Customer Reviews

Beijing Doll

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Chun Sue makes a memorable debut with "Beijing Doll," a blistering roman a clef set during Sue's mid-to-late teens. While Sue herself can come across as naive and sometimes unlikable, her raw emotions and confusion make this feel a bit like a real-life Chinese "Catcher in the Rye."

She is a disaffected fifteen-year-old, from a middle-class family in Beijing. Loves punk-rock bands, writes poetry, longs to drop out of school, and struggles with her own feelings of nihilistic despair and pessimism. Soon after the book opens, she loses her virginity to Li Qi, only to find that he has a girlfriend and doesn't love her.

She immerses herself in the rock scene again, and gets involved with a rising indie-rock god/poet, then a Finnish tourist, while going to a shrink, getting magazine jobs and dropping in and out of school -- a merry-go-round of sex, rock, love, and a neverending search for a vague freedom.

"Beijing Doll" was famously banned in China. And it's not surprising -- this isn't exactly a complimentary look at Chinese youth. Chun Sue's story isn't too different from that of many other disaffected teens, but she does bring a lot of unbridled dark energy to it. Her alter ego is a girl who has seen enough to be jaded, but is naive enough to still not know quite how it all works.

Her writing is spare and sharp, with the occasional lapses into poetry. At times the story can get a bit monotonous -- the parade of brief boyfriends tend to blur together, as do Sue's semi-suicidal fantasies. And many older readers will find her angst and complaints annoying. However, Chun Sue does do a good job of capturing the confusion, the contradictions, and the depression of being a teenager.

Chun Sue's alter ego, Jiafu, only grows much at the end; readers might be annoyed with her repeated lapses into relationships with men who use her or have serious issues. However, those who remember the darker moments of teenagerhood will probably identify with her struggles. Maybe not with the vast number of boyfriends, or the pessimism about finding happiness. But the confusion on the inside is striking.

A unique coming-of-age tale, "Beijing Doll" is a peculiar roman a clef, with a mixture of the annoying and the sublime. Dark, wild and weird, but thoroughly unforgettable.

This was a disappointingly unoriginal account of "teenage angst"...another memoir of a privileged youth with no parental guidance and too much free time to sulk around.

I'm all for this genre, but this book was totally cliche.

"Beijing Doll" reads like the diary of an indecisively boy-crazy teenage girl . Unlike the average youth diarist, however, Chun Sue wrote for music magazines early in her high school career in order to pursue a personal passion and to draw her away from her oppressively strict high school environs. A rock music addict who embraced and wrote about the Beijing punk rock scene, Chun Sue depicts much teenage angst and moodiness in "Beijing Doll," but seemingly fails to grow out of it. Her voice is fickle in the book, but supported with spurts of vague determination and personal strength. Overall, a decent debut and coming-of-age book by a young writer; any later efforts should be more substantial.

Having thoroughly enjoyed "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang and "Red Scarf Girl" by Jiang Ji-Li, I picked up "Beijing Doll" in the hopes that it could show me how modern Beijingers work and live and look at communism. Man, was I ever disappointed.

There's nothing original about Chun Sue's story and very little that's interesting. No wonder she had so much trouble getting the book published -- it reads like an unedited diary. After the (n+1)st run-in with her "bourgeois" parents and the (n+2)nd imploded relationship, the reader may find him or herself wondering if Chun Sue will ever look beyond her own self-absorption or learn from her mistakes.

I feel sorry for teenagers in this world of blogging, myspace and the kiss-and-tell memoir: at least my embarassing diary rants were not in the public domain.

I especially feel sorry for Chun Shu, the vulnerable but wannabe-tough author of "Beijing Doll". Book deals unhealthily encourage the angsty self-importance of teendom, and her rebellious posturing would be comic if she were not so sincere.

Chun is just another spoiled brat from China's 1980s generation: little emperors raised in relative affluence, the over-protected only child of well-meaning parents. Unhappy at school, she like millions of her peers finds rock music a gratifying outlet, and she tags along as a wannabe groupie to lots of wannabe musicians, having lots of boring sex that she describes in boring detail. Her parents' patient confusion and tolerance of her follies just accelerate her downward spiral of existential angst.

