From the Mouths of Babes

IT USED TO BE that when people celebrated Chinese New Year, they would paste red strips of paper on the wall with maxims like "Things are Looking Up" and "From the Mouths of Babes" written across them. When I hark back in my title to the guileless discourse that emerges from the "mouths of babes," I don't mean to imply that I am about to spit out something that ought not to be said. It's just that I would like to indulge in talking about myself for a while- When a child in grade school comes home after school and excitedly begins to narrate everything he's seen and heard that day—how partial the teacher is to certain students and how Wang Debao was late to school and how the classmate who shares a bench with him was taken down a few points for being untidy-grown-ups, while disinclined to take him up on any of it, will let him talk on and on. I must have known the sorrow of this sort of situation when I was small for I've made it a taboo ever since to talk when no one is listening. Even now, I am happiest when some-one else talks and I listen. When I'm talking and someone else is listening, I am invariably left with the uneasy suspicion that I've made myself quite tiresome- If one is really full to bursting with things to say and has no one to say them to, perhaps the only recourse is to sally forth and accomplish world-beating deeds, so that when the time comes for an autobiography, one need no longer be concerned that no one will take any notice. This is a childish fantasy, of course, of which I have been disabused as I have slowly come to realize that I have scant hope of becoming a celebrated public figure
 worthy of a best-selling autobiography. Better, then, to write a little about myself and let off some steam, so that I don't become an insufferable chatterbox when I get old.
Still, the kind of familiar writing that's full of "me me me" from start to finish ought to be taken to task. I recently came across a couple of lines in an English book that might serve as a rather fitting jibe at authors excessively interested in themselves: "They not only spend a lifetime gazing at their own navels but also go in search of other people who might be interested in gazing along with them." Unsure as to whether what follows constitutes a navel exhibition, I have chosen to write it all the same.
I don't know whether the custom of drawing "life lots" is common in other places besides here. When I was one year old, a group of objects were duly placed in front of me on a lacquer tray in order to predict my future career. What I picked was money—I think it was a little one-pound gold coin. That is how my aunt remembers the story, although there was also a maidservant there who still insists that I chose a pen, and I am not entirely sure which of the accounts ought to be trusted. In any case, I have been very fond of money ever since I was small. My mother was shocked to discover this propensity, and would shake her head and mutter, "Their generation. . . ." My mother is a noble sort of person. When she had a lot of money, she made no mention of it, and even later, when she was in desperate need of money, she treated it with thorough indifference- I found her purity and detachment provoking and took the opposite tack. As soon as I learned the word "materialism," I insisted on calling myself a materialist.
I like money because I have never suffered on its account-certainly, I've experienced a few minor nuisances to do with money, but nothing com-pared to what others have suffered-and know nothing of its bad side and only the good.
When I lived at home, I did not have to worry about food and clothing, and my tuition, medical costs, and recreational expenses were all taken care of for me. But I never had any money of my own. There was the worry that children would spend any ready cash on snacks, so my father always made us give back our New Year's coins after the holidays were over, and we never thought to protest. I never bought anything for myself in a store until I turned sixteen. I never had a chance to buy anything and thus never developed the desire to do so.
 Coming out of the cinema, I felt like a child in custody at the gendarmerie as I stood on the curb waiting for the family chauffeur to find me and take me home. (I could never find him because I was never able to memorize the number on the license plate of our family car.) This is my only memory of what it feels like to live in luxury.
The first time I ever earned any money was during middle school, when I drew a cartoon and submitted it to the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury.' The newspaper office gave me five dollars, which I promptly used to buy a little tube of Tangee lipstick. My mother thought I should have saved the five-dollar bill as a souvenir, but I was not so sentimental. As far as I am concerned, money is merely money: it allows me to buy all the things I want.
There are some things I believe ought to belong to me simply because I am able to appreciate them better than anyone else, because they give me an incomparable delight. I dream night and day about a new outfit I have designed in my head, turning it over and over in my imagination, and when the time finally comes to buy the material, I stall, deliberating still more over the purchase to come. This is a process in which pain mingles with delight. If I had too much money, there would be no need for deliberation. Nor would deliberation be of any use if I hadn't any money at all. The painful pleasure I derive from the exercise of restraint is characteristic of the petite bourgeoisie. Whenever I see the term "petite bourgeoisie," I am promptly reminded of myself, as if I had a red silk placard hanging from my chest imprinted with these very words.
