Beijing Doll

I went back to Guodong. He always listened to me when I whined about how sad and lost I felt.

Good for him. So why did you have to inflict it on the rest of us?

The hype tries to sell Beijing Doll as a novel so controversial that it got banned by the Chinese government - exactly what "banned" means in this context isn't mentioned. I picked it up hoping for some insight into what it means to be a teenager in China today, but in the end, all it accomplishes is to demonstrate that self-obsessed 15-year-olds who think quoting Kurt Cobain in their diary makes them deep are alike all over the world.

I know a lot of people hate dark, pessimistic texts like this one, where you write about yourself as if it were someone else. If you can't stand it show more any longer you can stop reading here, I won't make you continue.

Why, thank you for your permission. show less

This book was hyped back in the early 2000s during the breakout period of Chinese female writers in English translation (Wei Hui, Mian Mian) with translator Howard Goldblatt's cachet, a mistake that blots his record, as the arid narrative meanders without purpose.

Banned in China, this book is the "autobiographical novel" that tells the story of Chun Sue, a young woman coming of age right at the turn of the millennium. The book's cover purports that it is "uncensored, raw, and bloody," and that the narrator/protagonist seemingly holds nothing back. Maybe it's because I'm jaded, having come of age at roughly the same time as the author, but nothing in this book really shocked me all that much. Of course, China's society is far stricter than my own, so this book may well be more of a shocker there, but nothing that Chun Sue describes in this book is really all that different from the lives of so many American teenagers. If anything, I'd say she got off pretty light, as adolescences go.

I have a show more number of problems with this book, some of them purely technical. For one thing, the "autobiographical novel" designation doesn't make any sense to me. If it's autobiographical, wouldn't that make it a memoir? Also, the lack of cohesive story line and ultimate lack of resolution got tiresome. None of the "characters" are part of the story long enough for readers to come to care about them, and the story, such as it is, doesn't seem to arrive at any sort of conclusion. The book reads more like a teenager's diary than a real narrative, which I would be far more accepting of if there seemed to be an element of depth or even intrigue. No such luck.

On the other hand, this book might actually be good material for mothers looking to better understand their teenage daughters' angst and hormonal passion. Such topics are so much more palatable when they concern a third party rather than one's own daughter, so a reader might be able to examine Chun Sue's erratic behavior with somewhat more objective detachment. This isn't to say that Chun Sue's behavior really makes sense -- rather, her behavior seems rather typical of many girls her age, and might provide a window (albeit a narrow and somewhat hazy one) into the lives of adolescent Millennials (or whatever kids are called these days).

Overall, this book is highly forgettable, even when one is in the middle of it. Don't bother reading through to the end -- I assure you there is no reward or hidden gem in its conclusion, as I had hoped there might be. show less

Suorasanainen kuvaus nuoren tytön elämästä ja siitä, miten vaikeaa on sopeutua muiden joukkoon. Elämä ei ole helpoimmasta päästä ja arkipäiväiset ongelmat ja kamppailu on kuvattu kiinnostavasti.