Body-Writing: Cruel Youth, Urban Linglei, and Special Economic Zone Syndrome in Mian Mian's Candy

Abstract

Both Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby and Mian Mian's Candy—the two novels scholar Hongwei Lu analyzes in her two-part series on China's controversial body-writing phenomenon—have been dismissed by Wolfgang Kubin and many other Chinese critics as “trash.” However, in this second installment of her series, Lu argues that Candy, in contrast to Shanghai Baby, offers a far less glossy and far more authentic glimpse of the negative effects that the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll lifestyle associated with the so-called Special Economic Zone syndrome has had on the urban youth of China's boomtowns, and therefore speaks to the devastating cultural ramifications of the rise of transnational capitalism, which has been glorified in other works under the label of “body-writing.”