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Banned in China.
It wasn't her goal, but it certainly hasn't hurt Mian Mian's
career as a writer. Chinese authorities banned Mian Mian's
first novel, Candy, when it was published in 2000,
denouncing her as "a poster child for spiritual pollution."
But censorship did not dampen sales. Candy quickly
became an underground best-seller. Pirated editions still
circulate widely in China, and now, an English-language
version, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, is available
from Back Bay Books.
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Candy is a dark confessional novel, the story of a teenage
girl who drops out of her elite prep school in Shanghai and
makes her way to Shenzen, a frontier boomtown filled with fortune
seekers, renegades, slackers and lost souls. There she takes
up with a long-haired Chinese rock guitarist, struggles to find
her own identity and becomes addicted to "chasing the dragon"
-- inhaling heroin -- before her father finally rescues her.
The novel confirmed Mian Mian's reputation as China's literary
"bad girl." "In China, we never had a book like this," Mian Mian
told FRONTLINE/World reporter and KQED Pacific
Time host Nguyen Qui Duc. "About sex, drugs, and rock and
roll. Like the '60s in America ... Chinese, they are not so used
to a writer being so open. To talk about, in full detail, a troubled
girl. It's too much for them."
Too much for government censors, but not for her avid readers.
 On
the Edge
In this first excerpt from Candy, Mian Mian's teenage
narrator, Hong, describes the academic pressures and sexual
tensions that cause her high school friend, Lingzi, to have
a nervous breakdown and ultimately commit suicide. This harrowing
experience prompts Hong to quit school and run away to a lawless
border town. "I quit trusting anything that anyone told me,"
Hong says. "Aside from the food I put in my mouth, there was
nothing I believed in. I had lost faith in everything." Depression
and female suicide are among the normally taboo topics Mian
Mian dares to write about in her novel.
Rock and Roll Romance
Sometimes Candy is dark and disturbing. Sometimes it
reads like the latest "chick lit." Trying to find her way in
a chaotic border town, Mian Mian's alter ego, 19-year-old Hong,
meets a Chinese rock guitarist, Saining. They share a passion
for Jim Morrison and the Doors and for China's rock legend,
Cui Jian. After they make love for the first time, Hong says,
"I saw into my own future, saw that I would become a woman with
many stories to tell. But every story would have its price."
 Escape
to the Open City
Like many in her post-Mao generation, Mian Mian's central character, Hong, is searching for something to believe in. She tries to find it in Shenzhen, the gritty, free-for-all "open city" in the South. There she experiences moments of exhilarating freedom and self-discovery, but she succumbs to heroin. Fortunately, her loyal father arrives to save her, as happened in Mian Mian's own life. "My father is my hero," she says in an afterword to Candy.
"So many young people are getting lost," Mian Mian told the
International Herald Tribune. "I want to show them how
freedom is exciting but also dangerous."
back to top
Excerpts from CANDY by Mian Mian.
Copyright © 2003 by Shen Wang; Translation Copyright ©
2003 by Andrea Lingenfelter. By permission of Little, Brown
and Company Inc. All rights reserved. To purchase copies of
this book, please call 1.800.759.0190.
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