One

An island.

Such is my existence within the stale breath of my house, my house against the undying neon of the Bund, and the Bund beneath the fires that scorch the sky.

Mine is an island of solitude and silence. Not even the stifling August heat can begin to thaw the ice that entombs me. Within it, my quiet, unwanted existence, untouched and uninvited by the occasional vivacity of the house. I hear it even now, the chatter of the radio downstairs and my half-sister’s whining against her mother’s inconsequential tyranny. It’s been lunchtime for a quarter hour, yet no one has come to fetch me.

I lift my head from my notebook, a thick and dog-eared thing full of spontaneous poems and half-finished prose, all of them manifestations of that part of me that often inflames under Mother’s abrasive words. Mother, and Confucius before her, considers vocal ravings a deplorable moral deficiency, so my only outlet is to bleed my words in streams of blue, like a wounded creature of oceans deep.

I close the notebook and push it deep into my drawer, beneath department store catalogues and novels by Dumas and Austen. In this household, wanton pandering of the foreign was only a mild dereliction warranting no more than another pointed lecture. But Mother won’t appreciate my notebook full of charged sarcasm toward all the virtuous precepts of antiquity that sustains her purpose, nor will my knees appreciate the sharp ridges of the washing board.

My eyes trace up the labyrinthian vines on the wallpaper until they untangle at the base of the ceiling. A meditative little exercise to release myself from my literary trance. A Briton had built this house to be a caricature of his estate on those distant, elysian hills that I could only dream of. The countryside of London. But this rented residence isn’t ours, and no pastoral fields stretch from my window to the horizon. Sprawling factories of the International Settlement break at the southern bank of the Soochow Creek, and beyond that dark band of water full of sampans and motorboat oil, thick smoke is still rising from yesterday’s bombing of Chapei.

Japanese fighters, harbingers of incendiary destruction, are still making swoops over the ruined north like hawks hunting mice. They can cross the river easily to rain fire on our idyllic neighbourhood, but they won’t. The invisible wall around us is impregnable.

Someone knocks at my bedroom door. I open it to see my old nanny’s wiry figure wrapped in her shapeless long tunic. She grins at me brightly.

“a-Ling, come quickly, while the food is still hot,” she whispers in heavily accented Mandarin. It’s not an accent from around Shanghai. A dialect of northern bumpkins, Mother had once said.

“Amah! Where have you gone?” Mother’s impatience echoes up the stairs.

“Ai! Coming!” Amah beckons me before hurrying away.

I slip downstairs. The radio on the sandalwood sideboard is repeating the Nationalist government’s proclamation of resistance. I turn the noise down as I pass. The war is far beyond our sheltered garden.

The burgundy carpet stretches from the landing into the dining room. To one side is a mahjong table, four rows of tiles placed upon a green field like the Long Wall of Ten Thousand Miles. To the other, a Bodhisattva statuette gazes down at the dining table from atop the sandalwood shelf.

By the glass-topped dining table, Mother sits with perfect posture, her darkened face contrasting starkly with my half-sister’s cross-armed smugness.

“Fine, you can have one piece of cake today,” Mother says. She’s wearing her long hair in the traditional style, a tight bun secured by a pair of gold pins, and over a dark blue chipao with subtle patterns of peony. A solemn elegance to distinguish from my modern bob above a sleeveless summer dress in the western style. Despite our years together under the same roof, she will never fill the vacancy left by my muma’s death, and we will always be irreconcilable opposites.

Amah returns with a lovely chocolate cake on a fine porcelain plate. A week’s worth of rice reduced to a small lump of sugar. As much as the Settlement is unassailable, nothing could stop the fluctuating prices from rippling into our lives. Tiehtieh is a sensible man to advise prudence across the household despite his comfortable income as an inspector of the Shanghai Municipal Police, but Mother will always pamper that selfish little devil, the pearl in her palm.

a-Yün forks the cake into her mouth with savage enthusiasm while Amah brings me a hot bowl of rice and tops up the cold scraps with fresh seconds. Jade tofu, pork shreds stir fried with soy sauce, snow pea shoots in a clear soup. A frugal affair, but all made from ingredients I love. I smile at Amah. She reciprocates warmly.

