Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Only the pigeons would bear witness. They are the offspring of those birds of four decades before; generation after generation, their line never stops and everything is recorded in their eyes. You can hear them cooing and know that their nightmares are born of the nights of man. How many unsolved crimes there are in this city, all committed during those late-night hours in the long, dark longtang alleys that run like cracks through the city, never to see the light of day. When day breaks and the flocks of pigeons take to the sky, you will see that the moment they suddenly leap into the air carries with it a sudden terror. The eyes of these mute witnesses are filled with blood; countless injustices remain sealed away in their hearts. The whistles of the pigeons are clearly cries of mourning; it is only thanks to the vastness of the sky that they do not sound so harsh. The pigeons fly circles in the sky, but never go far; they are expressing their condolences for all the lost souls in this old city. Amid the forest of new skyscrapers, these old longtang neighborhoods are like a fleet of sunken ships, their battered hulls exposed as the sea dries up.

The last image caught in Wang Qiyao’s eyes was that of the hanging lamp swinging back and forth. Long Legs had pushed against it with his shoulder and sent it swinging back and forth. There was something familiar about this picture and she was trying hard to figure out where she had seen it before. Then, in that last moment, her thoughts raced through time, and the film studio from forty years ago appeared before her. That’s it: it was in the film 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. And then the light was extinguished and everything slipped into darkness.

In another two or three hours, the pigeons would be getting ready to take flight again. They would leave their nests and dart into the sky, their strong shadows flashing onto her drapes as they flew past. The potted oleanders on the balcony across the way were beginning to bloom, opening the curtain on yet another season of flowering and decay.

September 23, 1994–March 16, 1995

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. 1Wang 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 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 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.