From Asiaweek
Issue 10th August 2001

Material Girls
A Beijing novelist's steamy tale of gold-digging Chinese women in
Singapore raises hackles in both countries
By ANNE MEIJDAM

Book tours are a useful promotional device, but Chinese author Zhu
Ziping passed on a recent invitation to sign copies of her new novel,
Wuya, in Singapore. She's too worried that angry women will turn up to
give her a rough time. "Maybe I could wear a big hat, so people won't
recognize me," Zhu says.

Her offense: portraying Chinese women, in their search for mates, as
money-obsessed and ready to prostitute themselves for a more
comfortable life. Writing under the pen name, Jiu Dan, she describes
the experiences of mainlanders like herself, who went to Singapore to
study English. All her characters have just one goal in mind - snaring
a rich man. Some moonlight as club hostesses to meet guys. One
ex-journalist becomes the mistress of a wealthy ex-politician.
Although fictional, her book mirrors real life closely enough to hit a
raw nerve.

Many mainland women, humiliated by the unflattering portrait in Wuya
(Chinese for "Crow"), have written letters, phoned the publishers and
posted critiques on the Internet, one attacking Zhu for having "no
shame." In Singapore, where Wuya was launched last month, publisher
Lingzi Media fielded angry calls from Chinese professionals. "It's
very unfair to mainland women who come to Singapore. People here and
back home will look at them suspiciously," says Rao Qiaohong, a
Chinese married to a local man. In China, Wuhan-based Yangtse
Literature Publishers has faced similar outrage. "It's kind of dirty,"
huffs Luo Liyan, a Beijing shop owner. "Maybe there are girls like
that, but they must be the minority. Jiu Dan writes like every Chinese
woman is an unscrupulous gold-digger." The novel has also fuelled
fierce online debates (see http://woman.zaobao.com/wuya 2001.html).

The author shrugs off the criticisms. "Being a tai-tai (rich man's
wife) is the ambition of many mainland girls," Zhu says. "It is not
romantic. Let's not make it prettier than it is. China is still poor,
and young women want better lives." Though steamy, her novel is no
more graphic than those of "bad-girl" writers like Shanghai-based Mian
Mian. Where their stories of sex and drugs in the urban underbelly
share a hip grittiness, Wuya's barbs lie in the ordinariness of its
characters. Motivation is stripped to its tawdry basics: We are living
in a material world, and we are material girls. "Hooligan" novelist
Wang Shuo, one of China's hottest writers from the 1980s, admires the
approach. Wuya is a "beautiful" work, he says. "Without any fear of
losing face, Jiu Dan bares her soul. It is without any of the literary
pretensions that other Chinese writers suffer from."

Zhu, 33, insists the book isn't autobiographical, although she also
admits to being less concerned with mastering English than hooking up
with a rich man while she lived in Singapore during the mid-1990s. She
didn't have much trouble achieving that goal. Her boyfriend's family
had five cars, she recalls, including a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW. As in
the novel, her affair ended unhappily. But the characters are
composites of various people she has met, Zhu says. Even so, the book
has many of her friends in Singapore squirming. Recently, she even got
an angry phone call from her former lover, who felt he recognized
himself in the book. "He thought he lost face," she says.

The author now lives alone in Beijing, where she works as a columnist
for a TV magazine. Zhu's ambition, however, is to quit journalism to
become "the greatest female novelist in China." She has published two
other fictional works; neither has been as successful as Wuya. The
title was inspired by the sight of a flock of crows at a Singapore
beach: The birds with a bad rep reminded her of people suffering the
same handicap.

Controversy hasn't hurt Wuya's sales. After an initial run of just
2,000 copies, Singapore's Lingzi Media is now printing a fifth
edition. It's the first time a book by a mainland author has done so
well in the Lion City, says Pat Ong, a manager of the Popular Book
chain. In China, sales have reached 60,000 copies. That's not enough
to give Zhu the financial cushion she craves to become a fulltime
writer. Her hopes rest with English, French and German translations of
the book. Until the checks roll in, Zhu must squeeze in her next novel
between her editing work. The tentative title: Xique, or Magpie.
Unlike the unlucky crow, the magpie is considered a harbinger of
happiness - and perhaps Zhu's ticket to a writing career.

- With reporting by Vivien Ng/singapore
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