Life in Shanghai according to Zhan Ailing’s Sealed Off is one of tired, mechanical routine, wherein the economic needs of existence drive each person through an isolated and haunting death march, and happiness isn’t an expected luxury, all the while the lack of economic means of others forces them into a disparaged squalor. Ailing accomplishes this through her figurative descriptions of Shanghai during an air raid, and the characters therein, as well as the interactions between two key characters who, for a moment, seem to escape from the trappings of routine.
For everyone stuck during the air raid over Shanghai in Sealed Off, the mechanical needs of modernity are tangible and terrifying. The silence and inactivity of Shanghai forces them into a corner between finding something to distract themselves, and their thoughts reminding them of their own unhappiness in their repetitious lives: “[The passengers] simply had to fill this terrifying emptiness—otherwise, their brains might start to work. Thinking is painful business” (Ailing 527). Their routines reduce them to cogs in an endless machine, performing their tasks, and going home, awaiting morning for it all to repeat, terrified to stop long enough to be cognizant of the monotony of it all, as demonstrated by the first paragraph of the short story: “[the tramcar tracks] stretched and shrank, stretched and shrank, on their onward way—soft and slippery, long old eels, never ending, never ending…the driver fixed his eyes on the undulating tracks, and didn’t go mad” (525). The driver’s duty is like that of his track, endless and repeating, never changing, and never improving, with only the objects of his duty keeping him from breaking. Moreover, the demands of modern Shanghai separates those forced to either meet those demands or suffer the pains of squalor and poverty. This is shown through the interactions between Shanghai citizens just before the air raid, as they seek shelter, but are swiftly denied shopkeepers who already have it:
“Let us in for a while,” they cried, “We have children here, and old people!” But the gates stayed tightly shut. [The shopkeepers] inside the metal gates and those outside the metal gates stood glaring at each other, fearing one another (526).
To those inside the gates, the people outside are a threat to their security, to the routine they have built through their shops, and to those outside the gates begging for their lives, those inside are facilitators of their potential doom, as the air raid comes overhead, and they have nowhere to hide. But whether or not they are inside or outside the gates, each person has divided themselves down those lines, creating an Other out of everyone that is outside of their routine. This otherizing extends itself down economic lines as well, as seen in the final line of the short story, wherein the tramcar driver, after the tramcar began moving again, started to sing a song he had heard from a beggar when the tramcar first stopped, and shouts at another beggar for approaching him, calling her “swine!” (533). Despite relating to the song the previous beggar sang, upon facing another beggar near him, he feels revulsion, and separates himself as superior in his routine as compared to the beggars in their destitution. While the tramcar had stopped during the air raid, so too had his routine, and thus he enters into a state of removed separation between himself and the beggars around him. But once the air raid ceased, and the tramcar once again moved forward, the division between himself and the beggars, between his routine and theirs, continued again. As the character Cuiyuan’s internal monologue states: “everything that had happened while the city was sealed was a non-occurrence. The whole Shanghai had dozed off, had dreamed an unreasonable dream” (533). But it is the interactions between Cuiyuan and the married man Zongzhen that best illustrates the ceasing of routine, and the inevitability of its return.
