by Mian Mian
He said, I’ll never be able to love you again. You’re pathetic. You’ve always been so enigmatic and such an expert at deception.
He also said, I’m sorry.
I felt remorseful and afraid. Perhaps all we have is our innocence and confusion, and to lose these would be to lose everything. What the hell had we been up to all those years? That night, I obliterated all of the good that we had shared in the past. I destroyed it all.
Stars were twinkling brightly overhead, and maybe the clouds were white. We were losing ourselves because the moon had been extinguished. And another substance was bringing light to humanity, red clouds in the east.
I was crying too.
Saining said, I’m so sad. And I said, I feel sad too.
Saining went out.
I watched the early-morning light as it filtered through the curtains and scattered. In the past this was the hour when we made love, and at this moment it was as if I could see his face, like that of an angel, flashing in and out of view among the ordinary people down in the street. This was the loneliest time of day for him, and the most anxious. It was the time I felt the most moved by him. At night, when we got totally fucked up, our greatest fear was of being jostled around among those calm and virtuous morning faces. Honestly, he just liked to have a good time. He was completely clueless about everything, but at the same time, he understood everything. He was a child, but a child with a world of his own. Saining said that idiots were actually his favorite kind of people. He didn’t find them pathetic at all. On the contrary, he thought that they were free, because they would take anything of value and smash it to bits. And they didn’t care.
One morning several days later, Saining went out into the courtyard to play violin. As I listened to him playing the violin and watched him from behind, it suddenly struck me that this man had truly loved me and that he truly didn’t love me now. I thought about the first time we’d met. Outside, it was pouring rain, and I’ve long since forgotten what music was playing. Nor do I remember what made me look at the overgrown boy who was swaying there, swaying from side to side, and smiling at nothing in particular. An oversize white short-sleeved T-shirt and multicolored pants made of corduroy. The pants were really baggy, like a skirt, but they were obviously pants. He was by himself at the bar, rocking from side to side, a glass of whiskey in his left hand, while his right hand swung back and forth. And as I watched his legs, his footsteps moved him toward where I was sitting. He was wearing a pair of light blue sneakers. The soles were very thin, and these shoes made him seem to stumble as he walked. His hair was long and glossy and perfectly straight—the tips brushed his shoulder blades. His face was very pale, and although I couldn’t see his features clearly, I was certain that he was smiling. Still, I didn’t know whether or not he was looking at me. I kept eating my ice cream. A little while later, I noticed a man’s hand, with a whiskey glass in it, just to my right. It was a large hand with sturdy fingertips, and I knew at a glance that he bit his nails. I bit my nails too. His hair tumbled down right in front of me. I smelled its fragrance, and I looked up and saw him. I swore it was the face of an angel! He had on a strange smile, and the naked innocence in his eyes threw me off balance. And ever since that night, I’ve never been able to take my gaze away from the face I saw in that moment. Perhaps that’s why I’m still alive today, because I believe in that face. I trust it.
Out of the blue, Saining announced that he was going back south to get our dog.
I said, It’s only a dog. It’s a child that will never grow up. It’s like an idiot—do you understand the meaning of the word idiot?
Saining was drinking cough syrup as I spoke. He said, The way this medicine feels as it rolls down my throat is just like saying good-bye.
S
You’re gonna say that love is Romeo and Juliet
But you’re talking about a book
You’re gonna say that love is the angels in the Sistine Chapel
But you’re talking about a painting
You’re gonna say that love is what your neighbor feels for Maria
But you’re talking about a story
’Cause I want to know
If you ever felt it
The tornado inside
The earthquake inside
But you can’t tie down all the dishes in your cupboards
There’s a seaquake inside
But you can’t find a thousand life vests to save you from drowning
’Cause I know
Love is drowning
It’s pain and light, thunder and magic, it’s a joke!
Has it ever happened to you?
