The Valley of Amazement

CHAPTER 1

HIDDEN JADE PATH

Shanghai1905–1907Violet

When I was seven, I knew exactly who I was: a thoroughly American girl in race, manners, and speech, whose mother, Lulu Minturn, was the only white woman who owned a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai.

My mother named me Violet after a tiny flower she loved as a girl growing up in San Francisco, a city I have seen only in postcards. I grew to hate my name. The courtesans pronounced it like the Shanghainese word vyau-la—what you said when you wanted to get rid of something. “Vyau-la! Vyau-la!” greeted me everywhere.

My mother took a Chinese name, Lulu Mimi, which sounded like her American one, and her courtesan house was then known as the House of Lulu Mimi. Her Western clients knew it by the English translation of the characters in her name: Hidden Jade Path. There were no other first-class courtesan houses that catered to both Chinese and Western clients, many of whom were among the wealthiest in foreign trade. And thus, she broke taboo rather extravagantly in both worlds.

That house of flowers was my entire world. I had no peers or little American friends. When I was six, Mother enrolled me in Miss Jewell’s Academy for Girls. There were only fourteen pupils, and they were all cruel. Some of their mothers had objected to my presence, and those daughters united all the girls in a plot to expel me. They said I lived in a house of “evil ways,” and that no one should touch me, lest my taint rub off on them. They also told the teacher I cursed all the time, when I had done so only once. But the worst insult came from an older girl with silly ringlets. On my third day, I arrived at school and was walking down the hallway when this girl walked briskly up to me and said within hearing distance of my teacher and the younger class girls: “You spoke Chinee to a Chinee beggar and that makes you Chinee.” I could not bear one more of her insults. I grabbed her ringlets and hung on. She screamed, and a dozen fists pummeled my back and another bloodied my lip and knocked out a tooth that had already been loose. I spit it out, and we all stared for a second at the glistening tusk, and then I clutched my neck for dramatic effect and shrieked, “I’ve been killed!” before collapsing to the floor. One girl fainted, and the ringleader and her pack scampered off with stricken faces. I picked up the tooth—a former living part of me—and the teacher quickly put a knotted kerchief to my face to stanch the blood, then sent me home in a rickshaw with no parting words of comfort. Mother decided on the spot that I would be tutored at home.

Confused, I told her what I had said to the old beggar: “Lao huazi, let me by.” Until she told me that lao huazi was the Chinese word for “beggar,” I had not known I was speaking a hodgepodge of English, Chinese, and the Shanghainese dialect. Then again, why would I know the word beggar in English when I had never seen an American grandpa slumped against a wall, mumbling with a slack mouth so that I might have pity on him? Until I went to school, I had been speaking my peculiar language only in Hidden Jade Path to our four courtesans, their attendants, and the servants. Their syllables of gossip and flirtation, complaints and woe, went into my ear, and came out of my mouth, and in conversations I had with my mother, I had never been told there was anything amiss with my speech. Adding to the mess, Mother also spoke Chinese, and her attendant, Golden Dove, also spoke English.

I remained troubled by the girl’s accusation. I asked Mother if she had spoken Chinese as a child, and she told me that Golden Dove had given her rigorous lessons. I then asked Mother if I spoke Chinese as well as the courtesans did. “In many ways, yours is better,” she said. “More beautifully spoken.” I was alarmed. I asked my new tutor if a Chinese person naturally spoke Chinese better than an American ever could. He said the shapes of the mouth, tongue, and lips of each race were best suited to its particular language, as were the ears that conducted words into the brain. I asked him why he thought I could speak Chinese. He said that I studied well and had exercised my mouth to such a degree that I could move my tongue differently.

I worried for two days, until logic and deduction enabled me to reclaim my race. First of all, I reasoned, Mother was American. Although my father was dead, it was obvious he had been an American, since I had fair skin, brown hair, and green eyes. I wore Western clothing and regular shoes. I had not had my feet crushed and wedged like dumpling dough into a tiny shoe. I was educated, too, and in difficult subjects, such as history and science—”and for no greater purpose than Knowledge Alone,” my tutor had said. Most Chinese girls learned only how to behave.

