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Marrying Buddha

by Wei Hui

Constable and Robinson $105

Germaine Greer wrote  in The Female Eunuch  about 35 years ago: 'If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?'

Her feminist call was for women to live their own lives on their own terms, but critics zeroed in on her argument that women could get liberated through sexual intercourse. Men didn't  like being thought of merely as sexual objects.

Perhaps that's what the Chinese authorities dislike about Zhou Weihui and her message to China's urban, educated women, albeit in a Sex and the City kind of way, that they can take control of their own lives.

Unfortunately,  Wei Hui  - she uses her first name as nom de plume - doesn't know what she wants, which itself may be an acute observation on modern China, or just an indication she hasn't thought much beyond becoming rich and famous.

Shanghai Baby was her big break, carefully packaged for sale to the west and fuelled by China's reaction to its publication in 1999. Mention of her name in the official media was banned in March 2000. The Economist reported that, within months, more than half a million pirated copies had sold. The rights to Shanghai Baby went to 16 countries and it was translated into 11 languages. The English edition came out in 2001.

Marrying Buddha has received quicker treatment. Published in China in August last year and apparently already banned, the English rights for  Britain and the Commonwealth went to London publishing house Constable and Robinson, with translation by Larissa Heinrich. Editions in other languages are on the way. But this translation seems rushed, with enough typographical errors to suggest cut corners.

Wei Hui picks up where the semi-autobiographical Shanghai Baby left off, and some of its characters, including the transsexual Xi'er, are taken forward as the protagonist, erotic novelist Coco, deals with the book's success and life in post-September 11 New York.

She has a new lover, blue-eyed Japanese-Italian Muju, archetype of this century's beautiful Eurasian male, with whom she fights to establish her identity. But she's also drawn to a more patriarchal figure in the form of the  fortysomething Nick, in black Armani, who's bent on conquest.

Wei Hui isn't an original writer, borrowing what other Chinese writers have already done. Dai  Sijie explored Freud and Taoism  in Mr Mou's Travelling Couch,  just published in English, and Shanghai's sex and drugs milieu has been heavily mined by other 'pretty women writers'. But  she does strike a chord.  There's an online forum on chinadaily.com.cn that debates  her strengths - 'understanding the minds of young Chinese people' and 'disillusion ... with the old ways of China' - and weaknesses - mainly that it's not 'Chinese literature'. China's young writers know where the money is, and it doesn't lie in that direction.

In Marrying Buddha, Coco  has given up drugs and alcohol, but still likes her sex, and the  scene in which Muju, who  practises the Taoist discipline of non-ejaculatory orgasm, gives her a jade egg is truly impressive erotic writing. The rest is rather banal.

Quite what has upset the censors is unclear. The book  is extremely critical of the shallowness of so-called western decadence and has Coco yearning for something more.

Wei Hui still throws around brand names like so much confetti, but pop culture has  a limited use-by date and  there's a problem when Chanel sunglasses need to carry the adjective 'trendy'.

In Marrying Buddha,  Wei  Hui tries to reconcile her inner conflict with a visit to the Chinese Buddhist sanctuary of Putou off the coast of Zhejiang, where she takes refuge in the Temple of Righteous Rain.

The lessons she learns there are not greatly edifying and could have come straight from an old episode of Kung Fu - 'Grasshopper, true style is knowing how to use labels with discretion.'



Marrying Buddha