The Valley of Amazement

But then she spoke again, now in a soft and sad voice, as if she were a child. She looked away and remembered when her circumstances changed, again and again.

Magic Gourd

I was only five, just a tiny girl, when my uncle took me away from my family and sold me to a merchant’s wife as her slave. My uncle told me he was doing only what my father and mother had ordered him to do. To this day, I don’t believe that was true. If I did, my heart would turn completely bitter and cold. Maybe my father wanted to be rid of me. But my mother must have been grief-stricken when she discovered I was gone. I am sure she was. I have a memory that she was. Although how could I know that when I did not see her after I was stolen? I have thought about this for many years. If my mother did not want me, why did the bastard take me away in the middle of the night? Why did he sneak me away?

I cried all the way to the rich man’s house. He bargained and sold me as if I were a piglet who would grow fat and tasty. The merchant had a wife by an arranged marriage, as well as three concubines. The middle concubine was called Third Wife, but she was first in his heart. She was the wife who took me as her maid. The merchant, I soon discovered, found excuses to go to her room more often than to the others. Looking back, it seems strange that she had such power over him. She was the oldest of the wives. Her breasts and lips were larger than what was considered ideal. Her face was not delicate. But she did have a certain way about her that mesmerized her husband. She spoke with a slight tilt of the head and in a soft melodious voice. She knew the right thing to say to soothe his mind, to restore him. I overheard the other concubines say she came from the brothel life in Soochow and she had wrapped her legs around a thousand men and sucked out their brains and good sense. They were jealous of my mistress, so who knows if their gossip was true.

Like my mistress, I was not born with great beauty. My big eyes were my best feature; my big feet were my worst. They had been bound, and they burst from their bindings after I arrived in the merchant’s house, and because I walked on tiptoe, no one knew any better and I did not wrap them up again. Unlike the other maids, I was not just obedient but eager to do anything to please my mistress. I felt proud that I was the maid to the merchant’s favorite, the most highly valued of his wives. I brought her plum flower blooms to put in her hair. I always made sure her tea was scalding hot. I brought her boiled peanuts and other snacks throughout the day.

Because I was so attentive, my mistress decided I would one day be a suitable concubine to one of her younger sons—not as the second wife, but perhaps the third. Imagine me being called Third Wife! From then on, she treated me more kindly and gave me better food to eat. I wore prettier clothes and better-made longer jackets and pantaloons. To help me become a suitable concubine, she criticized my manners and the way I spoke. And that is who I would have become if the master, that ugly dog’s ass, had not ordered me one day to take off my clothes so he could be the first to break me open. I was nine. I could not refuse. That was my life, to obey the master because my mistress obeyed him. When it was over, I was bleeding and could barely stand from the near-fainting pain. He told me to get hot towels for him. He made me clean him, to wipe away all trace of me.

Whenever he visited my mistress, I would be standing outside the room, waiting. I could hear her teasing high voice, his low murmuring, “This is good, this is good. Your moist folds are like a white lotus.” He was always talking about his sex organs and hers. He would grunt, and she uttered little cries that sounded like fear and girlish delight. Then they would fall silent, and I would run and get the hot towels, so that by the time she called for them, I could bring them in immediately.

I would pretend I could not see the master behind the gauzy bed curtain. I saw the shadows of my mistress as she washed him. She would throw the dirty towels on the floor, and I rushed forward to take them away, nauseated by the smell of the two of them. I then had to return and wait. When my mistress left, I went in, and he lay me on my back or stomach, and he did what he wanted, and sometimes I fainted from the pain. So that became part of my circumstances, to open my legs, to bring him hot towels, to remove my scent from him, to return to my room, and to rub his scent off me.

When I was eleven, I became pregnant, and that was how my mistress discovered her husband had been rutting me. She did not blame me, and she did not blame her husband. Many husbands did this to maids. She simply said I was no longer suitable to be her son’s concubine. Another maid brought me a broth and she put this in a long glass tube and stuck this inside me. I had no idea what she was doing until I felt it pierce me and I screamed and screamed as other servants held me down. Later, I had terrible cramps for two days and then a bloody ball fell out and I fainted. When I woke I was feverish and in terrible agony. My insides were turned outside and were so swollen, I thought the baby had not fallen out but was growing. I found out later the maid had sewn me up with the hair from a horse’s tail so that I could break open again like a virgin. But now pus was growing where a baby would have been.

