Bad Bad Girl

Chapter I

A Daughter

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice.

Your grandmother was a Suzhou beauty, she says. Do you know where is Suzhou?

Of course, I say. West of Shanghai.

For I do know: Suzhou is where the classic Chinese gardens are—the Humble Administrator’s Garden. The Lingering Garden. The Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets. West of Shanghai is the correct answer. But my mother does not say so. She is the same now as she was when she was alive—a master of the art of withholding.

Your grandmother was a Suzhou beauty, my mother says again. She spoke Suzhou dialect, Chinese people say it is like singing. And she was tall and thin. By the standards of 1920s Shanghai, that is.

Meaning thin but maybe not so tall, I think. As was my mother in her youth, too, although I mostly picture her in her late-life, big-bellied stage, when she had the bulbous shape of a snake that has swallowed a large animal. Her stomach was so perfectly spherical that had she not been in her nineties, you might have thought her pregnant, and indeed it was likely the result of her five children, the second of whom was me.

But whatever.

Go on, I say.

All my life, after all, I have wanted to know how our relationship went wrong—how I became her nemesis, her bête noire, her lightning rod, a scapegoat.

You look like her, she says. Only not so tall, not so thin, not so beautiful.

Oh, I laugh. Now, this is the mother I remember, tactful as a sledgehammer. You are too kind.

When I see you, I see her, she says.

Oh no. Your mother? I say. Because of all the possible misfortunes of birth, to remind your mother of a mother who had rejected her is surely one of the worst—as well as, it seems, a great unmentionable. For what does she immediately say but: Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!

Well, she wasn’t exactly the mother of your heart, was she? I say. That was your nursemaid, the one you called “Nǎi‑mā”—milk mother—right? The one who was sent away.

She neither agrees nor disagrees. But then she repeats, Nai‑ma. And as dead as she is, she begins to cry.

My grandmother was twenty-two and my grandfather forty-eight when they married, and for all I know, he was a ringer then for James Bond. But in the only picture I have of him, he is short and rotund. He is wearing a padded Chinese gown; his arms splay in a way that might put one in mind of a penguin. And then there are his porthole glasses, thick and black as Mr. Magoo’s. Actually, he was a crack Chinese banker up to whose porte cochere chauffeured cars would roll, their shiny doors opening to reveal the gigantic shoes of foreigners. At one point, he saved China’s rural banks from collapse by convincing the Shanghai bankers to back them—or so the family story goes, at least—holding the meeting at his house because his was the only driveway big enough to handle so many cars. My aunt remembers coming downstairs and asking what was going on. To which my grandmother answered, Baba has just saved banking in China. But in the photograph, he mostly looks earthquake-proof—as if, were there to be a big one, he would be the last to topple.

His first wife having died—“of natural causes,” my mother always hastened to say, as if we might suspect foul play—my grandfather needed to replace her. He had had two children by that first wife, after all; someone had to take charge of them. And so: enter a matchmaker with a photo of my grandmother the Suzhou beauty. Would I more truly resemble her if I painted my cheeks and coiffed my hair and could squeeze into that dauntingly columnar qípáo? Could I, had I been born in China, with enough powdering and pampering and corseting, have exuded her just-possibly-attainable unattainability? One wants to say it’s hard to know, but in truth it’s easy enough. My grandmother’s beauty only throws into relief my plainness, with that uniquely inescapable unkindness of so many family resemblances. It’s a good thing that I have had, here in America, options besides attracting widowed bankers.

My father would boom, “Hello, hello!” to the foreigners as they filled up the garden, my mother says now. It was the only English he knew. And so it was always “Hello, hello!”

What about your mother? What did she say? I ask.

My mother was always sort of like in the background, she says. You do not see her too much; she does not have too much to say.

People said she never even laughed out loud. Is that true?

She was a real lady. Very proper.

She had self-control.

Not like you.

Always talking, you mean.

You have no self-control! she says. Too much to say.

