Masquerade

Shanghai in June is a sweltering continuum of neon and glass, its colors and textures either smudged by gloom or rendered aggressively crisp under the harsh sun. Meadow cocoons himself in his parents’ high-rise flat in Xujiahui for several days, gently adapting his circadian rhythms to this side of the world. Time is a circle, he thinks whenever he visits. Even though his adolescent years in the city are long past, and he sleeps in the guest bedroom of an apartment where he has never lived, there is a kind of primal intimacy in the mundane. He has come to associate the floral coverlet and floor-to-ceiling wardrobe of the bedroom with the tedium and ease of family life, these bland furnishings forgivable in the presence of decades-old knickknacks that his parents have kept since their stateside days in Tennessee: a ceramic incense holder shaped like a rabbit, a Great Smoky Mountains mug crammed full of ballpoint pens, a framed Gustav Klimt print on the wall.

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He messages a few people, including Selma, to make plans for the coming week, but otherwise he enjoys taking it slow. The sloth feels nearly adolescent—thirty-one going on thirteen—as he whiles away the daylight hours watching inane historical dramas on television, going on long walks with Papaya, his parents’ skittish golden retriever, or trailing his mother at the vegetable market.

It’s so intense a disconnect from the late nights and breezy banter of his Brooklyn life. His parents, Meadow sometimes considers, are partially to blame for freezing him in time. He’s lived more than half his life apart from them, so it only makes sense that they often regard him as a recalcitrant teenager. He has made his peace with it mostly, just as they have also come to accept immutable truths about him. That weekend they celebrate his mother’s birthday with a leisurely dinner at a Taiwanese steak house. Meadow presents her with a designer handbag that he bought at a secondhand shop in Nolita, which she effusively receives.

The next day, when his mother is at her dance class, he opens the carry-on backpack to look for the tube of hand cream he brings when flying. The first thing he pulls out at random is a green book with gold lettering. Meadow is still in his underwear, sprawled across the bed, but the sight of The Masquerade jolts him awake. He scrambles upright as he examines the cover again, his name printed at the bottom. Amid the turmoil of his last morning in Brooklyn, the discovery of the book completely slipped his mind. Now he looks at it anew, turning it over in his hands. The book is remarkably well-preserved for being nearly eighty years old, though the pages have a stale whiff to them. The binding does feel somewhat fragile, as though it might come apart if not carefully handled.

“The Masquerade,” he mutters, opening the book and scrutinizing the title page. “‘A tale of deviance and deception.’ By Liu Tian, translated by Barnaby Salem.” What a weird coincidence, he thinks, that the writer has the same name as him—or at least he presumes so based on its romanization. There’s a chance that the surname Liu is a different character than his own, while tian too could be written any number of ways. Nonetheless, he likes the strange serendipity of it, imagining that he and the book’s author might share this common name by which countless Chinese men, and some women, have been known over the centuries.

His gaze flickers over the roman numerals of the publication year on the copyright page. The era piques his interest, fragments of his past life in academia flickering in the recesses of his mind, a black-and-white montage of marching soldiers, trams and trolleys, waltzing couples, planes jittering over a cityscape. Somehow it doesn’t surprise him that Selma has this tome among her possessions; maybe she even meant to gift it to him and simply forgot to mention it. He turns to the first page and begins to read:

Just after nightfall, a man in a black tuxedo jacket alighted before a splendid estate in Shanghai’s International Settlement. The house was bone-white beneath the full moon, surrounded by ample gardens on all sides, several fountains along the driveway, and ornate balustrades on the upstairs balconies.

The man’s finery was suitable for making an entrance at such a locale. He strode with a self-possessed air in his starched shirt and tuxedo jacket, his patent-leather shoes clopping on the pavement. In addition, he was accoutered in another accessory stipulated by the organizer of the evening’s festivities: a mask.

