Crazy Rich Asians – a bookish view

Of course I had to watch this movie. I loved the books. Sure they’re not high literature, but what Kevin Kwan has done is offer an extremely readable ethnographic portrait of a sliver of Singapore society – the very very rich old moneyed clans with their ties across Asia.

Having read and enjoyed all three books (Book 1, Book 3 and Book 2 in order of preference if you must know), I would have been jumping up and down for the film, without all the hype, which I’ll admit was cray cray – though the justification for  the hype was that it is the first big budget Hollywood production to feature an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club, which I can get on board with.

With the hype has come criticism – that the film fails in its representation of Singaporean society, effacing its multiracial character in favour of a sweeping Chineseness, with the only Indians being featured being basically servants (and no Malays at all). The defence has been that the novel and the film focus on an extremely restricted strata of society – and this is exactly it’s point, that it is clannish and exclusive.

Having read the novels, however, I can say that the novel is much more racially diverse even within the rarified world of the elite. I distinctly remember a hyper-wealthy Indian family being mentioned multiple times as part of the same social world as the formidable grandmother Shang Su Yi. The novel actually details the connections across the super wealthy and former royalty in Asia – from Thais to Indians and Chinese. I’m pretty sure that Indians were also mentioned as part of the social set of the younger generation (Rachel and Nick honeymooned in India) and generally part of Singaoire society. I cannot be 100% sure of Malays but that’s because the representation of Indians specifically caught my attention in the novel.

In the film, Indians appear in the background as servants and in one particularly unnecessary scene provoke fear as security guards when Rachel and her friend believe themselves to be lost in the jungle. The turbaned security guards brandishing guns are perceived as ‘scary tribals’, which is quite silly as Peik Lin, Rachel’s friend, is from Singapore and surely would be familiar with turbaned people. I blame this on Hollywood’s cluelessness and insatiable desire for a cheap laugh.

Even more galling is that the Singapore Tourism Board associated itself with the film – which makes its narrative (with its offensive Chinese-washing of Singaporean society) somewhat official. I can understand why the tourism board jumped on this – the film and the novel are love letters to Singpaore, and while the focus is on high society and fabulous displays of wealth, the best characters are notable for their down-to-earthness so that no visit to Singapore is complete without a visit to a hawker centre for example.

So yes, on representation, the film is a #fail, ironic because the hype promotes it as a #win for representation of Asian faces in Hollywood. But as we know, there are exclusions within exclusions and Crazy Rich Asians is a textbook case of this.

The other unnecessary Hollywoodish change in the film was the proposal scene on the plane at the end. It was straight out of some chick flick so generic that I cannot recall which one it was. It felt wrong, because for all it’s flaws – OTTness being the principle one – I don’t recall that this was the book’s ending (it was not). The book offers a much more ambiguous happy ending.

On the other hand, the film had some good additions, particularly in the form of Awkwafina as Peik Lin and Ken Jeong as her father, both of whom kept the husband entertained when he was threatening to descend into “how much longer”. There is also the much vaunted mah jong scene, though this lent itself to the Hollywood ending so I’m not sure I’m fully on board with it. Apparently, the Hollwyoodish ending – with mummy-in-law lending her ring to the festivities – was due to Michelle Yeoh, who plays Eleanor Young, Nick’s mother, refused to play the stereotypical evil mother-in-law, which is a pity, because Eleanor was both a cliche and not, a very Singaporean mother. Honestly, Michelle Yeoh plays a different Eleanor to the one I imagined when I read the book, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In terms of casting, the film got it right, half-Brit Henry Golding notwithstanding (my Singaporean colleague tsked tsked that he is not goodlooking at all, but I don’t know). I loved Constance Wu as Rachel.

The person I had the most problem with was Gemma Chan as Astrid, the novel’s quintessential It girl. In the film, Astrid is stiff and appears to be in mourning most of the time, even before her issues with her husband are revealed, except in the scene with Rachel at the engagement party. In the novels, Astrid and her storyline are second only to Nick’s and frankly, her love story in Book 2 was super romantic, but apparently all this was squished in the movie into an exchange of looks during the credits which I missed – and am likely going to watch the whole movie again for – because the husband jumped up and made a beeline for the exit as he always does.

Apparently, a sequel film is already on the cards, and for that I’m glad. Hopefully, the makers will take on board the critique of the representation of minorities and do better next time around.

