Written on Water, page 9
There came a day when youthful idealism could no longer maintain itself in the face of unremitting disaster. Fashions began to retract, taking on a curt, tightened look. Trumpet sleeves narrowed into cylinders. By 1930 they had risen to the elbow, while at the same time the high collar began to make a comeback. Unlike the old Sycee collar, which had at least the virtue of cutting across the cheekbones diagonally in order to give even the most recalcitrant of faces a pleasing melon-seed shape, the new collar was like a tube pressing under the neck, providing even young women whose skin had yet to sag with a double chin. Such a collar is simply unforgivable. But it did serve quite adequately as a symbol of the deliberate, reasoned sensuality so prevalent in the atmosphere ten years ago: an upright collar separating a goddesslike head from the voluptuous and sensual body far below. This was parody; this was the mad laughter that comes on the heels of despair.
The double-breasted and belted military-style greatcoat so popular in the West at the time was perfectly suited to the sad, shrill mood in China. Chinese women, moderate to the last, softened this gallant look by wearing the masculine overcoat over a floor-length gown of sleek velveteen, with scandalously long slits up the thighs, revealing long pants of the same fabric, edged with shiny silver lace. Perhaps the person inside the outfit also represented a similarly strange combination: aggressively idealistic on the outside but a thoroughgoing materialist when it came to the point.
In recent years, the most important alteration in fashion has been the elimination of sleeves (a gradual and apparently quite dangerous procedure, undertaken with the utmost of caution over the course of twenty years). At the same time, collars became much shorter, hemlines rose, and all ornamental features such as pipings and trimmings were done away with entirely, replaced first by cloth-covered “butterfly buttons” and then by hidden metal clasps. In short, the end result was subtraction: the stripping away of all ornaments, whether necessary or unnecessary. What remained was a tight sleeveless sheath, showing the neck, the arms, and the part of the leg below the knee.
What is important now is the person: the qipao became nothing more than a foil faithfully setting off the contours of the figure. The garments of the era before the revolution were altogether different. The individual was of secondary concern; what mattered was the creation of a poetic sense of line, an abstract form. Thus it was that the female form was conventionalized: it was only when women took off their clothes that one could become aware of any differences among them.
Fashion in China is not an organized, planned business venture. There are no great fashion houses like Lelong’s and Schiaparelli’s in Paris that monopolize the market and exert influence throughout the world of white people. Our tailors lack initiative of their own and can only follow the vast, unaccountable waves of communal fancy that make themselves manifest from time to time. And it is for this reason that Chinese fashions can be more reliably read as representing the will of the people.
It is impossible to verify who really starts these fashions, because the Chinese have very little respect for copyrights and the originators do not appear to mind so very much anyway, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. Shanghai attributes the recent arrival of medium-length sleeves—sometimes called three-quarter sleeves—to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong people, just as eager to shift responsibility on to someone else, insist that they came from Shanghai.
The billowy return of sleeves heralds a revival of formalism. These latest developments are moving in the direction of tradition. Traditional detail can never be reclaimed, but to the extent possible, traditional lines most certainly may. Utilized in a suitably dynamic manner, they can be adapted to the demands of modern environments. Those who would stretch the front of the qipao to apronlike proportions, for example, effectively suggest the hidden allure of spending time in the kitchen, the implications of which are worth pondering.
The modern history of men’s clothing has been less eventful. There was only a very brief period—between 1915 and 1919 or 1920—when men’s clothes paid a modicum of attention to foppish adornment, edging robes with little “as-you-wish” patterns and allowing for the use of fabrics usually reserved for women’s clothes. The people of that era, however, felt this to be a strange and rather unsettling phenomenon. Today, Western-style men’s suits are cautious and colorless, adhering as closely and as conservatively as possible to the established image of a foreign gentleman. This is notwithstanding the fact that even Chinese-style garments have been trapped for many years within a limited palette of gray, coffee brown, and dark blue and restricted as well by extremely monotonous fabrics and patterns. Men enjoy far more freedom than women, but purely on account of this single and all too conspicuous unfreedom, I would not want to be a man.
Clothes seem to be quite inconsequential. The ancient hero Liu Bei had this to say on the matter of clothes: “Brothers are like one’s hands and feet; wives and children are like clothes that can be put on and taken off.”6 But it will be very difficult indeed for women to reach the point where husbands are likened to clothes. One Western author (was it Bernard Shaw?) once complained: “Most women put more careful thought and consideration into the choice of their hats than their choice of husbands.” Even the most heartless of women will wax passionate when she starts to speak of “last year’s quilted silk gown.”