The plain white mask was fitted around his head with an elastic band and had two eyeholes through which he peered. This simple adornment over the man’s deep-set eyes and the sensuous ridge of his nose rendered him practically anonymous. An expectant smile formed on his lips as an attendant opened the front door with an obsequious nod, and laughter and music wafted amiably towards him. This would surely be an evening to remember, Mizuno felt, spinning on his heels to survey the revelry. The delight that welled up in his chest was like that of a man claiming triumph in his bets at the horse races.

A veneer of peace had settled over Shanghai in the past months. Gone was the threat of bombardment by sea and by aeroplane, those great metallic birds whose eggs had laid waste to railway tracks, palaces of entertainment, and squalid tenements alike in mere minutes, to say nothing of the countless lives that were consigned to the conflagration. The Pearl of the Orient had held steady through months of chaos, and now she emerged again like a defiant queen, benighted and wounded, but still in reign.

On this night, the events of the previous year’s summer could scarcely be imagined, those wretched months evaporated like a dream upon waking. Thank goodness, thought Mizuno as he accepted a glass of champagne from a masked servant. This was the most cosmopolitan city in the world, and it had been dreary to see things grind to a halt as ships and tanks duelled well into the autumn. Just over half a year later and the ease of modernity could be felt once more in the gilded pleasures of Shanghai nightlife, with its vigourous music, beautiful women, and epicurean delights.

It is only human nature to seek pleasure and diversion. Some may even choose to ignore the violence or, worse yet, rationalize it for the greater good, deluding themselves to believe that a measure of cruelty is necessary to wrest control of collective destiny. Whether one considers this frame of mind utopian or maniacal, all forms of desire in this mortal coil are mere illusion: like the mirror’s reflection of a flower, as the proverb goes, or the water that contains the likeness of the moon. Dear reader, pay close attention to the story that unfolds. The tale of Mizuno will shock and amaze you . . .

Meadow devours the first twenty pages as the glare of daylight grows brighter beyond the bedroom window. The novel plunges him into the world of a masquerade ball in high society Shanghai in the late 1930s. Mizuno turns out to be a Japanese newspaper editor, a man dispatched to the freewheeling Pearl of the Orient to oversee cultural reportage for the sizable community of his compatriots. He apparently speaks some measure of Chinese and has made himself a fixture in the social scene, hobnobbing with the international elite. After being interrupted by Japanese military incursions a year earlier, the city’s nightlife has come roaring back with a vengeance. The first pages of the book offer lengthy descriptions of the lavish interior of the German-style estate where the party is being held, as well as a survey of those in attendance. The impeccably appointed serving staff make their rounds with trays of cocktails and canapés, while Mizuno’s fellow party guests don all manner of masks, from Peking opera and South Asian deities to Venetian Carnival and Greek theater. A few times, Meadow turns back to the title page and stares at the name—his name—printed on it. Liu Tian, translated by Barnaby Salem. He shakes his head in disbelief.

Whoever Barnaby Salem was, he certainly managed to translate the novel into flowing English prose, even peppered with the antiquated locutions of a bygone era. Meadow can picture the characters so vividly, his mind conjuring up the lush visual textures of this world by way of filmmakers he has long since internalized. He can’t help but think that a Shanghai masquerade ball would be the perfect canvas for the sentimental stylings of Wong Kar-wai or the dreamy opulence of Chen Kaige. He figures this book tells the tale of star-crossed lovers whose romance is thwarted by the tides of history, or something like that. The setting directly recalls the research that once consumed him in grad school, a memory still tinged with regret so many years later.

Papaya’s wild yipping at the front door snaps him out of his thoughts. “My darling Tian,” his mother singsongs from the foyer, “what do you want to have for lunch?” The book gets relegated to the nightstand as Meadow puts on a shirt and stumbles out of the bedroom.

