Night in Shanghai Read online

  In the afternoons, his work done, he returned to the now pristine basement and its baby grand. In those last hours before sunset, when weak light slanted in through the dust motes in the air, his piano playing would make the owner, Big Lewis Richardson, along with anyone else who happened to be in the house, stop what they were doing and drift down the stairs to listen.

  He understood that they were not used to hearing this kind of music in the house, read from the page, at this level of difficulty. “It’s a commitment,” his mother used to say, with a hush, as if art stood above all else. But what had this commitment brought him? Two dollars a night if he was a colored man, five if he was not.

  She had not minded about him passing, but she was always afraid he would be distracted by the sounds of stride and Dixieland. “You’re not playing that Saturday night music, are you?” she would say. “Put that sound right out your mind.” She didn’t even like it when he embellished his classical pieces with extra ornaments, or a little too much rubato. “Don’t doctor it up,” she would tell him. “You think you know better than Mendelssohn?”

  But when it came to jazz, she need not have feared, since he could not play it. He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes—perfect for small and secret spaces. Now that alcohol was legal again, the music was changing, along with the very character of the night itself. Swanky clubs and ballrooms opened, featuring larger, dancehall-type orchestras. With so many more instruments, especially on top in the reeds and the brass, songs had to be tightly arranged, by skilled bandleaders. This meant work, and it was considerably closer to Thomas’s own playing than the exuberant Dixie-style polyphony of the ’twenties had been—but still out of reach.

  This was clear to him after he heard the top bandleaders like Henderson and Ellington, who played whole orchestras like instruments. Thomas could play, but they were titans, and there was never a moment when he did not know the difference.

  Big Lewis certainly knew. “You play nice,” he said, that first week in Seattle. “But where you going to get work playing like that?”

  “That’s the problem,” said Thomas.

  “What you need is to learn the standards, with a little swing.” Big Lewis launched into singing “About a Quarter to Nine,” a popular song from the film 42nd Street.“Go on!” He waved toward the keys.

  Thomas shrank, humiliated. “I can’t play that way. Reading is all I can do.”

  “You serious? That’s it?”

  “Yes. If it’s written, I can play it. Let me get the music for that one and look at it.” So Big Lewis advanced him five cents, and Thomas went down to Jackson Street for the sheet music, came back, and read it through. When he did, it was so simple he was embarrassed. In playing it for Big Lewis, he did his best to embellish it so it would sound more presentable.

  But the older man was unimpressed. “Swing the rhythm! Let it go!”

  Thomas started again.

  “No! You turned the beat around again. Where are you, in church?” Big Lewis gave a slam to the nearest tabletop and scuffed off.

  Each night Thomas listened closely to the jazz in the basement, especially the piano work of Julian Henson, which was tightly controlled even when he improvised. There was restraint to it, a kind of glassy hardness. If I could play jazz, I would play like this fellow. But when he tried it at the piano the next day, it still eluded him.

  Big Lewis heard. “You’re trying too hard. It’s variations on a song. Think of it like that, a song.” He showed Thomas how to use the blues scale to force what he called the worried notes, especially the flatted third and seventh, over a major chord progression. When Thomas could not hear how to layer these up with counter-rhythms, or how to build chords from dissonant intervals, the older man sang him through it and showed him, using his voice, how to dance around his improvisations and get off them as quick as a grace note. By the end of that week Thomas could play at least a few of the popular ballroom numbers, like “Body and Soul” and “I Can’t Get Started,” and his renditions sounded respectable, if not exactly right.

  “Will I get by?” he asked Big Lewis.

  “No. Not around here—too many good musicians. Now, in a small town, I ’spect your sound could get over. You want that to happen, you got to work, and work hard.”

  So Thomas threw himself into practicing dance numbers every afternoon, and though he got better, he knew he was still well shy of the mark when Big Lewis pulled him aside one night at closing time and told him there was an agent in the house, a man from China, who needed a piano player.

  “To play in China?”

