The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi: A Guide

Diterbitkan oleh Anthony
pada November 11, 2026

Read Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow through Wang Qiyao and Shanghai’s lanes. Explore its treatment of memory and find the 2008 English translation.

Quick Answer: What Is Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow?

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (长恨歌, Cháng Hèn Gē) is a novel by Wang Anyi (王安忆, Wáng Ānyì) about Wang Qiyao (王琦瑶, Wáng Qíyáo), a young woman who enters a Shanghai beauty pageant in the 1940s. The novel follows her into the 1980s, watching the city change through the rooms she inhabits, the people who remember her and the image of Shanghai she comes to represent.^[1][4]

The opening: Shanghai’s lane neighborhoods, known as longtang (弄堂, lòngtáng), come into view before Qiyao’s story takes over.^[3][5]
Chinese publication: The novel ran in Zhongshan magazine in 1995 and appeared in book form in 1996. It received the fifth Mao Dun Literature Prize.^[2]
The English book: Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan translated The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, published by Columbia University Press in 2008.^[1]
The shared title: Bai Juyi (白居易, Bái Jūyì) wrote an earlier poem of the same Chinese title about a Tang emperor and his consort.^[6]

This guide explains the opening, the decades it covers and the editions you can look for. It leaves the end of Qiyao’s story to the book.

A guide to the Shanghai setting, Wang Qiyao’s life and the English translation.

Wang Qiyao’s first appearances are easier to understand after you have spent some time looking at the city around her. Wang Anyi opens with lanes, circulating rumors, private rooms and pigeons above the roofs. By the time the narrative turns to Qiyao, it has already shown how neighbors observe one another and pass on what they see.^[5]

The attention Qiyao earns on a stage feels different once you have seen how neighbors pay attention to one another in the lanes.

How Wang Qiyao’s Life Follows a Changing Shanghai

In the 1940s Qiyao is attracted to the glamour of Hollywood and enters the Miss Shanghai contest. The contest lets her step into public view.^[8] The pageant fixes a public image that people can recall long after the contest itself.

The novel moves from the late Republican era through the early People’s Republic and into the 1980s. Among the details the publisher highlights are private mahjong games during the Anti-Rightist Movement and a later revival of interest in a glamorous old Shanghai.^[8]

The changing decades are easier to follow if you watch what happens to Qiyao’s social life. Which gatherings can happen behind a door? Which memories can be shared openly? By the 1980s, younger people can be interested in the style of an era they never lived through. For Qiyao, that era is part of her own biography. A guide to Shanghai culture gives broader context for the city’s changing reputation.

Why the Novel Begins With the Lanes

In a discussion of her own Shanghai neighborhood, Wang describes stylish shops along a commercial street and ordinary households just behind it.^[3] That proximity helps explain the movement between display and privacy in the novel’s opening. Behind what a passerby sees from the street are rooms, voices and routines the passerby can only guess at.

The opening’s gossip and pigeons give you two ways to look at the lanes. Rumors move from one household to another. The birds let you imagine the roofs together from above.^[5] One device takes you close to the people who notice a change in a neighbor’s behavior. The other lets you pull back and see how small each household is within the city.

Read the first pages for one repeated detail. A window, a rooftop or a room can show you where someone is looking from. Then notice the change when Qiyao becomes a subject of attention herself.

What Old Shanghai Means in the Novel

By the 1980s, Qiyao’s association with a stylish past makes her interesting to people looking back at an earlier version of Shanghai.^[1]

She remembers relationships and routines that the younger people around her encounter as fragments. She can recall what it cost to live through the changes. The people drawn to her can choose the aspects they find appealing.

Compare the private mahjong table with the pageant stage. Each brings people together, but the people at the table have a say in who sees them and what gets discussed. Literary scholar Park Nan-yeong reads the novel’s daily routines and spaces as a way of preserving parts of Shanghai’s history that a public account can overlook.^[4]

Readers of Eileen Chang may recognize the importance of rooms, dress and social observation. Here the long span lets you watch people rediscover and revalue such details. For a different use of a neighborhood’s collective voice, compare Yellow Mud Street, where rumors make the place itself harder to recognize. In the context of modern Chinese literature, the book offers a way to read social change at the scale of a household.

How to Find the Novel, the Poem and the Film

For the novel in Chinese, search 长恨歌 or 長恨歌 alongside 王安忆 or 王安憶. WorldCat records a 1996 Chinese printing in Wang’s collected works.^[9]

For the English translation, look for the subtitle A Novel of Shanghai and both translators’ names. The Columbia University Press paperback carries ISBN 9780231143431.^[1]

The poem by Bai Juyi concerns Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei (杨贵妃, Yáng Guìfēi) at the Tang court. Wang’s title brings the earlier poem to mind, while the novel gives its sorrow a different place and time.^[5][6] Readers looking for another literary treatment of the Tang pair can turn to The Palace of Eternal Life.

The 2005 film Everlasting Regret is an adaptation of Wang’s novel. Stanley Kwan directed it, with Sammi Cheng as Qiyao.^[7] If you begin with the film, return to the opening pages to see how the narrator introduces the lanes.

FAQs About The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Is Wang Anyi’s novel the same as Bai Juyi’s poem?

They share a Chinese title. Bai Juyi’s poem concerns a Tang emperor and Yang Guifei, while Wang Anyi’s novel follows Wang Qiyao in twentieth-century Shanghai.^[1][6]

Who translated The Song of Everlasting Sorrow into English?

Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan translated it. Columbia University Press published their translation in 2008 with the subtitle A Novel of Shanghai.^[1]