- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Penguin (28 Feb 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0141033975
- ISBN-13: 978-0141033976
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 610,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
An immediate sensation upon publication in China, I Love Dollars makes high comedy out of modern everyday life in China. In the title story, a young man, acutely aware of his filial duty, sets out to secure a prostitute for his father, only to haggle his old man out of a good time. This and other stories amplify China’s identity crisis in post-Mao settings ranging from an old Yangtze River vessel to failing factories, cheap diners, and a for-profit hospital run according to dated socialist norms. Through a cast of brilliantly drawn characters, Zhu Wen’s stories create a vivid portrait of contemporary China — its wealth and poverty, humour and chaos.
About the Author
Zhu Wen became a full-time writer in 1994 after working for five years in a thermal power plant. His work has been published in mainland China's most prestigious literary magazines, and he has produced several poetry and short story collections and one novel. He has also directed four films, including Seafood, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, and South of the Clouds, which won the NETPAC Prize at the 2004 Berlin Festival. He lives in Beijing.
Julia Lovell is a translator and critic of modern Chinese literature and a research fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
FATHER'S VISITS ALWAYS took me by surprise. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
FATHER'S VISITS ALWAYS took me by surprise. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profound transformation,
By
This review is from: I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China (Paperback)
This book can only be fully appreciated by Chinese readers. It is a realistic portrait of the transformation of the whole Chinese society generated by the policies of Deng Xiaoping. As Julia Lovell writes astutely in her excellent introduction, `Deng was convinced that Communist China's stability depended on the spread of material prosperity. To the ever-pragmatic Deng, it was irrelevant whether the means were capitalist or socialist, provided that the end of preserving party rule was achieved.'The impact on Chinese society was nothing less than tremendous on all levels: family life, generation conflicts, sex, art (literature), human relations or working conditions. The generation clash is preponderant in `I Love Dollars': the current generation is `greedy for everything, everywhere, smashing, grabbing, swearing.' Or, in `Pounds, Ounces, Meat': `You, youth of today! You can't cook; you can't convert pounds into metric! You treat your family like dirt. You're all useless.' In `A Hospital Night', a young man is pestered nearly into a nervous breakdown by older people. Sex is purely business: `As long as we're paying for the genuine article at a fair price, into the shopping cart it goes, just like everything else.' Prostitutes are `businesswomen controlled, like we all are, by macroeconomic price regulations.' (I Love Dollars) Art (literature): `they write for money. `Commercial and popular success becomes paramount. For the older generation, `a writer ought to offer people something positive, ideals, aspirations, democracy, freedom.' (I Love Dollars) In `Wheels', a bike incident turns into a violent extortion. In `Ah, Xiao Xie', a pastiche of the centrally planned `Soviet' system, you cannot leave your factory unless you have a long arm. In the best story of the bundle `A Boat Crossing', a Kafkaesque haunting nightmare, everything is for sale, even a young lady, in a corrupt mini-society (boat = country) under the spell of mysterious powers. Where can people go? Zhu Wen's fluently written brilliant stories show a China and its population at crossroads. Highly recommended.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not worth many dollars.,
By Dick Johnson - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China (Paperback)
There are six stories in this book, each roughly tied to the others. They are I Love Dollars; A Hospital Night; A Boat Crossing; Wheels; Ah, Xiao Xie; Pounds, Ounces, Meat.
I read quite a bit of Chinese fiction, from classic to very modern. I like most of what I read. I read quite a bit of post-modern and like most of it as well. This book, though, is nearly impossible to review. Usually such a book has a few good stories, a few stinkers and the rest so-so. To me, each of these had moments of all three. Some were clever in concept but way overworked - the fallacy that if some is good then more is necessarily better. Some were a mixture of noirish post-modernism (and just quirky) that just didn't work. All had humorous moments; all had interesting characters; but none were great from beginning to end. Unless you are determined to sample untried authors, I'd give this one a pass. There were enough interesting moments to give this three stars - but had this been a novel, I'm not sure I would have finished it. |
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