Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi's Song of Unending Sorrow

The rise of nostalgia in China in the 1990s was symptomatic of the epochal changes in the preceding two decades. These changes can be split into two intertwined strains of modernization and modernity. If modernization was only a vague aspiration in the mid-1980s, heralded by material goods such as TV sets and refrigerators as well as waves of Western discourse, it has deflated into a mixed experience of modernity for many, with its hopes and distress, since the early 1990s. The large-scale influx of global capital and the unleashing of market forces have accelerated the modernization process with staggering yet uneven results. While the centralized political structure remains very much in place, the basic fabrics of everyday life and patterns of social relations are undergoing drastic, frequently traumatic changes. The acute sense of modernity that all that is solid melts into air is indeed very much apparent.

Nostalgia has seeped into many departments of cultural production and threatens to become a general structure of feeling. Some anecdotal instances suffice to offer a glimpse of the tremendous drive to preserve the oldies. Demolition of old city blocks for residential and business high-rises is accompanied by desperate rescue efforts to document in film, video, and photography the last vanishing vestiges of a receding era. Memoirs, reminiscences, reproduction of old artifacts, new releases in video format of films of the 1930s and 1940s as well as of revolutionary history, new films bent on romanticizing the village tucked away in a purer past, and the thriving nostalgic restaurants—all these and more seem evidence of nostalgia as a mass mentality.

Nostalgia needs to be understood against the backdrop of acceleration and shocks of modern experience that, for all its excitement and adventure, also brings trauma and loss. The campaigns of nostalgia in the 1990s stemmed from the dire consequences of the blinding speed of the market economy, the rapid rise of a distorted consumer society, and the overhaul of the administrative structure stumbling on the corruption of inherited power in economic life. The consequences of modernity as a process of rationally restructuring society in one decade brutalize consciousness and daily life with violence and anxiety. The sharp increase in unemployment, the disappearance of trust and security, the thinning of the communal network of support, and above all the loss of a cohesive ideology and shared values prompted the disenfranchised population to yearn for better images of life in the past. All of a sudden the pre-Revolutionary times and even Mao's years are glowing in their simplicity and solidarity, in their inexhaustible hopes and common destiny, their poverty and cruelty conveniently forgotten.

Nostalgia provides a buffer not only for victims of modern distress but also for its most aggressive proponents. The drastic social transformation along the line of Weberian rationalization and the embrace of the global market cut short the lingering legacy of socialism that had shaped the outlook and lifeways of millions. Yet jumping on the bandwagon of global capital by no means guarantees smooth sailing. While one can don the hat of transnational businessman or globe-trotting intellectual overnight, to have a “cosmopolitan” identity thrust upon the self is not without pain and struggle. There arises the need to find the seeds of continuity in the past that anticipated a future that has suddenly arrived. Thus we have a nostalgia that does not look beyond the current state of affairs to challenge it but seeks to find images of continuity, to cloak the current fast-paced development with the glorious mantle taken from the past. This is the nostalgia that imagines a strain of modernity that had supposedly been repressed by socialism but is said to enjoy a renaissance in recent years, promising to deliver China from its revolutionary “deviations” to the global arena of...