by Anyi, Wang
Mrs. Jiang saw her daughter’s illness as the perfect opportunity to assert her own rights. Strutting into the apartment with an authoritative mien, she went straight into Jiang Lili’s bedroom, completely ignoring the rustic crowd outside. Within less than five minutes, she had already listed more than a dozen things that she thought were wrong about the household and voiced an equal number of suggestions. Her criticisms negated virtually everything as it presently was, and even she knew that her suggestions were impossible to carry out. Initially, Jiang Lili tried her best to put up with her, but her mother kept on pushing. Taking her daughter’s silence as acquiescence, Mrs. Jiang became even more animated; she flailed her arms about, declaring that she was going to change the bedding and give her daughter a proper bath. She looked as if she was getting ready to revamp their entire living situation. Jiang Lili had no patience to argue with her: she simply flung the bedside lamp across the room. Emboldened by the commotion, Jiang Lili’s Shandong mother-in-law rushed inside to find the room in total chaos. The glass thermos had been shattered, the medicine spilled all over the floor; Mrs. Jiang, her face ghostly pale, was still trying to reason with the patient as if she were a normal person, but Jiang Lili kept throwing everything within her reach, including her blanket and pillows. The mother-in-law grabbed the blanket and, throwing it around Jiang Lili, tried to restrain her that way, while Jiang Lili struggled in her arms like a threshing flail. She had no recourse but to urge Mrs. Zhang to go home and come back after Jiang Lili had calmed down. Jiang Lili collapsed the moment her mother was out the door. After that incident, her mother-in-law made a point of clearing all visitors with Jiang Lili before letting them in.
When Mr. Cheng and Wang Qiyao went to see Jiang Lili, they were turned away at the door. Mrs. Zhang came outside to explain that Jiang Lili was not receiving visitors because she was weak and needed her sleep. The old lady felt so badly about turning them away that she could barely bring herself to look them in the eyes, as if this was somehow her fault. Although neither of them dared say so out loud, each had an idea about why Jiang Lili refused to see them, and both were vexed. Jiang Lili’s decision not to let them in was a form of reproach—an eternal condemnation from which they would never be free. Neither dared to look into the old lady’s eyes—they even avoided one another’s eyes as they parted hastily and went back to their respective apartments.
On two separate occasions after that Mr. Cheng and Wang Qiyao paid visits individually to Jiang Lili’s house. Mr. Cheng was rebuffed a second time. After leaving in disappointment, he walked east on Huaihai Road until he came upon a bustling wineshop, with common laborers sitting around square softwood tables. Outside the entrance was a pot of “stinky tofu” simmering in a pot of boiling oil. Unable to resist the aroma of food and wine, he took a seat at one of the tables and ordered a small bottle of rice wine and a plate of shredded tripe. The others sitting at his table were strangers, and each ordered basically the same thing—one or two dishes and a bottle of wine. As they ate, the conversation of the party at the next table grew louder and louder. Once the rice wine had got into his system, Mr. Cheng felt warm and his eyes began to sting; before he knew it, tears were trickling down his face. No one around him seemed to notice. The smoke from the steaming wok enveloped everyone at the table in a hot, oily mist; no one could see clearly, and Mr. Cheng was free to wallow in his misery.
At this very moment, Wang Qiyao was sitting on the side of Jiang Lili’s bed. Wang Qiyao had arrived at the mouth of the longtang leading to Jiang Lili’s just as Mr. Cheng left it, and Jiang Lili had asked her in.
Wang Qiyao’s first impression when she entered the bedroom and saw Jiang Lili was how much better she looked compared to the last time. Jiang Lili’s hair had been carefully combed back behind her ears, she was wearing a freshly laundered white shirt, her cheeks were a rosy red, and she was sitting up in bed, propped up on a pile of pillows. Instead of greeting Wang Qiyao, she turned her back to her. Wang Qiyao sat down on the edge of the bed, wondering what to say; Jiang Lili’s profile showed clearly that she was crying. The curtains were half-drawn and the westering sunlight crept in, gilding her hair, clothes, and the blankets, giving the room a melancholic air. After a long interval, Jiang Lili suddenly laughed, “Don’t you think the three of us are ridiculous?”
