Candy (31 page)

Her imagined Shenzhen is an extravagant intensification of reality, much like the Shanghai of earlier Chinese popular authors like Eileen Chang, a threepenny opera of gangsters, prostitutes, and beautiful doomed musicians—women with a past, as the saying goes, and men with no future.

“A lot of lost people came to Shenzhen from elsewhere,” Mian Mian says. “They all dreamed of using money to save their life.” That kind of existential void, in a place with no history and consequentially no family or community ties, resulted in a cannibalistic society. “It is such a cruel city,” she says. “It has no heart. There is no such thing as friendship there. No one is your friend.”

Shenzhen’s tabula rasa is also present in her prose—she’s more likely to quote Jim Morrison than the Tang poets, something rare in a culture burdened by thousands of years of literary allusions. It is this, as much as her content, which has made her the poster child of “spiritual pollution.”

Nowadays Mian Mian enjoys a domesticity remote from the milieu of her fiction, commuting between Shanghai and the English countryside with her British husband and their one-year-old daughter. Born Shen Wang, Mian Mian attended Shanghai’s elite Yanji school at the behest of her father, a famous engineer. Teenage growing pains hit hard; when, at sixteen, a classmate had to be institutionalized, she felt saddened but almost relieved: “Until then, I thought I was uniquely weird.”

Those years, the mid-
1980
s, witnessed a
wenhua re
or “culture fever” as the Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang’s relatively liberal rule electrified a society traumatized by Mao’s social experiments. Rock music and other products of Western pop culture became available after a thirty-year absence, and “modernist” writers like Xu Xing reintroduced irony, sarcasm, and black humor into fiction. “Xu Xing’s work opened my eyes,” she says. “He wrote about his real feelings. It was very black and very funny but also very sensitive. Until then, I didn’t know what writing could be.”

This, along with a Madonna video and her own classroom experiences, led to “Like a Prayer,” which was chosen for publication by
Shanghai Wenxue,
a prestigious literary magazine of the time. But this wasn’t to be. Deng Xiaoping fired Hu in
1987
and an “anti-rightist” campaign ensued. Teenage suicide was too controversial in this new environment, and the story was dropped. Devastated, she ran away from home. “I thought I had no chance in this world,” she says. “I had no education, no degree. The only thing in my life was writing, and I had failed at that. There was only one thing left. I could make money. So I went to Shenzhen.”

She arrived in a city carved out of rice paddies and banana plantations just a few years earlier. Its sweatshops were moving farther into the Pearl River Delta, and Shenzhen boomed as it morphed from a factory town into a service hub part Las Vegas, part Panama City. Such quasi-capitalism had yet to hit Shanghai or other cities, so for a while Shenzhen attracted the ambitious and the desperate from all over China, creating a flamboyant demimonde. Mian Mian thrived in this world until a broken love affair drove her to heroin. “I didn’t know what danger is,” she says. “And I didn’t know what freedom is. I just did whatever I wanted.”

For three years she lived as a recluse, watching television shows from the black-and-white era every night until dawn. Finally her parents brought her back to Shanghai and checked her into a hospital. Rehab in China employs crude but effective forms of therapy: They put her in a ward for the criminally insane. “It was such a horrible memory,” she says. “I never took drugs again.”

She started to write again, in
1997
publishing
La La La
in Hong Kong, from where it seeped into the Mainland. A series of four interlocking stories, it spoke (not surprisingly) of love, music, drugs, and despair in Shenzhen. In
1999
Candy,
her first full-length novel, appeared on the Mainland. “My books are not for intellectuals,” she says. “My readers are in the streets, in a disco, listening to cool music.” This differs markedly from the role Chinese intellectuals usually arrogate to themselves. “I don’t want to teach anybody,” she insists. “My only message is: This world is cruel. But you can survive.”

Jonathan Napack’s article on Mian Mian, headlined “Banned in Beijing: A Rebel Writer’s Message,” first appeared in the
International Herald Tribune
on Thursday, February
8, 2001
. Reprinted with permission.

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1
. The novel’s narrator, Hong, idolizes figures like Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Do you think Saining shares any of their characteristics? Does this help illuminate Hong’s relationship with him or only further obscure it?

2
. What is the biggest difference between Hong’s and Saining’s personalities? What are the largest sources of conflict between them?

3
. Do you think that Hong would have gotten involved with heroin if she had not been in love with Saining or someone like him? Do you think that Hong will stay clean? What about Saining?

4
. Do you think that Hong and Saining will stay together? Do you think Hong’s happiness is dependent on Saining?

5
. How does Hong’s relationship with her own sexuality change over the course of the book? Do you think that sex plays a larger role in Hong’s life than it does in most people’s lives? Or is this novel just more open and honest about it?

6
. What does the book’s title,
Candy,
mean to you? How do you interpret the final sentence of the book?

7
. What aspect of Bug’s AIDS scare was the most surprising to you?

8
. The Communist Party is still firmly in control of China’s government. Judging from what you read in
Candy,
to what extent do politics affect daily life in China today? How?

9
. Were you shocked by this story? Were your reactions in any way determined by the novel’s setting? How might your response to the book have been different if
Candy
had taken place in New York or Los Angeles, for example?

10
. Do you think Hong’s life would have been different had she not moved to “the South”? To what extent do you think the relatively new freedoms found there influenced the course of her life?

11
. Toward the end of the book Hong describes writing as a “prescription.” Do you believe in the redemptive power of art and expression?