'SHANGHAI IS decadent,' says the author of Panda Sex, without a hint of disapproval. 'Once again, it's one of the most important cities in the world.' Mian Mian should know. When she was born in the city in 1970, 'there was just one market in our neighbourhood'. Now, Shanghai is the mainland's most glamorous destination. It's that air of possibility and glitz that Mian Mian captures in her new book (known simply as Panda in Chinese). The story tracks a couple 'having an open relationship', she says. 'They love each other and have been together for 10 years. But they don't have sex any more.' Instead the couple agree to separate their sexual lives from their life together, a relationship model Mian Mian calls 'futuristic'. The book tracks them as they move between real-life Shanghai destinations interacting with characters 'based on my experiences with friends but are fictional'. It isn't the first time the author, whose real name is Sheng Wan, has pushed the boundaries of Chinese culture. A short story she wrote about teenage suicide, Like a Prayer, was dropped by a Chinese publishing house in the late 1980s because it was deemed too controversial. She dropped out of high school and moved to Shenzhen. Distraught and without a degree, she hoped to make money in the city. Instead, she got caught up in the nightlife and ended up addicted to heroin. Her first book, a collection of short stories called La La La was published in Hong Kong in 1997. It wove together four tales about love, music, drugs and despair. 'La La La is about that kind of life,' she says, 'the drugs, the nightlife, the city feeling.' After she moved back to Shanghai in 1995 and went through a detox programme, she found a mainland publisher for La La La, but the book never made it out of the factory. 'The government was not ready to accept this kind of book,' she says. 'I'm a troubled girl.' Her second book, Candy, was published on the mainland in 2000, but after selling 60,000 copies in four months, it was banned as well. Not only did Candy deal with the same provocative themes but, she says, 'It got too much media attention. The government doesn't care about my book, but they were concerned because I was getting so much publicity.' The state censors passed Panda Sex, which was published last December, largely 'because there are no drugs and no sex,' she says. But even though Panda Sex is tamer than Candy, which has several erotic scenes, publishers still consider her work dangerous, largely because her two earlier books remain banned: the publication of Panda Sex was delayed for more than a year and three publishers backed out after signing contracts. 'I was a little surprised when it was finally published,' she says. The government's acceptance of the novel is due partly to its unusual format. The book is divided into short screenplay dialogues interspersed with photographs of the city and of Mian Mian and her friends. The first scene - which Mian Mian says is one of her two favourite parts of the book - happens on 'Sunday afternoon, with sunlight, at 20 Waitan Guangdong Road's seventh-floor M on the Bund'. With the succinctness of a screenwriter and the wry observations of a novelist, she lays out the setting: 'Some people are on the balcony smoking and holding drinks and looking at the much-loved and much-hated Bund and the legendarily futuristic Pudong District.' Like most of the locations in Panda Sex, the restaurant M on the Bund, the Pudong district and the Bund itself and the Huangpu River waterfront - once the Wall Street of the former British enclave - are real, and Panda Sex is also part guidebook. At the end of the narrative, Mian Mian provides addresses and phone numbers, and sometimes-brief descriptive introductions, for each of the places and for some of the people mentioned in the book. 'For tourists with three or four days in Shanghai,' Mian Mian says, 'the places I wrote about can make a perfect itinerary.' For most people, however, the book is more a way to indulge in the world that Mian Mian inhabits and to imbibe some of Shanghai's energy. 'We still don't understand love well enough,' D.J. Bobby, a character in one scene says. 'Maybe it's because I'm not a real man. Real men are all very selfish.' As the mainland's most cosmopolitan city - with the first Formula One circuit in the country, China's tallest building, Jin Mao, and a cultural milieu that has included shows by Elton John and the New York Lincoln Centre's Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra - Shanghai also provides a sense of where China's younger generations are heading. Like much of the developed world, that direction seems to be towards a materialistic and self-centered culture. Eating a meal at M on the Bund in the book's opening scene, one character says: 'The less money I have, the more I like to spend it', and advises his wife: 'It's best if we don't make any rules, there should be no rules at all, we should be more free.' Freedom is a word Mian Mian uses to describe Shanghai. 'You can make a lot of money,' she says, noting that for young Shanghainese 'easy love and easy leaving' is also common. But like Panda Sex, she says she's matured from when she wrote Candy and La La La. 'When I was young I slept around. But not now. Panda Sex is more about the quality of love.' One question will be how well that less-raucous style plays with audiences. The banner, 'Banned in Beijing', helped her earlier books to sell abroad. They've been translated into 16 languages and Candy became a best-seller in France. In China, the attention Candy garnered by being banned also made it a favourite in unofficial street markets. Mian Mian gets letters from fans who, she says, 'for the first time could look for something real'. On the mainland, where drug use and promiscuity are on the rise but where the media continues to demonise and avoid the issues, that dose of reality has been Mian Mian's trademark. 'I don't lie,' she says. 'I have to tell the truth.' Shanghai media, Mian Mian says, has been banned from reporting on Panda Sex, but she says that since it became available in bookstores throughout China in December it has sold more than 10,000 copies a month. Asked if she thinks its publication may be evidence of a loosening of the country's cultural reins, Mian Mian demurs. 'I don't think China is any more open than it was in the past.' Instead, she suggests the book was allowed to be published because it's less openly provocative than Candy and because it 'has no political problems'. She doesn't think she'll ever be allowed to publish Candy on the mainland. Instead, she's working on making a movie based on Panda Sex. 'The movie,' she says, 'will be strange and surreal.' If it's like the book it will dazzle viewers with possibilities and youthful exuberance and provide a melancholy backdrop about what is lost in the big city. 'Shanghai is like a wave. We're always getting pushed up and down and back and forth.' It's a ride that more and more Chinese are taking. Panda Sex is published in Chinese by Qunyan Publishing House (China) and Time International Publishing (Hong Kong)
