With two women in the house and no man to smooth things over, things often got difficult. If, however, you were to think that they might have been ostracized because Weiwei did not have a father, you couldn’t be more wrong. Even though people whispered behind their backs, no one ever gave them any trouble; in fact, some people even pitied them and tried to help. As far as trouble went, they had only themselves to blame. Like all women locked in a power struggle, they were always scheming against each other. In 1976 Wang Qiyao was forty-seven years old, but she looked at least ten years younger. This was even more noticeable when she was with her daughter, for she appeared to be the handsomer older sister. But beauty is one thing, youth another. There is nothing one can do to turn back the clock. In the end youth always has the upper hand, for it confers privileges that are absolute and uncontestable — and those were always there for Weiwei to draw upon. And so Wang Qiyao was also jealous of her daughter — Weiwei had something on her mother after all. Mother and daughter had the upper hand at different times, depending on which perspective you viewed the situation from.
Every year, on the hottest day of summer, Wang Qiyao would air out all her clothes. She would open her camphor chest, hang the clothes out on bamboo poles, and spread her assortment of leather shoes on the windowsill. The entire room would be filled with particles of dust swirling in the sunlight. For a time Weiwei looked like she was walking on stilts when she tried on her mother’s shoes. Her feet could only fill out the points of the shoes; after taking a few steps, she would fall down. But as the years went by her feet gradually filled out the high-heels. The laddered silk stockings at the bottom of the chest also excited her: putting her hand inside them, she would stretch them out in the sunlight to view the translucent silk, which resembled the wings of a cicada. Her hands grew bigger each year and eventually ripped through the stockings. And then there was the beaded handbag, the broken pearl necklace, the brooch with a missing diamond, and the moth-eaten flannel beret, scattered in the corners of the chest, which together composed a colorful and exotic portrait of another time. In the sunlight the portrait was a bit dull, even depressing — a peeling oil painting whose faded paint had lost its original luster but still held on to some of its splendor.
When Weiwei tried on those old clothes and accessories and looked in the mirror, she saw not a person but a witch! Affecting what she took to be the poses of a bad girl, she giggled until she doubled over. She couldn’t imagine what her mother had looked like back then, nor could she fathom the kind of world her mother had lived in. Today’s world may have been insipid and boring, but it was superior because it was hers. Occasionally Weiwei would intentionally damage some of the items at the bottom of her mother’s chest; she might pinch a few tufts of fur off a collar, or pull out a few strands of silk from the satin cheongsam, and wait for her mother to scold her so that she would have an opportunity to talk back. But come sunset, when Wang Qiyao put her things away, she wouldn’t always notice; even when she did, her reaction was always rather mild. She would hold the damaged article up to the light and examine it carefully before folding it up again and putting it away.
“Who knows if I’ll ever have the chance to wear this thing again. .” she would say.
This made Weiwei a bit depressed; she felt sorry for her mother and was even slightly remorseful, not out of compassion and kindness, but from the wanton arrogance of youth. The world belonged to her — why should she bother to harass an old lady like her mother? In her eyes anyone even ten years older qualified as “old.” Sometimes she referred to someone as an “old lady” or “old man” when they were actually still in their thirties — we won’t mention what she must have thought of people in their forties!
But deep down Weiwei had a slight inferiority complex that often led her to overlook her own positive qualities. That’s the way young people are: lacking the requisite experience to take advantage of their best traits, too impressionable, and short of self-confidence. The result of all this was that she became reluctant to go out with her mother. Whenever her mother was around, Weiwei couldn’t help putting on a look of dissatisfaction, an added detriment to her appearance. As a little girl, she depended upon her mother and had to suppress her sense of frustration. But as the proverbial wings got stronger, her feelings of dependence faded, her frustration intensified, and mother-daughter conflicts escalated.
In 1976 Weiwei, now a high school freshman, continued to be lackadaisical in her studies and so naturally had no political aspirations. She was a typical girl from Huaihai Road for whom window-shopping was a daily routine. What she saw displayed in the shop windows represented a life-style she could reach out and touch, with nothing of the grand illusion about it. It represented a life beyond the bare necessities to which she could aspire; you might call it the aesthetics of living — a spiritual dimension to enhance her material pursuits. Girls like Weiwei are molded by a distinctive aesthetics of living. In Shanghai, nowhere will you find girls with a better fashion sense than those who lived around Huaihai Road. The way they wear their clothing is a concrete manifestation of this aesthetics of living. The special charm they lend to a simple blue blouse simply by the way they wear it could take your breath away.
Back in the era when people were deprived of entertainment and excitement, the slightest thing was enough to light up a young lady’s life. These girls were in no way less impressive than people who fought heroically against the currents. Moreover, they spoke less and took action more often. They devoted themselves to promoting a life based on passion and a “tell-it-like-it-is” philosophy. If you were to walk down Huaihai Road during the late sixties or early seventies, you would sense, beneath the hypocritical and empty political lives people were leading, a heart that was beating vigorously. Of course you would have to look closely to see it. You could find it in the slight curls at the tips of otherwise straight hair, in shirt collars peeping out from underneath blue uniforms, and in the way scarves were tied with fancy shoestring bows. It was remarkably subtle, and the care people put into those details was moving.
Weiwei’s dream for after high school was to work behind the counter selling wool sweaters at a local government department store. To be fair, career choices in that era were limited, and Weiwei was not the ambitious type, nor was she a great thinker. Her plans for the future were based on what she thought others were doing. In this respect she was no match for Wang Qiyao, but naturally this also had to do with the limitations of her time. In short, Weiwei was a typical Huaihai Road girl; she didn’t stand out, but neither did she lag behind — she was one of the masses, a face in the crowd.
1976 was a year of epochal change; the impact it had on Weiwei lay all within the realm of the aesthetics of living. The return of classic movies was one area, of high-heeled shoes another, and of perms yet another. It was only natural that Wang Qiyao too should get a perm. Maybe the hairdresser’s skills were rusty, or maybe she just wasn’t used to curly hair after so many decades of seeing only straight hair, but when she reached home, Wang Qiyao was extremely upset. Her new perm looked like a chicken’s nest, sloppy and unkempt, and it made her look old. No matter how she combed it, she just couldn’t get it right. She scolded herself for having gone and the beauty salon for advertising something they obviously couldn’t deliver.