Wang Qiyao, at a loss for words, gave a little laugh in response.
Hearing this, Jiang Lili turned around and gazed at her. “He was here earlier, but I wouldn’t let him in.”
“He really feels badly,” explained Wang Qiyao.
Jiang Lili’s face tightened. She exclaimed indignantly, “What the hell do I care if he feels bad?”
Wang Qiyao did not dare to respond. It suddenly dawned on her that Jiang Lili’s rosy cheeks, which were by now bright red, were the sign of fever. She extended her hand to feel her friend’s forehand. Jiang Lili pushed it away violently, but from the touch of her hand Wang Qiyao knew that she was burning up. Sitting up in bed, Jiang Lili leaned over and pulled a loose-leaf binder from the drawer of the desk next to the bed and flung it at Wang Qiyao. Inside were lines of handwritten poetry. Wang Qiyao recognized the poems as Jiang Lili’s and was immediately taken back to their high school days. Those pages could have been burned to ash and she would have still recognized the flowery language—it had Jiang Lili’s name written all over it. But as maudlin as they were, the words still exuded a touching sincerity. There is something about great romantic poems that always awakens nausea in the reader—a combination of sincerity and exaggeration that leaves the reader at a loss as to whether he should laugh or cry. Wang Qiyao had never been able to stand this kind of poetry, and that was why she didn’t want to be close to Jiang Lili. However, staring at those poems that moment, she was overcome by tears. She realized that even if this had been a show, the way Jiang Lili had invested her entire life into it had made it all real. Behind every line of poetry, whether good or bad, she could see the shadow of Mr. Cheng. Jiang Lili snatched the folder from Wang Qiyao’s hands and, quickly flipping through the pages, read aloud the most absurd sections, often bursting into laughter before she could finish each line. Her mother-in-law peeked through the crack in the door to see what all the commotion was about. Jiang Lili laughed so hard that she could no longer sit straight and doubled over on the blankets.
“What do you make of this one?” Jiang Lili’s eyes glimmered with sharp brightness and her voice took on a shrill new tone. Wang Qiyao couldn’t help feeling apprehensive; she went to take the binder from Jiang Lili’s hands so that she wouldn’t be able to read any more. But Jiang Lili resisted, and in the course of their struggle she even scratched the back of Wang Qiyao’s hand, drawing blood. But even then neither would give up; Wang Qiyao insisted on taking the binder away from her and even pushed her back down on the bed. As she struggled, Jiang Lili’s laughter eventually dissolved into tears, which flowed copiously down her cheeks from behind her glasses.
“You’re just the same as him! You both want to hurt me! You both say you want to see how I’m doing, but all you do is provoke me!”
Stung by the injustice of her remarks, Wang Qiyao momentarily forgot that she was talking to a dying woman.
“Well, you can rest easy because I will never marry him!” Wang Qiyao shouted in agitation.
Jiang Lili too became agitated. “Go ahead and marry him. Why should I care? What sort of person do you take me for, anyway?”
“Jiang Lili . . .” Wang Qiyao spoke through her tears. “It’s not worth it. Don’t throw your life away for a man. How could you be so foolish?”
Jiang Lili’s tears were coming down in a steady stream. “Well, let me tell you, Wang Qiyao. . . . It’s the two of you who have ruined my life, totally ruined it!”
Wang Qiyao couldn’t suppress the desire to console her; she reached out to hug her.
“Jiang Lili, do you think I don’t know? Do you think he doesn’t know?”
At first Jiang Lili tried to push her away, but Wa
ng Qiyao pulled her back into her arms and held her tight. They embraced and both were crying so hard that they could barely breathe.
“Wang Qiyao, I have had such wretched luck . . . such wretched luck!” Jiang Lili sobbed.
“If your luck is wretched, then how about me?”
All their pent-up bitterness surged up from deep inside them. But, alas, all of that was water under the bridge, and there was no way anything could be undone.
