A book not about English teachers, or people struggling to find their way in this world, is definitively more than welcome in the very tight panorama of foreign writers in China. It certainly can offer a different type of insight on how foreigners often perceive China and its costumes and breaks the wall of self-imposed silence that we are courteously invited to build around us when we enter the country. The book is also a ferocious, absurd and wildly entertaining satire (think about a “Kafka meets Vonnegut meets Fellini” take on Chinese politics), definitively worth your precious time, but only if you share the same sensitivity of course: “Party Members” comes with a very sour taste which won’t appeal everybody, certainly not the ones looking for bucolic images of the Chinese countryside and the innocent people who populate it.

Arthur Meursault, long-term expat, author and blogger (find him at arthurmeursault.com) doesn’t hold back when detailing the protagonist’s sexual escapades (which in turn become more and more violent and disgusting as his path to power paces up), his moral decay and ruthless business practices. Language is often as rich and lavish as graphically disturbing, yet always coated by a dense and wicked sense of humor. The fact this book is not for the faint-hearted goes without saying, and by turning away from this upside down morality play readers will deprive themselves of a great deal of liberating fun. The prose is extraordinarily effective and proves to be highly accessible without being too simple or poor.

The very private relationship between your typical Chinese everyman and his penis turns into an unstoppable hunger for power that will bring our anti-hero at the top of the local section of the Party where, thanks to a system that awards ruthless behavior, he will have the chance to indulge in is favorite pastime: destroying people’s lives in order to get ahead. The story follows Yang Wei from his birth to his untimely, but well deserved, end… From being the most average and unassuming Chinese government worker of an imaginary Chinese town, to a shark whose quench for power and destruction looks unstoppable. His life changes all of a sudden after being humiliated by a colleague and former friend flaunting his promotion and newly-gained social status; Wei, beaten and humiliated, has the most surprising and life changing encounter of his life, an event that will lead his life to vertiginous height of uncontrolled debauchery and moral corruption. Wei’s penis starts not only talking to him, acting as an advisor and master, but dictating his agenda and slowly, but steadily, taking control over him. Wei’s penis coming to life changes his life completely and shakes his priorities. Inspired by the motto “The only way to be successful is to be a complete and utter dick”, Wei steam rolls everyone—his family, his parents, his coworkers, his subordinates, anyone representing an obstacle is bound to disappear one way or another.

For anybody familiar with China and its rather unique way of doing business, descriptions of meetings, parties, KTV and spa sessions will sound disturbingly familiar (and hilariously disgusting): when you’re on top, the sky’s the limit and nobody will dare to say anything to you, let alone stop you. Relationships are shallow and the only agenda is survival: people are judged by what they bring to the table, be that money, connections, face, or sex. Being a dick (and controlled by a dick) saves Wei from relenting his run to power. Only when he begins questioning his own actions, on the light of a very overly reproachable occurrence, his fate will be doomed, thus letting his dick to accomplish his destiny and become the biggest “dick” of the office (a fate that was impossible to escape apparently from the very start of this descend into absurdity).

The book’s main selling point, Wei’s penis as a character, is also one of the weaknesses of the entire story. It doesn’t really emerge as a well-developed character and struggles in finding its own voice. His dialogues are stiff (no pun intended) and explanatory sometimes. It takes several chapters to find some sort of personal voice rather than being the author’s alter ego. Meursault himself seems to struggle in distancing himself from what is the (a)moral angle of the book, but Wei’s dilemma and final retribution, although absurd, sound real from the entire length of the story.

Meursault’s sense of humor is wild and cruel: he describes a society without morals or faith, where everything is allowed. What’s most important is not getting caught. His book is fun and fast to read, yet it still finds the time to involve the reader and seek his or her complicity. Laughing is always relieving, but questioning how far you can stretch your sense of fun without being an insensitive “dick” popped in my mind several times as the protagonist’s actions became more and more extreme.