What’s more, I did not think like a Chinese person—no kowtowing to statues, no smoky incense, and no ghosts. Mother told me: “Ghosts are superstitions, conjured up by a Chinese person’s own fears. The Chinese are a fearful lot and thus they have many superstitions.” I was not fearful. And I did not do everything a certain way just because that was how it had been done for a thousand years. I had Yankee ingenuity and an independent mind; Mother told me that. It was my idea, for example, to give the servants modern forks to use instead of ancient chopsticks. Mother, however, ordered the servants to return the silverware. She said that each tine was more valuable than what a servant might earn in a year, and thus, the servants might be tempted to sell the forks. The Chinese did not hold the same opinion about honesty as we Americans. I agreed. Now if I were Chinese, would I have said that about myself?

After I left Miss Jewell’s Academy, I forbade the courtesans to call me Vyau-la. They also could no longer use Chinese endearments like “little sister.” They had to call me Vivi, I told them. The only people who could call me Violet were those who could say my name precisely, and they were my mother, Golden Dove, and my tutor.

After I changed my name, I realized I could do so whenever I pleased to suit my mood or purpose. And soon after, I adopted my first nickname as the result of an accident. I had been racing through the main salon and bumped into a servant carrying a tray of tea and snacks, which clattered to the floor. He exclaimed that I was a biaozi, a “little whirlwind.” A delightful word. I was the Whirlwind who blew through the famed house of Hidden Jade Path with my nimbus of fluffy dark hair and my cat chasing the ribbon that had once held my hair in place. From then on, the servants had to call me Whirlwind in English, which they pronounced “woo-woo.”

I loved my golden fox cat. She belonged to me, and I to her, and that was a feeling I had with no other—not even my mother. When I held my kitty, she kneaded her paws on my bodice, snagging the lace and turning it into fishing nets. Her eyes were green like mine, and she had a beautiful golden sheen over her brown-and-black-splotched body. She glowed under moonlight. Mother gave her to me when I told her I wanted a friend. The cat had once belonged to a pirate, she said, who named her Carlotta after the Portuguese king’s daughter he had kidnapped. No one else had a pirate’s cat, whereas anyone could have a friend. A cat would always be loyal, unlike a friend. Mother said she knew that for a fact.

Almost everyone in the house feared my pirate cat. She scratched those who chased her off the furniture. She howled like a ghost when she was stuck inside a wardrobe. If she sensed fear in people who approached her, she bristled and let them know they were right to be scared. Golden Dove froze whenever she saw Carlotta prancing toward her. A wildcat had badly wounded her when she was a little girl, and she had nearly died of green pus fever. If anyone picked up my kitty, she bit, fast and hard, and if anyone petted her without my permission, her claws flew out. She murdered a seventeen-year-old boy named Loyalty Fang, who came to Hidden Jade Path with his father. I had been looking for Carlotta and spotted her under the sofa. A boy was in the way and he started jabbering to me in a language I could not understand. Before I could warn him not to touch Carlotta, he reached down and grabbed her tail, and she dug her claws into his arm and peeled off four bloody ribbons of skin and flesh. He turned white, gritted his teeth, and fainted, mortally wounded. His father took him home, and Golden Dove said he would surely die, and later, one of the courtesans said he had and that it was a pity he had never enjoyed any pleasures of the boudoir. Even though it was the boy’s fault, I was scared that Carlotta would be taken away and drowned.

With me, Carlotta was different. When I carried her in my arms, she was tender and limp. At night, she purred in my arms, and in the morning, she chirped at me. I kept bits of sausage in my apron pocket for her, as well as a green parrot’s feather tied to a string, which I used to lure her out of hiding from under one of the many sofas in the salon. Her paws would poke out of the fringe as she batted at the feather. Together we raced through the maze of furniture, and she vaulted onto tables and chairs, up curtains, and onto the high lips of the wainscoting—to wherever I wanted her to go. That salon was Carlotta’s and my playground, and that playground was in a former ghost villa that my mother had turned into Hidden Jade Path.

On several occasions, I heard her tell Western newspaper reporters how she secured the place for almost nothing. “If you want to make money in Shanghai,” she said, “take advantage of other people’s fear.”

Lulu

This villa, gentlemen, was originally built four hundred years ago as the summer mansion of Pan Ku Xiang, a rich scholar and a renowned poet, for what lyrical merits no one knows because his inscribed thoughts went up in smoke. The grounds and its original four buildings once stretched over one-half hectares, twice what it is now. The thick stone wall is the original. But the west and east wings had to be rebuilt after they were consumed by a mysterious fire—the same flames that ate the scholar’s poetic thoughts. A legend has been handed down over four hundred years: One of his concubines in the west wing started the fire, and his wife in the east wing died screaming in a circle of flames. Whether it is true, who can say? But any legend is not worth making up if it does not include a murder or two. Don’t you agree?

