Wei Hui (pronounced Way-Way), who is now 27, was already well known in Shanghai as a writer of short stories, and hailed by the state media as a rising star of her generation, before the appearance of her first novel, Shanghai Baby. Plenty of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and high fashion, delivered in a style that veers from na∩ve idealism to cynical world-weariness made the book an immediate success with Wei Hui's generation.
The Chinese authorities were so alarmed by the novel's popularity that they burnt 40,000 copies in public, and called Wei Hui "decadent, debauched and a slave of foreign culture". Naturally, this was excellent publicity for the book, which still circulates illegally in China, and was bought by 12 publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
One's curiosity is immediately awakened by the idea of reading the new voice of young China, but it is quickly dampened again. When the authorities denounced Wei Hui as "a slave of foreign culture", they were spot on. To the Western reader the novel is just another account of the narcissistic obsessions of a group of privileged, self-indulgent, young fashion victims, whose idols are Madonna and Sean Penn, and whose idea of profundity is exemplified by the Beat poets and rock lyrics.
The translation, by American Bruce Humes, has been edited, but we are not told how or why. It looks very much as if the novel has been "repackaged" for Western consumption.
The best (and most untypical) line in the book occurs when the narrator tries to silence a camp, bisexual fashion stylist, who is complaining about his complicated love life, by reminding him how lucky he is: "There are eight billion peasants in our country still trying to scrape a living." This puts things in perspective.
The narrator, Coco, has left a career in magazines, and is working as a waitress in a fashionable cafΘ while writing a novel, which she hopes will make her famous. She moves in with Tian Tian, a dreamy, introspective artist, supported by his widowed mother, who runs a Chinese restaurant in Spain. He persuades Coco to give up her job and concentrate on her novel. Even though the couple are tenderly in love, Tian Tian is impotent. Coco compensates by having a steamy affair with a well-endowed German businessman, Mark. Tian Tian slides into morphine addiction, successfully breaks the habit, then backslides, perhaps because he has found out about Coco's affair, and dies. Mark is recalled to Germany, leaving Coco wondering "Who am I?" "My ideal literary work would have profound intellectual content and a best-selling, sexy cover," Coco writes. Wei Hui has achieved at least one half of this ambition, but do not look for intellectual content.
Even the erotic writing, so shocking in China because it is by a woman, and features female masturbation and homosexuality, is no better nor worse than most soft porn. Although much is made of "the debauched, mysterious and fragile atmosphere of Shanghai", that extraordinary city is never brought to life, but remains an anonymous urban backdrop to its characters' aimlessly frenetic lifestyle.
Alannah Hopkin is an author and critic