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BOOK REVIEW
Banned in China for sex, drugs, disaffection
Candy by Mian Mian, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter

Reviewed by Michael Mackey

SHANGHAI - Aside from moments of telling, almost chilling illumination, there is little, if anything, uplifting about Candy, a

somber book about a young woman, Hong ("Red"), who slowly and imperfectly comes to terms with personal freedom in contemporary, convulsively changing communist China.

"We didn't want to become good little members of society nor did we know how," author Mian Mian, one of the stars of Chinese rock-chick-lit, recently told journalists here.

That this book addresses the issue of freedom is particularly ironic, at least in the political sense, as Candy was banned by the Chinese government for its subject matter - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and a cynical, disaffected me-me-me generation.

Speaking of freedom, the protagonist, Hong, 17, is released from a Beijing prison where she served time for her role in a stabbing. She runs south to wide-open Shenzhen on the Hong Kong border, a magnet for self-indulgent youth, and just about everybody else, since it is a special economic zone where foreign companies get special concessions. In Shenzhen, Hong becomes a nightclub singer, cavorts with her wanna-be-rock-star boyfriend and slips into heroin addiction. She writes extensively about her recovery, a painful rehabilitation program financed by her wealthy family, and her slow recovery from heroin - and her clearly incomplete recovery from self-indulgence.

Yet Candy is about more than casual sex and drugs, the candy, or self-indulgence, of self-centered youth. "Our candy is our stories," Mian says. This is a book about China's assertive and iconoclastic youth culture. And the book's brash modernism - quoting Jim Morrison of The Doors over minor Tang Dynasty poets - probably was as much a reason for banning it as was Candy's cynicism about modern life.

Even today, though illegal pirated versions and English-language copies are now circulating on the streets of the mainland, the book remains officially blacklisted.

Dark yet optimistic
That certainly is not keeping Mian from speaking candidly about it. She recently told journalists that she has a responsibility to share the culture of China's youth with the world. And regardless of how dark the book may be, the author remains sanguine about it in a way that stops genteel literary criticism dead in its tracks.

These stories provide a dark message about disturbing trends in youth culture, particularly heroin addiction, in China, which has at least a million registered addicts, and many more unregistered. And, like others in the genre, it tells of the grungy, less attractive side of China's opening up, frenetic modernization, quest for money and pleasure - and the jettisoning of traditional values.

"This story is quite dark, quite heavy," Mian says. Yet despite its darkness, or perhaps because of it, Candy is still "a simple picture of the Chinese youth culture". And it is a picture Mian says she is able to draw from her own experience.

Born Sheng Wan, Mian Mian grew up in an influential Shanghainese family, and though she's careful not to sell Candy as an autobiography, the images of Chinese youth in her book are shaped from her own life. "This book is a fiction," said Mian Mian. "It's not a real story, but I put a lot of my experience into it."

More than just sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll
In addition to sex and drugs, Candy is also a reflection on a newly emerging brand of Chinese literature, one that suggests that Chinese urban youth are behaving more and more like youth the world over. But because it is set in China, a country with a deep history of personal and political oppression, Candy also conveys a lot of self-centered whining from people who seem not to appreciate how lucky they are both in the context of contemporary China and its history.

Thus the book can't help but address the serious changes that have occurred in recent Chinese history, specifically the 10 years of reform from 1989-99. Although the momentous events of that decade are a surprisingly vague backdrop for the narrator Hong's and her friends' own passage into adulthood, this in itself suggests that the process for both Hong and China is inconclusive, unfinished and damaging.

The story begins in 1989, without reference to Tiananmen Square and the massacre of peaceful democracy demonstrators in early June of that year. That's when Hong splits to Shenzhen.

While Hong is gallivanting through Shenzhen, then-leader Deng Xiaoping is exhorting cadres to remove the shackles from the economy and their thinking. In 1992 a riot nearly takes place in Shenzhen (true) about the ability to join a shares lottery - the right to obtain paperwork allowing citizens to put their names on the ballot for shares in companies up for listings on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange - more specifically, the option to try for shares.

