I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China

About

Five novellas and a short story chart the hedonistic, chaotic underbelly of post-Mao China. Set against mundane landscapes — a Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital — Zhu Wen's characters pursue money, sex, and freedom with the reckless energy of people who have just discovered that the old rules no longer apply and the new ones haven't been written yet. Zhu Wen writes with audacious plainness, refusing to aestheticize the mess of China's economic transformation or moralize about its casualties. His fiction captures a specific historical moment — the scramble of the 1990s — with the documentary precision of someone who lived it and the dark humor of someone who survived it. Stories from a China between ideologies — where the only thing everyone agrees on is that dollars are better than slogans.