Written on Water, page 7
That people who have neither professions nor pastimes find solace in marriage was attested to by the endless parade of marriage announcements in the Hong Kong newspapers. Some of the students among us got married as well. Students typically have very little understanding of the realities of human nature. When they have had for the first time an opportunity to peel away someone else’s surface, revealing the timid, pitiful, or laughable being underneath who shrinks from the slightest touch, they almost always fall in love with this first discovery. There is no question, of course, that they had everything to gain and nothing to lose by love and marriage, but willingly to limit their own horizons when still so young seems rather tragic.
The vehicle of the times drives inexorably forward. We ride along, passing through thoroughfares that are perhaps already quite familiar. Against a sky lit by flames, they are capable nevertheless of shaking us to the core. What a shame that we occupy ourselves instead searching for our reflections in the shop windows that flit so quickly by—we see only our faces, pallid and trivial. In our selfishness and emptiness, in our smug and shameless ignorance, every one of us is like all the others. And each of us is alone.
SHANGHAINESE, AFTER ALL
When I returned to Shanghai a year ago, my first impression of the Shanghainese from whom I had been separated for so long was that they were fair and plump. In Hong Kong, eight or nine of every ten Cantonese are dark and skinny. The East Indians are even darker, and the Malays even skinnier. Having grown accustomed to seeing them, each and every Shanghainese seemed as fat and white as a gourd, like the children in powdered milk advertisements.
The second thing that struck me about the Shanghainese was their knowingness. The popular literature of the Hong Kong masses is best represented by the celebrated bus stop placard: “If the bus should stop, it would be here.” Shanghai is of an entirely different order. When I first got back to Shanghai, I often found myself exclaiming: “They’re Shanghainese, after all.” I went to buy soap and heard a little shop apprentice explaining to his partner: “Hey, the character you want is the xun [merit] in the name Zhang Xun, or ‘work of merit,’ not the xun [fragrance] in the word ‘xunfeng’ [scented breeze].” The News printed an advertisement for the grand opening of a department store that was written in a genuinely compelling mixture of parallel and free-style prose in the manner of the Qing dynasty Yanghu School.1 On the dangers of selecting the wrong gift, the advertisement had this to say: “When friendship hangs in the balance, how great the stakes?” Seemingly a parody, yet quite true nonetheless, and not at all overstated.
The knowingness of the Shanghainese is not limited to their facility with language and proficiency in the ways of the world. One can also find specimens of spontaneously spirited and unaffected writing almost anywhere in the city. Last year, one of the tabloids printed a doggerel verse by an author whose name I have already forgotten, although I will never forget the poem itself. Two actresses had invited the author to share a meal, and the occasion prompted him to write: “At table with two of the greats / Miss Zhang and Miss Yun share lovely traits / After eating my fill I continue to sing their praise / Such an opportunity doesn’t come every day.” Such a lovably roundabout sort of self-deprecation! There is helplessness, magnanimity, and indulgence here—an indulgence born of exhaustion, when one looks down on others but also looks down on oneself and yet still retains a sense of intimacy with both oneself and others. I saw another couplet on a streetcar that expressed the same sentiment with even greater clarity. The words had been scratched with a finger across the black coating on the window of the tram: “Grandpa and Grandma each have their reasons, men and women their equal rights.” The saying has always been “Grandpa has his reasons, and Grandma says she’s right,” so why bother to ascertain who’s really wrong? Both of them are in the right. And what with the years of trouble caused by the proposition that “men and women have equal rights,” why not just let them be equal? Once again, this is a case of an indulgence that stems from sheer exhaustion. The grin stretched across a face covered in sweat and grime is emblematic of Chinese-style humor.
Shanghainese are traditional Chinese people tempered by the high pressure of modern life. The misshapen products of this fusion of old and new culture may not be entirely healthy, but they do embody a strange and distinctive sort of wisdom.
Everyone says Shanghainese people are mean, but their meanness is measured. Shanghainese know how to flatter and deceive, how to curry favor with those in power, how to fish in troubled waters. But because they also understand the arts of life, their practice of these arts never goes beyond the bounds of propriety. And as far as meanness goes, the only thing I know for certain is that every fiction needs a villain. Good people like to hear stories about mean people, but bad people most certainly do not enjoy stories about those who are good. This is why none of my stories has for its main character a saint. There is only one girl who might be said to approach the ideal, being kind, compassionate, and righteous, but if she weren’t so pretty, I am afraid she might end up being more than a little annoying. Even with her beauty, many readers might well feel like telling her to go back to the fairy tale where she came from. She might have a place in a story like “Snow White” or “Cinderella.” But Shanghainese people are not that naive.
I have written a book of Hong Kong romances for Shanghainese readers, including the seven stories “Aloeswood Ashes: The First Incense Brazier,” “Aloeswood Ashes: The Second Incense Brazier,” “Jasmine Tea,” “Heart Sutra,” “Glazed Roof Tiles,” “Sealed Off,” and “Love in a Fallen City.”2 The entire time I was writing these stories, I was thinking of Shanghainese people, because I wanted to try to observe Hong Kong through Shanghainese eyes. Only people from Shanghai will be able to truly understand the parts where I wasn’t able to make my meaning clear.
