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Literary Review
The path to freedom
SHEILA KUMAR
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The story of one woman’s journey from a ‘flower house’ to finding her own space as a painter, with the vast canvas of modern Chinese history as the background...
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The Painter of Shanghai, Jennifer Cody Epstein, Penguin Books, Rs. 450
The pasted blurb that reads, “If you liked Memoirs of a Geisha, you’ll love this”, acts more as dampener than titillator. And the fact that the story gets off to a detached, almost torpid start does not help either. However, mid-way, the book suddenly comes to life and the hitherto one-dimensional characters suddenly acquire interesting tints.
Set in the China of the early 1900s, The Painter of Shanghai is about Pan Yuliang, who is born poor, sold by an opium-addicted uncle to a brothel and begins to learn life’s lessons in the hardest way possible. After some years in the “flower house”, the girl meets an honest government official, Pan Zanhua, who falls deeply, irrevocably in love with her. He rescues her from a life she just cannot be sanguine about, though she tries hard to, keeps her as an official concubine, and most importantly, starts her on the path of emancipation, empowerment and freedom. A freedom, of sorts.
Step by step
It’s all little steps, taken step by step, of course. First, flying in the face of convention, Zanhua encourages the young Yuliang to let go of the bandaging of her foot, to let them free. He encourages her to read, to discuss politics with him and then, when she starts to show an interest in art, while he is less than happy about it, he doesn’t stand in her way.
And Yuliang`s way is a forceful one, drawing its own compelling trajectory, allowing nothing to come in the subsuming path of drawing, sketching, painting. As she finds her feet, those unfashionably unbound and large feet, she enrols in the Shanghai Art Academy, wins a scholarship to Paris, moves onto Rome, returns to Shanghai and the ever-patient, ever-waiting Zanhua. It’s a life that holds as many crests as troughs, with Yuliang facing outrage, moralistic ire, intimidation and condemnation, in turns. Finally, total freedom to live the way she wants, paint the way she wants, awaits her beyond the shores of China but in the process, she has to sacrifice her supportive lover, her steadfast rock, the man who loves her far more than she loves him, Zanhua. What she gains on the carousel in terms of education, talent and respect, she loses on the roundabout of love.
Not a bad read
It’s an absorbing read that, however, does not engage the emotions of the reader too much. Yuliang`s travails in pre-Communist China, her introduction to Western cuisine on the Left Bank, her dalliance with a fellow student, all of it has the subtlest shading of something not quite Chinese. The historical canvas is large, beginning with Royalist China and the Last Emperor then going on to Sun Yat-Sen and then Zhou Enlai but Epstein manages it by a distillation process. So, while these are interesting times indeed for China, the reader is made to focus on the interesting times of Yuliang instead. And whether the individual is really more interesting than the nation is debatable.
The style is direct, the descriptions deliberately sparse. Whenever the author tries to delve deeper into Yuliang’s emotions or China’s upheavals, that’s when the tale falters. Nope, this one’s no Memoirs of a Geisha but it’s not too bad a read, at that.
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