This was a turbulent time for China, but Hong appears more or less oblivious, cavorting with her troubled Chinese musician boyfriend Saining, made more attractive by his foreign passport and connections, in that most romantic of locations - a restaurant toilet.

Crass perhaps, but Candy isn't trash; far from it. As Mian herself says, it's too dark, too obsessively inward-looking to be that. One early interlude is erotic, rather than titillating, and much of the writing has an oddly jarring poetry to it. "I will become a woman with many stories to tell. But each story would have its prices," Hong says of herself - a comment that also could apply to China.

Personal story gives glimpses of China's history
Still, despite the temptation to impose political interpretation, this is a personal, not a national, history. And if the book tells us one thing about China, it is that heroin is a problem, and that the existential torpor of the twentysomething generation is alive and well.

Facts and reliable figures are hard to come by in China, but according to official figures there are about a million registered drug addicts in the nation of 1.3 billion, three-quarters of them under 35. The number of regular drug users officially is estimated at about 4 million, and about 225,000 people were sent to drug-rehabilitation centers in 2003.

The novel begins to lose its way, as love affairs and friendships continue or falter, and the characters move between each other and various drugs and rehabilitation centers - described as a grueling form of recovery.

The style and structure of the narrative - fragmentary and without quotation marks - does not make for clarity of ideas or story flow. Still, while the novel is sometimes confusing and self-indulgent, in one interesting sequence, Mian tells of a group of female friends and their hard lives and repeated misfortunes. The trouble is, there's just too much darkness.

And in the end, there is no great redemption - after all, this is China's reality, not Hollywood.

Although Hong makes the transition from being a singer of sorts to being a writer of sorts, the boyfriend Saining is still there. Fundamentally, not much else seems to have changed. Hong and Saining go back to Shanghai with their friends, and there they complain about the nightlife - the self-indulgence of a new urban class - the AIDS scare and bad pills. That's about the sum of it.

Inspired by her own life
Like the protagonist, Mian did drop out of high school. She also went south, experimented with drugs, went into rehab and eventually became a writer (Mian also has written short stories in a collection titled La la la).

And like Hong, Mian's work has a school of writers, some of whom, according to what passes for literati gossip, have done better in the genre of youth and darkness than she. In Candy, Mian alludes to her own apparent superficial success, as well as her intense rivalry with other authors such as Wei Hui, the author of Shanghai Baby.

"Hong the writer and her imitators were overnight sensations - at least their bullshit images were," says embittered boyfriend Saining late in the book.

At the end of the novel, the narrator daydreams of a party in which the guests are simply themselves. And in real life, it seems the author also can be herself. In addition to writing, Mian now works as a nightlife promoter, putting on parties and music raves. She's a name dropper, dropping the names of big-time disc jockeys, both those running mega-parties in Beijing and Shanghai and international DJs such as Paul Okenfold.

That's not enough; now she wants power.

"I want power in the future. I want to change something. I want the pop culture in China to become more cool, more colorful," Mian told journalists.

Beneath all of her iconoclastic pronouncements, however, it's surprising to find that the outspoken writer of Chinese rock-chick-lit has something in common with the more conservative elements of the mainland's political establishment: she wants to ban "bad influences" from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Hollywood - specifically, the straightforward adaptation of the sentimental, commercial, lowest-common-denominator approach to music and movies that one gets in both Hong Kong and Hollywood.

Yes, the woman whose work was banned for its sexual candor, drug-world references and alienation now would like to exclude certain types of overseas pop culture.

She admits that culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong has "a cool part ... but the big garbage comes to China" - and she wants the government to limit it, though she does not elaborate.

Before the bad influences are banned, though, she needs to get her next book published - and maybe banned, if she's lucky. The book is Panda Sex in English, simply Panda in China. Despite its provocative title, Mian says this book is very different from Candy and is unlikely to incur the wrath of the authorities. "I don't think they will ban this book - it's very clean, nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with drugs." Aside from this, all Mian is saying is that it's "very private".

Candy by Mian Mian. Translated by Andrea Lingenfelter. Published by Back Bay Books. ISBN 0-316-56356-0. 224 pages. Price US$13.95.

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Apr 29, 2004

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