We Still Can't Get Enough of Beijing

As if we haven't already spent the past two weeks either glued to our TV screens watching the Olympics in Beijing or scanning news articles about China from every socio-political-cultural-economic angle that reporters can dig up (or reading blogs from lucky friends actually attending the games), here we are with yet another take on Beijing.

This comes from a young Chinese writer and filmmaker from Beijing named Xiaolu Guo, whose newest novel to be published in the U.S. is called Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. Don George, in this month's Trip Lit column, writes that the book "is an elliptical antidote to the predictable portraits of Beijing and China that are bound to dominate the media during the Beijing Olympics."

The story follows teenager Fenfang Wang from her rural Chinese village to Beijing, where she drifts into a job playing an extra in movies. Her relationships—with a movie production assistant, an American student, a Chinese artist—fare about as well as her career prospects. The novel's disaffected, wry, and very contemporary voice is the total opposite of those cute-as-anything fuwa Olympic mascots.

Here, Xiaolu answers some e-mailed questions from Associate Editor Amy Alipio:

The book's main character, Fenfang, says, "Beijing is the least romantic place in the whole universe." Are you surprised a travel magazine would be recommending your book, when Fenfang paints such an unromantic picture of Beijing?

I’m not surprised. The best travel literature shows the truth about a place, blemishes and all. But of course the novel isn’t a travel piece; it’s literature which paints a very subjective and personal image. The only truth here is one of human emotion. 

Twentysomething Fenfang is clear-eyed about China's economic boom. She says, "Despite the boom, everything felt as it always had been. Same old vinegar, just in a new bottle." When hutongs are knocked down and replaced with new towers, she's not sentimental about the old, saying they're grey, cold, and cramped. But what do you think is old and authentic that's worth saving in Beijing, and conversely, what do you think of the new that's positive?

Fenfang is representative of a confused generation in a confused time—that being contemporary Chinese society where all the ideology and values are fighting against each other, yet trying to survive in one space. The conversation—what’s positive, what’s negative—is not reflected in the material results of China’s economic boom but in the deeper thoughts on values. Old values, i.e., the respect of family and the older generations, are being swept away by the new ones in which money is one of the critical measurements of one’s position to society. But at the same time these new values are being questioned and replaced by the profound “old” way of thinking and living. The thing we must continue to do is search for the balance between the so called "new" and "old. "

You incorporate your own photos and film stills in the book: McDonald's neon, the web of electric power lines, littered railway tracks. How did you decide to include these?

In a sense this novel is so intimate in that a rebellious young woman murmurs to herself in a city where no one can really hear her, her words become a kind of monologue. And so I felt it was important to show another layer of reality which the text can’t capture. The visual images are so concrete that Fenfang’s monologue becomes a documentary of sorts.

Obviously the world's eyes have been on Beijing in the run-up to and during the Olympics. What do you think of all the media focus now?

Much of the media coverage has been upbeat and breezy with regard to Beijing, one big travel poster. It isn’t always the case—whenever anything controversial, according to Western perception, occurs in China, the media turns. So what matters in the long run is the staying power of art and literature, which should inform as well as influence the media. But that’s a longer discussion.

I understand you now divide your time between London, Paris, and Beijing. How has your view of Beijing changed, looking at it from the outside?

I could easily say that for me life is always elsewhere than where I am at the moment. But Beijing will always be Beijing. My impression of the city, which is so familiar to me, could never be from that of an outsider.

If friends were coming to visit you in Beijing, where would you take them, what would you have them see or experience?

I would be the worst tour guide, I haven’t any hidden secrets to share of the city. I think the best thing to do is not to take people around but leave them alone and let them make their own discoveries. I think those memories will stay with them much longer. And as an artist, I am constantly fascinated to learn what they end up finding.

Read More: Check out Doubleday's readers guide to aid in the discussion of the book.

Photo:  Courtesy Doubleday Publishers