The Last Rose of Shanghai(21)
“Who won?” I asked in Shanghai dialect, crossing the high threshold of the reception room.
At a round table, Sinmay was sitting at the east; Peiyu the west; my youngest brother, Ying, the south; and Cheng, the north. No electricity again, so the curtains were rolled up to let the natural light in. Around them, two house servants, all we had left of the twenty we used to have, walked around with small clay jars of stewed chicken bits, milky porridge cooked with red dates and ginseng, bite-sized thousand-layer cakes, and sugar-coated rice crackers. A shabby party before the war, but a decent one in these days.
“We don’t know yet. Aiyi, look. Cheng’s mother and I finally found an auspicious date for your wedding. It’ll be spring next year, a good time. We’ve started planning. We’ll hire a traditional band, put a deposit on a restaurant, and send out invitations,” Peiyu said.
She was the matriarch of the family, replacing Mother, now in charge of my wedding. She wore a purple tunic with golden braided frogs. Her stomach was protruding, pregnant with a sixth child, due any day. Peiyu had bound feet and rarely left the compound, but she was a capable woman, negotiating the ever-changing land tax with the rogues working for the Japanese, running the household, and gathering gossip from relatives.
“The traditional band playing souna? It’s so old-fashioned. I prefer a jazz band, sister-in-law.” Planning my wedding was not my favorite topic; it was Peiyu’s.
“No jazz band, little sister. Cheng’s mother wants a traditional band. What took you so long to get home? Was there another shooting on the street?”
This was all I could do about my own wedding. Tell them my preference, then be overridden by the wishes of Cheng’s mother or Peiyu. “Two. It’s good you stay at home.”
“Aiyi, guess what? Sinmay has questions about the foreigner you hired,” Cheng said in a chiding tone. He was always like this, treating me like a child when he grew unhappy with me.
Sinmay glanced my way. He was thirty-four, fourteen years my senior, and in his black eyes was his usual bitterness that had appeared since my lawsuit. Sinmay was a publishing tycoon, the owner of several literary imprints and a newspaper called Analects, and also a poet in his own right. He was Cambridge educated, yet he embodied tradition, always garbed in a long gray robe; all he needed was a long pigtail to complete the picture of an old-fashioned scholar from the dead dynasty. “Is that true? I heard there was some kind of brawl in your club,” he said finally. His voice, slow and raspy, sounded like a series of scratchy rhythms coming out of an old gramophone.
In front of him, all my womanly craft of feigning and smiling was of no use. I had to be submissive to make him believe he was in charge. “That was a few weeks ago.”
“Why did you hire him?”
“Older brother, he’s good at the piano, and he’s different from other foreigners. He’s not biased.”
“All foreigners are biased. They don’t care about us. The Japanese dropped their bombs on Shanghai, but they all sat in their cafés, admiring the technology of the fighters flying by.”
“He’s just a pianist.” I kept my voice even—Cheng was watching me.
“I didn’t know your club had a piano.”
“I borrowed one.”
“Now, this is most perplexing to me. That someone as shrewd as what people say you are would take such extraordinary steps to jeopardize your own business. I assume you know what you’re doing.”
I smiled eagerly. “I do. I have a plan. He’s going to play a new type of jazz, called the stride piano. It’ll be very popular, and the whole of Shanghai will flock to my dance hall.”
“That type of music only plays in the Jazz Bar.”
“Precisely. Now I’ll bring it to everyone.” One of the maids handed me a bowl of bird’s nest soup on a saucer.
“Eat it. It’s delicious,” Peiyu said without taking her gaze off the mah-jongg tiles.
Just the distraction I needed. “I’ll eat it in my room.” I turned around with the bowl.
“Why in such a hurry? I warn you, Aiyi. Let him go. People will gossip. You know how we feel about the foreigners. This will turn into a scandal, a threat to our family’s reputation. Aren’t you at least concerned?” Sinmay said. “This is a dangerous time for our country. The Nationalists have lost Shanghai and Nanjing, and we are the lamb on the butcher’s table. And the Japanese are insatiable! They want to conquer the entirety of China. I hear they will soon bomb the Nationalists’ new capital in the heartland.”
The Nationalists had been retreating for years; Chongqing was their new capital. “They already bombed it,” Ying, my youngest brother, at the south, said.
“Those animals!” Sinmay cursed. “Did you know that dog Yamazaki was promoted? He confiscated our family’s fortune, and now he’ll lead a division that’ll deal with people in the Settlement. Aiyi, if you’re also involved with foreigners, you’ll get his attention, and you’ll lose everything—your customers, your club.” He tossed out a tile of nine dots. Peiyu groaned. It was a tile she needed, but with her west position, she couldn’t take it.
The name Yamazaki made me tremble. I still remembered the mole under his eye, his repugnant malice. The head of a cavalry unit confiscating the locals’ property, he had burst into my home and declared that all my family’s possessions were now the property of his emperor. He ordered us to fill out the forms that contained our bank accounts and our shares in a steel company, a railway company, and a silk trading firm, or we’d earn death. He would have confiscated our home, too, if it had not been for my grandfather, who I learned later was friends with the head of the Imperial Kwantung Army before it became a slaughter machine.