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.
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 twentieth-century 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 film, 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 film 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 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 film 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 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.