By

Publisher: Washington Square Press
ISBN: 0743421574    
Release Date: 2002-08-07

List Price: USD 13.00     Paperback

Buy it from:   amazon.com (from US$ 2.95)

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.

Shanghai Baby	from sunseasurfer
What a bitch	from eden	1 replies

6 out of 6 found this helpful:

This is where the buck stops

melancolia(Vienna, Manila)   

Like everyone, I was fooled, not floored.
Like everyone I bought the hype, the publicity. And oh, how much did I regret shelling out 15 euros to get it.
Like everyone I wanted to believe she is the voice of my generation, the Asian women generation. But hell, no, she is not and she will never be.
Her promise came empty-handed like the story itself. She wanted us to believe that she, through her protagonist Coco, represents the modern China. But if you read each word, each sentence she used, it is evident that she just wanted to take you in for a ride, her obsession with herself, her blatant name-dropping (the quotes overkill she plastered in the beginning of every chapter) of literary icons and pop culture celebrities, her fascination with labels and designer goods.
In the end her debut came out superficial, detached, sloppy.
“Shanghai” was her ego. And it felt flat.
Wei Hui should thank her enemies by catapulting “Shanghai Baby” to the “watchlist.” The buzz, more so the banning and the burning hysteria, doesn’t deserve it.

2006-01-18 15:10   |   2 comments   

3 out of 3 found this helpful:

Masturbatory garbage

Brendan(Beijing)   

A good translation and literary pretensions on the author's part can't change the fact that this book is nothing more than a shallow, pretentious, stupefyingly dull imitation of earlier writers (particularly Mian Mian, whose 糖, 'Candy,' set the template for this genre) who were not all that much to write home about themselves.

The main selling point of this book abroad seems to be that it was Banned In China. Those of us who live here and have even a passing knowledge of the literary scene know that getting banned here is pretty easy - easier, certainly, than writing something of substance, which Wei Hui most certainly has not.

2006-06-20 05:37   |    comment   

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satellite360 (Beijing)	sunseasurfer (Australia)	Brendan (Beijing)

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