Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Wang Qiyao went on waiting for Director Li. She dared not go out again after having missed him that day. Ever since she started noticing her neighbors’ empty windows, she also could not bring herself to open her own windows. The curtains were tightly drawn so that she could avoid noticing the moving lights on the wall. In her apartment the lamps burned brightly both day and night. The clocks were not wound, so there was no sense of time. The only sounds emitted from the gramophone — the voice of Mei Lanfang going, Yi yi eh eh , round and round, over and over.

Wang Qiyao wore a floor-length dressing gown all day long, with a belt loosely tied around her waist, looking somewhat like Mei Lanfang on stage playing the female role in Farewell, My Concubine. This thing called time — if you ignore it, it will go away, she thought to herself. She grew calmer, and found that she had begun to understand Mei Lanfang. She grasped just what it was that Director Li heard in his voice. It was the gentle but tenacious striving of women. The striving was like a needle hidden in cotton. It was directed toward men, and toward the world. While men understood this, women themselves were not conscious of it. This was what constituted that little bit of true understanding between men and women.

Mei Lanfang’s singing voice served as a foil to the silence of Alice Apartments. This silence was a feature of Shanghai in 1948. Silence filled many anthill-like concrete buildings, and may even be said to have held some of them up. It was the other, complementary, side of the city’s energy, like shadows cast by light. Wang Qiyao had shut off the world outside. She had stopped reading the newspapers or listening to the radio. The news was confusing and unremitting: a crucial battle between the Nationalists and the Communists was being fought in Huaihai; the price of gold was soaring; the stock market collapsed; Wang Xiaohe was shot by the government; the Jiangya steamship running between Shanghai and Ningbo exploded and 1,685 people sank to the bottom of the sea; a plane flying from Shanghai to Peking crashed, and among the dead was an adult male under the pseudonym of Zhang Bingliang, known to us as Director Li.

WU BRIDGE IS the kind of place that exists specifically to be a haven for those trying to escape from the chaos of the world. In June when the jasmine blooms, its fragrance permeates the whole town. The canals divide themselves into endless configurations as they flow beneath the eaves of the houses on the water. The black-tiled eaves are neatly aligned, as if delicately drawn with a fine paintbrush. Stretching over the canal, one after another, are arched bridges, also delicately drawn. There are many such towns in the Jiangnan region, and they always evoke feelings of nostalgia. But once the turmoil of the day is over, people are always eager to return to the cities and start the race all over again. The scenery in small towns like this comes straight out of an old-style landscape painting; the austere concept of emptiness is incorporated therein. White is the shade of colorlessness, black is the mother of all hues — together, they conceal all things, embrace all things, and bring all things to an end. But the painstakingly applied brushstrokes also suggest a Western-style picture, because in it are people buying and selling, cooking and dressing, going about their daily lives, and enjoying moments of leisure in the middle of their labor. So, beneath the void is solidity, and a multiplicity of actions lie behind the ascetic exterior. These qualities combined are what makes these towns especially suitable for wounded refugees from the cities.

An uncanny wisdom seems to pervade these places — a chaotic kind of understanding, intelligence born of ignorance. The people are all monkish, neither joyful nor sad, not passive, not aggressive; devoid of rancor, their behavior changes with the seasons. Their wordless philosophy is open to interpretation. In the morning, sunlight comes in like a rainstorm, striking Wu Bridge from all directions; smoke rises from kitchens, mist from the trees. The light, smoke, and mist of Wu Bridge blend into a soundless melody.

Bridges are the principal feature of this place, its very soul. To outsiders, they suggest the Buddhist idea of being ferried to the other shore. Wu Bridge is a place of compassion. Beneath its bridges the water swiftly flows, carrying all refuse away. Overhead the clouds glide by, preparing rain for the earth. The bridges let boats pass underneath, and people walk over them to the other side of the canal, where the long eaves stretch out from the houses to shield them from the sun and the rain.

Every grain of rice eaten at Wu Bridge has been winnowed, hulled, polished, washed, and strained in baskets. Every piece of firewood used in cooking the rice has been split into small pieces and placed under the sun to dry. If the firewood, used one piece at a time, is not completely burned, it is set aside as charcoal for the brazier to give warmth in the winter. The stone slab roads of Wu Bridge are covered with the imprints of naked soles; the sides of the canals are crowded with women beating laundry. People live their lives in measured drops at Wu Bridge, neither frittering away their time nor wasting anything. Nor are they greedy. They spend what they earn carefully and make sure there is something left for their heirs. Everything at Wu Bridge — the roads, the bridges, the houses, the pickled vegetables in the pantries, the jars of wine buried in the ground — has been accumulated day by day, generation by generation. You can see this in any early morning scene. Along with the cooking smoke are the enticing smells of sun-dried vegetables and boiling rice, as well as the aroma of rice wine. In this place one reaps what one sows — what can be more satisfying than a beautiful place where the virtuous get their just deserts?

As dawn breaks over Wu Bridge, a rooster opens the chorus of morning cries. Another day has begun, a day of spring flowers and autumn harvests, all clear signs that nothing here ever changes. Never mind the unruly changes going on in the world outside, Wu Bridge remains true to itself. It understands that the multipatterned kaleidoscope of the outside world is only an extension of good, simple living. When the great and the overweening plummet from their heights, Wu Bridge is there to accommodate them. When everything else turns dismal, it remains unchanged. It is the base and the core. It is time itself. Like an hourglass, it renders the flow of time visible. The other shore and the passage there are all contained within.

Water is the reason places like Wu Bridge can exist. The waterways of Jiangnan are like branches on a tree, extending out one from the other, multiplying a hundred times over. Wu Bridge is surrounded by waterways, but it is not isolated, like an island in the sea; it is rather a quiet enclave in a noisy world. The sea is cold, vast, and boundless, whereas these canals and waterways wind through people’s lives. The sea is a place without hope: what happens there is dictated by fate. But canals open up a way out of those places that are without hope; setting up a visible truth to stand against fate, they are easygoing and come-at-able. Compared to islands, places like Wu Bridge are more knowing, more prosaic, more willing to compromise. We can believe in them without sacrificing our earthly happiness, a crude happiness far removed from any splendor. This is a happiness that does not require the accompaniment of elegant music, but grows out of the pleasures of everyday living. Wu Bridge hovers, marvelously poised, between the philistine world and the realm of enlightenment. It is hard to tell to which side the balance is tilted. Places like these are here to put a crimp in society’s vanity, but also to alleviate its sense of hopelessness, maintaining a delicate equilibrium. Once or twice in our lives, we arrive by some miracle at a place like Wu Bridge, where we can recompose ourselves.