Written on Water, page 8
The rickshaw driver sat grinning on his running board, arms folded: “But why should it be that, of all the people standing here, the only one they chose to arrest was him?”
Idle roadside chitchat, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others—pathetic yet lovable all the same.
The knit blouse of a woman in the street, because she has had her hands in her pockets for a very long time, is stretched into a most inelegant bulge; when viewed from behind, it appears to be too long at the front, too short at the back.
The saying is that the “everyone on the road knows what’s really in Sima Zhao’s heart.” In the United States, “the man in the street” is a phrase used constantly to signify the common man. Whether news reporters need to praise or cast blame, the “man in the street” is invariably summoned to bear witness: “as even the man in the street knows . . .” But usually the man in the street knows nothing of the sort, even in his wildest dreams.
When you watch people in the street, they usually return your gaze, so that you can’t look them over at length or leisure. But if you want to force the issue, it’s easy to make someone submit to a close, hard look without reciprocating. There are not many people who are stylish from head to toe, chic from top to bottom. Most ordinary people are well aware of their deficiencies and will invariably avert their eyes and look down at their feet in dejection when swiftly scrutinized from head to toe. There is another method as well. Staring fixedly at people’s feet is enough to put them in a flustered state. Are their socks inside out? Is it obvious to everyone that their shoes are made of fake leather? Are they bowlegged? Pigeon-toed? When I was little, I used to listen to an old maid from Hefei tell stories about how she had hunted wolves in the countryside. She said wolves had “copper heads, iron backs, and hemp stalk legs.” That was why they were able to fend off attackers with their heads or their backs but not with their legs. The psychological weaknesses of human beings also seem to be located below the trunk.
There is an army barracks in the neighborhood where the soldiers practice playing the bugle every morning and every evening, without much sign of progress. I have heard other people say that the sound is pure torture, that the exercises grate on the ears, but somehow the noise doesn’t trouble me at all. Great music stands alone as a bequest to the world, belonging like all perfect things to a superhuman realm. It is only in the realm of perfect technique that the ever-tangled and tired human element is allowed a moment of rest. When one’s technique has yet to be perfected, struggle, anxiety, disorder, and adventure predominate, and the human element remains strong. I like the sound of humanity because it’s always about to reveal itself.
The sound of a huqin played by a beginner is like that, too.4 Even when I’m listening to a master perform, I like to hear him tune his instrument. I like those tentative, fragmentary squeals and squawks. Listening to people learning to play the violin, however, is another matter: that sharp, sawtooth wave of sound is too much like the cries of a dying chicken.
One night as I walked along a desolate street, I heard a song about roasting gingko nuts: “Sweet so sweet and sticky, too.” The singer was a boy about ten years old, and he had yet to really learn the song by heart so as to be able to sing it with conviction. I cannot forget that dark, gloomy, long avenue, with the boy kneeling on the ground beside his wok, his chest illuminated by the light of the fire.
A CHRONICLE OF CHANGING CLOTHES
If all the clothing handed down for generations had never been sold to dealers in secondhand goods, their annual sunning in June would be a brilliant and lively affair.1 You would move down the path between bamboo poles, flanked by walls of silk and satin—an excavated corridor within an ancient palace buried deep under the ground. You could press your forehead against brocades shot through with gold thread. When the sun was still out, this thread was warmed by the light, but now it is cold.
People in the past went laboriously about their lives, but all their deeds end up coated in a thick layer of dust. When their descendants air these old clothes, that dust is shaken out and set dancing in the yellow sunlight. If memory has a smell, it is the scent of camphor, sweet and cozy like remembered happiness, sweet and forlorn like forgotten sorrow.