During my fever days, I could not rise out of bed. I sometimes heard people say that my color was green and that I would soon die. I had seen a green corpse once and imagined myself looking the same. I would be afraid of myself. “Green ghost, green ghost,” I kept saying. The master came to see me, and I saw him through the slits of my eyes and gave a scream of fear. I thought he was going to rape me again. He looked nervous and said soothing words, telling me he had always tried to take good care of me and that I should remember that he never beat me. He thought I was so stupid I would be grateful and not come back to haunt him as a ghost. I had already told myself I would. A doctor came, and my arms and legs were tied down before he inserted sacs of medicine, which felt like burning rocks. I begged them to let me die instead. The fever stopped after a week, and my mistress let me stay another month until my insides were no longer outside, and the horsetail stitches no longer showed. And then she sold me to a brothel. Luckily, it was the first-class house where she had worked before the merchant took her as his concubine. The madam inspected me, top to bottom, and poked around the opening of my vagina. She was satisfied that I was unbroken.

They named me Dewdrop. Everyone said I was very clever because I quickly learned to sing and recite poetry. The men admired me but did not touch. They said I was precious, a little flower—all sorts of things that made me truly happy for the first time in my life. I had been so starved for affection I could not eat enough of it. When I was thirteen, my defloration was sold to a rich scholar. I was fearful that he would discover the truth about my virginity. What if he could tell I had been sewn up? He would be angry and beat me to death, and the madam would be furious, and she, too, would beat me to death. But what could I do?

When the scholar took my hips, I clamped my legs together out of fear that he would soon discover the truth. But when the scholar finally broke through the horsetail thread, it was just as painful as the first time and I screamed and cried genuine tears. Blood poured out. Later, when the scholar inspected the damage he had caused, he pulled out the loose hair of a horse’s tail. “Ah, we meet again,” he said. So this was not the first time the ruse had been played on him. I shivered and cried, telling him the master of my old house ordered me to fetch hot towels when I was nine, and that my mistress sewed me up after the baby fell out. I babbled about my fever and how I nearly became a green ghost.

He stood and got dressed. The maid brought in hot towels, and he said he would clean himself. He seemed sad. After he left, I waited for the madam to come into the room and beat me. I imagined I would be driven out of the house. Instead, she came to me and inspected the blood on the bed. “So much!” she exclaimed in a pleased voice. She gave me a dollar and said the scholar had given this extra gift for me. He was a very kind man, and I was sorry to hear that he died a few years later of a high fever.

So that is what it is like to be kidnapped and later taken to the underworld of the living. You are not the only one. And one day, whether your defloration happens here or in the arms of a lover or a husband, you probably won’t need a horse’s tail to be part of your marriage bed.

A MONTH AFTER Magic Gourd told Mother Ma the pox story, the old lady turned for the worst, and everyone agreed she might not last to Spring Festival. Not only did her fingers remain black, but her legs also took on the same hue. Because of the story Magic Gourd had made up, she truly feared she had the pox. We did not know what she really had. Maybe it was the liver pills. Perhaps it really was the pox.

But then the old bustard’s maid came to us in the common room when we were having our breakfast. While carrying out her mistress’s chamber pot, she said, she stumbled and some of the piss hit her face and went into her mouth. It tasted sweet. Another maid had told her that a former mistress had sweet-tasting urine and that her hands and feet had turned black as well. So then we knew she had the sugar blood disease.

A doctor came, and over Mother Ma’s protests, he cut off her bindings. Her feet were black and green, oozing with pus. She refused to go to the hospital. So the doctor cut off her feet right there. She did not scream. She lost her mind.