I like Shanghainese people, and I hope the Shanghainese will like my book.
SEEING WITH THE STREETS
There was a foreign girl who spent two years in China. Having never paid her respects to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Monte Carlo of the Orient, or the Venice of the East and lacking any interest whatsoever in China’s new culture and new cinema, she did, however, develop an appreciation for Chinese children: “So beautiful, especially in winter, bundled up in their padded jackets, padded pants, padded gowns, and padded overalls until they are so short and so round, wobbling this way and that. Oriental eyes look nice in the first place, and on the little yellow faces of the children, those wondrous slanted eyes look even more wonderful. I wish I could take one home to Europe with me!”
Intellectually earnest fellow nationals felt that she was treating the future masters of our country as mere playthings, that her language was clearly insulting to China, and that it would be necessary to lodge a protest with the embassy. More mischievous souls were able to joke about it, saying that bringing a child with Chinese blood back home wouldn’t be so terribly difficult, if she were so inclined.
Having heard her words, however different our reactions to them might have been, we could not help looking anew at Chinese children, for we had never thought there was anything particularly remarkable about them before! When people in the family are an annoyance to others, we are usually so accustomed to them that we don’t notice anything amiss; when family members are lovable or ought to be held in high regard, we often fail to realize this until after we have been told it by people outside the family. To be sure, we cannot expect to receive such compliments all the time, for we have far too many failings that urgently need fixing and ought really to concentrate our energies on absorbing some hard-sounding but honest truths, as a means of self-admonition. And yet, if we spend our days sweating with self-hate and contemptuously telling ourselves we don’t deserve to live, what exactly is the point of living? We may as well select a few of our happier traits and take a look.
It is better to walk ten thousand miles than to read ten thousand books. When we go from home to work, to school, to the market, we walk at least a mile a day. After ten or twenty years, we will have covered several thousand miles. And if each time we walk down that street as if it were the first time we had ever seen it, if we see afresh and with new eyes, without succumbing to the blindness of familiarity, we will have done something like walking ten thousand miles, without even sailing the four seas.
There are a lot of things worth looking at on the streets. At dusk, a rickshaw rests by the side of the road, with a woman sitting at a slant on the seat, a mesh bag in her hands, full of persimmons. The rickshaw man squats on the ground, lighting the wick of an oil lamp. The sky darkens, and the lamp at the woman’s feet gradually grows bright.
The braziers used to roast yams have the same shape and dusky color as the roasted yams themselves.
Little restaurants will often cook pumpkins just outside the front door, and while you couldn’t really say that it’s a nice smell, the hot pumpkin steam and their “eye-brightening” red imparts a sense of “warmth for the old and comfort for the humble” to those who pass by.1
On cold mornings, there are usually people squatting on the sidewalk lighting little braziers, sending forth billows of white smoke as they fan the flames to life. I like to walk through that smoke. There are similarly sweet, warm, and overpowering clouds of smoke outside the garages that dispatch cars retrofitted to run on naptha instead of petrol. Most people do not like burnt smells—burnt coals or spent matches, milk or cloth—but to dismiss them as “the stink of coal” or “the stench of burnt cloth” seems rather summary.
Most of the people who ride on the back of someone else’s bicycle are attractive young women or, barring that, small children. But the other day, I saw a postman in his green uniform riding a bicycle with a little old lady on the back, who must have been his mother. A deeply affecting sight. And yet the era in which a Li Kui would carry his old mother on his back has passed us by.2 The mother, unaccustomed to such lavish favors, looked somewhat ill at ease. Her feet dangled in the air as she sat carefully, her face reflecting her diffidence—like a poor relation sitting in a tall rosewood chair asking for a handout—as she rode into the wind with a smile that must have chilled her tongue.
Someone attaches a little red lamp to the wheels of his bicycle, so that all you see as he rides past is a whirling red circle, its flowing movement lovely in the extreme.
Over shop windows in the deep of night, the bars of the protective window gates form a filigree, underneath which lie layers and layers of air-raid defense paper, yellow, white, transparent, stuck in squares and diagonals atop the glass, as enigmatic as the latticed window frames and curtain rods of ancient times.
A shop has long since closed, the lights are off, and the wooden mannequin’s leather coat has been stripped away. She stands with her shoulders exposed, facing away from the street. But her modesty is wasted, for even if she were facing outward, she would hardly move passersby to beautiful dreams. She was manufactured a little too cheaply and too clumsily, and there is nothing to recommend even the face or the hands or the feet that would have been exposed even with the benefit of the coat. I once saw plaster torsos of Laurel and Hardy in a boutique in Hong Kong that not only looked nothing like them but were in dreadful taste as well, especially their chubby, pale faces. The mannequins in Shanghai boutiques are not much nicer. Underneath even the most expensive wool knit hats, they are forever wearing the same inhuman grins. They are an insult to humanity, an irony even more extreme than the proverbial “monkey groomed to wear an official’s cap.”