We cannot really imagine the world of the past, so dilatory, so quiet, and so orderly that over the course of three hundred years of Manchu rule, women lacked anything that might be referred to as fashion. Generation after generation of women wore the same sorts of clothes without feeling in the least perturbed. At the beginning of the dynasty, because men were forced to show submission to the conquerors but women were not, women’s clothing still retained the clear imprint of Ming dynasty styles. From the middle of the seventeenth century all the way to the end of the nineteenth, capacious jackets with huge sleeves were perennially popular, giving their wearers an air of statuesque repose. The jacket collar was very low, nearly nonexistent. One wore a “great jacket” on the outside. On informal occasions, the great jacket would be removed to reveal the “middle jacket.” Beneath the middle jacket was a form-fitting “little jacket,” which would be worn to bed and was usually of some enticing shade like peach pink or “liquid red.” Atop this ensemble of three jackets, finally, would be the “Cloud Shoulder Vest Coat” of black silk, with broad edging patterned with stylized “coiled clouds.”
The sloping shoulders, narrow waist, and flat chest of the ideal beauty, who was to be both petite and slender, would disappear under the weight of these layers on layers of clothing. She herself would cease to exist, save as a frame on which clothing could be hung. The Chinese do not approve of women who are overly obtrusive to the eye. Even the most spectacular virtues recorded by history—for example, a woman hacking off her own arm after having been touched by a strange man—however admired by commoners, always produced a vague sense of regretful unease among the educated class, who believed women should not draw attention to themselves, no matter the circumstances. The most spotless of reputations can be tarnished by exposure to the steamy breath of the multitudes. If even women who sought to gain distinction for themselves by such honorable means had their detractors, what of those who, in eccentrically deviating from sartorial norms, did even greater violence to accepted modes and customs?
The strictest formalization prevailed in the matter of the skirt worn outside the trousers when a woman left the house. Usually it was black, but on festive occasions a wife might wear red, and a concubine pink. Widows were restricted to black, but if the husband had been gone more than a few years and the in-laws were still in the house, lake blue or lilac were permissible. The tiny pleats in the skirt were the most exacting test of a woman’s grace and comportment. Ladies of good family walked with such mincing steps on their tiny feet that, although the pleats could not be prevented from moving a little, this motion was restricted to an almost imperceptible quiver of the fabric. A pretty maiden of humble origins, unused to such attire, would almost inevitably create the unfortunate impression of being wind-blown and wave-buffeted. Even more trying were the red skirts worn by brides, which were festooned with innumerable sashes, each half an inch wide and tied at the end with a little bell. The bride was to emit no more than a faint chime as she moved, like the sound of bells on a distant pagoda carried on the wind. It was not until the 1920s, when gathered skirts with a freer and more billowy effect came into style, that these sorts of skirts were done away with entirely.
The slightest deviation in the wearing of furs was also seen as the mark of a parvenu. Each sort of fur had its own season, and the distinctions were extremely precise. In the event of an unseasonably cold October, it was permissible to wear three fur-lined jackets, but in choosing just what sort of fur to wear, one had to consider not the weather itself but the season. In early winter, one wore short-haired furs, starting with Persian lamb, purple lamb shearling, and pearly lamb shearling. Then came the “intermediate furs,” such as silver squirrel, gray squirrel, “grayback,” “foxleg,” “sweet-shoulder,” “Japanese sword,” and finally, in the coldest winter months, the long-haired furs: white fox, blue fox, Western fox, darkling fox, purple sable. Purple sable could only be worn by those with official titles. Middle- to lower-class people were much more prosperous in those days than they are now, for most were able to own a sheepskin coat or a “gold and silver” robe patched together from the cheaper white and yellow fur from the belly and back of a fox.
Young ladies lent a spot of brightness to the gloom of winter months with their “Zhaojun” hoods.2 In historical illustrations, the hood Zhaojun is wearing as she is sent off on horseback to marry the king of the Huns is of the simple, generous Eskimo type made so popular by Hollywood starlets in recent years. But the nineteenth-century version of the Zhaojun hood was absurdly colorful and gay: a black satin cap of the sort worn by men but rimmed with fur and decorated with a large red pompom on top and a pair of pink satin ribbons streaming from the back, at the ends of which were sewn two little gold seals that chimed when they came into contact with each other.