For the past few years, I have been a self-supporting petite bourgeoisie. Speaking of professional women, Su Qing once said: "I look around and see that I paid for every single thing in my apartment all by myself, down to the last nail. But where's the happiness in that?"2 This declaration ought to be made into a maxim, but only after turning it over in one's mind a few times does the bleakness of its message begin to strike home.
I once overheard a woman puffing up her chest and declaring: "I've been on my own since I was seventeen. Now I'm thirty-one, and I have yet to take any money from a man." Might this statement that seems to express pride also border on resentment?
For the present, I still enjoy my self-sufficiency to the fullest, perhaps because it remains a novelty for me. I am unable to forget how I had to ask
'The Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury was an American-owned English-language daily that was published from 1929 until the Japanese occupation of the city in 194.1-
2Su Qing (1917—?) rocketed to literary fame in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation on the strength of her first novel, Jiehun shinian (Ten years of marriage)-
 my father to pay my piano teacher's salary when I was little. I stood in front of the wicker opium couch, waiting, waiting for ever so long, and still no reply came. Later, I left my father and went to live with my mother. At first, the act of asking my mother for money had a fascinating, intimate charm. This was because I had always loved my mother with a passion bordering on the romantic. She was a beautiful and sensitive woman, and I had had very little opportunity to be with her because she had gone abroad when I was four, coming home only infrequently and going away again soon after each visit. Through a child's eyes, she seemed a distant and mysterious figure. There were a couple of times she took me out when, merely by taking my hand in hers as we crossed the street, she would send an unfamiliar thrill through my body. But later, despite the straits in which she found her-self, I had to press her for money every second or third day. The torments I suffered on account of her temper and my own ingratitude little by little extinguished my love for her in a stream of petty mortifications, until nothing was left of it.
To love someone enough that you are able to ask for spending money: that is a strict test, indeed.
Although the work can be grueling, I like my profession very much. "Skills civil and martial, sold for the emperors's gold." The literati of the past relied on the ruling class for their daily bread, but things are a little different nowadays. I am delighted that the guardians of my living are neither emperors nor kings but the magazine-reading masses. I don't mean to flatter or toady, but I must say that the masses are a most lovable sort of boss. They are not nearly as fickle as the aristocracy ("heavenly power is inscrutable" as the saying goes), they do not put on airs, they will give you their sincere sup-port, and, in return for a good turn or two, they will remember you for five, or even ten, years. Most important, the masses are abstract. If you must have a master, it stands to reason that an abstract one is much to be preferred.
Although I don't make quite enough money to get by, I have managed to collect a little hoard of valuable things. Last year, I heard a friend of mine make a prediction to the effect that the georgette chiffon that has sold so poorly in recent years is bound to become fashionable again soon, because in today's Shanghai there's no way to come up with new variations on women's fashions, and people must look instead for inspiration in the styles they remember from five years ago. So I saved a few hundred yuan and bought a bolt of georgette. I have held on to it ever since. Now, I see that georgette has indeed come back into vogue, so I have taken the fabric to a consignment shop. Yet I almost hope that they won't be able to sell it, so that I can keep it for myself.

Full of such contradictions, I venture into the streets to buy groceries, perhaps with something of the romantic pathos of an aristocratic gentle-man fallen on hard times. But recently, as an old vegetable vendor weighed my purchases and helped pack them for me, he held on to the handle of my mesh bag with his mouth to keep it open. As I lifted the now-dampened handle to carry my purchases away, I felt nothing out of the ordinary. And having discovered that something within me was different from before, I was happy: some real progress had been made, although I could not tell how or why.
Zhang Hen.shui represents most people's ideals in this regard.3 A girl should wear a refreshingly plain blue cotton coat, one that merely hints at
3Zhang Henshui (1895-1967) was one of the leading writers of the "Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies" school of urban popular fiction in the first decades of the twentieth century.
 the red silk cheongsam she is wearing underneath. Amid modesty and innocence, a suggestion of seduction. But I have neither the qualifications nor the ambition to become a character in one of his novels.
Because my mother was inordinately fond of having new clothes made, my father once muttered under his breath, "People aren't just clothes-hangers!" One of my earliest memories is of my mother standing in front of a mirror, pinning a jadeite brooch onto a green, short-waisted jacket. Standing to one side, I looked up at her, awash with envy and unable to wait until I grew up. I once said: "When I'm eight, I want to wear my hair in a wave; at ten, I want to put on high heels; and when I'm sixteen, I'll eat sticky rice wraps and sweet dumplings and everything else that's hard to digest." The more impatient I became, the more I felt that the days went by all too slowly. And thus the long days of childhood coursed sluggishly onward, like a warm sun shining on the thick, pink lining of an old cotton-padded shoe.