Mother acknowledges my presence at last. “Finally remembered to come down, hmm?” she says with dripping sarcasm.

I’m always the scapegoat for her frustrations toward a-Yün, but I know better than to confront her directly. “The papers say the price of rice will double if this fighting keeps up. Truly ‘every grain is the fruit of hard toil,’” I say, casually quoting the Tang dynasty poet Li Pai. “But maybe the price of cake will fall when no one else can afford them anymore.”

Mother slaps her chopsticks down. I keep my eyes on the dishes, pretending not to see her.

“The weather is rough today, there might be a typhoon later. Take a-Yün to her painting lesson and return quickly, and I will forget about your insolence.”

“I can’t, I have an appointment.”

She huffs. “With whom?”

“Boys probably,” a-Yün says with a mouthful.

“What do children know?” Mother snaps. a-Yün screws up her face with exaggeration.

I don’t answer. Mother’s feigning ignorance. She hates that every year today, unthreatened by storm and thunder, I will abduct Tiehtieh’s attention from her. She knows that Tiehtieh loved Muma more than he will ever love her. This day that Tiehtieh spends with me, it’s adultery. He will have another family on his mind, another woman who came before her, and she hates it.

I smile at that thought. “This tofu is really quite tender,” I say.

Mother scoffs. “You will take a-Yün to Master Tseng, or I will burn those foreign books of yours. We spent all that money to put you through a good school, but all you’ve learned is how to grovel at those barbarians. What a disgrace you are to the family—”

“Alright, I’ll take her,” I cut her off, not for any immediate worry that she’ll run out of books to burn before needing to rummage through my loaded desk to find my notebook, but because these arguments never end in my favour. The old precepts mandated that a young lady must defer to the matriarch, and such is the inviolable order of things in this good and virtuous house.

Mother turns to the old nanny. “Tell the driver to ready the car. Eat up, a-Yün, unless you want the typhoon to sweep you into the Whangpoo River.”

In front of our wrought iron fence, our chauffeur opens the car door for us. a-Yün and I scooch across the backseat. The car pulls away, and I watch our steep red roofs and vine-covered walls recede in the mirror. When warfare burned through Chapei five years ago, Mother had wanted to move into a courtyard house in the Old City with dragons guarding its swallowtail roofs, but Tiehtieh settled us on Yu Yuen Road because I had once stopped at the gate of a house like this one, awestruck by its picturesque serenity like a farmer seeing the ten thousand electric lights of the Paramount for the first time. Mother had complained about everything from offensive fengshui to tasteless décor, but nothing could change Tiehtieh’s mind.

###

We stop on a winding road on the outskirts of the Old City south of the Settlement. Cramped shops built from stone and thatch flank the road, everything from teahouses, grain merchants to a myriad of cheap eats. They’ve claimed most of the road too. Between a messy clutter of tea tables and a grain merchant’s pile of rice sacks, a crowd of tattered old men are shouting bets at a pair of fighting cocks within a bamboo fence.

Ahead, an alley full of lane houses cuts a slit in the seamless cacophony, its opening marked by a stone arch that gave the lane houses its name: shikumen, stone vault gateways. I lead a-Yün through the arch and down the laneway, our skirts brushing past a hunched man scrubbing a tub of pig innards.

“This place always stinks. Why doesn’t Master Tseng live somewhere nicer?” a-Yün says loudly.

“He can live somewhere nicer if you pay for his rent,” I reply.

Master Tseng lives in a second-floor unit no bigger than our bathroom. On the landing, empty chicken coops are stacked to the ceiling, next to two enormous jars of pickled vegetables and a broken wheelbarrow. I knock on Master Tseng’s door. A frail man wrapped in a patched and faded changshan answers.

He smiles at me, then beams at a-Yün. “Young Miss! You’re very pretty today,” he says warmly, but no levity could enliven his pale and malnourished cheeks. Master Tseng was only approaching fifty when I met him four years ago, but even then, he was already so ashen, his face so deeply lacerated by wrinkles that I had thought him to be at least a decade older.

