The Valley of Amazement

As she washed Madam Ma’s body to prepare her for the underworld, she said, “Mother, I will always remember that you said I played the zither especially well.”

GOLDEN DOVE CAME to the house a week after Mother Ma died. It had been five months since I had seen her and yet she seemed to have aged a great deal. I felt a flash of anger at first. She had had the opportunity to tell my mother I was still alive. She took away my chance to be saved. I was about to demand she write my mother again, then realized I was acting like a selfish child. There had never been an opportunity for her to save me. We all would have suffered. I had heard many stories since coming to the Hall of Tranquility about people who had been killed when they went against the wishes of the Green Gang. I fell into Golden Dove’s arms and did not have to say anything. She knew the life I had had with my mother. She knew all the ways in which I was spoiled. She knew how much I had suffered as a child, believing that my mother did not love me anymore.

Over tea, she told us that the house had lost its luster. The corners were filled with dirt, the chandeliers had grown chains of dust. And after only a few months, the furniture had become shabby, and all that was unusual and daring in my mother’s house simply looked odd. I imagined my room, my bed, my treasure box of feathers and pens, my rows of books. I saw in my mind the lesson room, where I looked through a crack in the curtains of the French glass doors and saw my mother and Lu Shing talking quietly, deciding what to do.

“I’m leaving Shanghai,” Golden Dove said. “I’m going to Soochow, where life is kinder to those who are growing old. I have a little money. Maybe I’ll open a shop of some kind. Or maybe I’ll do nothing except drink tea with friends and play mahjong like the old matriarchs.”

One thing was certain in her mind: She would not become the madam of another house. “These days, a madam has to be ruthless and mean. She has to make people afraid of what she might do. If she is not harsh, she might as well open the doors and let the rats and ruffians come in and take what they want.”

She gave me news of Fairweather. He was a favorite topic among patrons and courtesans at parties. After he duped my mother, they recounted how cunning and handsome he was. No one thought he had done anything terribly wrong. He was an American who had swindled another American. I was wounded to hear how unsympathetic people were toward my mother. I had never known how much they disliked her.

In Hong Kong, he and Puffy Cloud lived in a villa halfway up the peak. Within a month, due to his gambling habit and Puffy Cloud’s love of opium, they ran out of money. Puffy Cloud returned to brothel life, and Fairweather tried one more time to swindle a businessman, a taipan who was a member of another Triad. “Fairweather wasn’t able to steal the taipan’s money. Instead he stole the heart and virginity of his daughter. All the rumors were the same: Fairweather was stuffed headfirst into a large sack of rice, and with his feet paddling in the air, he was thrown into the harbor, where he promptly sank. To picture it made me feel a little sick, but I was also not sorry to hear he had a frightful death.”

When Magic Gourd left to order tea and snacks, Golden Dove spoke to me in English to avoid feeding gossip to the eavesdroppers. “I’ve known you since the day you were born. You are like your mother in so many ways. You often see too much, too clearly, and sometimes you see more than what is there. But sometimes you see far less. You are never satisfied with the amount or kind of love you have. You want more and you suffer from never being able to have enough. And even though more may be in front of you, you don’t see it. You are suffering greatly now because you are unable to escape from this prison. You will find a way out of this place one day. This is a temporary place of suffering. But I hope you don’t suffer forever from keeping love from your heart because of what has happened. That could have happened to your mother, but you saved her after she was betrayed. All the love she has been able to feel is because you were born and you opened her closed heart. One day, when you leave this place, come visit me in Soochow. I will be waiting.”

“TAKE OFF YOUR shoes,” Magic Gourd ordered. “Stockings, too.” She frowned. “Point the toes.” She sighed and shook her head and continued to stare at them, as if she could make them disappear by thought alone.

The new madam of the house was coming in two days, and Magic Gourd was anxious that I be allowed to stay, so that she could remain, too, as my attendant. She had the shoemaker make a pair of stiff slippers that forced me to stand on just the balls of my feet. He added cuffs to mask the heels of my feet and wrapped red ribbons around my ankles. The slippers gave the illusion of a tiny hobbled foot.

“Walk around the room,” she ordered.

I pranced like a ballerina. After five minutes, I limped stiffly like a duck without feet. I fell into a chair and refused to try any longer. Magic Gourd pinched my arm hard to make me stand. As soon as I took one step, I toppled and knocked down a flower stand and its vase.

“Your pain is nothing compared with what I had to endure. No one let me sit. No one let me take those shoes off. I fell over and bumped my head and banged my arm. And it was all for nothing.” She lifted one of her misshapen feet. It was nearly as large as my natural ones. The instep was a hump. “When I was sold to the merchant’s family, no one bothered to keep my feet wrapped, and I was glad at the time. Later, I realized my feet were unlucky two ways—ugly and still big. When I first started in this business, lily feet mattered. If my feet had been smaller I could have been voted the number one beauty of Shanghai. Instead, I wore shoes like the ones on your pampered feet, and I only became number six.” She was quiet for a moment. “Of course, number six is not so bad.”

