by Anyi, Wang
After that evening, both of them seemed to forget what had transpired; they put it aside and never mentioned it again. However, Wang Qiyao stopped asking Old Colour things that might upset him, such as “How do I compare to your mother?” which under the circumstances would have taken on a provocative overtone. They also stopped talking about how old they were and whether or not she was “ageless”—all these became taboo subjects. The results of that day’s confrontation seemed to be a loss, as they now had fewer topics they could discuss; but that loss was actually a way of purging the impurities in their relationship, like pruning away dead branches. After that, their relationship became purer and simpler; they might not have always had things to say, but sometimes silence is better than speech. There were also times when they talked nonstop—always about important things, such as Wang Qiyao’s reminiscences of the past. Her stories were so splendid that they made everything happening in the present pale in comparison. But the splendor was all linked with heartbreaking losses, like a ceremonial robe bathed in neon light.
Wang Qiyao showed him a forty-year-old hand-carved box from Spain; she let him examine the floral engravings on the outside, but wouldn’t open it up, as if the contents were not meant for his eyes. The designs on the box and even the style of the lock were all quite dated; it was a useful prop to help him get into the forty-year-old role he was trying to play. To a certain degree, he even viewed Wang Qiyao as an old Hollywood star, but he never looked at himself as her male counterpart. He was more like an adoring fan, the kind that thinks what they see on screen is real. He loved those old movies from that era—he couldn’t get enough of them. And though all he did was watch, it was often enough to make him forget where he was.
Emerging from Wang Qiyao’s stories and coming back down to reality, Old Colour felt the same feeling of letdown he had at the end of a movie. Although what was being recounted wasn’t his own experience, he was so consumed by the story that it seemed to affect him even more than her. That’s because she had to use part of her energy to cope with the changes in her life and keep herself together. The next time he lay on the rooftop outside his dormer window and stared up at the sky, images began to appear before him. One after another, they rolled over the horizon formed by the rooftops. Oh, how this city resembles a sunken ship! That telephone pole is like a mast jutting up from the bottom, still hanging on to a bit of tattered sail—the sail is actually the remains of a child’s kite that got caught in the wires. Old Colour was so sad he could almost have wept. The clouds suspended over the ship’s hull were the bearers of illusions and mirages.
The distant sound of the pile-driver reached his ears, echoing throughout the sky; that pile-driver seemed to be driving this city down to the bottom. He could feel the roof shaking, and the tiles beneath him made a rattling sound from the vibrations. Not even jazz could console him anymore; his records were all dusty and the needle on the record player had lost its point, producing a hoarse sound that only deepened his sorrow. Before he knew it, he fell asleep. When he awoke the stars had come out to disperse his illusions, but the pile-driver was hammering away even more fiercely, its sound rising and falling like a great choir. This choir was a new all-night program in the city. The sounds would only die off as the dew formed with the coming of dawn. He instinctively drew back; as he opened his eyes, a flock of pigeons flapped past overhead. Where am I? he wondered. He watched the pigeons with a dazed stare as they receded, to become spots on the horizon, and imagined himself one of them. The sun rose, its light shining down on the roof tiles. It was time to get up.
“Do you ever feel that this city has aged?” he asked Wang Qiyao.
She laughed. “Is there anything that doesn’t age?” She went on after a pause, “Look at me, I’m evidence of that! What right do I have to expect other things not to age too?”
He looked at Wang Qiyao and his heart was seized with pain. No matter how young she appeared, she still could not conceal her puffy eyelids and those delicate wrinkles. How could time be so heartless? he thought, and pity welled up inside him. He raised his hand to caress Wang Qiyao’s hair like an older friend offering consolation. Wang Qiyao laughed and tried to push his hand away, but he resisted and firmly took hold of her hand: “You always look down on me.”
Using her free hand to smooth down his hair, she replied, “I never do . . .”
“You do!” He held his ground.
But so did she. “I never once looked down on you.”
“It actually has nothing to do with age,” he added.
Wang Qiyao thought for a moment before responding, “That depends. . . .”
