Informationen zum Autor

Wei Hui, daughter of a Chinese army officer, studied literature at Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University. She is the author of "The Shriek of the Butterfly, Virgin in the Water, Crazy Like Wei Hui, " and "Desire Pistol." "Shanghai Baby" is her first full-length novel, as well as her first writing to be published in English. She lives in Shanghai.

The Times (London) A steamy Chinese novel in the Western style about life in contemporary China, condemned for exposing subjects that are completely taboo in modern Chinese literature.

Autorentext

Wei Hui, daughter of a Chinese army officer, studied literature at Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University. She is the author of The Shriek of the Butterfly, Virgin in the Water, Crazy Like Wei Hui, and Desire Pistol. Shanghai Baby is her first full-length novel, as well as her first writing to be published in English. She lives in Shanghai.

Klappentext

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.

Leseprobe
Chapter One: encounter with my lover

Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes

And lovely landscapes to discover

But all I really want to do right now

Is find another lover!

--Joni Mitchell

My name is Nikki but my friends all call me Coco after Coco Chanel, a French lady who lived to be almost ninety. She's my idol, after Henry Miller. Every morning when I open my eyes I wonder what I can do to make myself famous. It's become my ambition, almost my raison d'être, to burst upon the city like fireworks.

This has a lot to do with the fact that I live in Shanghai. A mystical fog envelops the city, mixed with continual rumors and an air of superiority, a hangover from the time of the shili yangchang, the foreign concessions. This hint of smugness affects me: I both love it and hate it.

Anyway, I'm just twenty-five, and a year ago I published a collection of short stories that didn't make any money but got me attention. (Male readers sent me letters enclosing erotic photos.) Three months ago I left my job as a magazine journalist, and now I'm a bare-legged, miniskirted waitress at a joint called the Green Stalk Café.

There was a tall, handsome young man, a regular at the Green Stalk, who would stay for hours drinking coffee and reading his book. I liked to watch his changes of expression, his every move. He seemed to know I was watching him, but he never said a word.

Until, that is, the day he gave me a note that said "I love you," along with his name and address.

Born in the Year of the Rabbit, and a year younger than me, this man enchanted me. It's hard to put a finger on what made him so good looking in my eyes, but it had something to do with his air of world-weariness and his thirst for love.

On the surface we're two utterly different types. I'm full of energy and ambition and see the world as a ripe fruit just waiting to be eaten. He is introspective and romantic, and for him life is a cake laced with arsenic -- every bite poisons him a little more. But our differences only increased our mutual attraction, like the inseparable north and south magnetic poles. We rapidly fell in love.

Not long after we met, he told me a family secret. His mother was living in a small town in Spain, with a local man, running a Chinese restaurant. It seems you can make a lot of money in Spain by selling lobster and wonton.

His father had died young, suddenly, out there, less than a month after going to Spain to visit his mother. The death certificate said "myocardial infarction," and his ashes were flown home in a McDonnell Douglas jet. Tian Tian still remembered that sunny day, and how his tiny grandmother, his father's mother, cried, tears streaming down her wrinkled face like water dripping off a wet rag.

"Grandmother was convinced it was murder. My dad didn't have any history of heart disease; she said my mother killed him. That she had another man over there, and they plotted it together."

Staring at me with a strange look in his eyes, Tian Tian said, "Can you believe it? I still can't work it out. Maybe Grandmother was right. But whatever -- Mother sends me a lot of money every year to live on."

He watched me in silence. His strange story grabbed me immediately, because I'm drawn to tragedy and intrigue. When I was studying Chinese at Fudan University in Shanghai, I'd wanted to become a writer of really exciting thrillers: evil omen, conspiracy, dagger, lust, poison, madness, and moonlight were all words that sprang readily to my mind. Looking tenderly into his fragile, beautiful face, I understood the root of Tian Tian's sadness.

"Death's shadow only fades little by little as time passes. There will never be more than a thin glass barrier between your present and the wreckage of your past," I told him.

His eyes grew wet, and he clenched his hands tightly. "But I've found you and decided to put my faith in you," he said. "Don't stay with me just out of curiosity, but don't leave me straightaway."

I moved into Tian Tian's place, a big three-bedroom apartment on the western outskirts of the city. He had decorated the living room simply and comfortably, with a sectional fabric sofa from Ikea along one wall and a Strauss piano. Above the piano hung his self-portrait, in which his head looked as if he'd just surfaced from a pool.

To be honest, I didn't much like the area. Almost all the roads were full of potholes and were lined on both sides with cramped, shabby houses, peeling billboards, and reeking piles of rubbish. There was a public phone box that leaked like the Titanic whenever it rained. Looking out of the window, I couldn't see a single green tree or smartly dressed person or a clear patch of sky. It was not a place where I was able to see the future.

Tian Tian always said that the future is a trap set right in the middle of your brain.

For a while after his father died, Tian Tian lost the power of speech. Then he dropped out of high school in his first year. His lonely chil…