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
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).6 And 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.