Shanghai Baby

The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide. Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China. The risque contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting, this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it depicts the new generation rising in the East. Set in the centuries-old port city of Shanghai, the novel follows the days, and nights, of the irrepressibly carnal Coco, who waits tables in a cafe when she meets her first lover, a sensitive Chinese artist. Defying her parents, Coco moves in with her boyfriend and enters a frenzied, orgasmic world of drugs and hedonism. But, helpless to stop her gentle lover's descent into addiction, Coco becomes attracted to a boisterous Westerner, a rich German businessman with a penchant for S/M and seduction. Now, with an entourage of friends ranging from a streetwise madame to a rebellious filmmaker, Coco's forays into in the territory of love and lust cross the borders between two cultures -- awakening her guilt and fears of discovery, yet stimulating her emerging sexual self. Searing a blistering image into the reader's imagination, Shanghai Baby provides an alternative travelogue into the back streets of a city and the hard-core escapades of today's liberated youth. Wei Hui's provocative portrayal of men, women, and cultural transition is an astonishing and brave exposure of the unacknowledged new China, breaking through official rhetoric to show the inroads of the West and a people determined to burst free.

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Title of ebook: Shanghai Baby
ISBN: 9780743424158
Publisher: Pocket Books
Internet download file size: 267 kb
Pages: 272
Released online for download: 09-01-2001
Author of eBook: Hui, Wei
Translator: Humes, Bruce

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Shanghai Baby

Chapter One: encounter with my lover

Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes
And lovely landscapes to discover
But all I really want to do right now
Is find another lover!
--Joni Mitchell

My name is Nikki but my friends all call me Coco after Coco Chanel, a French lady who lived to be almost ninety. She's my idol, after Henry Miller. Every morning when I open my eyes I wonder what I can do to make myself famous. It's become my ambition, almost my raison d'être, to burst upon the city like fireworks.

This has a lot to do with the fact that I live in Shanghai. A mystical fog envelops the city, mixed with continual rumors and an air of superiority, a hangover from the time of the shili yangchang, the foreign concessions. This hint of smugness affects me: I both love it and hate it.

Anyway, I'm just twenty-five, and a year ago I published a collection of short stories that didn't make any money but got me attention. (Male readers sent me letters enclosing erotic photos.) Three months ago I left my job as a magazine journalist, and now I'm a bare-legged, miniskirted waitress at a joint called the ... read full excerpt from Shanghai Baby ebook

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