Leave Me Alone by Murong Xuecun

Book cover- Leave Me Alone by Murong Xuecunc. Photo / Supplied

Judging from this effort, Murong Xuecun is a writer to keep a close eye on. Leave Me Alone, subtitled "A Novel of Chengdu", was first published in excerpts on a literary website to huge response. A publisher got in touch and the novel was long-listed for the Man Asia Prize last year. Murong didn't win, but by all accounts he doesn't care much for literary honour. After a burst of publicity, the former Chengdu sales manager for a car company high-tailed it to Lhasa.

Murong, who has followed the adage that you should write about what you know, has chosen as his protagonist Chen Zhong, a sales manager for a motor oil company. Chen is smart and bored and prefers to spend his time drinking, gambling and whoring with two former university buddies, Li Liang and Bighead Wang.

All three seem set on a path to personal destruction, and in Chen, Murong has created a character reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, whose rebellion against convention and expectation turns into a kind of dysfunction.

The success the book enjoyed in China comes from its energy but also a vast array of cultural in-jokes from cynical takes on ancient legend to dissections of pop song lyrics. It might end up a novel too tied to its time, but there is such truth in the characters that my bet is that Leave Me Alone should enjoy cult classic status in the West for some time. There are constant echoes of rebel lit, from Kerouac to Salinger to early Amis and Brett Easton Ellis.

Underlying Chen's self-destructive journey is nostalgia for a surer past supplanted by a present in China that has left new generations adrift in a culture that has paid a moral and spiritual price in its drive for First World status. As Chen's brother-in-law says, "These are dark times. No one can predict what tomorrow will bring. Everything is false; only money is real."

The quote could have come from Leslie T. Chang's excellent and moving reportage in Factory Girls. As a Wall Street Journal reporter, Chang decided to report from the frontline of the Chinese economic material, the factories and their workforces that have transformed southern Chinese cities like Dongguan.

I have visited Dongguan. It's one of the charmless new cities without much of a past and a chaotic present. There were no accurate street maps, hardly any footpaths. It was a place for commerce, not community. A grey haze engulfed the city and left dust on buildings and in your nasal passages.

Unlike Shenzen, which had official status as an open economic zone thrust upon it, Dongguan's path was a product of market convenience.

In less than 20 years it has developed into a place that manufactures 40 per cent of the magnetic heads and 30 per cent of the disk drives for the world's personal computers. The city produces 30 per cent of the world's athletic shoes, and the biggest of the shoe factories, Yue Yuan, employs 78,000 people.

Most of the workers are young women from rural China and it is these women that Chang befriends to tell stories that are heart-breaking and sobering, even for the women whose intelligence and ambition enable them to find promotion to management.

Chang worked for a business paper, but never falls into the trap of confusing numbers with people. "It takes 200 pairs of hands to make a running shoe," she writes. Her reportage is beautiful. Fact upon fact, interview upon interview made me look at my pair of Pumas with renewed understanding and regret.

Shawna Yang Ryan's first novel provides a complete contrast, though at heart it is concerned with the same themes, the struggle for identity and a new life. Water Ghosts falls into the genre of diaspora fiction. Set in Locke, a Californian farming community where Chinese migrants settled in the 1900s, the novel is a Chinese culture clash story as the westernised migrant Richard Fong (Fong Man Gum) is surprised by the sudden appearance of Ming Wai, the wife he had left behind in China, who appears mysteriously one foggy afternoon on a derelict and drifting boat with two women companions. Fong's longtime lover Chloe Virginia Howell is not impressed.

The book left me with two quibbles: the writing stresses "poetic" colour and detail at the expense of character and pace; and Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston have been here before with far finer novels.

Leave Me Alone by Murong Xuecun (Allen and Unwin $27.99) Factory Girls: Voices From the Heart of Modern China by Leslie T. Chang (Macmillan $34.99) Water Ghosts by Shawna Yang Ryan (Pier 9 $35)

Gilbert Wong is an Auckland reviewer