Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

The fumes from the brazier, the smoke from the cigarette, the tune of the singing boatman merge into a lullaby. Grandma broods over the paths open to Wang Qiyao. The thing to do is send her to a nunnery, where her heart would be forcibly held down and she will at least be able to live out her days in peace. Yet this option was as unsatisfactory to Grandma as it would have been to Wang Qiyao. Grandma actually appreciated worldly happiness even more than Wang Qiyao. The only kind of happiness Wang Qiyao has known is in large part hollow, made up of finery and fancy food; Grandma has known happiness to its fullest. Grandma loves feminine beauty, which no flower can rival. Often, looking at herself in the mirror, she cannot not help but be thankful that she was born a woman. She prefers the quiet world of women to that of the man, where one has to remain on battle alert at all times, struggling to the death. A man’s shoulders are weighed down by the burdens of family as well as business, and he walks a tight wire where the slightest misstep can plunge him into ruin; whereas a woman simply shares the fruits of his labor and if necessary suffers along with him. The agony of childbirth is fleeting. The flesh and blood breaking off from a woman’s body remain linked to her forever. This is something that men will never understand. Looking again at Wang Qiyao, Grandma pities her for not having yet enjoyed the benefits of womanhood. These benefits are ordinary yet genuine — solid through and through, from the beginning to the end, in name and in fact. They are the happiness that is enjoyed with an ordinary heart. Unfortunately, the poor child’s heart has lost its ordinariness. It has been twisted, and henceforth she will only appreciate warped happiness.

Waterfowl swim in the wake of the boat. Gu gu , they cry, before taking flight.

“Are you cold?” Grandma asked.

Wang Qiyao shook her head.

“Hungry?”

Seeing Wang Qiyao shake her head again, Grandma realized that she was scarcely more alive than a marionette. Her spirit had wandered off and Grandma feared that when it finally returned, the child would be a changed person. How will she be able to settle down again after everything that has happened? At this point, the boat came to a small town and Grandma asked the boatman to fetch some rice wine. She heated the wine over the brazier and offered some to Wang Qiyao, to warm her hands even if she didn’t care for any. From vendors hawking their wares on the dock, Grandma bought some tea-flavored hard-boiled eggs and pickled bean curd to go with the wine.

She gestured toward the people and houses onshore. “Wu Bridge is just like this town, only bigger,” she told her granddaughter.

Wang Qiyao’s eyes were fixed on the lichen-dappled stone wall where the boat was tied, against which the water was lapping.

Raising her eyes to look at Grandma, she felt no connection to the shriveled and odd-looking woman before her. How horrible it is to get old! Yet she knew this was a fate from which no one can escape. All along the winding waterways, she could think about nothing but getting old — the idea tore at her. This whole place with its endless waterways is ancient, including the sky, the water, the lichen on the stone. The Kunshan boatman couldn’t be that old, yet he looked like a fossil. She felt as if she had fallen into the bottomless abyss of time: there was nothing to hold on to. Grandma’s brazier was antique, the embroidered pattern on her shoes timeless, the wine she drank of indeterminate vintage, even the bean curd she was eating had been pickled in age-old broth. The boats and carts along the interminable waterways crawl on for all eternity. Time is a wall forged of metal that no one will ever break through. No one can withstand time. The earth endures season after season of planting and harvesting. Waterfowl sing the same tune for hundreds of years. And in a scale of time where the units are counted in centuries, people are as ephemeral as fireflies. Succeeding generations appear and disappear like the teeming eggs that fish spawn. One is no more than a passing traveler, among innumerable others. How old is this boat that ferries people from one shore to another? How old is Wu Bridge, a place that existed even before Grandma was born?

One by one, the bridges overhead receded into the background; Wang Qiyao felt they must have passed through countless gates to arrive in an ancient world that had been closed to her. She could have cried, had she not been so numb. Her sadness was mixed with a strange sensation that touched her deeply. That day, the scenery was colored in all different shades of grey. The leaves had fallen from the trees, exposing the delicate branches; the surface of the water was wrinkled by tiny waves; the lichen was made up of an infinite number of dainty dots; scratches on the sides of houses, built up line by line, accumulated into a tangled mass. Chimney smoke and the sound of laundry being beaten on fulling blocks are so primordial that one hardly notices them. The only bright spots in the landscape are the fish and the lotus blossoms printed on the aprons and headscarves of the women doing their wash on shore. Although these hand-printed patterns are also archaic, they always appear new. It is as if every era needs them and they become true living fossils. They never age, and even through the passage of time they always appear eternally contemporary. Floating down the river of time, they bob unsteadily on the surface, like water sprites, while all else sinks down to the bottom. They are like a Daoist elixir of immortality: their presence allows the world to endure even longer.

There seemed to be no end to the bridge arches they passed through in order to get into the heart of this ancient world. The chimney smoke grew denser, and the chorus of laundry blocks came at them at shorter and shorter intervals. A new spark lit up Grandma’s eyes. She snuffed out her cigarette and began to point things out to Wang Qiyao, who remained absorbed in her own thoughts. The insides of her heart were scattered, its remnants strewn everywhere. Even if she were one day to try to mend it, the scattered pieces could never be completely recovered. The boatman suddenly stopped singing and asked Grandma for directions. He swung the boat around as if heading for home. Not long after that, Grandma announced that they had arrived. The anchor was dropped and the boat drifted toward the shore. Led by Grandma, Wang Qiyao emerged from the canopy to discover that the sun had come out. Its glare made her squint. Disembarking on the arm of the boatman, Grandma paused, brazier in hand, to describe the exciting scene on her wedding day to Wang Qiyao. All the homes alongside the canal had their windows open and people were craning their necks to watch her dowry chests and decorated sedan chair being lifted onto the boat. The blossoming white gardenias set off her red wedding gown. Among the green buds on the trees, the blue water, the black roof tiles and bridge piers, she alone was a splash of red. This red, ephemeral but recurring, is part of a cycle that has been renewing itself since time immemorial.

At Wu Bridge, Wang Qiyao stayed at the house of her Grandma’s brother, who ran a pickled foods shop famous for its pickled bean curd. Every day a fresh delivery of firm bean curd arrived from their supplier. The supplier had two sons. The elder was married with children; the younger, known to every one as “Deuce,” attended school in Kunshan and had been planning to enroll at a normal college in Shanghai or Nanjing that fall, only the unsettled political situation had prevented him from taking the entrance examinations. Deuce sported a look that is best described as “old-fashioned modern”: he had glasses, wore a camel-colored scarf around the collar of his school uniform, and parted his hair down the middle. He viewed the women of Wu Bridge with disdain, wouldn’t dream of mixing with the men, and spent most of his time reading in his bedroom instead. On moonlit nights, his silhouette made one of the local scenes — the Wu Bridge recluse. Without exaggeration, every part of Wu Bridge had its own recluse, and it was Deuce’s turn to take the stage. Recluses were bubbles on the river of Wu Bridge — the river kept on flowing, but each day its bubbles were different.