The Last Rose of Shanghai(4)
4
AIYI
On the way to my club, watching the red-brick buildings and red-tiled villas passing outside the window, I thought of the blue-eyed foreigner. He seemed different from the attackers. I could guess he was arrested because he was with me—the Sikh policeman must have realized I was a victim, but he had to put up a show to appease my attackers. Arresting the young man was unfair. Yet this was what Shanghai had become, a city so far from justice, so close to jail.
Who was he? Why would he bother to help me? Didn’t he know the rules in Shanghai?
Shanghai, my home, my city, was no longer mine after a plague of wars; it belonged to the foreigners from many countries. The British, having defeated us a century ago, controlled the rich and prosperous Settlement with the Americans, and the French built their villas in the Concession. The Japanese, armed with terrifying fighter planes and rifles, were the newly minted victors. They had established their own domain for many years in the Hongkou district, north of the Huangpu River, where they played baseball in the park and staffed hospitals with their women and soldiers from Japan, and now they marched on our streets and slept in the homes they’d seized. We Shanghainese, the conquered, were powerless. Many lost their homes in the Old City, south of the Settlement; only a few lucky ones, like my family, got to keep their ancestral homes, and many others crowded under the shadows of the art deco buildings or scattered around the rice paddies and mosquito-infested fields in the north and west.
Segregation was not a law, but prejudice was rampant like disease. We all stayed away from one another. We Chinese tended our sick at home and the foreigners cared for theirs in their hospitals. We dined in our courtyards, the Europeans drank in their coffeehouses, and the Japanese ate in their restaurants lined with tatami.
Out of business necessity, I kept friends like Sassoon and socialized with them; often we drank brandy mixed with new interest and old resentment. I was aware of the risk of mingling with them. Getting assaulted was not a surprise, but it was a surprise to be aided by a white man, a complete stranger.
My Nash turned on Bubbling Well Road and stopped on a street lined with plane trees with bare branches. I stepped out of my car, pulled my mink coat tighter to fight against the wintry chill, and walked to a stately three-story art deco building with a sleek circular overhang in white stones. The air was vibrating with jazz tunes; the evening session had started. In the dimness that was swallowing the city, One Hundred Joys Nightclub, crowned with a crystal glass dome topped by a stylish flagpole, glowed brilliantly in red neon lights. A vision of beauty and opulence, it was the first luxury nightclub in Shanghai and had earned the envy of Sassoon at its opening.
And it was mine.
I entered the building. In the high-ceilinged atrium, a chorus of voices rose to greet me. I nodded at the bellboys and restaurant owners who rented the spaces on the first level, crossed the tessellated floor, and went up the marble staircase to the ballroom on the second level. On the landing, one of the bouncers opened the thick wooden doors of my club, and I went inside. Instantly, the sound of music and voices of customers rushed to my ears, and familiar gauzelike vapor rich with imported cigarettes, expensive fragrances, and sharp aroma of alcohol enveloped me. As a habit, I studied everything: the brilliant eighteen thousand light bulbs meticulously embedded in the vaulted golden ceiling—a sight that never failed to make a first-timer gasp in awe—the round teak sprung dance floor aglow with pebbles of light, the band on the curtained stage, the customers in the corners, and the curved wrought iron staircase leading to the third floor.
No one was complaining about liquor, fortunately.
I gave my fur to the coat man, walked down the circular path around the dance floor, and headed to the bar. On the stage, the band started to play the music. The sound of double bass dribbled first, a trickle of dark molasses; the drumbeats pulsated, playful like a lover’s tease. Then with a bolt of pure energy, the trumpet blared. Shadowy figures leaped up in the darkness and rushed to the dance floor. Spinning, swaying, they kicked up their feet, black suits and glittery gowns whirling in a sea of jade green, wine red, and ginger yellow. The ballroom had everything the merriment seekers wanted: all music, all lulling voices, and all joys—loose, dark, as intimate as hot breath.
My customers were Chinese, and I knew many of them: the young men in pressed suits and pants, the modern girls in leather shoes and fitted dresses, the thick-bellied businessmen who recently doubled their wealth by some dubious means, the Western-universities-educated architects with glasses, and even Mr. Zhang, a gangster, who had a habit of spinning a folded pocketknife in his hand. There were also Nationalist turncoats, toadies to the Japanese, nameless assassins, and Communist spies.
They all came for their own reasons, but I would like to think they craved jazz, the foreign music of love and yearning that puritans criticized as erotic and dirty, and the waltz and tango that the traditional stoic men derided as immoral and indecent. And most importantly, they all had money. For entertainment in my ballroom was not cheap: an hour’s rate cost more than a meal for many families and a drink more than a week’s wage for many laborers. But with a fallen Shanghai, many shuttered businesses, rampant diseases, beheadings, assassinations, and daily shootings on the street, what else could you do to feel alive other than dancing and singing some songs from your heart?
I tapped my leather shoes against the teak floor and swung my hips and arms, just slightly so no one would notice. I loved jazz and loved to dance, but as the owner of the nightclub, I had learned to show great restraint of my passion or some unwanted hands would find me. So I never sang, or hummed, or swayed on my own dance floor.