Rating: 
Summary: Cheap thrill
Review: Nothing to rave about. Superficial storyline and the characters are weak and uninteresting. Bad portrayal of mainland Chinese but which could be true of some of them.
Rating:
Summary: Sociologically interesting
Review: While not great literature, this and its "companion" brat pack novel _Candy_ by Mian Mian, give a glimpse into a steamy, hedonistic movement among some of China's youth. In that sense, both are a refreshing change from the milquetoast literature that readers in China have been fed for decades. While not wildly daring from the viewpoint of U.S. readers, these novels are revolutionary in China, truly breaking new ground. Both authors have been forced to pay the price for their courage.Candy is harder hitting, covering more of China over a longer period of time, and is written in a spare, unadorned style that accentuates the bleakness of the topics. Shanghai Baby is more pretentious, and one soon tires of the whining self-obsessiveness of CoCo. Still, when read for their insights into the thoughts and feelings of the brat generation in China, they help to show, contrary to official propaganda, that people in China deal with the same pressures and influences as people everywhere. That this and other novels were banned by Chinese authorities says a lot about the Stalinist control China still wields over anything that can viewed as "spiritual pollution." The spiritual pollution in this case consists of mildly explicit descriptions of heterosexual relations, a few rounds of female masturbation, and a suggestive lesbian kiss. For writing these exposes of steamy China, both writers have been blacklisted and will have a hard time publishing future works. That is a shame because both show promise and are likely to mature into thoughtful, provocative authors with voices much needed in China. I encourage you to read these novels, not necessarily for their literary value, but for their cultural insights. At the same time, you'll be giving a financial boost to authors who, because of the sword over their heads, will be having a hard time making a living by the pen. For those studying Chinese, both books are also available in Chinese through HooLoo. Both are great ways to learn _very_ vernacular Chinese.
Rating: 
Summary: very superfacial
Review: I find the characters in the book very superfacial, particularly the Baby, to the point, she is annoying.
Maybe it is banned, because it is too bad. Very pathetic!
Rating:
Summary: Slow at first, but surprisingly good
Review: It started off very slow, and after the first 2 chapters I put it down and did not read it again for about a month. There was just a lot of background information in the beginning which made it... well... boring. However, the plot thickens substantially towards the middle of the book, after she sleeps with Mark for the first time. After this moment, the story moves and becomes surprisingly quite good. The novel is insightful on many levels. It has a lot of truths about contemporary Chinese society, and at the same time she also illustrates the human truths about the characters. She did a terrific job of bringing out the inner secret motivations and conflicts/hypocracies. I am glad that we have this kind of story coming out of China. It's modern, refreshing, and a bit feminist. It's also quite original. It's certainly not the stereotypical literature from Chinese female writers.
Rating: 
Summary: Unexpectedly and surprisingly interesting
Review: I found this book in a Sydney Australia bookstore and it turned out to be an unexpected surprise. Part on the intrigue is the fact that the Chinese dictatorship burned 40,000 copies of the book in April 2000. What kind of book is so subversive and so threatening that it is worth publicly burning and banning? Wei Hui is a young woman who had already authored four books before writing what may be an autobiographical tale of loneliness, confusion, and searching. If an American woman had authored this book with it's descriptions of wild parties, music, and the restaurant scene with many young people energetically seeking excitement, it would be interesting but not surprising. What makes this book so fascinating is not only that the Chinese dictatorship finds it threatening at a moral/ideological level but also that the world it portrays is clearly incompatible with a totalitarian regime. If there is even one tenth as much artistic and personal freedom among the young in Beijing and Shanghai as this book portrays and if the freedom to travel within the country is as great as this book outlines (at one point our narrator decides at midday to leave Shanghai and fly to Beijing for a party that night and does so with no difficulties) then China has already decentralized and loosened the power of the secret police to a degree unthinkable in the Soviet Union at any point before its final three years. The personal goals and anxieties of young people in this book are clearly compatible with the modern west. The degree of interaction with foreigners is astounding and represents a breakdown of both censorship and control in ways that will reassure those who worry about China slipping back into totalitarianism. Finally, her comments about women and life and her repudiation of some aspects of feminism will cause conflicting emotions for those who would like to identify her as a feminist heroine. She acts outside traditional patterns yet with a remarkably traditional sense of what moves women.
