Crossed Paths

Wang Anyi traces Shanghai in map and memory as she revisits its lanes, a mental flâneur.

- Wang Anyi

For almost the entire decade of the 1990s, I was deeply depressed. My mother was ill and was in and out of the hospital every year. Her room was on an upper floor of a newly built hospital, and it would be safe to say this was the tallest point in the vicinity. There was a window at the end of the corridor. Looking out from it, you could see the unbroken expanse of roof tiles of old-fashioned longtangs,* while little black dots swooped and soared in the rays of the setting sun—flocks of pigeons returning to their roosts. I spent a lot of time in front of that window, sometimes with my mother, sometimes in solitude. I felt wounded at heart, by whom I didn’t know, but my pain was clearly being inflicted by some limitless and irresistible force. These interludes were a silent communion that brought me a sense of peace. That’s the city I live in: covered over by my life, so that no matter how much distance I put between us, even if I’m looking down from the highest point, all that’s visible to me is my own heart. The city’s bright and shiny surface has always given off a whiff of cloying vulgarity, not to mention a sort of anomie. It has always been tainted by life.

The shape of the city in my mind’s eye is always a little vague. I actually know my way better around cities where I’ve stayed only briefly, cities where I don’t even speak the language, than I know this one.There are many streets whose orientations and intersections I still don’t have a clear picture of. Not that I’m afraid of getting lost—I usually manage to find the place I’m going to. But the opposite can happen as well. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, I never reach the street I’m looking for; I just go round and round in circles, only to end up right back where I started.