Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

“He really feels badly,” explained Wang Qiyao.

Jiang Lili’s face tightened. She exclaimed indignantly, “What the hell do I care if he feels bad?”

Wang Qiyao did not dare to respond. It suddenly dawned on her that Jiang Lili’s rosy cheeks, which were by now bright red, were the sign of fever. She extended her hand to feel her friend’s forehand. Jiang Lili pushed it away violently, but from the touch of her hand Wang Qiyao knew that she was burning up. Sitting up in bed, Jiang Lili leaned over and pulled a loose-leaf binder from the drawer of the desk next to the bed and flung it at Wang Qiyao. Inside were lines of handwritten poetry. Wang Qiyao recognized the poems as Jiang Lili’s and was immediately taken back to their high school days. Those pages could have been burned to ash and she would have still recognized the flowery language — it had Jiang Lili’s name written all over it. But as maudlin as they were, the words still exuded a touching sincerity. There is something about great romantic poems that always awakens nausea in the reader — a combination of sincerity and exaggeration that leaves the reader at a loss as to whether he should laugh or cry. Wang Qiyao had never been able to stand this kind of poetry, and that was why she didn’t want to be close to Jiang Lili. However, staring at those poems that moment, she was overcome by tears. She realized that even if this had been a show, the way Jiang Lili had invested her entire life into it had made it all real. Behind every line of poetry, whether good or bad, she could see the shadow of Mr. Cheng. Jiang Lili snatched the folder from Wang Qiyao’s hands and, quickly flipping through the pages, read aloud the most absurd sections, often bursting into laughter before she could finish each line. Her mother-in-law peeked through the crack in the door to see what all the commotion was about. Jiang Lili laughed so hard that she could no longer sit straight and doubled over on the blankets.

“What do you make of this one?” Jiang Lili’s eyes glimmered with sharp brightness and her voice took on a shrill new tone. Wang Qiyao couldn’t help feeling apprehensive; she went to take the binder from Jiang Lili’s hands so that she wouldn’t be able to read any more. But Jiang Lili resisted, and in the course of their struggle she even scratched the back of Wang Qiyao’s hand, drawing blood. But even then neither would give up; Wang Qiyao insisted on taking the binder away from her and even pushed her back down on the bed. As she struggled, Jiang Lili’s laughter eventually dissolved into tears, which flowed copiously down her cheeks from behind her glasses.

“You’re just the same as him! You both want to hurt me! You both say you want to see how I’m doing, but all you do is provoke me!”

Stung by the injustice of her remarks, Wang Qiyao momentarily forgot that she was talking to a dying woman.

“Well, you can rest easy because I will never marry him!” Wang Qiyao shouted in agitation.

Jiang Lili too became agitated. “Go ahead and marry him. Why should I care? What sort of person do you take me for, anyway?”

“Jiang Lili. .” Wang Qiyao spoke through her tears. “It’s not worth it. Don’t throw your life away for a man. How could you be so foolish?”

Jiang Lili’s tears were coming down in a steady stream. “Well, let me tell you, Wang Qiyao. . It’s the two of you who have ruined my life, totally ruined it!”

Wang Qiyao couldn’t suppress the desire to console her; she reached out to hug her.

“Jiang Lili, do you think I don’t know? Do you think he doesn’t know?”

At first Jiang Lili tried to push her away, but Wang Qiyao pulled her back into her arms and held her tight. They embraced and both were crying so hard that they could barely breathe.

“Wang Qiyao, I have had such wretched luck. . such wretched luck!” Jiang Lili sobbed.

“If your luck is wretched, then how about me?”

All their pent-up bitterness surged up from deep inside them. But, alas, all of that was water under the bridge, and there was no way anything could be undone.

Neither knew how long they sat crying and hugging like that; their bodies ached from so much crying. Eventually, it was the smell of Jiang Lili’s breath — a sweet fishiness that carried the stench of rot — that reminded Wang Qiyao that her friend was dying. Swallowing her grief and holding back her tears, she let go of Jiang Lili and gently laid her back down in bed before going to get a hot towel to wipe her face. Jiang Lili continued to cry; there seemed to be no end to her river of tears. By then it was starting to get dark outside. At the wineshop, Mr. Cheng had drunk himself into a stupor and was slumped over on the table, unable to get up. He heard the sound of the ferry in the distance and, in his drunken daze, thought he had boarded and was gradually pulling away from the shore. He could almost see the vast ocean, boundless, as it spread out around him.

The exultations and lamentations of 1965 were all like this, grand in an insignificant way. Tempests in a teacup, they yet had a beginning and an end, and were enough to take up a whole lifetime. The noises they made were petty and weak; even exerting their greatest effort, they were unable to make the sound carry. Only when holding one’s breath could one hear the faint buzzing and droning, but each sound was enough to last a lifetime. Gaining strength in numbers, they converge into a large mass hovering over the city sky. They form what is known as a “silent sound,” which sings its melody above the raucous noises of the city. One calls it a “silent sound” because it is tremendously dense and enormously large, its size and density equal to if not exceeding its “silence.” The same method is found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, where shading and texture in rocks and mountains are created by using light strokes of ink. And so, this “silent sound” is, in truth, the greatest of all sounds, because it is where sound itself begins.

Just one week after their meeting, Jiang Lili’s spleen ruptured and she died of a massive hemorrhage. At the time of her death she was surrounded by Old Zhang, her three sons, and the whole family from Shandong. She had been in a coma before she died and did not leave any last words. At the factory where she used to work, a memorial service was held in which she was remembered for her courage in breaking off relations with her family from the exploiting class and for never giving up her dream of joining the Communist Party. Neither her parents nor her brother attended the memorial service. Apparently they realized that their presence would constitute a stain on Jiang Lili’s lifelong ideals. But her family did hold all of the traditional funerary rites, from the “initial seven,” performed over the first seven days after her death, to the “double seven.” The “double seven” was held every seventh day, ending with the seventh ceremony, which took place on the forty-ninth day after her passing. During each ceremony, the family would sit together, sometimes in silence and sometimes quietly talking, creating an atmosphere of understanding and forgiveness. Jiang Lili, however, was gone forever and fated never to share in the tranquility of their communion.

Mr. Cheng and Wang Qiyao did not attend the memorial service; they actually did not find out about Jiang Lili’s death until after it had taken place. By the time they learned of her death, they seemed to have gotten over the terrible grief they had been feeling and were more relieved than anything else: Jiang Lili was now released from her pain. They themselves had nothing worth celebrating, but they were the kind of people who had grown accustomed to making concessions to reality. They knew how to be satisfied with whatever cards life dealt them, unlike Jiang Lili, for whom life was a constant struggle, because she always refused to conform, always stubbornly insisting on doing things her own way, all the way to the bitter end. The two decided, each without letting the other know, to pay special homage to Jiang Lili, but both chose the same day to carry out their memorial, waiting until Tomb-Sweeping Festival of the following year. Mr. Cheng went alone to Longhua Temple and swept the ground in front of the vault where Jiang Lili’s ashes were kept. Wang Qiyao waited until the middle of the night when everyone was asleep before she burned a cut-out of spirit paper for her lost friend. Although she did not believe in such superstitious practices — neither did Jiang Lili — it provided small fraction of comfort in an otherwise helpless situation. What else could she have done?