Interior Castles I

      ‘Forty coolies!’ was my grandmother’s abbreviated reference to her life in Shanghai a hundred years ago. She and her sister were cared for on an estate in the city’s International Settlement. My grandmother would shake her head as she spoke the words forty coolies, spoke them with wonder, not embarrassment. At the turn of the last century, Shanghai was home to many Europeans, expatriates who created their own little Englands and Germanys and Frances and whose households were served by Chinese labor that was unimaginably affordable. To illustrate, my grandmother would tell this story: One day an old groundskeeper fell from the top of the ladder while pruning a tree on the family’s property. As he fell, he grabbed for the ladder and pulled it over with him. The head gardener came running from the greenhouse, picked up the ladder, dusted it off, and left the groundskeeper where he had fallen.

      When asked by my great-grandfather why he would pick up the ladder and not the man, the head gardener shrugged as if the answer were obvious. ‘Man old, ladder new,’ he said, and he bowed and returned to the greenhouse. In China, life was cheap, and, my grandmother would have added, dirty.

      ‘The filth! The filth!’ was the second most frequent of her invocations of the country in which she lived until she was seventeen. In an age without vaccines or antibiotics, where yellow fever and cholera and typhus outbreaks were common, dirt meant danger. From my grandmother’s childhood home, ‘night soil’ was collected by one of the under coolies (out of forty, one was designated for the literal shit work) and carried out to the street in the morning to be collected by an ox-drawn wagon when it passed on the boulevard. These wagons, called kongs, took human excrement to the rice paddies where it was used as fertilizer, guaranteeing the contamination of waterways and the spread of cholera. My grandmother’s only brother died before his second birthday, and according to family lore, what he died of was dirt. The little boy’s death began before the meningitis subsequent to a teething infection; it began with his very birth in China. Even as the only son of an otherwise Orthodox Jewish family, he died uncircumcised because my grandmother’s mother once saw black crescents of dirt under the Shanghai rabbi’s long fingernails and was so frightened by the sight of them that she decided to wait until she could take her son home to a rabbi in London.

      Seventy years later, if you were to put a plate of Chinese food before my grandmother, she would vomit. Traveling with me through New York City’s Chinatown in the back of a taxi, she covered her eyes. And if she didn’t readily offer her hand in greeting to an Asian person, it wasn’t racism or snobbery (not exactly, although my grandmother was an imperious woman who never questioned her right to any of her wealth or possessions), but a fear of contagion that never diminished. Her family bought ivories and porcelains, silk rugs, jade, cloisonné; they decorated their homes in Shanghai, and later in Nice, in London, and in Los Angeles with these things. But that was the extent of their interaction with China. Much of the food they consumed was imported from England. Even the cows and the chickens were brought to them over the oceans – a long journey for livestock. ‘Orpingtons,’ my grandmother said the chickens were called. She spoke this name with rapture. ‘White and beautiful!’ she said. What she meant, I knew, was white and clean.

      Vegetables were grown on the family’s own land and, before they were eaten, scrubbed with carbolic soap, a poisonous antiseptic detergent made from coal tar. Decades later, when washing anything she considered particularly dirty, my grandmother would whisper the words ‘carbolic soap’ to herself and would shake her head with longing. Clearly, nothing could be dependably laundered without it. For me, a child born in Los Angeles in 1961, the words had a quaintly ridiculous ring, and yet one winter, when our children succumbed to a particularly virulent and tenacious stomach virus, I found myself collapsed, despairing, over our washer. If only I had carbolic soap, I knew the germs would perish.

      In Shanghai, my grandmother remembered, she once glanced through the open door of a hotel kitchen and saw a Chinese pastry chef patting a pie crust flat on his bare, sweating belly – despite the incontrovertible ‘fact,’ my grandmother assured me, that Chinese people bathed only once a year. Her own ritual of hygiene, to which I listened from outside her tightly closed bathroom door, included such vigorously loud scrubbing and frantic splashing that it sounded as if she were trying to lather up a tiger rather than her own assumably cooperative limbs.

      Every day that she lived in China, my grandmother learned that a home was maintained in opposition to the world around it. That was the kind of home she made in Los Angeles; that was the home in which I grew up. When she married another displaced British subject, a man whose mild personality was eclipsed by her fierceness, she made a life with him that confined rather than supported and that invited rebellion from my American-born mother. In an inspired flight of defiance, my mother found my father, who was raised in El Paso, Texas, and who had a Baptist preacher for one grandfather and a Methodist for the other. My parents were as ill suited to each other as might be imagined, and their marriage was short-lived. When it was over, my mother gave me to her mother as the replacement daughter she believed would buy her freedom. At least that was her version of the story. ‘You were supposed to ransom me,’ she explained.

      Since the same woman raised us, mine was not the typical Los Angeles childhood any more than my mother’s had been. My grandmother emphatically disapproved of all things American and encouraged me to form myself in contrast to the