If I knew how to sculpt, I would be more than willing to develop in that direction. Shop window design is an exceedingly interesting line of work, because there is a motionless drama enacted in every display. (During the middle ages in Europe, every holiday would be celebrated with dramas sponsored by the Church as a form of worship. The earliest religious dramas were extremely minimal, without even a smattering of dialogue, in which the actors playing biblical roles would don luxuriantly colorful robes, strike magnificent poses, and stand motionlessly in place. Every few minutes, they would shift position, forming a different pattern on the stage, or what was called a tableau. When Chinese people hold religious festivals, it seems to me that the performers do move around the stage as they sing, but there might well be tableau-type performances as well.)
The purpose of shop windows is to stimulate one’s desire to buy things. They say that an excessively inflated desire to consume is the common affliction of modern city dwellers. In desiring to buy items they do not need, they naturally want more money than they can earn and proceed to do whatever it takes to get it. Shop windows are thus the irrational by-product of an irrational society. But such theories aside, we might speculate that the sights offered to the public by this kind of street art, however grand and aristocratic they seem, serve to relieve their audiences of the need to actually spend money. Dispensing delight and visual pleasure free of charge ought, after all, to be considered a form of public service.
On a bitterly cold winter night four or five years ago, I went to look at the shop windows on the Avenue Joffre with my cousin. Under neon lights, hats slanted across the slanted faces of the wooden beauties, atop which slanted feathers. I don’t wear Western suits and had no need to wear a hat to match and no desire to buy one, but I could still gaze at the display with appreciation, neck huddled inside my coat, hands firmly ensconced in my pockets, pointing at the window with the tip of my nose and my chin, frosting the cold plate glass with white blossoms of breath. These days, the face of the city has grown leaner, and the storefronts along Avenue Joffre have lost much of their luster. And even if they were as brilliant as before, would we still be as thrilled by what they had to offer?
There is a display window for a salon that I do like. It is curtained in green fabric, and underneath the foot of the curtain there is always a tabby cat who either paces back and forth or lies curled by the window, fast asleep.
The Western-style coffee shop next door is filled with the clamor of machinery each night, lights blazing, turning out pastries and sweets. The smell of eggs and vanilla extract lingers until dawn before dissipating into the air. In a big city where “bills keep falling from the sky even when you’re inside,” it seems almost unreasonable that the owners allow us to enjoy the aroma without having to pay a cent. But the aroma of the cakes made by our sweet-smelling neighbor far outstrips their flavor, a fact that becomes apparent as soon as you’ve eaten one. Perhaps everything under heaven is the same: a cake that’s done isn’t as good as a cake in the process of being made. The glory of a cake is in the aroma it gives off as it bakes. Those who enjoy life lessons may well find one here.
On my way to market, I happened to run into a military blockade and was detained in an area just yards from home. So near, and yet it might as well have been the ends of the earth, as far as I was concerned. In a sunny spot, a servant woman tried to force her way past the lines, struggling as she shouted: “It’s getting late! I have to get back and make dinner!” Everyone in the crowd broke into laughter. A Cantonese rice peddler sitting on the curb told her son “They’ll let you go if you need to see a doctor but not to cook dinner.” Her voice was so deadpan, so solemn, so very satisfied with all and sundry that it sounded like a beginner’s foreign-language textbook. But for some unknown reason, her voice was somehow unsettling, as if there were a deeper meaning to what she had said. And yet there really wasn’t.
Standing in front of the rope strung from a bamboo enclosure stood a man, no more than a yard away, dressed in black with a black nylon cap, very short of stature, who reminded me of the illustrations of the detectives in the novel Xiepu chao (Tides of the Huangpu).3 From the other side of the cordon came three men in tight-fitting uniforms, striding with their chests thrust forward, their leather shoes sounding out crisply against the pavement. People who are able to move freely during a blockade seem almost obligated to move with their chests thrust forward and their shoes sounding out crisply against the ground. Two of the men had already crossed the line when the third darted forward and grabbed hold of the arm of the man in black, easily, familiarly, and, without a word of explanation, led him back toward the other side. The other two also made their way through the crowd, took hold of his other arm, and then, with long determined strides, vanished with him into the distance. This was the first time I had ever seen a criminal arrested. And even the authorities seemed to realize that the scene had lacked a certain suspense: in order to make up for the shortfall, they dispatched a group of MPs to the scene after it was all over to quell any unrest. From some distance away, the MPs drew their pistols and surveyed the scene before them, fully prepared to mop up any remaining resistance. I was prepared as well: to throw myself to the ground at the first sound of gunfire so as to avoid being hit by a stray bullet. But all they did was gaze from afar and, detecting no telltale signs of malfeasance or mischief, loudly voiced their disappointment in Shandong dialect and went on their way.
When the tension had subsided, the crowd struck up a debate about just what had happened. A delivery man, supporting his bicycle, bent his head down to laughingly address the woman peddling rice: “How could he possibly have gotten away? As soon as something happens, they post pictures everywhere. How could he have gotten away?” Then he turned to the rickshaw driver with a guffaw: “They nearly missed him. Those two had already walked past him, but the third guy caught sight of him.” He continued: “Standing right here the whole time. But no one even noticed him!”
