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Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

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Fenfang is seventeen years old when she escapes from her tiny, suffocating village, where all that awaits her is a life full of sweet potato farming. She travels to Beijing, where she works many odd jobs to stay afloat, before finally managing to become a film extra. In between making minute appearances in TV shows and films, Fenfang struggles to build a modern life for herself in the vast city of Beijing, facing sexist men, the strict Communist rules, and struggles to learn where her own destiny lies.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is a highly intriguing and scintillating novel that will leave the reader with much to ponder. Fenfang is a very easygoing narrator and the story unrolls smoothly from her perspective, giving the reader an educational, but still very substantial glimpse into the bustling life of China's younger generation, all in an honest and sure voice that will make a lasting impression. This is a book that demands your complete attention, through random observations, inquisitive contemplations, and a gritty and realistic grasp on life, making the connection between readers and author an instantaneous one.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is a small book, but it does provide an insight into a world many of us know so little about, life inside Communist China.

Told in twenty chapters, each a fragment of Fenfang's life, this book is a series of small narratives in the life of this young woman. Growing up in a small village Fenfang sees her future as a never ending farming of the sweet potato fields all around her. Her parents are silent and worn down so Fenfeng decides to pack it all in and head for the big city Bejing. At only seventeen years of age Fenfeng is a little out of her depth, and struggles to survive.

I enjoyed this novella that depicts this determined young woman's search for success. She takes a series of menial jobs slowly working her way into the movie business, playing unnamed woman in non-speaking extra roles. She is at times, brave, scared, brash and submissive. She has a few relationships with men, one a bit of a stalker, another is an American citizen who's slumming and a third that's her closest friend and obviously in love with her. Living in a handful of different apartments, she has some trouble with the Communist Neighborhood Committee; their main purpose is to spy on everyone. Most of these are old school Communists who are looked at with disdain by the younger Chinese who are obsessed with American movies and TV, all DVD's acquired on the Black Market. The clash with the old and new was particularly interesting to me.

Fenfang eventually works her way into writing a screenplay that is accepted for filming, and succeeds in leaving her life on the edges of life behind. Since Xiaolu Guo is a screenwriter herself I have to believe that this is a semi-autographical work, one that at first seems slight but grows on you and makes you wonder about these young people that will be forming the direction of the new China.

Fenfang Wang, a twenty-one-year-old woman living in Beijing, is ravenous for life. Her story begins:

"My youth began when I was twenty-one. At least, that's when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life--some of them might possibly be for me. ... Be young or die. That was my plan."

Fenfang finds a job as a minor actress of silent roles while nursing plans to sell a screenplay. She embraces Beijing but often recalls her childhood on a sweet potato farm with her peasant parents.

This novella consists of twenty "fragments," many of which are curiously supplemented with photographs. Each fragment is a kind of set piece, often centered around a meal. This disjointed structure, along with Fenfang's voice, capture the innocence and immediacy of youth without glossing over the difficulties. At one point, Fenfang despairs, "I was always drifting and believed in nothing." Twenty Fragments lacks momentum and character development but succeeds in depicting Fenfang's youthful angst. This is an engaging (and brief) book.

This translation was published in 2008. It was a revised version of the Chinese original (Fenfang's 37.2 Degrees), which came out in 2000, when the author was 27, and was her first novel published in China. She reworked the original to reflect changes in her thinking about how the main character in it ought to mature.

The work was indeed a collection of youthful fragments, fairly personal compared to works read by older Chinese authors. It was written in the first person and based partly on the author's life in China in the 1990s, from her late teens into her 20s. There were glimpses of her hand-to-mouth existence in Beijing on the fringe of the film world and a few people she met there. Her attempts at education and script-writing, a few relationships, a brief return to her parents' home in a village in southern China, the sale of her first script, and her leaving Beijing. The book didn't mention that the author was seven years older than the narrator's age, had studied film at China's most prestigious film academy and left Beijing for England.

The novel was strongest, in my opinion, at conveying the narrator's determination to get ahead, and what it felt like for her to be young and poor in Beijing. Cheap roach-infested apartments, cheap food, eating at fast-food restaurants to save on electricity bills, crowds, noise, dust, pollution, and so on. Polishing her writing skills, absorbing foreign creations and trying to meet people who could help her. Whenever the novel remained on these things, it was enjoyable. Whenever it strayed, it began to bog down for me.

The narrator's own feelings about things were usually apparent or could be read between the lines, so I could get a clear idea of her. But she didn't seem deeply introspective, nor -- though a perceptive observer of others at times -- did she seem much interested in describing other people, so it was difficult to get a more than superficial grasp of those around her. For instance, a boyfriend was described, a foreigner, but his character and motivations were vague, and nothing was said about how they met or what he meant to her.