But there were also occasions when I resented the days for going by too fast, like the time when I grew so much and so suddenly that I never got to wear my new foreign-style suit of scallion-green brocade, not even once. Whenever I thought about that outfit later, I felt a deep sadness and saw its loss as one of the greatest regrets of my life.
For a time, when I was living under the regime of my stepmother, I had to choose things to wear from among her hand-me-downs. I will never be able to forget a certain dun-red, thinly quilted gown. It was the color of chopped beef, and I wore it for what seemed like forever, looking as if my whole body was covered with chilblains, and even when winter had passed, the scars from the sores still remained-the gown was that hateful, that shameful. Mostly on account of the fact that I was ashamed of my own appearance, my life in middle school was unhappy, and I rarely made any friends.
After I graduated from upper school, I lived with my mother. My mother put forward a very equitable proposition: if I were to marry early, there would be no need to continue my studies, and I could use the money that would have been spent on tuition to dress myself in the latest fashions. But if I kept on studying, there would be nothing left over for clothes. After I went to Hong Kong for college, I was awarded two scholarships, and because I had saved my mother a substantial sum of money thereby, I decided that I could finally indulge myself by having a few outfits made precisely to my specifications. And ever since then, I've been immersed in clothes and fashion.
When it comes to harmonizing color and tone, Chinese people have only recently learned the principles of "contrast" and "matching" from the West. The common, crudely simplified conception of contrast is red against green, while matching is green with green. But what most people do not
 Realize is that the clash between two different shades of green is extraordinarily clear, and the more closely the two shades encroach upon one another, the more uneasy the viewer will become. The contrast between red and green can be delightfully provocative. But if the contrast is too direct, if the red is too bright and the green too saturated, the effect is not unlike a Christmas tree in its utter lack of subtlety. In the past, Chinese people did pay attention to strong contrasts. There is a line in an old children's song: "Red and green really fit / purple and red look like shit." In the Golden Lotus, the servant's wife, Song Huilian, is wearing a bright red tunic with which she matches a borrowed purple skirt. When the master, Ximen Qing, sees her, he is so disturbed that he rifles through her trunks in search of a bolt of blue silk for a new skirt.4
Modern Chinese often say that people in times past had no idea of how to match colors. But the sorts of contrasts they used were never unequivocal. Instead, they were uneven: sapphire blue and apple green, pine needle yellow and bright red, scallion green and peach red. We have already for-gotten what they once knew.
The reticent charm and complex harmony of the past can now only be found in Japanese fabrics. That is why I love to go shopping in Hongkew; I regret only that the fabrics there are stored in bolts, like the scrolls of ancient paintings, so that one cannot examine them at will and must instead ask a store clerk slowly to unroll each sample.5 To make a mess of a whole store and still not buy a single thing is no small embarrassment.
The tailoring of kimonos is extremely elaborate, and the patterns printed across broad swaths of fabric are often buried underneath the folds. For these sort of patterns, using the simpler lines of the Chinese cheongsam would in fact create a far clearer profile.
Japanese printed fabrics, each bolt a painting. Every time I buy some fabric and bring it home, I unroll it again and again to admire the images before finally handing it over to the dressmaker. A small Burmese temple half obscured by the leaves of a palm tree, rain falling incessantly through the ruddy haze of the tropics. A pond in early summer, the water covered with a layer of green film, above which floats duckweed and purple and
4A classic of Ming dynasty vernacular fiction, The Golden Lotus (finping mei) portrays in meticulous detail the domestic intrigues, business dealings, and sexual excesses of Ximen Qing, a wealthy merchant, and his many wives and concubines.
5Hongkew (Honggiao) was a district of Shanghai dominated by Japanese shopkeepers, soldiers, and colonial officials; it also played host to a large community of Jewish refugees during the war years-
 white lilac petals toppled from their stems. Perhaps a fitting scene for a short lyric set to the tune "Lament for the Southland."6 Yet another bolt, which might be titled "Flowers in the Rain": on a white background, big gloomy purple blossoms, dripping with moisture.
I even remember the fabrics I have seen but could not buy There was a rich olive-green silk across which stole an enormous black shadow, laden with the wind and thunder of an approaching tempest. And another sort of silken fabric, pale aquamarine, shimmering with ripples reminiscent of wood grain and lake water; above which floated at regular intervals a pair of plum blossoms as big as tea bowls, iron-edged and silver-filigreed, like the multihued stained-glass windows of a medieval church, its translucent red panes set between leaded borders.
