Twenty Fragments of Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo has conceived the love child Ha Jin and Sandra Cisneros never had. Taking after her mother, Fenfang Wang depicts her life in Beijing in short Mango Streetesque stories - buying a green-apple bathing suit, writing a screenplay, scrounging up money for a meal. She has left her rural family behind and now lives alone in the city. Supporting herself as a movie extra, she moves from apartment to apartment trying to avoid an obsessed ex-boyfriend. As she pours a glass of Great Wall Red Wine or slurps her UFO noodles, Fenfang wearily tries to make something of her new found freedom. As she recounts, children in rural China skip from childhood to middle age. At 21, she is determined to revive a youth she never experienced and fill it with shiny things. Ever her father's daughter, she details the realities of Chinese life interfering with her pursuit - endless paperwork, nosy elders, dust. Whether choking on exhaust or failing to find romance at McDonald's, Fenfang views her disappointments matter-of-factly. As she says, "It wasn't that the landscape was ugly exactly, it's just that you wouldn't take a photo of it." Luckily Guo is there taking snapshots. Each fragment of this collection reveals the aimless ambition and enthusiastic ennui Fenfang and her peers are confronting in post-modern China. Is it any wonder that Fenfang excels at roles such as Bored Waitress or Woman Walking Across a Bridge? Although her part may seem insignificant, catching a glimpse of her, albeit briefly, may lead us to contemplate what her life is really like. We may ponder what books she reads, how she takes her coffee, or why she dreams. We may even ask who her parents are. If we don't, as one character notes, we're likely to take nothing more from the experience than we would shopping for cabbages.