Proper though she might have been, my grandmother did smoke opium. She was not an addict. She was a social smoker, as most society women were—a smoker of expensive Persian opium, beautifully prepared for her and her friends by an opium sous-chef. Never mind the price, opium was so good for cramps, they agreed, and oh! How bright the opium-smoker’s world, how bright and sharp and glorious! It was all the world should be, a world in which a woman might make demands—demands! can you imagine?—and even laugh out loud, keeping a hand over her mouth as a giggle bubbled up through her fingers.

Another world, indeed.

My grandmother could not read, but she was hardly alone. Never mind most women, most people in China couldn’t, not even in modern Shanghai. What with its neon lights and dance clubs and exciting crossroads style—its hǎipài, as people called it—Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East.” But alongside its cars and trams and double-decker buses rolled ox-drawn carts and rickshaws and wheelbarrows. The British racecourse boasted the largest grandstand in the world; its clubhouse featured so much teak and marble, it could have been a land-bound Titanic. But cheek by jowl with its splendors sprawled the sort of shantytowns for which words like “destitute” and “squalor” were coined. Many of the shanties did not even boast bamboo-pole walls; many were straw-mat lean-tos. This “Paris” was no Paris.

Even rickshaw pullers mobbed the schools and libraries that had been opened for them, though. Everyone hungered for an education, and my grandmother was no exception. Having taught herself a few characters, she had a newspaper delivered, so that she could practice. Then it was two papers; and then three. She went to the storytelling theaters as well, listening raptly as scenes from Dream of the Red Chamber were read and performed—how she loved them. The poetry! The romance! No middle-aged widowers in that story. Instead, there was true love, enduring love, in a garden outside society. Was this what novels were? They were like opium fantasies.

In real life, meanwhile, she dutifully produced five children, one every two and a half years, as if meeting the terms of a contract. My mother was the first and a disappointment.

I should have been a boy, she explains now. I should have been a number one son.

Because? I say.

Because that’s how Chinese people think, she says. The number one son carries on the family line.

And people might not live forever but the family line does?

That’s right.

And only boys carry it on, so what use is a girl? Except to bear sons?

If my mother did not have a son, there would be a new wife soon, my mother says.

As for the good news: at least my mother lived to feel everyone’s disappointment. In the China of her childhood, after all, families like my father’s, with five boys and no girls, were hardly unknown.

Why didn’t Dad have any sisters? I ask now. Do you think they were drowned?

Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk! she says. But then she says, Families in Shanghai did not do such things.

How about in Yixing? I ask—Yixing having been my father’s hometown, a prosperous town on the far shore of Lake Tai, a bit west of both Shanghai and Suzhou.

She does not answer.

In any event, everyone agreed: it was too bad she was a girl. And on top of it, when my grandmother threw my mother’s placenta into the Huangpu River, it floated far away. Shēng háizi bèilǎo, people said—to have a child is to prepare for old age—but the placenta was an augury. My mother was destined to be raised and fed, only to drift away. Not only would she help carry on some other family’s line, she would be of no help to my grandmother as she aged, either. In short, she would be of no use at all.

And children were supposed to be of use, I say now.

Of course, says my mother.

They weren’t ends in themselves as they are here, at least theoretically.

I don’t know what you are talking, she says.

Anyway, there would be other children to rely on, and at least my grandmother would not have to raise any of them. That was what nursemaids were for.

...

My mother loved her nursemaid. Nai‑ma nursed her and slept with her; Nai‑ma was always there to dress her and pick her up and carry her around on her back. Nai‑ma laughed and teased; she tickled my mother and chased her. She was lively and naughty—what my mother would later call “mis-cheevous”—a girl herself, in truth, who had been fired from her last job, although no one knew that but my mother. For stealing, Nai‑ma once said (talking to herself, really; my mother was just a baby), which she did not do anymore, she said. She had learned her lesson. And anyway, it was such a small thing she took, just a pin—a tiny phoenix made of kingfisher feathers. She took it out and showed it to my mother and pinned it on her. Its feathers were blue and iridescent, like a glimpse of bright sky in a rain puddle; it had a beady red eye. The mistress who had owned it never wore it because the tip of one of its wings was bent. But Nai‑ma had felt sorry for it—an abandoned thing no one wanted until it was gone. Then suddenly it was important! Suddenly it was valuable! My mother laughed to hear the story, if only because of the face Nai‑ma made—her eyes opened wide, and her mouth, too, with its chipped front tooth.

