Chapter 3
Old Colour
“LAO KE-LA” REFERS to a specific breed of debonair figures active during the fifties and sixties. These were the keepers of old-style Shanghai fashion in the new society, at a time when holding on to the past was considered radical. The term probably originated with the English word “old colour,” or perhaps “old classic,” a remnant of the colonial culture of Shanghai in the day of the treaty ports. As the lingo of the city incorporated bits and pieces of foreign languages, words became dismembered and, with the passage of time, grew increasingly distant from their original meanings. By the eighties, people who fell into the category of “Old Colour” were virtually extinct. The surviving handful were all fairly advanced in age, their erstwhile shape completely transformed; eventually even the term itself was forgotten. But then something odd happened. In the mid eighties, a new generation of Old Colours emerged quietly upon the scene. Lacking their predecessors’ craving for notoriety, they were not compelled to behave ostentatiously and appeared more easygoing. It was not even easy to spot them in the crowd. Where might one go to find such a specimen?
These Old Colours — when everyone was out buying a stereo, they were listening to old phonographs. When Nikon and Minolta cameras equipped with auto-focus features were all the rage, they were busy fiddling with their vintage Rolleiflex 120s. They sported wind-up watches, drank coffee brewed in small pots, shaved with old-fashioned razor blades and shaving cream, took great delight in antique slide projectors, and wore large leather shoes shaped like boats. When you saw these markings, you could be certain that you had found one. Then, having found one, you couldn’t help but notice just how crude and boorish the so-called fashionable were in comparison. The rush to be trendy left no time for elegance or refinement. One was driven about by a succession of waves. Speed and quantity were all that mattered, and the result was that corners were cut and things got done in a slipshod manner and had eventually to be discarded. You could tell this by looking at the clothing shops where advertisements for markdowns were posted all over the walls, shelves, and counters — even the stalls outside. Before the last season’s clothes had sold out, they were two steps behind the latest fashion, which had already arrived. What choice was there but to run constant sales and markdowns?
In this crude and uncultured fashion world, the “Old Colours” were the stewards in charge of safekeeping refinement. They were the only ones paying attention to the things that mattered; though they never advertised themselves or talked about what they were doing, they had their feet firmly planted on the ground. They took things one step at a time; men of action, they let others do the talking. They didn’t even have a name. The term “Old Colour” was given to them by the few who remembered the old days, but it never gained wide circulation. A small minority called them Western-style “Yuppies,” but that never caught on either. And so they remained nameless, silently tilling their little plot of land. We could, if we chose, refer to them as nostalgic “lovers of the past,” although they were all young and didn’t have a past to love per se. But they had all been to the Bund and seen, riding on the ferry, what it looked like from out on the water: there they saw the ramparts formed by the Georgian buildings, the Gothic bell tower with its pointed steeple, and the dark forbidding windows staring back at them — all of which sent them down the tunnel of time. They had also climbed up to the rooftops to release pigeons and fly kites, and there, looking out over the sea of rooftops, a few of which jutted out like sails, felt as if they were navigating against the currents of time. Besides these, the ivy crawling up the sides of the walls and the sounds of someone playing the piano in the Western-style house next door also came to feed their nostalgia.
Wang Qiyao knew one of these “Old Colours.” He was twenty-six years old, so calling him an “Old Colour” was a bit ironic, a way of emphasizing his youth. A gym teacher at a local middle school, he normally dressed in sweatpants, and his hair looked like the bristle end of a scrub brush. He had a dark complexion from years of working outdoors. At school he kept to himself and never fraternized with his colleagues. Who would have guessed that he was an accomplished flamenco guitar player with a collection of more than a hundred jazz records? This “Old Colour” lived in a traditional longtang in Hongkou, with parents who were honest, hardworking government employees and watched what they spent; his sister had left home to get married. He himself occupied the third-floor tingzijian: his palmwood cot lay on the floor along with his record player. As soon as he entered his room, he would take off his shoes and, sitting on the bare floor, enter into his own little universe. Outside his dormer window was a slanted portion of the roof. Occasionally, during the summer, he would climb out the window with a backpack, spread a mat out over the roof tiles, and, tying himself to the windowsill with a rope around his waist, spend the evening lying outside. Looking up, he would see a sprinkling of stars suspended in the deep blue sky above. He could faintly make out the rumbling sounds of the machinery from a factory in the distance, and the smoke from the factory’s smokestack billowed white against the sky. The scattered sounds of the night seemed to have sunk down to earth, while he himself had dissolved into the air, empty of thoughts and desires.
Old Colour was still without a girlfriend. Although he got on quite well with some of the girls in his regular circle of friends, things had never developed past the point of ordinary friendship. As there was nothing further he needed, he had no particular aspirations and was content just to have a job. However, he recognized that he had only himself to rely on, and this made him approach things with a positive attitude. And, though he lacked long-term goals, he did have some short-term plans. This meant that, while never vexed by major problems, he was struck by the occasional fit of inexplicable depression. For these depressions he found an antidote in his collection of old jazz records from the twenties. The sound of the saxophone, mixed with the hissing sound of the needle against the vinyl, gave him a feeling of an almost palpable intimacy. Old Colour was a bit old-fashioned: nothing new suited his taste, because to him it lacked substance and smacked of the nouveau riche; but then neither was he a fan of things that were too old, which would have felt antiquated and dismal. A hundred years was just about enough. He longed for a time back when, like the sprinkling of stars in the night sky, only the elite prospered — for a European-style house on a smooth cobblestone road, and the spiraling sounds of the phonograph twisting their way up through an otherwise perfect silence. This was, when all was said and done, what all those old jazz records stood for.
His young friends were all modern individuals at the cutting edge of fashion, quite the opposite of Old Colour. When Shanghai inaugurated its first tennis court, his friends were the first customers standing in line; when a certain luxury hotel opened up a bowling alley, they were the first to try it out. All of them were college classmates of Old Colour from the phys-ed department; they prided themselves on their athletic spirit and prowess, which happened to be right in tune with worldwide fashion. Just look at the most popular brand names of the day — Nike and Puma — you could see that they were all athletic apparel, whereas brands like Pierre Cardin had long been on the way down. This cohort would appear on the streets on motorcycles, a girl seated at the back with her hair streaming down from her helmet, and you could feel the rush of wind as they flew past. They were the wildest ones on the dance floor at the discos. They always managed to get hold of a foreigner or two to give their gatherings an international flavor — which, incidentally, gained them entry into all kinds of exclusive places where only international guests were welcome.