Another question that may arise while reading is if it’s acceptable for a foreigner to criticize his host country in such a virulent way, a question valid for every foreigner living in any country. The book doesn’t conceal his not-so-subtle sense of frustration and comes with an urgency that may reveal the author’s personal struggles in China (struggles common to many expats, I imagine). It’s a good chance to read a different kind of book about China, something that doesn’t happen too often. Recommended.

Party Members is published by Camphor Press (camphorpress.com) and can be purchased on Amazon or in selected book shops.

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The book tells the entwined stories of two contrasting English Teachers in Ningyuan: they work for the same school and the book follows pretty much their existence as they try to cope with an alien environment. The book describes their daily routines as foreigners living in the Chinese countryside, and dealing with the somewhat inscrutable Chinese mentality, while trying not to fall into the traps that can beset foreign teachers. There is a sense of detachment in their lives (something whoever has lived as an expat may relate to): they don’t belong to the place nor was the decision to relocate entirely their own, which is a perfectly logical plot device if you want to trigger a comedic situation. The novel is neither a comedy nor a drama though, rather a minimalistic portrait of what being a foreign teacher in a remote area of China really entails, which is where the book stops being interesting, sadly.

Carroll’s style is so rich in descriptions that any action is frozen and the story barely moves. If the intention was to describe the lazy dullness of life in the Chinese countryside with all the antics and the habits people develop, well, this good intention lays under a deep layer of one overwritten paragraph after another. One of the factors that contributes to the inanity of the book is how dialogues are merged into the text without hyphens: the author seems to take a few steps back and watch the story from a distance that doesn’t confer perspective and profundity, but that flattens everything in a frigid bi-dimensional diorama. It would a good stylistic choice if intention was to cast an ironic light on life of a group of stranded expats: pity is there isn’t an ounce of humor for the entire length of the novel. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter and how one of the main characters is introduced:

“For two years now, he had been living in their country, in a crowded metropolis where you rarely glimpsed the sun, forgotten by his people and his people lost to him. Yet despite this estrangement from his family and his friends, he felt no greater bond of kinship among the Chinese with whom he lived. He was a man of more than sixty, gaunt and disheveled, with sparse gray whiskers surrounding his mouth and a sharp, protruding jaw that called attention to his chin. Scanning the crowd, he reached into his pocket and produced a small leather book, whereon the word PASSPORT has been printed in relief across the front. There was little money inside, but from what he could tell, it was likely to be enough. He folded his bills. Then he tucked them away at his breast.”

One of the problems I had as a reader was the complete lack of emotional bond all characters convey: they’re neither likeable nor despicable, they just happen to live in a challenging environment. Characters just happen to exist through their actions, while their interior life is neglected. Their inner words are not depicted. Second problem is characters are not really different from each other from a personality point of view. Since they have no interior life, they happen to be quite nondescript and the conflict between the leading characters doesn’t reach any intensity. No character is put through enough hell to make it an engaging story.

Quincy Carroll never really emerges with his vision and intentions as a writer; his style is rather too uniform and too descriptive. Of course, his purpose is to accurately describe the rural side of China and the members of the ethnic minority that populate it, but in the end he neither creates a world nor engages and moves his audience.  In order to create a bond with your readers and make them care for your characters, to amaze them with the beauty of life in China, you must create a world and imbue it with life: it doesn’t matter whether your book is “Lord of the Rings” or “Sense and Sensibility”, any story lives within its own rules and its unchangeable logic. “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” reads like a landscape painting where everything is seen from a forbidding distance just close enough to give you the illusions you know it all.

“Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” is published by Inkshares, a crowdfunded book publisher. Visit Inkshared.com if you want to know more or if you are interested in starting your own project.

