The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi (afterword)

3/4

“Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan’s graceful translation . . . helps us understand why Wang Anyi is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the Chinese-speaking world.”

—Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review “A beautifully constructed cyclical narrative. . . . The manner in which character types and events recur against the city’s shifting backdrop is impossible to forget.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A genuine classic.”

—Taipei Times

“Spellbinding, colorful . . . a page-turner right up to the end.” —Historical Novels Review

Wang Anyi ’s books in English include Lapse of Time, Love in a Small Town, Love on a Barren Mountain, Brocade Valley, and the novel Baotown, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year award. She lives in Shanghai.

Michael Berry is associate professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Wang Anyi The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Wang Qiyao was a girl born of the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of working-class Shanghai. Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, and this fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life. After the Communist victory, Wang Qiyao continues to indulge in the decadent pleasures of the Shanghai bourgeoisie, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist campaign and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. She reemerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of “old Shanghai,” only to succumb to a tragedy that echoes the Hollywood noirs of her youth.

Wang Anyi

Honorable Mention: Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work, Modern Language Association

Susan Chan Egan is the coauthor of A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit: The HalfCentury Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams.

9A Novel of Shanghai 0

Weatherhead Books on Asia Columbia Universit y Press New York www.cup.columbia.edu cover im age Digital

composite. © Veer. © Getty Images

cover design Lisa

Hamm

Tr ansl ated by Michael Berry & Susan Chan Egan

ISBN: 978-0-231-14343-1

9 780231 143431

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

columbia

Afterword

Wang Anyi and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow Wang Anyi came to prominence during the early eighties with a string of award-winning short stories, such as 1981’s “The Destination” and “The Rain Patters On,” and over the course of the next few decades came to establish herself as one of the most prolific, dynamic, and imaginative fictional stylists on the Chinese literary scene.

Born in Nanjing in 1954, but raised in Shanghai—the setting for so many of her stories—Wang Anyi hails from a literary family. Her father, Wang Xiaoping (1919–2003), was a noted dramatist. Her mother, Ru Zhijuan (1925–1998), was an important writer in Mao’s China who caused waves with her 1958 short story “Lilies,” whose graceful style boldly broke with the party line on literature of the day.1 Wang Anyi spent two years (1970–1972) in Anhui as an educated youth before joining a song-anddance troupe in Xuzhou, where she played the cello. She began writing in 1975, publishing her first short story, “Pingyuan shang” (“On the plains”), in 1978. As the restraints that stifled creative freedom for her parents and so many writers of their generation began to lift in the 1980s, Wang Anyi’s literary career began to flourish. With a string of important short story collections (Lapse of Time), novellas (Love in a Small Town, Love on a Barren Mountain, Brocade Valley), and novels (Baotown), Wang emerged as nuanced writer unafraid to challenge literary conventions and push the boundaries in her bold portrayals of sexuality and female desire.

As Wang’s literary vision continued to expand and mature during the 1990s, many of her works took on a markedly more experimental approach. Jishi yu xugou (Facts and fictions), a sprawling fictional exploration of her family’s matriarchal lineage, was matched by an equally powerful examination of her father’s Singaporean family line in Shangxin de taiping yang (The sorrowful Pacific). 1990’s Shushu de gushi (Uncle’s

Afterword /432

story) was a influential offering that became a representative work of Chinese postmodern fiction in the post-Tiananmen era. An interesting counterpoint to this string of experimental writings was Mini (Minnie), a disturbing tale of two educated youths who return to Shanghai after the Cultural Revolution only to descend into a dark web of addiction, prostitution, and betrayal. Minnie provided Wang with ample scope to flex her storytelling muscles while crafting an unsettling postscript to the tales of educated youth she had written more than a decade earlier.

In the years following the landmark publication of her 1995 novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wang Anyi has shown no signs of slowing down when it comes to her own ever-expanding fictional universe. She has published more than half a dozen volumes of new fiction, from 1995’s Wo ai Bier (I love Bill), which explored the effects of a university student’s series of relationships with foreign men in the wake of her breakup with an American diplomat, to 2005’s Biandi xiaoxiong (The fierce and ambitious), a landmark novel that traces the radical moral and psychological transformation of a Shanghai taxi driver after he falls victim to a random carjacking. In between, Wang’s astonishingly prolific fictional output has included such novels as Meitou and Fuping and numerous collections of short fiction, including Youshang de niandai (The age of melancholy) and Xiandai shenghuo (Modern life).