At heart, Crazy Rich Asians is in the lines of the 19th century courtship novel such as Pride and Prejudice, in which a young woman of respectable but not outstanding lineage finds herself in an aristocratic milieu. In it’s minute detailing of the life of this class, it also harks back to The Age of Innocence. This is a classic romance plot line that has been successfully handed down to chick lit via the Harlequin romance.

It is also relatable in another sense. Many young women on the cusp of their weddings (myself included) can recall the sense of uncharted waters when faced with the minefield of their husband’s family – formidable mother-in-law, catty cousins, judgemental aunties, ex-girlfriends and traditions in which one never seems to put one’s foot right. The point in the film when Rachel is humiliated and flees had a number of us, tearing up. The Chinese aunty next to me was basically bawling during the mah jong scene.

So while this is a tale of the ultra-rich, in some ways, it is one that speaks to the concerns of young and not-so-young women.

 

Keep the Change

Title: Keep the Change
Author: Nirupama Subramanian
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010

Keep the Change exemplifies a sub-genre in chick lit: the career novel. In Western chick-lit, the best-known example of this sub-genre is The Devil Wears Prada in which an idealistic and middle-class young woman enters a profession and finds herself out of her depth. She nearly loses herself, and then figures out both where she wants to be with her career and who she is.

In Keep the Change, Damayanthi is a “simple” Iyer girl from Chennai, who is under siege at home due to her single state. The novel opens on her 26th birthday, which instead of being a happy occasion, is only a reminder of the shame of her being unmarried. Leading the charge is her mother whose histrionics would be funny if they weren’t actually emotional blackmail.

Her father is presented as a passive bystander, the reasonable man, shaking his head at the drama of the women he lives with. In fact, he enables Damayanthi’s mother and even cajoles her into going along with her plans. This is not unusual in Indian middle-class families. It is quite common for young urban Indian women to say their fathers brought them up with liberal values, but in fact these fathers do not step in when the young women are coerced into marriages before they are ready. Their diffidence allows them to appear to be the voices of reason while allowing their wives, the mothers, to be the executors of patriarchal agendas.

Damayanthi, like many women her age educated to believe that her life will be different from her mother’s, has other ideas. She is accused by her mother of being spoiled by the English books she reads, peopled with men like Mr Darcy, and Damayanthi agrees to some extent – she wants the fantasy man and the fantasy life, the kind of life the woman Victoria she writes to lives. This life involves fashionable clothes, a career and a boyfriend on whose arm she would saunter into parties and nightclubs.

Damayanthi has a role model in her friend Sumi who flew the coop to build a career in investment banking/ consulting and who urges her to spread her wings. She also has a vision of her life if she has an arranged marriage as her mother wants in the form of her unhappy cousins. In fact, her name comes from the legend of a self-sacrificing wife, but this is a role that our modern-day Damayanthi rejects.

There are thus a number of clear dichotomies in the novel – arranged vs love marriage, small town versus big city, mother versus daughter.

Damayanthi secures herself a job in a multinational bank, moves to Bombay and begins a journey of self-discovery. She begins to date, has sexual experiences, and learns the ropes at work. In fact, it is work that takes up the majority of the plot of the novel – Damayanthi is looking for love, but she is also looking to succeed in the office and it is in the latter space that much of her growth happens.

Damayanthi satirises corporate culture, the jargon, the self-important men, the parochialism beneath the facade of cosmopolitanism but she must learn to play the game. In this, she has a mentor in her metrosexual friend Jimmy, who schools her in the way of the world.

Somewhere along the way, Damayanthi has a makeover – she get her hair cut, puts on makeup, wears a short-ish skirt- and wins many admiring glances. This is the ‘change’ of the title, but it is not one she entirely comfortable with. “Keep the change,” Jimmy tells her. “It suits you and you are still you, inner beauty and all.” Damayanthi’s modern look therefore, it is implied, does not change who she really is.

The “makoever trope” is typical of chick lit and neoliberal culture in general, epitomised in the ‘makeover shows’ that dominate reality television. The Devil Wears Prada also turns on this makeover, in which Andy caves and embraces the world of fashion she has so far held herself slightly aloof from. What is emphasised there, and in this novel, is that the protagonist remains “herself” inside, even if that self is being essentially transformed by her experiences at work.

