CHAPTER ONE
Every Friday, I deliver the bones the way my grandmother taught me, with my shoulders down and my chin held high.
“Be proud of my art,” she said, so I strut down the alleys of the Old Chinese City with her package wrapped in brown paper, wearing my pride like an ostrich feather fan behind my head.
The way night unfolds in Shanghai, like a sigh against a mirror, makes the city harder and harder to read as the hours crawl by—the bluish gas lamps above the fortune tellers’ stalls, the hooves of a slaughtered cow swinging gently over the pebbled sidewalk, the large wooden mallet falling with quiet thuds onto a sheet of peanut brittle. Everything is muted, like the beginning of a dream. As I catch the bloodshot eyes of the pork butcher eating noodles behind his stall, I begin to think the streets are inhabited not by warm bodies, but by ghosts.
Past the blinking neon sign for a Turkish bath, the man I’m looking for is sitting on a crate beside a fruit stand in the crumbling wall, smoking a cigarette. As he draws his hand away from his mouth, his fingers glint silver in the washed-out moonlight.
The first time I made this delivery, I was twelve years old, and the fruit seller was just a teenager. “You see his hands?” my grandmother whispered in my ear, as I hid behind her with wide eyes that did not know what to make of the flashing neon and blue smoke. “Those are not the hands of a boy who chops pineapples all day.”
I held out my trembling hands made of flesh, and he used his silver one to place a yellow rind in my palm, the sticky juice running between my fingers. There was no other word to describe the honey in her voice except pride, but it wasn’t until many years later, when I watched him slip a dagger between the ribs of another man, that I understood what those hands were for.
The man drops the cigarette from between his silver fingers and crushes it with the heel of his leather shoe. After so many years, he can read my relationship with my grandmother from the brooding slant of my eyebrows. “You’ve been fighting with her again, haven’t you, Jingwen?”
The thin fragrance of dragon fruit swirls in the cold December air.
I shrug my shoulders, which are bare below the short cap sleeves of my qipao, and hand over the package. “I’m going dancing later. Let’s get this over with.”
The fruit seller peeks inside the package, marveling at the assortment of bones, and pours its contents into the large brass scale meant to weigh fruit. When he stands, the hilt of a sabre peeks over his shoulder, wrapped in gray-blue leather. “Lots of arms,” he observes. “Not that many legs.”
“Legs aren’t in fashion right now.”
Xiao Lei is a gangster in the Society of the Blue Dawn. Not too many years ago, he gave up his own right arm—flesh, bone, and sinew—and lay on a table screaming as my grandma cast a mold of his flesh in steel, and sewed his nerves together, the old and the new. “You know what they miss the most?” my grandma told me, the corner of her mouth lifting like we were sharing an inside joke. “The lines on their palm.”
The scale wobbles back and forth a few times and steadies.
“Twelve kilos,” Xiao Lei says. “You sure you want to be paid in yuan today? The Mexican silver dollar is the highest-valued currency on the market.”
I roll my eyes and thrust my hand out, palm up.
Xiao Lei pulls a wad of paper bills out of his pocket, licks his thumb, and begins to count.
“Nine hundred. You know, I see the way you look at me. Just because I’m a gangster doesn’t mean I’m trying to cheat you.”
His silver finger brushes against my palm, and I expect the cold kiss of steel. But Xiao Lei’s hand is warm. Despite his plea, I count the money anyway while he watches me. “Still, if you were an ordinary boy, you’d be taking girls out dancing on Friday night. Not pretending to sell fruit while doing whatever it is you’re doing.”
A gentle fog begins to engulf the alley, like a watercolor brush being dragged across parchment, warning of dawn rain.
Xiao Lei leans his elbow against the crumbling wall, smirking a bit. “Liqing tells the gang you would make an excellent physician if you chose to become her apprentice. You certainly have the flair for it.”
“She told you to say that.” I tuck the bills safely into a pocket I’ve sewn into the waistline of my qipao, so I don’t lose them later at the cabaret. “I’ll pass the money along to her. Good night, Xiao Lei.”
He grins, leaning his shoulder against the alley wall. “You don’t realize how good you have it, dancing the night away without second thoughts about your grandmother’s world. Don’t you ever get curious how the cabarets can still shine when this city is up to its neck in darkness?”
The mist refuses to clear, hanging in the alley like hot breath on glass. I suddenly wish I’d worn a wool coat.
“It sounds like you’re talking about some fairy-tale myth. Not Shanghai.” There’s a British banker I danced with last week, who likes to pay girls with literal gold ingots to sit beside him and sip champagne. If I hang around here any longer, he might choose a different partner tonight. “I need to go.”
