Cracked Egg had a special fondness for Plume, who had once worked at Hidden Jade Path until she was too old. She’s like a daughter, he’d say. He was protective of all the girls, and they often expressed their gratitude by telling stories to others about his efforts to protect them. Cracked Egg feigned he was not listening, and the girls would call out every now and then, “Isn’t that what you did?” He would give them his most baffled look.
If my father was indeed Chinese, I would want him to be someone like Cracked Egg. But then I heard Snowy Cloud tell a story a month after the debacle with Misty Cloud. We were having breakfast in the common room.
“Yesterday a drunk came to the gate,” she said. “I was sitting in the front garden, just out of view. I could tell by the cheap and shiny clothes that he was one of those overnight successes, no meat to his words, just yellow fat floating in cold broth. He was not an invited guest and would not have been allowed one step over the threshold. But you know how polite Cracked Egg is with everyone.
“This man asked, Hey, are your whores good at acrobatic feats? He patted a fat purse. Cracked Egg put on his sorry face and told him that all the girls in Hidden Jade Path used a technique called ‘stiff corpse.’ He went on to demonstrate that our limbs were locked in one position by rigor mortis and our mouths were frozen into a grimace. For that, he told the man, they charge three times as much as the loose-limbed girls in the Hall of Singing Swallows on Tranquility Lane. So the man happily toddled off to that low-class brothel, which I heard has just had an outbreak of syphilis.”
Everyone laughed uproariously.
“Plume told me he came by last week and smoked a few pipes,” she added. “He told her not to cry, that she was still lovely. She wept in his arms. He always shows her his concern and generosity. Every time they have sex, she said, he insists on paying her twice the usual amount.”
Every time they have sex. I imagined Cracked Egg crawling over my body, his long face looking at my scared one. He was not my father. He was the gatekeeper.
I ASKED MY mother if we could visit an orphanage for abandoned half-breed girls. She did not hesitate in agreeing it was a good idea. My heart beat in alarm. She gathered up some of my old dresses and toys. At the orphanage, I carried them into a large room crowded with girls of all ages. Some looked entirely Chinese, and others purely white—until they smiled and their eyes tilted upward at a slant.
Now, whenever Mother was too busy to see me, I took this as evidence that she had never wanted me. I was her half-American, half-hated child, and I guessed the reason she could not tell me the truth: She would have to admit that she did not love me. I was always on the verge of asking her about my father, but the question remained lodged in my throat. This new knowledge now sharpened my mind. Whenever the courtesans or servants looked at me, I detected sneers. When visitors gave me more than a passing glance, I suspected they were wondering why I looked half-Chinese. The older I became, the more this side of me would show, and I feared that over time, I would no longer be treated like an American, but as no better than other Chinese girls. And thus I sought to rid myself of whatever might suggest I was a half-breed.
I no longer spoke Chinese to the Cloud Beauties or to the servants. I used only pidgin. If they talked to me in Chinese, I pretended I did not understand them. I told them again and again that I was an American. I wanted them to recognize we were not the same. I wanted them to hate me, because this would be proof that I did not belong to their world. And a few of them did come to hate me. Cracked Egg, however, laughed at me and said he had had both Chinese and foreigners treat him worse. He continued to speak to me in Shanghainese and I had to acknowledge that I understood, because he was the one who told me when Mother had returned, or that she wanted to speak to me, or that she had asked that the carriage be brought around to take us to a new restaurant for lunch.
No matter what I did, I feared the stranger-father within my blood. Would his character also emerge and make me even more Chinese? And if that came to pass, where would I belong? What would I be allowed to do? Would anyone love a half-hated girl?
Shanghai1912Violet
At half past noon on my fourteenth birthday, cheers broke out at the front of the house, and firecrackers exploded in the courtyard. Carlotta flattened her ears and flew under my bed.
It was not our custom to lavishly celebrate birthdays, but perhaps I had reached a special age. I ran to find Mother. She was standing in Boulevard, looking out the window at Nanking Road. Every few seconds, I heard rounds of firecrackers popping off in the distance. Then came the whistles of rockets, ripping the air, followed by booms in my chest. Hurrahs rose in crescendo and pitch, then fell, over and over again. So the hullabaloo was not for my birthday after all. I went to Mother’s side, and instead of greeting me, she said, “Look at those fools!”
Cracked Egg dashed in without knocking. “It’s happened,” he announced in a hoarse voice. “The news is all over the streets. The Ching dynasty is over. Yuan Shi-kai will soon step up as president of the new Republic of China.” He had a wild look on his face.
It was February 12, 1912, and the Empress Dowager Longyu had just signed the abdication on behalf of her six-year-old nephew, Emperor Puyi, on the condition that they could remain in the palace and retain their possessions. Manchu rule was over. We had been expecting this day since October, when the New Army staged a mutiny in Wuchang.
“Why would you trust Yuan Shi-kai any more than the emperor’s cronies?” Mother said to Cracked Egg. “Why didn’t they keep Dr. Sun as president instead?”
“Yuan Shi-kai got the Ching government to step down, so he won the right to step up to the presidency.”
“He was commander in chief of the Ching military,” she said, “and his imperial roots might still be in him. I’ve heard some of our customers say that given time, he’ll act just like an emperor.”
“If Yuan Shi-kai turns out to be corrupt, we won’t have to wait two thousand years for the Republicans to let go of our balls.”
MONTHS BEFORE THE abdication, the house had been abuzz over the coming overthrow of the Ching dynasty. The guests at Mother’s parties did not meet in the middle for several days. The Western men remained on their side of the social club, and the Chinese men remained in the courtesan house. They had talked separately and incessantly about the coming change and whether it would be to their advantage or result in the opposite. Their influential friends might no longer be influential. New associations would be necessary. Plans should be made now, in case new taxes were levied, or if the treaties affecting foreign trade were better for them or no longer in their favor. Mother had had to lure them back to the middle with promises that lucrative opportunities sprout out of the chaos of change.
The servants had also caught the fever of change. They recited a litany of tragedies under imperial rule: Their family land had been seized, and no land had been left to bury their dead. The ancestors’ obedience had been punished and the corruption of the Ching had been rewarded. Foreigners had become wealthy on the opium trade. Opium had turned their men into the living dead. “They’d sell their mothers for a gummy wad!” I heard Cracked Egg say.
Some of the maids were afraid of revolution. They wanted peace and no other changes, no new worries. They did not believe their lives would improve under a new military government. From all they had experienced, when there was change, there was suffering. When they married, their lives became worse. When their husbands died,