Moving Toward the Limelight

By Carolyn See,
who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Friday, August 15, 2008; C03



TWENTY FRAGMENTS OF A RAVENOUS YOUTH

By Xiaolu Guo

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 167 pp. $21.95

When Xiaolu Guo was born, a little over 30 years ago in a remote village in rural China, she received the government ID of "Peasant." Later, she was given the opportunity to attend film school in Beijing, and her ID was upgraded to "Citizen." It's as an irate citizen that Guo writes "Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth," an outraged, outrageous, sometimes very funny novel about a rough peasant girl named Fenfang Wang. She runs away from a steaming hot village in the middle of Chinese Nowhere, fleeing parents so undemonstrative and taciturn they seem barely to have mastered the ability to speak.

At 17, Fenfang hits the streets of Beijing, determined to make her fortune. But Beijing is a hard city: As a girl, Fenfang has no value in this society, and as a peasant, she's only learned how to dig up sweet potatoes. Even four years later, she has only learned to work in a factory, to be a movie usherette, fabricate tin cans ("5 cans in 45 seconds") and clean toilets.

Her luck changes, however minutely, when she goes to a movie studio and signs up to be an extra. She becomes "Extra 6787." Fenfang is philosophical about her position: "So I was the 6,787th person in Beijing wanting a job in the film and TV industry. . . . I felt the competition, but compared with the 1.5 billion people in China, 6,786 wasn't such a daunting number. It was only the population of my village." Fenfang is filled with hope. "All those shiny things in life -- some of them might possibly be for me."

God knows, she's already put in her time, squatting in empty apartments, making plastic guns in noisy factories, sweeping floors at movie houses. At first her life as an extra doesn't seem to improve her luck, but things do change eventually. She's courted by a Beijing assistant director, Xiaolin, who clumsily offers her a larger lunch than she's entitled to. She ends up living with him (and his whole family) for three years, but despite the relative security of the arrangement, she finds it unbearable. She finally leaves him, and he stalks her for the rest of the novel, breaking light bulbs that leave destructive shards everywhere, yelling at her until his throat gets hoarse. She can't stand him, but she misses him when he's gone; sometimes it seems that girls must be the same everywhere. Fenfang continues her stubbornly independent life, looking for the shiny things. She conducts a long-distance romance with an American named Ben. He's taught her a lot about books and movies and how to behave, but he's gone home now. They talk a lot on cellphones, but the relationship is going no place.

Fenfang makes a decent living playing a lady who crosses a bridge in one movie or another, or a lady who falls off a bicycle. But she knows her career as an extra is a dead end. She writes a screenplay that is predictably scorned and roundly rejected. (The movie business would seem to be the same whatever side of the world you're on.) Her personal life is built on a predictable, stereotypical collection of boyfriends: the boring-and-violent Xiaolin (the male body you can always fall back on), Ben (someone to be idolized from thousands of miles away), Patton (the neutral pal everybody has) and a dear heart named Huizi (her soul mate, the man beyond sex, love or even yearning, her touchstone, her inspiration). That's how women tell their stories, all too often. It's an old structure, but strangely sturdy. It holds up.

The China that Fenfang lives in is on a building binge, tearing down whole neighborhoods in a night, throwing up shoddy, charmless buildings, manufacturing the worst kind of materialistic junk. (The author made a 2004 documentary, "The Concrete Revolution," on this subject.) When Fenfang returns to her village, the peasants own televisions, but their pure and beautiful river has been polluted with toxic trash. (The West has been very prissy about this mindless pollution, but it's not as if we didn't go through our own industrial revolutions.) What becomes of Fenfang -- who is, in every way, ravenous for life -- remains a mystery. What China has become in the past 30 years or so is Fenfang's village in macrocosm. It's a scary thought.