Geling Yan - The Flowers of War

That evening was Yumo’s lucky break. She was looking extremely elegant, wearing a string of pearls which were obviously genuine, and holding a copy of the Modern Magazine . From her get-up she looked like an unmarried girl from a rich family, although with a slightly aloof air which gave the impression of unusual maturity. As Shitiao’s party entered the dance hall, they spotted the young woman sitting in one of the armchairs which lined the sides. She was just the sort of girl they were looking for. One of Shitiao’s friends thought she might be waiting for a girlfriend, another that she had danced until her shoes hurt her and was giving her feet a rest. Shitiao watched as two of his friends went up and asked her to dance and were rebuffed with a tactful smile. Then they picked on him and told him to try his luck.

Shitiao asked her if she would do him the honour of taking a cup of coffee with him. She looked at him shyly but stood up and waited as he helped her on with her coat, just like any young lady used to Western manners. Behind them, Shitiao could hear his friends wolf-whistling above the music, presumably because they were jealous.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked politely.

‘Zhao Yumo. And yours, sir?’

What a self-possessed young woman, he thought as he answered her question. They drank their coffee, and he asked what she was studying. She showed him what she had been reading. The Modern Magazine had articles on just about anything current: politics, economics, lifestyle and health, and the scandalous things which film stars were getting up to. There was more to her than dignified elegance, Shitiao felt. From time to time, she would shoot radiant glances in his direction until he was covered with a sheen of sweat, his throat tightening and his heart swelling in his chest. This was a woman whose femininity (and she was supremely feminine) was just waiting to be released. Traditionally, a man set up a family with a decent woman like his mother, yet that deprived him of so much, emotionally and physically. Any man with a bit of experience of life understood that no matter how womanly and coquettish a girl, marriage would instantly kill her desire for pleasure. A girl who combined the attractions of a prostitute with a respectable family background was an impossibility. But the other way round, outwardly a lady but a whore in your bed, that was possible. Someone like Zhao Yumo, for example.

Yumo was a highly ambitious and resourceful woman. She could adapt her language and behaviour to people from all walks of life. She had always thought she had been born into the wrong family—she should have been the petted daughter of wealthy parents. She was worth just as much as any of them. She had been well educated in the classics, played the pipa and could paint and do calligraphy. Her parents were people of status and education but hopeless with money and, at the age of ten, she had been given by her father to an uncle to pay off a gambling debt. After the man died, his widow sold her to a brothel on the Qin Huai River. By the age of fourteen, she knew all the tricks of the trade. When she played drinking games, she could quote lines from classical poetry and even knew all about the allusions in the poems. She was twenty-four when Shitiao met her, and she had made up her mind that she would not tell him she was a prostitute; she would wait until he was so smitten by her that he was ready to abandon his family for her. At her age, she had to start looking for a different kind of life. She could not go on drinking with clients for ever.

She began to tell Shitiao about her life one day in a hotel bedroom. By now, Shitiao was feeling that it was wonderful to be a man and that, in fact, he had wasted the previous thirty years of his life. His ideal woman lay beside him. He did not yet know that Yumo really was a dyed-in-the-wool, grade-one professional prostitute.

She told him half-truths about herself: how she was a virgin until the age of nineteen and had only kept the men company as they drank, and danced for them. One day she met a man and, when he said he wanted to marry her, gave herself to him. When this heartless man broke off their engagement and left her after a couple of years, she was broken-hearted. She fell so gravely ill she almost died. She nestled in Shitiao’s arms, weeping as she told him the sad tale. Even the most hard-bitten man would not have doubted her words, let alone a young man like Zhang Shitiao, ready to right all wrongs and with a heart as soft as glutinous rice.

Not only was he not disgusted by Yumo’s outpourings, he swore on his life that he would not be the second man in her life to let her down.

It was Shitiao’s wife who revealed the truth about Yumo to her husband. She found a hotel manager’s name card in his suit pocket and racked her brains as to why her husband should have been staying in a hotel. One thing they did not lack at home was rooms. He could only have gone to the hotel for some nefarious reason. She called the number on the card and asked the manager: ‘Is Mr Zhang Shitiao there?’ The manager addressed her as Miss Zhao. Shitiao’s wife was a resourceful woman and pretended to be ‘Miss Zhao’. ‘Mr Zhang said to tell you,’ the manager went on, ‘that he’ll be there today at four o’clock, an hour late, and please will you wait for him.’

It only took Mr Zhang’s wife half a day to dig up the dirt on Zhao Yumo. Then she presented her husband with the facts. He categorically denied that Yumo was a prostitute until she mobilised all his old school friends and he was forced to face the fact that there was only one Zhao Yumo in Nanking and that was the famed prostitute of the Qin Huai brothel. However, it was too late. By then, Yumo’s emotional and sexual arts had ensnared him. He insisted that she was the most beautiful and most unfortunate woman in the world. According to him, his friends and family only despised her because they were all of the intellectual class!

In the event, though, it did not prove too difficult to turn Shitiao from his wicked ways. His wife only had to put on a tragic face, accept the painful truth that she had been wronged, and throw herself into caring for his family. Shitiao had spent six years in Europe. He prided himself on his humanist spirit. He never wanted to hurt anyone, let alone someone who was weak, especially when they had already been wronged. His wife not only endured her sufferings silently; she was also suffering from both pretended and real sicknesses. She looked miserable and her breathing grew weak, but she forbore to lay a single word of blame at his door. She never even asked him where he went every evening. Shitiao’s sympathies gradually shifted over to his wife’s side. He bickered with Yumo when they met and began to find her little ways and moods less appealing. When all government departments made the wartime move from Nanking to Chongqing, he at first said he would buy Yumo’s freedom from the brothel and would get her boat ticket so that she could quietly follow the family to Chongqing. But the day before they were due to leave, he sent her a letter saying he had been wounded in an air raid and would have to postpone the transfer to Chongqing. For the moment, he would be going with his wife to Huizhou, her home city, to convalesce in peaceful country surroundings. With the letter he enclosed fifty silver dollars and a gold bar, a gift which was less generous than that of her former lover, who had left her with a diamond ring. To Zhang, a senior civil servant in the Ministry for Education, who believed that everyone was born equal, Yumo was worth only one gold bar and fifty silver dollars.

‘Shameless bitches!’

Yumo’s reverie was broken by a shout that came down the ventilation shaft.

‘Who’s up there?’ asked Yumo.