I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China (Weatherhead Books on Asia) by Wen Zhu (PDF)

Description

In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation’s increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen’s fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often hedonistic individualism that is feverishly taking root.Set against the mundane landscapes of contemporary China-a worn Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital operating by dated socialist norms-Zhu Wen’s stories zoom in on the often tragicomic minutiae of everyday life in this fast-changing country. With subjects ranging from provincial mafiosi to nightmarish families and oppressed factory workers, his claustrophobic narratives depict a spiritually bankrupt society, periodically rocked by spasms of uncontrolled violence. For example, I Love Dollars, a story about casual sex in a provincial city whose caustic portrayal of numb disillusionment and cynicism, caused an immediate sensation in the Chinese literary establishment when it was first published. The novella’s loose, colloquial voice and sharp focus on the indignity and iniquity of a society trapped between communism and capitalism showcase Zhu Wen’s exceptional ability to make literary sense of the bizarre, ideologically confused amalgam that is contemporary China.Julia Lovell’s fluent translation deftly reproduces Zhu Wen’s wry sense of humor and powerful command of detail and atmosphere. The first book-length publication of Zhu Wen’s fiction in English, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China offers readers access to a trailblazing author and marks a major contribution to Chinese literature in English.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly Written during the mid- to late-1990s, Wen’s first work to be translated into English is a collection of bleak, absurdist tales chronicling the underside of China’s capitalist miracle as experienced by young men whose lives exhibit none of the glittering promise of economic progress. In the title novella, a son haggles with prostitutes in an embarrassingly misguided attempt to entertain his visiting father. In “A Hospital Night,” a young man is manipulated by his girlfriend into keeping watch over her sick and resentful father in a hospital staffed by brutish nurses. The workers in “Ah, Xiao Xie” try desperately to quit their jobs at an under-construction and over-budget “national showcase” power plant that is unable to produce power, but are prevented from doing so. Zhu Wen portrays the banal details of his settings with precision—it’s no surprise that he has since transformed himself into an award-winning filmmaker (Seafood, 2001). Given the abiding sense of hopelessness, the book has its tedious moments, but it is saved by a narrative voice that is by turns low-key, flippant and neurotic, and highly readable as translated by Lovell. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review Highly readable. ― Publishers WeeklyZhu Wen has a brilliant feel for detail in this colloquial, slangy translation. — Wingate Packard ― Seattle TimesBrilliant… Wonderful… I Love Dollars is a publication that’s not to be missed. — Bradley Winterton ― Taipei TimesSplendidly translated by Julia Lovell… an absorbing portrait of the go-go years in China. — Jonathan Spence ― London Review of Books About the Author Zhu Wen became a full-time writer in 1994 after working for five years in a thermal power plant. His work has been published in mainland China’s most prestigious literary magazines, and he has produced several poetry and short story collections and one novel. He has also directed four films, including Seafood, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, and South of the Clouds, which won the NETPAC Prize at the 2004 Berlin Festival. He lives in Beijing.Julia Lovell is a translator and critic of modern Chinese literature and a research fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Like Wang Shuo, Jia Pingwa, Liu Heng and other outcast authors born in the 1960s-70s who came of age in the 80s-90s, Zhu Wen maintains an uneasy, on-off relationship with his present milieu, having a great deal to say that few seem to want to read about. The Chinese audience for domestic fiction, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not much interested in realist or ironic descriptions of their society, in contemplating unflattering mirrors held up to them showing the dark side of their country’s meteoric prosperity. Instead, as with most readers everywhere in our age of US cultural hegemony spearheaded by Hollywood, Disney and Apple, contemporary Chinese who read at all are more interested in fiction that appeals to their desires and longings, in escapist and fantasy writing, formulaic romances and mysteries, inspirational biographies, self-help books and get-rich-quick guides, in books that manage to combine all of these aspirations to some degree: the Harry Potter series, Dan Brown’s tomes, or word-of-mouth bestsellers like Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (all widely popular in the Chinese). It’s not that there is no potential readership for serious or “literary” fiction; it’s just that few publishers have the financial incentive to venture into such dicey territory (sound familiar?), not to mention the toxic byways of political satire in China. The result is that the audience for Chinese realism and satire is largely relegated to the foreign readership in translation. It is also noteworthy that the title novella I Love Dollars and the five other stories in this collection were all published in the original almost two decades ago.The packaging for the English readership is curious and (I feel) somewhat disingenuous, with the blurbs playing up the comic selling points ad nauseum: “an absorbing portrait of the go-go years in China…extravagantly funny”; a “hilarious send-up of China’s love affair with capitalism”; “as penetrating as Kafka, as outrageously funny as Larry David, and with a slangy swagger all Zhu Wen’s own”; “…would make anyone laugh…classic comic fiction of the highest order.” I did not find the stories particularly funny; sad, poignant, and telling perhaps, or black humor at its grimmest, but not laughter-inducing. The narrator of the title story seeks a prostitute to entertain his father in his middle-aged lassitude and when that fails, asks a girlfriend if she would offer herself to him for generosity’s sake (she angrily refuses). The narrator’s girlfriend in “A Hospital Night” bullies him into standing watch until dawn in a hospital ward over her irascible father after his gallbladder operation, which involves repeatedly sticking the man’s penis into a plastic bottle to enable him to urinate while repeatedly being fought off, in front of all the other staring patients in the room. The narrator of “A Boat Crossing” gets lodged in a ferry cabin with a rough trio of men bearing a dead body in a sack; it’s unclear whether the cadaver is to be used for medical instruction or is really a murder victim. Meanwhile a woman tries to sell her 17-year old niece to him for $500, and that’s not to have sex but really to sell her and convey the money back to the girl’s destitute family. “Wheels” spins the street accident theme increasingly notorious in the Chinese press these days, as the narrator unknowingly “brushed against some old man’s arm as I rode down the hill” on his bicycle, and his ignoring this slight makes for dour consequences.I might add here that if a Western male expat writer were to attempt similar themes in the Chinese context, particularly those involving Chinese females, he would lambasted as highly sexist and irresponsible at best, or exaggerated and implausible at worst, though that’s a conundrum of the English publishing world and is refreshingly irrelevant here. While I occasionally got bogged down in Zhu’s narrow, relentless Beckett-like focus on gritty and sordid minutiae, elsewhere his technique is assured and I found the stories largely memorable and instructive in their own way, vividly conjuring up scenes and locales I would rather not personally have to encounter.