The inclusion of photos at the start of each chapter was a great idea and added atmosphere to the book. Also interesting were the mentions in passing of authors she was reading -- Kafka, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Duras -- and movies she was studying: Betty Blue, The Matrix, Casino, Fallen Angels, Sixth Sense, Sliding Doors, Tokyo Love Story, The Lost Weekend, films by Hitchcock. Many of the fragments from her own life were treated as if they were scenes or outtakes from a movie, and the novel could easily be filmed. A Chinese writer mentioned in passing in the book was the late Zha Haisheng (Haizi), an important poet for the post-Mao generations, and his poem quoted in the book might be seen as one key to it.

Excerpts from the book:
"In my village, people lived like insects, like worms, like slugs hanging on the back door of the house."

"The snow was black on the ground from the muck pumping out of the chimneys."

"The things about my cockroaches, they were very cinematic, like the birds in that Alfred Hitchcock film. I was under constant attack. Singled out, they were weak and destructible, but collectively they were unbeatable . . . . Once I swallowed one while absent-mindedly drinking my tea."

"I loved piracy. It was our university and our only path to the foreign world."

"This forgotten [English] dictionary might be my passport to the world too."

"Then he asked my age, and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big s--t had happened in our lives."

"I kept my true thoughts, desires and dreams hidden deep within. I became a person who was very good at hiding her emotions. Maybe that was why people thought I was heartless. Apparently my face often had a blank expression."

"Sometimes I would rather look back if it meant that I could feel something in my heart, even something sad. Sadness was better than emptiness."

"Finally I was getting closer to the shiny things."

From the poem by Haizi: "From tomorrow, I will be a lucky person/Feed horses, chop wood, travel the world . . . I will have a house facing the ocean; the warmth of spring will blossom/From tomorrow, I will write to my family/Tell them I am settled, I am calm/A warmth will radiate through my life/It will radiate to everyone in this world/From tomorrow, each river and each mountain/Will be given a new and tender name . . . . May your future road be clear and bright/May you be reunited with your true love/May you find real happiness in this dusty world/I will face the ocean, waiting for spring to warm the air and flowers to blossom."

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is just that. Definately a enjoyable read.

This is a quick read. This book relays the story of FenFang, a young woman in Beijing. This 167 page book is a small fleeting glimpse into the classic "coming of age" storyline. Each chapter is very brief and enough to grab your interest and does leave you wanting to know more.

The reference to the "Heavenly Bastard in the Sky" grabbed my attention and made me contemplate this characters relation to other people, to her community. I couldn't help but enjoy the reference, being quite unconventional. This book moves quick and is truly "fragments."

In the authors acknowledgement, at the end of the book she comments on how this book came to exist through several changes. The first was to translate it to English and capture the raw "slangy Chinese" girl's words and actions. The second was the author's own feelings about the book reading it ten years after she wrote it. She found that she "didn't agree with the young woman who had written it. Her vision of the world had changed, along with Beijing and the whole of China." The author felt she needed to rework each sentence because she did not see things the same anymore.

I'd have enjoyed reading it before any changes were made. It is raw, it is real and it is a very enjoyable read, but again, I was left wanting more. Don't let this deter you from reading this book, though. It's an interesting perspective in a not so perfect world.

Fenfang Wang is one of China's millions of "liudong renkou," the "floating population" of migrant peasants leaving their birthplaces for the big cities. However, instead of heading from the sweet potato fields of her Ginger Hill Village home to the factories of southeastern China, she travels northward to Beijing to find her fortune. Instead, she finds menial jobs cleaning toilets, fabricating tin cans, and working as an usher (and living) in a cinema until one day, she fills out an application to be a movie extra for Beijing Film Studios. Over the succeeding years, she accumulates an array of non-speaking movie roles as an extra, roles for characters that are as just as invisible in the movies as she has been in her real life - scared girl in police chase, female number three hundred, woman waiting on the platform, bored waitress, and the like.

Fenfang's career provides little more than the backdrop for her real story. In the twenty short chapters that constitute the "fragments" of the book's title, she encapsulates the experiences of minimally educated Chinese villagers who have migrated to the large cities to find work and, for some, their place in modern life. She struggles to find work, changing jobs and residences and even cell phone numbers frequently. She shops when she makes occasional money, but she also experiences dry spells where her cupboards are bare. She forms relationships with men - one with a fellow countryman named Xiaolin (a verbal play on Shaolin, the martial arts school?), another with an Englishman named Ben - but they lack depth or permanence. Everything is Fenfang's life is a conflict of extremes, pulling her first one way, then another - education, career, village versus city life, relationships.

Throughout her story, Fenfang's one constant and confidant is a television scriptwriter named Huizi. He is Fenfang's anchor, but he is also a phantom, appearing more as a disembodied guide than as an actual presence. Part philosopher, part quoter of ancient Chinese poetry, part censored scriptwriter for films that will never be produced, Huizi's influence leads Fenfang into writing a movie script of her own that plays a significant role in the book. Huizi also serves as Fenfang's father figure and life coach. "Never look back to the past," he advises her, and "never reget." Most important, Huizi reminds Fenfang, "You must take care of your life." Thus it is that Fenfang begins her story as a 21-year-old and ends it as a 17-year-old back in the sweet potato fields of Ginger Hill Village, but with an immensely matured, independent perspective.