“On what?
Wang Qiyao didn’t answer and it was only after he pressed her that she finally said, “On the timing.”
The archness of her reply drew laughter from both of them; he was still holding on to her hand. And though the whole scene was rather silly, even pointless, underneath lay something very serious. What that something was it was difficult to say, and to attempt to find out would only cause more pain. Who ever saw a courtship like this? Was that any way to flirt? With more than a quarter of a century between them, the timing was completely off, and so was the rhythm. If it hadn’t been for that mysterious something, the whole thing would have been disgusting. They held hands for a while but stopped short of anything else. It was a good thing that they were both patient; but more than patience, they didn’t seem to have any real objective, so what was the point of rushing? And so they eventually let go of each other’s hands and let everything go back to the way it was before. Even though one of them might still say something absurd from time to time, they found their way to deal with it and went on just as before.
“You can’t blame me!” he said on one occasion.
“I don’t!” she replied.
“But deep down you do! You blame me for coming into your life too late,” he argued.
Wang Qiyao laughed and responded, only after a pause, “Should we start practicing for the next life?”
“What for?”
“Haven’t you heard? It takes a hundred years of self-cultivation if you want to be on the same boat, and a thousand years if you want to share the same pillow.”
As soon as she said “pillow,” they both felt a tremor of the heart and fell immediately silent. Wang Qiyao started to turn red, aware that she had spoken out of turn and injected something prurient into the conversation. When she saw him sitting there in silence with his head hanging low, she thought he was upset and was so embarrassed she started to cry. To prevent him from seeing her tears, she quickly turned around and walked into the kitchen, where she stood for a few moments, putting away various odds and ends in a state of abstraction. By the time she came back he was gone. There was a note on the table: Together in this life—who needs a next life? Reading those words actually calmed her down a bit; it was, in a way, ridiculous, and she wondered: What is he thinking? Can he be serious? She took the note and crumpled it into a ball. The incident eventually passed, and, in its wake, so did several equally tense moments. But fear lingered every time she thought about their clashes. She was living on the razor’s edge; she knew she couldn’t take one false step, but she didn’t know how to get off. It was like walking a tightrope—and it was exciting. But you can’t stay up on the tightrope too long or you’ll lose your footing. Whenever they were alone together, the atmosphere would grow tense, and they both seemed to have their daggers drawn.
Zhang Yonghong’s visits were especially welcome during these tense moments. With a third party present, they could get down from the tightrope for a while. The three of them could talk about almost anything, and no matter how far off the topic was, Wang Qiyao and Old Colour always seemed to be on the same page. With Zhang Yonghong there as an outsider, they became one—her lack of a direct connection to them seemed to strengthen their connection to each other. In this way a tacit understanding arose between them. The addition of Zhang Yonghong seemed to solve the quandary they were fa
cing about whether to move forward or step back—with her there, they could simply drag out the status quo. Gradually Zhang Yonghong became an essential part of their relationship.
When Old Colour invited Wang Qiyao out to dinner yet again, she couldn’t refuse because Zhang Yonghong was also included. She brought Long Legs, and the four of them went to the Western restaurant on the ground floor of the Jinjiang Hotel for steak. Even though Long Legs only came along at the last minute, he was the most gregarious one at the table and so took center stage. He knew all the latest slang and told them all the popular gossip, recounting all kinds of amazing stories—old news to Old Colour and Zhang Yonghong but a revelation for Wang Qiyao. She had no idea that there were people in the city who made their livelihood out of burning, killing, looting, and pillaging, living their days amid the glimmer of knives and pools of blood. She listened in a state suspended between belief and disbelief, pretending that what she was listening to was just tall tales.
