“Move!” I screamed.

He didn’t lower his arms, which remained in front of Yu, protecting her.

Xiong Fa arrived then. He stepped between his son and his wife, but his attention went first to Yu. He brushed the girl’s hair aside and we saw that she had a long gash across her right cheek, starting below her ear and ending halfway along her jaw. Blood flowed freely. It was already dripping onto the floor, leaving a stain. I watched it settle and was reminded again of the water marks left by this family, my family, visiting Ma’s and Ba’s house for the first time on that stormy day when Grandfather and I had been told to stay away.

For a moment I was lost.

“Yan, get a cloth to stop the bleeding. Lu Meng, take Yu to the People’s Hospital,” Xiong Fa instructed them, and they left. “This is crazy. Why do you do this to a harmless servant?” he rebuked me.

“She is not. She is sleeping with you! Maybe even your son.”

“What? That is madness.” He shook his head.

He looked at me and I stared back as hard as I could, my nostrils flaring and my eyes bulging. I could not believe he was denying what he had done. He cleared his throat to talk while mine was tight, almost suffocating me; I watched him look down at the blood and then he said, very softly, “I am sorry for everything but it can’t be undone.” He paused and looked at me with such sorrow on his face then. His skin was sagging and he had put on much more weight. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and I saw scars on it from where he had been tortured and beaten by the Japanese soldiers. “Feng, there is so much anger in you. I can’t do this anymore. Please, will you stop?” he asked.

We stood in the corridor alone but knowing the whole house was watching and listening.

“Feng, please. Please think clearly.” He looked at the floor and then up and across the balcony to the unseen faces listening. “We have been through so much. There has been war, hunger, and now people all over the country are demanding huge changes. We have hurt each other and many years ago we lost a child.”

I looked hard at him and suddenly thought he may know. He may have learned what I had done. That night felt so close to me again. My nostrils again filled with the smell of blood and shit of that evening. I stood still and firm on the wooden floor but my legs felt as they did that night, dead and paralyzed.

“Lu Meng would not be alone. And you and I would have another child. Another baby. Lu Meng is happy with Yu and in all that is happening around us it is something to be joyful about.”

He looked directly into my eyes. It had been so long since I had seen them, they were now softer and more watery, there was now a longing that had washed out his parents’ pride and arrogance, which I had not noticed before.

“Please think about this.”

He stepped forward, now closer to me than in years. I could see the lines of his face, years of hardship endured for us, I thought back to the day we stood outside the door of the banquet hall during our wedding, his face shiny and plump like that of a glazed pig. I thought of what had happened since that day and in my anger I could not understand what he was trying to explain, this old man standing in front of me.

I remember taking a half-step back.

I brought my right hand up and slapped him. His head moved slightly but barely flinched.

“Shut up. It was you and your family. Always your family. Now it is your family again.”

“Feng.”