Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

From the author of the 2007 Orange Prize finalist A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers comes a wholly original and thoroughly captivating coming-of-age story that follows a bright, impassioned young woman as she rushes headlong into the maelstrom of a rapidly changing Beijing to chase her dreams.

Twenty-one year old Fenfang Wang has traveled one thousand eight hundred miles to seek her fortune in contemporary urban Beijing, and has no desire to return to the drudgery of the sweet potato fields back home. However, Fenfang is ill-prepared for what greets her: a Communist regime that has outworn its welcome, a city under rampant destruction and slap-dash development, and a sexist attitude seemingly more in keeping with her peasant upbringing than the countrys progressive capital. Yet Fenfang is determined to live a modern life. With courage and purpose, she forges ahead, and soon lands a job as a film extra. While playing roles like woman-walking-over-the bridge and waitress-wiping-a-table help her eke out a meager living, Fenfang comes under the spell of two unsuitable young men, keeps her cupboard stocked with UFO noodles, and after mastering the fever and tumult of the city, ultimately finds her true independence in the one place she never expected.

At once wry and moving, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth gives us a clear-eyed glimpse into the precarious and fragile state of Chinas new identity and asserts Xiaolu Guo as her generations voice of modern China.

"London-based novelist and documentary filmmaker Guo was a 2007 Orange Prize finalist for A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. She has completely re-written, in English, this story of tough, sprightly heroine Fenfang Wang, first published in 1997 in Mandarin (and earlier this year in a different, U.K.-only English translation). Fenfang, 17, leaves her mother a note and flees her rural farming village for Beijing. An odd job cleaning a movie theater brings her in contact with a low-level director and leads to higher-paying work as a movie extra, where she's a face among thousands. Her affections, stuck between 'volatile' producer's assistant Xiaolin and 'beloved' American student Ben, do little to lessen the hard knocks, which keep coming. Then, at the suggestion of her friend Huizi, Fenfang gives script writing a go, and things start to change. Guo beautifully captures the sense of a young girl struggling to forge a life. Fenfang's voice is bracing and welcome." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

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... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 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.

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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XIAOLU GUO was born in a fishing village in southern China. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, she wrote several books published in China before she moved to London in 2002. She was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 International Womens Film Festival for her first feature “How Is Your Fish Today?,” and is the recipient of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Cinefondation Residency grant based in Paris. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, her first novel published in the U.S., was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. She divides her time between London and Beijing, and is at work on a new novel.