And who is she really? This is the crux of the question that every Indian chick lit novel seems to be posing. While as girls, chick lit’s protagonists were raised to believe that their communities were liberal, their twenties bring the realisation that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The arranged-love dichotomy epitomizes the crisis of self that the young woman finds herself in. Does she imagine herself in the role of traditional wife, a role that she never truly believed she would have to fulfill, or does she want something else. And does she have it in her to fight for that something else, even when she is not entirely sure what that is.

Figuring out what the “something else” is and how to attain is the real journey of the novel. In Damayanthi’s case, it is largely figuring out what she wants to do with her life. It is a tiring journey, and one she almost gives up on, but we must have our happy ending, and when it comes, it is this – she discovers what she wants to do and she decides to do it. And yes, almost as an after-thought, there is a man, but the real Prince(ss) Charming of this tale, it turns out, is herself.

The novel presents a South Indian milieu and I discovered that readers from the south tended to like it less, finding its caricatures of the south Indian lifestyle cringe-worthy. Maybe because I am not from the south, I did not have the same reaction. What I did object to was the uncritical presentation of the “Tam Brahm” milieu – something that in fact mirrors life. “Tam Brahm”, the casual descriptor of  belonging to the pinnacle of the caste pyramid as if it is just another playful identity tag, is oft-used among the urban Indian set. How is it that invoking one’s own caste so casually is ok when it’s Tam Brahm, when references to caste are otherwise a no-go?

Keep the Change repeats this, as if Tam Brahm is not an identity steeped in a very special kind of privilege that is underscored by violent exclusions. Damayanthi remains steadfastly vegetarian, she balks at the chicken fillets sitting in the freezer next to her ice-cream, although she attributes this phobia to her mother.

Another problem I had was the subtle slut shaming of women who are too sexy. Damayanthi is on a journey of sexual discovery herself, but she still seemingly cannot handle women such as the flirty secretary in the office or her (admittedly snotty) flatmate Sonia. To its credit, the novel does reveal Sonia to be not-so-bad but there was something off about how Damayanthi is presented as the girl who is modern but not dangerously (sexually) so.

I did not love or hate this novel on first reading. On second and third reading, I began to appreciate its satire and what it was trying to do. There is some pretty hard hitting critique of the status quo, and I like where the novel ends. Like You Are Here, this is a debut novel and it has a debut novel’s flaw in terms of but of choppiness in the writing and in some places trying too hard or descending into cliches. While some have complained that the novel is too over-the-top, I think Subramanian was attempting satire and I think she more or less succeeds.

If you’ve read this novel, what did you think? Too much or just right?

 

 

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Title: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Author: Xiaolu Guo
Published: 2008
Publisher: Random House

This book is not strictly chick lit but it has two of the elements – a romantic relationship (although not a quest for a partner per se) and a Bildungsroman trajectory. It also has a characteristic that while not indicative of the gender as a whole, may be classified as a sub genre – the East West encounter.

Our protagonist with the unpronounceable (to non-Chinese people) name – Zhuang Xiao Qiao – travels from a small town in China to London to learn to speak English. There she encounters the strangeness of the West which she gradually comes to embrace (somewhat) via the mediation of a Western man.

In this, the novel is similar to Shanghai Baby, which I will write about later, in that it proposes the Western man in some sense as the initiator into sexual (and by implication cognitive) liberation. This novel is different, however, in that said Western man is presented as the yin (roughy dark/passive/female principle) and the Chinese woman as the yang (light/active/male principle).

There is also an acknowledgement of the lopsided nature of the cultural initiation process. The older Western man imparts knowledge but rarely expresses curiosity in the younger Asian woman’s culture, expressed in her frustrated cry: “You never ask me!”

The novel does somewhat fail the Bechdel test. Written in the second-person and centering on one potent romantic relationship, maybe Guo can be forgiven for basically having her protagonist almost exclusively converse with one man, but it did strike me as weird that one her solo trip to Europe all her encounters were with men. Or is this what happens when pretty young women travel alone and naively proceed with conversations (and more) with strangers?

Because the novel is a journey in language as well as cultural accumulation, it is written in the distinctly broken English of the Chinese person. Thus, unlike The People’s Republic of Desire which presents itself as seamless English text, this novel speaks in the voice of the linguistic outsider and the unsophisticated small town girl and thus rings truer.

