Product Description

Coco is a Shanghai cafe waitress, full of enthusiasm for life. She falls in love with a young man, Tian Tian, for whom she feels tenderness and love but who is reclusive and impotent. Despite her parents' objections, she moves in with him. But then she meets Mark, a dashing businessman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241798 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-20
• Original language: Mandarin Chinese
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Most of the Chinese novels with which Westerners are familiar describe people living under an oppressive regime that has a stranglehold on every aspect of daily life. But in Wei Hui's engaging semi-autobiographical novel of a young middle-class woman's struggle with love, lust and her understanding of the world, the state is very much in the background - ironically, considering that the novel was banned in China for its frankness about modern life. The main plot is fairly simple. Coco, the heroine, is a college drop-out who dreams of becoming a writer. She lives with Tian Tian, an unemployed, impotent drug addict. Needing more than the gentle love Tian Tian can give her, Coco embarks on a torrid affair with a married German. Wei Hui writes openly about the heroine's sexual desires and love life, experimentation with drugs and fascination with Western culture - especially youth culture - and perfectly captures the high of being young, beautiful and hip. Wei Hui is clearly a talented writer, and some of the novel's poetic passages and the evocation of Shanghai as a vibrant city are beautifully done, although occasionally the quality of the writing flags, possibly the fault of the translation. This is a fresh, modern, female perspective from mainland China, and a fascinating expose of a culture in transition. --Kirkus UK

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.

Customer Reviews

A Magical Translator !
I read Shanghai Baby in both English translated version and the original Chinese version.

I shall not repeat the storyline here, as this book has been widely publicized during the past 6 years.

I simply recommend EVERYONE to buy this English translated version of Shanghai Baby. If you love beauty and elegance of words, then, you have more than plenty here in this book.

The translator, Bruce Humes turned the otherwise coarse crude shallow original Chinese version of Shanghai Baby into a new-born book of a poetically sad tragedy, which could have happened in any human society, be it Communist or Democratic, be it in the Orient or in the West.

This is to say, if you could put up with Coco, the female main protagonist (the author herself), her extremely over-sized ego, and her unfathomable huge materialistic appetite for the Western label luxury goods.

I would give this English translated version of Shanghai Baby 5 stars in rating, and for the original Chinese version, zero star.

simply beautifull, yet complex
personaly, i found this book amazing, her language is unbelievably beautiful. maybe a hard read for people with a short atention span as she writes about everything she sees with such detail,but in her minds eye, which is what makes it so beautifull, along with that the storyline is interesting, not full of excitment but i personly found it exciting in its own way. its not a fairytale with a happy ending, its a truthly and quite disasterouse expression of someones life. one word to describe it would be beautiful, as iv said 3-4 times now, so you get the hint. i recemend it greatly.

Over expectation
i read the chinese version after the book became a massive hit and was curious - so i got it. everything's under expectation so it's just a ok-read for me, the funniest moment reading this book is the mentioned about my DJ friend there. And that's it.