Dinner ended in a flutter of excitement as Long Legs insisted on paying the bill, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Old Colour tried to pay, but gave up after a few attempts. Zhang Yonghong couldn’t care less about who paid. However, Wang Qiyao and Old Colour were not happy, feeling that they had just eaten off the wrong plate. They had intended to use Zhang Yonghong as an agent to help them resolve a long outstanding issue between them; but not only had they been thwarted, they were now left with their feelings still dangling. Zhang Yonghong and her boyfriend hopped in a cab to go to their next engagement as soon as they left the hotel. The other two were left standing on the street and, for a moment, didn’t know where they should go. It was only after they had walked for some time along the covered corridor outside the hotel that they became less awkward.
“I really wanted to treat you to dinner this time,” said Old Colour, “But I still didn’t get to.”
Wang Qiyao laughed. “I guess you weren’t sincere enough!”
“Then I’d better keep trying. . . .” With those words he put his hands in his pockets and extended his elbow toward Wang Qiyao, who slipped her arm through his. The shady streets of Maoming Road are a place of endless romance. You say those trees lining the street are there to provide shade from the heat? You’re wrong. They are there to create a dreamscape, a world where people are shrouded in shadow, insulated from the brilliant light on the outside.
Long Legs
Zhang Yonghong and Long Legs managed to keep their friendship up for quite some time. One reason for this was that he was always willing to spend money on her, and another, that a suitable replacement had yet to show up. According to Long Legs, his grandfather was the famous Soy Sauce King known throughout Shanghai and, as his only grandson, Long Legs was the legal heir to his estate. Grandfather, he said, had soy sauce factories all over Southeast Asia and a few in Europe and America. Besides the soy sauce business, the old man held interests in a rubber plantation, farmland, even a virgin forest; he had his own private dock on the Mekong River and his company stock sold on Wall Street in New York. It sounded like a story right out of the Arabian Nights.
Zhang Yonghong didn’t take it seriously, but one thing she knew was true—he did have money. The way Long Legs threw his money around was astonishing; Zhang Yonghong had to adjust the way she looked at money by several digits. Unable to control her excitement, she would occasionally describe their extravagant spending habits to Wang Qiyao. When Wang Qiyao asked her where all that money was coming from, she repeated the fabulous story Long Legs had told her. In retelling the story, she herself began to believe it. But Wang Qiyao didn’t. She suspected something was amiss but didn’t want to be the one to break the news to Zhang Yonghong; she had had the opportunity to observe Long Legs and noted several things that didn’t sit right with her.
There were always people like Long Legs who hustled their way throughout Shanghai. Most of them didn’t have a normal job, yet somehow they got all their basic needs pretty well taken care of. These were the men one saw drinking and making merry in the lobbies of fancy hotels during the day. There’s no need to mention what they did in the evenings—without them, the city’s nightlife would never get off the ground. But don’t make the mistake of supposing that all they ever did was have fun, because they were also working to earn their keep. They did such things as playing tennis with foreigners and giving motorcycleriding lessons. They helped travel agencies to arrange tours and, while they were at it, made sure to exchange some foreign currency on the side. To establish these relationships with foreigners on the streets and in hotel lobbies, they usually spoke some English, at least enough for simple greetings, exchanging money, filling in as a tour guide, and making small talk. The international nature of their work tended to broaden their horizons, and eventually they came to display a level of sophistication in their manners and dress that was right up there with the rest of the world. They were a group of the most liberal-minded of men, completely unrestrained in their style. In Shanghai society, there were all kinds of necessary but minor details that people were too busy to deal with: that’s where these men came in—to fill in the gaps. They were perhaps the busiest of all; virtually all the cabs in Shanghai relied on them for their business, as did the restaurants. How prosperous the city appeared—and all thanks to them!
Long Legs was six foot two and had a long thin face that caved in somewhat in the middle, slightly protruding front teeth, and eyeglasses. He looked extremely thin, but was actually fairly well built. His buck teeth gave him a bit of a lisp, but this didn’t really get in the way; it actually made him sound more refined. He was quite the talker and would open up to everyone, whether he knew them or not, which always left people with a warm impression. He loved to treat friends to dinner; so much so that when he ran into old friends at a restaurant he would sometimes settle up for them when paying his own bill. Whenever he took Zhang Yonghong out shopping, he made sure that they went for the best, and he never showed up empty-handed at Wang Qiyao’s, always remembering to bring along a house gift. His usual gift was most elegant—a dozen roses. On cold winter days he bought roses flown in from the south at ten yuan a stem. Wang Qiyao’s apartment was unheated and the flowers would wither before long.