’Cause you’re gonna write a story where you’ll be Juliet
’Cause you’re gonna paint a thousand blue angels playing harp
’Cause you’re gonna jump into that river of yours
And get soaked to the skin
Get to drown together
Get to cry together
Get to hold hands together
Get to get lost in her arms
And I’ll be there
In the audience
Learning an Eastern patience, and the patience of the fisherman
Until my turn comes
I am a ditch where water has collected after the rain, my name is Mian Mian, and this story is not the story of my life. My life story will have to wait until I can write nakedly. That’s my dream.
Right now my writing just falls apart.
Right now the real story has everything to do with my writing, and nothing to do with my readers.
My CD player is always spinning around, like inexhaustible hope. My ears bring me this perfect world. Perfection has always been in the present. This remembered world is mine, I possess it, and it is everything to me.
Right now it’s early in the morning, on April 21, 1999, and the only thing that’s clear in this shattered piece of candy is the poem I received last night, in a note left for me. It has a sweet name, “I’ll Talk to You Tomorrow.”
This time, he didn’t go away. It’s as if he really likes Shanghai. Maybe our eyes will witness the last dawn of this century together.
But we don’t know for certain where we are. He’s a person, and I’m a person. That proves that we aren’t really so far apart.
Altered, my life plays at several speeds. The mortal guitar goes on weakly, trying to express everything with some sort of tonality, trying to use one thing to stand for all things.
No matter how hard I try, there’s no way I can become that plaintive guitar. No matter how hard I try to make up for my mistakes, the sky will not give me back the voice that I once offered it. I’ve been defeated, so writing is all I have.
Sometimes we have to believe in miracles. The voice in my writing is like the reverberations of a bottle breaking at midnight. Listening over and over to the Radiohead CD I stole from a friend, on this uniquely pure and stainless morning, at the age of twenty-nine, here at S. I come to the end of this piece of candy.
SHANGHAI, 1995-99
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mian Mian lives in Shanghai and works as a writer and nightlife promoter. She is the author of two books, the story collection La La La and the novel Candy. She has become a cultural icon to a generation of Chinese youth who value her authenticity and honesty in portraying the new face of contemporary China.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Andrea Lingenfelter has translated such novels as Farewell My Concubine and The Last Princess of Manchuria as well as film subtitles and poetry. She lives in Seattle.
CANDY
A NOVEL
MIAN MIAN
A READING GROUP GUIDE
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR OF Candy
Mian Mian talks with Jonathan Napack of the International Herald Tribune
“So many young people are getting lost,” Mian Mian says. “I want to show them how freedom is exciting but also dangerous.”
Mian Mian, thirty, is perhaps China’s most promising youn
g writer. Her stories deal with issues—sexuality, drug abuse, China opening to the world—that touch the core of her generation’s experience. Too young to remember Mao’s collectivist dystopia, they know only today’s disillusioned consumerism and see self-definition, rather than nation building, as the focus of their lives.
Last year the Chinese government gave her its ultimate award: It banned her books, along with those of her nemesis, fellow Shanghai chronicler Wei Hui. Willy Wo-lap Lam, a former columnist for the South China Morning Post who is called China’s Walter Winchell, says an enraged President Jiang Zemin personally recited to the Politburo one passage, a description of casual sex with a young Westerner.
But with “banned in Beijing,” an irresistible sales pitch, for all the wrong reasons, translations are finally hitting the bookshelves: Tang (or Candy) appears next month in France, from Les Bonbons Chinois, Editions de l’Olivier, and in 2003 in the United States, from Little, Brown.
Mian Mian’s stories tend to circle around the years she spent in Shenzhen in the early to mid-1990s, the most lawless and chaotic time in that notorious border town’s short history. Running away from her native Shanghai at age seventeen, she drifted into the city’s nightlife scene, falling in love with a series of feckless musicians and acquiring a serious heroin habit along the way. With the help of her parents, she returned to Shanghai in 1995, went into rehab, and started to write. “There are no old people in that city,” Mian Mian says of Shenzhen. “Everyone was so young.”
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-1980s, 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 1999Candy, 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?
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