Always known primarily for her novels and short stories, in recent years Wang has also been gaining increasing notice for her rich array of nonfiction genres, which range from travelogues, diaries, and transcripts of university lectures to essays on literary technique, music, and masterworks of world fiction. These essays have been collected in such books as Gushi he jiang gushi (Stories and telling stories), Xiaoshuojia de shisan tangke (Thirteen classes with a novelist), and Xinling shijie (The world of the mind). And while serving as chair of the Shanghai Writers Association and as professor of Chinese literature at Fudan University, Wang has also ventured into literary translation, with a Chinese edition of Elizabeth Swados’ My Depression.

But among her rich body of work, which now contains more than three dozen volumes of fiction and essays, it is The Song of Everlasting Sorrow that stands out as her crowning literary achievement. Completed in 1995 and published the same year, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow tells the story of Wang Qiyao, a Shanghai girl enraptured by fashion and Hollywood movies who, after being discovered by an amateur photographer, competes in the 1946 Miss Shanghai beauty pageant. A recent high school graduate at the time, Wang Qiyao becomes second runner-up and is awarded the

michael berry /433

title of “Miss Third Place”—a fleeting moment of stardom that is the pinnacle of her life. For the next forty years Wang Qiyao clings to that moment and the glamorous lifestyle of pre-liberation Shanghai, in all its glory and decadence. Throughout the historical vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, Wang Qiyao survives and perseveres, secretly playing mahjong during the anti-Rightist Movement, giving birth to an illegitimate child, and carrying on fleeting romances on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. She emerges in the 1980s as the purveyor of “old Shanghai”—a living incarnation of a new commodity called nostalgia—only to be murdered by a petty scam artist in a tragic climax that echoes the films of her youth.

In 2000 the novel was awarded China’s highest literary honor, the Mao Dun Prize, which is given only once every five years, among numerous other literary awards in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It was around the same time that Asia Weekly assembled a panel of literary critics from around the world to determine the one hundred best works of twentiethcentury Chinese fiction and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was ranked number 39 on the list. Further testimony to the novel’s importance comes in its multitude of popular-culture manifestations. The year 2003 saw a major stage adaptation of the book by Zhao Yaomin, which received starred reviews after its Shanghai premiere. In 2004 the novel became one of the first Chinese titles to be released on compact disc as an audio book. And 2005 saw the release of a major motion picture adaptation under the title Everlasting Regret, directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan and produced by Jackie Chan. The fi lm, which starred Sammi Cheng, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, and Hu Jun, offered stunning cinematography and sumptuous set design, but lacked the nuances, narrative breadth, and emotional power of the original novel. The same year, Kwan also produced To Live to Love, a thirty-five-episode television miniseries adaptation (directed by Ding Hei), which was accompanied by the publication of a teleplay novelization penned by Jiang Liping and a separate illustrated edition with drawings by Weng Ziyang. In all their stunning array, the popular reinventions of Wang Qiyao in the decade since Wang Anyi brought her to life have not only offered new alternatives for this character’s fictional universe, but also placed her alongside real-life icons like Ruan Lingyu and Zhou Xuan as one of the most potent cultural symbols of old Shanghai.

One of the key pitfalls encountered by both the fi lm and television adaptations of the novel stems from the need on the part of the producers to continually reintroduce characters—such as Mr. Cheng, Jiang Lili, and Director Li—for increased dramatic effect and continuity of story, even

Afterword /434

when those characters pass away in the novel. This stands in contrast to the character Wang Qiyao, who, as conceived by Wang Anyi, is a woman incapable of maintaining enduring human relationships. People come and go throughout her life, but she can never hold on to them—not even her own mother or daughter—and this is precisely one of the qualities that make this character so unique . . . and stain her life with sorrow.

Cycles of Sorrow and Copies of Nostalgia Whereas visual adaptations of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow have gone to great lengths to strengthen the interpersonal relationships in Wang Qiyao’s life (such as her virtually nonexistent bond with her parents) and reintroduce secondary characters back into her life (such as Mr. Cheng and Director Li, who both die in the novel), the original work already has its own internal philosophy of narrative continuity, one far more subtle and sophisticated. In contrast to the rather forced reintroduction of characters in the fi lm and television miniseries, Wang Anyi’s novel instead weaves a complicated web in which relationships, scenarios, and even characters serve as counterpoints to earlier incarnations of themselves. The effect is a form of literary déjà vu that works simultaneously on the interior as well as the exterior levels of the text as both the novel’s characters and we the readers try to navigate through the complex human networks that Wang Qiyao alternately constructs, abandons, and reconstitutes by way of proxy throughout her life.

