We're Still in Love With The Romance of the Past

So fully have the events of the Cultural Revolution been integrated into Chinese life that painful memories have come to coexist with nostalgia. Visitors to the Olympics will notice that Beijing taxi drivers hang pictures of Mao Zedong from their rearview mirrors in an echo of the cult of personality that reigned from 1966 to 1976. A decade ago, Cultural Revolution-themed restaurants were some of the capital's most popular dining spots. By contrast, a later trauma, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, remains taboo; it hasn't been aired culturally, and it festers.

If Chinese fiction fans aren't obsessing over the Cultural Revolution or romantic Easterns, what are they reading? There's a clue in recent million-selling novels featuring carnivalistic explorations of Chinese urban life today, with its instant gratifications and ennui. Wang Shuo's "Playing for Thrills" tells the story of a shiftless former soldier who gambles, drinks, pursues women and may have been involved in a murder, while Wei Hui's "Shanghai Baby" follows a hedonistic young woman as she tries to find herself in a world of clubs, sex and brand names. These louche-lifestyle novels were huge hits in China. Then they were translated into English and released with considerable fanfare in the United States, where they caused barely a ripple. They aren't Easterns. They aren't the China stories Americans want.

Nevertheless, brave publishers continue to introduce contemporary Chinese writers, attempting, book by book, to open the door on what China is today. Two forthcoming titles seem to at least have a chance of attracting America's attention. Xiaolu Guo's "Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth" is the story of a young migrant woman who goes to Beijing to try to build a life -- an iconic storyline in China today, where the "floating population" exceeds 100 million. The author brings solid literary cred, too: Her last novel to appear in English, "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers," was shortlisted last year for the United Kingdom's Orange prize, awarded to the best new novel in English by a woman. [See the story Guo wrote for this issue of Outlook on Page B3.] "China High," by the pseudonymous ZZ, is the debut memoir of a young Chinese-born, American-educated man I know who was riding a wave of success as a Beijing attorney a few years back when he got arrested for recreational drug use. Stuck in a Chinese prison, frantically texting friends on the outside for help and mentally revisiting his life, he comes to know and be affected by the motley unfortunates who crowd his concrete cell -- con men, thieves, a transsexual prostitute. Asked to explain his title, ZZ has said: "You think you know China? Take a hit of this."

We'll see whether the West is ready for stories like these, for a new narrative tradition that presents this wildly contradictory, fast-growing, crucially important country as it actually is -- a country of good and bad, old ways and new, with as many facets as its 1.3 billion people.

You may wonder whether I'm putting my money where my mouth is. After three books set in modern China, am I doing anything to help? Dear reader, forgive me. I'm writing a historical novel.

mones.nicole@gmail.com

Nicole Mones's most recent novel is "The Last Chinese Chef."