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

something of a celebrity. She’s almost always included in the Merchant Guild’s yearly flower calendar, which features a different local beauty for each month.
    The merchant stands up. Yuliang kneels before him. The perfumed water meets the fish-sweat smell of sex. Yi Gan’s hand absently plays with her hair as she washes his flaccid member. His thick fingers pull small strands from the bun that signifies her virginity.
    After he has left the room, Yuliang refills the little Buddha bowl. She adds a half-teacup of salt and carries it over to Jinling. The brothel cat, Money, who is always either deeply in heat or asleep, winds urgently around her ankles. ‘Out,’ Jinling intones. Yuliang dutifully picks up the animal and drops it in the hall, where it tucks a leg behind itsear like a festival contortionist and begins animatedly to lick itself.
    When Yuliang returns Jinling is examining her breast, which has been bitten. ‘That old bastard deserves a thousand cuts,’ she says, pouting. ‘It’s the second time he’s done this. I should tell Godmother. I never want to see him again.’
    ‘You should,’ Yuliang agrees. But she knows that Jinling won’t. Yi Gan is head of the Merchant Guild. He’s the kind of client the girls here call a ‘bean curd’: ever-present, easy to squeeze money from. Offending him would hurt everyone: girls, servants, Godmother. Especially Jinling herself.
    But it’s the thought of offending Jinling that sends a shiver down Yuliang’s neck. ‘You’re not really angry with me, are you?’
    Jinling hoists her leg onto a chair. ‘Angry?’ She holds out her hand for the cloth.
    ‘For not watching.’
    Jinling fingers herself a moment, then gets to work. ‘Oh, that. No. Not really.’ She winces. ‘It may even tempt him into the bidding. You know: “This one’s so innocent, she can’t even bear to watch!” Men like that in a virgin.’ Her white fingers deftly delve the pink folds the merchant has just purchased. Yuliang watches beneath her lashes, both ashamed and entranced. ‘Later, though,’ the top girl adds, ‘you’d better learn to be more jolly. No one wants to bed a corpse.’
    She grits her teeth as the salt goes to work. ‘Well, almost no one,’ she adds. And giggles.

6
    In the following months, Yuliang seeks safety in small tasks, little rituals. She forges armor out of routine. At the Hall, the ‘leaves’ sleep at two or three and are roused promptly at seven. They take turns perching on the chamber pot’s chipped rim, behind the screen that screens nothing but their bodies. They wash up with water from a pitcher on the bureau, rub and rebind their sore feet. They put on their ‘chore’ clothes. Yuliang saves the cheongsam Wu Ding gave her for the dirtiest work – floor-scrubbing, collecting chamber pots for the night-soil man. She thrills at each rip and slop, revels in the spreading stains. As the fabric unravels, she pictures it as her uncle’s frayed spirit. Disintegrating.
    After eating the girls sweep the courtyard, attacking bottle shards and crumpled call-cards. As winter approaches, lines of snow fill in the spaces between stones, creating an illusion of checkered smoothness. Yuliang sweeps the snow out, along with used matches that look like twisted and burned little bones. Though she’s not supposed to she sweeps the trash into the gutter. She defiantly hopes it will cause a flood when spring comes.
    The afternoons are devoted to more formal training, which Yuliang and Suyin receive in the spare pantry. They’re taught music, deportment, ‘love.’ The music teacher has a face that droops as though made out of warming wax. Shepicks out songs on her three-stringed pipa, teaches the girls popular tunes about the moon’s reflection on water, on icy lakes. Yuliang sings these back without missing a note, and is oddly strong with the male verses. The teacher tells Godmother that she has an ‘unusual talent’ and that she holds ‘great