by Anyi, Wang
At twenty-six years of age, Old Colour should have been too young to care about the passing of time; time had yet to teach him such truths, but that is precisely why he longed for the past—that is the only reason he dared to extol the fruits of time! The passage of time associated with those old jazz records was indeed a good thing; it had smoothed things out until they were strong and fine, rubbing off the superficial layers to reveal the inner grain, like gold emerging when the fire has burned away the dross. But what he saw that day was not an object, like an old jazz record, but a person. He was at a complete loss as to what to say, because the situation had an element of the tragic. He had finally touched the heart of that bygone era, whereas before he had only paced back and forth on its surface. Something halted his steps and Old Colour couldn’t bring himself to walk away. He picked up a glass of wine and leaned up against the door, fixing his gaze on the television. Eventually Wang Qiyao got up from the corner to go to the restroom. As she walked past him, he flashed her a smile. She immediately accepted his smile, responding with a look of gratitude before smiling back at him. When she came back, he asked her if he could get her a drink. She pointed to the corner and said that she already had a cup of tea, so there was no need. He asked her to dance. She hesitated for a moment . . . and accepted.
Disco music was blaring in the living room, but they danced the four-step at half speed. With all manner of wild movements swirling around them, only they were stationary, like a lone island in a rushing torrent. She apologized, suggesting that he go back to disco dancing rather than waste his time with her. But he insisted that he was having a good time. He put his hand on her waist and could feel the slight pulsations of her body. It was a strategy of nonmovement in response to the myriad changes taking place around her, of finding her own rhythm, no matter what the tempo of her surroundings might be, a rhythm that could carry her through time. Moved by this, he remained lost in silence until she suddenly complimented his dance skills; they were now doing a traditional Latin number. When the tune changed, someone else invited Wang Qiyao to dance. During the next number, they each danced with their respective partners but their eyes occasionally met, whereupon they exchanged a knowing smile, lit up with the joy of this chance meeting. The party took place on the evening of National Day and fireworks were being set off from one of the balconies. A single rocket shot up into the darkness and slowly unfurled its fiery petals in the night sky before breaking up into a stream of falling stars, which vanished slowly, leaving a faint white shadow in the sky. It was some time before the last of the light was absorbed into the blackness.
After that evening Wang Qiyao ran into Old Colour at a few other parties and they gradually got to know each other better. One time Old Colour told Wang Qiyao that he suspected he was the reincarnation of someone who had lived four decades earlier. This person had probably died a violent death in his youth, but because he hadn’t properly finished out his previous life, was now left with a strange attachment to the past. Wang Qiyao asked him if he had any proof of this. He replied that his proof was based on his endless longing for the Shanghai of the forties, a world that otherwise had nothing to do with him. Sometimes, walking down the street, he would slip into a daze that seemed to transport him back to the past. The women would all be wearing cheongsams and dresses, the men had donned Western-style suits and hats, the trolley bell would ring out, and girls crying “Gardenias for sale!” sounded like orioles, while the apprentice at the silk shop made crisp noises with his scissors as they cut through pieces of fabric. Amid these sights and sounds he would slip into the past, becoming a person of that bygone era, someone who parted his hair in the middle, carried a leather briefcase, and supported his virtuous wife and family by working at a Western firm. Wang Qiyao laughed at this.
“Virtuous wife? Tell me, just how is she virtuous?”
He ignored her and continued on with his story. He said that in his vision he had taken the trolley to work as usual when a gun fight broke out inside the trolley car. A spy from Wang Jingwei’s puppet government was trying to assassinate a man from the Chongqing faction. They chased each other around the car and in the end he was shot by a stray bullet and died there on the trolley.
“You got all that from a TV show!” Wang Qiyao challenged him.
Still disregarding her comments, he continued, “I was unjustly killed and my soul refused to accept what happened. That’s why even though I seem to be here, my heart is in the past. And look at the way I always make friends with people much older than me, and when I first meet them I always have a feeling of déjà vu.”