One of the earliest examples of this narrative pattern occurs in part I, when Wang Qiyao’s best friend Wu Peizhen is “replaced” by Jiang Lili.

What may appear on the surface as a new bond formed in the wake of a fallout with her former best friend actually serves as a prelude to a cyclical pattern of relationships that will recur throughout Wang Qiyao’s life.

As the novel progresses, these patterns become most evident in the series of love triangles that dominate each respective section, involving Mr. Cheng and Director Li in part I, Uncle Maomao and Sasha in part II, and Old Colour and Long Legs in part III. These romances are, in each case, further conflated by the women in Wang’s life—for instance, when Weiwei and Zhang Yonghong appear in part III as shadowy reminders of Wu Peizhen and Jiang Lili from the novel’s opening.

The situational motifs that echo and reverberate throughout The Song of Everlasting Sorrow are not so much base repetitions as subtle de-evolutions that further illustrate the inner world of the heroine. Cycles

michael berry /435

of repetition reflect not only Wang Anyi’s ingenious literary design, but the heroine Wang Qiyao’s tragic quest to reclaim her memories, revisit her past, and relive her lost loves. It is tragic because, with each affair, with each romance, more of herself gets stripped away and destroyed.

From innocence (Mr. Cheng) to practicality (Director Li) and from deception (Sasha) to becoming a true object of “imaginary nostalgia” (Old Colour), in the end Wang Qiyao is no longer even the object of desire, but merely a means to an end (Long Legs). This is, once again, not simply the author’s literary technique at work, but an expression of the psychology of Wang Qiyao, who is continually searching for vehicles to relive her past, no matter how futile that attempt may be. Her song of everlasting sorrow is a canon that, instead of growing stronger with each refrain, grows increasingly weaker and desperate.

The same cyclical logic also manifests itself through characters who appear as hazy reflections of figures from earlier chapters that have long since faded from Wang Qiyao’s life and hence the novel’s narrative. Just as the author observes, “Everything in this city has a copy, and everything has someone who leads the way,” 2 the characters, too, have their copies and clones. One of the most interesting examples comes in the form of Zhang Yonghong, Weiwei’s best friend and Wang Qiyao’s confidante. If there is a true double for Wang Qiyao herself, it is not her daughter but Zhang Yonghong, the most fashionable girl on Huaihai Road in the eighties. But even as Zhang Yonghong masters all the fashion secrets, dance steps, and kernels of Western culture from Wang Qiyao, she can never truly measure up. And how can she? Born during the Cultural Revolution— more than two decades too late to experience the real “old Shanghai”—her identity is branded by her name, “Yonghong,” or “Eternally Red,” a permanent reminder of the socialist cradle from which she came.

The longing for Shanghai’s pre-liberation days, which form the setting of part I and the object of Old Colour’s obsession in part III, has led many critics to comment on the place of nostalgia in the novel’s framework.

These, however, are readings that Wang Anyi sees as detracting from the work’s original vision: The part of the book in which The Song of Everlasting Sorrow provides the most nostalgic material appears in the section set during the 1940s, but that is entirely fictionalized. I have absolutely no personal experience relating to that era and therefore absolutely no psychological reason to feel nostalgic. All I wanted to do was to create a most majestic stage for Wang Qiyao to live out the few good days she had in her life. . . . And so The Song

Afterword /436 of Everlasting Sorrow was not completed under the thrust of simple nostalgic sentiments; moreover, what it contains and represents cannot be embraced by the term “nostalgia.”3

While Wang Anyi has repeatedly rejected descriptions of her novel as a work of nostalgia—referring to the glorious world of old Shanghai as embodied by foreign concessions, calendar girls, and the bright lights of the Bund—the drive to recreate relationships throughout the novel points instead to her heroine’s own very personal form of nostalgic longing. It is a nostalgia that drives Wang Qiyao to ceaselessly attempt to re-create earlier moments in her life. In Wang Anyi’s literary world, history seems to repeat itself . . . but it doesn’t. And in the end it simply produces flawed copies and imperfect replicas of itself, wherein the original patterns and scenarios appear increasingly distant. But isn’t that what nostalgia is all about? An incurable longing for what is lost but can never be recovered.