I know very little about him except that he was Tiehtieh’s classmate from long ago, a polemic schoolteacher who made his public debut with a column criticizing police violence during the labour strikes of 1925. For a few days, he was a luminary among May-Forth-minded students. Then his school dismissed him, and no other doors would open. For a while, he drifted from factory to fishing boat to slaughterhouse, doing whatever that will pay him anything at all, until Tiehtieh connected him with an editor who now occasionally hires him to write pulp fiction for a gossip tabloid. It was far beneath him, but it put rice on his table.

Tiehtieh had told me about Master Tseng when I showed him my first publication in the school journal, an essay critiquing the local occidentals’ anti-oriental mind. “It’s well written, but you shouldn’t have written it,” he had said from behind a screen of cigarette smoke as if he was a mystic. “Spoken words fade with the wind, but ink on paper is like a carved tablet.”

I remember being mesmerized by the embers crumpling fatalistically from the tip of Tiehtieh’s cigarette. They always splatter lifelessly in the ashtray, but for a moment before that, those embers will burn as bright as the sun. I often wonder if Master Tseng regrets writing that column or if he believes his moment of red-hot brilliance to be worth the tremendous cost. To be the inspiration of a whole generation of youths, even if briefly, is beyond the wildest dream of most scholars.

I don’t know which of them is right, but one of them is my father. I acquiesced to less political writings during my remaining years at the Diocesan Girl’s School in Hong Kong. Mostly poems and prose about pastoral life, sometimes with a dash of timid romance. None of them saw the light of day in a publication again.

a-Yün pulls her hand out of mine. “Go away now, Big Sister. Master Tseng said he’ll teach me how to paint peony flowers like the ones on Muma’s chipao.”

The master chuckles. “She gets feistier every month.”

“Mother will give her a good beating one of these days,” I say as a-Yün skips past us to Master Tseng’s writing desk. Except for his bed, it was the only other furniture. “Before I go, is there a phone in the lilong?”

He shakes his head sheepishly. “If it’s urgent, the general store at the corner has one.”

The general store is beneath an apartment as crowded as the shikumen lane house. I duck in and take in the chaos packed into the tiny shop. Packets of common herbs, cheap smokes, salt and flour and shoe polish are shoved together with little rhyme or reason.

“What you want?” the square-face aunty says from behind the counter, her paper fan flapping faster now, as if my presence suddenly made the already stuffy shop unbearable.

I maintain my politeness, as is proper. “May I use your phone?”

She eyes my white dress, which features a bold cut that pinches tightly at the waist and flares out at the hip with equal bravado. “Young people these days, no face.” She tuts with disdain but brings up the phone from under the counter anyway. “Twenty cents.”

I frown. “The public telephone at the post office only takes five cents to operate.”

“Well, then go to the post office,” she says, but her hand stays extended.

Life’s hard for a small shop, I tell myself. Her suppliers might inflate their wholesale prices because of the fighting in the north, and her customers might be less liberal with their spending. But I can still spare twenty cents, and Mother will say it’s good karma for the family.

 Square-face Aunty pushes the phone forward. I dial Tiehtieh’s office. His secretary comes on and patches me through.

“a-Ling? Something the matter?” Tiehtieh hides it well, but I still hear a tinge of worry. He knows that I try not to bother him at work.

“I can’t make it. I’m at Master Tseng’s. Mother sent me.”

A pause, then with some frustration, “She should know better.”

“It’s alright, next time.”

“No, it’s your birthday. Let’s meet at Café de Flore. Three-thirty?”

“What about the typhoon?”

“It’s all right. It’s passing over north of us. Three-thirty, you’ll be there?”

I pause for a moment, then concede quietly. “En, I’ll be there.”

“Okay, see you then.”

The phone line breaks. I sigh.

If my world is an island, then Tiehtieh is the great blue whale carrying my island upon his back, keeping it afloat, sheltering it from the terrible waves of the sea. But I don’t like to make inconveniences for him. Foolish as it might be, part of me is terrified that his affection is finite. If I took too much too quickly, perhaps one day I will suddenly realize that there’s nothing left, and my island will sink into the cold, dark depths. And no one will be there to save me.