Novels which turn on the East-West encounter can descend into cliche but this one stops short and the stumbling language is one reason for this. When non-native speakers use a language there may be a lot of errors, yes, but there is also the possibility for intended or unintended defamiliarisation. This may be a part of the success of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is also why I used to tell my students not to strive for so much perfection in English that they strip the  Cantonese out of their speech. That in trying to translate too perfectly, something precious may be lost. That I have never come across a seamless translation of “gaa yau” (“add oil”) and maybe that is as it should be.

In fact, the novel also highlights this in conversation on Xiao Qiao’s birthday. “You are funny,” the Western men tell her and her Japanese friend. The women point out that they don’t mean to be, that the humour and the straighttalking is the unintended consequence of their linguistic poverty (in English).

“Quiche, q-u-i-c-h-e. I can’t believe it when I am swallowing this piece of shapeless hot stuff. Such an ambiguous piece of food. Totally formless. I wonder about what my parents would say if one day they come to this country, and they eat this. My mother probably will say: ‘It is like eating something from other people’s mouth.’ And my father will say: ‘It must be left from earlier meal so they re-cook it but inside are already messed up.’ I will agree with my father: it is a piece of big mess indeed. You tell me it is actually from France and I don’t believe you. I think the English are too ashamed to acknowledge it is their food. So they say it is French to defend themselves.”

My love of quiche could not stop me from giggling madly. Apart from the humour, the writing touched me in some primitive way. For the past five years or so possibly as a result of aging and the diasporic life, I find a special place in my heart for the diction of home – the mixing of Hindi and English exemplified by Anuja Chauhan’s work, the patterns of speech of the aunties of the Bombay suburb I grew up in and now I realise, the particularities of the Chinese people speaking English. Just goes to show how the Chinese has become so embedded in my idea of home.

 

 

On reading in India

This podcast featuring Chikki Sarkar, publisher of Juggernaut Books and two editors, did a quick overview on reading in India, by which they really mean reading in English in India. It’s a good, if a bit disjointed, introduction to Indian writing in English. The go-to book(s) is Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s History of Indian Literature in English. Of course he only deals with the BC (Before Chetan Bhaghat) era; for the AC era, Ulka Anjaria’s A History of the Indian Novel in English.

Some highlights:

• More Indians are reading in English than ever before
• There is a renewed appetite for translations from regional languages, mythology and non-fiction.

Unfortunately, they never got around to discussing the commercial fiction category that chick lit falls into, although it was acknowledged that the explosion in reading in English in India can be attributed to the boom in this kind of fiction.

The panel’s conclusion is that these developments can be attributed to a sort of “know thy country” sentiment, in which people are interested in excavating knowledge about India. This is an interesting take on the subject – I definitely think there is a resurgence of national pride and in knowing “Indian culture” in all its aspects, but I think the publishing boom wherein foreign investment in the sector was opened up so that it was actually possibly for editors in India to commission local content that fuelled this trend.

Three books on single women in China

Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Inequality in China (Leta Hong Fincher):

“Leftover women” or “sheng nu” is the term used in China for unmarried women in the twenties and beyond. Ironically, this term was popularised by the All China Women’s Federation for reasons Hong Fincher explores in her study.

Hong Fincher deals with the relationship between women’s status and China’s economic reforms via the figure of the single woman. She points out how the advent of capitalism was in some ways a regression because it elided the (at least official) commitment was in some ways a regression because it elided the (at least official) commitment to gender equality and women “holding up half the sky” of the Maoist era (whatever its flaws) in favour of older patriarchal ideas of women’s place in society.

Indian scholars such as Rupal Oza,  Purnima Mankekar and Shoma Munshi to name a few have made similar arguments about the impact of neoliberalism on Indian ideas of femininity and this is something I also explore in my work. The difference between the Indian case and the Chinese case is that Maoism for all its flaws represented a vocal commitment to gender equality (which had some positive side effects) whereas the nationalist movement in India resorted to the hardening of the inner/outer split with women being elevated for their status in the home, as explored by almost every scholar in the classic Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History but most famously Partha Chatterjee in his essay “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question”

What I found most fascinating in Hong Fincher’s book is how the property market intersects with the lives of single women and how the combination of the return to traditional ideas of femininity with the rise of private property as the main source of wealth creation has negatively impacted women.

