(Re-)Reading Shanghai’s Futures in Ruins: Through the Legend of an (Extra-)Ordinary Woman in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

Ian Ho-yin Fong

doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.124248

Authors

Ian Ho-yin Fong Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.124248

Keywords:

Longtang, Walter Benjamin, phantasmagoria, allegory, nostalgia, ordinariness

Abstract

This essay is an allegorical reading of Shanghai futures through a fictive woman, Wang Qiyao, in Wang Anyi’s novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (1996). The novel is about her life in China from the 1940s to the 1980s. Using Benjamin’s critique of 19^th century Paris in relation to Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s (“the Paris of the Orient”) the essay examines questions of phantasmagoria, nostalgia, memory and awakening and relates these to the possible Shanghai futures to come.

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