⭐my favorite inner workings of china book is Factory Girls by Leslie Chang – I learned so much – and of course her husband’s humorous and informative book of driving in China and it’s infrastructure. However, this is an insider’s account and thus invaluable!

⭐I enjoy reading modern books from China. I read Ha Jin, Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, and Mo Yan frequently. Whereas some of these authors, like Yan Lianke, write long allegories set in China’s China’s recent troubled past, others claim to show China’s new, capitalist-loving culture. I read an old review for Zhu Wen’s “I Love Dollars” and decided to give it a go. The review, like the publisher, claimed that “I Love Dollars” fell in the later category of exposing this new, outrageous, and absurd world in China.The book collects six short stories. The premises of many of the stories shine. For example, in the title story, a struggling writer’s father visits him in town. The father and son spend the day trying to find suitable prostitutes. Unfortunately, I felt the story got bogged down in repetition and monotony. The story “Hospital Night,” about a possible son-in-law taking care of us his girlfriend’s father, had moments of comedy, but suffered from the same monotony. “A Boat Crossing” was a rambling story about a man trying to get upriver and the many strange people he meets. Unfortunately, the ending did not satisfy because none of the strange people were ever explained.A reader looking for a collection of short stories about absurdity in modern China might do better with “Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh” by Mo Yan. Although Mo Yan’s stories frequently end abruptly as well, I felt that they were quicker and more descriptive, and the title story follows a similar theme as Zhu Wen’s: prostitution and making money in modern China. While not short stories, Yan Lianke’s books – any of them really – offer more profound historical and societal insights.

⭐Had to read this book for class, and it really was not what I expected. A son trying get his father laid, to a couple debating over meat. I didn’t care for it much and it was hard to stay focused on the stories.

⭐This book can only be fully appreciated by Chinese readers. It is a realistic portrait of the transformation of the whole Chinese society generated by the policies of Deng Xiaoping. As Julia Lovell writes astutely in her excellent introduction, `Deng was convinced that Communist China’s stability depended on the spread of material prosperity. To the ever-pragmatic Deng, it was irrelevant whether the means were capitalist or socialist, provided that the end of preserving party rule was achieved.’The impact on Chinese society was nothing less than tremendous on all levels: family life, generation conflicts, sex, art (literature), human relations or working conditions.The generation clash is preponderant in `I Love Dollars’: the current generation is `greedy for everything, everywhere, smashing, grabbing, swearing.’ Or, in `Pounds, Ounces, Meat’: `You, youth of today! You can’t cook; you can’t convert pounds into metric! You treat your family like dirt. You’re all useless.’ In `A Hospital Night’, a young man is pestered nearly into a nervous breakdown by older people.Sex is purely business: `As long as we’re paying for the genuine article at a fair price, into the shopping cart it goes, just like everything else.’ Prostitutes are `businesswomen controlled, like we all are, by macroeconomic price regulations.’ (I Love Dollars)Art (literature): `they write for money. `Commercial and popular success becomes paramount. For the older generation, `a writer ought to offer people something positive, ideals, aspirations, democracy, freedom.’ (I Love Dollars)In `Wheels’, a bike incident turns into a violent extortion.In `Ah, Xiao Xie’, a pastiche of the centrally planned `Soviet’ system, you cannot leave your factory unless you have a long arm.In the best story of the bundle `A Boat Crossing’, a Kafkaesque haunting nightmare, everything is for sale, even a young lady, in a corrupt mini-society (boat = country) under the spell of mysterious powers. Where can people go?Zhu Wen’s fluently written brilliant stories show a China and its population at crossroads.Highly recommended.

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