  “Shanghai. I’ve heard tell of it—fellows get recruited.”

  Thomas stared. Shanghai! It was alluring, dangerous; there were songs about it. “Is that him?” he said of the tall, rangy fellow who was the only Asian man left in the place now that it had emptied out. He had a narrow face, doorknob cheekbones jutting beneath his long, dark eyes. Thomas noticed his hair was combed straight back and pomaded down, while his suit still showed creases from the steamer trunk. He dressed like a gentleman, which struck Thomas as a promising chord of commonality.

  “Go talk to him,” Big Lewis said.

  “What if he—”

  “Say you’re a pianist, then just play. Don’t say anything else.”

  He looked down at his overalls. Maybe it was a good thing, a lucky thing, the way he was dressed. “Play what?” he said nervously.

  “The Rhapsody.”

  Thomas closed his eyes for a second; yes, genius, Big Lewis was right. Rhapsody in Blue was the one piece he had memorized which was flat-out impressive and also danced at least a little bit close to the music he had to pretend to know. So he crossed the floor, still littered and sticky, and set his mop and bucket down with a neat slosh. “Name’s Thomas Greene,” he said. “My boss tells me you’re looking.”

  And now he was in Shanghai, beside Alonzo, coming to the end of the lane, to Rue Lafayette, where they paused before turning. Thomas studied the older man’s face. “You look like you like it here.”

  “Best thing ever happened to me. All my life I knew what I deserved, but Shanghai is the only place I ever got it. You’ll see.” With those words, Alonzo raised a casually crooked finger, and a panting coolie ran up with a rickshaw. Alonzo climbed up onto the rattan seat and slid over, making room for Thomas, who stood frozen. The older man had been here a year and knew all the holes and corners, sure, but should they really be pulled along by a poor, unfortunate man in a harness? Even the slaves had not done work like this. But the bare-armed coolie stamped impatiently, slick with sweat in the cold air, his sinews ropy, his legs strong. He wanted to resume running.

  Alonzo was looking down with compassion, and Thomas understood that he too must have crossed this particular threshold on arrival. The city was cruel. Maybe all cities were cruel.

  “You know what?” Alonzo said to him. “Man’s got a right to choose his master.” He patted the seat.

  And Thomas climbed up beside him.

  They swayed and jostled down the street, the gasping, heaving coolie pulling them at a steady rhythmic lope. Thomas felt almost sick, sweat popping out, though whether it was his discomfort with the coolie or the rocking motion roiling his overambitious breakfast, he was not sure. Alonzo seemed wholly undisturbed, placid almost, as he gazed down at the traffic, so Thomas forced his mind off the rickshaw puller, instead ranging back over what other musicians had told him about Shanghai before he left Seattle.

  “Freest place on earth,” Roger Felton had said. “Pleasure every damn place you look, and your money just as good as any white man’s. Think on that! Fellows earn a lot, no two ways about it, but there isn’t a one of them I’ve seen come back with a penny. They spend it all.”

  Not I, had been Thomas’s silent reaction. I can save money. He had been much more sobered by what Roger had said when h
e asked about politics. “Say the Japanese fighting the Chinese, and the Chinese fighting each other. Say gangsters running the city. People disagree, they end up dead, so you best play your music and keep clear of it. Hear?”

  The money Lin Ming had quoted him seemed to override such concerns, not to mention his own insufficient skills: fifty dollars a week for band members, and one hundred dollars a week for him, the leader. Granted, those were Shanghai dollars, worth only a third of American, but Lin had said Shanghai prices were as low as dirt—twelve dollars for a tailor-made suit, two for dinner in a restaurant, three dollars for a woman, all night. And in Shanghai he could have any woman, no race laws, a thought that would not stop tugging at him as they steamed across the Pacific.