The most common colors on the market are the kinds you cannot name, the not quite blues, not quite grays, and not quite yellows that are used only for background and referred to as neutral colors, camouflage, "civilized colors," or secondary colors. Amid these secondary colors, there are splashes of enigmatic brilliance and coy allure, like the sun of another world shining on one's body. But I always feel that even these splashes are never enough, never enough, like Van Gogh, who always bemoaned that his colors were not strong enough, until he painted sunflowers suffused in the intense sun-light of southern France and was finally compelled to pile colors on top of one another in such staggering amounts that layers of oil paint began to protrude from the canvas, transforming painting into a sort of sculpture.
For people who are unable to speak, clothes are a kind of language, a "pocket drama" they can carry wherever they go. Surrounded by this dramatic ambience of our own making, do we become "people in cases"? (Chekhov's "Man in a Case" always wears a raincoat and carries an umbrella in order to insulate himself completely from the outside world. Even his watch has a watch case. In fact, everything he owns has its own special case).7
The transformation of life into drama is unhealthy. People who have grown up in the culture of the city always see pictures of the sea before they see the sea; they read of love in romance novels and only later do they know love. Our experience is quite often second-hand, borrowed from artificial theatricals, and as a result the line between life and its dramatization becomes difficult to draw.
There was a night, under the moon, when I strolled down a corridor in
6"Lament for the Southland" (Ai jiangnan) is the tune title (cipai) of a Song dynasty song lyric current in the tenth and eleventh centuries-
7For a translation of this text, see Anton Chekhov, Later Short Stories, 1888-1903, trans- Constance Garnett (New York: Modem Library, 1999), 397-410-
 a school dormitory with a classmate. I was twelve and she was a couple of years older. She said: "I'm very fond of you, but I don't know how you feel about me." Because there was a moon, and because I had a fondness for fiction, I softly and solemnly said to her: "I'm . . . besides my mother. .. you're the only one I have." At the time, she was deeply moved by my words. And I had even managed to move myself.
There was another incident of this sort that still makes me uneasy. It was even earlier. I was five years old. At the time, my mother was not in China. My father's concubine was a prostitute, older than he, and known by the sobriquet Big Eight. She had a pale oval face shaped like a melon seed above which dangled long bangs. She made me a stylish snow-green velvet skirt and jacket in the very height of fashion and said: "Look how nicely I treat you! When your mother had clothes made for you, she always used odds and ends and old scraps. She certainly wouldn't part with a whole bolt of velvet. Who do you like more, me or your mother?" I said: "I like you." What rankles most when I think back to that time is that I was not lying.
When I was a child, I would often dream of eating "cloud-layer cakes," but when I finally ate the thin wafers they seemed to turn to paper in my mouth, and even worse than the astringent flavor was the melancholy sense of disillusionment.
I've always liked to drink foamed milk. When I drink milk I always find a way to gulp down the little white beads on the edge of the bowl before touching any of the rest.
In Dream of the Red Chamber, Grandmother Jia asks Xue Baochai what plays she enjoys watching and what things she likes best to eat.8 Baochai knows all too well that people getting on in years like their drama loud and lively and their snacks soft and sweet and answers accordingly, just to indulge her. I am just like old people in that I enjoy foods that are sweet and tender. I will have none of those crunchy, savory things such as pickled vegetables, preserved turnips, seaweed crisps. I can't crack open melon seeds. I lack the dexterity needed to handle fine foods such as fish and prawns. I am instead a most complacent carnivore.
8Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), written by Cao Xueqin in the 1750S and also known as The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji), is the greatest masterpiece of Chinese vernacular fiction and one of Chang's primary literary sources of inspiration. See Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, trans- David Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, i979)-
 Shanghai's butcher shops are really quite lovely: snow-white, sparklingly clean, with dark, rose-colored paper signs hanging from tiled walls: "stew meat XX yuan," "filet mignon XX yuan." Big, white, globe-shaped lamps hang from the ceiling, shrouded with black air-raid shades yet still positively bright and cheery on account of the red lining inside the fixtures. The shop clerks in white aprons gleam with ruddy good health, their plump faces grinning as they stand with feet propped up on stools, reading the tabloids. Their eggplants are especially big, their onions are especially sweet, and their pigs are especially ripe for slaughter. A bicycle cart stops out front, and two pigs are brought inside, laid out neatly and as yet uncarved, with only traces of blood around their snouts and a light incision around their bellies, revealing the red lining underneath. I do not know why, but such a sight makes me not the slightest bit uneasy. It is as just as appropriate as could be, and as lawful, and as right. I would be quite happy to take up a post at a butcher shop, to sit behind the cash register and collect the money as it rolls in. These places are like mental sanitoriums, full of fresh air. It wouldn't do to think too much about any one thing in particular.