Over the next days, he manages to get out of the house a few times to jog, to have coffee or dinner with friends, or to perambulate through Hengshan Park. Most of the people he socializes with are former classmates from grad school in New York, or acquaintances he’s accumulated by chance. Sandwiched between his early life in Tennessee and adolescence in Indiana, the few years he lived in Shanghai feel like an outlier and oddity, a blip in his existence. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, the ripples still gently purling outward to its edges. For his parents, this city has been home for more than twenty years. Meadow is unable to make any such claim of his own, having been dispatched at age fourteen to Auntie Marilyn’s suburban home in what he retrospectively considered his era of midwestern longing, followed swiftly by the northern Californian reverie of his college years, and then the gaping maw of New York. Of all places in the world, he has lived in New York the longest. But Shanghai still has a hold on him in some way, even though it has always been difficult to articulate the reason for it.

Images and sensations flood his brain when he lies awake at odd hours, or descends precipitously into heavy slumber in the middle of the day: the faces of his parents, the smell of summer rain, a stranger’s smirk. The tobacco-stained interior of a taxi, a fruit vendor’s listless call. China is a topsy-turvy place he could never claim, and yet to which he is inextricably bound. Shanghai’s gleaming buildings and traffic-choked arteries feel like a splendid illusion, a façade beneath which lies some primordial substance that remains elusive, unknowable. Even now, as his experience of the city has become nearly blasé with routine, there are times when he detects a whisper of meaning in the mundane, which he strains to decipher. He replays these experiences with his eyes closed, picturing himself wandering through this ghostly metropolis with attentiveness and caution. Always at the brink of epiphany, it seems, he takes one wrong step and slips into a crevice in the sidewalk. The summertime air billows around him, sweet and soporific, as he plunges deeper and deeper into the dark nowhere of the in-between.

*

He finally arranges to meet up with Selma for lunch on Monday at her subleased flat. By that time, he is so preoccupied by the slew of recent activities and excursions that he completely forgets to mention the book to her. The address she provides leads him to an old-fashioned residential alley near Changshu Road. When he asks for directions from the security guard sitting in a squat booth, the old man gestures vigorously at the lane behind him. “Just straight back there, young chap,” he bellows. “Then left, then another left. You got it?” Meadow thanks him and walks on, feeling the fabric of his shirt cling to his back in the sticky heat.

Selma lives in a building with a tiny yard where clothes have been hung out to dry. He lets himself in through the gate and ascends the open stairwell to the second floor. There’s only a single door at the far end of the dim corridor. He strides over and knocks three times.

“Coming!” a voice exclaims from inside.

A flurry of footsteps, then the door flings open. Meadow sees only the silhouette of a woman in the doorway, dramatically haloed by afternoon light on the far wall behind her. A blast of cool air from inside the apartment wafts over him. Selma’s features come into view, the familiar intensity of her gaze offset by an affectionate smile. As always she is a vision of timeless composure, her pale blue dress billowing in a languid breeze, the dull shine of a single jade clip in her hair. She leans forward and wraps her arms around him.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” says Selma. “Come in, come in.” “Hey, stranger. Fancy running into you here.”

Meadow steps inside and takes off his shoes, closing the door behind him. He finds himself looking out onto a cozy living room with a black marble dining table and a low leather couch. Hazy rays of afternoon sun filter in through a curtainless arched window. A velvety-voiced jazz singer croons from an unseen speaker. The room is suffused in the light fragrance of a rosemary candle, along with something savory on the stove.

“Make yourself at home,” Selma calls from the kitchen. “Lunch will be ready in a jiff.” The kitchen is rather cramped, with minimal countertop space but modern appliances. Selma presides over a saucepan with a wooden spoon, a rice cooker counting down nearby. When she notices Meadow peeking in, she exhorts him to take a seat and relax.

He acquiesces and flops onto the leather couch. “Nice place.” He whistles, eyes still roaming. “I just knew you’d land yourself some stylish digs.”

“Oh, I got lucky,” Selma says. She tells him she’s subletting this apartment from a friend of a friend, a Brazilian designer who is away for a few months. It’s been the perfect launchpad for her to explore Shanghai, a city she’s visited only once before, while getting settled into the artist residency. As she talks, she glides over holding a tray with a tall glass of soda water and two bowls of snacks, then sets it on the dining table. “Here we have scallion crackers,” she says, “and some wasabi peanuts that I paid way too much for at some fancy basement supermarket.”

