by Annie Wang
The People’s Republic of Desire
Annie Wang
Those who know little to nothing about Chinese culture will receive an eye-opening experience of how China was and how China is now through Annie Wang’s novel The People’s Republic of Desire.
Wang takes readers on a journey with four cosmopolitan women learning to live life in the new China. Niuniu, the book’s narrator, is a Chinese American woman, who spent seven years living in the States obtaining her degree in journalism. In the book, Niuniu is now considered a “returnee” when she goes back to China to get over a broken heart. What she meets upon return to her homeland is not the traditional Confucian values she left, but a new modern China where Western culture seems to have taken over – to an extreme.
Niuniu, the narrator of the book, is called a “Jia Yangguiz” which means a “fake foreign devil” because of her Westernized values. Her friend Beibei is the owner of her own entertainment company and is married to a man who cheats, so Beibei deals with his infidelity by finding her own young lovers. Lulu is a fashion magazine editor who has been having a long-term affair with a married man, and thinks nothing of having several abortions to show her devotion to him. CC, also a returnee, struggles with her identity between Chinese and English.
In The People’s Republic of Desire the days of the 1989 idealism and the Tiananamen Sqaure protests seem forgotten to this new world when making a fast yuan, looking younger, more beautiful, and acting important seems to be of the most concern to this generation.
Wang uses these four woman to make humorous and sometimes sarcastic observations of the new China and accurately describes how Western culture has not only infiltrated China, but is taken to the extreme by those who have experienced a world outside the Confucian values. What was once a China consumed with political passions, nepotism, unspoken occurrences, and taboos is now a world filled with all those things once discouraged – sex, divorce, pornography, and desire for material goods. It’s taken the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” to an all-time high.
Wang offers a glimpse of modern day Beijing and what it would take for any woman – returnee or otherwise – to move forward and conquer dilemmas in the fast-moving Chinese culture. The characters joke that “nowadays, the world is for bad girls” and all the values of their youth have been lost to this new modern generation of faking their identity, origin, and accent. It seems that such a cultural shock would be displeasing to those who knew the old China, but instead these young women seem to be enjoying the newfound liberties.
If you’re looking for a quick read with a plot, you won’t find it in The People’s Republic of Desire. Each of the 101 chapters read like individual short stories, separate stories about friends, family, and other individuals who Niuniu is acquainted with or meets and through which Wang weaves a humorous and often sarcastic trip into Beijing, China.
The book is filled with topics of family, friends, Internet dating, infidelity, rich, poor, and many of the same ideals most cultures worry themselves about. Many of the chapters end with popular phrases that give the reader an insight into Chinese culture and language. Wang does seem to use Niuniu’s journalistic background to intertwine the other characters and come to a somewhat significant conclusion.
As the press release states, “Wang paints an arresting portrait of a generation suffocating in desire. For love. For success. For security. For self actualization. And for the most elusive aspiration of all: happiness.”
With The People’s Republic of Desire, Wang does just that. She speaks not only of the new culture but also of the old ways and how China used to be. She may have educated readers about the new China with her knowledge of the Western and Chinese culture, but also Wang hits the nail on the head when it comes to showing most people’s needs. After all, aren’t most human beings striving for many of these same elusive dreams?
Joanne D. Kiggins
***
From Publishers Weekly
As Wang reveals in intimate detail, today's affluent Beijing women – educated, ambitious, coddled only children enamored of all things Western – are a generation unto themselves. The hyperobservant narrator of this fascinating novel (after Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen) is 20-something Niuniu, a journalist who was born in the United States but grew up in China and returned to America for college and graduate school. Now she's back in Beijing nursing a broken heart and discovering "what it means to be Chinese" in a money- and status-obsessed city altered by economic and sexual liberalization. Supporting Niuniu – and downing a few drinks with her – are her best buddies: entrepreneurial entertainment agent Beibei, sexy fashion mag editor Lulu and Oxford-educated CC. Sounds like the cast of Sex in the Forbidden City, but the thick cultural descriptions distinguish the novel from commercial women's fiction. A nonnative English speaker, Wang observes gender politics among the nouveau riche in careful, reportorial prose. Though Niuniu's romantic backstory forms a tenuous thread between the chapters, and the novel – based on Wang's newspaper column of the same title – doesn't finally hold together, this is a trenchant, readable account of a society in flux.
