Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Neither of them paid attention during their classes that afternoon. When school finally let out the two rushed out of the gate and hopped onto the trolley car. Most of the passengers at that time of the day were housewives with cloth bags in hand, wearing wrinkled cheongsams , the seams of their stockings running crookedly up the back of their legs. They either had messy, disheveled hair or, if they had just walked out of the beauty salon, hair that look like a helmet. Their faces were rigid, as if nothing in the world concerned them. Even the trolley seemed to be afflicted with an air of apathy as it rattled along the tracks. Amid this sea of indifference, Wang Qiyao and Wu Peizhen were animated and alive. Though neither said a word, centuries of anticipation and excitement were brewing inside them. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the Shanghai boulevards were suffused with weariness, preparing to sign out and change shifts. The sun hung in the western sky above the apartment buildings, glowing ripe and golden. Their hearts were filled with anticipation as if they were about to begin a brand-new day.

The director led them into the dressing room and had a makeup artist work on Wang Qiyao. Seeing herself reflected in the mirror, Wang Qiyao could not help feeling that her face was small and her features plain — she realized that a miracle would not occur — and this depressed her. She became completely resigned as the makeup man worked on her. She even closed her eyes for a while to avoid looking in the mirror, uncomfortable and anxious only to get everything over and done with. She even got neurotic and thought that the makeup man, impatient to get finished with her, was applying the makeup hurriedly and crudely. When she opened her eyes once again and looked, she saw the awkward expression of someone who had no desire to be there. The harsh, unmodulated light of the dressing room made everything appear commonplace. Losing all confidence in herself, Wang Qiyao decided to simply let everything ride; she focused on watching the makeup man gradually transform her into someone else — a stranger she did not recognize. It was then that she began to calm down and her tensions eased. By the time the makeup man finished his job, she had even started to regain her sense of humor and joked around a bit with Wu Peizhen, who remarked that Wang Qiyao looked like the Lady in the Moon descending into the secular world, whereupon Wang Qiyao quipped that if she were a Lady in the Moon, she was the kind whose image was found on boxes of mooncakes. The two of them had a good laugh. Once this happened, Wang Qiyao’s expression relaxed, her powdered face lit up, and she came to life. As she returned the gaze of the beauty in the mirror, the image she saw no longer seemed quite as distant and unrecognizable.

Before long the director sent someone over to escort Wang Qiyao to the set, Wu Peizhen naturally following close behind. The lights were already set up and Wu Peizhen’s cousin was up on the scaffolding, smiling down at them. The director, on the other hand, became serious and cold, as if he did not even know them. He had Wang Qiyao sit on a bed. It was a Nanjing-style bed with ornate flower patterns carved into the woodwork, a mirror set into the headboard, and high bed curtains all around — all the signs of rustic elegance. Wang Qiyao was to play a bride in a traditional wedding ceremony. She would be wearing a crimson bridal veil over her head when the groom entered and he would pull it away, slowly revealing her face. The director explained that her character had to be bashful and charming, filled with longing and uncertainty; he unloaded these adjectives on her all at once, expecting her to capture them all with a single expression. Wang Qiyao nodded, but deep down she was completely lost and had no idea where to begin. But having decided to let everything ride, she was actually quite calm and composed. She was aware of everything going on around her, down to the shouts of “Camera” coming from the adjacent set.

The next thing she knew, a crimson bridal veil came down over her head. Suddenly everything was swathed in darkness. In that instant her heart began pounding like a drum. She understood that her moment had come and fear welled up inside her as her knees began to tremble faintly. The set lights came on, transforming the darkness into a thick crimson hue. Suddenly she felt feverish, and the tremors worked their way from her knees up through her body. Even her teeth began to chatter. All the mystery and grandeur of the film studio hung suspended in the light shimmering outside her veil. Someone came and straightened out her clothing and then quickly walked off set. The air whisked against her as he passed by. The crimson veil fluttered a bit, for a moment softening the anxieties of that afternoon. She heard a series of “okay”s repeating in rhythmic succession around her, as if converging upon a common target. Finally came the word, “Camera.” Wang Qiyao’s breathing stopped. She could not catch her breath. She could hear the film running through the camera, a mechanical sound that seemed to override everything. Her mind just went blank. When a hand pulled away her wedding veil, she was so startled that she shrank back with fright. “Cut,” the director yelled. The set lights went dim, the crimson veil went back over her head, and they took it once more from the top.

As they redid the scene, everything grew fuzzy. Things faded off into the distance, never to reappear, as if they had been an illusion. Then Wang Qiyao snapped out of her daze, her shivering ceased, and her heart rate returned to normal. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness once more and through the wedding veil she could make out silhouettes of people moving around. The set lights came up and this time the shouts of “OK” sounded perfunctory. When the word “Camera” was called out, it too seemed little more than a formality — but this formality still carried with it an air of authority, of unwavering power. She began to prepare the emotions the director wanted to see on her face; the only problem was that she had no inkling of how to act bashful or charming, or what it meant to be filled with longing and uncertainty. Human emotions are not simple symbols that can be called up at will. The crimson wedding veil was lifted to reveal a rigid expression; even the bit of natural charm that she normally had about her was frozen.

As soon as he saw her through the eye of the camera, the director sensed that he had made a mistake; Wang Qiyao’s was not an artistic beauty, but quite ordinary. It was the kind of beauty to be admired in by close friends and relatives in her own living room, like the shifting moods of everyday life; a retrained beauty, it was not the kind that made waves. It was real, not dramatic — the kind of beauty that people noticed on the street and photo studios displayed in their front windows. Through the camera’s lens, it was simply too bland. The director was disappointed, but his disappointment was partly for Wang Qiyao’s sake. Her beauty will be buried and lost to the world, he said to himself. Later, in order to make things up to her, he had a photographer friend of his do a photo shoot for her — but this photo shoot turned into something quite extraordinary. One of the photos even made it into the inside front cover of Shanghai Life with the caption, “A Proper Young Lady of Shanghai.”

And so that is how the screen test ended, just another trifling incident in the life of the film studio. After that, Wang Qiyao stopped going. She wanted to forget the whole affair — that it had ever happened. But the image of that crimson wedding veil and the dazzling studio lights were already imprinted in her mind and reappeared whenever she closed her eyes. There was a strange frisson attached to that scene; it was the most dramatic moment in Wang Qiyao’s quiet life. The moment had come and gone in an instant, but it added a dab of melancholic color to her heart.