###

Café de Flore is on Boulevard de Montigny in the French Concession, a short way south of the shared boundary of the Settlement and the Concession on Avenue Edward VII. Despite being as far away from the Chinese districts as it can be, the junction of Montigny and Edward VII is filled with refugees driven back from the Bund by the Shanghai Municipal Council.

Around a man-high wall of sandbags occupying the sidewalk, a seamless crowd of Chinese and Jewish refugees are flooding across the road toward the camps in the Great World amusement centre. My chauffeur inches the car across the junction with maddening sluggishness. We pass a Sikh policeman in a bright red turban, who’s gesturing fervently at the traffic from atop the podium, but his directions fail to imprint any semblance of order into the chaos. There are simply too many pedestrians and rickshaws, and everyone’s picking their own convenient way around each other.

I ask my chauffeur to let me walk the rest of the way. My dress earns me some lingering glances, mostly men, but also condescending looks from more modestly covered women. I ignore them like water would ignore river rocks.

Café de Flore is easy to miss. There’s no obvious signage except the small white text printed on the flap of its dark blue awning. Beneath the awning, a quartet of lamps sway in the breezy wind, two of them housed within enclosures of wrought iron and the others within red paper lanterns. With no wall or window to obstruct the narrow shop front, today’s refreshing gusts flows freely through the café.

I step in, my ears immediately assaulted by the horrendous singing of two men to the tune of “Arise!” playing on the radio. They’re seated at the bar, too busy waving their afternoon beer like victory flags. I settle at an empty table behind them. Their awful singing continues, song after song, until I can barely understand their slurring words anymore. Yet somehow, their joviality grows endearing.

When Tiehtieh finally arrives, the last drops of my second cappuccino had dried to a crust, just as the first. The singing men had been replaced by an elderly couple, who are now also replaced by a quartet of labourers not much older than me.

Tiehtieh is slim and short even for an average Chinaman, but he always enters with a wind, his footsteps brisk and forceful, and his officer’s cap and immaculate navy uniform always gives him an acute aura of authority.

I rise to greet him, but he waves me down and lets out a sigh of relief. There’s sweat on his greying brows. “I’m late, I’m sorry, I was tied up.”

“We could’ve waited for another day. This isn’t that important.”

He eases into the chair across and takes my hand. Within a ring of wrinkles, his eyes glow with a melancholic softness. “a-Ling, you know how much your birthday means to me.”

I look away. It’s not my birthday that means the world to him. It’s the anniversary of my muma’s passing. He doesn’t say it, but I know that each time after a glass of wine or two or four, when he gazes at me with those soft, melancholic eyes from beyond the hazy evening lamp, it’s not me that he sees standing in the darkened doorway. A name once escaped his breath, barely above a whisper. That name wasn’t mine, and it broke my heart.

I wish I had the chance to know her, my beautiful Muma whose last words were to entrust me to her shattered and hapless husband. I wish she could come to me in a dream to assure me that I’m more than a rag doll stitched together from fragmented memories of her.

Tiehtieh squeezes my hand, his calluses rough against my softer fingers. “I know we don’t spend enough time together, and I keep using work as an excuse. I’m a bad father, especially since—”

“It’s all right,” I cut him off. I hear the lament in his voice. “The fighting got bad in Chapei, and lots of refugees are coming across the bridge. I know. It’s a lot of work for the police.”

The corner of his eyes droop. He sighs lightly. “You’ve been a good sister to a-Yün even though Ying’er hasn’t been the kindest mother to you. I know it’s hard. I probably don’t fully understand how you feel, but I want you to know that I see it. I’m proud of you, a-Ling. You’re the greatest blessing of my life.”

Tears blur my vision of his old hands. I hold him tighter. “It’s enough for me,” I say nasally. “We’re family.”

“Silly girl, you’ll mess up your makeup.” Tiehtieh thumbs my cheeks. “I bought you a gift. I don’t know if you’ll like it.” He cradles a small gift box from his uniform pocket like a fragile treasure. Inside, a pair of earrings lay on the black velvet. Two sterling butterflies dangle from crystal studs. “Try them on.” He looks on expectantly, tired eyes full of delicate hope.

