The best Coco can muster in the way of insight is when she muses: "I need only think of the countless disasters here on Earth to cheer myself up. How blessed a girl like me should be: young, good-looking and the author of a book."
Shanghai Baby does, however, have merit by providing some contemporary perspective on China's younger generation and its uneasy embrace of the wider world. Wei begins each chapter with a snappy quote from a Western author or songwriter -- among them Jack Kerouac, Margueritte Duras, Milan Kundera and Tori Amos -- and fills her narrative with Western references, twice evoking the film Titanic.
Along with the name-dropping is a seemingly endless list of brand names -- the Volkswagen Santana, Armani, Gucci, Opium perfume -- offered without any trace of irony. Wei seems especially preoccupied with affixing the markings of sophistication on her character and on the city of Shanghai by noting the smoky bars thumping with house and trance music, the impulsive way Coco catches an airplane to Beijing, or the towering highway flyovers. These elements provide a new type of character to come out of China -- materialistic, confident, rich and raised on a diet of TV and pop culture instead of Mao.
The fascinating flip-side to Wei's apparent love-hate relationship with Western cultural icons is revealed in other scenes. Wei sets up a ludicrous situation in which a crabby old American wife of a rich banker tells Coco and her friends to leave a public grassy area where they are picnicking because the woman's rent, at an insane US$25,000 a month, includes a view of the lawn, which the group has made unsightly with their presence. It is hard to imagine a foreigner in China saying: "You Chinese know that a good neighborhood commands a high price. So I'm asking you to leave at your earliest convenience." The contrived nature of that exchange is repeated later in a clash at a party between an American and a Serb, who is upset at the NATO bombing in his country.
Then, when Mark's wife visits, she says practically by way of greeting Coco: "In my country, we don't have any smoke-belching three-wheel vehicles, and no one hangs clothes out to dry on the pavement." Incredibly, in response to this offensive remark, Coco dreamily says to herself that Germany must be like paradise.
Elsewhere in the book, Coco says: "The beauty of a Caucasian woman can launch a thousand ships. In contrast, the beauty of an Asian woman relies on the knit brows and enticing eyes of a pin-up girl from some erotic bygone era." The number of comments about Asian women's "slender physiques" and "silky black hair" causes the reader to suspect that Wei is more entranced by "mysterious" Asians than anyone else.
Wei's strength in this novel is in giving Coco an easy confidence in her sexuality, which is also the reason Shanghai Baby has been acclaimed as a watershed literary event for China. But even though Coco is in control of her body, her sex life is not interesting enough to qualify Shanghai Baby as racy, much less "debauched."
Publication Notes:
Shanghai Baby
By Wei-hui; translated by Bruce Humes
279 pages
Robinson
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