At that moment the music came back on and the two of them went back out onto the dance floor. Halfway through the number, Wang Qiyao suddenly smiled and said, “Actually, it’s funny how I lived through that era and, much as I want to, I can’t go back. But here you are, able to go back whenever you want!”
Her words moved him, but he didn’t know quite how to respond.
“Even if it is a dream,” Wang Qiyao continued, “It’s my dream! You don’t get to have those dreams and make them seem so real!”
With that, the two of them broke out in laughter. Before they left for the evening, Old Colour invited Wang Qiyao out to dinner the next evening. Seeing him play the role of the gentleman, Wang Qiyao thought him ridiculous, but she was also touched. “Why don’t I be the host? But not at a restaurant. Why don’t you come over to my place for a simple dinner? Anyway, you decide.”
The next evening Old Colour arrived nice and early for dinner at Wang Qiyao’s apartment. He sat on the sofa and watched Wang Qiyao as she trimmed the bad ends off the bean sprouts. Wang Qiyao had also invited Zhang Yonghong and her new boyfriend, whom everyone called Long Legs; they arrived just before dinner was supposed to start. By then the dishes were already on the table and Old Colour was putting out the plates and chopsticks as if he was one of the hosts. Because Wang Qiyao was a whole generation older than her guests, she felt no need to stand on ceremony and put out all of the cold and hot dishes together, leaving only a pot of soup simmering on the gas stove. Zhang Yonghong and her boyfriend had seen Old Colour around, but didn’t really know him well enough to connect a name with his face. They couldn’t help feeling a little awkward, and the conversation didn’t get off the ground until Wang Qiyao smoothed things over. Since they were eating, the subject at hand naturally turned to food. Wang Qiyao mentioned a few dishes that they had never heard of, such as Indonesian coconut milk chicken. Since they were no longer able to buy coconut milk, she said, she couldn’t make that dish. Another one was Cantonese-style barbecued pork, which she couldn’t make because some of the ingredients were also unavailable. Then there were French goose liver pate and Vietnamese fish sauce . . . the list went on.
“That’s what dinners were like forty years ago,” Wang Qiyao explained, “a veritable United Nations conference. You could get food from any country! Shanghai back then was a little universe of its own. It was a window onto the rest of the world. But what could be seen outside the window was not half as important as what happened inside. What you saw outside was mere scenery; what happened inside was the foundation of everyday life. Forty years ago nobody ever flaunted this foundation, no posters or advertisements were needed. Every grain of rice and every piece of vegetable was accounted for. Today people carelessly grab things by the handful, and everything tastes like cafeteria food cooked in vats. Did you know that, forty years ago, when you ordered noodles, they would make them one bowl at a time?”
Old Colour could tell that Wang Qiyao’s words were meant for him. She wanted to show him what life was really like forty years ago—to remind him how little he really knew. He knew that he was being mocked, but he didn’t feel insulted; he actually welcomed that type of criticism, because it gave him entrée into real knowledge. He also got a taste of how astute she was. That was a quality from four decades ago: it was about silently putting up with wrongs rather than fighting for a better position, because in her world ther
e was no place for displays of strength or cries of emotion. There was more consideration for others and less calculation for oneself. It was about understanding, something that was missing from the prevailing astuteness that has taken root forty years later.
After that night Old Colour started to come by quite often. On one occasion, when Zhang Yonghong was asking Wang Qiyao’s advice about making a coat, he sat beside them, listening. Although he understood little about dressmaking, what she said seemed to contain some more abstract truths that could be applied to all kinds of things. He realized that he had been completely ignorant before; those old jazz records he listened to were intended as an accompaniment or background music; the real melody and action lay elsewhere. The saxophone might snatch at your attention with its dazzling displays of virtuosity, but the real star of the show always maintained its composure. Simple and unadorned—it was the common heart with which one lives the everyday. He gazed out the window at the neighbor’s closed window across the way and wondered what lay concealed. Perhaps romantic stories were being played out. He walked slowly around the room; with each step he heard the sound of floorboards creaking and knew that here too were stories. There was so much indeed that he neither knew nor understood. In fact, the romance of forty years ago had lain right under his eyes, scattered in every corner.