The other surprising thing is the state-sponsored campaign of vilification against single women – who are chastised for both being selfish by endangering the stability of the nation and for depriving men of wives (these poor men are called bare branches which has a somewhat better ring to it than leftover). There is an inherent contradiction here – are these women the left(over) or the leavers?

Leftover in China: The Women Reshaping The World’s Next Superpower (Roseanne Lake)

While Hong Fisher’s approach is academic, Lake’s is ethnographic. “Leftover” tag notwithstanding, Lake takes a more positive view of the situation of women, noting that the gender imbalance that resulted out of the one child policy forced parents to value their daughters.

When I first started reading Lake’s book I found it hard to get into, which I attributed to having read Hong Fincher’s more academically rigorous book first, but I have now realised that Hong Fincher has spoken out against Lake for not attributing her, and I did think it curious Lake did not refer once to Hong Fisher’s groundbreaking work on the same subject. It is possible that Lake wanted to take a position that was opposite Hong Fincher but there was no reason act like the latter’s work did not exist at all.

In the end, I did get into her book and I think it was her reference to the rebellious runaway brides of Canton in the 19th C, women who realised that their economic prosperity in addition to their autonomy lay in being single and who devised strategies such as marrying dead men to retain control over their own lives. These example are important for us to realise that there were historical precedents to the powerful single woman.

Despite presenting a more positive picture of the single state, Lake also documents the challenges that single women face and the pressure to marry. For example, there are parks in China – I think I actually saw this in Chengdu – where parents and grandparents post resumes of their children, like a verdant marriage fair. Like a chick lit novel, the book gives us insights into the dating scene in China such as how saying I love you is a relatively new concept, how men like their wives to be like “plain yogurt” that they can later flavour but there is scope for intelligent women in the mistress role,  and the importance of sajiao or  ‘the strategically executed temper tantrum.”

We also get an insight into the modern history of romance in China – it was the Communist Party that came down against arranged marriage. The couple were supposed supposed to be comrades who formed a revolutionary dyad against the feudal family structure, an ideological relationship in which love came to be dismissed as a “bourgeois sentiment”.

And we have this classic statement from a woman exploring her sexuality and describing it in English: “I lost my virginia  but I can’t get the organism. How to do?”

Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China (Leslie T. Chang)

Hong Fincher and Lake focus on upper middle-class single women. Leslie T. Chang walks with the millions of working class women who are arguably now China’s economic backbone. These women leave their villages and “go out” to make their fortunes in China’s manufacturing centres. They leave behind the community and mores of the village, and have to grapple with making their own in the city.

Like Lake, Chang focuses on and follows a few women, whose journeys reflect in some ways the country’s own. Along the way, Chang begins a journey of her own, in search of her roots in China.

It’s a beautiful read, one of those rare non-fiction books that left me with the same wistful feeling as fiction does.

 

 

 

You Are Here

Title: You Are Here
Author: Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
Date of Publication: 2008
Publisher: Penguin

If there is a triumvirate in Indian chick lit to replicate the Bridget Jones’s Diary-Ally McBeal-Sex and the City trinity of its Western counterpart (and I know Ally McBeal is a TV show not a book, but this is Imelda Whelehan’s point, not mine), it is Almost Single-The Zoya Factor-You Are Here in my mind.

You Are Here was the highly anticipated debut novel of popular blogger Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan. The blog, The Compulsive Confessor, cemented Madhavan’s reputation as India’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw, chronicling her life as a single woman in Delhi and briefly Mumbai with candidness that extended to sex. The blog earned her a publishing deal, and the result was You Are Here.

The novel was launched with a fair bit of media attention, thanks to both Madhavan’s profile through her blog and the fact that it appeared smack at the peak of the chick lit boom (though we didn’t know that then). Reviews were mixed – many people hated it, many people complained it was just a repetition of the blog (a problem I didn’t have because I came late to the blog party), some liked it.

I had mixed feelings on my first reading of it too. The novel was raw, and yet, there was something there. On second reading, I liked it … a lot. On the third (and this was for the PhD), I was a fan.

Yes, it lacked finesse in some places. Yes, there was (almost) no point. Yes, the end was odd. And yet.

The novel follows the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Arshi, a twenty-something in Delhi, who moans at the start of the novel that both her love life and her career are in disarray. Having just broken up with her boyfriend, Arshi is in a funk, not helped by the fact that she has a “shit job” in a “random PR company”.

