Night in Shanghai by Nicole Mones

from Suzhou, since that charming town of canals and gardens was known for its lovely and sweet-voiced girls—yet Lin’s mother truly had been born and raised there. In Shanghai she was called a “one-two” because a man could drink with her for one dollar and pierce her for two. One-twos were not the lowest—those were the Cantonese saltwater sisters, who worked the docks, and the alley girls who let themselves be had against a wall for thirty cents—but they were far from the highest. A step up from them were the two-threes, and many tiers above
them
were the city’s premier courtesans, perfectly formed, gorgeously dressed, able to sing, play, and hold their own in games of poetry and calligraphy with the very rich.
    Lin Ming’s mother was nothing like them. But Du was hardly more than a boy himself when he met her, and little better than she. He never paid for her; they were friends. That was another reason why, years later, when he heard about the tall, thin boy who looked so much like him, being raised in the Suzhou brothel to which Lin’s mother returned after giving birth, Du decided to have himself driven to that peaceful garden town so he could see the child up close.
    Lin Ming’s whole world then was the brothel, with its successive courtyards, its butterfly flock of aunties, its vermilion Gate of Coming and Going. Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo. All around were the lilting strands of Suzhou dialect. If it was Third Month, he would use the coins in his pocket to buy green dumplings stuffed with lotus root. In the autumn, at the festival of the weaver and the cowherd, he would eat the special coiled, sugary cakes. The world was his, and it passed in front of him in the stream of faces, the scudding clouds above the roofs, the crisp flapping banners of merchants. Back then he never thought about the future.
    That changed the day his father came.
    He remembered the way his mother entered his tiny room at dawn to awaken him. Normally she herself never arose before noon. “Get up, Sprout,” she said; he remembered because she used his milk name. He yanked away from her.
    “Bathe,” she told him. “Put on your new blue gown.”
    “It’s scratchy. I bathed last night.”
    “Put it on.”
    “Why?”
    “Your father is coming.”
    He went still. She might as well have said the sun and the moon had changed places, for he had no father.
    “Get on the horse,” she said, smoothing the bedclothes as if she could take away all the bumps in the road ahead. “Time to be a man.”
    A clamor rose in the lane, the squawks of chickens, cries of children, rumble of a motorcar. He pulled on his clothes and ran to stand in the courtyard between Jiang Ma, the proprietress, and his mother.
    The big square automobile puttered in and crunched to a long and extravagant stop. A knot of bodyguards climbed out, followed by a tall man with a shiny shaved head and a long loose gown that swung with his steps. He had crossbow cheekbones and big ears.
Ears like mine
. A hot knife of panic slid into Lin’s middle.
    The man looked at him for a long time without expression and then turned to talk to his mother. They had not seen each other since she left Shanghai during her pregnancy, but a wisp of affection was still evident between them as they turned away from Lin without a glance and walked toward the reception hall, already negotiating. A few days later he was sent to Hankou.
    Much later Lin Ming understood that it was an investment. Du had enrolled him in Hankou’s Lamb of God Missionary School so that someone in his sphere might understand the language and thoughts of the foreigners. That Lin had