Genres collide in this dark and atmospheric reimagining of 1930s Shanghai for fans of Nghi Vo and S. A. Chakraborty.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Rosalie M. Lin’s Daughter of Calamity, which is out June 18th 2024.
Jingwen spends her nights as a showgirl at the Paramount, one of the most lavish clubs in Shanghai, competing ruthlessly to charm wealthy patrons. To cap off her shifts, she runs money for her grandmother, the exclusive surgeon to the most powerful gang in the city. A position her grandmother is pressuring her to inherit…
When a series of dancers are targeted―the attacker stealing their faces―Jingwen fears she could be next. And as the faces of the dancers start appearing on wealthy foreign socialites, she realizes Shanghai’s glittering mirage of carefree luxury comes at a terrible price.
Fighting not just for her own safety but that of the other dancers―women who have simultaneously been her bitterest rivals and only friends―Jingwen has no choice but to delve into the city’s underworld. In this treacherous realm of tangled alliances and ancient grudges, silver-armed gangsters haunt every alley, foreign playboys broker deals in exclusive back rooms, and the power of gods is wielded and traded like yuan. Jingwen will have to become something far stranger and more dangerous than her grandmother ever imagined if she hopes to survive the forces waiting to sell Shanghai’s bones.
Chapter Two
My name means “the silent ripples in water.”
In Mandarin, the lingua franca of the Old City, it’s 靜紋, pronounced Jingwen. Liqing named me. Every time it rains, when mist shrouds the piers like a fur stole and black umbrellas bob in the street like diving bells, I think about the circumstance of my christening. In Shanghai, the ripples in water are never silent. Even the rain that drips off the eyes of the door-guarding lions comes with its own pa-la, as it pools under their paws quivering. Water is how eleven nations forced Shanghai to her knees and sliced her skin into concessions, when they came across the sea in their steam-powered ships and razed her city walls.
Liqing talks about a day when the sun never rose in the forty-fifth year after the Partition of Shanghai, when the carriages stopped on Bubbling Well Road and the horses tore their stirrups in terror, and in the darkness below the piers, the waves lay still. That was the day the Mother of Calamity, the goddess who had watched over the city since its founding, fled with her entourage of winged tigers and leopards across the sea—when she saw how the Western powers had carved her beloved city into a mosaic of babbling tongues and different-colored eyes. And a city without a god, Liqing reminds me, is nothing more than a ghost city. She named me after that day so that I would never forget, that someday Shanghai would need its goddess back, and there might be no one.
In Japanese, my name is Shizuko. I’m not a poet, but I believe that every time you rehome a name in a new language, it loses a piece of its heart. In Chinese, my name sounds wistful, like the first two words of a Tang Dynasty poem. In Japanese, it sounds like the shape of an ocean wave, the angry kind that rushes at the shore during storms. The Japanese army came to Shanghai last winter, after they captured Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning in the northeast. Their presence has lingered in the bands of long-bearded ronin who roamed the farmlands in the outskirts, torching barns suspected of harboring rebel bases. Some say there’s a war brewing on the horizon, and we should all gather our things and flee south. But no one’s really running.
In French and English, my name is Vilma. After Vilma Bánky, the Hungarian actress. The Paramount’s manager named me because he thought “Jingwen” wasn’t sexy enough. This name is newest to me, like leather gloves that haven’t been broken in. For my twentieth birthday, the manager gave me a framed photograph of Vilma Bánky in The Son of the Sheik, being dipped back into a kiss by the male lead. I’ve placed the photograph on my nightstand, where I study it sometimes, but I don’t feel like Vilma Bánky.
In Shanghai, everybody wears multiple faces. Even the streets have more than one name—the temples, the banks, even the Paramount. Some mornings when I walk home alone at the break of dawn, I think about how terribly lonely it is to live in a place like that—a place where you can never really know anyone.
It may be hard to understand then, why nobody leaves the Sin City of the East, despite all the warning signs. But you see, the Shanghai I was born into had just entered its Golden Age of dancing and jazz. And there was no feeling in the world like soaring across the dance floor in imported silks, drowning in flying lights and the croon of trumpets, night after night, believing the morning would never come.
Six days a week, I drag myself out of bed to practice with the East Sea Follies, a ragtag troupe of taxi dancers from the Paramount who have banded together in our desperate need for a second salary. Our latest choreographer is Madame Evgenia Tsoy, a former ballerina of the Russian Imperial Ballet. As a refugee in Shanghai, she has grand visions of remaking the ballet out of whatever troupe of girls she can find, even if they are vedettes and burlesque performers. The latest punishment she has devised for unpunctuality? Footwork drills in a handstand for the entire duration of the warm-up. I much prefer taxi dancing, but unless you’re Li Beibei, who can afford to throw her dance tickets off the edge of bridges just to watch them float down to the water, dancing with a salaried troupe is a necessity.
So, while Beibei inevitably sleeps in, no doubt dreaming of Neville Harrington’s promise of a summer getaway to Qingdao in her silk-curtained canopy bed, I wake up late and do my makeup while slurping half-dissolved cocoa powder, my window thrown open for the morning sun. As I’m applying lipstick, I hesitate with my upper lip only half colored.
The carmine lip rouge looks like blood. Quickly, I wipe my upper lip on the back of my hand, smearing red all over my knuckles. But Huahua didn’t bleed messily.
I turn away from the mirror.
My dappled shadow breathes heavily on the wall.
I throw open my window as far as it’ll go before the pane gets stuck. There’s a prayer of some sort going on at the Daoist shrine across the street, monks in black robes chanting scripture while shaking tambourines. The aroma of fresh crab shell pie floats into my room, and I crave the escapism afforded by a mouthful of pork and spring onion rolled in hot shallot oil. But the smell is quickly overtaken by that of soap flakes, as the elderly woman next door begins slapping wet underwear onto a laundry line outside her window.
Forget it then. I won’t wear lipstick. With one last pat of rouge on my cheeks, I toss my coat over my leotard and fly out the door.
From Daughter of Calamity by Rosalie M. Lin. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
