TOFU-magazine : mian mian

A huge, crackling neon bolted over the window bathes Mian Mian first in scarlet, then in sour green. Skin flushed and sensuous one moment, anaemic and lifeless the next, she lounges on the bed in a cheap Shanghai hotel sucking on a cigarette. Soon, she will prowl the city’s bars and nightclubs for the doomed and the damned, to hack away at their lives with ferocious,black-and-white, staccato bursts.

Prostitutes, junkies, strippers and club kids. Gangsters, punks, groupies and pimps - all are not-so-fair game for this nocturnal chronicler of Communist China’s seedy underbelly. Typifying a new generation of writers who are shaking off the Party’s creative shackles and dragging Chinese fiction into unexplored territory, Mian Mian’s realm is one of wretched love affairs, hard drugs, promiscuous sex and suicide.

Her work is revolutionary for the People’s Republic. Her own tale is one of personal liberation, excess and redemption.“Writing is much more than my life,” the vivacious, 29-year-old reformed heroin addict smiles, her kind, curious eyes framed by a harsh, geometric bob; her famished frame clad head-to-toe in black. “Writing saved my life.”Published in Hong Kong in 1997, Mian Mian’s first, cathartic book of semi-autobiographical short stories “La, La, La” literally snatched her back from the living dead. Three fresh volumes — Acid Lover, Every Good Kid Deserves Candy and Nine Objects of Desire — were unleashed on an unsuspecting mainland China in May.

“Mian Mian is the only original voice of China in the 1990s,” says Maschi Mita, sinologist and translator of Chinese literature for Einaudi Publishing of Turin, which specialises in works of international cultural significance. “She doesn’t cry about her, and China’s, harrowing past. She analyses her life, and the lives of young people on society’s fringes, with a cold eye.”

Mian Mian’s story begins at the age of 17, when a Shanghai classmate slit her wrists. “Everyone in China knows someone who has committed suicide,”she dismisses with the flick of a chalky hand. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), China’s female suicide rate is the world’s highest — 21 per cent of the world's women live in China, yet 56 per cent of those who commit suicide worldwide are Chinese. Even so, the tragedy was a turning point. Explaining her first attempt at writing, she adds: “Life was so dark back then. I don’t know why, I just felt I had to get it down. I needed to talk.”

Confused and searching for answers, she fled 1,800 kilometres for glittering Shenzhen, the high-rise, “wild-east” boomtown bordering Hong Kong where economic reforms that kicked off in 1980 first took hold and late premier Deng Xiaoping called on the Chinese masses to throw off decades of state control by announcing:"To get rich is glorious."

Seduced by the bright lights and heady, anything-goes atmosphere, she embraced a debauched life of late nights, marijuana, booze and rock music. But harsh reality crashed the party when she lost her virginity. “Basically, he raped me,” she says. “I thought: “That’s life.” I was young. It was my first experience of guys. I knew nothing else.” First love also proved traumatic. After a few blissful months of much-needed stability, she was devastated to discover that her sweetheart, the singer in a band, was sleeping with her friend, a neighbourhood prostitute.

Self esteem in tatters, she bedded a procession of faceless men, as recounted by La, La, La’s feral narrator: "A guitarist I met at one gig. He was beautiful, totally irresponsible. We were with friends, drinking and smoking, talking about music, men and women, how to give a good blow job.
When the sun came up, he said: 'Why don't we go to my place.' He was the best I've ever had. Even better because he left town the next day. Never seen him since." That didn’t work, so she turned to heroin — every day for three years. Penniless and ravaged by her addiction, she finally hobbled back to Shanghai at the end of 1994. Her civil-engineer father and Russian-teaching mother, tipped off by Mian Mian’s friend, found heroin in her bag and signed her into a drug-rehabilitation clinic. A brief relapse when she bolted back to Shenzhen, and she finally kicked the habit. She was 24.

"We grow up fast now,” Mian Mian says, highlighting China’s enormous generation gap resulting from breakneck economic reform. With more disposable cash than their parents could ever dream of, the only little red books being waved by the youth of China these days are packed with the phone numbers of potential dates. “China was so poor. Now, in the cities, there’s money everywhere. Kids read foreign magazines, watch MTV, they are on the Net, they take ecstasy, ice, smack, and they sleep around."

It’s all far removed from her parents' day. Under Mao, sex outside marriage was condemned as a bourgeois transgression. Despite a rich history of erotic literature and art, romantic love and carnal lust were banned. Personal freedom was a useless diversion fromthe construction of a utopian socialist paradise.

Like Mian Mian, China, too, is paying a price as the nation unbuttons. At the end of September 1998, the Ministry of Health reported 11,170 accumulative HIV infections for a population of 1.3 billion. The WHO extrapolates to a more realistic 400,000. Of recorded infections, intravenous drug users account for 68 per cent. About 10 per cent are aged under 20. Totally eradicated between 1964 and 1978, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) numbered 400,000 in 1998. Billy Stewart, Beijing-based technical assistant with a European Commission-funded programme to provide STD and Aids prevention training, estimates the real figure today is probably nearer 4 million.