Guo's literary style is direct and unadorned, creating an introspective voice for her protagonist that is simultaneously observational, confessional, and pleasurably colloquial. For example, Fenfang's favorite expression of surprise or dismay, "Heavenly Bastard in the Sky," conveys a sarcastic secularism while still hearkening to the Buddhist Chinese belief in a sky full of gods. Even her heroine's "ravenousness" (and that of the society around her) is played for satirical effect, whether for diplomas and certificates, money, romance, professional success, material possessions, or food. The overall effect is to create in her narrator a distinctively believable respesentation of the young, upwardly striving migrant women of mainland China. Guo's fictional Fenfang Wang compares very favorably to the young women recently documented by Leslie Chang's FACTORY GIRLS and far surpasses the whiny, self-centered heroine of Mian Mian's novel, CANDY.

Following on the success of her first novel, A CONCISE CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR LOVERS, Xiaolu Guo is proving herself an irrestible new voice of China's young generation, a group vastly different from any Chinese generation before them. They are the future of an emergent new economic, political, cultural, and military world power. We should all be listening closely to voices like Guo's, both for the literary pleasure they bring as well as the reflection they offer of a new, modernizing, and Westernizing China.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is the story of young Fenfang's journey away from the sweet potato fields of her village and into life as a twenty something in modern day Beijing.

Fenfang works as a film extra among other jobs. There she meets Xiaolin an Assistant to the Producer. Though there isn't much actual romance between them they live together with his family for several years. She also befriends an American student named Ben and his cast of friends.

I really enjoying seeing the world through Fenfang's eyes be it her use of the phrase "Heavenly Bastard in the Sky" to the cockroaches in her apartment to her film script outline of "The Seven Reincarnations of Hao An" to the Old Hens in her apartment watching her every move. Fenfang's is a quiet story and for that I truly enjoy it. I don't believe I have ever read anything quite like this before, it's a beautiful portrait of what it's like to be a young woman in modern day China. It's funny, exciting and a little bit sad.

This book is literally told in twenty small atmospheric fragments. I really like how each fragment has a descriptive title. There are also small black and white pictures sprinkled throughout the book. The dust jacket art is just beautiful. I really can't think of a more beautifully designed book and cover.

A good, quick read with brief, almost machine-gun style "fragments" that chronicle a young woman's migration from the potato fields of rural China to the sharp, bleak big city of Beijing, itself uncomfortably hurtling through change from old to new materialism. You can't help but like Fenfang as she seeks something better than digging up tubers, becomes urban, but discovers that life isn't all that much better elsewhere - it just offers that possibility. Her atrophic relationships, perhaps stifled by this urbanization as much as Beijing and Fenfang are covered with the polluting yellow dust of industrialization, turn out to be rather poignant. The reader definitely feels the distance she feels from others even as she wants to be close to them, however abusive or shallow they may be. The visit she makes to home - a short fragment - stands out. This book's a good window into the heart of a young woman who wants something better, wants to be connected, and feels the strain of a country's growing pains as she sorts out her own. The play-within-a-play, Fenfeng's movie script of a nondescript man struggling in new China, is a neat device.

The writing was easy and smooth. It felt like Fenfang was just telling you her story plain and simple. I read this book quickly and enjoyed it very much.

Twenty-one-year-old Fenfang Wang is a little lost. She might know the general direction of where she's headed, Beijing, but after that, nothing is certain. But she can't go back to her little isolated village in the Chinese countryside; she's had enough of that monotonous life of digging up sweet potatoes. And so, young Fenfang navigates her way through dusty Beijing, struggling to find a place she belongs in and some satisfaction to her life. But along the way as she barely gets by, she encounters many obstacles of the newly modern Chinese era, from restriction of the Communist regime and dreary jobs as a film extra to bad men and hopeless dreams. In this uniquely written coming-of-age tale, a young Chinese woman strives to forge her own identity amidst the hardships in the city and her own life.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth was an interesting tale and glimpse into the life of a contemporary Chinese city. I enjoyed Fenfang's frank voice; Fenfang can be relied on to tell it like it is, from the most depressing parts to the very best. However, I felt this honesty failed to really animate any of the characters besides Fenfang, and even Fenfang's character was sometimes a little weak. The plot never gets too exciting; this novel focuses more on the mental and emotional maturation of Fenfang. This isn't a bad thing per se, but the plot's boringness did make Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth a little more difficult to get through. The story read more like a memoir than a novel, and I wasn't left with a sense of accomplishment that is generally standard in coming-of-age novels. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it leaves the readers a little confused unless they really take the time to think about Fenfang's story.

I don't recommend Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth because while it had its great moments, nothing about it really drew me in. readers who enjoy short stories about identity especially in combination with foreign landscapes and cultures may also like this novel.