Mingmei Yip: The Nine Fold Heaven

“Hello, anybody here?”

Not even a ghostly response.

“Jinying, are you there?”

The ghosts, if there were any, remained stubbornly silent. I looked at the bedroom, the restroom, and kitchen; there was no Jinying, not even his pleasant body scent. Disappointed, I sat down on the sofa to think. It was late, why wasn’t he home? Suddenly a chill rose in my heart—perhaps he had forgotten me already and was now in a nightclub admiring another pretty singer. After some disheartening thoughts, I started to search his apartment for clues of his whereabouts.

I started with his drawers, then methodically went through his writing desk, cabinets, and closets. But there were only piles of bills, receipts, old magazines, and newspaper clippings, mostly about me. Then my wandering eyes landed on his upright piano and I dashed over to open its lid. Yes, a notebook, almost new, was staring at me like an orphan baby begging to be picked up. I snatched it out and opened it to discover that it was a diary filled with Jinying’s irregular, agonized handwriting. There were also some drawings of a naked woman who actually looked like me with phoenix eyes, a watermelon-seed face, and long, curly hair swept to the side. And the woman was pregnant! More surprises came when I saw what was written underneath two of the drawings of the woman’s bulging belly. The first one read:

Precious Baby formula:

Medicine to protect the embryo: ginseng, red dates, white fungus, bird’s nest.

Note: Taking these, both the mother and her baby will have fair, clear skin, thick, dark hair, and strong qi circulation.

The second read:

To dear Jinjin,

Son, even if I never meet you in this world, your baba still loves you wherever you are.

The next few pages had been torn out, leaving me wondering what more Jinying had written about me and our baby: stillborn, according to my singing teacher Madame Lewinsky, but alive somewhere according to my dream.

So I flipped back to the beginning of the diary and started to read.

Whether dead or alive, the people closest to me have eerily vanished. My father, gone. Camilla, gone. Our little Jinjin, gone.

Even my father’s trusted bodyguard Gao, gone. He’s probably taking care of Father, but actually, I don’t care. He hung around Camilla too much. But I’m afraid to ask Camilla about him, because her answer might crush me.

The newspapers said that Police Chief Li suspects Camilla was involved in the gang shoot-out at my father’s hideaway. When we thought we would both be killed, Camilla confessed to me that she was working as a spy for my father’s bitter rival Big Brother Wang.

So she’d been using me to kill my father! Although I hate my father and his evil deeds, heaven would strike me if I’d have him murdered!

But I miss Camilla terribly, can’t sleep, and have no interest in other women. I’m afraid to talk to reporters, lest I let slip secrets about her.

I must find Camilla. If she truly loves me, we’ll find a way to start a new life together. If she doesn’t, I’ll go back to America and never return to Shanghai.

I think Camilla must have left Shanghai. She must be hiding in Hong Kong—that’s what Chief Li thinks too. And, of course, he can’t go after her there. So I’ll go there myself to look for her.

I have no idea what I’ll do if I leave Shanghai. I definitely won’t practice as a lawyer. My father sent me to law school at Harvard, but that was really for him, not for me. He wanted me to be a lawyer for the prestige, and especially for me to help his business. My father sent me to the most prestigious law school to help him break the law!

On the next page was a cutout newspaper photo of me, but the rest of the page was missing, like some of the others. I set the diary down on the coffee table, feeling anxious but also touched by Jinying’s drawings of a pregnant me with all the nutritious herbs for our baby, and his loving note to little Jinjin.

Then I rubbed my temples and thought. I had just risked my life coming back to Shanghai to find Jinying—and now he was in Hong Kong looking for me? Heaven really enjoys playing games with us mortals!

Would we ever meet again? I thought of the Chinese saying, “Five hundred incarnations of looking at each other just to rub shoulders in this Dusty World.” But we didn’t just rub our shoulders, we had a son together! So we must have turned to look at each other much more than five hundred times in our past lives to be awarded a son in this one. I hoped Jinying and I would be reunited and have a chance for happiness. But I also knew this would be determined not by what I wished, but by the mysterious working of karma.

And I was all too aware that my karma was bad, very bad.

I remembered the pessimistic Chinese saying, “Husband and wife are like birds in a forest, when disaster strikes, they will fly their separate ways.”

But Jinying, instead of ignoring me and going his own way, traveled to Hong Kong to look for me. But how could he possibly expect to be able to find me there? Of course anyone could post a flyer or buy a newspaper ad for Xunren, “Finding a Missing Person.” But I didn’t think he’d be so naive as to give away my name so my enemies could find out where I was.

Worse, I’d already changed my name from Camilla to Jasmine Chen and Shen Wei when disguised as a man. Therefore, Young Master, your effort would prove to be futile one more time! So maybe we were not destined to be together after all, and I should accept that our brief encounter was like a failed magic show. Just like my former rival and partner Shadow, who was about to disappear from a water tank, but instead nearly drowned in it!

Feeling an unbearable sadness, I went to his piano and sat down, but afraid of alerting the neighbors, I did not touch the keys but began to hum very softly.

After that, I went to put a disc on his gramophone and turned the volume to the softest. My singing of “A Wandering Songstress” flooded the room with bittersweet emotion. All I could hope was that “wandering” would lead to something sweet, not bitter.

That evening, after I returned to the hotel, I decided not to go back to Hong Kong to look for Jinying. For if I did, how could I find him, or him, me? It would be what the Chinese call “looking for a needle on the sea bottom.” Anyway, sooner or later, he would have to come back to Shanghai.

Instead, I would look for Jinjin. The first step was to pay my singing teacher, Madame Lewinsky, a visit.

The next morning, I dressed up like a student: white shirt, black skirt, my hair in two short pigtails, and no makeup. I didn’t disguise as a man because I didn’t want to shock Lewinsky or arouse her suspicion by cross-dressing.

I took a rickshaw to her apartment building in Avenue Petain, a short distance from my hotel in the French Concession. The puller trotted through the busy boulevard bustling with hawkers, rushing pedestrians, bicycles, and buses. “Hurrying to reincarnate” is how we describe people hurrying about these crowded cities.

Amidst blowing horns and screeching brakes, we passed shops, restaurants, two colleges, a library, a conservatory, and a cathedral before we reached a residential district with neat and clean apartment blocks.