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 remember the first time I went to Len's office to have my eyes tested. He was so gentle and delicate, a doctor who really cared for his patients. I remember his wild look as we made love. I remember him holding my hand as we strolled along the Seine. How could this not be real love?

From Mimi's office at the World Trade Center, I walk west along the Avenue of Heavenly Peace, past the Nikko Hotel, the Jianguo Hotel, and the Silk Market. When I reach the Diplomatic Apartments, I stop a middle-aged man getting off the number 9 bus and ask him for a cigarette.

I don't smoke and didn't feel like it when Len left me, telling me that he didn't need love. But now, I suddenly, desperately, need something bitter in my mouth. At least the bitter flavor of tobacco could give me a kind of comfort. The cheap cigarette makes me start coughing violently. In the midst of a violent cough, I take a kind of delight in my self-abuse.

Jianguomen Wai. Such a familiar place. My office is right ahead, that yellow-brick building, a symbol of China 's 1970s modernization. There are so many new glassy buildings towering over it. I awkwardly puff on the cheap cigarette and walk through the crowds waiting for buses, selling newspapers, and begging.

I am a girl who collects stories.

A girl who lives on reminiscences.

The wind begins to blow.

It begins to rain.

One of Beijing 's unforgiving thunderstorms.

I stand in the rain thinking about my past in the States, and all of the experiences of love, lust, and hatred that I have seen in this world. After such a long period of mourning for what I lost by loving Len, can I put an end to this? I decide to resign from my job. I don't want to run away from where I failed. I should go back to the United States and face my fears. Some things cannot be avoided, and only through confrontation can they be resolved.

It is time for me to learn to love again, to be intimate again. When I first came back to China I used to think that real love was hopeless and I would be alone forever. But looking at my life in America through my new Chinese lenses has shown me otherwise. It is time for me to take a chance with my life again. Going back for a visit to the States was one of the best things I could have done for myself. The answers to the rest of my life lie somewhere in America. I still have unfinished business there. Even if I face defeat, I still have to go. Even if I have to search to the ends of the earth, I will never give up.

Every great story should have its share of risk. It is time to find my own story.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my former editor at the South China Morning Post, Susan Sams, who decided to publish my unconventional column "People's Republic of Desire" on page one of the "Life and City" section of the paper – which ran two years and ten months, and turned out to be more successful than we'd all expected. During the running period of the column, I received letters from readers of all nationalities, age groups, and professions. It amazed me that a Hong Kong – based paper could actually reach out to so many people around the globe. Thank you, Charlotte Harper, for showing the column samples to Susan Sams.

My gratitude also goes to four diehard supporters of this book: my best friend, Antony Dapiran, an international lawyer whose Chinese is perfect, who gave me so much help in the early stages from language, translation, to reading my contract pro bono. Without his friendship and encouragement, this book would have been impossible. Michael Davis, who started as a reader of my column in Manhattan, but has become a good friend, who wrote me feedback on almost every column and continued our conversation on the characters of this book face-to-face in New York, Fredericksburg, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Also, Michael Rice and Ben Paul, both of you are wonderful! Gracias!

Finally, I thank my editor, Claire Wachtel, who has a great sense of humor; everyone at Harper, and my agent, Liza Daw-son, who has helped make this book possible.

About the Author

Annie Wang was born in 1972 and grew up in Beijing China Her first short - фото 2

Annie Wang was born in 1972 and grew up in Beijing, China. Her first short story was published when she was fourteen years old. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for the Washington Post Beijing Bureau before becoming a contract interpreter for the U.S. State Department. She has written eight books in Chinese. Her first novel written in English, Lili, was published internationally to extraordinary reviews. Her writing appears in numerous publications, including Fortune, T i me , USAToday.com, Harper ' s (China), Elle (China), and on National Public Radio. Wang lives in the Bay Area and in Shanghai.

www.anniewang.com

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The Peoples Republic of Desire - фото 3
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