Shanghai Baby

Infobox Book
name = Shanghai Baby
title_orig =
translator = Bruce Humes


image_caption =
author = Wei Hui
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = China
language = English
series =
genre =
publisher = Robinson Publishing UK
release_date = 1993
media_type = Print Paperback & Audio book
pages = 256
isbn = 1841196843
followed_by = Marrying Buddha

"Shanghai Baby" is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Chinese author Wei Hui.

Plot introduction

The novel's narrator and main character, supposedly a semi-fictionalised version of the author, is a 25 year old Shanghainese woman named Nikki, or Coco to her friends, a waitress in a Shanghai cafe. Coco is trying to write a first novel after previous success publishing a collection of sexually frank short stories. At the cafe, Coco meets a young man, Tian Tian, for whom she feels extreme tenderness and love. However, Tian Tian - an artist - is reclusive, impotent and an increasing user of drugs. Despite parental objections, Coco moves in with him, leaves her job and throws herself into writing.

Shortly afterwards Coco meets Mark, a married German expatriate businessman living in Shanghai. The two are uncontrollably attracted and begin a highly charged, physical affair. Torn between her two lovers, and tormented by her deceit, her unfinished novel and the conflicting feelings involved in love, lust and betrayal, Coco tries to understand who she is and what she wants from life.

Plot details

Twenty-five year old Nikki - whose friends call her Coco after Coco Chanel - is a young Shanghainese writer, fascinated by the West and Western culture. A graduate of Fudan University, Coco has written a successful collection of short stories, "The Shriek of the Butterfly", which, unusually for China, have sexually frank themes written from a woman's point of view. Coco now wants to embark upon her first novel, a semi-autobiographical work set in Shanghai.

The novel opens with Coco working as a waitress in a Shanghai cafe. Whilst at work, she meets a sensitive-looking young man, Tian Tian. Coco and Tian Tian start an intense relationship and Coco leaves her parents' home to move in with her new boyfriend. However, Tian Tian, a talented young artist, is extremely anxious and shy. His mother left him in the care of his grandmother when he was a small boy, after his father mysteriously died. Tian Tian now refuses to speak to his mother, who is living in Spain, although he lives off the money she sends him. Tian Tian's problems cause him to be completely impotent and unable to consummate his relationship with Coco.

Coco soon meets another man - a large, blond German named Mark who is living and working in Shanghai. Coco and Mark are intensely attracted to each other, and start an affair, despite the fact that Mark is married and Coco is living with Tian Tian. Mark seems to want only pleasure from the affair, and Coco is torn between conflicting emotions.

Tian Tian, sensing that something is not right, becomes more and more withdrawn and starts to use drugs. He embarks on a trip to the South of China, leaving Coco alone in Shanghai. Coco continues her relationship with Mark, even after meeting his wife and child at a company-sponsored event.

Coco discovers that Tian Tian has become addicted to heroin, and travels to him to bring him back to Shanghai, where he enters a rehab centre. Meanwhile, Tian Tian's mother returns from Spain with her new husband. Mother and son are reunited, but Tian Tian is unable to overcome his hatred of her.

Mark tells Coco that he is moving back to Berlin and so the two must part. Coco spends several days in Mark's apartment. In her passion, she does not tell Tian Tian that she will be absent. When she returns to her own flat, she discovers that Tian Tian is gone and is at a friend's house. He has been informed of what he already suspected - that Coco is having an affair. Mark departs from Shanghai and Coco and Tian Tian resume living together. Shortly afterwards, Coco wakes up to find Tian Tian dead from a heroin overdose.

Reaction to novel's publication

Shanghai Baby was banned in China as being decadent and copies were publicly burned.

In the West, the intended audience for the novel, the reaction was positive and the book was translated into English and other languages. In 2007, the novel was made into a film, directed by Berengar Pfahl and starring Chinese actress Bai Ling in the lead role of Coco.

