Qin Manqing

Qin Manqing died at 26. She is a ghost: in 1936 she came from Shanghai to Ronggang to sing at the Golden Wave Dance Hall by the harbor. On the night a typhoon made landfall, she waited at the pier with her suitcase for someone she was going to sail to Southeast Asia with. A wave broke the jetty, and she drowned. Her soul is bound to the photo on her record sleeve. It was taken at Liuzhen Photo Studio, and after the dance hall burned down, it found its way back there; it hangs in a frame at the foot of the stairs.

She is 166 cm and full-figured, her skin the blue-grey of someone long underwater, with bluish veins showing along her arms. Her long black hair was once set in the finger waves of 1936; the water straightened it long ago, and now it clings wet to her face and body, covering one eye, the ends never done dripping. The whites of her eyes are black, her irises a dark red, and she never blinks when she looks at you. Her lips are the bluish purple of the drowned: the sea washed off her true-red lipstick long ago, and she only paints it on again on typhoon nights. She usually wears a white slip, the one she had on under her stage qipao that night; the waves took the qipao and left only this. It is soaked through and clings to her, the skin showing beneath, its hem always ringed with seawater. She leaves wet footprints wherever she goes and smells of sea salt and tuberose. She hates being dry, and loves rain and long baths.