Zhang Ailing in 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The old-time Overseas Chinese call Los Angeles “Luo Sheng.” It’s a phonetic transliteration, just like “Lo Shan,” the shortened form of “Lo Shan Ji” [Los Angeles]. But when it’s cut to two syllables, with “Sheng” at the end, those not familiar with the term could think it refers to a U.S. state—a short form of Louisiana, maybe? This city does cover a huge area, though it’s not as big as a state. It’s famous for being a “Mecca of Car Culture,” lots of cars, late models, everywhere—everyone has a car, hence the terrible bus service. It’s bad in the city, even worse in the suburbs.

Here on this main route in a little satellite city, the bus stop was stagnant, no one had come for half an hour, maybe longer. Peering down the road, craning to spot an approaching bus, all you could see was a stretch of scenery, the upper swathe filled with commanding mountain ridges, rising and falling, which the yellow-green of Southern California’s steady, year-round climate, warm and dry, shimmered into the hazy blue of afternoon sky. Up on those hills, there were no houses yet, this valley being quite far from the city; and even among the trees, there were none of the little white houses that dot the hills in closer suburbs. There was only that high hill stretching up and out all in one color, a lightly yellow vegetation green, then the sky behind the hill, in a blue that wasn’t very blue. The Spaniards, when they’d first landed and looked at this empty mountain, had probably seen the very same thing.

A pair of freeway bridges ran across the mountain’s lower slope, one above the other, two lines of white cement, each with its own guardrail. That stripe of white over a white road deck turned those bridges into dazzling runways for an auto show, the size and speed thereof reduced by distance; one by one they rolled by, sedate, tiny, and exquisite, delightfully miniature toy cars in every springtime hue interspersed with others in the latest, pale, and refined metallic colors: dark silver, dark red, and the faded tea-brown of military-supply food cans. There were trailer trucks, vans with seats in front and cargo in the back, motor homes, car carriers with both decks full; and a new kind of delivery truck with flimsy panels and a pull chain in back, giving the impression of a white plastic bag from the cleaner’s. There were camper vans with windows in a protruding section over the cab, looking like a rhino’s snout or an elephant’s curled trunk. Most of the traffic was long-haul trucks, next to which the guardrails looked even lower, not likely to stop anything; those big white trailer containers, shaking and toppling along, looked just about ready to fall off the bridge.

Under the two bridges was a bit of ground that gradually flattened out. A pair of old, yellow, two-story houses with lattice windows, the old-fashioned kind with wooden grilles painted brown, stood along the borders of an L-shaped yard. There were a few big trees and an old truck parked underneath them. A heap of something or other was piled on the muddy ground, covered with that olive-green Army oilcloth that’s carried in lots of shops. It felt like a place in those sleepier times of the thirties and forties, back when neither time nor space had some high price attached to it.

Upper slopes, lower slopes, and the bridges’ understory: together they made three bands running parallel, horizontally, each one a separate time period, like the stratified eras excavated by archaeologists. The top layer was ancient times but then, from the middle to the lower layer, the sequencing was reversed, jumping back in time from the present to an era several decades past.

In the foreground, this major street was a big, wide stretch of asphalt flanked by shops that were all single-story or two stories hunched down, the proportions all wrong, an odd feeling in the whole place, as if the road’s shoulders had crumbled down and the road itself were some kind of huge, high, ancient yellow-earth road with dry gullies running alongside—all giving rise, without real reason, to the feeling of desolate ruin.

The shops sold furniture, or curtains, or windows and doors; or they were toy stores, stores that sold flooring, or bathroom fixture stores. Obviously this was a “residential city,” also called a “bedroom community,” built up in this location because safety in the city was not good; having moved their families out here, the next thing was to fix up their new homes and then, every day, drive a long way into the city to work, only coming back to sleep. Maybe because of the “Slow-Growth Movement” for environmental protection, development here was languid and delayed: all of the storefronts were plain and gray, the signboards done in a conservative style with gold lettering on a black background, making them seem like vintage establishments. The shops were so deserted, sparrows could hop around undisturbed. The sidewalk was devoid of people, till every once in a long while a plump female shop clerk went out and got fast food with a cold drink, which she held cradled in both hands when she came back; she looked, here in the broad daylight, like a guilty, late-night curfew-breaker, skulking and skittering till she’d gotten back inside again.

It was pretty much an empty city, except for the traffic passing by in a constant stream—but no buses. Under the bus stop sign was a bench, and on the green paint of the backrest, written in big letters in white chalk, there was

WEE AND DEE

1988–?

Which, in Chinese, would be:

WEI AND DI

1988 TO — ?

English does have a girl’s name, Dee. But here, with Dee set alongside Wee, these should be Chinese surnames: Dí and Wèi, with two different surname characters possible for “Wèi.”

Here, in the midst of utter ennui, this sudden sighting of written marks made by a Chinese strikes a spark of delight. The two surnames pronounced “Wèi” in Mandarin use an English spelling not quite the same as “Wee,” so this must be an Overseas Chinese. Some of the names of Overseas Chinese, because they derive from Fukienese or Cantonese dialects, have very unusual spellings in English. That could mean that “Dee” is Dài instead of Dí, just as “Wee” could be either a form of Wèi, or maybe some other very ordinary and commonly used family name—there’s simply no way to be sure. It’s said that a lot of refugees from Southeast Asia have settled in this valley, though it’s not clear why they picked such a high-rent district. Refugees do of course divide into different social classes, but the people on the bus, they’ve got to be the ones without money.

