Anyi Wang

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book. *

Fu Ping is an orphaned village girl who has been promised in marriage to a young man she has never met. She travels to Shanghai to be with the boy's grandmother. As she is immersed in the big city and meets people from walks of life she has never encountered, Fu Ping grows to be more independent and assertive, casting doubt on the plans for her future.

The great strength of this novel is how vividly Wang Anyi describes life in the back alleys and shanty towns of Shanghai. As Fu Ping encounters the unfamiliar, the reader is also taken to places and lifestyles that have mostly passed into history. I was particularly impressed with her accounts of the lives of the river folk, and of the impact of the annual flood of the river, which reminded me in some ways of Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.… (mere)

The city of Shanghai had always been different - a bridge between the East and the West, with its own culture and traditions. In its longtang, people are used to living almost on top of each other and knowing everything about their neighbors.

Wang Qiyao was born in one of the houses in these alleys and in 1946, after the Japanese finally leave China is ready to conquer the world. Her tickets to fame are her beauty and her fashion sense - the first will fade with time, the latter will carry her through the next 40 years. The novel spans the 4 decades from 1946 to 1986 - from the days immediately after the war, through the creation of the PRC, the Great Leap Forward and the famine, the Cultural Revolution and the opening to the world. But it is not about the big events - they are there in the background but almost never called by name - instead we see how they change the life of Wang Qiyao and those around her instead. You do not need to know much about Chinese history to enjoy the novel but a general idea of the period and what happens in what order helps to put things into perspective.

It all starts almost like a dream - after failing to get a role in a film, Wang Qiyao ends up as the second runner up in the Miss Shanghai contest and that propels her to some fame. It looks like she is set for life when she chooses to become a concubine (an old tradition in China) but then the world changes and that one decision marks her life forever. She falls in love a few times in the decades that follow and she even manages to get a daughter but the carefree and almost naive girl of the 1940s grows into a beautiful and cold woman who uses the people she needs to (when she does not have other choices anyway) and lives her own life. Except that she never finds what she looks for - her connections never really become very close ones, one set of friends replaces another and you can almost see the echoes in the later ones - they look like a faded copy of the original. China and Shanghai change all the time but not always in the direction she needs them to go - by the time the world finally gets to some approximation of the old world, Wang Qiyao is the faded copy. And yes she keeps trying - because she just do not know how to give up. People die around her, other disappear but she is still there - the woman of Shanghai.

It is a fascinating story but the style takes awhile to get used to. It switches between lyrical and everyday all the time - sometimes inside of the same sentence. It took me awhile to place the style - despite when it was written and the time it covers, its style is closer to the Victorian novels and the Russian and French novels of the 19th century than to anything more modern. Once that clicks, once you resolve the disjointedness coming from the conflicting style and story, it becomes a lot easier to read.

The end was not really surprising - the way it happened came almost as a shock but the novel was always going to lead there - there was no other ending possible for Wang Qiyao.

I still cannot decide if the novel was overly long or if it had to be that long. The style takes awhile to grow on you but once it does, it feels almost natural - I cannot imagine Wang Qiyao's story told in any other way. You do not even need to like her - I found a lot of her actions questionable and her self-serving as a whole. But then everyone is an egoist when it gets down to their survival and Wang Qiyao manages to survive (with a bit of a help from a dead friend's gift when at the end of it. It is somewhat ironic that what makes it possible for her to survive is also what makes her story unchangeable - the author almost talks directly to her in the last pages of the novel but even that cannot change the trajectory her life had always been on).

The edition I read has two notes - a translator note at the start (which explains some changes done for readability - apparently the Chinese text was even denser, with run-on sentences and direct speech directly incorporated into the narrative with no markers where it is) and an afterword by Berry (which most publishers and editors would have called Introduction and put at the front of the book) which gives some context and details that help understand the novel better (and spoil it if you read it first).

I am not sure if I can recommend this novel - not because it is a bad one but because I really don't know who it will work for. It is not exactly literary, it is nor exactly realism and it is not exactly 19th century and somehow it is all of that and then something else which is even harder to define. And yet, I am very happy that I read it.… (mere)

“The longtang are the backdrop of this city. Streets and buildings emerge around them in a series of dots and lines, like the subtle brushstrokes that bring life to the empty expanses of white paper in a traditional Chinese landscape painting. As day turns into night and the city lights up, these dots and lines begin to glimmer. However, underneath the glitter lies an immense blanket of darkness – these are the longtang of Shanghai.”

