"It is dangerous for a woman to be too beautiful," the mother of Wang Qiyao, an ambitious teen beauty queen in 1940s Shanghai, admonishes in the opening act of the play "Chang Hen Ge," or "Song of Everlasting Sorrow." "It is much better for a woman to be plain and lead a simple life."

     Sure enough, through the course of Wang Anyi's 1995 novel of the same name and its recent theater adaptation, antiheroine Wang Qiyao encounters one bitter experience after another because she relies upon her beauty rather than her virtue. It is a relevant message for modern urban China, given the return of sexual commodification. But it's also somewhat surprising that the book has become popular among young materialists whose values it cautions against.

     Critics and readers alike consider Wang Anyi one of contemporary China's most important literary voices, particularly for her depiction of China's huge social changes over the two decades she has been writing. Her status is cemented by the numerous government cultural awards bestowed upon her, including designation as "Best Female Writer in Modern China" in 1998, and by her two-year tenure as head of the official Shanghai Writers' Association.

     "Song of Everlasting Sorrow" is Wang's most popular work, beloved for its rendition of life in Shanghai's old lane houses and for the tragic "typical Shanghai girl" Wang Qiyao. This and subsequent Shanghai-focused works placed Ms. Wang at the forefront of a group of writers reviving the Haipai, or Shanghai style, that characterized the city's art and literature in the pre-Communist era. A recent theater adaptation of the novel tapped into the popular appeal of the amorphous "new Haipai" and spread its influence into the dramatic arts.

     Wang Anyi was born in 1954; her mother, Ru Zhijuan, is also an established novelist. Like many of her generation, Ms. Wang spent her teenage years in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. After she returned to Shanghai and began writing in the late 1970s, many of her early stories addressed the difficulties of sent-down youth like herself reacclimating to city life.

     However, she quickly escaped the ranks of post-Cultural Revolution "scar literature" writers by exploring the grand tides of history. She did so by chronicling the commonplace idiosyncrasies of her characters' daily lives and by portraying the present as much as the past. Early successes starting with the 1981 short story, "The Rain Patters On," led to longer works, and she has since written about three dozen novels or novelettes, 11 volumes of essays and various other compilations, for a total of about five million books sold, according to her husband and manager, Li Zhang.

     Ms. Wang's reputation is enhanced by her ability to remain relevant and prolific over the span of two decades. "Wang Anyi is hands-down the most important mainland Chinese writer of the past 20 years," enthused critic Liu Zhi in a recent profile in the Yangtze Daily. "Some of her contemporaries like Ru Acheng, Ha Shaogang, Mo Yan and Su Tong have had similar career arcs, but they lack Wang Anyi's vibrancy."

     Chen Sihe, professor of modern Chinese literature at Shanghai's elite Fudan University, elaborated, "Wang Anyi is incredibly unique, there's no one to compare her to. She writes on so many different levels, is so universal and accessible, and really elucidates this society like no one else."

     "Song of Everlasting Sorrow" is the tale of Wang Qiyao, a 1940s Shanghai teen beauty queen who turned kept woman and was left destitute and lonely after a series of ill-advised affairs over the course of four decades. It appealed to Chinese readers with its mix of titillation, vicarious glamour and ultimate vindication of traditional morality. It was also well timed to tap into a growing surge of nostalgia for pre-Communist Shanghai. "'Song of Everlasting Sorrow' became famous because of its Shanghai relevance and Old Shanghai nostalgia, even as it satirizes that nostalgia," said Chen Sihe. "Readers like it because it is convenient, readable; it works both as a popular novel and as high literature, and appeals to both types of reader."

     According to Professor Chen, it was "Song" that established Wang Anyi as a harbinger of a resurgent Haipai, although he emphasized that her works are much bigger than that designation. The book's Shanghai context was what first attracted the attention of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center. "As Shanghai's leading government theater, we long looked to do something capturing Shanghai's local character and way of life," says Li Shengying, producer of the adaptation, which debuted April 10. "'Song of Everlasting Sorrow' has this wonderful way of using the story of a woman's life to capture Shanghai's turbulent culture and changes."

     It took two years for playwright Zhao Yaomin to turn the 376-page novel, which didn't contain a line of dialogue, into a coherent script. "Wang Anyi's works are very driven by description and characters, rather than plot and dialogue, which makes them very resistant to adaptation," explains Mr. Li. One of Ms. Wang's stories was adapted into a film, "White Spring," in the 1980s, and she co-wrote the script of Chen Kaige's 1996 "Temptress Moon," but "Song" marks the first onstage reincarnation of her work.

     The concept of a "Shanghai School" or "Shanghai Style" first emerged in the city at the turn of the 20th century describing a clique of traditional Chinese artists led by Wu Changshuo in pioneering a bold, modern aesthetic. In the 1930s the term was extended to literature in a series of feuding essays by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen debating the respective characteristics and merits of Haipai and Jingpai, or Beijing style. Lu Xun explained that "the 'Beijing types' are the proteges of officials, while the 'Shanghai types' are the proteges of businessmen," but the commercial orientation of Haipai soon spread to represent the broad, genre of mass-appeal, sentimental, descriptive tales of everyday life that grew out of the work of a group of writers known as the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School.

     Pre-Communist Haipai literature is typified by the works of Zhang Ailing, a popular woman writer who sprouted to fame in the 1940s and later emigrated to Hong Kong and then the United States. Zhang mostly wrote about the Shanghai girls of her era: their quirks, their vanities, their romances and their habits. Some critics dubbed Wang Anyi "the torch-bearer of Zhang style" because she "depicts Zhang Ailing's characters as if they had remained in Shanghai after the Cultural Revolution," in the words of the Wenhui Daily newspaper.

     Ms. Wang herself has constantly resisted the label. "I don't even consider Zhang Ailing her era's best writer," she explained in the Yangtze Daily article. "It's probably because we both write about life in Shanghai that I'm often compared to her, but actually we are very different, and our world views are totally differently. Zhang Ailing is very nihilistic, so she must write about minutiae like old buildings, family, and daily life, whereas I'm very progressive. Moreover, my Shanghai is post-proletarian, while hers was a Shanghai of petit bourgeois sentimentality."

     Despite Ms. Wang's resistance to the pigeonhole, she has acquired the title of champion of a new Haipai, along with Chen Danyan. Ms. Chen mostly writes popular, photo-laden Shanghai history books with titles like "Shanghai Nostalgia" and "Shanghai Princess"--a format Wang Anyi similarly explored in 2001 with the more cerebral "Searching for Shanghai." Ms. Chen has also has produced a few novels, such as "A Fish and Her Bicycle"--like "Song," an epic tale of a Shanghai girl over the course of many decades.

     "Haipai is hard to define," muses Li Shengying. "It's about life in the city's old lanes, the city's openness, and of course the people, the Shanghainese, their practicality and small-mindedness and small lives. Shanghai's style is very yielding and subtle, not hard like Beijing's."

     Chen Sihe takes a dimmer view. "Haipai is just a fad. It's about Shanghai, and Shanghai culture is a hot topic now, people are bringing it up a lot, but I think as a concept it's rather empty. People just like to hear about themselves, particularly the Shanghainese."