Anne Dowie

Annie Wang started writing about Chinese society as a 14-year-old student journalist in Beijing, where she was born into an elite family. She has since written ten books. In 2001, she wrote her first book in English, Lili, a novel considered a breakthrough look at the generation that came of age during the period of the Tiananmen uprising. Her second English-language book is a collection of short stories centered around four young Chinese women who struggle to find love and happiness in the new China. It's Sex and the City - Chinese style. Entitled The People's Republic of Desire (Harper Paperbacks, 2006), after her popular column in the South China Morning Post, the fictional stories depict a China anxious to discard the economic deprivations of the past. In this ironically revised version of Mao's class struggle, those who have wealth and status flaunt it before the many who don't. Conservative Confucian values are thrown out in pursuit of greater riches. Men buy fame and mistresses. Successful women buy lovers, turning the tables on centuries of patriarchal tradition. Wang, who returned to China in 2001 after completing a bachelor's degree in communications at Berkeley, now runs a fashion magazine in Shanghai.

You are part of this highly regarded mobile new generation born after the Cultural Revolution and who lived under Deng Xiaoping's thawing policies. In your book, you talk about how China is a country obsessed with youth and the future. The suffering of the past is forgotten.

I am totally a Deng Xiaoping kid. When Mao died, I was very little. I heard stories from my parents about how horrible the Cultural Revolution was, but we grew up in the era of Karl Marx and Coca-Cola combined. It was very mixed messages all the time. One day the American people are nice, another day they have polluted us spiritually. People talked constantly about nationalism - how we've been wronged by foreign forces and in the last 150 years there has been shame on the Chinese. But on the other hand, Western music and literature were introduced - some good stuff - things like jazz, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger when I grew up. I remember my first taste of Coca-Cola. It's a conflict between the East and the West. Love and hate.

Today, there is not much literature or art that talks about the Mao period. You want to be associated with the rich, not with the poor and the miserable. A lot of the history is so heavy with cultural baggage. The young don't want to hear about it - how their parents suffered or how their grandparents have suffered. They just want to enjoy the good times.

In your first novel, Lili, you wrote about disaffected Chinese youth breaking down under Communist rules and the strict social structure. Their ultimate rebellion was Tiananmen. Is that passion for democracy still there?

No, the passion for politics is not there. I think people were very idealistic in the 1980s. Authors and poets and thinkers were respected and admired because at that time people started to do more soul searching. They asked what went wrong during the Cultural Revolution: How could people be so horrible to each other? But then because of 1989 the soul searching stopped and people started to find another way to save China. So they thought the economic way could solve China's problems. Or at least the government thinks that way. They feed people information that way.

Your stories paint a picture of a society singularly driven by the desire for money and power. How true is this portrait?

It's 200 percent true. There's a rush into materialism. It's just beyond the imagination of many capitalists how a Communist country can be so capitalistic. I think it's in the veins of the Chinese to make money, to be practical.

People have been poor for so long. I was considered very privileged. My family had a telephone and most people didn't. But still I have it in my memory that people had to wait in line for four hours to get fish. Four hours! I was in line and when I got closer, the fish were all gone. These people want to catch up with the rest of the world. The government encourages this economic growth and they welcome Louis Vuitton. So why not? It's not just money this applies to, but also sex. There was capital punishment for having sex before marriage during the Cultural Revolution. And now, you can't be a political dissident, but you can become a sexual dissident.

Women have broken out of passive, dutiful, patriarchal expectations and are now having multiple lovers, watching porn, getting divorced. Is there a new sexual revolution going on?

Absolutely. It's not just with women but also men, especially older men who have been very good cadres for 30 years. These two groups, I'm telling you, are having fun. But it is a backward system for educated women, for intellectual women, women in their 30s and early 40s. I see a lot of them single. They are very intelligent, capable, beautiful, but they can't find husbands. Beibei, the character in my novel, is an example. She is highly successful and takes another route. [The character takes many young male lovers.] In Chinese society, men are not ready yet for a strong woman. And there are so many women out there, so demure, like little girls, so girly. But at the same time they are not shy. They are willing to have sex with Westerners in exchange for just a Western meal, or because they want to practice English. If you are married, they don't care. In marriages of the people I know, infidelity is almost 100 percent. Either it is the man or the woman.

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