In the afternoon, she dyed my hair black, oiled it, and pulled it tight so it would lie flat. In between, she talked.

“No one is here to please you. Don’t expect that from me. You are here to please others. You should never displease anyone—not the men who visit you, not the madam, not your flower sisters. Ah, perhaps you do not need to please the menservants and maids. But do not turn them against you. Pleasing others will make your life easier. And the opposite leads to the opposite. You must show the new madam that you understand that. You must be that girl she wants to keep. I promise you—if you are sent to another house, life will be worse. You would not move up in popularity and comfort, only down, down, down. Up and down—that’s our life. You mount the stage and do everything to make men love you. Later they will remember those moments with you. But they are not memories of you, but the feeling they were immortal because you made them gods. Remember this, Violet, when you step on the stage, you are not loved for who you are. When you step off, you may not be loved at all.” She daubed powder on my face, and clouds of white dust rose. She read my face. “I know you don’t believe me now.” She ran a brush of kohl over my eyebrows and painted my lips. “I will have to tell you these things many times.”

She was wrong. I believed her. I knew life could be cruel. I had seen the downfall of many courtesans. I believed something cruel had happened to my mother. That was why she was loveless and could not truly love anyone, not even me. She could only be selfish. No matter what happened to me in the future, I would not become like her.

Magic Gourd brought out a headband. “I wore this when I was your age. These are just tiny seed pearls, but in time, you will have your own, and maybe the pearls will be real.” She placed the headband around the back of my head and pushed it over my face, tucking in the loose strands.

“It’s too tight,” I complained. “It’s pulling at the corners of my eyes.”

She lightly slapped the top of my head. “Oyo! Are you unable to endure even this small amount of pain?” She stood back and looked sternly at the result, then smiled. “Good. Phoenix eyes, the most attractive shape. Look in the mirror. Eyes shaped like an almond and tipped up at the corners. No matter how much I pull back the sides of my hair, I cannot make a phoenix eye. Those eyes came from your father’s side of the family.”

I could not stop staring at myself in the mirror, turning my head, opening and closing my mouth. My face, where was my face? I touched my cheeks. Why did they look larger? The headband formed a V at my forehead and framed my face into a long oval. My eyebrows tipped upward at the ends as well. The center of my lips was painted into a red pucker, and my face was pale with white powder. With just these few touches, the Western half of me had disappeared. I had become the race I once considered inferior to mine. I smacked my lips and raised my eyebrows. I had the face of a courtesan. Not beautiful, not ugly, but a stranger. At night I scrubbed off the new face, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw how black my hair was. My true face was still there, what had always been there: the phoenix eyes.

The next day, Magic Gourd taught me to put on powder and rouge. The same Chinese mask appeared. I was taken aback but not shocked this time. I realized that all the courtesans looked different after they had prepared their faces for the evening. They wore masks, and throughout the day, I picked up the mirror and looked at mine. I added more powder and tightened the headband so that my eyes were pulled higher. No one, not even my mother, would have recognized me.

THE NEW MADAM was named Li, and she brought with her a courtesan whom she had bought when the girl was four. Under Madam Li’s tutelage, Vermillion had grown to become a well-known first-class courtesan, now nineteen years old. She had earned the affection of the madam, who called her “Daughter.” They had come from Soochow, where Madam Li owned a first-class courtesan house. It was widely thought that the courtesans from Soochow were the best. That was the opinion of everyone, and not just those in our world. The Soochow girls had a gentle manner, a leisurely way of moving, and their voices were sweet and soft. Many Shanghainese flowers advertised that they were from Soochow. But in the presence of one who truly was, the lie was apparent. Madam Li believed that she could have even greater success in Shanghai, where money flowed from across the sea, and after she bought the Hall of Tranquility, in keeping with the custom of naming first-class houses after the madam or the star, she renamed it in honor of her daughter: the House of Vermillion. It was good advertising as well. All the courtesans were sent away. I was not yet a courtesan, so I had no second-class reputation to overcome. There was a lot of crying and cursing among the departing flower sisters as their trunks were inspected to make sure they were not taking along furs and dresses that belonged to the house. The courtesan Petal threw me a hateful look. “Why is she keeping you? A half-breed belongs on the streets, not in a first-class house.”

“What about the courtesan Breeze?” I countered. Magic Gourd had told me recently about Breeze to give me encouragement. She was one part Chinese and another part American.

