Dear Slate, yes there are chocolate bars in China
How AIDS in China is spreading
Shanghaiist Scrabble: We have a winner!
New sex change rules for China
Two now executed over melamine milk scandal
People who looked at this cover and thought that it would be an insightful and sexy look into being a foreigner touring through a China just newly opened to the world will ultimately be disappointed.
Of course, we weren't expecting startling perceptivity from someone who had previously authored "Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess," and we realize that "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven" is by no means striving to be high literature, but even as one shallow girl's memoir it fails to please.
A China backpacking trip in 1986 should be a fascinating topic, but Susan Jane Gilman drowns out anything remotely interesting about the journey with brainless dialogue. The memoir's two heroines, Claire and Susie, are constantly described as "young and brilliant" (and they won't let you forget: Ivy league), but their conversations seem far from it.
Enjoy the following quotes? "Christ, is he retarded?"; "I swear. The plumbing alone in this country is a human rights violation" and "Okay, not to be an asshole or anything, but this house is smaller than my parents' Jacuzzi". We didn't either.
Unfortunately, this kind of drivel goes on for page after page, interspersed with "sweeties", nicknames and fits of giggling. As might be deduced from these snatches of dialogue, the two (young and brilliant!) Americans view China with no little amount of xenophobia. Even more tiring than their comments is the way the writer constantly points out how utterly limited the possibilities for Chinese are. ("Most likely she will have one child, followed by a series of forced abortions.")
Anyone who has actually been to China won't find the experiences of Claire and Susie very exotic. Cockroaches in Chungking Mansions? Who would have thought? The toilet was a hole in the ground? Unbelievable!
It is only after the first two-thirds of this book that a darker and somewhat more interesting story surfaces. Mental illness enters the scene and China is no longer the theme, just the setting - making the story much more tolerable. The language barriers, the bureaucracy, being a stranger in a strange land transforms from annoying to sinister.
"Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven" won't tell anyone who's lived in China anything they didn't already know about the country. But once the memoir shifts its focus, it becomes at least worth a flip through.
Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven, by Susan Jane Gilman, Grand Central Publishing, will be published on March 24
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Ada, thanks for the review. Now I don't need to read it...
Although, one can't always be turned off by bad book titles. I really thought the title "Foreign Babes in Beijing" was so atrocious that I didn't want to read it until my managing editor told me it was actually a decent read.
...well, I think "Foreign babes in Beijing" has a nice ring ;)
This genre of book does occasionally rise up and above into something more rewarding. I just read 'The Beach'across a few Sunday's in Boonna. It's a typical find yourself/go nuts tale of traveling into an exotic land where the locals barely register as independent intelligent voices, but it has a clear philosophical goal or area to explore.
China memoirs seem to lack that and just list up a bunch of 'isn't it all amazing/crazy stories'.
Hmmn, I read another one lately that was about a girl in Japan who ended up working in bars as a hostess. It was interspersed with stories about not dealing with her brother back home who was mentally ill. It's a classic in the genre. Ah I can't remember the title right now.
I'd argue that there's lots of bad .. . and lots of good China memoirs. Just because there's a lot of them.
Off the top of my head, the best ones by foreigners I think are Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, Red China Blues by Jan Wong and of course Peter Hessler's River Town.
How does "The Beach" - a work of abject fiction - fit into the discussion here?
My favorite hands down is "Red Dust" by Ma Jian if that counts.
Lol. "Foreign Babes in Beijing" is certainly a disastrous title. Any shred of interest I would ever have in reading such a book vanished once I saw that one.
@T
Iron and Silk is horrific and the movie, that he stars in himself, is worse. Isn't River Town the novel he wrote without going there? As in imaginative fiction? Does it read like a memoir? I haven't read it.
I saw a lot of parallels to 'westerner travels to exotic land' memoirs, when I read The Beach.
On another note, I was surprised to see how much things had been moved around for the movie version of The Beach.
Wow. Both praise for pap, trite airport novel like the Beach AND condemnation for a well written memoir that is a good look at China in the 80s. I have to question your reading tastes. I'm just sorry there was no dramatic shoot-out with Chinese pot farmers in Iron and Silk. Sheesh.
River Town is Hessler's personal account (i.e. NOT A NOVEL) of his two years in Sichuan as a Peace Corp volunteer.
The whole front cover: title, image, sunglasses, pose, etc., is offensive. That's how I judge that book. And Hahaha, The Beach. Drugs.
Yes my Mum always used to tell me to judge a book by its cover. Or something like that anyway.