Fu Ping Page 2

  She felt at ease in Shanghai, and was so self-assured that she chose her families, they did not choose her. And she was firm in her insistence to work only on Huaihai Road in the Western District, and only for Shanghai natives. She would never have considered working for speakers of the Shandong dialect, Party functionaries who came down from the north. Someone once referred her to an army commander in a Hongkou military compound. She went to take a look, and though the salary for taking care of the children was high, she chose not to take the job. The family lived in a sparsely furnished building, with waxed floors and a row of sofas against the wall, much like a government conference room. The kitchen was large, but the pots were empty and the stove cold. Not even water was boiled there; soldiers brought that over from a communal boiler. The family ate in not one but several dining halls, the commander in one, his wife—also in the military—in another, and the children in yet a third. Not what you’d call normal family life, and certainly not for her. She did not care for military surroundings either—they were not conducive to family life. So she walked out of the compound under an expanse of open sky, onto a similar expanse of open road. Not another person in sight, nor a single house, a bleak, dreary scene. Who can possibly live in a hellish place like this? she fussed. Back in the countryside at least there would be a pond with ducks and geese, and farmers in the field with their oxen. You walk around and soon you spot a village, with chimney smoke and clucking hens and swallows coming south to nest. Gaze into the distance, and you see one brick house after another. The coarse red bricks, fired just once, are porous and less sturdy than the green ones, but red creates a beguiling contrast to the lush green of the surrounding willows. Nainai was recalling all the colors in her country home when a passing army truck threw up a cloud of dust that coated her face and body, dreary dust from head to toe.

  Her homesickness had slackened by the time she was back in the vicinity of North Sichuan and Haining Roads, where the streets narrowed and shops, pedestrians, trolleys, and automobiles began to appear. Gazing down the lanes, she saw laundry drying and children playing, and she smelled cooking oil in the air. Here was a life she understood. The buildings in Hongkou were just too tall. Little balconies with black wrought-iron railings made the redbrick walls seen uncommonly big, too broad and too steep. That was true with the lanes, too—broad, big, and quite imposing, with vaguely oppressive verandas. The residents were a jumbled lot, with irregular features, an unsightly crowd that overshadowed the occasional attractive individual in its midst. This was a sight she could not bear. As she walked across the Haining Road Bridge at one of the wide stretches of the Suzhou River, she saw a congested cluster of ships sailing her way from upstream. Repelled by the stench rising from the river and the dampness carried on the wind, she did not feel at ease until she was back on Huaihai Road. When the new-style, relatively squat, shallow houses came into view, she could see all the way to the end of each narrow lane. They twisted and turned, with storefronts crowded up against each other on nicely proportioned byways. There were high-rises, but not like those at Hongkou, which had the fortified look of the Main Post Office; here the lobbies were only as wide as a single shop. Inside, elevators rose and fell in view of the people outside, with sunlight streaming in through stained-glass windows above the landings of a marble staircase beside the elevators. The elevator operators and the doormen were engaged in small talk, a word or two of their conversations reaching her ears as she passed. The street bustled with pedestrians, but they were orderly residents from the neighboring lanes for the most part, not a jumble of humanity. Everything was on a smaller scale, with interactive life that made it a good place for families. The locals simply looked better and were genteel, unlike Hongkou residents, who were sort of gruff. The locals knew how to dress, but were not slaves to fashion; precisely because they were familiar with the fads, they were staid, even a bit old-fashioned.

  Nainai walked along, no longer homesick. As we have seen, she had acquired the attitude of city residents, including their prejudices. Could anyone say she was not one of them? She was more familiar with the city than those young folks. Listen to her relate all the strange things she’d seen and heard, things you could never dream up. This street alone would have plenty of stories for you. Like the kidnapper who tapped a child on the head, causing him to lose his sense of direction, until all he saw was the street in front of him; he walked off with the man, right out of sight. Then there was the story of the ghost that cried in the middle of the night, and for this there was a name attached, that of a certain old woman from one of the lanes who heard it every night for a full half year, and then died. And there was the story of a wife who ran off with a servant, a woman who murdered her husband, and so on. Nainai knew lines from lots of dramatic offerings: The New Year’s Sacrifice, Wang Kui and Mu Guiying, The Butterfly Lovers, and Third Sister Yang on a Bed of Nails, most of the lines coming from popular local plays or Shaoxing opera. She could even sing a few of them! You can believe me or not, that’s up to you, but she had even seen Hollywood movies. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, she knew who he was. And she said his name like an American: Chap-lin. But she didn’t much care for American movies, mainly because of the happy endings; she preferred tragedies. The mere mention of one of the sad dramas had her in tears. Every child in her care had heard her tell stories that were perfectly suited to their youthful taste. She saw no need to faithfully follow a story line, preferring to hop from spot to spot, an episode here and an incident there, but always with powerful atmospherics, with a knack for exaggerating tales of horror and misery. In retelling The New Year’s Sacrifice, she focused on the scene in which Xianglin’s wife donates money for a threshold at the temple to avoid having her two husbands cleave her in half in the underworld. In Wang Kui and Mu Guiying it was the episode in which Mu Guiying returns from the grave, and in The Butterfly Lovers it was the final scene where the graves split open. The episode from Third Sister Yang on a Bed of Nails was particularly horrific. The children, their faces turned ashen from fright, would crowd around to listen and to tremble, and then beg her over and over, One more, tell us one more.

