The Song of Everlasting Sorrow · Companion GuideStories · Issue 00
10 minutes to The Song of Everlasting Sorrow — one woman's forty years, writing out a whole city's life
Wang Anyi's Shanghai epic: a beauty who walked out of a lane house, from cover girl to a death in bed.
Text and illustrations produced by the pipeline
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Opening
Pigeons skim the rooftops of the longtang; beneath their wings hangs a sky strung with qipao, bedsheets, diapers. Standing by the coop counting them is a girl just crowned third in a Shanghai beauty pageant. She has no idea that the next forty years will carry her down from this rooftop gilt, all the way to a bed in that same longtang, for a very different ending.
This is Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, a book that lives out forty years of one woman as the whole life of a city. The woman is Wang Qiyao. The city is Shanghai.
What Kind of Book This Is
First serialized in the journal Zhongshan in 1995 and published as a standalone novel that same year, written by Wang Anyi, it went on to win the fifth Mao Dun Literary Prize. It's widely regarded as the flagship work of the modern Shanghai school of fiction, a lineage that in literary history means writing centered on Shanghai itself, running from Eileen Chang in the 1930s to Wang Anyi in the 1990s with nearly half a century of silence in between. This novel is what picked that thread back up.
Wang Anyi's ambition is to weave one woman's forty private years and one city's forty public years into a single cloth. You don't need political history to read this book, and you don't need to memorize a timeline. History never walks onstage in the text itself; it hides in the radio at the mouth of the longtang, the calendar on the wall, the Lenin suit the tailor downstairs is busy altering.
People and World
Wang Qiyao is the single warp thread running through that cloth. As a teenager she is discovered in the longtang by the photographer Mr. Cheng and put on a magazine cover, which is how the alley first learns her name. She places third in a beauty pageant, then catches the eye of the powerful Director Li, who installs her as a caged songbird in the Alice Apartments in the French Concession. Mr. Cheng loves her silently for the rest of his life and never once says so, and she never lets him say it: the most restrained relationship in the whole novel, harder to write than any love affair.
A young man everyone calls Lao Kela pushes his way into Wang Qiyao's life. He comes to take photographs, to hear her talk about parties and cafes from forty years back, and somewhere in the listening his eyes turn fond. Wang Qiyao takes this for her last love, and finds out she has misjudged it. What he loves is the imagined symbol of old Shanghai, not the real face in front of him, worn down by the decades. She brings out the gold bars Director Li left her forty years earlier, trying to hold him, and that gesture is exactly what scares him off for good. He sends his girlfriend, Zhang Yonghong, to return the apartment key, and from her hands the key eventually passes to her own boyfriend, a man they call Long Legs.
Long Legs is a small-time drifter on the edge of Weiwei's social circle, and he has caught the scent of the gold. Late one night he slips into the small back room where Wang Qiyao lives in Pingan Li. Her life ends in that bed, in the same pose, the same shot, as the scene of a woman dead in her bed that a film crew once staged around her forty years earlier. The book never writes the murder itself; it writes only the rumpled sheets pulled back on that bed, an embroidered shoe kicked into the corner. This is Wang Anyi's harshest stroke: closing the book on the exact death Wang Qiyao once played for a camera forty years before, as if fate had written the script all along.
Art Direction4 plates
Before the guide was written, this book got a visual foundation — every illustration you just read grew out of it.
Jiang Lili is her schoolmate, the one who introduces her to Mr. Cheng. She falls for him too, and two unspoken loves grow crooked around each other for a lifetime, which is eventually what leaves Jiang Lili depressed and dying young in the chaos of a later decade. A petty, wealthy girl among her classmates, she is the first crack in Wang Qiyao's fate. Later, once Wang Qiyao has moved into the Pingan Li longtang, her neighbor Aunt Yan becomes her closest company: the woman who convenes the afternoon tea table for the lane's wives, holding up that Shanghai style of visiting where no reason at all is reason enough to drop by. Then there's Kang Mingxun, son of a family in decline; Sasha, half Russian by blood; and Weiwei, Wang Qiyao's daughter by Kang Mingxun. These few names are the whole of Wang Qiyao's middle-aged longtang world.
One rule governs the whole story: the Shanghai longtang is where everything happens, and it is also the echo chamber of fate. Pigeons overhead, gutters underfoot, qipao drying against the wall: these three images run through the entire book, and whoever reads them right has read the book.
Young Wang Qiyao: From the Longtang to the Cover
The story opens on a stifling Shanghai afternoon. Wang Qiyao, still a schoolgirl, is dragged along by her classmate Wu Peizhen to watch a film being shot, and stands off to the side saying nothing, which is exactly what catches the eye of a photographer named Mr. Cheng. The camera finds her face, and that settles it. He puts her on a magazine cover, and the longtang lights up with the news: the Wang girl has become a picture. I stopped short reading this part: the first time Wang Qiyao is truly seen in this book, she is seen almost as an object.
Before the cover's buzz has died down, a pageant notice goes up: Miss Shanghai. Mr. Cheng pushes her into it again, and this time she comes in third, Miss Third. First place is the crown, second still counts for something, third is the placement that belongs to neither. And it's exactly that in-between rank that colors the rest of her life: pretty enough to be desired, never quite prominent enough to be protected.
The Alice Apartments: A Songbird's Brightest Hour, and the Lights Going Out
The pageant delivers her straight into the hands of Director Li, a man with real power and standing, who sets her up in the Alice Apartments in the French Concession. In a single step she goes from the crowded courtyards of the longtang to a velvet sofa in a Western house, living out a songbird's life for however many times a month Director Li can visit. She does not go out, does not socialize, keeps the curtains drawn: the entire outside world has shrunk down to this one apartment. Wang Anyi writes this stretch of splendor in a cold, almost unenvious hand, because the reader is about to find out exactly how it ends.