Crushed by her ordeal, Mian Mian hid from the world after a thorough medical. Mercifully, she was clean. “When I came out of hospital, I couldn’t even speak,” she recalls. “It was all over for me. I wanted to die.” Moping in her darkened room, she watched videos and wept to Janis Joplin. Whenever she felt strong enough, she poured her torment onto paper. Two years later, she had completed a short story, which she submitted to respected literary magazine Xiaoshou Jie. The editor told her what she needed to hear: she had talent, and a new lease of life.
“The most striking aspect of Mian Mian’s writing is that she places a high priority on personal perception,” explains Wang Hong-tu, critic and senior lecturer in Chinese literature at Shanghai’s Fudan University, adding that her non-conformist approach echoes the increasing tolerance in China’s cities of alternative lifestyles. “Writers of previous generations took a more detached, reasonable approach. Writers born in the 1970s are the first in China to stress the individual’s need to communicate.”

Mita, who has translated 15 Chinese works in the last 11 years, including Su Tong’s internationally acclaimed Raise the Red Lantern, is equally enthusiastic. “Her continual flow of words is at once dramatic and tender,” she enthuses. She is young and naive in one sentence, hardened and streetwise the next.

“I prefer simple, direct language,” explains Mian Mian, who professes to using her skin as well as her brain when typing at her computer - always at night. Holed up in a secluded villa outside Shanghai, where she can crank up the house and techno music that inspires her, she now whacks out a tale every four days. “I tell it like it is, from real experience. I want to tell people that freedom is great, but that it can also be dangerous.

“I don’t think of myself as a writer. I’m troubled and stupid like everyone else. I grew up with the streets. I have dead friends, friends in prison, friends who are prostitutes, on drugs, drunk, married to shitty men. I write because I need to write, to make sense of life. Honesty is everything to me.”

Being a woman does not help. Mian Mian reports that prudish censors are continually deflecting her incisive attacks on the jugular of China’s male-dominated society. In one of her stories, the narrator fantasises about making love to a stranger. “They changed that to: ‘Seeing him makes me feel sad’,” Mian Mian laughs incredulously. In another, she used the phrase: ‘I’m your zero.’ The Chinese characters reflect a feeling of emptiness. “The publisher said: We can’t have that. You’re a woman. People will think you’re talking about your “hole.” Similarly, the words “I feel dry” were slashed. “They’re crazy. I was talking about my head, not my body.”

To maintain integrity, each of Mian Mian’s four books has a different Chinese publisher. “They all want to pay me, to package and market me. But I don’t trust them. As it is, I can argue or walk away. Once I have their cash, they’ll be in control.” Angry now, she snorts and slams her Marlboro into the ashtray: “If they change what I want to say, I’ll just put everything on the Net.”
Stuck in traffic on the way to another heaving, strobe-lit nightclub, Mian Mian has calmed down.

Beyond the taxi’s rain-dappled window, a middle-aged man hovers furtively near a barbers shop. Neon reflects in the sooty puddles and a heavily-made-up ‘stylist’ beckons. Late-night salons across China are often fronts for small brothels.

As well as Mita’s interest, Mian Mian has recently been approached by a German publisher keen to translate ‘La, La, La.’ And she is also especially proud of Nine Objects of Desire. One of a series of books highlighting Chinese fiction writers, she is the only one featured outside of the mainstream.
To reach a wider audience, she plans a series of shorts dissecting the “fucked up” relationships between lonely expatriates and Chinese in Shanghai, the city once known as the ‘whore of the Orient’. “Mostly Western men and Chinese women,” she says, “but also gays, lesbians, three-in-a-bed, everything.”

She is also writing the screenplay for an independent movie, Shanghai Baby, in which she will attempt to act for the first time. “It’s about everyday Shanghai people. We’ll be playing ourselves,” she says. “Easy.” In collaboration with an artist friend, she has just decided to print a story on 20 rolls of toilet tissue to be sold for charity.

Heroin, she asserts, is a ghost of her past. And though it will surely return to haunt her, that i where it will stay. These days, she sticks to the occasional social joint - the effects of ecstasy remind her of the medicine in rehab. She still organises parties, drinks to excess, seduces men and goes out too much. “Research,” she cackles. But she also finds time to work on Candy, her first full-length novel covering 11 “cruel” years in the life of a young Chinese couple. Once again, sex and drugs play major roles, along with alcohol abuse and insanity. Once again it will be semi-autobiographical. But Mian Mian insists she has not yet stripped herself, or modern China, completely bare.

“My life is far more extreme than those I’m writing about now,” she says darkly. “I’m not quite ready to tell my complete story just yet.” She sinks into her black leather jacket. Her kind, curious eyes narrow and smile again. “But I’m getting there. I will.”