It is in the final scene of the novel, when Wang Qiyao is strangled by Long Legs in her apartment on Peace Lane, that she is struck by an otherworldly epiphany and the true meaning of the simulated death scene she witnessed as a teenage girl at the film studio suddenly becomes apparent.

Then, in that last moment, her thoughts raced through time, and the fi lm studio from forty years ago appeared before her. That’s it: it was in the fi lm studio. There, in that three-walled room on the set, a woman lay draped across a bed during her final moments; above her a light swung back and forth, projecting wavelike shadows onto the walls. Only now did she finally realize that she was the woman on that bed—she was the one who had been murdered.4

It is in that moment that it suddenly becomes clear that even Wang Qiyao’s own life is but a copy, an attempt to recreate a fleeting fantasy/ nightmare of her youth. And if it is, then perhaps the sorrowful song of the ensuing four decades was all part of a necessary plot to produce the perfect tragically stained reproduction?

Writing Literary History and Erasing History The Song of Everlasting Sorrow borrows its title from one of the most famous literary works of the Tang dynasty, Bo Juyi’s (Bai Juyi) (772–846)

michael berry /437

extended narrative poem “Chang hen ge,” which forms the single most important subtext to the novel. Dating from 809, the original poem tells of the epic romance between the Tang emperor Xuanzong (685–762) and his beloved concubine Yang Guifei (719–756), whose stunning beauty is legendary in Chinese historical lore. Beginning with Yang’s entry into the palace, the poem recounts the emperor’s passionate love for her, which eventually leads to his dereliction of state affairs and a full-scale rebellion (the leader of which, An Lushan, gained power through Yang’s influence). In the wake of the rebellion and growing unrest, Xuanzong is pressured to order the execution of his beloved consort, and the final section of the poem describes his quest to find her in heaven, concluding with the famous couplet, “While even heaven and earth will one day come to an end, this everlasting sorrow shall endure.”

Some readers may see similarities between the imaginary Wang Qiyao and the legendary Yang Guifei, from their status—Wang was “Miss Third Place” but not Miss Shanghai while Yang was a concubine but not the empress—to their shared tragic fate by strangulation. But the way Wang Anyi cements her indebtedness to Bo Juyi throughout her novel is through numerous and subtle textual referents, such as when she describes Wang Qiyao’s discriminating fashion sense in language directly quoted from the Tang masterpiece, thereby further equating her heroine with the prototypical tragic beauty.5 Wang Anyi, however, does not stop with “Chang hen ge” and actually laces her novel with intertextual references, such as to the work of tenthcentury poet Li Yu and the Tang poet Cui Ying’s famous “Yellow Crane Tower” (“Huang he lou”), from which the chapter headings “An Old Friend Flew Off on a Yellow Crane” and “All That Remains is the Tower Whence It Flew” are borrowed. The way Wang Anyi seamlessly weaves this myriad of textual references into her novel, using them to comment on her story, is part of what makes The Song of Everlasting Sorrow such a powerful literary work. But the novel’s attachment to Chinese literary history does not stop with the Tang dynasty.

David Der-wei Wang was among the fi rst critics to link Wang Anyi’s literary recreation of old Shanghai with one of the twentieth century’s greatest Chinese writers, Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) (1920–1995).6 And while his influential essay “A new successor to the Shanghai School” argued that The Song of Everlasting Sorrow secured the author’s place as Eileen Chang’s literary successor, Wang Anyi has downplayed any similarities to work of the iconic writer, instead claiming that the

Afterword /438

closest thing to a literary model was actually Hugo’s Notre-Dame of Paris. While The Song of Everlasting Sorrow situates itself within a rich literary history of Chinese and Western classics from which it draws and to which it has often been compared—from Bo Juyi and Cui Ying to Eileen Chang and Victor Hugo—Wang Anyi’s conception of history itself is quite different.

