IanLit

The picture of Shanghai in the 1940’s that Zhang Ailing creates in her short story “Sealed Off” greatly contrasts the realism in Mu Shiying’s and Wei Hui’s portrayals. The hard, fast life of Shanghai’s cosmopolitans is not captured here. Instead, shut down and brought to a halt by the threat of an air raid, the city is silent and vacuous. Ailang likens it to a huge man, “dozing in the sun, its head resting heavily on people’s shoulders, its spittle slowly dripping down their shirts” (188). The reader is trapped on a tramcar in a moment of stillness that this bustling metropolis rarely experiences. In the silence, the reader catches glimpses of people’s lives that seem meaningless and dreamlike. Some office workers chatter and gossip. Lu Zongzhen, one of two central roles in the story, peels away the newspaper that was covering his dumplings and reads the ink headlines imprinted on his food. Everyone on the tram finds something to read, even if it is a business receipt, a sign or a business card. We get full disclosure of what is running through their heads, and what we see is not turmoil created by the charge of the city, but instead absentmindedness. As the narrator remarks, the tram riders “simply had to fill this terrifying emptiness—otherwise, their brains might start to work. Thinking is painful business” (190). It seems as though the common citizens of Shanghai live a life without meaning, or a life that is just a dream, not reality.

Even before the air raid siren empties the streets of people and “the sound of voices [ease] into a confused blur” (188), the tramcar still navigates over absurd, dreamlike tracks that undulate like “soft and slippery, long old eels, never ending” (188). The narrator remarks that even when the tram driver has his eyes fixed to the tracks, he didn’t think what he saw was a hallucination (188). He, like the rest of Shanghai, appears to be absent. When the sirens pierce the air, they don’t startle everyone back to reality, instead the siren pulses are absorbed into the dream world: “Every ‘ding’ was a cold little dot, the dots all adding up to a dotted line, cutting across time and space” (188). The appearance that the city is in some absurd, floating dream even before it is brought to a halt makes me think that the citizens of Shanghai have always been in this dream.

But something changes when Wu Cuiyuan, a university teacher sitting on the tram, comes into the picture. She is the first character in the story to think. She thinks about why she gave a certain student an good grade without consideration, she thinks about her family and the abuse they give her, and she reiterates the idea that people around her do not think: All the people in her family were good people; […] when they listened to the wireless, they never tuned into folk-opera, comic opera, that sort of thing, but listened only to the symphonies of Beethoven and Wagner; they didn’t understand what they were listening to, but still they listened. In this world, there are more good people than real people… Cuiyuan wasn’t very happy. (191) Cuiyuan is unhappy because she is aware of the lack of realism around her, which created by people’s nature and what they deem “good,” not by the nature of reality itself.

Cuiyuan senses refreshing reality in only two people, a child sitting next to her and Lu Zongzhen. Lu Zongzhen appears to be trapped in this still moment alongside Cuiyuan, and the two of them experience an intense romantic connection. This is because Zongzhen also realizes the fakeness of his life, saying that every day he goes to work not knowing why he does, and he laments the fact that his primary goal in life is to “just keep going, keep getting by, without thinking—above all, don’t start thinking!” (194). Through this spontaneous moment when they share a realization that life as the people around them have constructed it is fake and passive, Zongzhen and Cuiyuan wake up from their dream: “Zongzhen and Cuiyuan suddently felt they were seeing each other for the first time. […] They were in love” (195).

Neither of them wants the moment to end, but when the threat of an air raid is lifted, the city gets moving again. It feels as though Cuiyuan is drifting back into a dream from this state of reality: the “ding” pulses of the siren “cut across time and space” again, and Zongzhen leaves (197). In the end, it turns out that the interaction between Cuiyuan and Zongzhen hadn’t occurred at all, in fact Cuiyuan had just imagined Zongzhen’s flirtatious advances. Sadly, she had not woken up in that timeless moment that she shared with another person who was unhappy with his fake life, and instead “the whole of Shanghai had dozed off, had dreamed an unreasonable dream” (197). This tragic story of a solitary, unhappy woman trapped in a city where people live without thinking departs from the hard realism that Mu Shiying and Wei Hui use to describe Shanghai. There is no sex, violence, joy, or corruption in Ailing’s Shanghai, just sadly vacant lives.