Ash has managed to achieve quite the name for himself within Beijing’s literary circles. He has helped to set up websites like Beijing Cream and The Anthill, has organised Whisky and Writers nights at The Bookworm and now he has a book out through Picador that is getting rave reviews on outlets like the FT, the New York Times and the BBC.
In short, a part of me really wanted to hate his book.However he actually wrote a very good book that is impossible to dislike.
He covers a lot of the same ground that I cover in my own book Party Members – generational pressure, university exams, corruption, house prices, even regional TV talent shows – but somehow still manages to find some light within the darkness. Partly this is due to his subject matter. Wish Lanterns follows the lives of six young Chinese all born after 1980 as they struggle to build a foundation for their lives in and around Beijing. It would be a very grim book indeed if these young people didn’t have hope to build better lives for themselves. For sure, there is darkness – and more than a few of the dreams of Wish Lanterns‘ six protagonists eventually hit a dead-end – but there is life and hope along the way. If there was any truth to Xi Jinping’s nonsensical propaganda slogan of the “Chinese Dream”, then the content of that dream is to be found somewhere within this book.
The six protagonists are used as narrative devices to highlight different aspects of modern China. Each one has a different journey and their various class backgrounds and career choices gives Ash an opportunity to explore the entirety of modern China through these windows on their lives. Wannabe rockstar Lucifer gives us glimpses into China’s banal television industry; upper middle-class Politics student Fred (former China TEFL teachers will be unsurprised to learn that Fred is a girl) allows Ash to tick off the boxes of China’s political changes over the last three decades; party girl Mia highlights the edgy arty side of Beijing; and the slightly more ordinary (but no less interesting) three remaining protagonists of Dahai, Snail and Xiaoxiao are vehicles to explore the every day events of marriage, birth and death in the Peoples’ Republic.
Despite the different backgrounds of the various characters, they all share some of the same challenges. The heavy prospect of marriage and buying a house looms over every single one of them as they enter their mid-twenties; the pressure bearing down on some of them more than others. My favourite character in the book was Snail – a rural migrant from Anhui who more than any of the six protagonists experiences the most setbacks on his journey: internet addiction, lack of housing prospects and (in the book’s saddest moment) miscarriage of his first child. Snail named himself after the titular gastropod due to his childhood sightings of them in his countryside home and his foresight in knowing that his future home was to be wherever the turbulence of China’s social upheavals would take him. Yet he also shares another trait with his namesake: the weight of familial expectations and pressure slowing him down in comparison to his peers. It’s the struggle and hope that still remains within Snail despite the challenges that life throws at him that makes it hard not to respect the perseverance of many of China’s millennial generation.
Ash certainly knows his topic well and has done his research. I was impressed by his thorough knowledge of modern Chinese history, but I was ultimately more impressed by the little details that proved he had really gotten to know his case studies. On more than one occasion he mentions something that I was arrogantly sure I was the only foreigner in China who knew about it, for example the joke that Hebei’s capital Shijiazhuang is referred to as “s*** plus dirt” or the ins and outs of mid-2000s PC games like Counter Strike.
Wish Lanterns is well written, in-depth, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. As loath as I am to mention Peter Hessler lest I get arrested by the Cliché Police, Ash actually succeeds in out-Hesslering Hessler as he manages to provide a wide-ranging full-scope overview of what life is like in today’s China, but doesn’t embarrassingly avoid some of the more risqué topics that Hessler frequently avoided. There is sex in the book (especially in Lucifer’s chapters); Ash doesn’t go as in-depth as other topics he covers, but at least it is there and not conspicuous by its absence as I found to be the case in Hessler’s River Town.
Any book which provokes self-reflection and contemplation within the reader – especially unexpectedly – is a worthy read. Add to that the already significant achievement of creating a narrative that wonderfully captures the zeitgeist of modern China in a way that few others have and you have a very good book indeed.
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Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
China's youth get a bad rep. They are spoilt little emperors who write-off ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 16, 2016John S Pickup China Specialist
A perceptive insight into young people in China.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 22, 2017A. R. Henderson
Wonderfully written book - feels like a truly authentic description of the life of young people today in China
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2017
