The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, by Wang Anyi (part 1)

3/4

“Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan’s graceful translation . . . helps us understand why Wang Anyi is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the Chinese-speaking world.” —Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review “A beautifully constructed cyclical narrative. . . . The manner in which character types and events recur against the city’s shifting backdrop is impossible to forget.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A genuine classic.”

—Taipei Times

“Spellbinding, colorful . . . a page-turner right up to the end.” —Historical Novels Review

Wang Anyi ’s books in English include Lapse of Time, Love in a Small Town, Love on a Barren Mountain, Brocade Valley, and the novel Baotown, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year award. She lives in Shanghai.

Michael Berry is associate professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Wang Anyi The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Wang Qiyao was a girl born of the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of working-class Shanghai. Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, and this fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life. After the Communist victory, Wang Qiyao continues to indulge in the decadent pleasures of the Shanghai bourgeoisie, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist campaign and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. She reemerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of “old Shanghai,” only to succumb to a tragedy that echoes the Hollywood noirs of her youth.

Wang Anyi

Honorable Mention: Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work, Modern Language Association

Susan Chan Egan is the coauthor of A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit: The HalfCentury Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams.

9A Novel of Shanghai 0

Weatherhead Books on Asia Columbia Universit y Press New York  www.cup.columbia.edu cover im age  Digital

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cover design  Lisa

Hamm

Tr ansl ated by Michael Berry & Susan Chan Egan

ISBN: 978-0-231-14343-1

9 780231 143431

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

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