Rebels Without a Cause

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When Wei Hui wrote Shanghai Baby in 1999, she launched not just a book but a genre: confessional, and often sexually charged, works of fiction and nonfiction by young, neophyte women trying to capture the Zeitgeist of hard and fast living in a roller-coaster China. The latest to let it all hang out is teenage iconoclast Chun Sue's Beijing Doll. This semiautobiographical novel, first published in 2002 when Chun was just 17 and which was recently released in English, chronicles the turbulent life of Chun, a high school dropout who shares the same name as the author. For Chun, school is an annoyance that keeps her from more pressing concerns like boyfriends, punk-rock clubs, shopping malls and McDonald's. After dropping out to write for a fashion rag, Chun goes back to school. But she can't abide the monotony nor the teachers' telling her what to do and be, and she leaves again, this time for good.

Chun's world is an apolitical but noisy place where Sonic Youth and REM share the soundscape with homegrown alt-rock bands like Pangu and PK14. It's a world where doting parents indulge their spoiled children—Chun's mother takes her from Beijing to Kaifeng to mingle with SpermOva, a punk band she adores, and stays alone in a guesthouse until Chun is ready to return to Beijing four nights later.

Reading Beijing Doll often makes you feel you're stuck on the phone with a mopey teenager who takes herself too seriously. The book is dense with melodramatic passages such as "I wanted to say that no one could plug the hole in my heart, that it was lost, that it was lonely." Chun's characters aspire to be individuals but can hardly be distinguished from one another, and the author offers scant insight into what drives them, other than their erratic mood swings.

But despite its flaws, Beijing Doll opens a window to the seemingly aimless lives of China's urban youth. Chun doesn't fight to defend her freedom by marching on Tiananmen Square; she does it by skipping school and dyeing her hair bright red. In China today, that's what passes for rebellion.