During their last week in the village, one of the men, a dominating personality named Zhu Hongming, moved uncomfortably close to her as they were digging a terrace. He was a leader; she had seen how the other students deferred to him, and how he preened in response. “I have been watching you, Little Sister. You have promise.”
Even to Song, who had little experience with men, it was offensive. She emitted a polite monosyllable.
Mistaking her reserve for self-effacement, he pushed ahead. “It’s so. Your political statements show intelligence.”
She stared. Not a single political statement had escaped her lips. It had taken only a short time in the north for her to see that the safest thing, especially while doing manual labor, was to keep her head down, say nothing, and attract no attention.
“I can help you advance,” said Zhu Hongming, his face dotted with blemishes which he had picked at until they bled. “I am well connected.” He touched her leg.
She winced and pulled back.
“I know a lot of important people in Yan’an. I am high level. I can help you”-his hand came back to her thigh-“or I can block your way.”
She snatched up her shovel and held it poised, point down, above the offending hand, which instantly vanished. How dare he speak to her as an inferior? He was a mere child, no more than twenty-one, while she, an old woman of twenty-four, had already been bought, sold, and reborn. “Don’t ever do that again,” she spat, and took her shovel with her to another row. Effortlessly, without even having to think about it, she had made a decision: enough of trying to climb on her own. Her first day back in Xi’an, she would write Chen Xing a letter.
By May, Thomas was down to his last few Shanghai dollars. For weeks he had been allowing himself only one small meal a day in addition to his dinner with the Huang family, perhaps a bowl of noodles like the ones he had shared with Eugen Silverman, or a large bun like a sheng jian bao. He went on combing the ads, moving quickly from the newspapers and magazines that had been bombed out of existence to new ones, and taking himself to every open call. He failed every time, sometimes even fumbling notes. He never practiced anymore, never played, never touched a piano except to audition while faint with hunger. But there was no help for it, especially after he had spent his last coin. When not at tryouts, he passed most of his time either walking or stretched out in his room, not wanting to impose too often on Alonzo and Keiko.
It was the rituals of the Huang housewife below him that became his clock and kept him tethered to life. First thing in the morning, she did not cook, but went out to the sesame cake store, that fundamental fixture of the Shanghai neighborhood, and brought back fried dough sticks, glutinous rice cakes, soy milk, and sesame cakes, which she had once told him were the “four Buddha’s warrior attendants” of a local breakfast. He watched entranced as they consumed these wonders. She bought everything fresh, all day long, buying just enough noodles and wrappers at the rice store, or sending an older child out to buy one or two cents’ worth of hot pepper or vinegar at the soy sauce store. She never kept any kind of food. She bought briquettes and coal dust almost every day, and used a paste made from water and coal dust to seal the smoldering fire in after warming the room and making tea with it in the morning, in this way keeping it alight until the evening meal. His loft cubicle was pleasantly warm as a result, though he knew with its one tiny window, it would be unbearable in the heat.
He let his mind go to Song. She was like a locked room inside him, waiting. On days when she held his attention, she was everywhere, leaving a trace of her voice in the laugh of a woman down in the lane, or a note of her fragrance in the air. He let himself drift in and out of the past as if he was slipping in and out of consciousness.
Yet he had also promised her he would stay alive, and when summer bloomed warm and humid, and he found himself weakening, he roused himself to one last audition. It was for a ramshackle club in the Chinese city that played Yellow Music, the popular local song form that combined singing styles dating back to the last dynasty with jazz and dance songs brought over by the orchestras from America. It was melodically different, with Chinese lyrics; he could never have even auditioned had there not been a written score on hand, which there was-and though it was a strange hybrid, he played it better than anyone else who showed up that day. As Buck Clayton had once remarked to him about Yellow Music, if it can be written, it can be played. He got the job.
The club was called Summer Lotus, and as soon as he got his first week’s pay, he went looking for Mr. Hsu to write everything out for him. He found the copyist still living in the same tiny tingzijian, with the same piled-high manuscripts, and happy to take the work. Soon, Thomas had all the songs in written form, and was able to keep up.
The club was the kind of place he would never have thought of even entering before. It filled every night with prostitutes and their clients, the latter exclusively Chinese, the prostitutes a regular League of Nations-Russian, French, Ukrainian, and girls from South America and India with long, silky waves of black hair. There was even one who wore the facial veil of an Arab, though he had no idea if it was her native costume or some sort of erotic stunt. So much here was a stunt.
He led the band every night through the summer of 1938, five Chinese musicians including the sinuous singer who carried every song. She did her numbers standing still, her little wrists held out before her in supplication and her small, childlike hips swiveling in plaintive time. The men who came into the club sat at the dimly lit booths all around the wall with their hands up under their dates’ skirts, the women blank, bored, unless they were being paid enough to make sounds of pleasure. They were his audience, the ones he played for, because their lives were as hard as any he had seen, despite the fact that they chattered and laughed together like schoolchildren.
One September night at the club, they were in the middle of a song called “Lovely Peach Blossom,” a Shanghai standard made famous by Fan Zhang and ably delivered by their seductive singer, even if she was a little thin on the high notes, when the sudden rise of sharp, frightened voices and the crash of a door being kicked in made the music falter.
Thomas signaled the band to keep playing. A few couples still tried to move to the music, but others clutched each other and backed off the floor. Thomas kept the rhythm going, and the singer bravely started the next verse.
But then Chinese toughs tumbled in, pistols waving. Thomas sat dumb on his piano stool, even as the other musicians evaporated like smoke from the stage.
The hostesses were fast disappearing through the exits. One of them, Abeya, a dark-skinned girl from Calcutta who always wore a silk sari and her hair in a glossy braid down her back, saw him frozen there and yanked him off the stage.