Criticism and literary themes

Some criticism of the book has argued that whilst Wei Hui described herself and her main protagonist as 'feminist', and as a 'sexually liberated woman', the novel merely perpetuated age-old Western stereotypes about Chinese/ Asian women and men. In the novel, both Wei Hui and her male characters (notably Mark) make a fetish of Chinese and Asian women, making them into objects of consumption. In the book, Mark forces Coco into sex in a nightclub toilet. Coco's reaction to this semi-violent event (which may be construed as rape as Coco does not completely accept Mark's advances) is one of angry submission. Symbolically, the West, or the Colonialist past, is forcing itself on and raping Asia.

I began to cry ... I ... suddenly felt even cheaper than the prostitutes dancing downstairs. At least they had professionalism and a certain coolness, while I was awkward and horribly torn between two personalities. I couldn't stand the face I saw reflected in the grimy mirror

The 'two personalities' that Coco is torn between represent her idea of herself as a sexually liberated woman, who 'consumes' men for her own pleasure and the stereotypical 'Asian doll', who is a glamourised prostitute. Throughout the novel, Coco expresses a deep nostalgia for Shanghai's colonialist past. She attends a colonial themed party with Tian Tian, at which she meets Mark. At the party, Coco is dressed as a typical Asian doll, in traditional Chinese dress, but she is submissive to the colonialist 'forces' whose spirits pervade the party. Coco constantly seems to misread and misunderstand the place that a young Chinese woman would have had to have in such a racist, rigid society, and constantly seeks to evoke her own romanticized view of it, despite constant reminders of how it excludes her. During a summer picnic on a lawn with her Chinese friends, Coco expresses nostalgia for the nineteenth century and the decadence (as she understands it) of Manet's painting 'Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe". In the middle of their picnic, Coco and her friends are asked to leave the lawn which belongs to an American couple who claim to be renting it at vast expense and do not want their view spoiled by Chinese youths.

Throughout the book, Coco name-drops a host of Western writers, and peppers her narrative with brand names and popular culture references. She frequently invites the reader to see her as if through a lens or in a cartoon, fetishized for consumption. Her experiences of emotions, which should be genuine, are never unmediated, and are always constructed from a pastiche of popular culture. An experience of love is likened to the popular film, Titanic. Coco is constructing a fantasy world around herself, based on glimpses and snippets of what is to her a foreign culture.

Chinese men are similarly constructed from stereotypical images and cliches. Tian Tian is impotent and a heroin (opium) addict. The young artist Ah Dick looks very feminine. In contrast, Mark is virile and strong. He plays sport and is able to satisfy Coco sexually. He is found in nightclubs where Western men hunt down young, submissive Asian dolls for sex. Coco is ostensibly sexually liberated, but is caught in romantic fantasies about colonial relationships between Asian women and Western men, and is unable to understand her place in 20th century Shanghai beyond consumerism and pleasure.

Shanghai Baby feeds pre-existing Western stereotypical fantasies about hyper-sexed Asian women eager for Western men, and impotent, opium-addled Asian men who are feminized in comparison with their Western counterparts. At the end of the novel, Mark leaves Coco after using her for a few weeks, returning to his wife and child in Berlin. Tian Tian commits suicide. Coco does not appear to grow or learn from her experiences, and merely carries on with her old life.

References

http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue8/lyne.html Sandra Lyne: "Consuming Madame Chrysanthème: Loti's 'dolls' to Shanghai Baby"http://www.gazette.de/Archiv/Gazette-Februar2002/Martin.html "Young and Decadent in Shanghai", Die Gazette, February 2002http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/youngchina/a.weihui.v.mianmian.html The Pen is Nastier than the Sword: Time Asia
"Shanghai Baby" Wei Hui, translated from the Chinese by Bruce Humes, Robinson 1993

Links

* http://www.shanghai-baby.com/index.php?m=5 Homepage of the 2007 movie "Shanghai Baby", directed by Berengar Pfahl
http://www.weihui.info/new/ Wei Hui's homepage, including photos and a blog (page is no longer active, 9/1/2008)