Mingmei Yip - Peach Blossom Pavilion

Avon

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Copyright © Mingmei Yip 2008

Cover photographs © Natalia Campbell / Getty Images (woman); myu-myu / Getty Images (bird); Shutterstock.com; Kevin Hua Long Jiang / Getty Images (background).

Mingmei Yip asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of 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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007570126

Ebook Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9780007570133

Version: 2014-07-25

For Geoffrey, Who gives me both the fish and the bear’s paw.

When there is action above and compliance below, this is called the natural order of things.

When the man thrusts from above and the woman receives from below, this is called the balance between heaven and earth.

–Dong Xuanzi (Tang dynasty, AD 618–907)

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One

1. The Turquoise Pavilion

2. The North Station

3. The Dark Room

4. The Elegant Gathering

5. Spring Moon

6. A Lucky Day

7. The Jade Stalk and the Golden Gate

8. The Haunted Garden

9. The Art of Pleasing

10. The Longevity Wrinkles

11. Rape of the Rock

12. Beat the Cat

Part Two

13. Life Went On

14. Mr. Anderson

15. The Prestigious Prostitute

16. Red Jade

17. The Ways Out

18. The Jade Stalk Refuses to Salute

19. Last Journey in the Red Dust

Part Three

20. Chinese Soap Opera

21. Melting the Ice

22. American Handsome

23. The Escape

24. The Bandits

25. This Woman Is Not My Husband

26. The Monk and the Prostitute

27. The Encounter

28. Separation

29. Replaying the Pipa

30. Flight to Heaven

31. The Reunion

32. Back to Shanghai

33. Revenge

Part Four

34. Ginseng Tea

35. Back to Peking

36. The Nun and the Prostitute

37. An Unexpected Visitor

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

The California sun slowly streams in through my apartment window, then gropes its way past a bamboo plant, a Chinese vase spilling with plum blossoms, a small incense burner, then finally lands on Bao Lan – Precious Orchid – the woman lying opposite me without a stitch on.

Envy stabs my heart. I stare at her body as it curves in and out like a snake ready for mischief. She lies on a red silk sheet embroidered with flowers in gold thread. ‘Flower of the evil sea’ – this was what people in old Shanghai would whisper through cupped mouths. While now, in San Francisco, I murmur her name, ‘Bao Lan,’ sweetly as if savouring a candy in my mouth. I imagine inhaling the decadent fragrance from her sun-warmed nudity.

Bao Lan’s eyes shine big and her lips – full, sensuous, and painted a dark crimson – evoke in my mind the colour of rose petals in a fading dream. Petals that, when curled into a seductive smile, also whisper words of flattery. These, together with her smooth arm, raised and bent behind her head in a graceful curve, remind me of the Chinese saying ‘A pair of jade arms used as pillows to sleep on by a thousand guests; two slices of crimson lips tasted by ten thousand men.’

Now the rosy lips seem to say, ‘Please come to me.’

I nod, reaching my hand to touch the nimbus of black hair tumbling down her small, round breasts. Breasts the texture of silk and the colour of white jade. Breasts that were touched by many – soldiers, merchants, officials, scholars, artists, policemen, gangsters, a Catholic priest, a Taoist monk.

Feeling guilty of sacrilege, I withdraw my nearly century-old spotty and wrinkled hand. I keep rocking on my chair and watching Bao Lan as she continues to eye me silently. ‘ Hai , how time flies like an arrow, and the sun and moon move back and forth like a shuttle!’ I recite the old saying, then carefully sip my ginseng tea.

‘ Ahpo , it’s best-quality ginseng to keep your longevity and health,’ my great-granddaughter told me the other day when she brought the herb.

Last week, I celebrated my ninety-eighth birthday, and although they never say it out loud, I know they want my memoir to be finished before I board the immortal’s journey. When I say ‘they,’ I mean my great-granddaughter Jade Treasure and her American fiancé Leo Stanley. In a while, they will be coming to see me and begin recording my oral history.

Oral history! Do they forget that I can read and write? They treat me as if I were a dusty museum piece. They act like they’re doing me a great favour by digging me out from deep underground and bringing me to light. How can they forget that I am not only literate, but also well versed in all the arts – literature, music, painting, calligraphy, and poetry – and that’s exactly the reason they want to write about me?

Now Bao Lan seems to say, ‘Old woman, please go away! Why do you always have to remind me how old you are and how accomplished you were?! Can’t you leave me alone to enjoy myself at the height of my youth and beauty?’

‘Sure,’ I mutter to the air, feeling the wrinkles weighing around the corners of my mouth.

But she keeps staring silently at me with eyes which resemble two graceful dots of ink on rice paper. She’s strange, this woman who shares the same house with me but only communicates with the brightness of her eyes and the sensuousness of her body.

I am used to her eccentricity, because she’s my other – much wilder and younger – self! The delicate beauty opposite me is but a faded oil painting done seventy-five years ago when I was twenty-three.

And the last poet-musician courtesan in Shanghai.

That’s why they keep pushing me to tell, or sell, my story – I am the carrier of a mysterious cultural phenomenon – ming ji .

The prestigious prostitute. Prestigious prostitute? Yes, that was what we were called in old China. A species as extinct as the Chinese emperors, after China became a republic. Some say it’s a tragic loss; others argue: how can the disappearance of prostitutes be tragic?

The cordless phone trills on the coffee table; I pick it up with my stiff, arthritic hand. Jane and Leo are already downstairs. Jane is Jade Treasure’s English name, of which I disapprove because it sounds so much like the word ‘pan fry’ in Chinese. When I call her ‘Jane, Jane,’ I can almost smell fish cooking in sizzling oil – Sizzz! Sizzz! It sounds as if I’d cook my own flesh and blood!