*
Fu Ping held Nainai in awe because she was Li Tianhua's grandmother. She had met Li Tianhua on two occasions, but had never spoken to him. To her he was a distant figure. Now she spent all her time in the company of his Nainai, even sharing her bed at night, sleeping head to toe. She could feel Nainai's warmth and smell the oil she used on her hair, her bath soap, and her face cream. A fairly small bed intended originally for Nainai alone, it had been pushed up against the northern wall, facing south. The door was in the western wall, while a table for vacuum bottles, cold-water jugs, and a tea service sat between it and the bed. A larger bed rested against the southern wall, more to the west than the east, where a door led out to the little garden. That was for the family's two girls. Many objects separated the two beds: a sofa and cupboard by the eastern wall; a chest of drawers and camphor chest by the western wall; a square table, leather-upholstered chairs, and a variety of squat stools in the middle of the room. Yet even with all that, the room did not feel cramped or cluttered, and there was little danger of bumping into things just by walking around. From half a room away the girls could talk back to Nainai or make fun of her Yangzhou accent and her unsophisticated view of the world, laughing so hard they'd nearly roll out of bed. Their excitement and madcap behavior had as much to do with the stranger Fu Ping as anything. That was something they also brought up with Nainai. As a relatively guileless woman, Nainai was not as concerned about the generational difference between her and Fu Ping as was the younger woman. She proudly dug down to the bottom of her chest to show Fu Ping a fur-lined padded jacket she'd managed to purchase after saving for years, along with silk-cotton and camel hair fabric. She also wore a pair of gold earrings, and when Fu Ping saw them from the side, glinting bright yellow, her expression may have been "wooden," but her heart raced. At night, after the lamps were out, moonlight and the shadows of tree branches entered the room through the naked window. Her ears filled with light-hearted banter between Nainai and the girls. This was a special game they played, but as someone who had just arrived, Fu Ping had no way of appreciating what was going on. Besides, the Shanghai dialect was still new to her, so what she actually heard was nothing more than lively, incomprehensible noise darting back and forth in the room. If only they could have seen her face at that moment, come alive with a shiny patina. She lay on her side, head tilted down, hair pulled behind her ear to expose her cheek—a picture of purity. Since she had done little during the day, she wasn't tired but in fact full of energy. The room's furniture, which seemed luxurious in the dark, gave off a faint luminescence. The visible patterns in the hardwood floor were like watery ripples. To characterize Fu Ping as "wooden" would be wrong, for she was all eyes and ears all the time; she always caught the gist of what was going on. Each day brought something new or led to a new appreciation of something old.
*
Familiarity with the street in front of the lane came gradually as she carried out chores for Nainai—buying one thing or another, taking the youngsters to the movies, and such. For her, walking along the street was like strolling through a crystal palace, not a speck of dirt anywhere and glitzy lights all around. All well and good, as she saw it, but a world apart from hers, bearing scant relevance to her own life. She liked the look of all those modern young people, but they didn't seem quite real, like characters in a movie or a play. The fashionable clothing in display windows was equally unreal in her eyes. Fashionable, but not wearable, not unless you wanted to look like a freak. She preferred the portraits in the photography shop window, since, with their attention to detail, they appealed to her sense of reality—transcendent visions of real people. But what truly fascinated her were places like the fabric shop, with its twin doors, where bolts of fabric on the display cases and racks made her feel at home, like running into an old friend. She often stopped in front of the shop to watch the clerk unroll a bolt of fabric, flipping the board over and over on the counter and producing a loud thump each time. Then a pair of scissors made a small opening in the double-folded fabric, and the desired length was neatly separated from the bolt. The next sound would be the clicking of beads on an abacus, and when the price was tallied up, Fu Ping watched as the change and receipt slid down to the clerk from the bookkeeper's spot. By then the purchase had been rolled up, wrapped in paper, and tied with fine paper ribbon. The transaction was complete. The mix of sounds had a stimulating effect on Fu Ping, who was also drawn to the tobacco shop across the street, another place that made her feel at home. The proprietress rested against the counter and ate out of a fine blue-edged bowl; when a customer entered, she tucked her chopsticks under the bowl, holding both with one hand as she handled the purchase with the other. If someone she knew passed by, she called out a greeting and started a chat. An elderly dressmaker and her apprentice ran a dressmaker's shop at the head of a lane a dozen or so paces from the tobacco shop. A northerner herself, the dressmaker spoke the Shanghai dialect with a thick northern accent. Her apprentice, a somewhat feeble-minded big girl with a red, bulbous nose, stammered incoherently but skillfully operated a sewing machine. They worked in a tiny space, no more than three square meters between a wall and a glass partition to the street that filled the interior with light. Anyone entering or exiting the lane instinctively glanced inside. Fabric was piled up on a counter close by a pair of whirring sewing machines. Fu Ping saw it all, the world of labor and food below the crystal palace. It reduced the barrier between her and the bustling street.