  Sometimes Nainai told stories from her country home. They, too, were horror stories, but another kind of horror, the rural kind. Filtered through her agrarian view of the world, they incorporated bewitching elements, and were not always simple and straightforward. That is why they sounded a bit like stage plays, filled with local color. One told of a beautiful bride in a phoenix headdress and embroidered cape who was being carried to her new home in a sedan chair in a colorful procession; when she raised her head and looked around, she bared her teeth, revealing the true image of a ghost. And with that she brought ill fortune into a peasant’s home. There was also the story of the little demon incarnate. All the offspring of a certain couple had died in infancy, never later than their first birthday, to the devastation of their parents. Then one day a medium advised them to cut the toes off the next child to be born so he could not walk to the door. They decided to take the advice: when the scissors were poised to cut off his toes, the latest infant’s eyes snapped open—they belonged to a grown-up! This was the story’s terrifying climax. Then there was the story of the dying man who spotted chain-carrying generals and soldiers sent by King Yama of the netherworld to lead him away. Nainai made the rattling of chains and the clanking of weapons horrifying yet impressive, investing her tale with the vibrancy of a theatrical martial arts battle.

  Those stories were all linked to Nainai’s own past. Widowed at a young age, the mother of two sons who had died one after the other, she accepted her lot as a woman born to suffer, preordained to seal the fate of her loved ones and destined to be self-reliant. After years of domestic work, she had accumulated some savings, but inadequate to outlast the requests for loans and handouts by a host of kin. Loans were really just handouts that sounded a bit nicer, for the money never found its way back. How many people she carried on her back! Her daughter was betrothed and her son-in
-law wanted to attend high school, at her expense; she had to pay for clothing for her nephew, who was studying to be an actor with a county drama troupe, where the first three years provided only room and board; her younger sister’s husband was stricken with cholera and had needed an operation—again, her money. Now her grandson had a prospective wife, so naturally that meant she would have to spend more.

  When she’d decided to adopt a grandson, her old friends in Shanghai had tried to talk her out of it. Now she would be his support, but would the day come when he’d take care of her? She was merely adding another expense on top of all the others. The current family she worked for had also urged her not to do it, saying she was better off holding on to her money. They’d even taken her to a bank to open a savings account; then, if people from home came for a handout, she could tell them it was in the bank and had to stay there until the account matured. But she went ahead with the adoption anyway. The so-called grandson was in reality the grandson of her late husband’s elder brother. Her daughter was to be married this year, and when that happened, her brother-in-law would claim the family house. But with a grandson, even though the place would belong to her brother-in-law, it would serve as her home. When she was too old to work, she’d return to the countryside and move in, as reason and custom dictated. To plan for that day, she cleverly arranged for her daughter to marry a nephew in her elder brother’s family. That way, if her adopted grandson turned his back on her, her elder brother and his wife would have to take her in. Even after working in Shanghai for three decades and acquiring a Shanghai resident’s card, she had no choice but to plan a return to the countryside, and that was why she was willing to lend money, even give it away, with the hope that the grateful recipients would not abandon her when the time came for her to go home. For a while, rumors of an affair between her future son-in-law and his classmate reached her ears from the countryside, so she asked someone to write a letter to ask him if it was true. He wrote back, with a line that said, When one drinks from the well, one doesn’t forget the well digger. She knew he was just being sweet and clever, but it was heartwarming anyway. She was the well digger, wasn’t she?

  Chapter Two

  EMPLOYER

  Nainai went to talk to the family before Fu Ping arrived. You can deduct five yuan a month for what my grandson’s fiancée eats while she’s here, she said. It’s only one more pair of chopsticks, they replied generously, so there’s no need to talk about that. After all, she’ll eat what everyone else eats. Nainai would not have brought this up with them if she hadn’t been aware that they were good and decent people.