That angst, Chun's petulant storm in a teacup, fuels the book and ultimately exhausts it. It is interesting, moving even, to watch her grapple with life, identity, sexuality, and society. However, she consistantly fails to learn from her experiences, opting for whining over the self-examination that a confessional memoir calls for, and eventually the reader just tires of her.

Nonetheless, "Beijing Doll" is a much better book than its precocious predecessors like "Shanghai Baby" and "Candy". Those are such cynical packaging of "Oooh, hot Chinese women! Doing drugs and sleeping with white men!" out to titallate the middle-aged male Western reader. "Beijing Doll", in contrast, is winningly honest, reading like a genuine diary and just as disorganized; Chun is focused upon herself rather than cunning marketing strategy. The problem is that she gazes so intently into her own navel that she eventually is swallowed up by it.

I remember hearing about the book in a magazine and then seeing in the book store for 14 dollars. I didn't want to spend that much money so I waited. I'M GLAD I WAITED! until my library got it. I expected the story to be very emotional and inciteful. Reading the story I found to be confusing with all these friends and how the story jumps from one thing to the next without anything inbetween. I felt there was no real ending rather the story just stopped. I wondered throughout reading Beijing Doll if it was the translation that was off rather than the story.
Overall made me depressed.

I was very excited to read this book upon seeing the reviews ... I was sorely disappointed. Being in China has absolutely no relevance to this girl's life ... her experiences seem similar to any American teenager attending school. She is middle-class, rebellious, a bit lost in her teen years ... not exactly the most unique and interesting story.

Chun Sue wanted to publish this book badly when she was 17, because the money she makes will turning her bad situation into a better one. She wants to have money, support, fame, and all kinds of stuff that could satisfy her wishes. Just like every little girl, she has a dream, but the reality bashed her feeling, therefore she started to hate all of these. Life is unfair to her, and no one could understand her. This makes her mad.Generally, her naive thoughts pushed her into the darkness.

I like this book a lot since the whole story took place in Beijing, my hometown. I followed Chun Sue's steps to revisit every places that I familiar with. Just like what she did, I dropped out from junior high when I was 12, because I didn't like my school at all, and childishly believed in such ethusiasism could bring me to somewhere. That's why I can totally understand her desperation and everyone else's reactions.

Chinese version is a little bit better than the English one, regardless of some misspelling in that Chinese edition, this is a great book. I called it the Chinese << Catcher in the Rye>>, which depicted same kind of dilusion and confliction. I like it, and supposely everyone who loves << Catcher in the Rye>> should also like it.

I just finished reading this and I don't know whether to feel sorry for the author or disgusted. The word that comes up for me is "apathetic". Everything and everyone in the book is apathetic. Chun Sue goes to bed with so many men/boys in this story and not once is there any mention of pleasure either for herself or for the males. There isn't any real point to the story and it is like an extended diary. Also, she must have come from a pretty well off family as she always had money, her parents let her get away with everything and do everything she wanted with no consequences (oh, her father did throw something at her but neither parent plays a part in the book). I get the feeling that this is Chun's world and everyone else in it doesn't matter or is just there to amuse her. Not recommended and I'm not keeping my copy of it.

Although my major is Japanese literature, I have also enjoyed reading a number of Chinese novels over the years. However, the novelists that I have read tend to be literary types such as Su Tong, Mo Yan, and Liu Heng. Recently though a number of popular novels such as Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby and Mian Mian's Candy have been translated into English. Being a reader of both "literary" and "popular" fiction, I can't help the fact that I still enjoy reading Stephen King novels, I wanted to indulge in popular Chinese fiction as well.

To begin my quest into the realms of popular Chinese literature I purchased Chun Sue's Beijing Doll. Written when the author was seventeen-years-old, she is the grand old age of twenty now, the novel is a semi-autobiographical telling of the authors life from her middle school days to the time she turned seventeen. Written in first person, the author details the daily doldrums within the confines of middle school and later a vocational high school, her numerous on again off again boyfriends, and the punk rock scene in Beijing. At some points Chun Sue comes of as little more than a brat, but at some points, if one is able to peel back the author's consumerist nature and hipster attitude, one can see the soul of a young girl struggling to find herself.

Banned in China because of its sexual nature, although it pales in comparison to other works, including those of Su Tong and Liu Heng, Beijing Doll is a decent read and it gives the reader a glimpse into Beijing's rock scene.