The Painter of Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Author:Jennifer Cody Epstein [Epstein, Jennifer Cody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical
ISBN: 9780141917498
Google: oVt5I6_xGyIC
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2008-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

22

‘You will,’ Teacher Hong announces, ‘refrain from picking up your pencil until I give the order.’

He frowns at the crammed but silent classroom, briefly meeting Yuliang’s eye. Embarrassed, she looks away. ‘The examination will run for exactly two hours. Any scribbling beyond that will disqualify the offending applicant. Am I understood?’

A chorus of voices, seventy strong and overwhelmingly male, shouts back, ‘Yes, teacher!’

‘Good.’ Stepping around the young men who sit cross-legged on the floor (there aren’t enough seats for all the applicants), he picks up a large hourglass from the windowsill. ‘Three… Two… One… begin.’

The air fills with the tap of pencils hitting paper. Yuliang stares down at her blank page, her mouth as dry as the sand trickling lazily through the timepiece. I can’t do this, she thinks miserably. What under the heavens was I thinking?

She finds herself surreptitiously studying the other applicants in the room: slick-haired boys, a haughty handful of well-dressed girls. They’re all rich – she can tell. And of course this makes sense. For while a poor family might spare a son for scholarship, who’d spare one for something as frivolous as Western painting? And what poor family would send their daughter to school to start with?

‘It’s all shit.’

Abruptly her deskmate flings down his pencil and crumples his first attempt. The room chuckles, but Yuliang feels a ray of gratitude: at least she’s not the only one facing an empty page.

Sighing again, she turns her gaze back to the still life. Don’t think of it as a whole at first, Teacher Hong told her yesterday. Break it up. Use one object as a road into the next. But what if all the roads seem blocked?

Her deskmate is now well into his second attempt. His face no longer reflects frustration but intent focus. Just draw, she commands herself, fighting back a wave of panic. Just draw something.

Obediently, she sketches something: a square. It is an approximation of the red table’s surface. The shape isn’t quite right. But it’s always easier to start over than it is to start from nothing at all.

Tearing off the sheet, she tries again, this time with better results. Use each object as a road into the next. She proceeds to the easiest object on the table, the orange… And in the space of a moment that neither registers nor matters, she is no longer outside the still life but working within it, running her mind’s hand over nubbly fruit skin. Pressing her face against the smooth tang of bottle glass. Exploring a vase’s crevices with both finger and pencil tip, each item part of a visual sentence she is translating. It seems a mere five minutes later that Teacher Hong raps his desk and says mildly, ‘Time.’ And then more crisply, ‘Time. Pencils down.’

A swell of groans. Yuliang has just enough time to scribble her name down the left margin. She hands over her paper, averting her eyes. She’s come to realize this about her work: that no matter how she

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.