Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

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 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. 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?

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) 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 first 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). 6And 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 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 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.

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.