  At home, in Maryland, he’d had his share of white women. Sometimes, when he played a party, he got lucky with a good-time girl afterward, and once in a while, when he was performing as an Egyptian or an Argentine, that girl would be white. None of them were the kind of girls he could know, or call on; they were janes, party girls, girls with bobbed hair and short flapper skirts who liked to be drunk every night, and were still young and pretty enough to do it. Actually there were very few girls back in Baltimore that he could call on, because he had never earned enough money to court the kind of respectable girl he wanted. He hoped Shanghai was going to be different.

  On the ship, in his tiny metal-riveted cabin, in the small mirror screwed to the wall, he assessed his face as he tried to put his hopes in order. He took after his father’s family, everyone always said so, light-skinned people. His father’s mother had been a teacher, and her father a chemist and an officer in the Twenty-fifth Infantry regiment in the Indian Wars. He had inherited his father’s looks and his mother’s ear for music, which came in turn from her own mother. But that grandmother fell in love with a landowning man during the Reconstruction years and became a farm wife outside Easton on the Chesapeake’s far shore. She never wavered, his grandmother; a cream and tan beauty in her youth, she played the rest of her life on a parlor upright, performing works that asked hard, crashing questions with no easy answers, pouring through open windows to dissipate in the tangled woods. He had loved that place.

  But it was gone, separated from him first by a continent on the rails, and now by the blue Pacific. He had never been at sea before, or on any vessel larger than the flat-bottomed scow he and his cousins had used to explore the tributaries of the Chesapeake up and down Talbot County. He stayed in his cabin that whole first day aboard ship, so afraid was he. It was not until the sun was dropping into the December horizon that he heard the thump of music from Lin Ming’s cabin, and stood with his ear to the metal wall. He knew the song, he had heard it on the radio, back on Creel Street—“Memphis Blues,” by Fletcher Henderson. In a rush of longing, home came back to him, the velvet air, damp and biting in winter, sweet in summer. He almost heard the far-off roar of the crowd at an Orioles game, the slipping, satisfying ring of leather shoes on white marble steps. He had left that world, but not its music, for that had crossed the ocean and was here with him, making him bold. He stepped out and knocked on Lin Ming’s door.

  His knuckle had barely touched the metal when the door swung back. Lin looked at him like a thirsty man seeing water; farther along, Thomas would understand how much the other man hated to be alone. “Come in! I thought you would never be emerging. What?” He followed Thomas’s gaze to his ankle-length Chinese gown, slit up each side for easy movement, worn over trousers. “You never saw one? It is freedom. Try sometime. You like Fletcher Henderson?”

  “Very much,” said Thomas, always appreciative of the musician’s formality and control.

  Lin looked pleased. “He is high level. And to me, he sounds like someone who works from the sheet music. Like you. What’s wrong? You look like you want to show a clean pair of heels! Don’t be embarrassed. I could see that you work by the reading and writing. Now here.” He piled a stack of seventy-eights into Thomas’s arms. “Take these to your room. Take my gramophone. These are songs the Kansas City Kings play, and we have twenty-two days to Shanghai, enough time for you to write them out. At least you can arrive with something.”

  Raised on obstacles, Thomas felt the surprise of gratitude almost like a blow. In his experience, one got help from friends, from family, not outsiders. “Thank you.”

  Lin waved him away. “Don’t thank me yet. I am taking you to China, where things are as precarious as a pile of eggs. Japan is invading us, they need land and food and the labor of our millions. They already occupy part of the north and are pushing south. China should be united to fight them, but we are divided into the two sides who want to kill each other—the Nationalists and Communists.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Neither. And I tell you why. The Nationalists and Communists may be poles apart, heaven in the north and the earth in the south, but they do agree on one thing—they think jazz is a dangerous element, and must be banned. So! How can I support either side?”

  “Ban jazz?”

  “I know.” Lin shook his head. “The arrogance. One hundred mouths could not explain it away. And how could the government ever ban any type of music anyway? This is the age of radio! But Little Greene, listen.” He had started using the nickname on account of Thomas being twenty-five to his twenty-eight. “When you get to Shanghai, Japanese people will try to tell you we Chinese are incapable of governing ourselves. That is their superstition, that we are lazy and disorganized, stupid, we are children who need them to take care of us. They will tell you that we want them there.”

