Young & Single in Beijing: ‘Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth’

A young Chinese woman’s voracious yearning for the West is what comes through most clearly in Xiaolu Guo’s “Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 167 pages, $21.95), a slender book that bears the hallmarks of so many first novels: tentativeness, clumsiness, transparent autobiography. It was Ms. Guo’s first novel published in China, and unearthing it now — after her success with “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,” short-listed for the Orange Prize last year — was a somewhat dubious decision. Yet publishing it in America just as the Olympics are taking place in Beijing is justifiable on grounds of more than mere marketing.Ms. Guo’s story of a peasant named Fenfang, who moves alone at 17 to Beijing from a remote village, grants illuminating, albeit fictional, access to one of the 15 million lives in that dry, teeming, polluted city. (It is a city largely without air-conditioning, we learn. The best escape from the summer heat? McDonald’s.) Fenfang works menial jobs, then finds her niche, and better money, as an extra in movies. She learns English; she discovers the joys of pirated CDs and DVDs. “I loved piracy,” she says. “It was our university and our only path to the foreign world.” Well, not quite the only path: Books by Western authors, such as Fenfang’s beloved Marguerite Duras, are another avenue.“Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth,” each of whose brief chapters is a numbered “fragment,” is peppered with small, black-and-white photographs of Beijing as bleak as Fenfang’s existence. She had arrived in the city hoping for fame and wealth, but since those have eluded her, she seeks something nearly as difficult to achieve: a degree of anonymity, an escape from the ever-watchful eyes of those around her. The day she brings her Bostonian boyfriend to her apartment for the first time, the police swiftly arrive and hustle her down to the station, where she waits for hours.“Around midnight a policeman called me,” she recounts. “He wrote down all my certification numbers and asked sternly how many boyfriends I had. Didn’t I know that behaving like I did before marriage was immoral? He filled me in on what my neighbours had been saying, about how I’d been bringing a foreign man to my residence. He ordered me to move out of my place immediately, the very next day. If I didn’t, the state could not be held responsible for anything that might happen to me.” As she leaves, one police officer says to another: “She’s no good, that girl. Much too individualistic.”Later, when Fenfang goes on a trip by herself, attempting to write a screenplay, she knows the people at the guesthouse where she stays think she is a prostitute. “Why else would a young woman rent a room alone? It’s not standard in China. And, in China, anyone who does something ‘not standard’ is immediately suspicious.” Writing while female is evidently one of those things. Finished with a script, she meets with a slimy producer who will look only in her general direction, not straight at her, because she is not a man. “And eh, don’t be angry, but let me tell you women can’t write,” he informs her.Ms. Guo, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, is a film writer and director as well as a novelist, and she may have been a stronger screenwriter than novelist when she wrote “Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.” The screenplay within the novel is one of its most compelling bits of writing, perhaps because it is almost entirely observation: of the ordinary man at the center of the movie, of a hardscrabble existence on the margins of Beijing.The book itself suffers from a peculiar problem; there is a hybrid feeling about it. As the author explains in her acknowledgments, translators Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey transcribed it into English 10 years after she wrote it. Ms. Guo says she wanted the English version to capture the sense of Fenfang’s “slangy, raw Chinese,” but in this it largely fails — whether because of the translation, because she decided to substantially rework the book once it was in English, or both. (It is British English, which adds a thin additional layer of otherness for the American reader. Ms. Guo moved to London in 2002 and now lives both there and in Beijing.)Lines such as “I took a sharp intake of breath” are reminders that this is the author’s second language. “Hot coffee is like a warm-blooded man. They both give you courage to face a new day,” Ms. Guo writes. One hopes that sounds less hackneyed in Chinese.What is most memorable about these fragments of youth is not the hobbled writing, nor is it Fenfang. Rather, it is a young person’s sensation of wanting to burst free of the East and embrace the West.

Young & Single in Beijing: ‘Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth’

Young & Single in Beijing: ‘Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth’

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