Three days later, she called me to sit with her in the garden where she was airing her footless legs. I had heard that she was making amends to all. She believed her disease was caused by her karma and that it might not be too late to reverse its direction.

“Violet, ah,” she said sweetly, “I hear you have learned good manners. Don’t eat too many greasy foods. It will ruin your complexion.” She patted my face gently. “You are so sad. To keep false hopes is to prolong misery. You will grow to hate everything and everyone, and insanity is certain. I was once like you. I was the daughter of a scholar family and I was kidnapped when I was twelve and taken to a first-class house. I resisted and cried and threatened to kill myself by drinking rat poison. But then I had very nice customers, kind patrons. I was the favorite of many. I had many freedoms. When I was fifteen, my family found me. They took me away, and because I was damaged goods, they married me off as a concubine to a nice man with a vicious mother. It was worse than being a slave! I ran away and went back to the courtesan house. I was so happy, so grateful to return to the good life. Even my husband was happy for me. He became one of my best customers. This is the beautiful tale you can one day tell a young courtesan about your own life.”

How could any girl think that was a lucky life? And yet, if I were Chinese and compared this life with all the possibilities, I, too, might believe over time that I was lucky to be here. But I was only half-Chinese, and I still held tight to the American half that believed I had other choices.

The doctor came a few days later. He cut off one of Mother Ma’s legs, and the next day, he cut off the other leg. She could no longer move around and had to be carried on a little palanquin. A week later, she lost the black fingers, then her hands, one piece after another until there was nothing left, except the trunk and head. She told everyone she was not going to die. She said she wanted to stay alive so she could treat us better, like daughters. She promised to spoil us. As she weakened, she became kinder and kinder. She praised everyone. She told Magic Gourd that she had musical talent.

The next day, Mother Ma did not remember who I was. She did not remember anything. Everything disappeared, like words in breath. She talked in dreams and called out that the ghosts of Persimmon and Commissioner Li had come to take her to the underworld. “They said I am nearly as black as they are, and we three would live together and comfort one another. So I’m ready to go.”

Magic Gourd felt very bad that Mother Ma believed in her lie, even to the end. “Shh-shh,” she said. “I’ll bring you a soup to turn your skin white again.” But by morning, the old lady was dead.

“Hardship can harden even the best person,” Magic Gourd said. “Remember that, Violet. If I become this way, remember the good things I did for you and forget the wounds.”

As she washed Madam Ma’s body to prepare her for the underworld, she said, “Mother, I will always remember that you said I played the zither especially well.”

GOLDEN DOVE CAME to the house a week after Mother Ma died. It had been five months since I had seen her and yet she seemed to have aged a great deal. I felt a flash of anger at first. She had had the opportunity to tell my mother I was still alive. She took away my chance to be saved. I was about to demand she write my mother again, then realized I was acting like a selfish child. There had never been an opportunity for her to save me. We all would have suffered. I had heard many stories since coming to the Hall of Tranquility about people who had been killed when they went against the wishes of the Green Gang. I fell into Golden Dove’s arms and did not have to say anything. She knew the life I had had with my mother. She knew all the ways in which I was spoiled. She knew how much I had suffered as a child, believing that my mother did not love me anymore.

Over tea, she told us that the house had lost its luster. The corners were filled with dirt, the chandeliers had grown chains of dust. And after only a few months, the furniture had become shabby, and all that was unusual and daring in my mother’s house simply looked odd. I imagined my room, my bed, my treasure box of feathers and pens, my rows of books. I saw in my mind the lesson room, where I looked through a crack in the curtains of the French glass doors and saw my mother and Lu Shing talking quietly, deciding what to do.

“I’m leaving Shanghai,” Golden Dove said. “I’m going to Soochow, where life is kinder to those who are growing old. I have a little money. Maybe I’ll open a shop of some kind. Or maybe I’ll do nothing except drink tea with friends and play mahjong like the old matriarchs.”

One thing was certain in her mind: She would not become the madam of another house. “These days, a madam has to be ruthless and mean. She has to make people afraid of what she might do. If she is not harsh, she might as well open the doors and let the rats and ruffians come in and take what they want.”

