Chen Qiufan

An interesting story that gets bogged down a bit and lost its grip on me before it's not-really-climax. A critique of the usual suspects (particularly Americans, but capitalists more generally, the Japanese) but also Chinese that exploit other Chinese, ex-pats, and buried amongst all that perhaps an overall critique of "China today", environmental destruction, and maybe just the modern world. Some of that seems clearly aimed at Chinese targets (the clan leader who returned to China after suffering racism/belittlement only to turn around and practice the same x100 on internal migrants, with the full participation of his co-regionalists, etc.)

Some of it smacks of a certain kind of common (and therefore, perhaps misread on my part?) pro-Chinese/anti-US Japan Western Filipino etc. bias. Definitely a case of SF as social commentary, it's just a little hard for me to interpret with confidence what that commentary consists of.

The story itself left me wanting a bit more... so an AI popped into existence... so maybe the "A" part of that is actually not appropriate. An intelligence popped into existence as a side effect of an experimental virus and heavy metal poisoning... cool, cool. It is not-quite-evil-not-quite-good... it is like a human in that respect... cool, cool. But it is kind of evil... it sure seems like. Yeah, probably. So kill it... okay, cool, I guess. As my brother once called it, "The Heinlein approach."

But, WTF. Was it? Is it? What? And then what? Tell me more. I want to know more about that.

EDIT (a few hours after initial post): I suppose one way of interpreting some of the uncertainty and inconclusiveness is that the various things at stake (traditional vs modernized/ing society; globalized, capitalist exchange vs. older forms of exchange; development's winners vs. development's losers; short term suffering vs longer-term gain; not just technology, but a technologized world vs. a "softer"/slower/more human world; etc. etc. etc.) are still uncertain. Was Mimi 1 "evil"? Mimi 0 ultimately thought so, but Mimi 1 certainly claimed that from a vaster perspective she had great things to offer. So, too, do Scott and TerraGreen, the "evil" Americans. And, to save the world, Mimi 0 --the Chinese, the 'waste person'-- did have to all but die.

I dunno. Maybe I'm searching too hard for a deeper meaning. But worth noting that maybe some of the dissipation, or lack, of a climax is because the book is getting at the point that things are provisional, murky, even undecidable.

Maybe?… (more)

I think a lot of my experience with this work of flash fuction will be a bit skewed because I have visited China (albeit I have never been to Shenzhen), so I do believe I got to enjoy this story a bit more.

The plot centers around an engineer whose high tech prototype product security job is in danger because the Chinese government has started to dismantle a series of border fences separating Shenzhen and Hong Kong and the companies located somewhat illegally in those lands being paid un foreign currency are about to be eaten alive by the mainlanders. After convincing a coworker to help him distract his boss to send a protoype to a bootleger (a real dog eats dog society), it looks like he is caught and has to flee into a Shenzhen slum where he becomes entranced by a beautiful prostitute named Winter Lotus who has a high tech holographic tramp stamp on her belly and he starts to become curious about her...

I think the highlights of the story is the real life history lesson of rural landowners buildings shambled buildings in prime real estate to get higher severence payme ts when the government inevitably expropriates the land to feed an unrelentingly hungry urban sprawl and how locals don't protest or criticize: they try to game rhe system to make a profit and cash it.

The story was pretty interesting and I would have wanted to know more about the technology the MC uses to spy on Winter Lotus but the book sadly either doesn't develop it much or it was sadly lost in translation.

I do think it was entertaining, informative and a different kind of story rhan what I am used to. Might give the author the benefit of the doubt and read some other of his translated work.… (more)