Arshi’s malaise, her insecurities about her body and men, are contrasted with her roommate, Topsy. Bizarre moniker aside, small-town girl Topsy is distinguished by her elfin grace, her supreme self confidence and her stable relationship.

The novel is basically a series of tangents on Arshi’s involvements with different men and the travails of her friends, to the backdrop of cafes, nightclubs and house parties. This sounds worse than it is – the problem is that it is quite hard to say what the novel is about, save that it is about life as the young, urban woman lives it, both in the city and in her head.

The more I read the novel, the more I liked its swirls of complexity, particularly the end. Yes, it is raw, and you can almost see the author trying to find her voice and yes, it was very blog-like which doesn’t always work in novel form, but the underlying notes – to me at least – rang true.

***

I just reread this strange New York Times piece on the novel. It alleges that the novel’s women are less liberated than they think. Having read the novel carefully, none of the women actually claim to be liberated. The novel is about this relatively new kind of life women are living, without purporting that it is feminist. The NYT piece also tut tuts:

In some ways, Arshi is just an Indian Bridget Jones. But in the West, that kind of post-feminism was possible because feminism came first. India, which has produced a female president, prime minister and business tycoons and whose universities are filled with brilliant women, has had its elite rebels. But it is leapfrogging into “Sex and the City” post-feminism without having had a broader-based women’s revolution.

FFS, NYT. India actually did and continues to have a women’s movement. (Many) Indian feminists reject postfeminism as a descriptor because we reject the Western feminist ‘wave’ timeline.

It continues:

You cannot fast-forward to the Carrie Bradshaw phase of man-woman relations without a stint of Betty Friedan.

Actually, you can. The black women’s movement in the US did. Betty Friedan’s complete erasure of black women was roundly critiqued by black feminists.

It then goes on to make a distinction between the “real feminism” of Indian villages and the “feminism of compromise” of presumably urban India comprising Arshi and her ilk. Okay.

***

But I digress. Read an excerpt of You Are Here here.

***

You Are Here is now out in its 10th anniversary edition cover (second from left below). Which cover do you like the best?

 

The People’s Republic of Desire

Title: The People’s Republic of Desire
Author: Annie Wang
Published: 2006
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks

This was another book that I should have read during my PhD, but didn’t. Then, when I got hold of a copy, I saved it up for our trip to China so that I was immersed in the locale while reading about it.

In terms of style and format, the novel reminded me a lot of Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, a book that came out of a series of newspaper columns, and thus, can be a somewhat disjunctive reading experience. When I got to the end of The People’s Republic and read the acknowledgements, I realised that this book too grew out of a series of columns the author wrote for the South China Morning Post in early 2000s. While Sex and the City managed to hold together through the threads of connections between characters and the overwhelming cynicism that pervades the narrative – presenting itself as a kind of dispassionate ethnography – The People’s Republic has a more coherent cast of characters, but somehow seems to come together less.

In a sense, this novel has something in common with the early Indian cross-cultural chick lit novels (the kind I do not classify as Indian chick lit per se), in which the woman returns to her roots, seeking both romantic fulfillment and the solution to an identity crisis (which is romantic fulfillment of a different sort). Nuinui, a journalist who grew up in China but spent several years in the US, returns, a homecoming that coincides with the pinnacle of the country’s opening up. She reuintes with her friends Beibei, a tough-as-nails businesswoman, Lulu, a fashion magazine editor and CC, an Anglophile Hongkonger.

If SATC had its types in Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, so does this novel – Nuinui is obviously the Carrie, with the added layer of being caught between East and West; Beibei is the entrepreneur but also the the girl with the (communist) party pedigree; Lulu is the artistic small-town girl who made it and CC, like Nuinui, is caught between East and West, with the added complication of her Hong Kong roots.

These women are immersed in a lifestyle defined by wearing luxury brands, partying in hip nightclubs, and consorting with foreigners sprinkled with an appreciation of some things Chinese. For example, having their heart-to-hearts over Chinese tea and dumplings.

The novel shares a similar zeitgeist to the Tiny Times series. I watched the second or third film, excited about the prospect of seeing Chinese chick lit on film, and although it was very pretty, in a Sex and the City movie kind of way, it was … unconvincing, to say the least. It is possible that China’s princelings live like this, but the whole shebang was a bit OTT. To a lesser extent, that’s the feeling one gets with this novel.