I replace my pearl spikes slowly, my hand weak from an immense sense of melancholy. Tiehtieh’s devotion and regret reminds me of that ageless, perennial love story of Liang Shan-Po and Chu Ying-T’ai. I wonder if, on a Ching Ming Festival many decades from now, I will find a pair of butterflies rising from Tiehtieh and Muma’s gravestones into the ashen sky. The rain will fade, the clouds will part, and a finger of golden sunlight will guide them to a happier place. They will be together then, my dearest butterfly lovers.

“How do I look?” I say, finally managing a smile.

He glows ardently. “Never more beautiful. They match your dress so well.”

I feel my ice thawing in the soothing warmth of my father’s tenderness. That ice was never really part of me, just a crust of loneliness frozen over time. Within it, I’m just a girl like any other, always yearning to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen.

But the moment dies abruptly.

A distant shriek cuts through the music from the radio, not deafening but discordant enough to plunge the café into confused silence. Tiehtieh and I had only a second to exchange an alarmed look before the booming shockwave smashes into us, rattling the building and shaking every cup and bottle from tables and shelves. I cower behind my arms, my scream obscured by a cacophony of shattering glass, but Tiehtieh pulls me down and into him.

It stops, as suddenly as it had started, but I can barely hear anything beyond the painful thumping of my heart. I’m shaking uncontrollably, my head huddled against Tiehtieh’s chest, and I’m clutching him like I’m dangling off the side of a cliff.

Tiehtieh caresses me. “It’s over, it’s over, we’re all right,” he says, his steady voice guiding me like the beam of a lighthouse through the thickets of a storm. Then he pries me away. “Stay here, I need to look outside.”

My trembling fingers fail to grab hold of him, and my pleading comes out as a garbled whimper. “No, don’t go.” But he’s already beyond my reach. I clamber up, shards of broken ceramic and glass slashing my palms and legs, and scramble after him.

Outside, the world is frozen as if I’ve stepped into a stopped frame of a cinema film. A rail-less tramway sits idly in a pool of glossy liquid, its windows gone, its contorted ceiling barely held up by cracked metal beams. Behind it, motor cars dot the road in their usual array of organized chaos, but they’re all stationary, and a foul smoke is rising from some of them. Amongst them, the rickshaws—

Then, I notice the horror.

The upturned rickshaws are obliterated, torn to pieces like cheaply made toys, the wheel and handles of one of them smashed through the window of a nearby car. A charred body is lying beside it, with only its bare feet still retaining some semblance of flesh.

I stagger back, my terrified scream choking up in my throat. The carnage sears itself into my mind. Lakes of black and red. Splintered billboards and fractured railings, burnt and mangled bodies pinned beneath them, some still writhing. Chunks of buildings and sparkling wires are everywhere. So much devastation. A light pole has crushed a car, a fire still blazing under its hood, and a man’s blackened torso is hanging out of the driver seat window.

I catch a glimpse of Tiehtieh running toward the crossroad. His receding figure draws a desperate whimper out of me, as if the tether holding me from falling into madness is being pulled toward the point of snapping. Instinctively, I chase after him.

Uneven debris crunch underfoot. I don’t know what I’m stumbling over. Not the concrete of the road, certainly, because there’s not a single inch of road to be seen, just an avalanche of shattered glass and rocks, ripped awnings, lost hats and shoes, and a glove on an arm jutting out of—

No, not jutting out of anything. Just a severed arm with stripped flesh and a jagged bone sticking out of its bloody elbow. I shriek and fall and kick away from it, but when I turn from that macabre appendage, I meet eyes with a rickshaw puller lying in the street, his hands still gripping the crossbeam, his wet guts spilling from his ribs, but neither the rest of his rickshaw nor his lower half was anywhere to be seen.

I scream again.

“a-Ling! Are you hurt?” Tiehtieh rushes over, filling my vision with his worried face. He takes off his jacket, swings it over my head and shoulders.

I grab it as if it was a suit of armour to save my life. “I’m scared,” I choke out those words, barely.

He holds me close. “Come, stay with me. I need to phone the station.”

I let him lead me forward, my field of view reduced to a slit in the jacket around my face, but I couldn’t deafen my ears to the strange noise in the air. An inhuman, ghastly wailing formed from a multitude of voices coming from everywhere, and it grows louder. I pull my father’s jacket tighter around me. It does little to stop my sanity from melting away into the nightmarish cacophony.

