Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui
The story, which is set in the ancient port city of Shanghai, centres on the irrepressibly carnal Coco, who works as a café waitress until she meets her first lover, a sensitive Chinese artist. In defiance of her parents, Coco moves in with her boyfriend and plunges headfirst into the hedonistic, drug-fueled world. Coco is drawn to a raucous Westerner, a wealthy German businessman with a taste for S/M and seduction, but she is powerless to stop her gentle lover’s spiral into addiction. Now that Coco has a group of companions, including a streetwise madame and a rebellious filmmaker, her explorations into the world of love and lust transcend cultural boundaries, stirring guilt and worries about being discovered while also igniting her developing sexuality.
Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui
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Shanghai Baby offers a different tour into the back alleys of a metropolis and the hard-core antics of today’s emancipated youth, burning a scorching image into the reader’s imagination. Astonishing and courageously exposing the unacknowledged new China, Wei Hui’s startling portrait of men, women, and cultural change cuts through official rhetoric to reveal the West’s inroads and a people desperate to break free.
There has never been a greater generational difference between those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation.
Shanghai Baby has already achieved cult status in mainland China. It is dark and edgy, delectably filthy, and an exhilarating concoction of sex and the hunt for love. Authorities in Beijing were so disturbed by the provocative tone of the blockbuster book by popular Chinese author Wei Hui that thousands of copies were seized and burnt. This story of a gorgeous writer and her sexually explosive affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it portrays the new generation rising in the East. It is as explicit as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and as disturbing as Trainspotting.