“The quantity of blood from each is not known,” Magic Gourd said. “And there were other rumors—that she had been not only a courtesan, but, early on, a common prostitute. Whoever she was, she worked step-by-step to raise herself to a better status every few months. According to plan, she attracted the affection of a wealthy Western man who took her for his wife. Now she is too powerful for anyone to speak openly about her past. That is what you should do. Step-by-step, higher and higher.”

Madam Li invited three courtesans from top-ranked houses, who had been lured by an agreement that they could keep any money earned in the first three months without sharing it with the house.

“Very smart of Madam Li,” Magic Gourd told me. “Those girls will work hard to take advantage of the deal, and the House of Vermillion will get off to a fast start.”

The cheap furniture and decorations in the salon were replaced that first day with the latest styles. And the courtesans’ boudoirs were sumptuously refurbished with silk and velvet, painted glass lamps, carved high-back chairs with tassels, and lace-curtained screens that hid the toilet and bathing tub from view.

My room remained the same. “You won’t be entertaining any guests in your room for at least a year,” Magic Gourd said, “and we still have to pay rent. Why run up our debt?” I noticed that she had said “our debt,” making it clear that she also meant “our money.” “What I have in this room,” she continued, “is much nicer than what the other girls had. It is still in style and it’s all paid for.” The furniture was dowdy and worn.

On the second day, we were seated at a table with Madam Li and Vermillion. Magic Gourd had already warned me to remain silent or she would pinch a hole in my thigh.

“Do you know why I am keeping her?” the madam asked Magic Gourd.

“You have goodness for this unfortunate waif and recognize her promise. We are most grateful.”

“Goodness? Pah! I’m keeping her as a favor to my old flower sister Golden Dove, only that. I have always been indebted to her for something that happened many years ago, and she extracted that debt from me when she moved to Soochow.”

Now the debt to Golden Dove had changed hands to me. Madam Li stared hard at me. “You better behave. I did not promise you could stay forever.”

Magic Gourd thanked her with excessive words. She said she would be a worthy tutor and attendant. She blathered on about her experience as a first-class courtesan, her ranking as one of the top Ten Beauties of Shanghai.

The madam cut in. “I don’t need to hear more of this boasting. It’s not going to change the fact that she is mixed race. And I don’t want Violet bragging to guests that she’s Lulu Mimi’s daughter. Everyone’s laughing about the American madam who fell into the trap of an American lover who was nothing more than a convict who had escaped from prison before coming to Shanghai.”

Fairweather was a convict? “How do you know—” I started to say until Magic Gourd pinched my leg and said to the madam: “As you can already see, she looks nothing like a Westerner now. No one will recognize her. We have given her the name Violet.”

Madam Li scowled. “And can you dye her green eyes? How do we explain that?”

Magic Gourd had already prepared an answer. “It can be a literary advantage,” she said in an overly elegant voice. “The great poet-painter Luo Ping reputedly had green eyes, and he saw the deepest qualities of the spirit.”

Madam Li snorted. “He also saw ghosts from the underworld.” She paused. “I don’t want paintings of ghouls hanging in her room. That would scare the pants off any man.”

Vermillion broke in. “Mother, I suggest we simply say her father was a Manchu, whose family originated from the north. Many on the border have foreign blood and light-colored eyes. And we can add that her father was a high-level official with the Ministry of Foreign Relations who died. It’s close enough to the truth anyway.”

Madam Li stared at me, as if to see how well the lies fit my face. “I don’t remember Golden Dove telling us those things,” Madam Li said.

“Actually, she said her father’s mother was part Manchu, and it was her grandfather who was the official. Her father was just a big disappointment to the family. Complete truth is not an advantage.”

Manchu blood! A disappointment to his family! I was stunned that Golden Dove had told them about my father. She had never told me these details.

“Don’t say he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Relations,” Madam Li added. “People might joke this girl was the result of his relations with a foreigner. Did she ever tell you his name?”

“I couldn’t pry that out of her,” Vermillion said. “However, this is already enough explanation to turn your debt to Golden Dove into an opportunity. Some of our customers are still loyalists to the Ching. And since the Ching emperors and empresses were Manchu, the bit about her Manchu blood might be useful. And since Manchu women don’t bind their feet, that can easily explain why her feet aren’t small.”

“We still need a story about her mother,” Madam Li said, “in case anyone hasn’t already heard the truth.”

“Might as well make her part Manchu as well,” Vermillion said.

“We can say she killed herself after her husband died,” Magic Gourd said. “An honorable widow, an orphaned innocent girl.”

Vermillion ignored her. “The usual reason will do. After the death of the father, his younger brother gambled away the family fortune and left the widow and her daughter destined to a life in the gutter.”

Madam Li patted her arm. “I know you’re still bitter about that. But I’m glad your mother sold you to me.” Madam Li turned to me. “Did you hear what we said about your father and mother? Is it straight in your head?”