Authors: Wang Anyi

Song of Everlasting Sorrow (78 page)

BOOK: Song of Everlasting Sorrow

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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 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 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?

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) 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.

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

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.

This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University.