“Amazing.” Meadow smiles. “You’ve really found your groove here. By the way, you’ll be happy to know I haven’t killed any of your plants yet. I can’t tell you how grateful I am—”

“My dear Meadow,” Selma interrupts, shaking her head, “say no more. You’re the one who’s doing me a favor. But how have you been? Flight was okay? How are your parents?”

Meadow reaches for the soda water and some crackers. Too much has happened since they last saw each other in May. Getting ghosted by Diego, schlepping his sad suitcases over to Clinton Hill, Peter’s birthday party, the past days in Shanghai—all of these events unspooled at a dizzying pace. “I just got dumped,” he sighs. “Or ghosted, I should say.”

“Oh no!”

“Remember the guy from the Chinatown party? Well, we had a thing going for . . . almost a month? God, I hate how ridiculous it sounds. But it felt so good for that stretch of time. It felt so real. Then he disappeared on me.”

The rice cooker announces successful completion of its task with a beeping melody. “I’m so sorry to hear that, my dear,” Selma says airily as she roots around in a kitchen cabinet. “Is it something you want to talk about?”

“You know what? Not really.”

Soon they’re seated across from each other at the marble table overlooking a beautiful lunch spread. Apart from the two bowls of rice, there is braised beef with daikon, Chinese broccoli in oyster sauce, and an assortment of vegetables Selma says she pickled herself. “Wow, you’ve really gone local,” Meadow says. “Looks delish.” “When in Rome,” Selma replies, picking up her chopsticks.

She tells Meadow about her meager attempts to learn conversational Mandarin, the familiarity of Chinese ideograms for someone who’d grown up with Japanese, the utter impenetrability of other aspects of the language. Luckily, most everything related to the residency, sponsored by one Gallery Potemkin, has been carried out in English. Selma’s main point of contact has been Anya, a firecracker of a woman who insists on dragging her not just to art openings, but to experimental music venues, farflung flea markets, and hidden teahouses. The program has also furnished her with a studio in Jing’an district, which has become an oasis amid this endless bustle of activity.

“I’ve been waking at five in the morning and catching the first train,” Selma says, pouring more soda water into their cups. “It’s already daylight by then. The sun rises so early in this part of the world, but the streets are still mostly empty at that hour. It’s an absolutely magical time to be out in the city.”

“Jesus, we’re on opposite schedules then,” Meadow remarks, stabbing into a piece of broccoli. “Five is when I go to bed after a late shift at the bar.”

“You know what I mean, don’t you, though? About a certain kind of consciousness that you can tap into only in those early morning hours.”

Meadow nods. It’s a time of day he knows well, offering a dark serenity that verges on the spiritual. Not just because of the physical relief of returning home, taking a hot shower, and conking out after endless hours on his feet, but for the peace that comes with being almost completely submerged in solitude. Even Atlantic Avenue and Fulton Street, usually a cacophony of brash bus drivers and scrabbling pedestrians, are part of this ethereal, slightly ominous plane of existence whose humming quietness seems to blot out any sound and color that dare remain.

Earlier that year, as she was settling the details of her residency, Selma asked Meadow if he would mind watering her plants while she was away for the summer. He agreed without too much thought. Bartending, after all, allowed him a flexible enough schedule, and they were less than twenty minutes from each other by foot. At the time he had been living in the gardenlevel apartment of a Bed-Stuy brownstone, renting a tiny room from a white environmentalist couple in their early forties who brewed their own kombucha and tended to a sizable herb garden in the backyard. Their schedules, opposite Meadow’s, meant that he barely saw either of them, but their interactions were always superficially pleasant. In the spring, the couple sat Meadow down just as he was getting ready for the early shift at the bar and broke the news: they were expecting. After accepting his congratulations, they gently informed him that they would need to repurpose his bedroom as a nursery. He was given until the beginning of June to find a place to live.

When Selma heard this, she made up her mind immediately that Meadow should stay in her Clinton Hill apartment for the summer. “You don’t need to pay rent,” she said. “Just look after the plants and keep it tidy.”

