After the Beijing government banned both books last April, their popularity soared higher than ever. Millions of pirated copies were sold, and the Chinese-language site goldnets.myrice.com posted electronic editions of both books in their entirety, attracting clicks by the hundreds of thousands. Beijing ordered the site to delete the material. The public’s fascination has hardly diminished since then.
Instead the battle has launched a whole new Chinese genre: “pretty woman literature.” Mian Mian’s anthology “Candy” includes a short story about drug addiction and sex with foreigners in the sleazy boomtown of Shenzhen. Wei Hui’s novel “Shanghai Baby” features heroin abuse and sex with foreigners in Shanghai. Mian Mian accuses Wei Hui of stealing ideas from “Candy.” Wei Hui accuses Mian Mian of badmouthing “Shanghai Baby” to drum up publicity for her own book. Wei Hui says “Shanghai Baby” was an instant hit because “China is hungry for a bad girl.” Nonsense, Mian Mian replies, Wei Hui is really just a good girl posing as bad. Thousands of Web sites and chat rooms sprang up to revel in the rivalry.
Literary spats rarely get so raunchy, even in the West. One writer says the other masturbates while she works. Each says the other doesn’t know what she’s talking about on the subject of having sex in public toilets. (For a while, Japanese tourists were flocking to Shanghai’s YY Club to see the cubicle that had inspired the dispute.) A few years ago talk like this could have ended in a prison sentence. For Wei Hui and Mian Mian it has led to American book contracts. The online furor over “Baby” inspired Bruce Humes, a U.S. Web surfer, to become its translator. Mian Mian promises that the U.S. edition of “Candy” will be even racier than the version that got banned in Beijing. “I’m replacing details about sex and drugs that were edited out so the book could be published in China,” she says. She keeps in touch with her fans via e-mail. Sometime they send samples of their own writing. “The Internet will do wonders for such young authors,” she predicts. The best thing about it? “No police.”
