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The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide. Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China. The risque contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting, this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it depicts the new generation rising in the East. Set in the centuries-old port city of Shanghai, the novel follows the days, and nights, of the irrepressibly carnal Coco, who waits tables in a café when she meets her first lover, a sensitive Chinese artist. Defying her parents, Coco moves in with her boyfriend and enters a frenzied, orgasmic world of drugs and hedonism. But, helpless to stop her gentle lover's descent into addiction, Coco becomes attracted to a boisterous Westerner, a rich German businessman with a penchant for S/M and seduction. Now, with an entourage of friends ranging from a streetwise madame to a rebellious filmmaker, Coco's forays into in the territory of love and lust cross the borders between two cultures -- awakening her guilt and fears of discovery, yet stimulating her emerging sexual self. Searing a blistering image into the reader's imagination, Shanghai Baby provides an alternative travelogue into the back streets of a city and the hard-core escapades of today's liberated youth. Wei Hui's provocative portrayal of men, women, and cultural transition is an astonishing and brave exposure of the unacknowledged new China, breaking through official rhetoric to show the inroads of the West and a people determined to burst free.… (more)
User reviews
there can be a book!
Last year, I read "Red Mandarin Dress" by Qiu Xiaolong, a detective story set in Shanghai in the 1980s, at a time when the whole city seemed to be one vast building building project as China underwent massive social and political changes. "Shanghai Baby" is set in the late 1990s and things couldn't be more different. There are only three or four places in the whole book where I noticed someone saying or doing something that reminded me that they were living in a communist country. Coco and her friends can choose their own careers and change their jobs when they want (unlike the reluctant policeman in "Red Mandarin Dress", who would rather have been a poet), can travel abroad freely, have Western friends and lovers and are most definitely part of a consumer society. Of course China hasn't changed completely, and "Shanghai Baby" was banned in China for its decadent subject matter and being corrupted by Western values.
I found the book interesting from that point of view and I liked the apt quotations that the author had chosen for each chapter, but I didn't really like Coco or care about her tangled love life.
Semi-autobiographical in nature and with the link between fact and fiction blurred for
All of this comes together in a heavily commercialised novel that reeks of self-promotion and exhibitionism; sex and material wealth are constantly exploited for commercial profit. Shanghai Baby is merely the culmination of the trend of "Babe Writers", common in the early 90s, whose novels focused on the lives of modern independent women in modern China. However, whatever sociological or literary worth this phenomenon might have had is lost in vapid, empty dialogue, obnoxious and one-dimensional characters, and exploitative writings. Unlike earlier novels by Chinese women, Shanghai Baby has nothing to do with protest, personal growth, or rebellion against social convention; rather it is testimony to the mantra "sex sells".
The only thing modern about this novel is its alternative Shanghai setting populated by artists, writers, and disaffected Generation Y members but ultimately that as well is nothing more than stereotypical hedonism and materialism.