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I have another idea of where to go. I start to walk toward the French Concession. This used to be a lively area—with brothels, nightclubs, and Russian bakeries—but somehow it all looks grim and depressed. Many street names have changed too, but even after all these years I remember the way to Z.G.’s old apartment, where May and I used to model. His landlady is still there, and she’s as mean and cantankerous as she always was.
“You!” she exclaims when she sees me. “What do you want this time?”
This, after not having seen me for twenty years.
“I’m looking for Z.G.”
“You’re still looking for him? He doesn’t want you. Haven’t you figured that out yet? Only your sister, see?”
The words she speaks are like needles jabbing into my eyes. Why would she say this now, when she never said it back then?
“Just tell me where he is.”
“Not here. Even if he were, you’re too old now. Look in the mirror. You’ll see.”
All the while she’s staring at my clothes, my face, my hands, my haircut. She’s probably been taking in my smell too, since years of a Western diet of beef and milk come out in my sweat. She may be a cruel old woman, but she’s not stupid. It’s not hard for her to deduce I’m a foreigner.
“He returned to Shanghai after Liberation,” she recounts. “He paid the rent he owed me and gave me more money for the items I’d stored for him—his paints, brushes, clothes, and the rest of it. He paid my grandson to deliver everything to his new home. Then he paid me even more—”
She’s hinting pretty strongly. Maybe some of the old China ways still work.
“How much for his address?”
She probably thinks she’s proposing an astronomical sum, but it’s little more than one U.S. dollar.
Z.G. lives not far from here on a pretty pedestrian lane lined with graceful Western-style houses built in the twenties. I stop to put on lipstick and run a comb through my hair. Then I smooth my hands over my hips to make sure all my seams are straight and my skirt hangs perfectly. I can’t help it. I want to look beautiful.
“He’s not here,” the pretty servant girl who answers the door tells me.
“May I come in? I’m an old friend.”
The servant girl stares at me curiously, but she lets me in, which is surprising until I step inside. My breath catches, and I’m frozen in place by what I see. Old posters of my sister and me are on the walls. They’ve been hidden from public view and protected from the grimness of the streets. They are for Z.G.’s eyes only. None of this is what I expected—not the posters, wealth, sophistication, or the three servant girls, who line up before me nervously and stare down into their folded hands.
I motion to the posters on the walls. “You can see your”—what would be the right word in the New China?—“employer and I knew each other well many years ago. Please tell me where he is.”
The girls shift their feet, refusing either to meet my eyes or to respond to my request. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with servants. I do what I did with Z.G.’s former landlady. I open my purse and bring out my wallet.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“He was sent to the countryside,” the girl I assume to be in charge answers. She appears to be the oldest, although I doubt she’s more than twenty-five. The other two girls continue to fidget.
I don’t remember Z.G. having ties to the countryside. I’ve also read that being sent to the countryside is a common punishment in the New China.
“Is it because he lives like this? Or …” I look again at the young faces before me. Has there been a problem with him living with these three women? All kinds of improprieties used to happen in the past. I’m calculating how to broach that subject when the servant with a short bob volunteers new information.
“Guns always shoot the leading bird,” she says in a low voice. “Master Li is in trouble.”
“Things always change to the opposite,” the third servant pipes in.
“Dog today, cat tomorrow,” the girl with the bob adds. “They could have sent him to a labor camp.”
“Or killed him,” the third servant says, raising anxious eyes to mine.
“Has he been arrested?” I ask. When the girls don’t respond, I say, “I want the truth. All of it.”
“He’s gone of his own choice to the countryside to redeem himself, learn from the peasants to be more humble, and remember the goals of socialist art,” the head girl quickly recites before the other servants can start in again with their gibberish.
“When will he come home?” I ask.