Old Colour was an extremely quick-witted young man, and it took only a little effort for him to comprehend what the world had been like back then. Nothing authentic could slip past his eye, and nothing fake could fool him. He could almost smell the air from back then, carrying the scents of Rêve de Paris perfume and gardenias. The former belonged to the elite while the latter captured the banal tastes of the commoner, but even those gardenias had been romantic in their own way, each one carefully planted and cared for. And while that French perfume strove to rise above the rest, it still had its feet firmly planted on the ground. They represented the romance of the everyday world, which was quite enduring; even after its shell was cracked, the kernel remained.
“Whenever I come over to your place,” Old Colour commented, “I really get the feeling that I have gone back in time.”
“If you go back in time,” Wang Qiyao mocked him, “I’m afraid there isn’t that far you can go! Your mother’s belly?”
“No,” he explained, “I’m talking about going back to a previous life.”
Afraid that he was about to carry on again about his previous life, Wang Qiyao quickly waved her hand for him to stop.
“I know all about your former life as a gentleman working at a foreign firm and married to a virtuous wife!” she snorted.
He laughed for a while before continuing, “I’m afraid that I even saw you once in my previous life. You were a student at a middle school, wearing a cheongsam and carrying a bookbag with a lotus-leaf shaped border . . .”
“And so you followed me, right?” She picked up where he left off, “and said, ‘Miss, would you like to see a movie? Vivien Leigh is in it.’ . . .”
With that, both of them keeled over in laughter.
That was the beginning.
From that point on, they often began their conversations that way, taking roles in a Hollywood-type movie. Naturally, love, which was the requisite theme, had to be part of the story. And so the two carried on rather recklessly, one fuelled by recollection, the other by aspiration, both fully immersed in their respective roles. From time to time they would forget it was mere playacting and take their fantasy as real. They even injected real feelings into the scenarios and grew melancholic as they ad-libbed. That’s when Wang Qiyao would have to put a stop to it: “All right already! Stop carrying on as if this was real!”
“I wish it were real,” declared Old Colour.
These words were followed by a long silence. They both felt a bit awkward and only then realized how far things had gone. He was after all still quite young and wasn’t always capable of finding the proper words for the occasion. He tried to explain by adding, “I really love the whole atmosphere of that time.”
Wang Qiyao didn’t respond immediately. It was only after a brief pause that she replied, “Oh yeah, the atmosphere back then was great! A pity that the people involved are now so old that their teeth are falling out!”
Old Colour realized that he had said something wrong, but he couldn’t find the words to explain himself any better and his face turned red in frustration. Wang Qiyao extended her hand to caress his hair.
“Such a child!”
He felt a lump in his throat and dared not look up. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling that he had been misunderstood, yet didn’t know how to express himself. Nor could he say for sure what exactly he had done wrong. As Wang Qiyao ran her hands through his hair he could sense the hurt this woman felt and her understanding. A well of compassion opened up in his heart, which brought them closer together.
They sat down next to each other and tried to avoid the previous topic of conversation by talking about some trivial things. Although the conversation wasn’t as animated as before, neither of them was uncomfortable, as they felt something existed between them that transcended the occasional silences. It was those made-up stories from old Shanghai—the kind that linger, clinging to the heart. That night Old Colour invited Wang Qiyao out to dinner again; she wanted to accept, but she didn’t. She thought, Just what is this? He’s forty years too late!
She smiled. “There’s no need for that. You usually eat better food at home than you do in some of those restaurants.”
