This Is How It Really Sounds (35 page)

She felt as if she lived her entire childhood in those gardens, the Humble Administrator's Garden, the Master of the Nets Garden, the Lion Grove Garden, the Garden of Lingering. As enchanting as the gardens were, though, the idea of Shanghai came into her life with an allure that was more immediate and noisy than the softly echoing
pipa
of the past. Suzhou had a reputation from ancient times for tall, pretty women, but as she got older, those far-off women that her mother personified seemed bland compared with the girls from Shanghai who made school trips to the gardens. No lingering of Song
dai
tradition about them. They wore their hair in waves and streaks, in unusual colors or even bright blond, instead of the long, straight black hair of the Suzhou girls. Their clothes were more daring, too. Even the way they talked, with that hissing
s
of the Shanghai dialect, slightly snakelike and jaded, had impressed her. From a young age, she'd known that there was something in Shanghai, something she couldn't quite imagine, that cast its dark luster onto all Shanghai's inhabitants, and she wanted to get close and bask in its wicked light.

When she turned twelve she asked her father if she could study in an English institute. There were all manner of English institutes in Suzhou: the nicer ones for the more privileged children, with their videos and their computers and their young foreign students in blue jeans who didn't speak Chinese, all the way down to the rough ones in the townships that the children of peasants and factory workers attended, with just a few posters on a bare plaster wall and a teacher who barely seemed to know English herself. She'd gone to a cheap one: they had five computers, but no glamorous Americans or Australians on the staff. She hadn't hidden her disappointment from her parents: surely an institute should have at least one foreigner! Her mother had seemed ashamed for some reason, and her father had just said woodenly,
That is your school
. Her grandmother had been the only one to react:
You silly girl! Do you think your father has money to spend on your selfishness? With your mother needing all those medicines!
She still felt sorrow when she remembered it. She hadn't even known her mother was sick.

At the institute, though, life was magnificent. She had a talent for language, and within a year she had won a scholarship to one of the best institutes in Suzhou. The New York Language Institute had a nice waiting room, with couches and a hot-water dispenser. It prided itself on being the most current institute, claiming to educate its pupils in culture as well as language. At this school, every class was taught by a foreigner, usually an American or Canadian of about twenty-five years who seemed to have, by Chinese standards, very little direction in their lives. If they were Chinese, they would be regarded as drifters, incipient failures, but as foreigners they still seemed high-class, and a good deal less ugly than when she was a young girl. Everyone knew that at any time they could go back to their countries and easily become rich. Some of the older students flirted with them, and more, because they knew that if one managed to strike up a relationship, to even get married, then they, too, could go away to the easy life, and make money, and come and go to China and the rest of the world as they pleased. The families of those girls were lucky, as the good fortune of America nearly always washed all who were around them.

She decided to try one out when she was only sixteen. He was a fleshy, slightly awkward foreigner named Thomas, with brown hair and a shy manner. She sensed he was someone attainable. He was soft-spoken and a bit withdrawn: she felt like the elder even though he was ten years her senior. Chinese girls were taught to be submissive: when the older girls gossiped about it, they always said that that was the quality that foreign men especially liked about Chinese girls, because their own women were so strident and large, with their big shoulders and hips. Chinese women, like herself, were more delicate, and in getting Thomas's interest she was as sweet and humble as the fresh jasmine blossom she sometimes wore around her neck as perfume. She asked him questions about idiomatic American expressions. She flirted and she retreated. She put herself in his presence and then pretended that she was very busy. He had finally, clumsily, clutched her to him, and she'd had to fight down the panic of the sudden intimacy. They'd kissed in his office, he'd rubbed her breasts, and though it wasn't so pleasant in itself, the triumph of knowing that she'd been able to get this far with him was exciting. She made what she thought were the appropriate sounds, sounds people made in movies, and she reached down and put her hand into his pants, because that's what some of the girls said was the thing to do. When her hand had suddenly gotten gooey, she gave an involuntary little cry of surprise, and he'd laughed, then given her some tissues to clean up. As soon as she'd gotten free she rushed to the bathroom and washed her hands for a long time, then came out faintly ashamed. Later she'd gone over to where he lived, a sparse, slightly shabby three-room flat he shared with another teacher, and they'd ended up having sex in his bare-walled room. It was strange because he was a foreigner and much older than her. Strange because it was her first time. What had really shocked her, though, was the bareness of the apartment, the sense of shabbiness, so different from what she expected a foreigner's apartment to look like. Where were the bookcases and the movie posters? By the time she left, she was already wondering what she was getting from this whole thing. And within a week it had ended, Thomas pretending to break it off with a gallant and overly formal speech about her age and his responsibilities as a teacher. The next semester he was gone, and, without him around to remind her of how awkward it had all been, she could revel in her first seduction of a foreigner. She was a worldly woman now. Next time, she would set her sights higher.

By seventeen, she had slept with two other men, and if she had been a traditional Suzhou girl, she might have worried about the loss of her purity. But in the eyes of her parents, she was still as pure as they had created her. And in the eyes of the imaginary Shanghai woman that she hoped to become, she was far too pure altogether. The vice director of the culture institute began to get her work playing the
pipa
for foreigners, as her mother had, and giving tours in her excellent English. She would dress in her mother's fine, embroidered robes and make a fortune in tips. She began to save her money for the move to Shanghai.

Things had begun to go better for her father; he was getting work providing costumes for the big dynastic dramas that had become popular in the movies and on television. He would travel to Shanghai and Beijing to meet clients. Her mother, though, became ever less mobile. They could do little to arrest her disease, and the drugs they gave her bloated her body, even as her muscles became less responsive. Her face had lost its beauty and become wide and slack, and her limbs, always so graceful, became leaden. Where it had first been difficult for her mother to walk, it now became difficult to breathe, and Mei Lin spent agonizing weeks with her as she struggled. In the end, she was content simply to sit there for hours practicing the
pipa
as her mother silently watched her.