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Hecht obviously knows what he’s talking about as, being himself a long-term expat in the area, he has drawn from his own personal experience (as it can be inferred from his own personal blog) ideas and stories that lay the foundations of his book, and it shows well: characters look real and relatable, grounded in reality, vivid and rich in their motivations and background. Characters are teachers, journalists, young artists, businessmen, all people that populate bars and clubs in the downtown of each city. Ray Hecht has collected and transformed some of the stories he heard (who knows how much autobiography might be in the book?) into a constellation of small existences that, although bordering on the stereotypical sometimes, often emerge as true in their own need of self affirmation.

Whoever experienced life in the Pearl River Delta can understand or relate to the urgency to be heard or to stand out that everyone in the book seems to display: life is too fast-paced and often people focus on their careers, while everything else slips into the background. If the 12 main characters all have something in common, it is a sense of isolation that compels them to question their own choices and fast-forward life to the next, hopefully safer, stage.

The three sections the book consist of several mini-chapters, each following a different character (some of them recurring from section to section, thus closing the circle and giving the idea of a mini universe where people can’t stop running into the same faces again and again). All stories are narrated in the first person and they read as confessions that break the fourth wall and ask the reader to participate in something private and meaningful that otherwise would be lost.

Each section of the book has its own different nuance that reflects the three different cities in which everything takes place:  Shenzhen is a new and fast city, Guangzhou is the old capital, Hong Kong is a hybrid city looking for a balance in its own internal differences. “Shenzhen” opens the book and throws us in the middle of the action: two foreigners, newcomers to Shenzhen, try and mostly fail to integrate in a city with no identity and history. Looking forward with no regrets is the key, even if something gets lost along the way. Marco, the businessman, and Danny, the English teacher, whether they are looking for instant gratification or for some meaningful experience, are constantly semi-detached from reality as they can’t help to feel their presence in the city is temporary, a sensation shared by all the characters in this first section. Life is so fast and opportunities so rich, there is no need or time to look back or to make detailed plans about the future.

“Guangzhou” offers a new take on the expat life in China. Guangzhou, the city, is the old Guangdong capital, an established city with its very own rhythm and style. Whereas Shenzhen’s no identity is reflected in its individualism and fast pace, Guangzhou’s somewhat quieter pace is mirrored by a sense of isolation that is sometimes difficult, or almost impossible, to break. Amber, the Canadian English teacher, Ting Ting, the aspiring artist, and Terry, the Asian American journalist, represent the struggle to find themselves in a vast and disperse city: whether you are looking for a professional achievement or to find people to hang out with, Guangzhou is a giant maze that needs to be crossed.

“Hong Kong” is the last section, the shorter and the most crowded: most of action occurs at a rave party on Lamma island, where we re-encounter many of the characters from “Guangzhou”. The party is where individual stories come to an apex and some of the loose ends are tied up (but not completely, we just manage to say goodbye to the characters we have been following so far). Chapters are shorter and there is more interaction than before between characters, so rather than focusing on individual stories, Hecht chooses to let all the tension explode at a party that can be read as a turning point in everybody’s life.

Hecht writes his characters in need of sexual gratification and infuses them with a need for drugs of any type. I admit this sounds like a stretch sometimes, since the high recurrence of such behaviors flattens out diversities rather than creates an invisible bond between characters. This detail represents one of the flaws of the book, flaws that don’t hinder its effectiveness, but reveal Hecht’s somewhat beginner’s naivete: characters seem to all convey the same emotional range, as well as same ambitions and doubts. That is a forgivable since their backgrounds and environments help in giving each character his or her own flavor, but Hecht doesn’t seem totally in control of his own voice (but 12 different characters, one for each sign of the Chinese Zodiac, os a huge challenge for a novice).

As one of the first attempts to describe the expat life of common people, both foreigners and locals, SCMB succeeds in capturing a particular moment in time and space in which we are allowed to peek in. Hecht’s prose flows smoothly (style is simple, but not bland) and although the reading experience is always rich in details and facts, less characters and more plot would have given the book a more solid texture. Looking forward Hecht’s sophomore effort is from now on something worth doing.

South China Morning Blues was published by Blacksmith Books. It can be purchased from Amazon or at select bookstores.

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