The Valley of Amazement
Shanghai, 1905. Violet Minturn is the young daughter of the American mistress of the city’s most exclusive courtesan house. But when revolution arrives in the city, she is separated from her mother in a cruel act of chicanery and forced to become a ‘virgin courtesan’.Half-Chinese and half-American, Violet moves effortlessly between the cultural worlds of East and West, quickly becoming a shrewd businesswoman who deals in seduction and illusion. But her successes belie her private struggle to understand who she really is and her search for a home in the world.Lucia, Violet’s mother, nurses wounds of her own, first sustained when, as a teenager, she fell blindly in love with a Chinese painter and followed him from San Francisco to Shanghai, only to be confronted with the shocking reality of the vast cultural differences between them. Violet’s need for answers will propel both her and her mother on separate quests of discovery: journeys to make sense of their lives, of the men – fathers, lovers, sons – who have shaped them, and of the ways we fail one another and our children despite our best attempts to love and be loved.Spanning fifty years and two continents, ‘The Valley of Amazement’ resurrects lost worlds: from the moment when China’s imperial dynasty collapsed, a Republic arose, and foreign trade became the lifeblood of Shanghai, to the inner workings of courtesan houses and the lives of the foreign ‘Shanghailanders’ living in the International Settlement, both erased by World War II. It is also a deeply evocative narrative of family secrets, the legacy of trauma, and the profound connections between mothers and daughters, which returns readers to the compelling territory so expertly mapped in ‘The Joy Luck Club’.With her characteristic wisdom, grace and humour, Amy Tan conjures a story of the inheritance of love, its mysteries and betrayals, and its illusions and truths.
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
First published in the United States by Ecco in 2013
Copyright © Amy Tan 2013
Cover photograph © ZenShui/James Hardy
Amy Tan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © November 2013 ISBN: 9780007467242
Version: 2014-07-15
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and
elude me,
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess’d soul, eludes
not,
One’s-self, must never give way—that is the final substance—
that out of all is sure,
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
When shows break up what but One’s-Self is sure?
—WALT WHITMAN, “QUICKSAND YEARS”
CONTENTS
Chapter 3: The Hall of Tranquility
Chapter 4: Etiquette for Beauties of the Boudoir
Chapter 5: The Memory of Desire
Chapter 8: The Two Mrs. Ivorys
Chapter 12: The Valley of Amazement
When I was seven, I knew exactly who I was: a thoroughly American girl in race, manners, and speech, whose mother, Lulu Minturn, was the only white woman who owned a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai.
My mother named me Violet after a tiny flower she loved as a girl growing up in San Francisco, a city I have seen only in postcards. I grew to hate my name. The courtesans pronounced it like the Shanghainese word vyau-la—what you said when you wanted to get rid of something. “Vyau-la! Vyau-la!” greeted me everywhere.
My mother took a Chinese name, Lulu Mimi, which sounded like her American one, and her courtesan house was then known as the House of Lulu Mimi. Her Western clients knew it by the English translation of the characters in her name: Hidden Jade Path. There were no other first-class courtesan houses that catered to both Chinese and Western clients, many of whom were among the wealthiest in foreign trade. And thus, she broke taboo rather extravagantly in both worlds.
That house of flowers was my entire world. I had no peers or little American friends. When I was six, Mother enrolled me in Miss Jewell’s Academy for Girls. There were only fourteen pupils, and they were all cruel. Some of their mothers had objected to my presence, and those daughters united all the girls in a plot to expel me. They said I lived in a house of “evil ways,” and that no one should touch me, lest my taint rub off on them. They also told the teacher I cursed all the time, when I had done so only once. But the worst insult came from an older girl with silly ringlets. On my third day, I arrived at school and was walking down the hallway when this girl walked briskly up to me and said within hearing distance of my teacher and the younger class girls: “You spoke Chinee to a Chinee beggar and that makes you Chinee.” I could not bear one more of her insults. I grabbed her ringlets and hung on. She screamed, and a dozen fists pummeled my back and another bloodied my lip and knocked out a tooth that had already been loose. I spit it out, and we all stared for a second at the glistening tusk, and then I clutched my neck for dramatic effect and shrieked, “I’ve been killed!” before collapsing to the floor. One girl fainted, and the ringleader and her pack scampered off with stricken faces. I picked up the tooth—a former living part of me—and the teacher quickly put a knotted kerchief to my face to stanch the blood, then sent me home in a rickshaw with no parting words of comfort. Mother decided on the spot that I would be tutored at home.
Confused, I told her what I had said to the old beggar:
