Book 28: "Shanghai Baby" by Wei Hui

[kittiwake]

Madonna invited us to a retro theme party called Return to Avenue Joffre on the top floor of the high-rise at the corner of Huaihai and Yandang Roads. Avenue Joffre in the 1930s, Huaihai Road today, has long symbolised Shanghai's old dreams. In today's fin-de-siècle, post-colonial mindset, this boulevard - and the bygone era of the revealing traditional dress, the qipao, calendar-girl posters, rickshaws and jazz bands - is fashionable again, like a bow knotted over Shanghai's nostalgic heart.

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.

Nottingham Round the World Reading Challenge
CHINA / SHANGHAI