“Aiyi, guess what? Sinmay has questions about the foreigner you hired,” Cheng said in a chiding tone. He was always like this, treating me like a child when he grew unhappy with me.
Sinmay glanced my way. He was thirty-four, fourteen years my senior, and in his black eyes was his usual bitterness that had appeared since my lawsuit. Sinmay was a publishing tycoon, the owner of several literary imprints and a newspaper called Analects, and also a poet in his own right. He was Cambridge educated, yet he embodied tradition, always garbed in a long gray robe; all he needed was a long pigtail to complete the picture of an old-fashioned scholar from the dead dynasty. “Is that true? I heard there was some kind of brawl in your club,” he said finally. His voice, slow and raspy, sounded like a series of scratchy rhythms coming out of an old gramophone.
In front of him, all my womanly craft of feigning and smiling was of no use. I had to be submissive to make him believe he was in charge. “That was a few weeks ago.”
“Why did you hire him?”
“Older brother, he’s good at the piano, and he’s different from other foreigners. He’s not biased.”
“All foreigners are biased. They don’t care about us. The Japanese dropped their bombs on Shanghai, but they all sat in their cafés, admiring the technology of the fighters flying by.”
“He’s just a pianist.” I kept my voice even—Cheng was watching me.
“I didn’t know your club had a piano.”
“I borrowed one.”
“Now, this is most perplexing to me. That someone as shrewd as what people say you are would take such extraordinary steps to jeopardize your own business. I assume you know what you’re doing.”
I smiled eagerly. “I do. I have a plan. He’s going to play a new type of jazz, called the stride piano. It’ll be very popular, and the whole of Shanghai will flock to my dance hall.”
“That type of music only plays in the Jazz Bar.”
“Precisely. Now I’ll bring it to everyone.” One of the maids handed me a bowl of bird’s nest soup on a saucer.
“Eat it. It’s delicious,” Peiyu said without taking her gaze off the mah-jongg tiles.
Just the distraction I needed. “I’ll eat it in my room.” I turned around with the bowl.
“Why in such a hurry? I warn you, Aiyi. Let him go. People will gossip. You know how we feel about the foreigners. This will turn into a scandal, a threat to our family’s reputation. Aren’t you at least concerned?” Sinmay said. “This is a dangerous time for our country. The Nationalists have lost Shanghai and Nanjing, and we are the lamb on the butcher’s table. And the Japanese are insatiable! They want to conquer the entirety of China. I hear they will soon bomb the Nationalists’ new capital in the heartland.”
The Nationalists had been retreating for years; Chongqing was their new capital. “They already bombed it,” Ying, my youngest brother, at the south, said.
“Those animals!” Sinmay cursed. “Did you know that dog Yamazaki was promoted? He confiscated our family’s fortune, and now he’ll lead a division that’ll deal with people in the Settlement. Aiyi, if you’re also involved with foreigners, you’ll get his attention, and you’ll lose everything—your customers, your club.” He tossed out a tile of nine dots. Peiyu groaned. It was a tile she needed, but with her west position, she couldn’t take it.
The name Yamazaki made me tremble. I still remembered the mole under his eye, his repugnant malice. The head of a cavalry unit confiscating the locals’ property, he had burst into my home and declared that all my family’s possessions were now the property of his emperor. He ordered us to fill out the forms that contained our bank accounts and our shares in a steel company, a railway company, and a silk trading firm, or we’d earn death. He would have confiscated our home, too, if it had not been for my grandfather, who I learned later was friends with the head of the Imperial Kwantung Army before it became a slaughter machine.
I held the bowl. “My club produces lucrative tax for his government. And when people dance, they don’t think of revolt. Yamazaki knows it.”
“Aiyi, you should think about starting a family. We’re good families, and girls from good families don’t work to make a living. You are not young anymore.” Peiyu’s game was not going well. She was grumpy. A traditional woman who believed a woman’s role was to be a wife and mother, she disliked that I worked—in an immoral nightclub, no less! She always said I was old, since she believed girls with my upbringing must be engaged at ten, married at fourteen, and give birth to a first child at sixteen. Like her. But I wondered if she wanted me to have children so I could lose my good figure. After five children, soon six, Peiyu had trouble finding her waist.