Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

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

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.