Perfect
When sitting in a tram, I sometimes happen to glance up at a gentleman standing in front of me, looking as grand as could possibly be, elegantly attired, refined, clearly a breed apart. But only seldom are such men's nostrils clean. Thus the phrase: "No man can be a hero in the eyes of those below."

My little brother is very beautiful, and I am not beautiful at all. From when I was very little, not a single person in my family did not bemoan the fact that his little mouth, his great big eyes, and his long eyelashes had been wasted on a boy. The older women in the family loved to tease him, "Lend me your eyelashes for a while, will you? I'll give them back tomorrow." But he would always refuse. Once, when everyone was talking about how pretty so-and-so's wife was, he asked, "Is she as good-looking as me?" Everyone made fun of his vanity.
 He was jealous of the pictures I drew, and when no one was looking he would tear them up or smear two big black marks across them. I can imagine the psychological pressure he felt. I was one year older than he was, I knew how to talk better, I was stronger and healthier, and he could neither eat the things I was allowed to eat nor do the things I was allowed to do.
When we played together, I was always the one who set the agenda. We were two stalwart and valiant warriors of "Jin Family Village." I was called Moon and he was called Apricot. I wielded a fine sword, and he had two copper cudgels. And along with us came a whole legion of make-believe warriors. It was always around dusk when the curtain rose. Old Mrs. Jin was in the kitchen chopping vegetables for our last meal before going off to battle. We would cross the mountains by the light of the moon, ambushing the barbarians under cover of night. On the way, we would dispatch two tigers and steal their spawn. The tiger eggs would be like big embroidered balls, and when you broke open the shells, the insides were as white as soft-boiled eggs, except the yolks were round. My little brother quite often would refuse to obey my commands, and we would quarrel. He could "neither make orders nor take them." Yet he was so lovable and such a pretty boy that I would sometimes let him make up a story of his own— "There was a traveler being chased by a tiger, so he ran and ran and ran, running like the wind, with the tiger roaring at his back . . ."-but before he could even finish, I would collapse into laughter and kiss his little cheeks, as if he were merely a plaything.
After we got a stepmother, most of my time was spent away at boarding school; I could go home only infrequently and had very little idea of what sort of life my little brother was living. Once, when I came home for vacation, I was astounded to see him grown tall and thin, wearing blue cotton overalls that were none too tidy, and reading a stack of comics rented from a bookstall. At the time, I was reading Mu Shiying's Nanbei ji (Poles apart) and Ba Jin's Miewang (Annihilation) and was of the opinion that his reading habits were greatly in need of revision.9 But he merely flitted in front
9Chang is reading examples of what would have then been thought of as new-style fiction. Mu Shiying (1912-1940) was one of the primary exponents of modernist fiction in the 1930s and a central figure in the New Sensation school of writing associated with the journal Les Conternporains (Xiandai)- Ba Jin (1904— ) was a self-styled anarchist whose fusion of the rebellious concerns of May Fourth-era new-style fiction and the melodramatic imagination of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly school made his fiction enduringly popular with modern Chinese readers. His most widely read novel is Jia, published in English as Family (Garden City, NY: Anchor, '979)-
 of me before slipping off somewhere else. Everyone at home proceeded to give me a detailed account of his many ignominious deeds, his failure to attend classes, his disobedience, and his lack of ambition. I was even angrier than they were and railed against him in like manner until even they urged moderation.
Later, at the dinner table, over a very trivial matter, my father slapped my little brother across the face. I gave a violent start, hid my face behind a rice bowl, and felt my tears come pouring down. My stepmother began to laugh, "Well? What are you crying about? It's not like he was scolding you. Will you look at that! He's the one who got hit, but you're the one that's crying." I dropped the bowl, ran to the adjoining bathroom, and bolted the door behind me, sobbing silently all the while, standing in front of the mirror and staring at my own distorted face, watching the tears roll down, just like a close-up in a movie. Then I clenched my teeth together and swore to myself: "I want revenge. One day, I shall have my revenge."



The bathroom window faced the balcony. With a popping noise, a little leather ball slapped against the window glass and bounced back onto the balcony. My brother was playing kickball out there. He had already forgot-ten everything that had just happened. He was used to this sort of thing. I did not cry anymore. All I felt was a chilling wave of sadness wash over me