Rating:
Summary: A good laugh
Review: A good laugh really. I knew "Shanghai Baby" was a semi-autobiographical novel but I was trying to make myself believe that I was reading some kind of satire instead when I started off... a kind of social commentary on some rotten minority in the Shanghainese society who twisted the meaning of "Western sexual liberation" to "doing whatever they want" and thinking that randomingly having sex with foreigners (hopefully marrying them to get passports, preferably American), taking drugs, indulging in materialistic desires (oh God the brand names -- Bret Easton Ellis really exhausted and "killed off" this kind of "social observation" in "American Psycho", please don't do it again), following their animal instincts are "cool" and fashionable things to do (and think that these are the things "Western people" do). Then five pages into the book I gave up. Wei Hui was obviously "masturbating". She was thoroughly enjoying this. She loved indulging in all this. It was not a satire at all. It was purely exhibitionist, taking her clothes off in public, purely attention-seeking, making a few bucks. This was worse than reading a girl's diary full of fantasies about sex with boy at school. This was actually worse than soft-pornographic erotic stories -- at least they are not as cliched and pretentious. However, Wei Hui did do a great job in accurately describing the social class she belongs to. I do believe there is a lot of credibility in there. But she was no more than a clown trying to tell us what is it really like being a clown. And it is all very pathetic and laughable. Some bits made me vomit. The book however really depresses me a lot... it tells me about some sort of people communist China has produced -- pretentious, ignorant, naive, stupid, money-worshipping... it also tells me about much of the hype and marketing strategies used these days in the literary world. "Soul Mountain" by Nobel-prize-winning Chinese writer (well, who writes in French) Gao received much less publicity than this piece of utter junk/joke.
I am going to keep this book forever to remind me how not to write and to give me quick laughs. Well worth having a look, to be honest. Just don't take it too seriously. By no means a good representation of China at all...... maybe just a representation of the sewer / back alley / rubbish heap where Wei Hui lives.
Rating:
Summary: Delightfully Shallow
Review: This is the coming of age story of a 25-year-old Shanghai girl. The story is unquestionably simple. Yet, though the author, you get to know as very conceited young woman named Coco who is stumbling through life, trying to write a novel. Throughout the story I was hoping to watch Coco mature, which finally begins to happen toward the end of the story. Along the way, the author treats us with a slew of interesting characters, which holds the story together. The story is shallow, and at times wanders without much focus, yet it was just juicy enough to keep me hooked. The later chapters of this book, if you make it that far, are satisfying. The book is by no means a literary marvel, and is not meant for everyone... but bottom line: I enjoyed it.
Rating:
Summary: trip to Shanghai
Review: Okay, it's not exactly a literary gem, but it's not bad. It's like a trip to Shanghai. If you're stuck with the image of massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the book would give you a new perpective about life in China, or in Shanghai at least. It is, however, wrong to hype Wei Hue as the "voice of China's new generation." Her bohemian heroine, Coco, is an unconventional lonely young woman. So are her friends, Tian Tian, Madonna, Spider and the rest. They belong to the Allen Ginsberg culture made up of artists, poets, a computer genius and a novelist.
Some westerners who didn't like the book must have been disappointed by the absence of the eastern magic, mysticism and wisdom which Amy Tan's Joy Luck Luck, for example, has aplenty of. What they have found instead is a mirror of their own culture characterized by individualism, promiscuity, drugs and, yes, 'rock and roll.'
There are pages that would bore you to death, especially those parts where Coco keeps updating the readers about the progress of her novel and her mushy description of her love affair with the impotent Tian Tian. (...) But despite the boring parts, the very last chaper made me decide that I liked the book after all. The conclusion is quite creative, convicing me finally of Coco's literary intentions.
Rating:
Summary: RACIST GARBAGE!
Review: If you still think all Jews are greedy scheisters and all African Americans are lazy and stupid, then you'll love this book too. The lack of insensitivity amazes me and is an indicator of the warped mental state of the author. The author seems intent on exploiting old racial stereotypes in order to make a tidy profit on the book. The storyline is poorly constructed and has no focus. It lacks imagination and seems as though it was written just to make money. Take my advice, do not waste your $$ on this book! This is a 2 thumbs down crock of horsehay.
Rating:
Summary: Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll ... in Shanghai
Review: Despite all the hoopla surrounding the publication and banning of this book in China, Shanghai Baby is an interesting read though by Western standards, it really isn't all that shocking. It tells the fairly ho-hum story of a twentysomething Shanghai woman, Coco, who divides her time between two lovers - the childish and heroin-addicted Tian Tian, and Mark, the golden-haired German - while philosophizing about love, art, the writing process, and life in a city that seems as divided between East and West as the narrator herself. The carefree and dangerously reckless lifestyles of Coco, Tian Tian, Mark, Madonna (no, not THE Madonna), and a handful of their friends and acquaintances is familiar territory to anyone who's read the works of Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis. What makes this book a better-than-average read is the portrayal it gives of the city of Shanghai itself, ie it reads very Western, which is probably what made the Chinese establishment so hot under the collar. Wei Hui writes with an assured voice (albeit here in translation) and the story she tells is enlightening only for the fact that it is written about Chinese characters in a Chinese city. What it ultimately reveals is that there really isn't much difference between the beautiful people of New York, L.A., or London and those of Shanghai or Beijing. Is this surprising? No, not really ... but it does make for a change of pace.
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