Wang’s writing style takes a while to get into. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (长恨歌) opens with details of the longtang or neighbourhoods within enclosed alleys of Shanghai. It’s a beginning that requires some patience from the reader. Because plenty of beauty awaits within.

“Four decades the story spans, and it all began the day she went to the film studio.”

Wang Qiyao is taken to a film studio by her classmate Wu Peizhen. There a director notices her and asks her to a screen test. However he realizes that:

“Wang Qiyao’s was not an artistic beauty, but quite ordinary. It was the kind of beauty to be admired by close friends and relatives in her own living room, like the shifting moods of everyday life; a restrained beauty, it was not the kind that made waves. It was real, not dramatic”.

To make up for it, he asks his friend Mr Cheng, a photographer, to take some pictures of her and one of them is published in a newspaper and Shanghai begins to notice her:

“The girl in the picture was not beautiful, but she was pretty. Beauty is something that inspires awe; it implies rejection and has the power to hurt. Prettiness, on the other hand, is a warm, sincere quality, and even hints at a kind of intimate understanding.”

She is convinced by the photographer Mr Cheng and her classmate Jiang LiLi to join the Miss Shanghai contest, where she becomes known as ‘Miss Third Place’:

“Girls like Miss Third place, however, are a part of everyday scenes. They are familiar to our eyes, and their cheongsams never fail to warm out hearts. Miss Third Place therefore best expresses the will of the people. The beauty queen and the first runner-up are both idols, representing our ideals and beliefs. But Miss Third Place is connected to our everyday lives: she is a figure that reminds us of concepts like marriage, life, and family.”

This is just the beginning of Wang Qiyao’s story. She gains the attention of a high-powered man, who essentially makes her his ‘apartment lady’ or mistress. After his accidental death, she is forced to restart her life in a different longtang, taking on the identity of a widow, making ends meet by giving injections (yes, this puzzles me too, apparently people come to her for various injections such as vitamins and “placenta fluid”). She makes new friends, starts to have a clandestine relationship with one of her mahjong partners (he is from a wealthy family) and finds herself with child.

While Wang takes us through the years of Wang Qiyao’s life, an aura of mystery still wafts around her. She is quite the enigma.

“She is the heart of hearts, always holding fast and never letting anything out.”

She is that woman at the party who sits quietly in the corner sipping tea. Not the life of the party (she is after all, much older than the rest of the partygoers) yet the eye is drawn to her:
“She was an ornament, a painting on the wall to adorn the living room. The painting was done in somber hues, with a dark yellow base; it had true distinction, and even though the colours were faded, its value had appreciated. Everything else was simply transient flashes of light and shadow.”

This is not just Wang Qiyao’s story but the story of Shanghai, as we move from the 1940s to the 1980s.

“Shanghai in late 1945 was a city of wealth, colours, and stunning women… Shanghai was still a city of capable of creating honor and glory; it was not rules by any doctrine, and one could let the imagination run wild. The only fear was that the splendor and sumptuousness of the city were still not enough.”

In 1960 though, times have changed drastically.

“In the still of the night the city’s inhabitants were kept awake not by anxious thoughts but by the rumblings of their stomachs. In the presence of hunger, even the profoundest sadness had to take second place, everything else simply disappeared. The mind, stripped of hypocrisy and pretensions, concentrated on substance. All the rouge and powder has been washed away, exposing the plain features underneath.”

Then in the 1980s, Shanghai is booming. Construction sites abound in this new districts’ “forest of buildings”:

“This was indeed a brand-new district that greeted everything with an open heart, quite unlike the downtown area, whose convoluted feelings are more difficult to grasp. Arriving in the new district, one has the feeling that one has left the city behind. The style of the streets and buildings – built at right angles in a logical manner – is so unlike downtown, which seems to have been laid out by squeezing the emotions out from the heart.”

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was such a different read for me. It moves at a very gentle pace and is probably best described as a portrait of Wang Qiyao’s life. Yet I was drawn to her melancholic story, to Wang Anyi’s intricate depiction of Shanghai through these volatile years. It’s an enduring, elegant novel, and one of my favourite reads so far this year.

Originally posted on my blog Olduvai Reads… (mere)