An excessive attention to detail characterized the costume of that era. In modern Western fashion, various unnecessary details cannot be said to have been eliminated, but they always have a purpose: to bring out the blue of one’s eyes, to create the illusion of a larger bosom for those who are deficient in that regard, to make someone look a little taller or a little more petite, to focus attention on the waist, or to conceal the curve of the hips. The details of ancient Chinese clothes, however, were completely pointless. You might say that they were purely ornamental, but then why were even the soles of cotton shoes inscribed with intricate patterns? There was seldom an opportunity for the shoe to be revealed to view, much less the sole. Even the slightly raised edges of the heels were covered with elaborate designs.
Quilted coats came with either “three pipings and three trimmings,” “five pipings and five trimmings,” or “seven pipings and seven trimmings,” and besides all the pipings and trimmings, the front and the hems were studded with sparkling sequins depicting plum and chrysanthemum flowers. The sleeves were finished with embroidered silk borders called “railings,” which came in seven-inch strips and were cut out to form the characters for “fortune” and “longevity.”
This amassing of countless little points of interest, this continual digression, reckless and unreasonable, this dissipation of energy on irrelevant matter, marked the perennial attitude toward life of the leisure class in China. Only the most leisured people in the most leisurely country in the world could appreciate the wonder of these details. It certainly took tremendous amounts of time and artistry to create fine distinctions between a hundred lineal designs that were similar but not the same and just as much effort to appreciate the differences among them.
Chinese fashion designers of old seemed not to have understood that a woman is not a Prospect Garden.3 The heaping together of too many details will inevitably diffuse interest and result in a loss of focus. The history of Chinese fashion consists almost exclusively of the steady elimination of those details.
Things were not as simple as that, of course. There was also the wax and wane of waistlines. The first important change came around the thirty-second or thirty-third year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu.4 The railways, no longer such a novelty, began to take an important place in Chinese life, and the fashions and fancies of the great commercial ports were swiftly introduced into the interior. The size of robes gradually dwindled, and wide trimmings and railings went out of date, replaced by extremely narrow strips of fabric. Flat piping was called “chive edges”; round piping was called “lamp wicking” or “incense stick trim.” In times of political turmoil and social unrest—the Renaissance in Europe, for instance—there will always be a preference for tight-fitting clothes, light and supple, allowing for quickness of movement. In fifteenth-century Italy, clothes were so tight that they had split seams at the elbows, knees, and other joints. During the days when the revolution in China was brewing, Chinese clothes were nearly bursting at the seams. During the short reign of the “Little Emperor,” Puyi, the jacket clung like a sheath to the body. And such were the wonders of the Chinese corset that even then the image of the body beneath the clothing had resembled not a real woman’s body but rather that of a pre-Raphaelite poetic muse. A slim, straight robe would fall straight to the knees, from whence two tiny trouser legs dropped a timorous hint of even tinier lotus shoes attached apologetically to the ground. There was something infinitely pathetic about those pencil-slim trouser legs. In Chinese poetry, “pitiful” is just another way of saying “lovely.” The instinct to protect the opposite sex, always a part of the masculine makeup, was perhaps given additional impetus by a difficult and transitional era in which the new could barely keep up with the destruction of the old. Women, formerly self-possessed in their wide robes and large sleeves, found that it would no longer do to look complacently fortunate. Instead, it was to their advantage to act the damsel in distress.
It was, moreover, an age of extremes. The evils of both our system of government and our system of family life were suddenly exposed. Young intellectuals condemned all that was traditional, even all that was Chinese. Conservatives, shocked out of their complacency, redoubled their efforts to suppress them. Wild controversies raged day in and day out, at home, in the newspapers, and in the entertainment field. Even the perfumed and powdered actors of the so-called civilization plays of whom wealthy concubines were enamored discoursed ad lib on contemporary politics to their onstage lovers, to the accompaniment of gushing tears.5
Late Qing Fashion.