Until the eighteenth century, men in both China and abroad were still able to wear bright colors such as red and green. The proscription of color in men’s clothing seems to be a signal characteristic of modern civilization. Putting aside the question of whether this proscription has negative psychological effects, one can declare at the very least that this is an unnecessary privation. Life in civilized society has many different kinds of necessary privations, and it seems to me that we should relent a little when it comes to these smaller items, as compensation. One might make another argument as well: if men were more interested in clothing, perhaps they would become a bit more complacent, a bit less inclined to use various schemes and stratagems to attract the attention and admiration of society and sacrifice the well-being of the nation and the people in the process of securing their own prestige. Of course, to argue that the task of bringing peace to the world could depend on men dressing up in gaudy splendor would obviously be somewhat ludicrous. Even an official wearing a brocade sash underneath his bright red python-patterned ceremonial robes can still play havoc with court protocols. It should be noted by way of reference, however, that in the rational utopia of the great prognosticator H.G. Wells, male and female citizens alike wear sheer, brightly colored clothes and cloaks made of a gauzy material.
1930s
By force of habit, a man dressed even slightly out of the mold inevitably strikes one as strange. Wearing an overcoat over a Chinese-style robe is one example; it would be better instead to add another quilted jacket or a fur robe on top, despite the added bulk. Once when I was on the streetcar I saw a young man, perhaps a student or perhaps a clerk, who had tailored himself a rather tight mohair robe with green checks over a rice-colored background. He was wearing women’s stockings, striped red and green, and an exquisitely carved fake ivory pipe hung from his mouth, although there was no tobacco inside the bowl. He sucked on the pipe for a moment, removed it from his mouth, took it apart piece by piece, put it back together, and then placed it back in his mouth to continue sucking, his face radiant with satisfaction. At first, I found him ridiculous, but then I thought to myself: why not, if this was what gave him pleasure. An autumnal chill as dusk approaches and vendors at a vegetable market prepare to pack up and go home. Fish scraps and pale green husks of sweet corn litter the ground. A child on a bicycle dashes down the street just to show off. He lets out a shout, lets go of the handlebars, and effortlessly shoots past, swaying atop the seat. And in that split second, everyone in the street watches him pass, transfixed by an indefinable admiration. Might it be that in this life that moment of letting go is the very loveliest?
Liveliness.
(1) A society lady, dripping with liveliness from head to toe;
(2) Hong Kong coed, slender and jaunty;
(3) a Shanghai coed, pale, plump, and energetic.
Hong Kong.
(1) Darling wife of an aristocratic gentleman;
(2) social butterfly;
(3) Negro blood;
(4) Indian businessman.
Local Colors.
(1) Cantonese girl;
(2) flighty Shanghainese girl;
(3) Ningbo housewife;
(4) Cantonese woman;
(5) Shaoxing secretary.
LOVE
This is true.
There was once a daughter of a tolerably well-off family in the country who was very lovely and sought out by many matchmakers, although nothing had come of their efforts. That year, she was only fifteen or sixteen years old. One spring evening, she stood by the back door, hands resting on a peach tree. She remembered that she was wearing a moon-white tunic. She had seen the young man who lived across the way, but they had never spoken. He walked toward her, came to a halt close by, and said softly: “So you’re here, too?” She did not say anything, and he did not say more. They stood for a moment and then went their separate ways.
That was all.
Later, the girl was abducted by a swindler in the family and sold as a concubine in some far-off town, then sold several times more, passing through any number of trials and ordeals. When she was old, she still remembered that incident and often spoke of that evening in spring, the peach tree by the back door, that young man.
When you meet the one among the millions, when amid millions of years, across the borderless wastes of time, you happen to catch him or her, neither a step too early nor a step too late, what else is there to do except to ask softly: “So you’re here, too?”
SPEAKING OF WOMEN
Westerners call mean and treacherous women “catty.” I recently came across a little English pamphlet called Cats dedicated to insulting women, even if you could not really say the contents were completely unreasonable. Various aphorisms about women of this sort tend to be scattered here and there and thus difficult to find. The virtue of this pamphlet is that it compiles them all in one place. I have selected and translated a portion of these sayings. Readers will no doubt react to them, whether with anger, amusement, or gratification. Men who think themselves fair-minded will probably render “even-handed judgments,” comment that some of them “are a little extreme,” or opine that “they’re true enough, but only of a minority of women, and ought to serve as a negative example for the rest,” and so on. In short, I have yet to encounter anyone who doesn’t have an opinion on this topic, myself included. Shall we have a look at the original text first and then discuss it afterward?
Mr. Anonymous, the author of Cats, solemnly states in his preface that “nothing that is said in what follows applies to you personally, dear readers, and if you happen to be male, well, it doesn’t apply to your wife, your sister, your daughter, your grandmothers, or your mother-in-law, either.”