We turn into a photo studio at the corner. Gaping holes have replaced the shopfront, and behind the obliterated displays are ripped pictures and broken cameras littered about chunks of fallen ceiling.

Tiehtieh releases me despite my feeble complaints and rushes into a narrow hallway. “The phone still works!” he exclaims, then a moment later, “Damn it! It needs five cents to operate!”

Tiehtieh rarely carries any cash. His secretary will make payments for him when they’re out and about, but his secretary hadn’t come today because our meeting was meant to be a private affair.

“a-Ling, your purse!”

I stare at him blankly. I don’t remember where it is. My mind is empty.

“Is anyone here?” he shouts into the wreckage.

A wheeze comes from beneath a buckled backdrop. Tiehtieh runs over and pushes the heavy wood away with a grunt. It cracks into two in a thundering rumble, revealing a Chinaman in a pool of his own blood.

“a-Ling! Come help me!”

I move to him as if under a spell and drop to my knees.

“Hold this, press hard on it.” He stuffs some fabric into my hands and pushes my hands against the man’s stomach. I do as he says, unable to move my gaze away from the man’s single eye. His other eye was gone in an oozing pulp of flesh, along with most of his face, one of his arms, and both of his legs.

“Where’s the money box? Backroom? Any lock codes?”

The man moves his fingerless hand to his trouser pocket.

Tiehtieh reaches in, pulling out some coins and huffs with astounded relief. “Hang on, the medics will be here soon, I’ll get you to a hospital,” he says as he rushes back to the phone.

Vaguely, I hear Tiehtieh shouting for as many ambulances and responders as were available, but all my attention is locked on the man. His eyelid is twitching uncontrollably, but he’s staring into my soul with an unmistakable lucidity. He’s as scared as I am. He doesn’t want to die.

“We’ll get you to the hospital; you’ll be all right; help is coming,” I say as I put a little more pressure on his stomach. His changshan was soaked through, as was the skirt of my white dress, and his hot, sticky blood is still rolling down my trembling hands. “You’ll be all right. You’ll live.” I repeat those words, my voice breaking up with the falsity of every word. But when I look back at what remains of his face, his light is already gone.

“No, don’t die yet; help is coming,” I croak, nasal words barely intelligible. I don’t know why I’m still saying this. I can hardly see the frozen desperation on his agonized face anymore. My eyes are filled with tears. I can’t see the desperation in his eyes anymore.

Gentle arms reach around me. Tiehtieh presses my head against his bony shoulder. I slump against him, sobbing uncontrollably. “What happened? Please don’t leave me. I don’t understand. I’m scared.” He holds me close, caressing me.

Time passes. Sirens move into our vicinity. More shouting voices gather outside, but not of pained or panicked screams. A set of footsteps approach us with urgency.

“Inspector, your car is here.” It’s Tiehtieh’s secretary.

Tiehtieh pulls me to a stand. My shaking has mostly subsided, but I’m still clutching his shirt as if I’m drowning. He drapes his fallen jacket back over me. “a-Ling, look at me.”

I lift my head slowly. Numbly. His face is stern, but his eyes are still that shining lighthouse. He grips my shoulders, his hands weighing down like metal pauldrons. “Hsiao Chün will take you home. I will come back as soon as I can. I need you to be strong. Can you do that for me?”

I nod stiffly.

He sends me away.

Westward, the Settlement seems entirely oblivious of the devastation at the Great World. Traffic continues to zip by around us—trams, cars, rickshaws, and hollering merchants with baskets on their backs. Energetic swing beats are still flowing from the Paramount to call attention to the imminent dawn of Shanghai’s sleepless night.

I gaze at the familiar bustle, feeling like I’d woken from a nightmare just to fall into a hallucination. All that destruction, all those corpses, all the blood. They’re so vivid but also so surreal. I shut my eyes and try to shove those images away, but I can’t unsee that dead man’s haunted eye, nor can I stop the intimacy of his terror from petrifying the marrow of my bones.

I shiver. The impregnable wall of my island is collapsing, and my garden is no more.