Christopher Vecoli

EALC 412, Fall 2013

Professor B. Ridgway

Shi Zhecun’s One Evening in the Rainy Season and Zhang Ailing’s Sealed-Off

This essay seeks to compare and contrast Shi Zhecun’s 1929 story One Evening in the Rainy Season

(henceforth Rain) and Zhang Ailing’s 1943 story Sealed Off (henceforth Sealed). On first reading these

two stories are strikingly different in tone, focalization, and texture; yet they share some clear structural

similarities. Both stories involve transient romantic moments between strangers, involving public transit

in the modernizing city of Shanghai, China, which end with the “fading-away” of the one of the romantic

characters. Both include vivid descriptions of the cosmopolitan city, complete with the presence of

foreigners, as well as migrants from within China with their distinctive local dialects. Both foreground

the weather as a virtual character with agency in its own right, and each story includes a break in the

flow of city life creating a liminal interlude outside of normal time, with references to clocks or watches.

Finally, both stories offer engagement with the literature on urban modernization in interesting yet

diametrically opposed ways, which allows them to shed light on this literature (e.g., the flaneur and the

blasé attitude, respectively), as well as vice versa; and both receive special attention in key treatments

of early mid-twentieth century modernist literature in China (Lee, 1999: 175-6, 289-291; Riep, 2003:

420; Huang, 2003: 460).

It is outside the purview of this essay to relate Rain and Sealed historically or situate them in the

overall oeuvres of their authors. However, it is worth noting that Shi Zhecun was in the forefront of

a short-lived international experimental literary modernist movement, New Sensationism, which

emphasized the stream of physical sensations in the individual psyche in the modernizing metropolis;

short-lived, because of political pressures from both Right and Left parties. Nevertheless, a space

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or precedent was established for later detailed modernist literary experimentation, of which Zhang

Ailing was the leading and most gifted exponent (Riep, 2003: 422). The historical context for early

modern Chinese literature, in a China newly open to the world, wherein Shanghai with its Western

concessions and socioeconomic dynamism was the port of entry for modernity, is indeed quite

fascinating (Lee, 1999). For current purposes, however, this essay will proceed to compare and contrast

Rain and Sealed with reference to, 1. Frame analysis (by which I mean the sequence of settings/frames

within the story, a definition which may be a bit idiosyncratic); 2. The flaneur and the blasé, and the

related concept from M.M. Bakhtin of “finalizability”; and, 3. The power of traditional gender roles.

It is hoped that this process will yield deepen understanding of the underlying dynamics of these two

key texts of modernizing Chinese literature.

I. Frame analysis: Rain

It is certainly interesting to compare the “frame structure” in Rain with that of Sealed. The former

is linear, with a layering of psychological time frames in the middle, while the latter has a more

complicated nested structure, of frames within frames. The first frame in Rain consists of the quite

self-conscious and self-contained narrator (the entire focalization of the story is in his voice) embarking

on his journey home from work to his wife, on foot in the rain, while explaining his resistance to the

conventional wisdom of his office-mates that it would be better to wear a raincoat and take a bus like

everyone else. With umbrella in hand he confidently ticks off the names of streets and bridges as he

walks, and savors and describes the sights and sounds of the city in the rain; this solitary strolling and

revelation of the city to itself seems to make him something of a flaneur, and the narrator is curious,

artistic, and acquisitive of urban sensations. The rain turns into a downpour, which slows traffic to a

crawl and sends most pedestrians rushing for cover. In the second frame, he pauses to watch the first-

class passengers get off a bus into the pouring rain: Russian, Japanese, local Chinese from Ningbo, and a

beautiful enigmatic young woman (see Rosenmeier, 2011). At this point he begins to actively question