He stresses repeatedly that his motivation in writing the pamphlet was not to avenge his own disappointments in love but acknowledges later that it may serve as a way to vent anger, for “a man who has been quarreling with his wife can read the book before bedtime and derive from it a measure of comfort.”
He says: “The material form of the woman is a marvel of rationality. That her spiritual constitution is rather less so is only to be expected. We cannot ask for too much.”
“When a man falls truly in love, the depth and passion of his feeling are far superior to those of a woman. On the other hand, when a woman hates someone, she is able to hold a grudge for much longer than a man.”
“The only difference between women and dogs is that dogs cannot be spoiled, do not wear jewelry, and—thank heaven!—cannot talk.”
“In the final accounting, every man ends up spending his money on a woman.”
“A man can flirt with the lowest of bar girls and not lose his standing as a gentleman. But a woman of high station cannot so much as blow a kiss at a postman without fatal consequences to her good name. From this, we can only deduce that men cannot compare with woman in at least one respect: they need not worry when bending below the waist, because they can always straighten back up.”
“Generally speaking, a woman needs less stimulation in her everyday life than a man. This is why a man who strays from the straight and narrow during his day of leisure in order to rejuvenate himself, soothe his cares, assuage his annoyances, or realize unaccomplished ambitions ought to be forgiven.”
“For the vast majority of women, the meaning of ‘love’ lies in ‘being loved.’”
“Men like to love women, but sometimes they also like women to love them.”
“If you promise to help a woman do something, she will do anything for you in return. But if you have already helped her, she will do nothing to return the favor. This is why one ought to agree to oblige any number of different women. You may perhaps receive something in return for your efforts that way. Women have only one kind of gratitude, which is gratitude in advance.”
“A woman may be wearing an outfit that looks lovely to all the men who see her, but in the eyes of a member of her own sex, the fabric is only ‘one shilling three pence a yard’ and could hardly be called beautiful.”
“Time is money, which is why the more time women spend in front of their mirrors, the more money they must spend in a boutique.”
“If you don’t flirt with a woman, she’ll say you’re not a real man. If you do, she’ll say you aren’t a gentleman.”
“Men boast of victories; women boast of retreats. But the ‘enemy’ has usually attacked on account of her own provocation.”
“Women dislike kind men but see themselves as remarkably efficient reformatories—as soon as they marry, their husbands will no doubt be transformed into saints.”
“Only men have the right to propose marriage, and as long as this tradition persists, marriage will never be a level playing field, because women will always be able to exploit the fact that they once acquiesced to your demands and thus retain the upper hand in any given domestic squabble. This is, in fact, why women will always cede the right to propose marriage to men.”
“Many women will never be happy until they can do something that isn’t right. Marriage, apparently, isn’t wrong enough.”
“Women often forget this simple point: their entire education has consisted of teaching them to resist temptation—and yet they spend their entire lives doing their very best to attract it.”
“Modern marriage is a form of insurance that was invented by women.”
“If women were paid royalties for the stories they invent off the top of their heads, they would all be rich by now.”
“If you ask a woman an unexpected question, her first answer will probably be true, and her second will be fiction.”
“A woman will often argue a point with great ferocity, until she is assured of victory over her husband. But in speaking with a third party, she will cite her husband’s position as an article of incontrovertible truth. Pity the husband . . .”
“Two women can never make friends as quickly as two men, because there are more secrets between them.”
“Women are really very fortunate: no surgeon will ever be able to dissect their consciences.”
“When a woman judges the quality of a man’s character, her sole standard is the way the man has treated her and her alone. This is why a woman is capable of saying: ‘I don’t believe this man is a murderer. He never murdered me!’”
“Men make mistakes. Women endlessly contemplate the mistakes they are planning to make.”
“Women don’t consider the future. At the same time, they do their best to forget the past. Heaven only knows what they have left to think about!”
“When a woman sets her mind on living thriftily, she is able to forgo the necessities of life to a truly frightening degree!”
“If a woman tells you a secret, do not under any circumstances tell another woman—because it’s almost certain that another woman has already told her!”
“No matter what favor you plan to do for a woman, she will believe that you really ought to lend a hand. No matter what you actually do for a woman, she will never thank you for doing it. No matter what trivial thing you forget to do for a women, she will curse you forever for not having done it. The family is not a charitable institution.”
“Most women never think before they speak. Men think but don’t speak!”
“If she decides not to read a novel for a second time because she already knows the story, she’ll never make a good wife. If all she cares about is novelty and has no interest in style or substance, once she’s surveyed her husband’s character and come to understand his weaknesses and peculiarities, she’ll begin to find him oppressively dreary and fall out of love with him forever.”
