Candy
by Mian Mian
Back Bay Books

Talk about tragically hip.

China's newest (and only?) literary wunderkind has dabbled in drug abuse, prostitution, suicide and raves. So has much of young middle-class China, but only Mian Mian, in a story about a singer who smokes and snorts her voice away before turning to the pen to express herself, has breached the chasm of censorship, taboo and an introverted tradition to become a generation's cult icon.

At least that's what the foreign critics of "Candy," Mian Mian's first novel, seem bent on believing.

It's true that Candy is revolutionary in the People's Republic of China, which banned the novel four months after it was released. A narrative of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll washed up on the shores of the free economic zones of southern China in the late '80s, its pages do not offer the sort of literary characters encouraged or sanctioned in a socialist society:

Here's the background on a minor character:

These men all dressed alike, in double-breasted suits of the same pale green as pickled vegetables, all with identical gold-colored buttons. Each of these men in suits had spent a decade in prison, and each of them had a face that betrayed a bad stomach.

And the aside occasioned by another incidental:

That's what Shanghai sluts are like; they want to have it both ways. They're good at letting slip, bit by bit, the details of their sad stories, not knowing what's true and what's a lie. In bed they're apt to blurt out, Do you love me? And they're good at faking orgasms and feigning madness.

The cast gets more degenerate. The prose remains just as sharp. But the steady line-up of thieves, pimps and free-basers pushes the central figure of "Candy" from the stage. It's easy to be blinded by the novel as a raw expose of China's dark underbelly. It's easy to miss entirely the complicated and poignant love story underlying the story.

Hong is a bright, adventurous and sensual young girl when she leaves her middle-class family in Shanghai and strikes out on her own. She gets in trouble, fancies herself a promising singer, discovers alcohol and falls in love with a dreamy musician, Saining. Much disappointment, anger, jealousy, confusion and reconciliation ensues. Depression and drugs soon replace sex and dancing. They split up, check into rehab, relapse and crawl back to each other's arms multiple times, not necessarily in that order. Hong finishes her tale a vastly changed person in all respects but for one — she still loves Saining, the man who dashed her dreams, led her to despair and then stopped loving her.

A nutshell bio of Mian Mian in her late teens mirrors that of Hong, and the author's familiarity with the seedy life she depicts is clearly authentic. Her frank and honest portrayal of disaffected youth are what wins accolades. But this is a critical assessment that the author derides in her novel. Hong, too, becomes a writer, and is greeted with a sneer:

Hong the writer and her imitators were overnight sensations — at least their bullshit images were ... the papers say this kind of writing "represents youth culture in transformation."

I don't know how many imitators "Candy" has inspired. All I know about Hong's world, with its hole-punched music (the victim of anti-piracy or anti-western campaigns or both) and its frustration with AIDS websites that all seem to refer them to 1-800 hotlines, I know from "Candy." But I am certain that its branding as a manifesto of a generation is both an honor for and a disservice to the author.

Today Mian Mian writes and promotes dance parties in Shanghai. She can be seen in multiple photos adorning her website, all of which fail to translate anything more than a modern gal addicted to sunglasses and cigarettes. Jim Morrison croons in the background.

Mian Mian ends her story with a personal address to her readers to set the record straight: "My name is Mian Mian," she writes in the final page, "The story above is not my autobiography. My autobiography will have to wait until I've been stripped naked as a writer."

Maybe then she'll lose the shades and the smoke and mirrors. But how alluring is candy without the shiny wrapping?

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)