Rebels Without a Cause

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...