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his choices, wondering why he chose to pause and watch this instead of crossing the street, why he

chose to watch the first-class passengers, and so on. This creates for us a sense of anticipation, an

expectation of some special event or perhaps an amazing coincidence. In frame three, the narrator

shelters from the heavy rain under an awning next to the young woman, while continuing to question

himself from moment to moment, and begins to study the young woman and read the sense of

her glances…. why does he stay here, and then, why not help to shelter her with his umbrella? In a

pivotal moment, he responds to the young woman’s inquiring and accusing look with a blush, which

implies an involuntary concern with how one is being perceived by a valued observer. Subsequently, he

invites her to share his umbrella, which he then gallantly holds aloft, and they proceed through the

driving rain, with the focus on his second by second sense of satisfaction, excitement and intrigue, and

yet growing paranoia. Her lilting Suzhou accent prompts him to begin to believe that she may be his

long-lost school girlfriend, and he begins to spin a fantasy about her, gradually losing the selfassured-

ness he possessed in the beginning. In frame four the narrator slowly reasserts a flaneurial detachment

by associating this unexpected lovely with, first, a painting, and then a poem, so that his sinking into

past memories gradually gives way to the aesthetic connoisseur and collector of images. In this

process he suddenly realizes that he prefers his wife’s lips to the young woman’s, and in that moment

relaxes; in the next moment she is gone, leaving him adrift in the middle of the street. In frame five,

the rain having stopped, the narrator hails a rickshaw and flies home as if in a dream. Upon his arrival,

he passes through a couple of identity misapprehensions, finally recognizing his wife in the light of the

lamp. He eats very little for dinner to prove his lie of having stopped for tea with a friend to wait

out the rain, which seems a form of punishment for his spiritual betrayal. This frame analysis allows

one to separate out the frames that organize the episodes of a story thematically, spatially, and/or

temporally. The story unfolds overall in a linear fashion, yet the narrator makes an involuntary descent

into the underworld of his personal romantic history in frame three, only to ascend in frame four with

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the reassertion of aesthetic distance from life/people in the city, the distance that enables his free

and autonomous strolling.

II. Rain: The Flaneur

The narrator of Rain would seem to qualify as a flaneur, the romantic urban wanderer, connoisseur

and collector who seems to be a masculine projection of the desire of the city to be intimately known as

an aesthetic body. He flaunts conventional wisdom to stroll in the rain and enjoy the

scintillating lights of the city at dusk, knows the streets and the local customs, and takes pride in

identifying the inhabitants by nationality or provenance. Yet the definition of the flaneur, equal parts

myth, urban legend and satisfying avatar, is itself elusive, and appears to reflect the values and needs of

the definer. Nevertheless, there is always something artistic and serendipitous about the random

walk of the near-universal figure of the flaneur, which in Yiyan Wang’s insightful work (2007) assumes

local, e.g., Chinese characteristics, fitting into a tradition of wandering Chinese recluses and poets. For

example, in her rendition, Chinese artistic wanderers were solitary but sometimes accompanied by

women, and Shi Zhecun’s narrator in Rain is clearly of this type. Leo Lee, on the other hand, though

he establishes Shi Zhecun’s own credentials as an obsessive bibliophile-flaneur of second-hand book

stores declares that the New Sensationist writers were too enamored of the stimulations of the city to

maintain the necessary ironic detachment of the flaneur (Lee, 1999: 37; Fruehauf, 1993). However,

the literary question is whether the narrator of Rain is a flaneur, not Shin Zhecun himself. In my view,

the narrator of Rain exhibits ironic detachment in spades, decrying the mouthfuls of mud that passing

cars splash on him, and he is keenly observant of the city and, just as acutely, his own reactions to it.

Having taken issue with Lee, I must also differ with Wang, for in this instance it is precisely the presence

of the “bewitching young woman” (Shi, 2007: 123) that thrusts him into the whirlpool of his romantic

history and undermines his self-possession and ironic detachment; until, with the deployment of

references to classical painting and poetry, he manages to partially free himself of this spell. Thus, it

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seems to me that the foregoing discussion of the flaneur in regards to Rain is not merely academic, but

rather helps to shed light on the dynamic heart of the story itself. Finally, I refer to M.M. Bakhtin’s

notion of the absurdity of “finalizing” a character; everyone has elements of self-determination,

freedom and unpredictability. (I take this as gospel, but have had trouble locating the passage; but see

Bakhtin, 1984: 166). I mention this because Shi’s narrator in Rain, with his flaneurial existential

awareness, stubborn resistance to the conventional wisdom of his officemates, constant self-

questioning and ironic detachment, remains open to his environment and his own thought, and is truly

unfinalizable. These qualities compel us to read and reread the story, rather than dramatic action.