Nai‑ma was soft and lopsided and good-natured. When my mother was very little, Nai‑ma let her play with her mouth, opening it wide and putting her fingers inside to feel her chipped tooth, and whenever she wanted to nurse, Nai‑ma would untie her tunic and let her nurse. Of course, that was her job. But when it was time to wean my mother, that was her job, too, yet somehow she could not do it.

“She is too big to nurse anymore,” my grandmother told Nai‑ma, her voice soft on the outside but hard on the inside, like a lychee nut.

And Nai‑ma soberly agreed. “She is not a baby,” she said with her most pious look. “Not a baby anymore, no. She is not a baby.” She shook her head in that funny way she had, half shake and half wag.

But soon my mother was four years old, then five, and still unweaned.

“This cannot go on,” my grandmother said. “You must stop.”

With company, my grandmother might hardly speak, but with the servants, her voice had grown less timorous all the time, especially with Nai‑ma.

“Stop,” she said. “You must stop.”

And Nai‑ma agreed and agreed—Nai‑ma was the very picture of agreement. “We will stop. We will. We will stop,” she promised, my mother hiding behind her. My mother held quiet until my grandmother left. Then she echoed, laughing, “We will stop! We will! We will stop!”—tickling Nai‑ma until she laughed, too, and opened her tunic and let my mother nurse anyway.

Of all the babies she’d ever taken care of, my mother was Nai‑ma’s favorite. So hungry all the time! And who cared about this girl who was going to drift away? My mother was nothing, like the kingfisher phoenix pin before people knew it was gone, and that was even before her brother was born. A boy, a boy, a boy! The new baby was everything to my grandmother—a little emperor from his first cry. His umbilical cord was cut with scissors made of solid gold; so obviously more important was he than my mother that she was summarily moved out of her south-facing room, into a room that faced east. And my grandmother’s distress when he caught a cold! Was he breathing? Why was he snorting? Was there a way of clearing his nose? He had his own nursemaid, of course—an experienced nursemaid from Suzhou, who knew how to suck the mucus out with her mouth, and who spoke the same dialect as my grandmother besides.

“Look how cute he looks!” she said when he sneezed.

And so successful was she in getting my grandmother to enjoy his sneezes that my mother and Nai‑ma were soon attending them, too, laughing delightedly as if at a show. They kept watch so as not to miss any, though really what Nai‑ma was watching was how this nursemaid charmed my grandmother.

“Shrimp have their way, and crabs have theirs,” she said sometimes, and shrugged.

But other times she complained about how rich people hired as many nursemaids as they liked, gossiping with their friends about which they liked best, while all the nursemaids could do was express some extra milk, have it put into a cake for their own babies, and hope that when the time came, they would be recommended to another family. Nai‑ma’s husband said she should try to stay as long as she could in this job, in part because it was such a good one. New clothes every year!

And so much food, and a room in the main house, a house with toilets, my mother puts in now.

Meaning no “honeypots”? I say.

That’s right.

At a time when pretty much every lane in Shanghai stank.

You cannot imagine the smell, she says.

But Nai‑ma’s husband also thought she should try to stay because my grandmother, it seemed, was not going to recommend Nai‑ma to anyone.

And so even after her little brother had stopped nursing, my mother and Nai‑ma would sneak away. Then it was the new baby, my mother’s little sister, to whom my grandmother would point, saying, “Look! How can you still be nursing when even Little Sister has stopped?”