Although Nuinui seeks to distinguish herself from by eschewing the superficial bubble of the  posh diplomatic compound in which she is granted an apartment for a hutong, she does not seem to think it ridiculous for a person to, being unable to choose between Shanghai and Shenzhen as the venue of their birthday party, to choose one for lunch and the other dinner. Maybe it is just symptomatic of my age to find the thought of this not just exhausting, but stupid.

Can you tell I did not love this book?

Maybe I would have been more into it if I had the defamiliarised feeling I did when I read Girls of Riyadh. China is not as unfamiliar to me as Saudi Arabia is, so I feel a bit like I did when I read Ha Jin’s The Boat Rocker, where things that might have probably been shocking  to an audience less familiar with China did not surprise me. I read these books because I want to get an insight into the country and culture I do not have, even after 12 years of living in Hong Kong, but I feel like these books are similar to the kind of Cantonese class I’ve taken – they scratch the surface.

One thing that did come across, and probably rings true, is how the West is held up as the standard of sophistication in most, if not all, things. In some ways – how they interact, for example, and the inexorable influence of the country’s past – the girl’s milieu is very Chinese (well, they are in Beijing), but what they hold up to be valuable seems determined by the West. Even as Niuniu may scoff at a man who thinks Starbucks is the height of sophistication, she and her friends distinguish themselves by their fluent English.

Maybe as with Ha Jin’s novel, I’ll feel later that I did not learn something new, but got a (slightly) deeper sense of something I did not know, but for now, my overwhelming feeling is somewhat “okay then.”

What I did enjoy were the lists of Putonghua words/slang to describe contemporary phenomena and there were patches of good writing that rang true, like the piece about queuing up and shoving, which tellingly also comes up as a column when you google the book. I read some of the columns and I enjoyed them, so I have a feeling that this book works better as a series of columns than a novel, which is a problem a lot of chick lit writing  that developed out of columns or blogs has. Doing a Bridget Jones’s Diary is no mean feat.

I think one of the things that got me was how things just fall into place for these girls – for example, Nuinui wants to write an article about different beauty norms in China and the West, so she has her friend arrange a panel discussion online. Or the aforementioned birthday party which two men compete to throw for the said woman in two competing citiies.Or how every single man they deign to consider has to be not just decently off but rich. To be fair, this is a problem in SATC also.

There is some discussion of changing sex norms – open marriages (well, actually China had a concubinage system and then tolerated mistresses for men for years), abortions, etc but these also seem to be presented with the desire to shock than explored in depth. For example, Beibei has a series of ‘toy boys’ but we don’t get a real sense of what this kind of arrangement is like at an emotional level.

One gets the feeling that something is lost in translation, even though the book was written in English.

 

 

 

The Zoya Factor

Title: The Zoya Factor
Author: Anuja Chauhan
Published: 2008
Publisher: HarperCollins (New Delhi)

The Zoya Factor is not the first Indian chick lit novel, but it is my favourite. If I had to recommend only one Indian chick lit novel, this would be it.

The novel follows Zoya, “a mid-level advertising executive”, who discovers she has special powers to influence the fortune of the Indian cricket team. As she is co-opted into the world of cricket, she finds herself both attracted to the team’s captain and on a collision course with him.

In its general plot – twenty-something single woman and her adventures in romance as well as her career travails – the novel ticks all the chick lit boxes. But Chauhan adds something more – Zoya’s supernatural powers – which should make for really weird reading, except that it works. Chauhan thus places her novel in the magical realism tradition of literary greats such as Salman Rushdie, and dare I say she pulls it off.

As part of India’s anti-colonial struggle, Indian women came to be nationalistically identified with the mother goddess (Bharat Mata). Zoya, as Goddess of Cricket, the modern sport in which the honour of the nation can be preserved, continues this legacy. Zoya’s experience of the double-edged nature of being an Indian goddess is a tongue-in-cheek examination of what the average Indian woman faces as a result of being put on a pedestal. What Zoya achieves in the novel is the ability to find a way to live with her powers while refusing to allow them to be chauvinistically co-opted by various parties for their own interest.