  The couple she worked for, officials in a government office, were also former members of the PLA; but since they were southerners—from the Jiangsu–Zhejiang region—they had little in common with those who had come south from Shandong. They had no trouble adapting to life in Shanghai. Under the tutelage of a nanny like her, they quickly learned how to eat and dress, and how to live like the locals. But there were differences: more open and relatively free of prejudices, they believed whatever Nainai told them. They had originally lived a more shared lifestyle, the sort that Nainai had seen in the compound at Hongkou: government housing, communal dining halls, children with assigned nannies, and no need to be concerned about household chores. Now they turned everything over to her and lived a carefree life. And since she ran the household, she found it easier to forgive some of their shortcomings. For instance, Mistress—Nainai used the old terms for her employers, something that took them a while to get used to—gave her all her dirty clothes to wash, including underwear, which clashed with her principles. As a widow, she avoided contaminated objects, as if she were a Buddhist nun, and there was definitely something unclean associated with soiled women’s underwear. But she went ahead and washed them, aware that someone like Mistress, with her military background, was not up on social etiquette, and that she would not have done that had she known. Besides, they treated her as a member of the family. When people from her Yangzhou village came to visit, rather than complain, Mistress actually greeted them with a friendly nod and had them stay for meals, which gave Nainai a great deal of face. She had worked in several households since coming to Shanghai, but this was her first new-style family, and she was happy with them.

  The generosity and open-mindedness of her new employer had no effect on Nainai’s work ethic. She worked as hard as ever, remained respectful, and treated her new employer in precisely the same manner as she had her old ones. She brought the man of the house hot water for him to wash his feet every night. A simple, laconic man, he paid even less attention to household affairs than did his wife. Seeing her carry in the basin of water unsettled him a bit, but since he could not stop her, he let her go ahead. After he washed his feet, she took the basin away to dump the water, and, over time, that settled into routine. On her own, Nainai also took some of the nicer clothes to the laundry and dye shop to be washed and ironed, since she was in charge of household expenses. When there were guests, she steeped and poured tea, as expected. But she did not always leave the room afterward, which was unexpected. Rather, she took a seat to the side, occupying herself with needlework as she listened to conversations between her employers and their guests; she frequently heard new and interesting things. Sometimes the conversation inspired her to add comments, which the guests found interesting, unique even. Most had military ties, and some were still on active duty. Steeped in the concept of equality, they never treated her as a servant. To them she was less a nanny than a spinster aunt or a widowed in-law. Many of the newly established residents of Shanghai, such as her employers, brought in unmarried relatives to help around the house.

  Theirs was a typical official’s family, one that could be both frugal and extravagant. They had no personal property, but both husband and wife earned respectably high salaries. They lived in a modern building on a Huaihai Road inner lane that boasted a large ground-floor room with a southern exposure and a smaller one with a northern exposure. A modest garden was attached to the larger room, intended for their use alone, but which they generously left open to others. Their next-door neighbor and the family upstairs were permitted to walk through their flat to get to the garden, where they put out their laundry to dry. The rooms had varnished floors and metal window frames. The housing authority waxed the floors once each season. Their agarwood furniture, either rented or borrowed from their work units, which came with numbered metal tags, rested upon the shiny, well-maintained slender floorboards. Their bed was made up with white sheets and a green army blanket brought over from their military quarters. The large room had no window covering, but since the smaller room, with its northern exposure, was their bedroom and faced the lane, patterned curtains hung at those windows. Over time more furniture was added. One was a wardrobe bought by the family upstairs. It was so big the movers had been unable to carry it up the stairs, after trying every imaginable angle, getting it only as far as the landing. When they asked their downstairs neighbors if they would be interested in buying it, they agreed on the spot, without even asking the price—they never worried about how much things cost. The wardrobe was an imposing piece of furniture, with an orange Chinese ash veneer and simple lines down the sides, a Western design with no feet and double doors that opened outward, with mirrors on the inside. One side was for hanging coats, the other had drawers. Truthfully, it did not match the family’s status, and would have looked better in the home of a bourgeois family that worshipped the West. Then they bought a sofa big enough for three. Nainai guessed its cost at a single glance. It had a chromed metal frame, streamlined wood armrests, and Simmons seats and cushions. She tested the tightly patterned springs with her hand, seeing how they produced a soft seat that bounced back after the occupant stood up. The cover was tightly stitched green velveteen, soft but sturdy. This sofa, she thought to herself, was the type owned by capitalists of former days, and it, like the wardrobe, seemed out of place, though it did give the room a lived-in feel. It no longer look
ed as if they’d be decamping on a moment’s notice. Later on, when Nainai asked for a table to prepare food, they moved the dining table they’d rented from their unit into the kitchen and went out to buy another table for meals. They’d learned how to economize by going to a consignment store, where they bought a table with four leather chairs. With her ability to spot quality, Nainai saw that it was an old walnut table with Chinese geometric patterns intricately carved on the sides and edges. But the color and veneer were Western, which made her wonder how bad things had to have gotten for the original owners to give up such a possession. At Nainai’s urging, the mistress bought a camphor chest. With this accumulated property, the place was furnished.