The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison

the page curled like a drying leaf. She watched the paper dresses, the shoes, and the chair ignite and collapse into ash. How quickly it was accomplished, the passage from one world to the next. She didn’t provide herself a paper house in which to live, a place for Chao-tsing to settle and shelter, but—never considering the possibility of her return—sent that girl traveling among the ghosts, ever away and away.
    Sa. Pai. Jer. Sa pai jer. Sapaijer . May couldn’t stop the syllables from repeating in her head. One of the last rituals she’d performed with her mother was the spreading of porridge, or sa pai jer , on the night set aside for feeding hungry ghosts. All the household observed the seventh-month festivities, and each member, down to the lowliest servant, had taken a turn stirring the cauldron in the courtyard. They’d all walked through town with a steaming bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, and when they reached the outskirts of the cemetery they ladled porridge onto the ground. The townsmen lit incense and burned spirit money, and everyone called out to the ghosts to eat and to fill their pockets and then be gone for another year. Now Chao-tsing would be among them, separated from her father by a graveyard wall, he lying cosseted and splendid among ancestors, and she prowling alone in the dark.
    As May had no flute, no funeral drum, she made her own music. Pursing her lips, she whistled and felt her last two pearls click against her teeth. The girl from Hangchow watched her. She’d seen many peculiar things at the Astor House Hotel; here was another.
    The new name was the one May would use from now on: May-li. May-li meant beautiful , and she’d chosen it while still smarting from the gardener’s telling her she was ugly. What it lacked in imagination it would make up for in suitability. Could there be a better name with which to begin her new life? May: In English, she’d discover, May was the warmest month of spring. The word meant possibility, if not exactly hope. It meant permission to go ahead.
    When the sun rose over the river, she was at her open window, watching. She hadn’t slept but had sat there, waiting for the light. She washed and bound her feet, put on her best shoes, not those in which she had run away, but the only other pair she’d brought, those in which she’d been hastily married. Dressed in a new embroidered silk blouse and matching trousers, she breakfasted in the second-floor lounge, at a small table set for one person, and at eleven o’clock she took not a rickshaw but a carriage to Madame Grace’s. The only brothel in Shanghai to employ girls of any nationality, Grace’s was a cooperative venture between two madams, one English, the other Chinese. It was the one place, May imagined, where she might make a life among Europeans, among women who walked with strides as long as men’s.
    “S HE HAS A BEAUTIFUL FACE , but an unlucky one,” cautioned Grace’s Chinese partner, who had interviewed and examined May.
    “Beauty makes luck,” Grace said.
    The partner snorted. “I hope you are right. She’s intact, anyway. That’s worth something.”
    “It’s worth quite a lot. Who’s that Beardsly or Bromly—the one from the customs office? He wanted a native girl. ‘An untouched one,’ as he put it.”
    The partner nodded, silent, her eyebrows drawn. There was something peculiar about a virgin who didn’t disrobe with a virgin’s timidity. This May-li had a haughty look, the look of a girl who’d come from wealthy circumstances, and yet she had unbuttoned her blouse as efficiently as if she’d never relied on a maidservant. And she did it with practiced vacancy. “These too?” she’d asked, indicating her foot bindings.
    “No,” the partner said, shocked. What Chinese woman, even a paid woman, ever offered to show her feet?
    Without hesitating, May lay on the couch and opened her legs. Most novices to the trade, despite—or because of—their vulgar