Shanghai Baby, lost in translation

Wei Hui’s novel Shanghai Baby caters to two different audiences: the chick-flick, romance novel industry, and the intellectual, social commentary readers. While this dichotomy leads to a good sell to the former, it faces the loss of the deeper message to much of the audience. The novel follows the life of Nikki, a Shanghai writer who is torn between two men while trying to finish her next novel. In the novel, Nikki’s love life seems to be entirely separated from her writing life. Just as she has two names – Coco and Nikki – she has two lives. In one, she parties around Shanghai, torn between the love of her life Tiantian, who can’t have sex, and Mark, the foreigner who only gives her sex. In her other life she is an aspiring novelist who delves into the deeper meaning of love and struggles to bring out the life of Shanghai into words on a page.

While this could have been pulled off successfully, Nikki’s lives are too far removed from each other in the novel, essentially creating two entirely different characters, the latter of which seems to be motivated by Wei Hui’s own thoughts on the city and her opinions on more serious issues. This is particularly notable in that she has her character graduate from the same university she did and even wrote short stories by the same name as Wei Hui’s.

The essential problem is that there seems to be no connection between the Fudan U grad and novelist, and the vacuous sex-crazed partier. She dances, drinks, and wanders around Shanghai for days on end, with hardly a care in the world, and then she will suddenly snap out of this phase and return to writing deep social commentaries for days at a time, hiding herself away from the world and not caring who she sees.

Her lovers, Tiantian and Mark, are also very two-dimensional. Tiantian is a passive artist who lives life in a haze. He loves Nikki, but otherwise does not seem to care about life. Mark is a rich German businessman whose only goal seems to be to have sex with Nikki. These qualities and sides to them are generally the only ones the reader ever sees.

As a quick read or airplane novel, as Shanghai Baby was marketed to be, the well-translated prose hides these many inconsistencies and allows the novel to simply be an erotic romance novel to the average reader. This readership, though, ultimately detracts from Wei Hui’s social commentary, which is the more worthy portion of the novel, but is hidden in-between a trashy romance book.