Peach Blossom Pavilion. Mingmei Yip

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       Prologue

       Precious Orchid

      The California sun slowly streams in through my apartment window, then gropes its way past a bamboo plant, a Chinese vase spilling with plum blossoms, a small incense burner, then finally lands on Bao Lan – Precious Orchid – the woman lying opposite me without a stitch on.

      Envy stabs my heart. I stare at her body as it curves in and out like a snake ready for mischief. She lies on a red silk sheet embroidered with flowers in gold thread. ‘Flower of the evil sea’ – this was what people in old Shanghai would whisper through cupped mouths. While now, in San Francisco, I murmur her name, ‘Bao Lan,’ sweetly as if savouring a candy in my mouth. I imagine inhaling the decadent fragrance from her sun-warmed nudity.

      Bao Lan’s eyes shine big and her lips – full, sensuous, and painted a dark crimson – evoke in my mind the colour of rose petals in a fading dream. Petals that, when curled into a seductive smile, also whisper words of flattery. These, together with her smooth arm, raised and bent behind her head in a graceful curve, remind me of the Chinese saying ‘A pair of jade arms used as pillows to sleep on by a thousand guests; two slices of crimson lips tasted by ten thousand men.’

      Now the rosy lips seem to say, ‘Please come to me.’

      I nod, reaching my hand to touch the nimbus of black hair tumbling down her small, round breasts. Breasts the texture of silk and the colour of white jade. Breasts that were touched by many – soldiers, merchants, officials, scholars, artists, policemen, gangsters, a Catholic priest, a Taoist monk.

      Feeling guilty of sacrilege, I withdraw my nearly century-old spotty and wrinkled hand. I keep rocking on my chair and watching Bao Lan as she continues to eye me silently. ‘Hai, how time flies like an arrow, and the sun and moon move back and forth like a shuttle!’ I recite the old saying, then carefully sip my ginseng tea.

      ‘Ahpo, it’s best-quality ginseng to keep your longevity and health,’ my great-granddaughter told me the other day when she brought the herb.

      Last week, I celebrated my ninety-eighth birthday, and although they never say it out loud, I know they want my memoir to be finished before I board the immortal’s journey. When I say ‘they,’ I mean my great-granddaughter Jade Treasure and her American fiancé Leo Stanley. In a while, they will be coming to see me and begin recording my oral history.

      Oral history! Do they forget that I can read and write? They treat me as if I were a dusty museum piece. They act like they’re doing me a great favour by digging me out from deep underground and bringing me to light. How can they forget that I am not only literate, but also well versed in all the arts – literature, music, painting, calligraphy, and poetry – and that’s exactly the reason they want to write about me?

      Now Bao Lan seems to say, ‘Old woman, please go away! Why do you always have to remind me how old you are and how accomplished you were?! Can’t you leave me alone to enjoy myself at the height of my youth and beauty?’

      ‘Sure,’ I mutter to the air, feeling the wrinkles weighing around the corners of my mouth.

      But she keeps staring silently at me with eyes which resemble two graceful dots of ink on rice paper. She’s strange, this woman who shares the same house with me but only communicates with the brightness of her eyes and the sensuousness of her body.

      I am used to her eccentricity, because she’s my other – much wilder and younger – self! The delicate beauty opposite me is but a faded oil painting done seventy-five years ago when I was twenty-three.

      And the last poet-musician courtesan in Shanghai.

      That’s why they keep pushing me to tell, or sell, my story – I am the carrier of a mysterious cultural phenomenon – ming ji.

      The prestigious prostitute. Prestigious prostitute? Yes, that was what we were called in old China. A species as extinct as the Chinese emperors, after China became a republic. Some say it’s a tragic loss; others argue: how can the disappearance of prostitutes be tragic?

      The cordless phone trills on the coffee table; I pick it up with my stiff, arthritic hand. Jane and Leo are already downstairs. Jane is Jade Treasure’s English name, of which I disapprove because it sounds so much like the word ‘pan fry’ in Chinese. When I call her ‘Jane, Jane,’ I can almost smell fish cooking in sizzling oil – Sizzz! Sizzz! It sounds as if I’d cook my own flesh and blood!

      Now the two young people burst into my nursing home apartment with their laughter and overflowing energy, their embarrassingly long limbs flailing in all directions. Jade Treasure flounces up to peck my cheek, swinging a basket of fruit in front of me, making me dizzy.

      ‘Hi, Grandmama, you look good today! The ginseng gives you good qi?’

      ‘Jade, can you show some respect to an old woman who has witnessed, literally, the ups and downs of a century?’ СКАЧАТЬ