“Can I at least tempt you with a dragon fruit for the road?” Xiao Lei cradles one of the spiny fruit in his silver hand with a smirk. “Look, a rare species cultivated in Annam. They must serve this in your ballrooms, but do they tell you about the traders who scalp the price until a cactus-bloomed fruit costs more than a ruby? It’s thanks to the Blue Dawn that you dancer girls get to nibble dragon fruit off crystal toothpicks.”
Behind him, the bathhouse sighs, warm steam pulsating out of the giant steel vents.
Standing against the brick wall, tendrils of mist and shadows dancing about him, Xiao Lei makes an imposing figure. In that moment, he’s right. I do want to know more—where he takes the bones after I leave, the way he might smile when he draws his sabre with his silver hand. I allow myself to briefly entertain a dream of myself as a gangster’s companion, sweeping through cabaret halls side by side with Xiao Lei, while the curious showgirls whisper about us behind their hands.
Quickly I remind myself that these evenings it’s much more fashionable to sip champagne with one’s pockets bulging with gold ingots.
“It’s just a fruit, Xiao Lei.”
He sighs, gazing down at the fruit in defeat.
“Alright, let me prepare this for you at least. Your grandmother insists the gang look after you. She has a disdain for the American diets that are popular in the tabloids.” Xiao Lei slices the dragon fruit’s white flesh open with an ordinary kitchen knife, the red skin curling back like a flame.
“Fine.”
I perch on the edge of a wooden crate, taking care to smooth my qipao over my knees so the silk stays unwrinkled. Unfortunately, the chilly night air has already raised gooseflesh along my thighs.
As I watch Xiao Lei’s silver hand glide through the night air, like a koi drifting along a riverbed, my mind wanders to my grandmother, depositing her delivery in my arms. She got her hair permed recently, white curls like the crests of ocean waves, which accentuate the sharp corners of her eyes. My grandmother likes to say that if I really loved her, I would show more interest in her work—more than begrudgingly ferrying a package of human bones across the city every Friday. But in the black markets of Shanghai, all goods change hands, flesh to silver to flesh, until you forget where they came from originally. And I’ve never found the thrill in flirting with danger when there are easier ways to enjoy life.
* * *
On Friday nights, I dance at the Paramount.
The entire ballroom shimmers like a mirage—white woodwork and crystal panels that echo the light like waterfalls. The orchestra is from Havana, but they play the latest American jazz, chandelier light swimming in the shells of French horns and sousaphones.
Before the long row of mirrors in the performer’s room, I smooth the wrinkles out of my qipao, which is the color of sea foam, with a high slit that runs up my thigh. Of the three clubs I dance at, the Paramount has the richest foreign guests and the gaudiest drama. When the manager hired me, he stressed that he wanted us to be “Chinese flappers,” whatever that meant, so I don a headdress woven from gold beads, with a fringe that swings over my eyes when I turn my head.
I am dabbing red color onto my lips with my middle finger, when the chair beside me is yanked back by a dancer wearing a velvet circlet adorned with a peacock feather.
Zenaida Minsky, who is renowned in the cabaret scene for her violet eyes and red-brown curls, brushes aside the ripped stockings and stray pearl earrings on the makeup table to rest her elbows on the surface. She blinks dreamily at her reflection. “Jingwen, can you believe this? Nastasya joined a circus in India, with elephants and fire breathers. Now she dances on top of an elephant! Oh, I’m so mad at her. She should have taken me with her!”
Her gently accented English is sharp to my ears. I remind myself that within the cabaret’s gilded walls, there is a different game we play. We duel not with silver hands or leather-wrapped sabres, but lips that shine with rouge like blood.
“Zina, you wouldn’t like India,” I assure her in English.
Zina sighs, her long lashes fluttering like the wings of a moth in firelight. “I want to go somewhere tropical, where the dancers balance fruit baskets on their heads and the cocktails are adorned with pineapples and bananas. I’m sick of the oily air in Shanghai.”
I move on to applying blush, leaning back to avoid smattering the mirror with powder. “You can barely stand the heat of a Shanghai summer. Don’t even think about somewhere tropical.”
“Oh, but the waves and the ocean—oww!” Zina yelps and cowers suddenly.
Arisha Lashkova, the oldest dancer among us, has just twisted her left ear. “Oh please, Zina, wipe that frown off your face. Your head is so empty, you couldn’t balance a pineapple on it if you tried. You only dream of it because you’re from the snowy wasteland of Harbin.”