Sensing that she was heading off in a different direction, Old Colour decided not to press the issue. From that point on, he would call on Wang Qiyao every three days or so. He would usually stay for a meal, and her apartment eventually became almost like a second home to him. Sometimes Zhang Yonghong would come over and wind up joining them for dinner. Other times she brought Long Legs along with her, but they wouldn’t necessarily stay for dinner, often just sitting and chatting for a while before leaving Wang Qiyao and Old Colour to have dinner alone. At such times the atmosphere would grow very still, as if signifying something. By tacit agreement, they avoided parties, which they found unwieldy because it was difficult to talk. Spending time at home may have been a bit too quiet, but there was a solidity to the quietness; they spoke when they had something to say, and kept silent when they didn’t. It was a setting more appropriate to two people who knew each other well, whereas parties were designed to make strangers feel more comfortable with each other.
Whenever Wang Qiyao tried out a new dish she would ask Old Colour, “How does this measure up to your mother’s cooking?”
Once, when she said this, Old Colour replied, “I never compare you to my mother.”
Asked why, he responded, “Because you are ageless.”
Wang Qiyao didn’t know what to say. After a pause she asked, “How can someone be ageless?”
Old Colour persisted, “You know what I mean.”
“You’re right, I know exactly what you mean . . .” said Wang Qiyao. “But I don’t agree with you.”
“You don’t have to agree with me,” Old Colour responded, before lowering his head in dejected silence.
Wang Qiyao paid him no heed, but deep down she was laughing wryly, thinking that this fellow really didn’t know when to quit. She wasn’t sure if she liked that feeling or not. She stood in front of the stove waiting for a pot of water to boil as she stared at the scenery outside the window. Dusk was falling and the last rays of the sun seemed reluctant to leave. This was a scene she had been looking at for years; it had been etched into her heart. She knew that feeling so well that it was clear at every moment what the next moment would bring.
Wang Qiyao went back into the room and put the freshly brewed tea on the table. Seeing the gloomy look on his face, she said, “Now don’t go making a big deal out of nothing! Everything is fine, so why spoil it?”
He turned away with a peevish look.
Wang Qiyao continued, “You’re a nice boy who is re
ally smart and polite and I really like you. But I don’t like boys who let their minds run wild thinking about crazy things!”
“Who are you calling a boy?” he shouted as he jerked his head up. “Stop calling me a boy—as if I was just a child!”
“What a temper!” said Wang Qiyao, as she got up to walk away.
But Old Colour called her back. “Where do you think you’re going? What are you trying to run away from? If you have something to say, then say it!”
“You want me to talk to you? About what?”
He pushed things even further. “You are the one being unreasonable. You’re always running away!”
Wang Qiyao laughed. Turning around, she sat back down. “So let’s hear what you have to say. Go on!”
He pressed on with his accusations. “You don’t even have the guts to look reality in the face!”
She nodded her head in agreement, signaling for him to continue, but he didn’t know what else to say.
Wang Qiyao snorted. “And here I was, thinking you had some great truth to set me straight on!”
Those words really set him off. Ready to explode, he opened his mouth but nothing came out . . . ; he pressed his head into Wang Qiyao’s bosom, wrapping his arms around her waist. Wang Qiyao was shocked but didn’t dare to reveal her surprise. She didn’t push him away or get mad; instead she raised her arm and began to gently caress his hair, whispering consoling words. He refused to raise his head, however, and after a while Wang Qiyao ran out of reassuring things to say and had to stop. The two of them sat in silence.
Dusk slowly crept in, covering everything with a veil of darkness, but leaving the delicate outlines still visible; all was still. They, too, remained motionless. There was no future for them to look forward to; they could only remain stationary, eking out the moment as long as they possibly could. All they had was silence; what was there to say when they would probably only end up arguing as before? In truth, they were just blindly letting off steam, but they could have just as well have been speaking different languages, like an ox trying to reason with a horse. In the end, both were left more confused than ever. Eventually they calmed down and things seemed finally to be getting back on track. But time was slipping by and they couldn’t just keep carrying on like that until old age! It was only after it was completely dark and they could barely make each other out that their silhouettes could be seen rising and separating. Only then was the light turned on in the last window to light up on Peace Lane that night.
