Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

He didn’t go back to visit Wang Qiyao for several days after this. When Madame Yan telephoned, he claimed he was tied up with business at home and couldn’t make it. He agonized over what he should say to Wang Qiyao but eventually decided to say nothing and behave as if nothing had happened. When Wang Qiyao asked why he had not joined them, he said he had been busy. When she wondered aloud whether he had found some more interesting places to go, he simply smiled and placed the package he had brought — a box of fancy cakes from Big Chang’s Bakery — on the table. Wang Qiyao hurried out to get plates for the cake. She had just given an injection to a patient and still had the scent of alcohol on her hands. Wearing a cardigan over a cotton cheongsam , with a pair of old-fashioned cotton shoes with straps, she busied herself getting the tea ready.

Suddenly Kang Mingxun recalled a hotpot dinner at his cousin’s townhouse, back around the time they first met, when he had tried telling everyone’s fortune based on random words that came to their minds. Wang Qiyao had picked the character for “earth,” whereupon he pointed to the right half and said it could be construed as “he.”

Impulsively, she pointed to the left half, made up of the “dirt” radical, exclaiming, “This shows that ‘he’ is buried, doesn’t it?” and her face was immediately stricken with grief.

Now he understood the cause of her sorrow.

Pity welled up in him, also a sense of loss, for Wang Qiyao as well as for himself. Feeling depressed, he spoke very little and remained aloof and listless the remainder of the afternoon. His gaze, turned outside the window, happened on the cracks and water stains on the neighbor’s balcony. The whole world looked damaged — nothing was perfect any longer. In contrast to the waxing and waning of the moon, this disintegration was unrelenting; the chipped only gets more chipped, the broken more broken, until one day nothing would be left but squalid ruins. Perhaps one day, when everything has completely disintegrated, the cycle will start over again. But life is short, and if it is someone’s misfortune to be born in a period of disintegration, he may have no hope of ever seeing perfection.

Kang Mingxun was the son of a concubine but the only male progeny in his family. As a child, he learned that he had to please his father’s proper wife, whom he was taught to address as “Mother,” as well as his birth mother. His father might take his second wife, “Second Mother,” to intimate social gatherings, but on formal occasions the family was represented by Father, Mother, and Kang Mingxun. Mother was by nature a manipulative person. Tradition and common practice already made her position one hundred percent unassailable, but she also had grievance on her side. She therefore claimed one hundred and thirty percent of privilege. The thirty percent extra that was her due naturally got deducted from Second Mother.

Father was conservative, so, as much as he adored Second Mother, hierarchy always came first. Everyone in the household had their proper place according to rank and age. As the male progeny, Kang Mingxun spent more time with Mother than with his own birth mother and thus became much closer to his half-sisters than he ever was to his own sisters. He felt the need to ingratiate himself, as if he would be rejected otherwise. He was vaguely aware that Mother’s love had to be won, whereas Second Mother would always be there for him whether he desired her love or not. Consequently, he was consequently much more solicitous of Mother and inclined to neglect Second Mother, to the extent that he would deliberately distance himself from her so as to please Mother. Even as a young boy he had always shown this unseemly tendency to align himself with the strong to exploit the weak — thanks to a healthy instinct for survival.

Once, while playing hide and seek with two of his sisters, he climbed the stairs to the third floor and pushed open the door of Second Mother’s bedroom; the bed skirt was moving, so he knew that someone must be hiding under the bed. But, on sneaking in, he saw Second Mother, sitting at the edge of the bed with her back toward him, head slumped over and shoulders shuddering. He stood stock still as his younger sister rushed out from underneath the bed and, jubilant and shrieking, ran past him. But instead of chasing her, he just stood there, transfixed.

It was a cloudy day. The teak furniture was gleaming, as was the waxed floor. Second Mother sat facing the window, her figure delineated against the dim light, her hair messy like a bird’s nest, her narrow shoulders pathetically small. Sensing someone behind her, she looked around through her tears, but before she had seen him, he had already run out of the room. His heart was beating wildly, and he was overcome by a mixture of pity, revulsion, and deep sadness. To camouflage his emotion, he emitted a gleeful shriek so loud that Mother came out to scold him. At this moment, Second Mother’s tousled head appeared at the top of the stairs, and his heart filled with hatred for her. This hatred grew in direct proportion to his pain. As he slowly matured and became adept at navigating this complicated environment, the pain and the hatred diminished until they were no more than hazy impressions, lighter than dust motes. Yet it was precisely these hazy impressions from his past that would sway the decisions he made during the crucial moments of his life.

Kang Mingxun understood that no matter how lovely Wang Qiyao was, or how much she appealed to him, or how marvelous she had been in bringing back his heart, she would remain a shadowy illusion. However much her beauty might intoxicate him, on this one point he always remained clear. Some things simply could not be done: no two ways about it. Yet he was unwilling to give up. He wanted to proceed, to take matters as far as they would go, and only afterward worry about picking up the pieces. The difficulty was how to proceed. How to stake out new territories? How to make his next move? What could he do? Wang Qiyao was infinitely cleverer than Second Mother, and a hundred times more tenacious. He was confronted with nothing but obstacles. However, his feelings for her only intensified when he realized that all her cleverness and tenacity stemmed from being isolated and vulnerable. These were survival mechanisms, but as such only showed up the hopelessness of her situation all the more. Kang Mingxun would never admit it, but he had a special empathy for the weak, otherwise he would not have been so quick to recognize their pathetic readiness to compromise and their convoluted tactics. Like Wang Qiyao, he lived on the margin, on other people’s sufferance, with precious little room for maneuver. They should have joined forces, but, sadly, their interests were in conflict, so neither was in a position to help the other. In the innermost recesses of Kang Mingxun’s heart there lived a compassion whose seed had been planted that cloudy afternoon in his childhood, and this compassion exerted a strong pull. He saw the specter of pain hovering ahead, but for the moment a happiness, still unexpired, beckoned. As discerning as he was, Kang Mingxun lived in the present — a present in which hope and happiness were scarce commodities. His eyes were forced by despair to turn away from the future and the shadow of pain, allowing him only to focus on the happiness that lay just within his reach.

Kang Mingxun began to call on Wang Qiyao more frequently, at times unannounced. He claimed to be passing by, thereby catching her unaware; her hair was often tied up casually with a handkerchief, and the place somewhat untidy. She would get embarrassed and, all in a dither, pick up various odds and ends, a detail that he always found touching. And so he kept making these surprise visits in the hope that they would lead to something unanticipated. . something miraculous. Once he came right at lunchtime, when she was eating leftover rice with a plate of tiny little clams the size and shape of watermelon seeds. The shells were piled high next to the plate. Seeing the frugal way she was able to make use of leftovers moved him deeply. On another occasion he arrived just as she was washing her hair, her collar turned down, head upside down in the wash basin, her hair full of bubbles. Under his gaze, her ears and the nape of her neck turned scarlet, like those of a naïve little girl. From the depths of the wash basin emanated what sounded suspiciously like sobs. When she was finished, she dried her hair hastily, with the water dripping down her back, wetting her clothes — this made her look even more pathetic.