Neither knew how long they sat crying and hugging like that; their bodies ached from so much crying. Eventually, it was the smell of Jiang Lili’s breath—a sweet fishiness that carried the stench of rot—that reminded Wang Qiyao that her friend was dying. Swallowing her grief and holding back her tears, she let go of Jiang Lili and gently laid her back down in bed before going to get a hot towel to wipe her face. Jiang Lili continued to cry; there seemed to be no end to her river of tears. By then it was starting to get dark outside. At the wineshop, Mr. Cheng had drunk himself into a stupor and was slumped over on the table, unable to get up. He heard the sound of the ferry in the distance and, in his drunken daze, thought he had boarded and was gradually pulling away from the shore. He could almost see the vast ocean, boundless, as it spread out around him.
The exultations and lamentations of 1965 were all like this, grand in an insignificant way. Tempests in a teacup, they yet had a beginning and an end, and were enough to take up a whole lifetime. The noises they made were petty and weak; even exerting their greatest effort, they were unable to make the sound carry. Only when holding one’s breath could one hear the faint buzzing and droning, but each sound was enough to last a lifetime. Gaining strength in numbers, they converge into a large mass hovering over the city sky. They form what is known as a “silent sound,” which sings its melody above the raucous noises of the city. One calls it a “silent sound” because it is tremendously dense and enormously large, its size and density equal to if not exceeding its “silence.” The same method is found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, where shading and texture in rocks and mountains are created by using light strokes of ink. And so, this “silent sound” is, in truth, the greatest of all sounds, because it is where sound itself begins.
Just one week after their meeting, Jiang Lili’s spleen ruptured and she died of a massive hemorrhage. At the time of her death she was surrounded by Old Zhang, her three sons, and the whole family from Shandong. She had been in a coma before she died and did not leave any last words. At the factory where she used to work, a memorial service was held in which she was remembered for her courage in breaking off relations with her family from the exploiting class and for never giving up her dream of joining the Communist Party. Neither her parents nor her brother attended the memorial service. Apparently they realized that their presence would constitute a stain on Jiang Lili’s lifelong ideals. But her family did hold all of the traditional funerary rites, from the “initial seven,” performed over the first seven days after her death, to the “double seven.” The “double seven” was held every seventh day, ending with the seventh ceremony, which took place on the forty-ninth day after her passing. During each ceremony, the family would sit together, sometimes in silence and sometimes quietly talking, creating an atmosphere of understanding and forgiveness. Jiang Lili, however, was gone forever and fated never to share in the tranquility of their communion.
Mr. Cheng and Wang Qiyao did not attend the memorial service; they actually did not find out about Jiang Lili’s death until after it had taken place. By the time they learned of her death, they seemed to have gotten over the terrible grief they had been feeling and were more relieved than anything else: Jiang Lili was now released from her pain. They themselves had nothing worth celebrating, but they were the kind of people who had grown accustomed to making concessions to reality. They knew how to be satisfied with whatever cards life dealt them, unlike Jiang Lili, for whom life was a constant struggle, because she always refused to conform, always stubbornly insisting on doing things her own way, all the way to the bitter end. The two decided, each without letting the other know, to pay special homage to Jiang Lili, but both chose the same day to carry out their memorial, waiting until Tomb-Sweeping Festival of the following year. Mr. Cheng went alone to Longhua Temple and swept the ground in front of the vault where Jiang Lili’s ashes were kept. Wang Qiyao waited until the middle of the night when everyone was asleep before she burned a cut-out of spirit paper for her lost friend. Although she did not believe in such superstitious practices—neither did Jiang Lili—it provided small fraction of comfort in an otherwise helpless situation. What else could she have done?
At the memorial service Jiang Lili’s mother-in-law’s incessant wailing almost drowned out the eulogies delivered by the factory leaders. Her weeping evoked a chorus of answering tears; the mournful wails of the family from the countryside gave the entire service a feeling of genuine sorrow.
All That Remains Is the Tower Whence It Flew
Mr. Cheng was among of the first batch of people to commit suicide in the summer of 1966. Looking back on the previous year, all the nonstop merriment seemed like a bad omen; when the cup overflows, disaster follows. But the coming storm was something that took most city dwellers completely unaware. Only a few people of the older generation sensed what was to come and had been quietly brewing. Thus one might say that the gaiety of 1965 was only enjoyed by those common city dwellers who did not sense the danger in the air. To them, the catastrophe of the following summer came out of the blue. Strangely enough, the oleander blossoms in the longtang that summer were as gorgeous as they had ever been; the gardenias, magnolias, tuberoses, impatiens, and roses were in bloom everywhere, filling the air with their fragrance. Only the pigeons were on edge. They would rise abruptly from the rooftops, tracing circles in the sky before returning briefly to their rooftop perches, only to fly away again in panic. They stayed in flight until their wings were nearly broken and blood almost ran from their eyes; they had witnessed too much. No tragic scene—whether causes or consequences—escaped their eyes.