She gave me news of Fairweather. He was a favorite topic among patrons and courtesans at parties. After he duped my mother, they recounted how cunning and handsome he was. No one thought he had done anything terribly wrong. He was an American who had swindled another American. I was wounded to hear how unsympathetic people were toward my mother. I had never known how much they disliked her.

In Hong Kong, he and Puffy Cloud lived in a villa halfway up the peak. Within a month, due to his gambling habit and Puffy Cloud’s love of opium, they ran out of money. Puffy Cloud returned to brothel life, and Fairweather tried one more time to swindle a businessman, a taipan who was a member of another Triad. “Fairweather wasn’t able to steal the taipan’s money. Instead he stole the heart and virginity of his daughter. All the rumors were the same: Fairweather was stuffed headfirst into a large sack of rice, and with his feet paddling in the air, he was thrown into the harbor, where he promptly sank. To picture it made me feel a little sick, but I was also not sorry to hear he had a frightful death.”

When Magic Gourd left to order tea and snacks, Golden Dove spoke to me in English to avoid feeding gossip to the eavesdroppers. “I’ve known you since the day you were born. You are like your mother in so many ways. You often see too much, too clearly, and sometimes you see more than what is there. But sometimes you see far less. You are never satisfied with the amount or kind of love you have. You want more and you suffer from never being able to have enough. And even though more may be in front of you, you don’t see it. You are suffering greatly now because you are unable to escape from this prison. You will find a way out of this place one day. This is a temporary place of suffering. But I hope you don’t suffer forever from keeping love from your heart because of what has happened. That could have happened to your mother, but you saved her after she was betrayed. All the love she has been able to feel is because you were born and you opened her closed heart. One day, when you leave this place, come visit me in Soochow. I will be waiting.”

“TAKE OFF YOUR shoes,” Magic Gourd ordered. “Stockings, too.” She frowned. “Point the toes.” She sighed and shook her head and continued to stare at them, as if she could make them disappear by thought alone.

The new madam of the house was coming in two days, and Magic Gourd was anxious that I be allowed to stay, so that she could remain, too, as my attendant. She had the shoemaker make a pair of stiff slippers that forced me to stand on just the balls of my feet. He added cuffs to mask the heels of my feet and wrapped red ribbons around my ankles. The slippers gave the illusion of a tiny hobbled foot.

“Walk around the room,” she ordered.

I pranced like a ballerina. After five minutes, I limped stiffly like a duck without feet. I fell into a chair and refused to try any longer. Magic Gourd pinched my arm hard to make me stand. As soon as I took one step, I toppled and knocked down a flower stand and its vase.

“Your pain is nothing compared with what I had to endure. No one let me sit. No one let me take those shoes off. I fell over and bumped my head and banged my arm. And it was all for nothing.” She lifted one of her misshapen feet. It was nearly as large as my natural ones. The instep was a hump. “When I was sold to the merchant’s family, no one bothered to keep my feet wrapped, and I was glad at the time. Later, I realized my feet were unlucky two ways—ugly and still big. When I first started in this business, lily feet mattered. If my feet had been smaller I could have been voted the number one beauty of Shanghai. Instead, I wore shoes like the ones on your pampered feet, and I only became number six.” She was quiet for a moment. “Of course, number six is not so bad.”

In the afternoon, she dyed my hair black, oiled it, and pulled it tight so it would lie flat. In between, she talked.

“No one is here to please you. Don’t expect that from me. You are here to please others. You should never displease anyone—not the men who visit you, not the madam, not your flower sisters. Ah, perhaps you do not need to please the menservants and maids. But do not turn them against you. Pleasing others will make your life easier. And the opposite leads to the opposite. You must show the new madam that you understand that. You must be that girl she wants to keep. I promise you—if you are sent to another house, life will be worse. You would not move up in popularity and comfort, only down, down, down. Up and down—that’s our life. You mount the stage and do everything to make men love you. Later they will remember those moments with you. But they are not memories of you, but the feeling they were immortal because you made them gods. Remember this, Violet, when you step on the stage, you are not loved for who you are. When you step off, you may not be loved at all.” She daubed powder on my face, and clouds of white dust rose. She read my face. “I know you don’t believe me now.” She ran a brush of kohl over my eyebrows and painted my lips. “I will have to tell you these things many times.”