Annie Wang
The People’s Republic of Desire
Preface
I first thought of writing this book in 2000 while I was staying at a hotel in Hong Kong overlooking Victoria Harbor. It was March then. When I left my home in California, the tulips and roses in the garden were blooming: blue, yellow, and white. The peaches and pear trees were in bloom as well. When the wind blew, it scattered peach and plum blossoms onto the stone path in my garden, reminding me of the poetry of my favorite Song Dynasty female poet, Li Qingzhao.
I love ancient China, but I live in modern China. And, at least in the case of this paradox, time is the eternal victor.
I have chosen to lead this life – going back and forth between East and West, China and the United States. I feel like a migratory bird traveling across the globe with the changing seasons.
For what? Stories, perhaps. In 2000, I gave up my job in Silicon Valley when "information technology," "Internet," "initial public offering," and "venture capital" were the hottest concepts in the world. I went back to China looking for interesting stories for the Washington Post. I told myself that I am a story collector of the poor, not the rich.
Looking out onto Victoria Harbor and at the skyscrapers standing out against the sky, I felt a battery of complex feelings well up in my heart. And I realized that I was thinking in Chinese again.
After years of living in the Bay Area, I had grown accustomed to talking about multiculturalism, spiritual paths, faith, identity, and the notion of belonging. Back in China, I hear people discuss at length the experience of their first taste of Starbucks coffee, the first time they drove a Buick, chatting on the Internet, experiencing a one-night stand or watching an adult movie. Divorce, oral sex, affairs, boob jobs, abortion, homosexuality, overcharged libidos, impotence – these once-taboo subjects have become daily conversations among urban women who take great pride in owning a bottle of Chanel No. 5. It's cool to be a sex dissident as long as you are not a political dissident. Conservativeness is a dirty word.
At the same time, Cuban cigars, Giorgio Armani, BMWs, and golf clubs are introduced to successful Chinese men as the symbol of their yuppie lifestyle. They hire young poor peasant boys as their bodyguards and take young poor peasant girls as their playmates.
No one remembers what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Nor are they concerned with China 's political future. Money and status rule the day. It seems only two types of people exist: those who admire power and wealth, and those who are being admired for their power and wealth.
China, this ancient civilization that
was once suffocated under the weight of its own history, has changed so drastically, so swiftly, it is far beyond the comprehension of the Chinese themselves, let alone outsiders and the go-betweens, such as me, who are known as American Chinese or Chinese Americans.
These are unspeakably crazy and illogical times. Dynamic. Impulsive. Pragmatic. Chaotic. Brimming with desire. Cheeky. Declining. Contradictory. A time when it's more shameful to be poor than to be a whore. And, at the same time, it's an era full of glory, dreams, and primitive passions. In China, everything is laid bare. There are no secrets.
I thought to myself, forget about identifying and belonging. It has never been that important, anyway. The word "home" needs to be redefined.
What the Chinese need is a solution to the problems of modernization, for themselves as individuals, and for Chinese civilization as a whole.
The Chinese once carried so much cultural baggage. We used to laugh with teary eyes, obsessed with the memories of humiliation and sorrow, wrenched to the gut with love and hate. We acted with impulsive nationalism and with the shame of defeat. We waited with painful anxiety, overcome by uncontrollable fervor.
Perhaps a little fast food frivolity, a little Starbucks shallow-ness, a little Hong Kong – style materialism, a little ignorance and indifference of history simply are necessary for the new market economy. Kick back, relax, and, only then, amid the void, will China and the Chinese be able to find a way out.