“But—”

“But nothing. The gallery is covering my housing expenses in Shanghai. You should take it easy and find yourself a new place for September. You can always stay on my couch longer, too, if you need.”

Meadow could think of no real reason to reject this offer, so he thanked her profusely and agreed. He’d also racked up enough goodwill at the bar to take a bit of time off. The opening reception for Selma’s show at the residency happened to fall close to his mother’s birthday. The more he considered it, the more he realized that it might just be the perfect occasion for a summer getaway.

After lunch, they decide to take the train to check out an exhibit at the Power Station of Art, where Selma hasn’t been yet. Meadow marvels at the way Selma moves through Shanghai with an almost preternatural sense of direction, barely needing to consult her phone as they navigate the subway or streets. She simply flows through crosswalks and alleys while remaining detached in some way, as though cushioned by her own pocket of air. The museum is a massive industrial building that once purveyed electricity to the urban environs, and now serves as a gathering ground for baby-faced hipsters and ladies of leisure. They wander absentmindedly through the exhibits, eventually making their way out onto an expansive terrace with wooden floors. The sky is a hazy bluish gray that Meadow equates with summertime in China. They walk to the edge of the terrace and take in the gritty view, the few boats drifting lazily down the Huangpu River, lost in their own thoughts under the sun.

That night they land at a tapas restaurant back in the thick of things, in the French Concession. The restaurant is tiny, with only four tables and a row of stools at the bar, the doleful accordions of Astor Piazzolla as a soundtrack. They sit side by side at the counter and consume plate after plate of Spanish omelette, smoked sausage, grilled eggplant, cheese and tomato. Selma regales Meadow with more anecdotes about her residency, the extraordinary people and situations she has been encountering at every turn. At times he gets so engrossed in her stories that he forgets about their surroundings. It could almost be any other night in New York, one more dinner outing to add to all his existing memories of their friendship. They share a conversational ease, an intuitive understanding of each other’s rhythms and idiosyncrasies. Meadow feels himself being constituted in her gaze, as though the particles of his existence were being reassembled, his contours made more solid, simply by being in her presence.

An aimless post-dinner stroll leads them to a brutalist bar called Sans Soleil. Meadow initially scoffs at the name, but he discovers that there’s a literal meaning to it: there are no windows in the room. More bunker than bar, the washed concrete of the interior is lit up in garish neon pink and sickly green like some retro-romantic vision of the future. By the cash register, the tangerine globules of a lava lamp wobble and warp in their sparkly liquid. Mariah Carey provides an incongruous soundtrack to the whole affair, crooning about fantasy and rapture, dreaming while awake. Meadow becomes aware of a mild ache in his legs from walking all day. Surprisingly stuffed from tapas and beer, and soon two cocktails deep, he starts to space out and stare at his reflection in the mirror that wraps around the length of the bar.

They are the only customers in Sans Soleil. Their silhouettes in the mirror are distant and defamiliarized; at a glance, they could be any other couple in Shanghai, siblings or lovers, classmates or coworkers. Selma has one elbow on the counter, chin against her palm, as she gazes at the lava lamp. Before Meadow even realizes it, the whole story of his romantic misadventure with Diego comes pouring out of him, in spite of his trying not to be a maudlin drunk. Or maybe it’s just the effect Selma has on him, coaxing him to name the feelings that burble in his core. “That’s quite the story,” she says at length. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

“Forget it,” Meadow grunts, turning to face her. He takes a swig of his gin gimlet, savoring the cold and sour tang. “I should know better. Still fall in love too easily.”

“It’s not a terrible trait,” Selma muses, “so long as you know how to protect yourself.”

Meadow hesitates. He wants to say something about these two things being at odds, surrendering to love versus shielding his heart. He knows that to show vulnerability can sometimes be fatal, especially early on in the dating game. But he’s never been able to put on the brakes before. Rather than dwell on the matter, he changes the subject and asks what time he should drop by her exhibition tomorrow.

“The reception starts at six,” she says, “but that’s too early. Come closer to eight and we can go to the afterparty together.”

