Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

It didn’t seem. I actually lived in a new place, nicer than anything I’d ever known.

My partner, so to speak, lives downstairs. Eighty-year-old Belinda Forster. She gardens once a week by instructing Pilar, a silent Mexican woman who lives with Belinda, where to put the different new plants, where to prune the apple trees. Belinda also lunches with a church group, reviews her will, smokes cigarettes. She told me, if I find her unconscious in the garden, or in the driveway, or wherever, to do nothing to revive her. She looks not very shrunken, not extremely frail. Her eyes are beautifully clear. Her skin is without the soft, puffy surface you often see in old people.

Belinda’s husband, a professor of plant pathology, died about fifteen years ago, shortly after his retirement. Belinda talks about his work, their travels in Asia, and his mother. Not a word about herself. She might consider that impolite, or boastful, claiming she, too, had a life, or a self. She has qualities of reserve, much out of style these days, that I admire greatly, but I become awkward talking to her. I don’t quite feel that I say what I mean. Does she intend this effect? Is she protecting herself against the assertions, the assault, of younger energies?

Upstairs, from the deck of my apartment, I see sailboats tilted in the wind. Oil tankers go sliding slowly by Alcatraz Island. Hovering in the fuchsias there are hummingbirds. Squirrels fly through the black, light-streaked canopies of Monterey pines. If my temperament were religious, I’d believe there had to be a cause, a divinity in the fantastic theater of clouds above San Francisco Bay.

Rue spoke with urgency, his head and upper body lifting and settling to the rhythm of his sentences. His straight blond hair, combed straight back, fell toward his eyes. He swept it aside. It fell. He swept it aside, a bravely feminine gesture, vain, distracting. I sighed.

Margaret pinched my elbow. “I want to hear him, not your opinions.”

“I only sighed.”

“That’s an opinion.”

I sat quietly. Rue carried on. His subject was the loss to the Chinese people, and to the world, of the classical Chinese language. “I am saying that, after the revolution, the ancients, the great Chinese dead, were torn from their graves. I am saying they have been murdered word by word. And this in the name of nationhood, and a social justice which annihilates language, as well as justice, and anything the world has known as social.”

End.

The image of ancient corpses, torn from their graves and murdered, aroused loonies in the audience. They whistled and cried out. Others applauded for a whole minute. Rue had said nothing subversive of America. Even so, Berkeley adored him. Really because of the novel, not the lecture. On the way to the lecture, Margaret talked about the novel, giving me the whole story, not merely the gist, as if to defend it against my negative opinion. She was also apologizing, I think, by talking so much, for having been angry and abrupt earlier. Couldn’t just say “I’m sorry.” Not Margaret. I drove and said nothing, still slightly injured, but soothed by her voice, giving me the story; giving a good deal, really, more than the story.

She said, The Mists of Shanghai takes place in nineteenth-century China during the opium wars, when low-quality opium, harvested from British poppy fields in India, was thrust upon the Chinese people. “Isn’t that interesting?” she said. “A novel should teach you something. I learned that the production, transportation, and distribution of opium, just as today, was controlled by Western military and intelligence agencies, there were black slaves in Macao, and eunuchs were very powerful figures in government.”

The central story of the novel, said Margaret, which is told by an evil eunuch named Jujuzi, who is an addict and a dealer, is about two lovers — a woman named Neiping and a man named Goo. First we hear about Neiping’s childhood. She is the youngest in a large, very poor family. Her parents sell her to an elegant brothel in Shanghai, where the madam buys little girls, selected for brains and beauty. She tells Neiping that she will be taught to read, and eventually, she will participate in conversation with patrons. Though only eight years old, Neiping has a strong character, learns quickly, and becomes psychologically mature. One day a new girl arrives and refuses to talk to anyone. She cries quietly to herself at night. Neiping listens to her crying and begins to feel sorry for herself. But she refuses to cry. She leaves her bed and crawls into bed with the crying girl, who then grows quiet. Neiping hugs her and says, “I am Neiping. What’s your name?”

She says, “Dulu.”

They talk for hours until they both fall asleep. She and Neiping become dear friends.

It happens that a man named Kang, a longtime patron of the brothel, arrives one evening. He is a Shanghai businessman, dealing in Mexican silver. He also owns an ironworks, and has initiated a lucrative trade in persons, sending laborers to a hellish life in the cane fields of the Pacific Islands and Cuba. Kang confesses to the madam that he is very unhappy. He can’t find anyone to replace his recently deceased wife as his opponent in the ancient game of wei-ch‘i. The madam tells Kang not to be unhappy. She has purchased a clever girl who will make a good replacement. Kang can come to the brothel and play wei-ch’i. She brings little Neiping into the room, sits her at a table with Kang, a playing board between them. Kang has a blind eye that looks smoky and gray. He is unashamedly flatulent, and he is garishly tattooed. All in all, rather a monster. Pretty little Neiping is terrified. She nods yes, yes, yes as he tells her the rules of the game, and he explains how one surrounds the opponent’s pieces and holds territory on the board. When he asks if she has understood everything, she nods yes again. He says to Neiping, “If you lose, I will eat you the way a snake eats a monkey.”

Margaret said, “This is supposed to be a little joke, see? But, since Kang looks sort of like a snake, it’s frightening.”

Kang takes the black stones and makes the first move. Neiping, in a trance of fear, recalls his explanation of the rules, then places a white stone on the board far from his black stone. They play until Kang becomes sleepy. He goes home. The game resumes the next night and the next. In the end, Kang counts the captured stones, white and black. It appears that Neiping has captured more than he. The madam says, “Let me count them.” It also appears that Neiping controls more territory than Kang. The madam counts, then looks almost frightened. She twitters apologies, and she coos, begging Kang to forgive Neiping for taking advantage of his kindness, his willingness to let Neiping seem to have done well in the first game. Kang says, “This is how it was with my wife. Sometimes she seemed to win. I will buy this girl.”

The madam had been saving Neiping for a courtier, highly placed, close to the emperor, but Kang is a powerful man. She doesn’t dare reject the sale. “The potential value of Neiping is immeasurable,” she says. Kang says Neiping will cost a great deal before she returns a profit. “The price I am willing to pay is exceptionally good.”

The madam says, “In silver?”

Kang says, “Mexican coins.”

She bows to Kang, then tells Neiping to say goodbye to the other girls.

Margaret says, “I’ll never forget how the madam bows to Kang.”

Neiping and Dulu embrace. Dulu cries. Neiping says they will meet again someday. Neiping returns to Kang. He takes her hand. The monster and Neiping walk through the nighttime streets of Shanghai to Kang’s house.

For the next seven years, Neiping plays wei-ch’i with Kang. He has her educated by monks, and she is taught to play musical instruments by the evil eunuch Jujuzi, the one who is telling the story. Kang gives Neiping privileges of a daughter. She learns how he runs his businesses. He discusses problems with her. “If somebody were in my position, how might such a person reflect on the matters I have described?” While they talk, Kang asks Neiping to comb his hair. He never touches her. His manner is formal and gentle. He gives everything. Neiping asks for nothing. Kang is a happy monster, but then Neiping falls in love with Goo, the son of a business associate of Kang. Kang discovers this love and he threatens to undo Neiping, sell her back to the brothel, or send her to work in the cane fields at the end of the world. Neiping flees Kang’s house that night with Goo. Kang wanders the streets of Shanghai in a stupor of misery, looking for Neiping.