That night, my thoughts slipped out of American and back into Chinese. I drank too much at Lan Kwai Fong Hong Kong with my girlfriends. In a postcolonial bar, we, a group of self-professed intelligent female graduates of distinguished American and British universities, found we were unable to define the notions of home and roots. Imported liquor, cigars, and loud music were for us a kind of comfort. Even though we shed tears that night, we still felt a temporary sense of security.
The next day, I went to a quaint, poor fishing village, stood on the dilapidated pier, and filled my nostrils with the smell of drying fish. The live sea animals in fish tanks, the skillful killing of these animals, the poor housing… these are the images of China that are being broadcast familiar in the West. With a shirt tied round my waist and waving my expensive digital camera, I wandered around with the other foreign tourists, gazing left and right with curiosity. I even faced the sea, stretched out my arms, and said, "This is life!" – like a character from a typical Chinese melodrama. Am I like a foreign tourist who is searching for exoticism in my home country or is the whole world becoming Westernized?
When I was fourteen, I fell in love with the Indian author Tagore and a line from one of his meditative poems: "Wisdom reaches the peak of perfection in drunkenness." So many years have passed, and I still have not found an aphorism better than that damn line. I haven't learned anything.
There was a time when I was heavy-hearted, all for the sake of writing, metaphysics, and the future of Chinese civilization. Who did I think I was? Only later did I understand how foolish I was. Now, I'm drunk with reality. No more a serious, obstinate, foolish intellectual. I want to be free-falling, free-falling with a China that is no longer homely.
I am casting off my burdens – no more will I play the role of a Confucian intellectual.
After all, aren't we the new breed? Aren't we young? Aren't we lonely modern souls? Don't we deserve to be happy and carefree? Don't we need a little fun? So let's play. After all, we have always been good at games.
1 A Fake Foreign Devil
"Returnee" is a popular word nowadays in China, especially since the Chinese government called on all "patriotic overseas Chinese" to return to their homeland to build a "modern, strong China."
These returnees have a number of common traits.
First, they don't normally wear miniskirts or makeup, like so many local girls do. They often don't look very fashionable and seem to care little about such frippery.
Second, they have usually obtained advanced degrees somewhere in the West and often like to say, as casually as possible, "I went to school in Boston." (But they never forget to wear their Harvard or Yale rings on their fingers.)
Third, they are timid pedestrians. It takes them forever to cross an average Chinese road.
Fourth, they don't smoke. In fact, they get dizzy around smokers.
Fifth, they don't like people to ask where they come from, especially someone who has just met them. If they are prodded for an answer, they tend to pause for several seconds as if faced with a multiple-choice question. If they were to give the traditional response, they would tell the inquirer the birthplace of their fathers' ancestors. Knowing your ancestors' birthplace and tomb sites demonstrates that you haven't forgotten your roots. Anyone who forgets his roots is despised and accused of being a sellout. In China the phrase, "He doesn't know his last name anymore," is hurled to mock those who try to forget their roots.
But in the last twenty years, some Chinese scholars have claimed that China 's long history and cultural roots have impeded its modernization. For the modern Chinerse, history is just so much cultural baggage. So the new Chinese way to answer is to name the birthplace, not of your father's ancestors but of your father. The American answer goes one step further: you simply point to your own birthplace.
So this is what is going through minds of the returnees when you ask them where they come from: Should returnees follow the traditional Chinese, the modern Chinese, or the American model? Or should they go one step further, and say that they come from California or London? Well, in China, smart people leave things vague. It's called nandehutu.