Over time Fu Ping got to know some of the people who frequented the area. While there was usually a good deal of pedestrian traffic, there weren't all that many regulars, and after a while she got to know their faces. One belonged to a slender woman whose unhealthy-looking, even somewhat pained expression—almost a grimace—detracted from her good looks. Most of the time she wore a white open-collar woolen blouse over a Western style skirt and carried a handbag; with her perm, she looked like a schoolteacher or perhaps an office worker. But she was out rushing around when most people were at work. Fu Ping also regularly saw an older, moon-faced Ningbo woman with large eyes. The woman seemed to know almost everybody, stopping to pass the time of day in a loud, clear voice with many of them as she made her way along. She was hardly ever without something in her hand, a grocery basket or a cook pot. Then there was the old man with a long face who had the look of a peasant—dark-skinned, gaunt, somewhat stooped, with closely cropped hair. The greasy apron around his waist showed that he was a clerk in the local sauce and pickle shop. At times he'd be carrying an empty oil drum; at other times, it would be a vat, and once she spotted him with a bowl of peanut butter, carefully covered by a piece of oil paper, and followed by a little girl in tears. Someone had taken the girl's change, it turned out, and he was going home with her to explain what had happened. Then there were the sallow-faced twin girls who appeared to have suffered their confinement with each other in the womb and ended up with frighteningly narrow seams of faces. Though still in school, they wore the looks of impatient adults, grumbling as they cast sidelong glances at people. There was a bound-foot old woman from the Northeast who dressed all in black, including a black cap with a jade ornament sewn into the front. Her face bore the scars of smallpox. A woman like that would be out of place in Fu Ping's Yangzhou village, but she blended in fine on the Shanghai street. No one found her appearance odd, and certainly not worth a second look. Though she carried the heavy smell of onions, garlic, and yeast, and spoke the local language of the Northeast, people stopped to talk to her from time to time. It was a street on which all sorts of laboring people, people who held down a variety of jobs, mingled comfortably to produce a richness that opened up new worlds for Fu Ping.
Fu Ping found life on her Shanghai street far more interesting than any movie. Unlike Nainai, she was unmoved by what she saw on the big screen; she needed no reminder that it was all make-believe and unworthy of her tears. When the other amahs and nannies shared their views of movies and plays, Fu Ping listened inattentively, waiting for them to get around to talking about the families they worked for. The extent of these women's knowledge was impressive; she had to admit that they were much better informed than she was. She learned the richly complex histories of local families, each possessing a story worthy of characters in a movie or a play. Village life seemed to never change, not for generations, and one family was very much like all the others. But not here, where every background was different, every story filled with unique twists and turns. Fu Ping had thought that everyone in Shanghai lived a life of ease and comfort until she realized how hard it was to actually make a living in a city. The stories she heard perfectly illustrated this. But she could also see that not everything was a struggle, that losses could be offset by gains. Since she was good at following the women's sporadic banter, she learned not only who they were as individuals, but also how they got along—or not—with one another. She just listened, keeping her questions to herself. Not only was she getting used to the Shanghai language, she could even guess the meanings of local sayings and slang. When they covered their ears or cupped their hands over their mouths, the looks on their faces gave her a pretty good idea what they were talking about. Apart from discussing neighborhood families, they gossiped openly about one another. One day Nainai took the two children to see a dentist, leaving Fu Ping alone at home. As she was sitting at a table pasting shoe soles, some neighborhood amahs and nannies were having a gossip session in the hallway on the other side of the door. She heard snatches of the conversation, and soon realized that they were talking about Nainai! Her hands began to tremble, but not from anger and not from surprise, as the image of Nainai's full profile, gold earring and all, materialized in front of her eyes, and at that moment she realized that Nainai actually cut quite a handsome figure.