III. Frame analysis: Sealed

Zhang Ailing’s Sealed can be read, in one way, as a heteroglossic carnival of colliding genres

that lampoons attitudes rather than individuals, a comedy with a touch of tragedy (see Bakhtin’s

discussion of the Menippean satire, 1984: 112). It is beyond my expertise to discuss Menippean

satire, but to deny Zhang’s sharp dark sense of humor would be to misread her story and miss the ways

in which it utterly resists serious political propaganda. A frame analysis of Sealed will help to clarify its

complex nested structure. The outermost frame is a surreal sun-baked urbanscape with ancient old long

eels for tram rails. An alarm cuts through time and space and creates first a chaos of people running,

then a liminal space of eerie quiet, with the inconceivably massive city dozing, and drooling, and

weighing down upon its inhabitants (compare the scintillating lights and lightness of Rain). Inside that

frame is the street scene with beggars, one singing an old, old song of “no money do I have” (p. 175) in a

Shandong accent, eliciting spontaneous participation from the tram driver, who is also from Shandong.

The next frame inward is the interior of the tram, a situation comedy of small groups and couples

pronouncing sentences of misguided conventional wisdom and strong petty concerns: “…in the end, he

doesn’t know how to act”; “Do you know what dry-cleaning costs these days?”; “I don’t get this

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cubism”, and “Writing words in is all the rage in Western painting.… the influence of Chinese painting”

misunderstanding a medical student’s sketch of a skeleton; and “Women are always like that. Dumplings

bought in the hardest-to-find, most twisty-windy little alleys had to be the best, no matter what” (pp.

175, 177)…. This last from the romantic male lead-to-be, an accountant who doesn’t find reading

dumplings odd or funny: “a straightforward kind of fellow.. eating is such a serious business” (p. 176).

The goal for these characters is to contain and finalize life in simple and trivial aphorisms. In the fourth

frame, focalization moves to the soon-to-be romantic female lead, which begins a kind of soap opera

about her unfulfilled life, to be followed by an encounter with the unfulfilled life of the accountant.

The physical description of her unremarkable blandness is satirical to the point of cruelty; even her dress

has a border like an obituary notice. Her interior life, however, is not complacent, but rather seething

with self-pity for the lack of respect she has as an English teacher from her “good” family (who want her

to marry a rich man), her students and her colleagues. She gives a student paper an ‘A” for being bold

and forthright and respecting her intelligence. The accountant, upset by the approach of his cunning

and despicably devious nephew (who has designs on the accountant’s pre-teen daughter), sidles over to

the teacher and pretends to flirt, in order to scare off the nephew. The tactic works, but the flirtation

begins to become real, so much so that the man begins to unload his woes (e.g., the uneducated wife at

home who doesn’t understand him) to the woman- who is dryly anticipating his every complaint while

maintaining a manner of intense interest/empathy. A passing convoy draws them each to put their head

out the window, and suddenly they see each other in close-up. This begins frame five, a brief cinematic

love scene: she looked like a peony… “They were in love” (p. 181; a movie within a soap opera within a

situation comedy)…“Being part of you, she understand everything, forgives everything” (p. 181). They

start to discuss terms of possibly being together (back to soap opera); would she consider being a

concubine? (Zhang Ailing’s father took one). He: “No! this won’t do! I don’t have much money and don’t

want to ruin your life!” She starts to weep openly and bitterly at the impending loss of this “dear” man,

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so he asks for her phone number to avoid making a scene… then back to the situation comedy/tragedy.

