Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
First published in the United States by Ecco in 2013
Copyright © Amy Tan 2013
Cover photograph © ZenShui/James Hardy
Amy Tan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © November 2013 ISBN: 9780007467242
Version: 2014-07-15
FOR
KATHI KAMEN GOLDMARK AND ZHENG CAO
KINDRED SPIRITS
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and
elude me,
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess’d soul, eludes
not,
One’s-self, must never give way—that is the final substance—
that out of all is sure,
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
When shows break up what but One’s-Self is sure?
—WALT WHITMAN, “QUICKSAND YEARS”
CONTENTS
Chapter 3: The Hall of Tranquility
Chapter 4: Etiquette for Beauties of the Boudoir
Chapter 5: The Memory of Desire
Chapter 8: The Two Mrs. Ivorys
Chapter 12: The Valley of Amazement
Chapter 15: The City at the End of the Sea
Shanghai1905–1907Violet
When I was seven, I knew exactly who I was: a thoroughly American girl in race, manners, and speech, whose mother, Lulu Minturn, was the only white woman who owned a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai.
My mother named me Violet after a tiny flower she loved as a girl growing up in San Francisco, a city I have seen only in postcards. I grew to hate my name. The courtesans pronounced it like the Shanghainese word vyau-la—what you said when you wanted to get rid of something. “Vyau-la! Vyau-la!” greeted me everywhere.
My mother took a Chinese name, Lulu Mimi, which sounded like her American one, and her courtesan house was then known as the House of Lulu Mimi. Her Western clients knew it by the English translation of the characters in her name: Hidden Jade Path. There were no other first-class courtesan houses that catered to both Chinese and Western clients, many of whom were among the wealthiest in foreign trade. And thus, she broke taboo rather extravagantly in both worlds.
That house of flowers was my entire world. I had no peers or little American friends. When I was six, Mother enrolled me in Miss Jewell’s Academy for Girls. There were