Director Li dies in a plane crash, his remains never even fully recovered. The moment the key to the Alice Apartments is taken back, Wang Qiyao's entire fortune shrinks to one jewelry box of gold bars, Director Li's last gift to her and a time bomb that will follow her for the next forty years. The cut is brutal: every light in that apartment goes dark behind her at once.
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Pingan Li: The Longtang's Injection Woman
After 1949, Wang Qiyao falls out of the Alice Apartments dream and back to earth, moving into the working-class longtang around Pingan Li. She survives on a skill nobody puts on a resume: giving injections, intramuscular, intravenous, whatever is needed, and becomes the most useful person in the lane. It is a far more hidden identity than Miss Third ever was, but it is also what grows her back into the bloodstream of the longtang. She and her neighbor Aunt Yan form a new inner circle: a couple of rounds of mahjong in the afternoon, a full table of dishes at night, gossip about the new tailor shop at the mouth of the lane. It looks trivial, but Wang Anyi spends an entire section building it into a history of the everyday. The era does not change through slogans from great men here; it changes through what suit of cards a woman is holding.
It is in this settled stretch of life that she meets Kang Mingxun, the son of a declining family who still carries the last of old Shanghai's gentleness about him. On the surface they are just neighbors dropping by; under the table, it is an affair. Wang Qiyao gets pregnant with his child, and the old pressure of family status closes in again: the Kangs will never accept her. So she does what longtang women of the time did. She brings in a half-Russian young man named Sasha and lets him take the name of the father. Sasha is a cover story; Weiwei's real father is Kang Mingxun, who is never once acknowledged as such. This triangle is Wang Anyi at her most clear-eyed and most painful. The love is real, the cowardice is real, and no one is wrong, yet everyone fails someone.
The years Weiwei is born are also the hardest years of Mr. Cheng's life. He keeps to his attic room in the next lane over, still taking photographs, still stopping by now and then to change her gas canister. I'll wait for you is a sentence he never says out loud; his camera is the only love letter he ever sends. When the Cultural Revolution arrives, that quiet, unspoken warmth becomes evidence against him. He is dragged out to be denounced, several of the charges tangled up with Wang Qiyao. In the end he jumps from a building. The book renders the sound of him hitting the ground as one soft thud, the longest-lasting crack in the longtang's collective heart.
The Old Guard Fades, a New Tide Rises
The turbulent years pass, and half the longtang scatters. Mr. Cheng has jumped to his death, Jiang Lili has died of depression in another city: the two names most tangled up with Wang Qiyao's whole life, gone within the same stretch of years. She has watched an era leave; she is still standing where it left her. This section is Wang Anyi at her most restrained. She never writes what Wang Qiyao's grief looks like, only that she lingers ten extra minutes at Aunt Yan's mahjong table, staying until everyone else has left before getting up to turn off the light. Those ten minutes carry more weight than any amount of weeping.
Suddenly it is the eighties. The dance halls of Reform and Opening arrive at the mouth of the longtang, bell-bottoms and Teresa Teng tapes echoing along the Bund. Weiwei is grown and planning her own wedding; Wang Qiyao is middle-aged now, and what stands out most is a new crop of young people who call themselves Lao Kela, Shanghai slang for a dandy nostalgic for a repackaged old Shanghai: the dancing girls of the Paramount, cigarette ads on old calendar posters, coffee in a French Concession villa. Their nostalgia is a misreading across time. The old Shanghai they love is the polished, ageless version from the movies, while Wang Qiyao's actual old Shanghai has long since worn down to nothing but patches.
A Late-Life Romance and the Gold Bars: One Last Attempt to Hold On, One Final Miss
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What It's Really About, and Why We Still Read It Today
On the surface, this is forty years in the life of a Shanghai beauty, told in order. But Wang Anyi's real ambition is to write a city through one woman. Wang Qiyao's rise and fall in miniature is the whole life of Shanghai, from the extravagance of the 1940s, through the plainness of the new China, to a 1980s where the city is fashionable again but unrecognizable. Her fate is the city's metaphor; her dressing table is the city's memo pad.
Wang Anyi's real feat is elevating the ordinary into the epic. A single injection, one cup of afternoon tea, a worn-out deck of cards in a longtang mahjong game: she can find the folds of an entire era inside any of them. It is a road few writers want to take, since it demands a fresh detail for every three lines written, but she walked it all the way to the fifth Mao Dun Literary Prize. This is the real reason the book is remembered: not for outlandish plot, but for the precision of the everyday.
Beauty was never the medal fate pinned on her. It was the setup fate laid in advance, and Wang Qiyao's whole life is lived out inside that one truth.
Why the Full Text Is Still Worth Reading Once You Know How It Ends
Everything above is just the skeleton. What makes the full text worth staying with is its Shanghai touch: the smell of the gutter in the longtang, the sound of pigeon droppings landing in a laundry basin, the local chatter over a mahjong table, the flicker of hesitation in a dressing-table mirror. No summary can hand you these; you have to turn the pages yourself to taste them. And there is Wang Anyi's restraint, disciplined almost to the point of coldness. She never wails or grieves outright; every emotion is hidden behind an action instead, like the soft thud of Mr. Cheng hitting the ground, like the ten extra minutes Wang Qiyao stays at the mahjong table. Read closely enough and you will see this is what it actually looks like to know how to write sorrow. Go on: the real Shanghai is still in there, waiting for you.
