The Last Rose of Shanghai: A Novel by Weina Dai Randel

Author:Weina Dai Randel [Randel, Weina Dai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2021-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Silence again. Its cold feet crawled, teeth gnawing noiselessly. My skin prickled; I shivered.

I was poor. I’d lost my club, my business, and now I had nothing.

You must have money and own things, so you won’t be a ball people kick around, Mother had said to me when my addict father sold the mountain in the outskirts of Shanghai, her dowry, for some pipe money. His addiction would grow worse, his temperament would change, and he would beat her when she refused to give him money. He would grow ill and die eventually, and months later, toddling on her three-inch golden lotus feet, Mother packed up for a ski trip in Switzerland. She loved the feeling of being airborne, she had said, and she had hoped this would be a trip to start her life of freedom, but she knocked her head against a rock. I would learn she had surreptitiously changed her will before the trip, adding my name and entitling me to a share of my family’s vast fortune, against the tradition that women couldn’t inherit properties.

And she had arranged my marriage with Cheng for the same reason—so I wouldn’t be poor, so I would always be looked after.

What had I done?

It would never work out with Ernest—a foreigner, a pianist, a poor man. He wouldn’t be able to give me a decent home, decent social standing, or decent food. We would always live in scorn, in hostility, in danger.

What should I do now?

I went to the moon-shaped bamboo shelf and took out the small brass brazier and the porcelain pot that stored aloeswood chips, a gift from my third brother before he left behind his share of inheritance to live a life of solitude in the Jing’an Temple. My third brother and Mother were both Buddhists and often meditated with the aloeswood chips.

I scooped out some chips from the pot and added them to the brazier engraved with coiling dragons. Sitting in lotus position, I lit the match and tossed it into the brazier. A blue seed of flame flickered from beneath the chips; a stem of pale smoke sprouted, grew plumper like a fruit, filled to the brim of the brazier, and then bloomed into the air. A smoky gown enveloped me.

I sat still, transfixed by the drifting smoke, the veins of air. I thought of my childhood days, happy days, the sound of runes Mother had mouthed, and the circle of life she believed in as the pale plume swiveled, growing, shifting, transforming into a grand dance hall filled with animated figures, and then it lengthened to form the mah-jongg tiles, the silk ties, the familiar world of courtyards, a world without ghosts, doubts, or fears.

Really, the best life was the safest.

I felt a lightness on my shoulders, like long hair had been snipped off. I got up, washed my face, picked out a blue dress, and went to Cheng’s home.

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