Long Legs was so busy running around that he never had time to spend the money he was making, so he ended up spending most of it on others while he wore the same old pair of dirty blue jeans all year round. His sneakers were also dirty and beat up. But it was part of his style not to pay attention to himself. This was especially true in winter: he’d rather stick with his accustomed single layer and huddle up, his nose blue with the cold, than put on a thick winter jacket. Even so, he would still be in high spirits, always laughing and joking. Happiness was in his nature—he liked noisy, festive occasions with a lot of people around, and when others were having a good time, he had a good time. In order to create a fun atmosphere he was even willing to make himself the butt of people’s jokes; he didn’t think twice about putting himself in what other people would have thought of as an awkward situation. The world doesn’t have many people like that, now, does it? Over time, he slowly won over everyone’s hearts. Whenever his friends went out, they always made sure to bring him along, and when he wasn’t around they would instantly start looking for him: “Where’s Long Legs? Where’d he go?”
That was Long Legs, patiently cultivating his interpersonal relationships. People like him, who know how to get by in society, may look on the surface as if they are always on the move, but in fact they are, relatively speaking, quite stable, and they have accepted principles to which they adhere. Like people who commute to work every day, their comings and goings are governed by fixed routine. Their day usually begins around eleven o’clock, when most factory workers start their second shift, and finishes up around midnight. When they say goodnight, each goes his separate way and gradually disappears into the shadows under the trees.
Riding his beat-up old bicycle, Long Legs would head toward the southwest corner of th
e city. There were few people out on the streets as he slowly pedaled past. At first he would hum some tunes as he rode, but that gradually ceased. The only sound left was the rattle of his bicycle chain. As the streets grew more desolate and the streetlights became more spread out, his light heart began to sink. If one of his friends could have laid eyes on him at that moment, they wouldn’t have believed that he was the same person. Joyless and melancholic, he knit his brows in a fury of impatient frustration that made him look ferocious. His face darkened and lost its usual glow. By then he had arrived at a residential area built in the 1970s, which, due to the shoddy construction and low-quality building materials, already looked old. Under the moon, which came out abruptly from behind the clouds, it looked like a series of massive cement boxes—there wasn’t a single light on in the whole complex. This was a place where nightmares lurked; only one sentient soul walked here—that was Long Legs. If you could have seen him from above as he rode through those cement boxes, you would have thought he looked like an insect crawling among the tombs in a graveyard.
Long Legs stopped in front of one of the buildings and leaned his bicycle against the wall. As he stepped inside, the darkness consumed him. Poor Long Legs: it was going to take a mighty effort to walk up a staircase cluttered with all kinds of random items that left the passerby barely a footwide space to squeeze through. But then at that moment he changed into a nimble cat, silently making his way upstairs, two or three steps at a time. From this you can imagine how long he must have been living here. He opened the door onto a dimly lit interior; the only light inside was coming in from the hallway window. There was also the sound of water coming from the broken toilet. The hallway was filled with various odds and ends. Two families had shared this unit for years; the cobwebs in the corner were proof. The first thing Long Legs did was to go into the kitchen and open up the small screen door to the cabinet, where fresh leftovers were kept, to look inside. He did this from force of habit—he wasn’t really hungry. Inside the cabinet were a few bowls, their contents coated with a thin layer of mold. Closing the door, he grabbed a jug of water from under the stove before going into the bathroom. A few minutes later came the sound of water gently splashing as Long Legs washed his feet in the basin. He did all of this by the faint light of the moon coming through the window; he didn’t need to turn on the light—he could have done it with his eyes closed. He sat on the toilet with his feet soaking in the basin, the dry towel in his hand draped over his knees, and stared straight ahead. A few insects scurried over the damp concrete floor. What was Long Legs thinking?