After the poet died, his eldest son hired the best stonemasons to carve a stele that sat on a tortoise and was crowned by a dragon, symbols of honor reserved for a high official—although there was no record in the county that he had ever been one. By the time his great-grandson was the head of the family, the stele had fallen and was nearly obscured by tall prickly weeds. Weather wore down the scholar’s name and accolades into unreadable indentations. This was not the eternal reverence the scholar had had in mind. When his descendants sold the place a hundred years ago for a cheap price, the curse began. Within a day of receiving the money, his descendant was seized with a firelike pain and died. A thief killed another son. The children of those sons died of one thing or another, and it was not old age. A succession of buyers also suffered from unusual maladies: reversals of fortune, infertility, insanity, and such. When I saw the mansion, it was an abandoned eyesore, the grounds a jungle of choking vines and overgrown bushes, the perfect haven for wild dogs. I bought the property for the price of a Chinese song. Both Westerners and Chinese said I was foolish to take it at any price. No carpenter, stonemason, or coolie would ever step across that haunted threshold.

So, gentlemen, what would you do? Give up and count your losses? I hired an Italian actor—a disgraced Jesuit with the dark looks of an Asiatic, which became more pronounced when he pulled back his hair at the temples, the way Chinese opera singers do to give the eyes a dramatic slant. He donned the robes of a feng shui master, and we hired some boys to pass out leaflets to announce that a fair would be held on the grounds just outside of the haunted villa. We had stalls of food, acrobats, contortionists, and musicians, rare fruits and a candy machine that pulled saltwater taffy. By the time the feng shui master arrived on a palanquin, along with his Chinese assistant, he had a waiting audience of hundreds—children and amahs, servants and rickshaw men, courtesans and madams, tailors and other purveyors of gossip.

The feng shui master demanded that a pan of fire be brought to him. He pulled out a scroll and threw it into the flames, then chanted a concoction of Tibetan gibberish while sprinkling rice wine over the fire to make the flames leap higher.

“I shall now go into the cursed mansion,” the actor told the crowd, “and persuade Pan the Poet Ghost to leave. If I don’t return, please remember me as a good man who served his people at the cost of his own life.” Forecasts of mortal danger are always useful to make people believe your fabrications. The audience watched him enter where no man dared to go. After five minutes he returned, and the audience murmured excitedly. He announced he had found the Poet Ghost in an inkwell in his painting studio. They had a most enjoyable conversation about his poetry and his past renown. This led to the poet’s laments that his descendants had cast him into early obscurity. His monument had become a mossy slab where wild dogs peed. The feng shui master assured the Poet Ghost he would erect a fine stele even better than the last. The Poet Ghost thanked him and immediately left the once-haunted mansion to rejoin his murdered wife.

So that took care of the first obstacle. I then had to overcome skepticism that a social club could ever succeed when it catered to both Western and Chinese men. Who would come? As you know, most Westerners view the Chinese as their inferiors—intellectually, morally, and socially. It seemed unlikely they would ever share cigars and brandy.

The Chinese, by the same token, resent the imperious way foreigners treat Shanghai as their own port city and govern her by their treaties and laws. The foreigners don’t trust the Chinese. And they insult them by speaking pidgin, even to a Chinese man whose English is as refined as a British lord’s. Why would the Chinese conduct business with men who do not respect them?

The simple answer is money. Foreign trade is their common interest, their common language, and I help them speak it in an atmosphere that loosens any reservations they might still hold.

For our Western guests, I offer a social club with pleasures they are accustomed to: billiards, card games, the finest cigars and brandy. In that corner, you see a piano. At the end of every night, the stragglers crowd around and sing the anthems and sentimental songs of their home countries. We have a few who imagine they are Caruso’s cousin. For our Chinese guests, I provide the pleasures of a first-class courtesan house. The customers follow the protocols of courtship. This is not a house of prostitution, which Western men are more accustomed to. We also offer our Chinese guests what are now the expected Western amenities of a first-class courtesan house: billiards, card games, the finest whiskey, cigars in addition to opium, and pretty musicians who sing the old Chinese chestnuts and encourage the men to join in. Our furnishings are superior to those in other houses. The difference is in the details, and as I am an American, that knowledge is in my blood.

