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Years of Sadness
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The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods. 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 become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the Hollywood noirs of her youth.
Lapse of Time
Six short stories and a novella from Wang Anyi, the most popular Chinese woman writer of Shanghai. The stories tell much about the quality of life in China today and the different senses of value of the writer's generation. The text is translated with skill from the original, and the stories included are: The destination, And the rain patters on, Life in a small courtyard, The stage, a miniature world, The base of the wall, Between themselves, and Lapse of time.
Years of Sadness
This anthology focuses on autobiographical works by Wang Anyi, the most prolific and critically acclaimed woman writer in contemporary China, highlighting a personal and emotional dimension of her writing that is essential to a deeper understanding of her creativity and productivity. The three pieces selected for this volume--"A Woman Writer's Sense of Self," "Utopian Verses," and "Years of Sadness"--explore some of the most fundamental and complex issues concerning Wang's identity as a woman and as a writer in early post-socialist China, the creative and emotional challenges she faced during her sojourn in the United States in the early 1980s, and her memories of adolescent years, a period of obsession, uncertainty, and loneliness during the Cultural Revolution.
Baotown
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The Book of Shanghai
As the end of the world arrives in downtown Shanghai, one man’s only wish is to return a library book... When a publisher agrees to let a star author use his company’s attic to write in, little does he suspect this will become the author’s permanent residence... As Shanghai succumbs to a seemingly apocalyptic deluge, a man takes refuge in his bathtub, only to find himself, moments later, floating through the city's streets... The characters in this literary exploration of one of the world’s biggest cities are all on a mission. Whether it is responding to events around them, or following some impulse of their own, they are defined by their determination – a refusal to lose themselves in a city that might otherwise leave them anonymous, disconnected, alone. From the neglected mother whose side-hustle in collecting sellable waste becomes an obsession, to the schoolboy determined to end a long-standing feud between his family and another, these characters show a defiance that reminds us why Shanghai – despite its hurtling economic growth –remains an epicentre for individual creativity.
Fu Ping
Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores the residential lanes and courtyards behind Shanghai’s busy shopping streets, the less she wants to return to the country as a dutiful wife. As Fu Ping wavers over her future, she learns the city through the stories of the nannies, handymen, and garbage collectors whose labor is bringing life and bustle back to postwar Shanghai. Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shangh...
Brocade Valley
One of a trilogy of novellas addressing the theme of women in extramarital affairs, Brocade Valley shocked China when it appeared in 1987, becoming a bestseller and effectively dynamiting the sexual puritanism of official Chinese writing. It is only in Brocade Valley, the third and most controversial of the series, that the sexually adventurous woman is not punished for her activities. On the contrary, she is awarded a highly modern prize: a new sense of self which enables her to author her own story, the story of a young married editor who has a passing but liberating affair with a famous writer. Wang Anyi brings to her heroine the device of a triple perspective - narrator, protagonist, projection. The special interior tone which results, pitched to Wang Anyi's delicately circling style, allows the reader an intimate, insider's eye-view of a surprising China and creates a resonant novella of unusual beauty.
Love in a Small Town
This is a tragic tale of a young man and a young girl, based on real people in the author's life while a member of the Anhui performing arts troupe. This is an exploration into human nature and sexuality at a time when sex was still a taboo subject in China.
The Little Restaurant
This collection of short stories by one of China's most prolific female writers portrays the nuances of life in 19th century and modern China. Wang Anyi's short stories in The Little Restaurant illuminate the emotional and intellectual complexity of the lives of the multiple generations caught up in China. Some of her short stories describe the lives of young students caught up in the Cultural Revolution who were sent away to rural communities across China to be educated and tempered in a hard scrabble existence; other stories revolve around the seemingly quiet lives of ordinary citizens in the city of Shanghai. In effortless language and with an eye for detail, she describes their simple physical existence and their complex interior lives. Her descriptions are realistic, affectionate and vivid yet somehow they remain evocative and haunting.
