Promotional Information

This semiautobiographical novel explores the conflicting feelings involved in love and passion. Coco is a would-be novelist, working as a Shanghai cafe waitress, who is torn between two lovers - one impotent, the other passionate.

About the Author

Wei Hui lives in Shanghai and is a graduate of the prestigious Fudan University. She is 27. This is her first novel.

Reviews

Escellent. - HeatA steamy Chinese novel in the Western style about life in contemporary China...condemned for exploring subjects that are completely taboo in modern Chinese literature. - The TimesWei Hui is intelligent and a passionte spokesperson for modern China. - Marie ClaireShanghai Baby is beautifully written, and the author cleary combines the qualities of natural feeling for writing with intelligence.

Wei Hui's debut novel, which was banned in China, delves deep into the dark and glittering heart of Shanghai, as experienced by a hopeful and hedonistic young novelist, Nikki (better known to her friends as Coco, after the also irrepressibly glamorous Coco Chanel). Although deeply in love with her impotent artist boyfriend Tian Tian, the frustrated Coco takes a successful German businessman as a lover. What follows is the painful and explicit sexual and vocational journey of a young woman in search of her true self, attempting to gain control of her own trajectory as nefarious forces work on her from both within and without. Indeed, it seems almost as if the city's over-the-top materialism drives its inhabitants toward adultery and dark passions, forcing them at once into the dual role of victim/accomplice. It is just such paradoxes that make Wei Hui's novel so complex and thought-provoking: she deftly explores the intimate relationships that belie the seeming oppositions of East and West, love and desire, the natural and the artificial, hedonism and spiritualism. Haunting and resonant, Shanghai Baby proves the existence of the sacred in the profane. For all Chinese literature and contemporary fiction collections. Tania Barnes, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.