  “I don’t think they’ll tell me anything. I’m a musician.”

  “Just remember, no matter what they say, do not believe it. They want us as their slaves.” He stretched, settled his gown, and said, “I am dying of the hunger. Let us go to dinner.”

  It was the twentieth of December when they finally steamed up the Huangpu, watching from the rail in the cold as lines of coolies carried goods to and from the docks at the water’s edge. They sailed around a turn in the river and the Bund came into view, an imposing colonnaded line of eclectic façades topped with cupolas and clock towers. Behind it crouched a city of low brown buildings.

  The ship dropped anchor, and passengers lined up to board the lighter that would take them to shore. He could see the Bund was thick with traffic, its sidewalks crowded. The energy seemed to come right through his feet the moment they bumped the dock and he stepped on the ground again, dear solid ground; he dodged through the crowd behind Lin Ming. All around them passengers swirled away to meet friends, relatives, and servants, then dispersed across a narrow strip of grass directly onto the boulevard.

  “No customs?” said Thomas, for they had simply walked ashore, without even showing their identification.

  “A free port,” Lin said proudly. “All are welcome.”

  On the sidewalk, the air rang with a dozen languages. They were surrounded by men in Chinese gowns and padded jackets, and wand-like women in high-necked dresses and sumptuous fur wraps. Other men passed wearing tunics from India and robes from Arabia, some with faces darker than his own. Suddenly he was not different anymore, everybody was different. No one looked twice at him, for the first time in his life. And no one cared that he stood right there on the sidewalk, neither deferring nor giving way nor lifting his hand to tip his hat, which was in itself a marvel. Even a few pale foreign women in their tick-tock heels and woolen coats walked right past him, unconcerned. He could feel a grin growing on his face.

  “Over here,” Lin Ming called, and Thomas saw him holding open the door to a black car. Rarely had Thomas ridden in a private car, but he slid in now, the smooth, fragrant leather and the murmur of the engine enveloping him. Shanghai was a fairy world, he decided as they drove along the river with its endless docks and braying vessels of all shapes and sizes.

  The city was mighty, yet Thomas could see hints of the war Lin had described, too: clots of soldiers in brown uniforms standing alo
ng the wharves, puttees tight to their knees and rifles hooked casually on their shoulders.

  “Japanese,” Lin confirmed.

  “I thought you said they had only taken over the northeast.”

  “Yes. Shanghai still belongs to China. But there was trouble four years ago, in ’thirty-two—fighting—and the foreign powers forced a cease-fire by promising that only Japan could have troops in Shanghai. China could not.”

  “No Chinese troops here? But it is a Chinese city.”

  “Correct.” Lin dripped dark irony.

  “How could foreign powers force China to accept a thing like that?”

  Lin almost wanted to laugh. “You are forgetting what I told you on the voyage. Shanghai is the city of foreign Concessions. Little colonies, each owned by another country. The city seems very free to you foreigners, but we Chinese must serve someone else. Do not forget that. You are a jueshi jia, a jazz man, you of all people should understand that we are not free. Up ahead, you see that row of docks? The Quai de France? That is the Frenchtown. This part now, we pass through? This is the International Settlement, belongs to Britain and America.”

  “Like foreign colonies,” said Thomas.

  “Concessions,” Lin corrected him, and said something musical in light, tapping tones to the driver, who made a right turn. “And here is the Avenue Édouard VII, the border of Frenchtown.”

  Thomas saw that the street signs on the right were in Chinese, while suddenly on the left, he read Rue Petit, Rue Tourane, Rue Saigon. The buildings here had red stone façades with tall French doors and wrought-iron balconies, and between the cross-streets, small lanes led away. Peering into these, he saw women carrying vegetables for the evening meal, young girls in groups with their arms linked, grannies shepherding little children. It was as foreign as it could be, yet faintly familiar.