For Cuiyuan and Zongzhen, it was a chance encounter that allows them to escape the routine of their monotonous lives; believing, if briefly, that there might be some reprieve from their miseries. But just as the air raid ends, and with it, the tramcar continues moving, routine always returns, and with it, all wishful thinking of escaping that routine through passion is lost. Yet, for the brief time that Cuiyuan and Zongzhen meet and see in each other a way out, some happiness is born. Cuiyuan is unsatisfied with her life. A university professor in her 20s, she has more reason to be proud of herself than most, yet she is unhappy. For her, this achievement has meant nothing, as, “no one at school respected her” (528). But more than that, she has disappointed her family, whose pride for their daughter died with their growing disillusionment, as they wished “she’d taken more time out of her studies, tried to find herself a rich husband” (528). Indeed, it is only when she grades a paper that is, “full of righteous anger” (528), that Cuiyuan finally feels the respect she is denied by those around her: “[the writer of the paper] treated her like an intelligent, sophisticated person; as if she were a man, someone who really understood. He respected her” (528). By reading a paper submitted to her that is written by a man who makes no attempt to mask his passion, Cuiyuan feels within its author a silent understanding that Cuiyuan is intelligent and mature enough to handle such passion. It is no surprise, then, that upon meeting Zongzhen, and hearing his eventual admission of his troubles, and pains, Cuiyuan feels again this respect, and is in love. Like Cuiyuan, Zongzhen is unsatisfied with his life. He is a married man who feels nothing but contempt for his wife, deriding her in his conversation with Cuiyuan: “[his wife] has such a temper—she hasn’t even got a grade-school education” (531), and like everyone else, is as trapped in his routine as he is trapped on the tramcar until the air raid ceases. But it is in his encounter with Cuiyuan that he momentarily escapes this routine, and sees in her an attraction he had never experienced before:
[Zongzhen] looked at [Cuiyuan], and she blushed. When she let him see her blush, he grew visibly happy. Then she blushed even more deeply. Zongzhen had never thought he could make a women blush, make her smile, make her hang her head shyly. In this he was a man. Ordinarily, he was an accountant, a father, the head of a household, a tram passenger, a store customer, an insignificant citizen of a big city. But to this woman, this woman who didn’t know anything about his life, he was only and entirely a man (531-532)
In Cuiyuan’s blush, Zongzhen finally finds some semblance of importance in his life. At this moment, he is no longer a faceless man waiting passively on a tramcar, instead, he is the man who makes Cuiyuan blush. It is because of this discovery that Zongzhen opens up Cuiyuan, telling her, “how his family squabbled; his secret sorrows; his schoolboy dreams” (532), yet Cuiyuan is, “not put off” (532) by these admissions. Instead, she discovered the aforementioned respect that she felt from the paper she graded. So, together, upon their mutual escape from the trappings of life, “were in love” (532). Because of this love, Zongzhen toys with the thought of making Cuiyuan his concubine, and asks her “Are you a free woman?” (532), an idea that excites Cuiyuan, believing that such an arrangement would anger her family, thus granting her some revenge for their disappointment: “[Cuiyuan’s family] wanted her to find them a wealthy son-in-law. Well, Zongzhen didn’t have money, but he did have a wife—that would make them good and angry!” But as sure as the tram would move again, and their routines would be restored, the fantasy of taking Cuiyuan as a concubine melts away, as Zongzhen comes to the realization that such a thing would “ruin [Cuiyuan’s] life” (532). So, once the tram stirred back to life, Zongzhen disappeared into the crowd of people on the tram, only visible to Cuiyuan once more, seated in his old spot before he sat next to her. Although initially happy to see that Zongzhen hadn’t left the tram after all, she quickly loses this happiness upon realizing the truth: “[Cuiyuan] understood [Zongzhen’s] meaning: everything that happened while the city was sealed was a non-occurrence. The whole of Shanghai had dozed off, had dreamed an unreasonable dream” (533). Like a dream, Cuiyuan and Zongzhen’s chance encounter ripped them from reality, allowing them escape and reprieve from the waking world. But as sure as the waking, Cuiyuan and Zongzhen’s dream would reach its inevitable end, just as the tramcar driver would inevitably continue down his track, the shopkeepers would eventually open up their gates for business again, and the beggars would continue to beg for what little scraps they could find; each of them divided and isolated in their roles and routines.
With the repetitious use of the line: ‘“Ding-ding-ding-ding.’ Every ‘ding’ a cold little dot, which added up to a line that cut across time and space” (533) Ailing uses the sound of an alarm bell to signify not only the sealing off and the opening up of the city, but the predictability and routineness of such alarms. Just as each ding added to a line across time and space, each identical day of the life of the people of Shanghai added to a continuous line of days leading only to tedium, and eventual death. Although in the space between the alarm signifying the stillness of the city, and the alarm signifying its return to wakefulness, there exists the dream of reprieve from this routine; of shared songs between lines of division, of respect, and of love; once the waking bell eventually tolls, the dream dies, and the mechanistic tedium of routine returns. Such is life in Shanghai.
References:
Zhang, Ailing. Sealed Off. Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury, The Chinese University Press, 1986.
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