“At your benefactor’s place, right?”

Selma laughs. “Sounds downright Dickensian. Douglas is just a collector and patron of the arts.” She lifts her glass and takes another sip. “Anyway, I think I should call it a night after this drink. Still have a few loose ends to tie up for tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Meadow replies. “We had a long day. I should head back, too. The dog always gets too excited and wakes everyone up when I get home.”

Moments later, they exit the air-conditioned stasis of Sans Soleil and find themselves back in the real world of Shanghai in June. Compared to the bar, the streetscape of Julu Road is a subdued symphony of orange light and black shadows, clouds dawdling in the bruise-colored sky overhead. The dark swelter of the city still thrums with life. Unseen cicadas screech from treetops while a sonorous ballad wafts out from a residential lane. A howl of laughter erupts in the distance. A breeze swishes through the plane trees and sends an aluminum can rolling down the curb.

Meadow slips a Chunghwa into his mouth and offers the pack to Selma. Even without looking directly at her, he can feel her gaze on him as she extracts a cigarette and holds it gingerly between her fingers. Just as he starts to pat his pockets for a lighter, she beats him to the punch. She strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette, then hers. “Thanks,” he murmurs. For a fleeting instant, Selma’s face is illuminated by the flame. Her sharp features give her a perpetually pensive expression, but the dark embers of her eyes are filled with empathy and something close to wistfulness. It was this intensity of feeling that brought them together, Meadow thinks, years and years ago. A desire or predilection to grasp at the spongy substance of living, to squeeze the essence out and make some sense of it. Selma takes the cigarette from her mouth to blow gently on the match.

They traipse through the French Concession and puff on their cigarettes in silence. After a few minutes, Selma looks at Meadow. “You fall easily into this kind of story,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind my telling you that.”

“Come again?”

A flash of light illuminates the sky and casts an expressionist glare over the street. Meadow detects a metallic whiff in the rising wind just as a peal of thunder crackles above.

“For as long as I’ve known you,” Selma continues, “you’ve been so eager for love. And you’re good at finding it, again and again. I’m sorry to be so blunt. I think you just . . . you let yourself get carried away. You’re searching for that perfect, graceful story.” A plume of smoke slips out from between the dark red of her lips as she contemplates how to finish the thought. “Remember that the story is always yours to control. When it veers off track, you can invent a new one and start over.”

He takes a long, thoughtful drag of the cigarette and blows smoke into the air. “Easier said than done,” he mutters. He knows that Selma’s words aren’t intended to wound, but he can’t help but clam up a little bit at her provocation. Invent a new story, he repeats to himself. If only I had any idea where all this was going. He’s long since lost the thread, wallowing in the inertia of his early thirties. But this much, he suspects, Selma already knows.

After a short walk, they bid each other goodbye on Huaihai Road beneath a stretch of gleaming malls and office towers. “Sure you don’t want me to walk you home?” Meadow asks.

Selma waves one hand dismissively. “I could find my way back blindfolded by now. Get some rest, Meadow. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good night, then. Thanks for spending the day with me.”

A wan smile flickers across her face. Selma in a pale blue dress, her willowy figure against concrete and glass, awash in the milky fluorescence of city lights—this image will resurface in Meadow’s mind weeks later when he’s back in Brooklyn. He’ll scour his memory for a clue, like groping in the darkness for an object that may or may not be there. He’ll strain to remember if there was anything strange in what she said to him, whether she carried herself any differently than usual. It won’t be the first time that Selma has occupied his thoughts like so, as though she were a vengeful spirit that can communicate only through obtuse signs and hidden messages. He’ll alternate between feeling vexed and fearful, incredulous and skeptical.

But none of this has come to pass. Meadow has no idea yet about the sordid tale that’s on the cusp of unfolding. So for the moment, he just leans in, kisses her on the cheek, and turns toward the stairs leading to the metro.

__________________________________

From Masquerade by Mike Fu. Used with permission of the publisher, Tin House Books. Copyright © 2024 by Mike Fu.