Annie Wang - The People’s Republic of Desire

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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.

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I speak to Mimi urgently. "Maybe besides our Jeremy Irons club and Ricky Martin fan club, we should also set up a Little Women's Club. The mission of this club would be to raise money for the poor, uneducated, and mentally and physically traumatized girls through hosting cultural events."

"Sounds great! We should make the club exclusive and the membership fee expensive," Mimi says.

"Why?" I ask.

"Charity, like golf, is a fashion among the rich. They will only do it when they think it is fashionable," Mimi adds with a bored expression and a wave of her hand.

97 The Little Women's Club

Following my experiences on my trip to the countryside, I return to the city and set up the Little Women's Club with CC and Mimi. We are all little women – shorter than five foot four. China is fascinated with models and the Brooke Shields type of tall Western beauty, and many Chinese women are risking their lives with leg operations to gain height, so we decide to celebrate being petite. "I was told Lucy Liu is only five foot three," says CC.

"Zhang Ziyi is only five-foot-three," Mimi says.

"Not to mention Mother Teresa, Liz Taylor, and Aung San Suu Kyi!" I add.

We set the requirements for membership in the Little Women's Club: a woman no more than five foot four in height, with a postgraduate degree or better and a strong CV.

Our shortest member is Dove, a poet, author, singer, and film star. She has published a collection of essays called Size Doesn ' t Matter. We set up a reading at CD Cafe, where Dove reads, sings, and screams. That night, we sell seven hundred copies of her book.

Although the membership fees are $1,000 per year, the response to the Little Women's Club advertisements exceeds all expectations. Female entrepreneurs, artists, authors, actresses, engineers, lawyers – all extremely intelligent women – donate money and offer suggestions. Some even voluntarily design the Little Women's Club Web site. Being a member of the Little Women's Club becomes fashionable and something of a status symbol.

Beibei, who has been doing business for so many years, knows clearly that in China, connections means money. She arranges for a concert to be hosted jointly by the Little Women's Club and her Chichi Entertainment Company and invites her proteges, the Young Revolutionaries, to be the only male special guests.

My father's company donates 500,000 yuan and Mimi's husband, Lee, provides 200,000 yuan on behalf of his company. In return, we give their companies exposure everywhere and one hundred VIP tickets.

Advertisements for the Little Women's Club Concert quickly appear at Beijing bus stops, and on radio stations, television stations, and even buses.

Beibei is pleased. Foreign company sponsorship, popular big-shot stars taking part, a public benefit concert, and television coverage – with the Young Revolutionaries as the only male act – it's a perfect chance for her to promote her band and gain publicity. She jokes, "Although I'm excluded from membership because of my height, I'll make the little women work for me! This is a battle between the tall and the short!"

On the day of the concert, Mimi and her husband Lee, Weiwei and his latest girlfriend, CC, Lulu, stepmother Jean, and I all sit in Lee's company minibus. It is like a family picnic.

After all the female artists have performed – the sweet, the crazy, the angry, the weird, the loud, the wild, and the sick – the Young Revolutionaries, surrounded by their entourage, come out onstage. The Young Revolutionaries were born and raised in Manchuria and have drifted down to Beijing, where they burst onto the music scene. Growing up listening to pirated foreign CDs, they are influenced by Western pop and punk music. They enjoy the limelight, being packaged, signing autographs for fans, and putting on cool poses for the cameras.

When the music starts, I see two groups in the audience: There are kids with dyed hair and vacant expressions who dance wildly; these are from China 's one-child generation which doesn't believe in limits. And there are older folks who twist their stout beer bellies, trying to shake away their midlife crises.

The Young Revolutionaries rap out their song:

My great grandfather Mao
Who I have never met
You are the coolest rock star
The greatest punk
The heaviest metal
All Chinese rockfans
Rock with you
On the new Long March
Rock and roll
Beat America, beat England
Let ' s get it together

"These Young Revolutionaries have the dance steps of the Backstreet Boys, John Lennon's hair and political sensibility, Michael Jackson's crotch-grabbing, Ricky Martin's butt-swinging, Nirvana's smashing guitars – the only thing they don't have is themselves!" CC declares.

" China is currently in a stage where it can only imitate. Everything is like that, including entertainment," says Lulu. "Young people will do everything possible to be different, but they end up falling into the same old conventions." Lulu doesn't like the Young Revolutionaries either.

Beibei is unhappy. "What's wrong with imitating? Even Hollywood movies are imitating Chinese martial arts movies!"

"Chinese kids today are really something. They haven't practiced their skills, they haven't trained their voices, but they dare to come out and be idols? Do they think we're all stupi d?" Jean shows no respect for the Young Revolutionaries.

As everyone is talking, Weiwei opens his mouth: "I can smell marijuana."

In front of us, a group of students with nose-rings are lighting up, and several girls with fluorescent bands around their arms and necks are violently shaking their heads to the music.

Although it is superficial, vulgar, and drug-fueled, the Little Women's Club Concert has raised 250,000 yuan. Mimi, CC, and I bring the money to a poor village in Xi'an. On the way, I say, "If such a manufactured and unremarkable event can lead to such good, perhaps it should be encouraged after all!" Mimi says, "The event allows big women and men to see what our little women are capable of." CC shakes her head as she replies, "I don't want our club to be associated with brats like the Young Revolutionaries. What I can't bear the most isn't their stupidity. Plus, as men, they are just too short!"

98 Too Far Ahead of Her Time

CC decides to go back to England. As she tells me about the decision, I'm shocked.

CC says, "It's been five years since I returned to China. I did my best to become more Chinese, but it didn't work."

"You don't like China anymore?"

"Sometimes, coming back to China is like living in Hong Kong twenty years ago. It's so hard to find people who are at my level. I'm a misfit here."

One of CC's problems is that she's too far ahead of her time. In China, it's considered cool to carry a credit card, for instance, but CC has five or six. It's considered cool to drive a Buick, but CC was chauffeured in a Bentley as a young girl. It's considered cool to drink Blue Mountain coffee, but she's gone through her coffee-drinking phase and has moved on to green tea. It's considered cool to drop English words into your con versations even if your pronunciation is incorrect, but CC speaks fluent English. It's considered cool to know how to bowl, but she grew up playing golf with her parents. It's considered cool for young educated women to discuss works of the Beat Generation such as Jack Kerouac's On The Road and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, but she read them when she was a student.

"I can't stand people who show off their brand-name clothes that are at least two years behind New York and London fashions. I have to lower myself again and again in order to stay popular among my Chinese friends. I'm getting tired."

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