Twenty-something Niuniu is one such returnee. If you've been to Beijing, you might have seen her. She's no different from all the other members of the trendy young xin xin renlei - the "new" new generation. Her hair is short, like a boy's, and spiked up with gel, sometimes dyed red, sometimes purple. Her hands are covered with all kinds of unusual white-gold rings, with little feet, apples, skeletons, snakes, and so on. Black nails, dark brown lipstick, baggy trousers, a colorful Swiss Army watch, yellow Nokia mobile phone, palm pilot, IBM notebook, JanSport backpack, and a Louis Vuitton purse, which always holds two condoms – not for herself, but in case one of her girlfriends needs one urgently.
Everybody in China has a dangan,or personal file, which is kept by the government and details their political, family, educational, and employment background. I have one, too.
Let's take a look at my dangan. Top secret.
Height: 5'2"
Age: Twenty-something Weight: 110 pounds
Marital Status: Single and fully detached Birthplace: United States
Mother: Wei Mei, daughter of revolutionary opera performers. Born in Beijing, half Han and half Manchurian, granddaughter of a Manchu minister. Married three times. Moved to the United States during first marriage in mid-1970s. Currently the wife of the chief representative of an American oil company. Mother of Niuniu and a pair of Eurasian twins, Dong Dong and Bing Bing. A former Hooligan girl and shop clerk during the Cultural Revolution. Currently a social butterfly in Beijing 's expatriate circle, involved in some high-level diplomatic exchanges and movie projects. No higher education, speaks fluent English.
Father: Chen Siyuan, orphan from Taiwan. Arguably Chinese, adopted by an American missionary and converted to Christianity. Ph.D. in electronic engineering from MIT. Former employee of Hewlett-Packard. Currently CEO of the Chen Computer Company. Twice married, currently to his former secretary, Jean Fang, who is eight years older than Niuniu and soon to have a baby.
Twin Sisters: Dong Dong, age nine, and Bing Bing, age nine. Students of Beijing Lido International School.
Education: B.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia. GPA 3.8. M.A. in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley.
Profession: Reporter for the World News Agency in Beijing.
Religion: Buddhism, light.
Smoker: Nonsmoker.
Drinker: Started at fourteen. Now occasional drink
er.
Sexual History: Lost virginity at sixteen. Had sex with twenty-two partners. Currently sexually inactive.
Psychological Background: Suffered from depression while in the United States after being dumped by her boyfriend, the moderately successful eye doctor Len, a third-generation Chinese American who holds an M.D. from Johns Hopkins. Six sessions with a shrink, who taught her about the eye movement treatment, about which she remained highly skeptical. Eventually she left United States for a makeover in China as an alternative strategy.
Probably, you've guessed by now that Niuniu is me. From my dangan, you can see why people call me a cosmopolitan woman. I love the word "cosmopolitan" as much as the drink. "Cosmopolitan" is a trendy word to toss around in China at the moment: China is building cosmopolitan megacities and luring people with a cosmopolitan background.
In a country where background and history are so important, it's increasingly popular in China to fake one's identity, origin, and accent. For one hundred yuan, you can get a fake ID, a dangan,or a diploma from any school in the world as easily as you can pick up a fake Rolex in Shenzhen nowadays.
Last week, I was in Shanghai, at a bar called CJW, owned by a friend's friend, where several native Shanghainese were complaining about "some peasants claiming to be native Shanghainese after being here less than three months."
Two weeks earlier, I was in a Hong Kong teahouse where the waitresses bad-mouthed a chic patron carrying a black Prada bag, who had just walked out the door.
"She can't be a local as she claims. Her Cantonese is far from perfect!"
"She must be a beigu - a northern auntie!"
"Northern aunties are so bold nowadays. They'll do anything, even steal other women's husbands. Shameless."
Upon hearing the exchange, I came to the conclusion that where you come from is a political question. In China during the Cultural Revolution, one's background could determine one's fate. Many of those who were unfortunate enough to be from educated families associated with the old guard were systematically purged by the state. The leaders of the Cultural Revolution wanted to start the country over from a blank slate, and that required the elimination of intellectuals and families with backgrounds that were deemed "undesirable."
