Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

The day that Uncle Maomao dropped by, the boy was feverish and a doctor had to be called in to give him medicine and shots. The two ladies were so busy that they did not have time to take their lunch until well past one o’clock in the afternoon. When Mama Zhang announced Uncle Maomao’s arrival, they asked him to join them upstairs. After all, he was family, and Madame Yan had known him since childhood. He sat on one side while they ate. It was a gloomy day, but the alcohol burner was still on and there was a warm feeling in the room. As soon as Mama Zhang put the dishes away, Uncle Maomao joined them at the table, and the three chatted without ceremony.

With Madame Yan guiding the conversation, both he and Wang Qiyao felt quite relaxed even though they were meeting for the first time. The bedroom setting created an atmosphere of easy familiarity, and they talked and laughed with little inhibition. When Uncle Maomao asked if they had a set of playing cards on hand and Madame Yan responded, “You have no adversary worthy of you here today,” he whispered to Wang Qiyao in an aside that he was an expert at bridge, playing every Sunday at the International Club. Wang Qiyao hastened to wave her hand, indicating that she was no bridge player.

Uncle Maomao laughed. “Who said anything about bridge? After all, who ever heard of three people playing bridge?”

“Then what did you want a deck of cards for?” asked Madame Yan as she got up to look in the drawer.

“One can do lots of things with a deck of cards besides play bridge,” he explained as he began to shuffle the deck she handed him. “Actually, bridge isn’t at all difficult. It’s fun to learn.”

He cut the cards into stacks of four each and explained how bids are made and when one should put a card into play. Madame Yan accused him of seducing them into the game by degrees, but she soon got into the spirit. Wang Qiyao, on the other hand, tried to dismiss his efforts, laughing, “We’ll be exhausted before we even get the hang of it, leaving him to play all by himself.”

“Is bridge that scary?” asked Uncle Maomao. “It’s not a trap, you know.”

He gathered up the cards and dazzled Wang Qiyao by shuffling them into a fan, then into a standing bridge. “Perhaps you’ll make more money doing card tricks at Great World Amusement Center,” Madame Yan teased him.

“I don’t know how to do tricks,” he rejoined. “But I can read fortunes. Let me read yours. .”

“You don’t get any credit telling my fortune. You already know everything about me,” said Madame Yan tartly. “Perhaps you can prove your ability by telling us a thing or two about Wang Qiyao.”

Uncle Maomao demurred at this. “This being my first meeting with Wang Qiyao, I will not be so impertinent as to make guesses about her past or future.”

“There, you have already exposed yourself — the rest is all excuses!” Madame Yan snorted. “Real gold is not afraid of being melted in the fire. I don’t believe for a second that you can actually read fortunes.”

With his cousin egging him on, Uncle Maomao felt he really had to show his stuff. Wang Qiyao begged to be excused from the exercise, but Madame Yan goaded her. “Don’t you worry! Let him do it. I guarantee he won’t be able to figure out a single thing about you.”

Uncle Maomao shuffled the cards again and cut the deck several times, leaving only a few cards fanned out in a row. He asked Wang Qiyao to pick one out and turn it over. But as soon as she did, the patient upstairs rang the bell, and she hurried off. While she was gone, Uncle Maomao furtively asked, “Tell me, has she been married?”

“Ha! What did I say? You’re a fraud. You just won’t admit it!” Madame Yan chortled. “But to tell you the truth,” she continued in a whispered undertone, “Even I don’t know.”

Time flew by that afternoon, and before they knew it, it was dinnertime. They were having so much fun that, when the horn of Mr. Yan’s car sounded at the back door, they asked Uncle Maomao to come back the next day. Madame Yan promised she would send Mama Zhang to fetch some crab dumplings from Wang’s Family Dumpling House. The next day Uncle Maomao showed up as promised at about the same time, but this time the two women had finished lunch and were busying themselves picking the plumules from lotus seeds with large blanket needles. The alcohol burner was not on, and the air had a crisp feel. Try as they might, they just couldn’t recapture the conviviality of the previous afternoon. After the lotus seeds were done, there was nothing else to do and they all felt somewhat let down. Uncle Maomao’s suggestion that they play cards with the deck that had been left lying on the sofa went unopposed. He said he would teach them durak , a Russian card game, the simplest form of poker, and explained the rules as he shuffled the deck. When he discovered that the ladies did not even know how to arrange their cards, he helped them do that. Then he realized he had seen their hands and had to reshuffle the cards. Their spirits revived as they played.

Playing durak with the two ladies demanded only ten percent of Uncle Maomao’s attention. Madame Yan kept comparing cards to mahjong as she played, devoting only thirty percent of her mind to the game. Wang Qiyao alone was focused. She fixed her eyes on the cards, considering one card carefully before she set it down. Unfortunately, she kept winding up with the weakest hand and the other two kept winning.

Wang Qiyao finally let out a sigh. “It looks like winning and losing are predestined. One cannot force the hand of fate.”

“So, Miss Wang is a fatalist,” commented Uncle Maomao.

Wang Qiyao was about to respond when Madame Yan said, “I don’t know about being fatalistic, but I do believe things are predestined. Otherwise, so many events can’t be explained. There was a ferryman in my husband’s hometown. One night, after everyone had gone to bed, someone hollered to be taken across the river. He got out bed and ferried the passenger across. When they reached the other shore, the passenger placed something hard into his hand and left in a hurry. The ferryman discovered it was a gold bar. He used it to purchase grain and made a fortune when famine struck the following year. He then took his money to Shanghai and bought stock in a rubber company that was just going public. Little did he know that the rubber company would declare bankruptcy within three months, leaving his shares totally worthless. Later, he found out that the man he ferried across the river was a robber with a price on his head.”

Enraptured by her story, they forgot about their card game and had to start all over again.

Uncle Maomao said it was mere coincidence. Wang Qiyao disagreed: “I think things had to work out that way.”

“I don’t know about coincidence” Madame Yan interjected. “All I know is that everything happens for a reason, and those reasons are set and nonnegotiable.”

“If you are predestined to have only seventy-percent happiness, and you insist on a hundred percent, you will be in trouble,” said Wang Qiyao. “My grandma told me about a courtesan in Suzhou, only moderately pretty, who captivated the heart of a Yangzhou salt merchant as wealthy as a king. He paid a sum of money to redeem her from the brothel. Soon afterward his wife died of illness and he made the courtesan his proper wife, and they had a son the following year. This should all have ended happily, but unfortunately the child began to look strange by the third month, and turned out to be deaf and dumb. Three months later, the woman fell ill with a strange disease that prevented her from eating or drinking, and she eventually died. Everyone said that her life had been shortened by her good fortune. It was not her fate to enjoy so much happiness.”