People begin to return to the tram, he is lost in the crowd, she ponders his death in her eyes as one

who is irrevocably lost; then- shocked- sees him sitting withdrawn in his former seat- it’s all been a

dream of the sleeping city in liminal time. The tram begins to move again… back to the street scene,

she sees a blonde woman and an Italian sailor, until the tram goes past and they disappear and “die;”

then the outermost surreal frame as the tram driver sings “no money do I have”… then he “bellows”

with an absolute lack of empathy, at an old woman beggar crossing in front of the tram: “You swine!”

IV. Sealed: The Blasé

Readily accessible literature on Zhang Ailing’s Sealed-Off often mentions the story in connection

with Simmel’s (1903/2010) construct of the blasé urban personality, withdrawn and self-protective

from the onslaught of intolerable amounts of rapidly changing urban stimulation. As Robin Visser notes:

… years later the novelist Zhang Ailing described the same tendency [Simmel’s “fear of contact”] in

cosmopolitan Shanghai in her 1943 short story “Fengsuo” (Blockade) where the passengers in a

stopped tram furiously read everything at their disposal to avoid making eye contact with others.

Such mental distancing becomes essential to maintaining one’s identity in a crowd, but inevitably

creates a sense of isolation. (2005: 198)

This same blasé scene is addressed by Xudong Zhang, but powerfully describing the broader context:

To capture the city while it is dozing is to sneak into its unconscious and watch its dream. Zhang

[Ailing] wastes no time in adjusting her focus onto the empty interiority of a now petrified city, the

enclosed space inside the tram car where strangers, face to face at close range, are determined to

ignore each other, struggling to be distracted from the maddening duration of an empty time devoid

of the action of the normal world. The tram car, a quintessential symbol of urban, industrial modern-

ity, is changed from a machine for entering the city into an apparatus for observing the temporal-

psychological structure of the modern metropolis. The result is more than a snapshot offering a

Simmelian picture of the city. (2000: 351-2)

I am convinced that the blasé syndrome is an important dimension of Sealed, but not only in the

broadly comical scene of “furious reading” (dumplings!) and avoidance of eye contact with strangers.

It also applies to the blasé/banal dialogue itself, as another way to repress “thought” and reduce

uncertainty in interactions with strangers, utilizing a lowest-common denominator of conventional

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wisdom and readiness to quickly and definitively categorize people, events and objects…that is, using

the Bakhtinian notion of “finalizability” in a negative way to minimize stress and (over)simplify life.

However, there are several moments in the story which escape this syndrome (although the

“romance” is, of course, doomed to fail). One occurs when the heroine gives her student’s paper an

“A.” Normally she wouldn’t think about it, but is forced because of the empty time to “think” and

acknowledge her true motivation (as mentioned above). Another moment occurs when the accountant

describes having first seen her face emerging from behind a torn advertisement for baby formula (for an

interesting analysis see Rojas, 2008: 163). Lastly, she blushes for him as he notices her beauty in their

close-up love scene. The blush, as in Rain, is an involuntary response to a sudden concern for how one is

being perceived by a valued other. In both stories, I will argue, the blush is a pivotal moment, and points

beyond both the flaneur and the blasé.

V. Conclusions: Flaneur/Blasé, Time, and the Power of Gender

As should be apparent, Rain and Sealed are diametrically opposed stories, despite structural and

thematic similarities. The former explores the experience of the urban flaneur in his element, savoring

the stimulations of the city (to the point of being carried away), while the latter satirizes the natures of

banal and blasé city dwellers benumbed to the stimulations of city life. We can see, however, that

both flaneur and blasé imply an emotional detachment from fellow-citizens: one is ironic, the other

indifferent. We can also see that the flaneur seeks stimulation, experience and change, while the blasé

avoids these; thus the flaneur and the blasé are two sides of the same urban coin. As Rob Shields writes:

