A Novel of Sex, Violence and Tiananmen Square
Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune

Tuesday, June 5, 2001

HONG KONG Growing up amid the higher echelons of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1980s, Annie Wang experienced the cushy side of socialism. .The daughter of a senior academic, she was a member of the privileged class and her friends were children of the party elite. Telephones still had not reached much of rural China, but Wang recounts how she spent hours calling friends to discuss homework. On weekends, they watched movies and read books forbidden to most. .To evade rules prohibiting Chinese from entering Beijing's luxury hotels, Wang and her autograph-seeking teenage friends hid outside the entrance in a senior official's borrowed Mercedes, waiting for foreign musicians to greet fans. .Many of Wang's friends cashed in their connections for the wealth and power brought by joining investment banks like Morgan Stanley. .Wang, however, turned to writing and is now preparing to bite the hand that fed her. Having left China in 1993 to study at the University of California at Berkeley, Wang later worked as a contract interpreter for the U.S. State Department, a position that helped her become a U.S. citizen last year. .Wang is publishing "Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen" in New York this week with the Pantheon imprint of Random House. She calls it the first novel set around the bloody crushing of pro-democracy demonstrators near Tiananmen Square in 1989. To avoid upsetting the Chinese government, the official date of publication was delayed from Monday, the anniversary of the event, to Tuesday. .The level of government concern about the portrayal of the Tiananmen Square events was recently demonstrated by harshly worded attacks on the editors of the "Tiananmen Papers," a book purporting to include transcripts of internal government documents. In addition to the attacks, China's president, Jiang Zemin, forced all senior officials to watch a pro-government documentary. .Despite the fact that several Chinese-born academics with U.S. citizenship have been imprisoned on espionage charges, Wang said she was not concerned that the government would react against an English-language novel set amidst the demonstrations and the crackdown. "I may be naive," she said. "But I am optimistic that China can now tolerate people who enjoy freedom of creativity." Now preparing to move from the United States to Hong Kong, Wang plans to visit her family in Beijing within the next few months. .Out of concern for possible impact of the book on her father, she requested that his name and the government institution for which he works remain unpublished. "You can criticize the government, but you need to give them room," Wang said. "This is not a political book, it offers an emotional rather than a political history of Tiananmen." .Although inspiration for the idea came during the crackdown, it took Wang more than a decade to write the book. ."Lili," titled after the main character, follows the turbulent childhood and adolescence of a beautiful musician born into a family of Beijing intellectuals. As the enemy class during the Cultural Revolution, Lili and her parents are banished from Beijing to the countryside for re-education. Raped by a local party official, Lili runs back to Beijing where she joins street hooligans and slips into an underworld of casual sex and brutal violence. Already considered a humiliation to her family, Lili brings further shame by falling in love and sharing an apartment with Roy, an American journalist who speaks perfect Chinese. .They go on a series of reporting trips around China, allowing Lili to learn about her country and begin a voyage of self-discovery. Readers follow Lili through impoverished Chinese villages, artists' communes and the so-called foreign concession where diplomats and foreign businessmen live in wealthier surroundings. Roy makes several efforts at what Lili mockingly calls helping to "save China," including a botched attempt at adoption that ends with the death of the child and mother. Lili and Roy argue at length about the role foreigners should play in China. .Lili also catalogues many of the new social types emerging in modern Chinese society: the fashionable new class of white-collar young women; networks of professional beggars; fat-cat capitalists, as well as Beijing's first all-girl rock band. .Lili's personal development culminates as the People's Liberation Army begins shooting civilians around Tiananmen Square. .Both Wang and the heroine of her novel offer an alternative perspective on what inspired many of those who joined the ranks of demonstrators. "I went to Tiananmen Square for the rock and roll atmosphere, not democracy," Wang said. "I was 16 and full of energy, not politics." .Lili, too, felt drawn to the carnival: "I like to go simply because I enjoy being with others, seeing colorful banners and wild clothing." .While wandering the square, Lili chats with some female students on a hunger strike who speculate as to whether a rock star will visit them. "If he comes, the fast will really have been worth it," one girl tells the others. .Lili's story stops the night the tanks roll into Beijing, but Wang's personal journey took her from adolescence on Tiananmen Square to her days as a university student in the United States. By moving to Hong Kong after seven years in America, Wang plans to experience and write about the changes that are affecting China today. ."I can no longer write from memory because every time I go back to China I see a totally new and different China," she said. "The changes happen so fast and there are so many young people yearning to make change happen even faster." .In some ways, Wang's book may be seen as the first English-language book in a line of works now dubbed "pretty woman literature." Written by flatteringly photographed young female authors, these books are set in China's cities and detail the racy lifestyle of disaffected youths. .Among the most well known of the genre are "Shanghai Baby" and "Candy," the plots of which follow nonstop party lifestyles mixing drugs and sex, often with foreigners. .Despite the surface similarities with her main character, Wang dismisses any comparison to such works. ."I want to write about inner humanity, not sex, Chanel bags and foreign boyfriends," Wang said. "So many of these books only look at the cosmetic changes in China, reading them is like buying a counterfeit handbag."