“Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf, is an essay which reveals the author’s walking journey through the London streets in winter. She uses incredible imagery as she records a stream-of-consciousness account of going across town in search of a pencil.
I’ve written a mirror image (and much shorter) response to the essay, to both be influenced by Woolf, and to share with you how her words are timeless and yet transmissible to me, in Shanghai, in 2021!
Woolf has a very delicate and thoughtful writing style, which shows the readers the scenery of London street at night. She lets the mercurial nature of the mind revert to memories such as a bowl she got in Italy, details which many people would perhaps ignore (for these memories occur before she has left her apartment). But this prepares the reader for her lustrous and dazzling street images. From her essay, I learned how to mirror her syntax and to hybridize her images with my reality.
In Woolf’s essay, the author starts with an excuse to leave her apartment— getting a pencil. My version is: I want to walk to eat a certain dish! Her essay actually influences the reader to think… when have I had such and such a kind of experience, what I have seen, what I have thought? From Woolf, I learned how to use this unique starting place to affect the reader. Because my essay is shorter I’ve linked to her ending to create a closed loop. In addition, I learned how to use her and my images to expand and let it flow like water.
For a link to Woolf’s original essay, please see here: http://s.spachman.tripod.com/Woolf/streethaunting.htm
Shanghai Tramping
By Qiuye QIAN
No one perhaps has ever felt stirred to find Shanghai dumplings on a Friday afternoon. But there are times when it can become the only thing to do; it occurs at times when, as sophomores at JZIB (the High School Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University), that we are so dog-tired and hungry that we need these dumplings, and an excuse for walking halfway across Shanghai between lunch and dinner suffices to leave home.
As the high-achieving student must take breaks to preserve their sanity, and the aesthete takes to vigorous exercise to balance out his remunerative musings, so when the desire comes upon us to walking around Shanghai, eating braised pork in brown sauce does for a reason, and arising from our rooms we say: “Really, I must eat braised pork in brown sauce,” as if using this as an excuse we could engage with our magnificent city and where it likes us best – by setting out with no particular aim save to get a braised pork in brown sauce.
The hour should be around 8 pm in the coming death of spring (the best time to view the busy night scene of Shanghai). For in spring, the bitter smell of mint and the cheap taste of tobacco mingles; the beer is preferred warm for the local people. We are no longer annoyed as in the winter by the strong pungent smell of hot pot and the artificially sweet air from the fruit supermarket. The night hour, too, gives us the irresponsible sensation which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house between eight and nine, we shed the self our friends know us by, and become part of that rambling drunkard in a small restaurant, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of staying with homework.
For at home we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce those memories. That wooden doll on the shelf, for instance, with fine marks and patterns, was bought at Chenghuangmiao on a sunny day: we were just aimlessly wandering in the antique shop when an old woman who had been boasting about the antique furniture in the shop plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, “Take it!” she cried, and thrust the lovely doll into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little house. Late in the afternoon, the pet dog Little Bean and the lost cat JJ sang a horrible song just like the crying of a small baby, so that we all leant out into the garden to look, and saw the light from the nearest large department store laced about among the old China fir and the dense clouds grey in the sky. This memory was balanced, just like the oyster shell on the beach, submerged among the billion grains of sand that washed away imperceptibly. There too was the shriveled old gatekeeper, who rose among the shadow of trees and rusty iron door and revealed the secrets of his soul–as everyone who is going to hug death does. All this – Shanghai, the late afternoon, light laces about the trees, the old man and the secret of the soul – rise up in a soft fragrance from the wooden doll on the shelf. And there, as eyes fall on the floor, is that dot of the dried oil painting on the mahogany flooring. Little Jessica made that. “The young girl’s a little devil!” had said Mrs. Crystal, putting the cup with which she was about to add tea and water to so that it evaporates round white rings from the glass of the table.
But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The petal-like covering which our souls have stretched out to house themselves, to make for themselves a pupa distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these layers piled up, like an asphyxia of baroque pearls (before they’re liberated from the oyster shell) with growing lines of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful the Shanghai street in summer! It is at once enthusiastic and indifferent. Here vaguely one can trace carved door frames and windows; here under the lamps are suspended fog of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their youth and energy, wear a certain look of unreality, a reserved air of depravity, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, dances away without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a pearl, not a crystal, not a diamond displayed in the jewelry cabinet. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, reflecting, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like crows, they choose beautiful and shining things, greedily carry them into their nests and enjoying them carefully.
The crow returns with a full load, carefully decorating the nest, vanishing in smoke. The aroma of braised pork in brown sauce slowly rises from the steam, with warm oil flickering on the translucent skin. The steam, the lovely doll, the young lady and men, everything are locked in a wooden box again. Cunning eyes deliciously and successfully imprison our deeper thinking, and all returns to the simple appetite.