In stark contrast to the rich literary history in which Wang Anyi brilliantly anchors her fictional universe lies the seeming weightlessness of “history” against which her novel plays out. Although The Song of Everlasting Sorrow spans four crucial decades of modern Chinese history, from 1946 to 1986, many of the historical landmarks we naturally expect are absent. All of the keywords that seem inevitable in modern China— the Civil War, Liberation, the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, the Open Door Policy—are virtually nonexistent in the novel’s narrative. This significant absence points to a new conception of history that is formulated by subtle changes in fashion and popular culture rather than politics and historical movements, an approach that stands in stark contrast to other works of contemporary Chinese historical fiction. In discussing the historical vision of her novel, Wang Anyi writes: Some people accuse me of “avoiding” the impact that large-scale historical events have on practical life. But I don’t feel that is the case at all. I personally feel that the face of history is not built by large-scale incidents; history occurs day after day, bit by bit transforming our daily lives. For instance the way women on the streets of Shanghai went from wearing cheongsam dresses to Lenin-style jackets—that is the kind of history I am concerned with.7

This is not to say that the historical forces that surround the characters in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow do not affect them—think of Director Li’s fatal plane crash toward the end of the Civil War or Mr. Cheng’s death during the Cultural Revolution—but history never takes center stage: instead it quietly plays out in the shadows on the periphery of the everyday. As the novel opens, Shanghai does not appear on a massive canvas, but gradually takes form from a series of dots and lines, signaling a fictional universe built on the details of daily life. Unlike Bo Juyi’s famous poem, which is written on a grand stage of politics, rebellion, and

michael berry /439

dynastic crisis, Wang Anyi’s tragic ballad quietly plays out in the backalley longtang neighborhoods of Shanghai, where “tell-it-as-it-is,” “less-ismore,” and the cycles of fashion rule the (every)day. And where two-thirds of Bo’s poem is devoted to the emperor’s mourning and his quest to find his lover in the netherworld after her death, who is there to mourn Wang Qiyao? In the end, the death of “Miss Third Place” is perhaps simply another piece of gossip to float through the labyrinthine back alleys of Shanghai.

R This afterword is aimed at introducing Wang Anyi and her Song of Everlasting Sorrow and providing a series of different perspectives from which to approach—or reflect upon—this seminal literary work. From cycles of recurrence to the politics of nostalgia and from literary history to a new historiography of the everyday—these are but a handful of the themes to which The Song of Everlasting Sorrow takes us. And while critics have described her work with many labels, including nostalgic, Shanghai-school, and feminist, Wang Anyi has rejected them all, a stance that has only increased the complexity of ideas with which we must approach her work. The novel has been alternately read as a postmodernist showcase and a postsocialist testimony to the fate of Shanghai in the twentieth century.

In the years since its initial publication, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow has come to be recognized as one of the true classics of contemporary Chinese fiction. At the same time, just as Wang Qiyao inspired Old Colour’s nostalgic longing for an “old Shanghai” he never knew, so The Song of Everlasting Sorrow has itself helped give rise to a new “Shanghai fever” that has swept China since the late nineties. In this context, new meaning is brought to the life (and death) of Wang Qiyao as she is posthumously transformed into a true “Miss Shanghai,” a fictional incarnation of this Paris of the Orient’s imagined past and a new icon for it as it looks toward the future.

M. B. Santa Barbara, California March 2007

Afterword /440

notes 1. See Perry Link, “Rebels, Victims, and Apologists,” in New York Times, July 6, 1986. “Lilies” and other representative works by Ru Zhijuan are available in the collection Lilies and Other Stories (Peking: Panda Books, 1985).

2. Page [orig 46].

3. Wang Anyi, “Chang hen ge bu shi huaijiu” (“The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is not a work of nostalgia”), in Wang Anyi Shuo (Wang Anyi speaks) (Hunan: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 2003), 121.

4. Page [orig 771].

5. Page 554. The original Chinese refers to the “rainbow skirt and feathered coat” (ni shang yu yi), a description that actually appears twice in Bo Juyi’s original poem to describe Yang Guifei’s clothing and which has come to be equated with the tragic consort. Thanks to Alice Cheang for this observation.

6. See Wang Dewei (David Der-wei Wang), “Shanghai xiaojie zhi si: Wang Anyi de ‘Chang hen ge’ ” (“Death of Miss Shanghai: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow”), in Wang Anyi, Chang hen ge (The Song of Everlasting Sorrow) (Taipei: Maitian, 1996), 3–10; and Wang Dewei, “Haipai zuojia, you jian chuanren: Wang Anyi lun” (“A new successor to the Shanghai School: On Wang Anyi”), in Kua shiji fenghua dangdai xiaoshuo 20 jia (Into the new millennium: Twenty Chinese fiction writers) (Taipei: Maitian, 2002), 35–54.

7. Wang Anyi, “Wo yanzhong de lishi shi richang de” (“The history I see is that of the everyday”), in Wang Anyi Shuo (Wang Anyi speaks) (Hunan: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 2003), 155.