Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Thunderous applause broke out. The house lights came on, illuminating even the audience. The queen had been announced, with a radiant crown of gold placed on her head. Her beauty was overpowering; in a hairnet woven with shimmering beads, she looked truly regal, unquestionably one of a kind. The gold crown could only be worn by her, for it belonged to no other. Even her flower basket seemed to be larger than the rest, as if it had anticipated extra votes — indeed, in the end it was so crammed with carnations that they hung over the sides. The first runner-up had an irrepressibly coquettish air; the silver crown suited her perfectly. There were more white carnations than red in her basket, as if she had been destined to win the silver crown. She bred desire as she shot forth flirtatious glances, this sensual woman who concentrated in her person the passion of the ages — a rare beauty indeed.

The applause thundered on as the lights turned even brighter, illuminating even the furthest corners of the theater. The show was at an end, and people were about to leave. Wang Qiyao sensed that tonight belonged to other people and that tomorrow morning also belonged to them. It was at that moment that she felt a hand leading her to the center of the stage, and a flower crown was placed upon her head. Her ears buzzed with the sound of applause, and she couldn’t even hear the announcement. The gold crown and the silver crown dazzled her eyes and she couldn’t see a thing. Stupefied, she was led over to the side of the queen. She composed herself enough to look at her basket and saw it almost overflowing with an equal number of red and white carnations. There, before her eyes, lay the fruit of her efforts.

Wang Qiyao was second runner-up in the beauty pageant; “Miss Third Place,” they called her. The title seemed to be custom-made for her. Her beauty and seductiveness, too understated, were not enough to make her the queen, but perfect for Miss Third Place. It was necessary to have a Miss Third Place. She was especially cut out to meet this intrinsic need, to play the supporting role: she symbolized the solid core underneath the resplendent surface, in no way inferior to the others and in fact truly representative of the quiet majority. In this city of romance, girls like her are the most elementary ingredient. The streets of Shanghai are crawling with girls who could have been Miss Third Place. Girls who come in first and second are always busy going to fancy parties and taking care of their various “foreign affairs.” We never see them — except when they are trotted out on important occasions. They are a regular part of every grand affair. Girls like Miss Third Place, however, are a part of everyday scenes. They are familiar to our eyes, and their cheongsams never fail to warm our hearts. Miss Third Place therefore best expresses the will of the people. The beauty queen and the first runner-up are both idols, representing our ideals and beliefs. But Miss Third Place is connected to our everyday lives: she is a figure that reminds us of concepts like marriage, life, and family.

MR. CHENG HAD STUDIED railway engineering, but his true love was photography. During the day he was on the staff of a Western firm, while at night he took photos and developed them at his home studio. His favorite subject was women — in his eyes the female form was the most elegant composition in the world. He had studied women and believed that a woman’s best years were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, when delicacy and maturity were equally alluring. He spent his entire salary on his hobby; it was a good thing that he did not have any other hobbies, or a girlfriend. He had never been in love. His love lay under the lens beneath the mercury-vapor lights, always upside down. His love was in the darkroom being developed, bathed in crimson light, floating to the top of the water like a lotus made of paper. Perhaps after gazing at so many women through the lens of his beloved camera, he could not help but assign them a secondary status. Mr. Cheng gave little thought to things like marriage. His parents in Hangzhou would sometimes bring the issue up in their letters, but he paid them no heed. All his energy and emotions were devoted to photography. Merely to touch the equipment brought him happiness. He felt as if each item in his studio could speak to him and understand his joy and pain.

In the 1940s photography was still a modern hobby, which naturally made Mr. Cheng a modern youth. At twenty-six, however, he was already an old youth. When he was a bit younger he had indeed been fascinated by all the modern playthings. Whatever was fashionable in Shanghai, he was sure to give it a whirl. He had been enraptured in turn by the gramophone, tennis, and Hollywood movies, and just like all modern youths, he was fickle in his interests, always tiring of the old and moving on to the new. But once he fell in love with photography, he pledged his steadfast devotion, to the abandonment of everything else. He had first been attracted to photography because of its modern appeal, but once he was hooked, he no longer pursued what was in fashion. Photography enraptured him the same way some people fall head-over-heels in love. Suddenly he realized that his entire past had been squandered in aimless desires and pointless distractions. Yet, though much precious time and money had been wasted, Mr. Cheng congratulated himself for having discovered all this in good time.

Since his discovery of photography, he no longer qualified as a young man in pursuit of the modern; gradually he had gotten too old for that. Surface novelties could not move him any more. What he needed now was true love. No longer did his heart wander as it had in his youth. He felt a hollowness that needed to be filled with something, and that something was true love. From the outside, Mr. Cheng still looked very modern, with his slick hair parted down the middle, gold-rimmed glasses, three-piece suit, shining leather shoes, fluent English, and knowledge of all the Hollywood stars, but his heart was no longer modern. This was something that those modern girls who pursued him did not know — and this was also the reason they always went away empty-handed.

Mr. Cheng certainly had his share of admirers. He was at the suitable age for marriage and the object of attention for numerous romantic young ladies and their parents. He had a proper job and earned a respectable salary, not to mention a very interesting hobby. Poor girls! Little did they know, as they sat before the camera casting suggestive glances, that they were directing these at a cold, unfeeling machine. It was not that Mr. Cheng didn’t pick up on all this; he was simply not interested. In his eyes, the girls who visited his photo studio were not real. Their every pout and smile was for the camera; none of it had anything to do with him. It was not that he did not admire their beauty; it simply did not affect him.

At twenty-six there were already some things to which he was impervious; he was quite different from the reckless seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boys who chase after their desires without the slightest regret or worry about what might happen tomorrow. A twenty-six-year-old heart has already begun to grow a shell; the shell may have some cracks and fissures, but by the age of thirty-six any remaining fissures would have been sealed. Who could still squeeze her way into a crack in Mr. Cheng’s heart? Finally, a candidate appeared, and her name was Wang Qiyao. On that Sunday morning when Wang Qiyao first walked into his studio, she didn’t immediately grab his attention — the lighting had filled the room with a soft darkness. Perhaps it was just this lack of any immediately striking quality that led Mr. Cheng to let his guard down. It was as if she had quietly stolen in on him.