Longtang alleys of all shapes and sizes ran all over the city, and it was during the summer of 1966 that the red- and black-tiled rooftops riddled with protruding dormer windows and concrete terraces were all pried open suddenly, their secrets laid bare for everyone to see. These secrets, conciliatory or compromising, damp and moldy, reeking of rat piss, were in the process of rotting away, destined to become so much fertilizer to provide nourishment for new lives—because even the most insignificant of lives must pay the price of sacrifice. These secrets, light but copious, could creep between the bricks and through the cracks in the walls, dispersing throughout the city’s air. But before anyone could notice the stench of their decay, they would already have transformed themselves, giving rise to new life. Now, when what lay underneath all those rooftops was revealed, the scene was shocking. Dubious tales, unveiled, went on to pollute the city’s air. One such tale told of a headstrong girl who, failing to heed the family rules, was locked away for twenty years. By the time she was released, she could no longer walk, her hair had grown gray, and her eyes could no longer withstand the sunlight. Who could have imagined that hidden beneath these rooftops lay private prisons, no better than rat holes, where prisoners scurried around in the dark?
This was also the setting in 1966 for the Great Cultural Revolution, which played out in the streets of the longtang of Shanghai. The revolution was a force that swept away everything in its path; it had the power to touch people down to their very souls. It penetrated into the hidden hearts of the city. From this point forward there was no place to hide, everything was caught in its grip. Those hidden hearts had largely relied upon the cover of darkness provided by the city in order to survive. Although they existed in secret, unknown to most, they were the greater part of what kept the city alive—its life-force. They were like the submerged portion of an iceberg. The city’s brilliant lights that sparkled in the night, and the bustling activities carried out durin
g its day, all had their foundations in these secrets; these secrets were the fuel that fed the flames of the life on the surface, only no one saw them. Well, now that the curtains have been torn open, these hearts are already half dead. Don’t just look at the dark, corrupted side of these hearts, for within they are shy, sensitive, and full of humility; they can endure suffering but not being exposed. You could almost call this a sense of dignity.
That summer all of the city’s secrets were laid bare, paraded throughout the streets. Due to the size and variety of the population, the secrets accumulated over the previous hundred years in this city exceeded what most cities accrue in a thousand. Just one secret wouldn’t have amounted to anything, but, put together, the whole was massive—a huge secret. These were secrets that could not be spoken, they were secrets that could not even be revealed through tears; these secrets were the beginning—and the end—to so many songs of joy and sorrow. Look, if you will, at the shattered glass vessels, the smashed antique porcelain, and the books, phonograph records, high-heeled shoes, and store signs all going up in flames! Look at the mahogany furniture, men and women’s clothing, pianos and violins that, virtually overnight, ended up piled high at all the second-hand stores! These are the leftover carcasses of those secrets, the fossilized remains of people’s private lives. You could also see the torn photographs scattered about the garbage cans; the torn faces in the ripped pictures looked like ghosts of the wrongly accused. In the end, actual corpses did appear, strewn along the crowded city streets.
Once all the secrets were exposed, the sediments that had been dug up along with them floated through the air, and gossip proliferated. The stories of illicit passions that we heard were only half true. And although we only half believe them, that does not stop us from perpetuating them. The alleys, lanes, streets, and roads of the city were all enveloped in a living hell. The gossip that was released had been chewed over by the toughest of tongues, which twisted and warped the words until they were unrecognizable even to the speakers themselves. You should never wholeheartedly believe the gossip you hear, but neither should you completely discount such rumors; because underneath the sensationalism there is always a grain of truth. That grain of truth is, in fact, quite simple, because it always stems from human nature—it all depends on how you listen to what you hear.