…even if the flaneur’s experience of distant vistas is done through the surrogate visions of the exotica

of metropolitan life, unlike Georg Simmel’s portrait of over-stimulated, stressed metropolitans

whose only refuge is withdrawal into the blasé mentality of imposed individuation, anonymity and

estrangement, the flaneur attempts to wallow in the rush of sensate information, taking pleasure in

the diversity of the stimuli of the urban environment…Simmel’s blasé attitude is thus a neurosis of

time-and–space effects. Again, the flaneur is the inverse. (1994: 73)

Perhaps the blasé life creates a need for controlled stimulation and excitation (think Disneyland),

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and a wonderful description of the cinema as the home of the modern flaneur is given in Bruno (1993:

48-9). That these two theoretical constructs still have legs is shown in “The flaneur, the city and virtual

public life” (Featherstone, 1998) and, for the blasé, “The postmetropolis and mental life: Wong Kar

Wai’s cinematic Hong Kong” (Lindner, 2012). I have not at all exhausted the application of flaneur and

blasé to Rain and Sealed, and I think that these stories operate on some level as a sort of urban

ethnography of the unique laboratory of modernization that was (and is) Shanghai. Finally, I must

mention a film that showcases a female flaneur (“flaneuse”) and her blasé writer-husband; after

writing this paper I can understand this film more clearly: La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961.

The cinematic defiance of gender stereotypes in La Notte brings me to my last observation.

There is a sense in Zhang Ailing’s Sealed of a profound historical awareness that exceeds or underlies

the urban environment. First there is the “old, old song, sung from one century to the next” (“Sad, sad,

sad! No money do I have!”) (p. 175). Then there is the authorial voice: “Life was like the Bible,

translated from Hebrew into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into English, from English into

Chinese. When Cuiyuan read it, she translated the standard Chinese into Shanghainese. Gaps were

unavoidable” (p. 177). There is also the reference to the peony in the “love scene,” which of course

is an ancient amorous trope of East Asia (Professor Ridgway, Ch’unhyang Lecture 1, EALC 275).

Rain also contains classical references, as noted: “Holding up an umbrella I accompany an elegant

beauty” seems to be an old line of poetry, while the key Japanese painting of a beautiful lady in the

rain dates to the 1700’s (Rain, p. 123; Wang, 2007: 46). These last ground gender dynamics in ancient

traditions. I will even claim that the “long old eels, never ending, never ending… two shiny eels crawling

out of the water” (Sealed, p. 174) are a reference to the two biological genders from time immemorial,

that make the track that holds up whatever conveyance is in fashion at that time; here, a tram. As

promised, I note that the blush is pivotal to both stories; in Rain the narrator blushes, and then feels “a

sort of masculinist impulse welled up inside” (p. 120). In Sealed, the teacher blushes, and: “Zhongzhen

had never thought that he could make a woman blush… In this he was a man” (p. 181). Thus, the two

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blushes drive the story like the tram driver drives the tram; perhaps we do not even notice

how important the gender drive is, taking it for granted from thousands of stories watched and heard.

The automatism of the gender drive threatens the flaneurial detachment of the narrator in Rain; and,

rather than being an avenue of escape for the romantic leads in Sealed, delivers them into a set of

preconceived gender notions and communication patterns; both men simply project their feelings

and desires onto the women, willy-nilly. Rain: “There are many facets to beauty. Granted, a pretty face

is important, but what also count are a graceful bearing, a well-proportioned figure, and a pleasant way

of expressing oneself or at least one that isn’t annoying. And this woman in the rain, I felt, would meet

such criteria completely” (p. 118). For her part, the heroine of Sealed doesn’t even bother talking:

“Men in love have always wanted to talk; women in love, on the other hand, don’t want to talk, because

they know, without even knowing that they know, that once a man really understands a woman he’ll

stop loving her” (p. 181). Potentially fatal to the flaneur (Ferguson, 1994: 27) the love impulse also fails

to provide freedom and intimacy to the blasé; it is even less conducive to “thought” than their normal

banal/blasé discourse. Of all this is to suggest that these complex and exemplary stories lend themselves

to multiple levels of interpretation; and while the urban environment and attitudes of modernity are

foregrounded, the rails beneath the tram are traditional gender dynamics.

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