It was a commotion unprecedented in the long history of a land of moderation and harmony. This atmosphere of hysterical excess gave rise to the Sycee collar, a tall, stiff affair that reached nearly as far as the nose and, like the Burmese neck rings made of gold that are piled one atop the other until they are almost a foot tall, forced women to stretch and distend their necks. This frightening and formidable collar was altogether disproportionate to the willowy limbs and delicate torso underneath. The top-heavy, unbalanced effect thus created was one of the signs of that time.
With the founding of the Republic, there was a period in which the superficial signs of enlightenment began to appear everywhere. It was a time when Rousseau’s idealistic notions about human rights were taken very seriously. Students enthusiastically rallied around the right to universal suffrage, demonstrated against filial piety, and advocated the promotion of free love. Experiments were even made in the practice of a purely spiritual, Platonic love, seemingly without much success.
Fashion also exhibited an unprecedented innocence, lightness, and delight in itself. “Trumpet sleeves” fluttered fairylike, affording a view of the pale jade of a woman’s wrists. Abbreviated jackets fit snugly around tiny waists. Ladies of the upper classes went out in gathered skirts but at home were clad in loose-fitting short pants ending at the knee. And because their silk stockings ended at the knee as well, there were inevitably moments of danger when a bit of flesh happened to be revealed in between. Women of a rather risqué temperament would even allow the tassels of the long, pale-colored silk sash used to belt the pants to dangle provocatively from underneath their short jackets.
Much of the inspiration for fashions in the early years of the Republic derived from the West. The collar was first reduced in height and then practically eliminated altogether. Necklines became round, square, heart-shaped, diamond-shaped; white silk scarves became suitable for all seasons; as were white silk stockings with black embroidered designs that crawled up the legs like insects. Social flowers and prostitutes wore spectacles just for the way they looked, since spectacles were a sign of modernity. Such was the extent of the indiscriminate importation of things foreign.
Warlords came and went, each trailing his own dusty wake of officials, government agencies, and legal codes. Fashion tripped behind, trying to catch up, undergoing a thousand transformations. The hem of the jacket, once square, suddenly went round, then just as suddenly V-shaped, before changing once again into a hexagon. In the past, women’s clothes, like jewelry, could always be sold for ready cash, but in the Republican era, pawn shops no longer accepted them, because once they went out of fashion, they were worthless.
Quick alterations in style do not necessarily indicate mental fluidity or a readiness to adopt new ideas. On the contrary. They may reveal instead a generalized apathy, for frustration in other fields may lead to the forced flow of intellectual and artistic energy into the domain of fashion. In a time of political chaos, people were powerless to improve the external conditions governing their lives. But they could influence the environment immediately surrounding them, that is, their clothes. Each of us lives inside our own clothes.
In 1921 women first began to wear long gowns. This garment, called a qipao, or “banner gown,” after the eight military banners under which the Manchus had invaded China in the seventeenth century, had always existed alongside Chinese fashions but went unremarked until the twentieth century. Manchu women, disliking the gown’s lack of feminine grace, had once shown an inclination to switch to the more alluring Chinese-style jacket and trousers but were severely reprimanded by an imperial edict that banned this practice. With the establishment of unity among the various nationalities by the new Republic, women all over the country suddenly began to wear the qipao—not because they wanted to show their loyalty to the Manchu Qing dynasty or their support for its restoration but because they wanted to look like men. From time immemorial, women in China have been identified by the phrase: “hair in three tufts, clothes in two pieces,” while men’s clothes since the Manchu dynasty have had no break at the waist. The difference between one piece or two pieces seems slight, even inconsequential, but women in the 1920s were quite sensitive to differentiation of this sort. They had been immersed in Western cultural influence and intoxicated by its calls for equality between men and women, but the yawning gap between these ideals and the reality that surrounded them was a constant humiliation. Soured and angry, they sought to discard everything that smacked of femininity, even to the point of eliminating womanhood altogether. This was why the first qipao were stiff, cold, and puritanical. The political misfortunes that befell the nation one after another, within and without its borders, could not help leaving the people disillusioned.
