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TIME
MAY 27, 2002/VOL. 159 NO. 20
Arts
Ginger Tale
Yet another Chinese heroine faces political adversity - will they ever stop?

Ever since Jung Chang's Wild Swans became a global publishing sensation, booksellers have decided that the Beautiful Chinese Literary Heroine is a golden goose. I don't know if there's an official literary term for this genre yet, but let's call it Chinese Chick Lit. If you look at books like Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves and Anhua Gao's To the Edge of the Sky, you'll find a basic formula: a feisty, exotically gorgeous woman suffers hell. Hell comes in the form of an oppressive regime (usually the Cultural Revolution) or through abuse inflicted by male power figures (heartless fathers or cruel husbands).

Anchee Min, author of the critically acclaimed historical novel Becoming Madame Mao, blatantly inserts all these elements in her latest offering, Wild Ginger (Houghton Mifflin; 217 pages). Min suffered a tumultuous childhood in China, finally escaping to the U.S., where she wrote a best-selling memoir. Novels like Wild Ginger are celebrated for their gripping historical accounts, but one suspects their success in the West is due in larger part to the authors' own sensational life stories. The book-jacket bios themselves play at the American immigrant fantasy: an attractive woman warrior babe escapes tyrannical regime, washes up in the New World and ends up making lots of little Uncle Sams.

Wild Ginger, Min's protagonist, has been marked out as a potential subversive since birth. She has exotic yellow-green eyes, a reflection of her mixed parentage (European father, Chinese mother). She starts off as a spunky little rebel, bravely rescuing the narrator, Maple, from the beatings of the schoolyard bully, Red Pepper. However, her need for acceptance makes her susceptible to brainwashing, and Wild Ginger becomes a Maoist hero (for foiling a burglary at a factory) and later develops into a communist demagogue. Her loyalty to the Red Machine requires her to repress her sexual yearnings for the resident Red Guard hunk, Evergreen. Unable to squelch her love, she dies - of a broken heart as much as anything else.

I suppose I was asked to review this book because I am a Chinese novelist. But the Chinese women in Wild Ginger and all the other books in the Chinese Chick genre strike me as completely removed from the experience of the contemporary Asian woman. In the novel, Wild Ginger is regularly beaten with belt buckles and has to wrestle with big issues like the struggle for political liberty and the freedom to love. Quite honestly, the major issues I've had to struggle with the past month were a) how to lose weight, b) how to remember where I've parked my car in the labyrinthine car park and c) what shade of highlights I should get for my hair. To tell you the truth - and this may disappoint Western readers who love the mythical figure of the Chinese Chick - most Asian women I know are more like Bridget Jones than Madame Mao.

Prepublication reviews have lavished praised on Wild Ginger for being "true-to-life." Too often, however, this true-to-life Asian woman found the characters speaking not in realistic dialogue but in political diatribe. Take Wild Ginger's argument with her mother, in which she lambastes her father: "He was a spy. Spying was his job. He was sent by the Western imperialists. Helping China thrive was his disguise. It was false. Helping the Western imperialists to exploit China was the truth."

Wild Ginger is in elementary school when she delivers this speech. One marvels over a schoolgirl's concern about Western imperialism, but the novel has scene after scene where Chinese teenagers talk like characters reading from scripts written by the Committee for Right Speeches.

The publishers have promoted Wild Ginger as a great literary novel. One prerequisite of such a novel should be originality. Unfortunately, if you're familiar with the basic elements of Chinese Chick Lit, you already know these characters and have seen these plot twists before. On the rare occasion where Min tries to be innovative - such as a sex scene where the characters make love while reciting Maoist quotations - it just comes off seeming weird. If you like cliched Chinese heroines and a hackneyed love story, all set against the now-too-familiar backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, this is a book for you. For me, I think I'll be reading Helen Fielding while getting my hair dyed at Le Salon Bis.

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