Xiao Bai - French Concession

If you make this one exception, you’ll never be ruthless again, she told herself. She could have simply killed him. She could have had him killed. She had loyal bodyguards and good friends in the White Russian gangs.

That day, as she threatened him with a gun and pushed the barrel into his chin, she had watched the tears well up in his eyes. She jabbed the barrel in farther behind his chinbone. He had to be punished. As she pushed harder, she could hear him moan and try to swallow, and she felt sorry for him. She knelt on the bed, naked, still sweating, but the torturer’s cruel smile played across her face. As she stroked his dick with her other hand, she could tell how petrified he was, how frustrated and vulnerable. He wouldn’t give in. But he couldn’t help getting aroused, and for Therese, that signified a form of surrender.

She was overcome by affection for him, and later she thought that might have been when she had fallen in love with him, perhaps because she had never had to think about whether she loved Hsueh until she was forced to decide whether to kill him. For more than three years, they had met every weekend at the Astor, and if she hadn’t had enough sex, all she had to do was give him a call. He was always there, and the thought of never being able to see him again had not crossed her mind. Never before had she thought of Hsueh as an actual human being, rather than a male body who gave her pleasure. He was jealous that she had other men, and had even stooped to spying on her. For the first time, she had learned of something that had happened to him outside their relationship: someone had beaten him up and forced him to report on her.

She started thinking of him as her lover, and the thought filled her with tenderness. When her gun was jabbing into his chin, hadn’t he almost wet himself from fright? Didn’t he tell her that later on, when she was fondling him? But he had said he loved her anyway.

She ruefully admitted that she was a woman just like the rest of them, like her friend Margot — love was the bane of their lives. She had survived war, famine, and revolution. She liked to think she wasn’t easily duped, and she knew insincerity when she saw it. But she also knew that everything in the Concession had a price. So she was choosing to overlook Hsueh’s lies because she could tell he was for sale, and she could afford to buy him. She thought her lover far superior to Margot’s. Equality couldn’t exist in any relationship that took place in this city full of adventure seekers, gold mines, and traps. One person was always in control of the relationship, and if it wasn’t him, it was you.

She directed Zung to leave Shanghai immediately, telling him she had reliable information that the gangs and even the police were aware of his latest deal. But she did not tell him about Hsueh. Zung was her business partner and trusted employee, but even so, how could she broach the subject of her private life, never mind reveal that she had been sleeping with a man sent to spy on them?

Earlier that evening, nouveau-riche Shanghailanders had arrived at an Edwardian villa in the west of Shanghai for an elaborate party. They had all been nobodies when they first came to Shanghai, but they had at least been ambitious. And now that they had made their fortunes and become the masters of this place, they had all bought worthless titles of nobility from their home countries back in Europe. They ate three-course meals. With the money they had made speculating on land, they hired tutors and nannies for their children. They spent huge sums of money on Russian jewels for their wives, and smaller sums of money on Asian mistresses whose lips revived their dicks. They permitted their half-Chinese sons to work in their friends’ companies, and abandoned them when their own speculating failed.

It was just past seven, and the dew on the grass had not yet softened the ground. The swimming pool was still sparkling in the dusk. Since it was a fancy dress ball, the villa and grounds were teeming with all kinds of odd characters. A group of Arab nobles leaned on the second-floor railing, the men wearing scimitars and the women wearing head scarves. The theme for the day was the sinking of the Titanic .

The captain — the founder of the American company the Raven Group, the evening’s host — announced that the ball had begun. The Arabs howled as though they were standing at the edge of the desert. Margot was wearing an elaborate fin-de-siècle pleated dress that trailed on the floor. Even her drawers had been specially stitched by Chinese tailors according to the fashion of the period, she whispered to Therese. They were long silk drawers with the type of open seat pants that nowadays only toddlers wore.

“You’d better find somewhere quiet and let Mr. Blair get under that dress,” Therese mocked gently. Margot’s husband was dressed as a general. He had managed to procure a number of medals and a gold-embroidered red sash with a large stain that looked for all the world like an old borscht stain. Baron Pidol was clearly fitting right in. He was acquiring the Shanghailanders’ leisure habits, and he already had a genuine antique sash.

An up-and-coming young poet from London tied a purple shawl around his head that covered his chin and was draped over his shoulders, in an impression of a Berber chieftain. Shanghai was his first stop on a journey through China, and he hadn’t yet traveled farther inland. The men who were learning how to be rich — or their wives, rather — all ordered literary magazines from London and knew of him from there. They invited him to banquets, keen to see the young prodigy from Cambridge. His companion was even younger and skinnier than he was, and had smeared his face black with paste. To avoid having to paint his shoulders black, he had drawn his tartan wool shawl higher around his neck to hide his pale skin. A man called Madier commented in what he meant to be a worldly tone: “I suppose the Moroccan gigolo costume suits him. The poets, Gide, I mean, didn’t they all use to go off to Morocco for this sort of thing?”

The poet and his companion couldn’t hear the people gossiping about them. The former was too busy grumbling about the music. The band was playing last year’s hottest jazz standard, “Body and Soul,” a perfect song for a slow dance with an arm around your partner’s waist. They always played new songs for this crowd, just to prove they were au fait with the latest musical trends. But would the poor dead musicians on the Titanic in 1913 have been playing jazz back then? The poet didn’t stop to think that if this had been 1913, people wouldn’t have been content to whisper about him and his companion — some busybody might have hauled them into court.

Shanghailanders were like that. While they might be fooling around, they despised and gossiped about anyone else who did. If things ever got so far that they made the newspapers, the whole Concession would enjoy a few evenings of Schadenfreude at the dinner table. Shanghai prided itself on setting trends, but it was also a stickler for conventional values. Someone said out loud that the woman singing in the band should be expelled from the concessions for being a disgrace to the British Empire. Apparently she had jumped up on the table at a businessman’s private bar and danced naked in the style of the Tiller Girls, kicking her feet up so high that they almost reached the chandeliers. The inebriated young men who were present all got an excellent view. They said even a prostitute wouldn’t do what she did after getting drunk: lie on the table, kick her legs up in the air, and even piss into a wineglass. Her husband, a failed speculator, had jumped off a building. He hadn’t been able to keep her under control, but couldn’t the Concession Police do anything about her?