Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

By the time Wu Peizhen got home, her family was already at the dinner table and she had to fib about where she had been. But she didn’t have an ounce of regret; even when later that evening she saw the blisters on the soles of her feet from all that walking, she still felt that it was all worth it. That night she even had a dream about the film studio. She dreamed of an elegantly dressed woman under the mercury-vapor lamps. When the woman turned to her and smiled, Wu Peizhen saw that she was none other than Wang Qiyao; she was so excited that she woke up. Her feelings for Wang Qiyao were a bit like the puppy love that a teenage boy feels for a girl for whom he is willing to go to the edge of the earth. She opened her eyes in the pitch-dark bedroom and wondered: Just what kind of place is this film studio anyway?

When the day finally arrived, Wu Peizhen’s excitement far surpassed that of Wang Qiyao; she could barely contain herself. A classmate asked them where they were off to. “Nowhere,” Wu Peizhen casually responded, as she gave Wang Qiyao a knowing pinch on the arm. Then she pulled Wang Qiyao aside and told her to hurry up, as though afraid that that their classmate would catch up and force them to let her in on their pleasure. The whole way there Wu Peizhen couldn’t stop jabbering, attracting curious glances from people on the street. Wang Qiyao warned her several times to get hold of herself. Finally she had to stop in her tracks and declare she wasn’t going any further — they had not even set foot in the studio and Wu Peizhen had already embarrassed her enough. Only then did Wu Peizhen cool down a bit.

To get to the studio they had to take the trolley and make a transfer. Wu Peizhen’s cousin was waiting for them at the entrance; he gave each of them an ID tag to clip on her chest so that they would look like employees: that way they could wander around wherever their hearts desired. Once inside, they walked through an empty lot littered with wooden planks, discarded cloth scraps, and chunks of broken bricks and tiles — it looked like a cross between a dump and a construction site. Everyone approaching went at a hurried pace with their heads down. The cousin also moved briskly, as if he had something urgent to take care of. The two girls were left straggling behind, holding hands, trying their best to keep up.

It was three or four o’clock, the sunlight was waning and the wind picked up, rustling their skirts. Both of them felt a bit gloomy and Wu Peizhen fell silent. After going a few hundred steps, their journey began to feel interminable, and the girls began to lose patience with the cousin, who slowed down to regale them with some of the rumors floating around the studio; his comments, however, seemed to be neither here nor there. Before their visit all of those anecdotes seemed real, but once they had seen the place everything was now entirely unreliable. Numbness had taken hold of them by the time they entered a large room the size of a warehouse, where uniformed workers scurried back and forth, up and down scaffolding, all the while calling out orders and directions. But they did not see a soul who even faintly resembled a movie star. Thoroughly disoriented, they simply trailed after Wu Peizhen’s cousin, but had to watch their heads one second and their feet another, for there were ropes and wires overhead and littering the ground. They moved in and out from illuminated areas into patches of darkness and seemed to have completely forgotten their objective and had no idea where they were — all they did was walk. After what seemed an eternity, Wu Peizhen’s cousin finally stopped and had them stand off to one side — he had to go to work.

The place where they were left standing was bustling with activity; everyone seemed to be doing something as they moved briskly around the girls. Several times, rushing to get out of one person’s way, they bumped into someone else. But they had yet to lay eyes on anyone who looked like a movie star. They were both getting anxious, feeling that the whole trip was a mistake. Wu Peizhen could hardly bring herself to look Wang Qiyao in the eye. All of a sudden, the lights in the room lit up like a dozen rising suns, blinding them. After their eyes adjusted they made out a portion of the warehouse-like room that had been arranged to look like one half of a bedroom. That three-walled bedroom seemed to be the set, but everything inside was peculiarly familiar. The comforter showed signs of wear, old cigarette butts were left in the ashtray, even the handkerchief on the nightstand beside the bed had been used, crumpled up into a ball — as if someone had removed a wall in a home where real people were living to display what went on within. Standing there watching they were quite excited, but at the same time irritated because they were too far away to hear what was being said on set. All they could see was a woman in a sheer nightgown lying on a bed with wrinkled sheets. She tried to lie in several different positions; on her side one moment, on her back the next, and for a while even in a strange position where half her body extended off the bed onto the floor. All this became somewhat boring. The lights turned on and off. In the end, the woman in bed stopped moving and stayed still in the same position for quite some time before the lights once again dimmed.

When the lights came back on, everything seemed different. During the previous few takes the light had been marked by an unbridled brilliance. This time they seemed to be using a specialized lighting, the kind that illuminates a room during a pitch-black night. The bedroom set seemed to be further away, but the scene became even more alive. Wang Qiyao was taking in everything. She noticed the glow emitting from the electric lamp and the rippling shadows of the lotus-shaped lampshade projecting onto the three walls of the set. A powerful sense of déjà vu gripped her, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not remember where she had seen this scene before. Only after shifting her gaze to the woman under the lamplight did she suddenly realize that the actress was pretending to be dead — but she could not tell if the woman was meant to have been murdered or to have committed suicide. The strange thing was that this scene did not appear terrifying or foreboding, only annoyingly familiar. She could not make out the woman’s features; all she could see was her head of disheveled hair strewn out along the foot of the bed. The woman’s feet faced the headboard and her head lay propped against the foot of the bed, her slippers scattered on opposite sides of the room. The film studio was a hubbub of activity, like a busy dockyard. With all the cries of “Camera” and “OK” rising and falling amid the clamor, the woman was the only thing that did not move, as if she had fallen into an eternal slumber. Wu Peizhen was the first to lose her patience; after all, she was the more brazen one. She pulled Wang Qiyao away so they could go look around other parts of the studio.

Their next stop was a three-walled hotel lobby where a fight scene was being shot. All of the actors, in suits and leather dress shoes, were standing around when suddenly a poor fellow in tattered clothes walked onto the set and slapped the hotel manager across the face. The way the action was carried out looked a bit ridiculous; the actor produced the slapping sound with his left hand as he slapped the restaurant owner with his right, but his timing was impeccable and one could hardly tell it was fake. Wu Peizhen liked this scene much more than the first. She watched them do take after take without getting bored, the whole time exclaiming how much fun it was. Wang Qiyao, however, grew impatient and said that the first one was much more interesting. She said that it was a serious film, unlike this one, which was pure buffoonery, no better than a circus sideshow.