Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

After that evening Wang Qiyao ran into Old Colour at a few other parties and they gradually got to know each other better. One time Old Colour told Wang Qiyao that he suspected he was the reincarnation of someone who had lived four decades earlier. This person had probably died a violent death in his youth, but because he hadn’t properly finished out his previous life, was now left with a strange attachment to the past. Wang Qiyao asked him if he had any proof of this. He replied that his proof was based on his endless longing for the Shanghai of the forties, a world that otherwise had nothing to do with him. Sometimes, walking down the street, he would slip into a daze that seemed to transport him back to the past. The women would all be wearing cheongsams and dresses, the men had donned Western-style suits and hats, the trolley bell would ring out, and girls crying “Gardenias for sale!” sounded like orioles, while the apprentice at the silk shop made crisp noises with his scissors as they cut through pieces of fabric. Amid these sights and sounds he would slip into the past, becoming a person of that bygone era, someone who parted his hair in the middle, carried a leather briefcase, and supported his virtuous wife and family by working at a Western firm. Wang Qiyao laughed at this.

“Virtuous wife? Tell me, just how is she virtuous?”

He ignored her and continued on with his story. He said that in his vision he had taken the trolley to work as usual when a gun fight broke out inside the trolley car. A spy from Wang Jingwei’s puppet government was trying to assassinate a man from the Chongqing faction. They chased each other around the car and in the end he was shot by a stray bullet and died there on the trolley.

“You got all that from a TV show!” Wang Qiyao challenged him.

Still disregarding her comments, he continued, “I was unjustly killed and my soul refused to accept what happened. That’s why even though I seem to be here, my heart is in the past. And look at the way I always make friends with people much older than me, and when I first meet them I always have a feeling of déjà vu.”

At that moment the music came back on and the two of them went back out onto the dance floor. Halfway through the number, Wang Qiyao suddenly smiled and said, “Actually, it’s funny how I lived through that era and, much as I want to, I can’t go back. But here you are, able to go back whenever you want!”

Her words moved him, but he didn’t know quite how to respond.

“Even if it is a dream,” Wang Qiyao continued, “It’s my dream! You don’t get to have those dreams and make them seem so real!”

With that, the two of them broke out in laughter. Before they left for the evening, Old Colour invited Wang Qiyao out to dinner the next evening. Seeing him play the role of the gentleman, Wang Qiyao thought him ridiculous, but she was also touched. “Why don’t I be the host? But not at a restaurant. Why don’t you come over to my place for a simple dinner? Anyway, you decide.”

The next evening Old Colour arrived nice and early for dinner at Wang Qiyao’s apartment. He sat on the sofa and watched Wang Qiyao as she trimmed the bad ends off the bean sprouts. Wang Qiyao had also invited Zhang Yonghong and her new boyfriend, whom everyone called Long Legs; they arrived just before dinner was supposed to start. By then the dishes were already on the table and Old Colour was putting out the plates and chopsticks as if he was one of the hosts. Because Wang Qiyao was a whole generation older than her guests, she felt no need to stand on ceremony and put out all of the cold and hot dishes together, leaving only a pot of soup simmering on the gas stove. Zhang Yonghong and her boyfriend had seen Old Colour around, but didn’t really know him well enough to connect a name with his face. They couldn’t help feeling a little awkward, and the conversation didn’t get off the ground until Wang Qiyao smoothed things over. Since they were eating, the subject at hand naturally turned to food. Wang Qiyao mentioned a few dishes that they had never heard of, such as Indonesian coconut milk chicken. Since they were no longer able to buy coconut milk, she said, she couldn’t make that dish. Another one was Cantonese-style barbecued pork, which she couldn’t make because some of the ingredients were also unavailable. Then there were French goose liver pate and Vietnamese fish sauce. . the list went on.

“That’s what dinners were like forty years ago,” Wang Qiyao explained, “a veritable United Nations conference. You could get food from any country! Shanghai back then was a little universe of its own. It was a window onto the rest of the world. But what could be seen outside the window was not half as important as what happened inside. What you saw outside was mere scenery; what happened inside was the foundation of everyday life. Forty years ago nobody ever flaunted this foundation, no posters or advertisements were needed. Every grain of rice and every piece of vegetable was accounted for. Today people carelessly grab things by the handful, and everything tastes like cafeteria food cooked in vats. Did you know that, forty years ago, when you ordered noodles, they would make them one bowl at a time?”

Old Colour could tell that Wang Qiyao’s words were meant for him. She wanted to show him what life was really like forty years ago — to remind him how little he really knew. He knew that he was being mocked, but he didn’t feel insulted; he actually welcomed that type of criticism, because it gave him entrée into real knowledge. He also got a taste of how astute she was. That was a quality from four decades ago: it was about silently putting up with wrongs rather than fighting for a better position, because in her world there was no place for displays of strength or cries of emotion. There was more consideration for others and less calculation for oneself. It was about understanding, something that was missing from the prevailing astuteness that has taken root forty years later.

After that night Old Colour started to come by quite often. On one occasion, when Zhang Yonghong was asking Wang Qiyao’s advice about making a coat, he sat beside them, listening. Although he understood little about dressmaking, what she said seemed to contain some more abstract truths that could be applied to all kinds of things. He realized that he had been completely ignorant before; those old jazz records he listened to were intended as an accompaniment or background music; the real melody and action lay elsewhere. The saxophone might snatch at your attention with its dazzling displays of virtuosity, but the real star of the show always maintained its composure. Simple and unadorned — it was the common heart with which one lives the everyday. He gazed out the window at the neighbor’s closed window across the way and wondered what lay concealed. Perhaps romantic stories were being played out. He walked slowly around the room; with each step he heard the sound of floorboards creaking and knew that here too were stories. There was so much indeed that he neither knew nor understood. In fact, the romance of forty years ago had lain right under his eyes, scattered in every corner.

Old Colour was an extremely quick-witted young man, and it took only a little effort for him to comprehend what the world had been like back then. Nothing authentic could slip past his eye, and nothing fake could fool him. He could almost smell the air from back then, carrying the scents of Rêve de Paris perfume and gardenias. The former belonged to the elite while the latter captured the banal tastes of the commoner, but even those gardenias had been romantic in their own way, each one carefully planted and cared for. And while that French perfume strove to rise above the rest, it still had its feet firmly planted on the ground. They represented the romance of the everyday world, which was quite enduring; even after its shell was cracked, the kernel remained.