Chauhan makes Zoya the Goddess, seem less absurd and more believable, by crafting the milieu in which she operates – 21st century middle-class India – with finesse. Apart from her skillful handling of plot, this is why readers love Chauhan – her humorous and close attention to life as we (the urban middle-class English-educated but bilingual global desi type) know it. Thus, she has entire passages mimicking the speech of various types – the small-town cricketer, the sleazy agent, the creepy baba, the oily-haired kid reciting a speech, the Malayalee maid – and even as one can’t help giggling, the whole thing is done with affection and not condescension. This is English as Indians speak it, infused with other languages and with its own unique diction (“What to do, control nahin hota”). Chauhan made her name for exactly this kind of writing and capturing the zeitgeist that such language evokes in the slogans that made her famous in the advertising industry and it is a delight to see the novelistic version of “Yeh dil maange more” (in fact, this is what one feels at the end of most of her books).

Unlike many Indian chick lit novels in which non-middle-class and upper-class types – maids, drivers, the roadside chaiwalla – are basically background props, if they exist at all, Chauhan brings these people to the fore so that one of the most memorable characters in the novel is Zoya’s maid Eppa.

The niggling problem with this is while these portraits are affectionately drawn and intimately recognizable, there is an underlying paternalistic validation of the status quo. Eppa is loved and seems to be fine with where she is, so one doesn’t have to think too hard about what it might have taken for her to basically leave her hometown and her family (and the chance to build a family of her own – does Eppa have children?) to traipse across the country with Zoya’s (Mammy in Gone with the Wind, anyone?).

While Western chick lit has been accused of using the chick lit protagonist’s career as a backdrop of romantic maneuvering, Indian chick lit fleshes out the career trajectory in more detail. So in The Zoya Factor, one gets a pretty authentic look at the world of advertising in India at the highest level – the cola wars – which Chauhan is more than familiar with, having played a role in crafting some of those iconic campaigns. Zoya is passionate about her job, and while she sometimes feels like a minion, especially around the famous cricketers, she is no bumbling Bridget Jones.

And there’s the romance. I do not believe that Indian fiction in English offered Indian women anyone that quite so completely dreamy as Nikhil Khoda. I mean, the captain of the cricket team – come on. Immediately, one starts to wonder – who is this paragon of erotic imaginings modeled on? (Dhoni? Rahul Dravid?). With Khoda, like everything else in her novel, Chauhan takes the tall, dark and handsome stereotype and gives it indigenous flavour. He has all the characteristics of the classic Harlequin hero – rich, older, more experienced (sexually but also in life), generally more competent,  makes Zoya feel like an impetuous child. This dynamic harks back famously to the redoubtable Mr Darcy of Pride and Prejudice fame but also the heroes of Georgette Heyer’s fiction. To this, Chauhan adds the quintessential Indian twist of making Khoda the supremely classy captain of the cricket team, arguably one of the most admired and powerful men in the country. Obviously, he is gorgeous to boot, but he’s also a man of integrity who tries to protect Zoya even when he is totally skeptical about her powers.

So, the romantic conclusion of the novel is pretty foregone, though as per usual there are misunderstandings and kahaani mein twists to be overcome (a little too much, IMO). At some point, one wants to give Zoya a little shake and say: “get over yourself.” This man is leading a team in the World Cup, FFS. Her insecurity is blamed on having being apparently “used” by a guy or two in the past, but it gets a bit much after the third “does he love me or love my powers” whingeing. Ouff. Still, this is the stuff of romance novels, so.

The larger tension in the novel is really how it will resolve itself by allowing Zoya to have her cake and eat it. Does she propel the team to victory, and in so doing, diminish Nikhil’s achievements as captain? Does the team win at all (remember, this is a romance novel but the romance need not be restricted to the couple alone, but can extend to the nation at large)? If the team wins without Zoya, what happens to her? If the team doesn’t win, what a let down. The fact is that if the team lost, it would be a bigger meh than Nikhil and Zoya not getting together and that tells you something about the strength of the national fantasy that Chauhan is tapping into.

Chauhan resolves it all fairly satisfactorily, though I did feel that Zoya’s strength lay in her being passive, in standing back, which is a tad in the region of feminine cliche. Nevertheless, if one doesn’t think too deeply (which obviously is not my thang), it works.

So what did you think, dear reader? Is The Zoya Factor your favourite Chauhan novel? Is Nikhil your favourite Chauhan hero? Did you think Zoya’s ‘yes-I-mean-no’ went on a bit too long? Was it a happy ending? Do tell.

Read an extract from the novel here.