Everywhere you go, people write on walls, or on utility poles: “Danny Loves Debbie” or “Eddie Loves Shirley” with a heart drawn around the two names. Men have been putting out this kind of scrawl forever, wherever. Even the scribble “So-and-So Journeyed Hither,” which has been written in China since ancient times, and “Gilroy Was Here,” the trademark tag of American soldiers sent overseas in World War II, are always in a man’s handwriting. So the words on the back of the bus stop bench had to have been written by a Mr. Wèi, if indeed this is the right “Wèi” for this name. “Wee and Dee” clearly follows the same format as “Eddy and Shirley” inside a heart, but Asian people, being more reserved, are too embarrassed to draw that heart, so they just leave it out.

Still, seeing this kind of thing written by an Oriental—and a Chinese, at that—is an entirely new experience. Probably he was waiting for the bus, waiting beyond all endurance, looking and looking down the road, to the very end, always in the same direction, because if he lost focus for even a mere moment, glanced around a bit, the bus would take it as an excuse to come flying down the road and buzz right past him, even though it normally lumbered along awkwardly, like one of those big, fat people who sometimes move with such sudden swiftness that no one expects it; and then, though it’s true that the vista in this hill town is quite scenic, looking at it for too long does become tedious, uninteresting; plus, there’s the withered feeling of a place that is far from home, not to mention the fear of arriving late for work, that anxiety making time trickle by even more slowly so that, after a long while, the only sensation left is of time bearing down; and when eyes see but blankly, ears hear but dimly, the overwhelming dullness driving him insane until, bored unto desperation, he pulls from his pocket the chalk he’d picked up from where it had fallen under the blackboard in the English language class he was taking, and blurts out the thing most on his mind:

WEI AND DAI

1988 TO — ?

Lines written on a tombstone, “Henry Bacon / 1923 to 1979,” come with a grimace. A boy and a girl in this wayward world, the two of them from the same place meeting each other in a foreign place—who knows what the future will bring? Have to see what the conditions of life entail, for each of them.

Usually, they’d use their English names with each other: Johnny, Eddie, Helen, Annie. Using family names instead feels objective, dispassionate—maybe because using given names would be too much like “Danny Loves Debby” or “Eddie and Shirley” with a big heart around it. Using one’s surname does look, as a confession of true feeling, rather like burying one’s head, leaving only a bit of tail to be seen. Still, a given name in English leaves room for denial, whereas Chinese surnames, for those people who know you, are immediately identifiable—this was braving gossip and laughter from the entire hometown community here! It was small, this little urban settlement, filled with people who’d come from the same district back in the old country. But at this moment, he was ready to ignore all that. A twinge of sharp pain cut into his feeling of being unmoored, then disappeared. Slicing into this three-layered cake of street scenery, the little knife got stuck, couldn’t cut through. The big cake was too dry, the top layer still the hazy blue sky as the Spaniards had first seen it, with the yellow-green mountain stretching out forever; the middle layer the freeway held up by the two bridges; the bottom layer, in that flipped sequence, the era of several decades ago: three generations under the same roof, blithely undisturbed by one another, looking right past each other. The three huge horizontal layers, a single silent travelogue in technicolor on a cracked silver screen, no audio added, played soundlessly in one corner of an exhibit that was running at a loss, and no one was watching.

Notes

Overseas Chinese: The term Overseas Chinese (huá qiáo) implies a permanent connection to Chinese culture even for those who live abroad, perhaps for generations; Chang tends to use it mostly for the Cantonese who settled in Southeast Asia or, as in this case, the United States, prior to the twentieth century.

Luo Shan Ji, Luo Sheng: Luo Shan Jihas become the usual Chinese name for Los Angeles but in the past Luo Shengwas also used for this purpose; a shěngis a province; hence, Luo Shengcould easily seem to be Luo Province or Luo State, rather than the name of a city.

Wee and Dee / 1988–? // Wei and Di / 1988 to–?:In the Chinese text, Chang presents the bus stop graffiti in English first, followed by a Chinese translation using two surnames, 魏 and 狄, for which the pronunciations, “Wèi” and “Dí” in Standard Mandarin dialect, come close to “Wee” and “Dee” in English.  She then raises the possibility that “Wee” refers not to 魏 but to 衛, two distinctly different surnames that use different characters but are pronounced the same way; she then goes on to suggest a similarly bifurcated set of possibilities for “Dee,” but now expands the range of possibilities to include two names that are not homophones: Dí 狄 and Dài 戴.

Gilroy was here: In the Chinese text, this phrase appears in English, spelled this way, followed by a Chinese translation. The actual English phrase is “Kilroy was here.”

Wei and Dai / 1988—?: Dí 狄 has here been changed to Dài 戴, without comment.

From Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang,to be published by New York Review of Books this August. This essay, which apparently derives from the author’s years of itinerant residence in temporary dwellings in the mid-eighties in the greater Los Angeles area—sometimes called her Motel Period—was first published in a Taipei newspaper in the spring of 1996, half a year after her death. 

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and screenwriter. She was born to an aristocratic family in Shanghai and moved to the United States in 1955. Her books in English translation include Love in a Fallen City, Naked Earth, Little Reunions, and Written on Water.

Karen S. Kingsbury is the translator of Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City and Half a Lifelong Romance, among other works. She is currently a professor of international studies at Chatham University.