She was almost happy when her mother passed away. Her mother was free now, and she herself was no longer weighed down with the fear of her mother's death. She had long ago stopped asking why her mother had to die at the age of forty-one, why she turned from a butterfly into a slug. Here in the Red Dust, that was simply how things went.

That fall she was admitted to the Suzhou Uni to study classical performing arts. She continued her
pipa
and began learning the
guzheng
, the giant zither, and the
erhu,
the two-stringed violin. She studied Costume and mastered the elaborate hairstyles of the Qing, the Ming, and the Song. She realized at last that that was what she was preparing to become: a Song Dynasty courtesan, elegant and clever and worldly.

After a year, she became bored with the Uni and moved to Shanghai. Not to a luxurious hotel filled with foreigners, but into a worn one-bedroom flat with narrow gray hallways and cold, drippy plumbing. The city felt infinite and impersonal, as if she was staring up at the underside of a massive floating object. She was another girl in the streets, passing other girls like herself every minute, some prettier, some better-dressed, some obviously privileged and already on track to succeed. It didn't matter. At last she was in Shanghai, and she could still sense the connection between herself and that other woman of her imagination who dipped into the furor of the city like a swallow and glided out again, gracefully and nimbly. That Shanghai woman.

*   *   *

Her father found her a job with a television producer that he often worked with, Mr. Zhang, and her job was to help on the shoots and do the English translations for the videos. She liked Mr. Zhang. He was a slight man about her father's age who wore a brown leather jacket and treated her as a daughter, rather than with other overtones. Mr. Zhang produced videos for Chinese companies, and she went on many tiresome shoots of electronics factories and offices. These outings always involved a long lunch, often with some of the executives of the factory to discuss the message they hoped to convey. It was during one of these banquets that she met the director of the East China Domestic Electronics and Tools Corporation. He was about Mr. Zhang's age, had a slack, fleshy face with large pouchy lips. He treated her with a mildly paternal indulgence, inquiring about where she was from and why she had come to Shanghai. She was surprised when Mr. Zhang told her that the man wanted to invite her to dinner. Her boss looked uncomfortable but asked her to go, since the director was an important client of his.

The director ordered the most expensive dish at a very expensive restaurant. It was the top grade of shark-fin soup: she could live for a month on the cost of two small bowls. Along with that, he ordered at least a dozen more plates, like lobster and hairy crab and a special Japanese beef, so that of the last eight dishes she could only take a single bite each, then leave the rest to grow cold. And meanwhile, he talked. He talked about his business dealings and his trips to Germany and Thailand. He had gone to Rome, he said, and he showed a picture on his cell phone of himself standing at the Colosseum. Had she been to the exterior? She should go—the foreigners loved pretty Chinese girls. He asked about her family and her schooling. He didn't realize that she did English translations. Maybe she could give him English lessons …

She knew that it wasn't English he wanted lessons in. She debated what to say. He was a tiresome man, but he was also an important client for Mr. Zhang. She gave him a bright smile. She would be happy to teach him! She could come to his office three times per week, and she would only charge the equivalent of one bowl of top-grade shark-fin soup.

From this man, she learned how to be a tutor. Not simply a tutor, but a tutor of wealthy older men who hoped, by paying her, to possess her. Sometimes they didn't even want to keep up the appearance of a lesson: they just wanted to talk about their business or their wives or their longing for something that kept escaping them. They were men who owned factories and had relationships with high officials. They would give her expensive perfumes, bring her shopping, take her to costly clubs and restaurants to meet their business friends. They always introduced her as a tutor but let their friends think that she was their mistress. They invented nicknames for her, always circling closer, letting her feel that their golden fortunes were within her reach. The trick, she realized, was to not care about their money. When you became attached to what they could buy you, they could control you with that attachment. If you didn't care, you were free.

In time, she began to meet foreigners. She found them much easier to manage, since they were already slightly off-balance in Shanghai. Sometimes they simply wanted to learn Chinese. There were young businessmen who would still go after her, and once or twice she had slept with them, but always with no concern for the future, and it was they who ended up wanting to be attached.

Peter Harrington was a bit like all these men, but he was also different. How much alike and how different was still to be seen. Today he would reveal what had happened to him on the Bund, or else he would try to maintain the silly face of the rich, strong man who is always clever and can never be beaten. Today she would find out who he really was.

When he arrived, she came out to the curb and locked the garden door behind her. He seemed disappointed when she didn't invite him inside the garden, but he greeted her with a light kiss on the cheek and held her just a moment longer than normal. She could sense an awkwardness about him. At first glance he had nothing wrong with him, only a very slight roundness at the top of his nose, which might have been there before. There were other signs, though.

“Where is Mr. Ma?”

He hesitated. “It was time for a change,” he said. “This is Mr. Hu.” He ushered her into the car and got in on the other side. “I'm dying to know where you're taking me.”

“A place you would never guess. Now I must talk with Mr. Hu.” She explained the situation to Mr. Hu in Chinese, and he smiled, charmed by her. Peter didn't understand a word of it.

“What did you tell him?” he asked.

“You must study your Chinese harder, Peter. You will find out when we arrive.”

The twilight had come down, and the rush-hour traffic was wall-like, choking, impossible, as always. Peter asked about her week, and she laughed. “You know my life: very boring. I played two concerts. I taught my clients.”

“Yes, I know how boring your life is, Camille. Living in a Chinese garden, going to elegant parties with artists and gallery owners.”

“You're right,” she answered. “Perhaps not a hundred-percent boring. Maybe only eighty percent.”