And now we’ve come to where East meets West, the Grand Salon, the common ground for businessmen of two worlds. Imagine the buzz of excitement we hear each night. Many fortunes have been made here, and they all began with my introduction and their exchanging their first handshake. Gentlemen, there is a lesson here for anyone who wants to make a fortune in Shanghai. When people say an idea is impossible, it becomes impossible. In Shanghai, however, nothing is impossible. You have to make the old meet the new, rearrange the furniture, so to speak, and put on a good show. Guile and get. Opportunists welcome. Within these doors, the path to riches is revealed to all who have a minimum of ten thousand dollars to invest or whose influence is worth more than that. We have our standards.

APPROACHING THE GATE of the mansion, you would know at a glance that you were about to enter a fine house with a respected history. The archway still held the carved stone plaque befitting a Ming scholar; a bit of the lichen had been left on the corners as proof of authenticity. The thick gate was regularly refreshed with red lacquer and the brass fittings polished to a gleaming richness. On each of the pillars was a panel with the two names of the house: HIDDEN JADE PATH on the right side, and THE HOUSE OF LULU MIMI in Chinese on the left.

Once you entered through the gate and into the front courtyard, you would think you had stepped back into the days when the Poet Ghost was master of the house. The garden was simple and of classical proportions, from fishponds to gnarly pines. Beyond it stood a rather austere house: the face a plain gray plaster over stone, the lattice windows showing a simple cracked-ice pattern. The gray-tiled roof had eaves that curved upward, not excessively so, but enough to suggest they were the wings of lucky bats. And in the front of the house was the poet’s stele, restored to its rightful place, sitting on a tortoise, topped with a dragon, and proclaiming the scholar would be remembered for ten thousand years.

Once you stepped into the vestibule, however, all signs of the Ming vanished. At your feet was a colorful pattern of encaustic Moorish tiles, and facing you was a wall of red velvet curtains. When they were drawn back, you were borne into a “Palace of Heavenly Charms,” as my mother called it. This was the Grand Salon, and it was entirely Western. That was the fashion in the better courtesan houses, but my mother’s sense of Western fashion was authentic and also daring. Four hundred years of cold echoes had been muffled by colorful tapestries, thick carpets, and an overabundance of low divans, stiff settees, fainting couches, and Turkish ottomans. Flower stands held vases of peonies the size of babies’ heads, and round tea tables were set with lamps that gave the salon the honeyed amber glow of a sunset. On the bureaus, a man could pluck cigars out of ivory humidors and cigarettes out of cloisonné filigreed jars. The tufted armchairs were engorged with so much batting they resembled the buttocks of the people who sat in them. Some of the decorations were quite amusing to the Chinese. The blue and white vases imported from France, for example, were painted with depictions of Chinese people whose faces resembled Napoleon and Josephine. Heavy mohair curtains covered the lattice windows, weighted with green, red, and yellow tassels and fringe as thick as fingers, Carlotta’s favorite toys. Chandeliers and wall sconces illuminated the paintings of rosy-cheeked Roman goddesses with muscular white bodies, who cavorted next to similarly muscled white horses—grotesque shapes, I heard Chinese men say, which depicted, in their opinion, bestiality.

On the right and left sides of the Grand Salon were doorways that led to smaller, more intimate rooms, and beyond them were covered passageways through courtyards that led to the scholar’s former library, painting studio, and family temple, all cleverly transformed into rooms where a businessman could host a dinner party for friends and be entertained by ladylike courtesans who sang with heartbreaking emotion.

At the back of the Grand Salon, my mother had installed a curved carpeted staircase with a red-lacquered wooden banister, which took you up to three curved, velvet-lined balconies modeled after those found in opera houses. They overlooked the Grand Salon, and from them I often viewed the festivities below as Carlotta strolled back and forth on the balustrades.

The parties began after sundown. Carriages and rickshaws arrived throughout the night. Cracked Egg, the gatekeeper, would have already memorized the names of those who were coming, and they were the only ones allowed to enter. From my perch, I saw the men burst through the red curtains and into that palatial room. I could tell if a man was a newcomer. He would gaze at the scene before him, scanning the room, incredulous to see Chinese and Western men greeting each other, speaking with civility. The Westerner would have his first glimpse of courtesans in their habitat. He might have only seen them passing by on the thoroughfare in carriages, dressed in their furs and hats. But here, they were within reach. He could speak to one, smile with admiration, although he learned quite emphatically that he was not allowed to touch. I was delighted to see my mother inspire awe in men of different nationalities. She possessed the power to render men speechless from the moment they walked into the room.