"I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China" | Taking the pulse of modern China

"I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China"
by Zhu Wen, translated by Julia Lovell
Columbia University Press,
228 pp., $24.50

Some artists catch the wave of their times so perfectly — by the luck of their brash youth coinciding with strange new times — that they flash out the zeitgeist like signals to another planet.

Zhu Wen seems to have been one such young man in China. He graduated from college in 1989, the year of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that were brutally put down by the government. He worked for five years as an electrical engineer in a state-run thermal power plant before quitting to publish the single novella "I Love Dollars" in 1994. The bold irreverence of his style, and the sensation it caused, suggest that he was bottled up and ready to explode out of state employment just at the moment when the Chinese were being exhorted by their leaders to embrace capitalism.

Also an award-winning film director, Zhu Wen is a trenchant social observer. His stories are filled with fresh and very funny episodes underscoring a serious critique of the crass commercial exploitation that poisons every relationship he portrays. In "A Hospital Night," the main character agrees to sit by his girlfriend's father's hospital bed after gallbladder surgery. The doctor, displaying the gallstones, observes that they are "worth a lot on the open market," and offers to rinse them off for the family. Later, when the girlfriend mentions incidentally to the narrator that her abusive ex-husband has offered her a huge amount of money to spend one night back together, he asks, "Why didn't you go?"

In "Ah, Xiao Xie," the younger employees of a terminally unfinished power plant would like to leave so that they can actually use their skills elsewhere before they become obsolete, but they are not allowed to quit. A co-worker dies, and there is a commotion over who will go to the memorial service: "Everyone, naturally, wanted to go, because a cremation had to be better than watching their own time go up in smoke at work."

In the title novella, "I Love Dollars," the narrator, who doesn't share his father's traditional values, says to an imagined son, "this thing they call respect is too intangible for me. We've all got things we could learn from money ... "

Zhu Wen has a brilliant feel for detail in this colloquial, slangy translation. His characters are restless but arresting individuals who are trying to keep their heads up as they navigate the rapids of change. His stories are structured around long periods of waiting: the narrator (usually a cynical, scrappy guy who likes to provoke people) endures the night in the hospital, waits for a boat, and even waits for extortionists to come and make good on their threats.

Despite all this waiting, there is a kind of pell-mell rush to the writing. Zhu Wen wrests drama from this mix of oppressive waiting and defense against the unpredictable predators who are certainly out there. The stories set in the power plant and hospital seem especially emblematic of the systemic problems China faces with fueling its economy and protecting citizens so vulnerable to state calculations.