With that, he walked over to the chest and pulled the wooden box out of the drawer. Unable to lie still any longer, Wang Qiyao got up from the bed to take back her possession. Long Legs ducked out of the way and held the box behind his back, out of her reach.
“What are you worried about, Auntie? Didn’t you say you didn’t have anything?”
Now it was Wang Qiyao’s turn to feel anxious. She began to perspire and screamed at him, “Put it down! You thief!”
“If you call me a thief, then that’s what I am!” A shameless, even brutal, look came over his face.
She tried to twist the box out of his hand, and he let her struggle all she wanted, but he wasn’t letting go. By then he had got a sense of the box’s weight. Excitement swelled inside him because now he knew that he had not gone through all this trouble in vain.
Anger contorted Wang Qiyao’s face. Gnashing her teeth, she cursed him. “You wretched thief! You’re a thief! You think I believed all that garbage you tell everyone? I saw through you a long time ago — I just didn’t want to embarrass you!”
The words made Long Legs swallow his smugness. He put down the box and grabbed hold of Wang Qiyao’s neck.
“Say it again! I dare you!” he screamed.
“Thief!” cried Wang Qiyao.
Long Legs wrapped his large hands around Wang Qiyao’s throat. Look at how thin her neck is, just skin and bones, it’s enough to make me sick! Wang Qiyao struggled to break free of his grip, cursing him all the while. His grip tightened. He looked at her face: so ugly and desiccated. Her hair was brittle and the roots were gray, but the rest was dark and shiny with hair dye — how comical! Wang Qiyao’s lips quivered, but no sounds came out. Long Legs hadn’t finished getting his kicks. He had exerted only a fraction of his strength and her neck was too skinny for his hands to dig into. That feeling of excitement rushed into his heart again and he squeezed tighter and tighter until the neck grew soft and lost its elasticity. He sighed a little regretfully, gently put her down, and released his grip.
Too impatient even to take a second look at her, he turned his attention to the box. The floral engravings on it indicated that it was highclass and expensive — a prized object. It didn’t take much effort for Long Legs to pry the lock off with his screwdriver and get the box open. He couldn’t help being a bit disappointed, even though it wasn’t a complete loss. He took out the contents and put them into his pockets, which felt heavy. He remembered what Wang Qiyao had just said about fingerprints and found a cloth with which he wiped the whole place down. He then turned off the light and quietly crept out of the apartment. Over the course of the entire episode, the moon had barely shifted; everything had transpired during the dead hour between two and three o’clock in the morning, a time when even the darkest of deeds can be carried out in absolute secrecy. Who would ever know what had happened here on this night?
Only the pigeons would bear witness. They are the offspring of those birds of four decades before; generation after generation, their line never stops and everything is recorded in their eyes. You can hear them cooing and know that their nightmares are born of the nights of man. How many unsolved crimes there are in this city, all committed during those late-night hours in the long, dark longtang alleys that run like cracks through the city, never to see the light of day. When day breaks and the flocks of pigeons take to the sky, you will see that the moment they suddenly leap into the air carries with it a sudden terror. The eyes of these mute witnesses are filled with blood; countless injustices remain sealed away in their hearts. The whistles of the pigeons are clearly cries of mourning; it is only thanks to the vastness of the sky that they do not sound so harsh. The pigeons fly circles in the sky, but never go far; they are expressing their condolences for all the lost souls in this old city. Amid the forest of new skyscrapers, these old longtang neighborhoods are like a fleet of sunken ships, their battered hulls exposed as the sea dries up.
The last image caught in Wang Qiyao’s eyes was that of the hanging lamp swinging back and forth. Long Legs had pushed against it with his shoulder and sent it swinging back and forth. There was something familiar about this picture and she was trying hard to figure out where she had seen it before. Then, in that last moment, her thoughts raced through time, and the film studio from forty years ago appeared before her. That’s it: it was in the film studio. There, in that three-walled room on the set, a woman lay draped across a bed during her final moments; above her a light swung back and forth, projecting wavelike shadows onto the walls. Only now did she finally realize that she was the woman on that bed — she was the one who had been murdered. And then the light was extinguished and everything slipped into darkness.
In another two or three hours, the pigeons would be getting ready to take flight again. They would leave their nests and dart into the sky, their strong shadows flashing onto her drapes as they flew past. The potted oleanders on the balcony across the way were beginning to bloom, opening the curtain on yet another season of flowering and decay.
September 23, 1994–March 16, 1995
Afterword
Wang Anyi and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
Wang Anyi came to prominence during the early eighties with a string of award-winning short stories, such as 1981’s “The Destination” and “The Rain Patters On,” and over the course of the next few decades came to establish herself as one of the most prolific, dynamic, and imaginative fictional stylists on the Chinese literary scene.
Born in Nanjing in 1954, but raised in Shanghai — the setting for so many of her stories — Wang Anyi hails from a literary family. Her father, Wang Xiaoping (1919–2003), was a noted dramatist. Her mother, Ru Zhijuan (1925–1998), was an important writer in Mao’s China who caused waves with her 1958 short story “Lilies,” whose graceful style boldly broke with the party line on literature of the day.1 Wang Anyi spent two years (1970–1972) in Anhui as an educated youth before joining a song-anddance troupe in Xuzhou, where she played the cello. She began writing in 1975, publishing her first short story, “Pingyuan shang” (“On the plains”), in 1978. As the restraints that stifled creative freedom for her parents and so many writers of their generation began to lift in the 1980s, Wang Anyi’s literary career began to flourish. With a string of important short story collections (Lapse of Time), novellas (Love in a Small Town, Love on a Barren Mountain, Brocade Valley), and novels (Baotown), Wang emerged as nuanced writer unafraid to challenge literary conventions and push the boundaries in her bold portrayals of sexuality and female desire.
As Wang’s literary vision continued to expand and mature during the 1990s, many of her works took on a markedly more experimental approach. Jishi yu xugou (Facts and fictions), a sprawling fictional exploration of her family’s matriarchal lineage, was matched by an equally powerful examination of her father’s Singaporean family line in Shangxin de taiping yang (The sorrowful Pacific). 1990’s Shushu de gushi (Uncle’s story) was a influential offering that became a representative work of Chinese postmodern fiction in the post-Tiananmen era. An interesting counterpoint to this string of experimental writings was Mini (Minnie), a disturbing tale of two educated youths who return to Shanghai after the Cultural Revolution only to descend into a dark web of addiction, prostitution, and betrayal. Minnie provided Wang with ample scope to flex her storytelling muscles while crafting an unsettling postscript to the tales of educated youth she had written more than a decade earlier.