by Anyi, Wang
Anger contorted Wang Qiyao’s face. Gnashing her teeth, she cursed him. “You wretched thief! You’re a thief! You think I believed all that garbage you tell everyone? I saw through you a long time ago—I just didn’t want to embarrass you!”
The words made Long Legs swallow his smugness. He put down the box and grabbed hold of Wang Qiyao’s neck.
“Say it again! I dare you!” he screamed.
“Thief!” cried Wang Qiyao.
Long Legs wrapped his large hands around Wang Qiyao’s throat. Look at how thin her neck is, just skin and bones, it’s enough to make me sick! Wang Qiyao struggled to break free of his grip, cursing him all the while. His grip tightened. He looked at her face: so ugly and desiccated. Her hair was brittle and the roots were gray, but the rest was dark and shiny with hair dye—how comical! Wang Qiyao’s lips quivered, but no sounds came out. Long Legs hadn’t finished getting his kicks. He had exerted only a fraction of his strength and her neck was too skinny for his hands to dig into. That feeling of excitement rushed into his heart again and he squeezed tighter and tighter until the neck grew soft and lost its elasticity. He sighed a little regretfully, gently put her down, and released his grip.
Too impatient even to take a second look at her, he turned his attention to the box. The floral engravings on it indicated that it was highclass and expensive—a prized object. It didn’t take much effort for Long Legs to pry the lock off with his screwdriver and get the box open. He couldn’t help being a bit disappointed, even though it wasn’t a complete loss. He took out the contents and put them into his pockets, which felt heavy. He remembered what Wang Qiyao had just said about fingerprints and found a cloth with which he wiped the whole place down. He then turned off the light and quietly crept out of the apartment. Over the course of the entire episode, the moon had barely shifted; everything had transpired during the dead hour between two and three o’clock in the morning, a time when even the darkest of deeds can be carried out in absolute secrecy. Who would ever know what had happened here on this night?
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
Afterword
Wang Anyi and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
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.1 Wang 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 U
niversity, 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.
The same cyclical logic also manifests itself through characters who appear as hazy reflections of figures from earlier chapters that have long since faded from Wang Qiyao’s life and hence the novel’s narrative. Just as the author observes, “Everything in this city has a copy, and everything has someone who leads the way,” 2 the characters, too, have their copies and clones. One of the most interesting examples comes in the form of Zhang Yonghong, Weiwei’s best friend and Wang Qiyao’s confidante. If there is a true double for Wang Qiyao herself, it is not her daughter but Zhang Yonghong, the most fashionable girl on Huaihai Road in the eighties. But even as Zhang Yonghong masters all the fashion secrets, dance steps, and kernels of Western culture from Wang Qiyao, she can never truly measure up. And how can she? Born during the Cultural Revolution—more than two decades too late to experience the real “old Shanghai”—her identity is branded by her name, “Yonghong,” or “Eternally Red,” a permanent reminder of the socialist cradle from which she came.
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