When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) describes someone as "decadent, debauched and a slave of foreign culture" that person may be worth a closer look -- but not always.
In the case of Wei Hui (衛慧), whom the party is targeting with this invective, the shrill judgments only served to prove how hopelessly conservative the CCP is and to send sales of her mediocre new book, Shanghai Baby (上海寶貝), through the roof in China. The book has now been translated into English and its first print run in French sold out within a week.
Shanghai Baby is a semi-autobiographical novel about a 25-year-old woman in China's most hyped metropolis during a period of personal and sexual coming of age. The heroine, Coco, is a young and beautiful (the author repeatedly reminds the reader of this second point) Fudan University graduate, whose post-graduation life is directionless, though by no means rough. Her well-to-do and doting parents have seen to it that she stay fashionably dressed and support her in her various writing projects. They don't even put up much of a fight when she moves in with an equally rudderless and unemployed character named Tian Tian.
The problems begin for Coco when she realizes her new boyfriend is impotent, apparently due to psychological distress caused by his mother, who fled to Spain and is thought to have arranged for his father's death there. Unable to accept Tian Tian's impotence, Coco ignites a passionate affair with a German man named Mark, whom she describes as "exotic" and who exists on the fringe of Coco's massive set of only-slightly-decadent friends and acquaintances.
Having started the affair, Coco is then torn between feelings of guilt toward Tian Tian and stubborness over her need to respond to her sexual urges. The soul-searching is never very convincing, and sounds more like formulation of adolescent excuses for not coming clean to Tian Tian -- it would hurt him, it would ruin a good relationship, she would have to stop her affair, and so on.
Tian Tian, on an impulsive two-month trip to Hainan Island, becomes a morphine addict, setting the stage for his willful self-destruction when he eventually catches wind of Coco's infidelity. Yet even Tian Tian's death doesn't cause the explosive catharsis one would expect in Coco, whose role in his death is irrefutable. Coco's bereavement rings shockingly hollow and after a couple months she is planning a trip to Berlin to see Mark. Clearly, Coco's world didn't stop spinning.
The most maddening aspect of this novel is the glaring fact that Coco is far less interesting than her friends.
Tian Tian's family background, for example, sounds full of intrigue, as his mother tries on occasion to win back the love of the son who wants nothing more of her. Coco's friend Madonna made a fortune by marrying and then divorcing a rich businessman in southern China after living a precarious life as a prostitute in Guangzhou. We're only provided with one of Madonna's stories -- when she almost lost her life to a bunch of thugs.
Mark, from "exotic" Germany, is a dashing, hulking Aryan stereotype with matching blonde wife and kids back in Berlin. One imagines that the pain felt by Mark over his betrayal of his wife and family was far more strongly felt than Coco's, and would be more interesting to explore.
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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