She was wrong. I believed her. I knew life could be cruel. I had seen the downfall of many courtesans. I believed something cruel had happened to my mother. That was why she was loveless and could not truly love anyone, not even me. She could only be selfish. No matter what happened to me in the future, I would not become like her.

Magic Gourd brought out a headband. “I wore this when I was your age. These are just tiny seed pearls, but in time, you will have your own, and maybe the pearls will be real.” She placed the headband around the back of my head and pushed it over my face, tucking in the loose strands.

“It’s too tight,” I complained. “It’s pulling at the corners of my eyes.”

She lightly slapped the top of my head. “Oyo! Are you unable to endure even this small amount of pain?” She stood back and looked sternly at the result, then smiled. “Good. Phoenix eyes, the most attractive shape. Look in the mirror. Eyes shaped like an almond and tipped up at the corners. No matter how much I pull back the sides of my hair, I cannot make a phoenix eye. Those eyes came from your father’s side of the family.”

I could not stop staring at myself in the mirror, turning my head, opening and closing my mouth. My face, where was my face? I touched my cheeks. Why did they look larger? The headband formed a V at my forehead and framed my face into a long oval. My eyebrows tipped upward at the ends as well. The center of my lips was painted into a red pucker, and my face was pale with white powder. With just these few touches, the Western half of me had disappeared. I had become the race I once considered inferior to mine. I smacked my lips and raised my eyebrows. I had the face of a courtesan. Not beautiful, not ugly, but a stranger. At night I scrubbed off the new face, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw how black my hair was. My true face was still there, what had always been there: the phoenix eyes.

The next day, Magic Gourd taught me to put on powder and rouge. The same Chinese mask appeared. I was taken aback but not shocked this time. I realized that all the courtesans looked different after they had prepared their faces for the evening. They wore masks, and throughout the day, I picked up the mirror and looked at mine. I added more powder and tightened the headband so that my eyes were pulled higher. No one, not even my mother, would have recognized me.

THE NEW MADAM was named Li, and she brought with her a courtesan whom she had bought when the girl was four. Under Madam Li’s tutelage, Vermillion had grown to become a well-known first-class courtesan, now nineteen years old. She had earned the affection of the madam, who called her “Daughter.” They had come from Soochow, where Madam Li owned a first-class courtesan house. It was widely thought that the courtesans from Soochow were the best. That was the opinion of everyone, and not just those in our world. The Soochow girls had a gentle manner, a leisurely way of moving, and their voices were sweet and soft. Many Shanghainese flowers advertised that they were from Soochow. But in the presence of one who truly was, the lie was apparent. Madam Li believed that she could have even greater success in Shanghai, where money flowed from across the sea, and after she bought the Hall of Tranquility, in keeping with the custom of naming first-class houses after the madam or the star, she renamed it in honor of her daughter: the House of Vermillion. It was good advertising as well. All the courtesans were sent away. I was not yet a courtesan, so I had no second-class reputation to overcome. There was a lot of crying and cursing among the departing flower sisters as their trunks were inspected to make sure they were not taking along furs and dresses that belonged to the house. The courtesan Petal threw me a hateful look. “Why is she keeping you? A half-breed belongs on the streets, not in a first-class house.”

“What about the courtesan Breeze?” I countered. Magic Gourd had told me recently about Breeze to give me encouragement. She was one part Chinese and another part American.

“The quantity of blood from each is not known,” Magic Gourd said. “And there were other rumors—that she had been not only a courtesan, but, early on, a common prostitute. Whoever she was, she worked step-by-step to raise herself to a better status every few months. According to plan, she attracted the affection of a wealthy Western man who took her for his wife. Now she is too powerful for anyone to speak openly about her past. That is what you should do. Step-by-step, higher and higher.”