Both Zina and Arisha claim to be exiled princesses, their families driven out of Russia by the Bolsheviks a few decades earlier, and Arisha—with her pale blue eyes and silvery hair that glows white before the incandescent bulbs—I could almost believe.
“I’m from Moscow,” Zina retorts.
“No, I’m from Moscow. You were born in a poor Siberian railroad town.”
We are interrupted by the creak of the dressing room door, and Li Beibei sashays in wearing a gold qipao embroidered with orange chrysanthemums. Beibei has the largest breasts of any girl in Shanghai. Her specialty is a belly dance with a snake, wearing nothing more than a beaded brassiere and a loincloth. She is only twenty, but she has already landed two men in prison and one dead in a gun duel over her affections. There is a rumor that she can cure men’s cancers with just the undulations of her hips and the smirk on her face.
Beibei elbows her way between me and Zenaida, where she beams, her lips ready to spill perfect English. Although Beibei is a country girl who moved to the city to be a nanny for two British children, she quickly found her fortune in the dance halls like a fish discovering water. “Didn’t you all hear? The son of Claud Harrington will be at the cabaret tonight.”
Zina and I exchange an annoyed glance in the mirror.
“You mean Claud Harrington the lumber magnate?” Arisha never passes up a chance to show off her knowledge of Shanghai gossip, which she cultivates through the meticulous reading of every tabloid in town.
Beibei plants her hands on the makeup table between Zina and me, showing off a large Padparadscha sapphire on her right hand, gifted by an Indian patron. “Yes. His only son and heir, Neville, will be here tonight with his cousin Daniel, who is visiting from France. I came to let you all know that he’s going to be dancing with me, so you all be sure to stay away.”
“Go to hell, Beibei,” Zina retorts, glowering through her thick eyelashes and wide eyes.
Beibei leans her hip into the makeup table, uncomfortably close to Zina and me. I can smell the gardenia perfume she wears, her painted eyebrows shining like fresh ink on a calligraphy scroll. “Do you want to challenge me?”
Zina folds her arms across her chest, the movement causing her chiffon dress to slip from her shoulder. “You know, I’m done taking your shit. You think you’re better than everyone just because you have to wear imported bras.”
“Stop it,” Arisha insists, smacking her in the ear again. “It’s not civil to fight like this on the dance floor. We’ll scare the guests.”
“Exactly,” I pipe up. “That’s why we do it in the dressing room. There are no guests here. I’m not afraid of you, Beibei. What are you going to do?”
Beibei flicks open a silver lighter adorned with trumpeting vines, the flame glowing with a menace between her fingers. She smirks in a way that reveals none of her teeth, yet I can’t determine if the gesture is sweet or menacing.
“You wouldn’t dare!”
But just in case, I grab a hairpin adorned with golden leaves to arm myself in response.
The door creaks open again, and a man’s blond head appears in the crack.
It’s the ballroom’s manager, a former flautist who was fired from the Paris ballet when he eloped with the prima ballerina. The girls whisper that his nose is crooked because the prima ballerina’s husband broke his flute over it, but if you visit the Turkish bath on the Rue de Consulat on Sunday evenings, you’ll see he enjoys having his shoulders scrubbed by a particular Russian bath girl who has the same delicate chin as his lost paramour. “What do you airheads fight about all evening?” he demands. “I can’t hear the cook explaining his idea for a wine-basted lamb shank dish. Please—keep it down.”
His head withdraws once more, and the door slams shut.
“He’s right, what are you four fussing about?” asks Huahua, a younger dancer recently poached from the smaller Majestic Club, who had been powdering her cheeks in a corner and pretending she’s too good for us. She’s new, but she too thinks she should be the queen.
Beibei tosses the lighter back on the makeup table with a deep, husky laugh. “Fine then,” she says, and without even raising her voice, she has garnered command over the entire room. “I propose a contest. Let’s settle this once and for all. Whoever can bring the richest date to the annual Firefighters’ Yuletide Ball at Christmas will get first choice of any dance partner for the next year. And all the rest will have to cater to the winner’s wishes—bring her champagne, massage her shoulders, even paint her toenails if she asks.”
The entire room hushes, as we picture ourselves in that position.
“Don’t you think you’re taking things a little far, Li Beibei?” Huahua asks, her hands covering her mouth.
Beibei narrows her eyes, the chrysanthemums sewn into her dress glowing like suns. “We waste so much energy fighting, don’t you think it would be simpler to objectively acknowledge that one of us is better than the rest?”
Copyright © 2024 by Rosalie M. Lin