Wang, Annie 1972–

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Wang, Annie 1972–

PERSONAL: Born Rui Wang, 1972, in Beijing, China; immigrated to the United States, 1993, naturalized citizen, 2000; daughter of a newspaper editor and an author. Ethnicity: "Chinese." Education: University of California, Berkeley, graduated, 1996.

ADDRESSES: Home—Hong Kong and San Francisco. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, novelist, editor, journalist, commentator, interpreter, public speaker, and women's rights activist. Worked at Washington Post Beijing bureau, Beijing, China; U.S. State Department, contract interpreter. Cofounder, with sisters Wei Wang and Fei Wang, of Chinese Culture Net, San Francisco, CA, 1997–.

WRITINGS:

Wang shi san jie mei de tian kong he meng, Wen hua yi shu chu ban she (Beijing, China), 1997.

Cong Beijing dao Jia Zhou, Zhongguo she hui chu ban she (Beijing, China), 1999.

Su bu ke nai, Shanghai wen hua chu ban she (Shanghai, China), 2001.

Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen, edited by Dan Frank, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2001.

The People's Republic of Desire (novel), Harper (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including the South China Morning Post, Time (Asia), and the Washington Post.

Worked as editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine in Shanghai, China.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist and journalist Annie Wang left China in 1993 to study at the University of California at Berkeley and later took a position as a contract interpreter for the U.S. State Department, a move that helped her become a United States citizen in 2000. The following year, she published Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen, set around the Chinese government massacre of prodemocracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Wang acknowledges that the book is an emotional, rather than a political, view of the events of that period. A Publishers Weekly contributor said her version, "at once convincing and utterly foreign, both attracts and terrifies."

Wang grew up a member of the privileged class of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1989, as a sixteen-year-old academic prodigy, she was named one of China's ten outstanding students. Wang hosted radio shows for teens, wrote, and dreamed of studying in the United States. Her father was a newspaper editor, and she enjoyed capitalist luxuries such as telephones, movies, and books, some of which were banned and inaccessible to the majority of the people. Thomas Crampton wrote in the International Herald Tribune that "to evade rules prohibiting Chinese from entering Beijing's luxury hotels, Wang and her autograph-seeking teenage friends hid outside the entrance in a senior official's borrowed Mercedes, waiting for foreign musicians to greet fans. Many of Wang's friends cashed in their connections for the wealth and power brought by joining investment banks like Morgan Stanley. Wang, however, turned to writing."

Wang's novel was born on a May day in 1989, as she pedaled her bicycle through Tiananmen Square, and it took her ten years to complete. "The result," wrote Sorina Diaconescu in the Los Angeles Times, "is a kaleidoscopic view of 1980s China, seen through the eyes of Lili, a street-smart heroine who turns tricks on the sidewalks of Beijing as an easy fix to boredom." Booklist contributor Elsa Gaztambide described Lili as "brimming with angst and rebellion, as refreshing as she is disagreeable."

Lili is arrested for "hooliganism" and sentenced to three months of re-education in the country. After she is raped by a party official, she runs away and returns to the city, where she lives on the edge, in a world populated by gangs and filled with violence. Lili brings further humiliation on her family by falling in love with a Chinese-speaking American journalist named Roy, who takes her along as he travels across China. It is then that Lili begins to understand her country, as she compares the lives of poor villagers and the lush accommodations of foreign diplomats and businessmen. Like Wang, Lili witnesses the student revolt and massacre by the People's Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square. In a Library Journal review, Shirley N. Quan called Wang's writing "clear, full of imagery" and noted that "she describes the oppression of free-spirited and free-thinking women in China." Diaconescu wrote that "the narrative hopscotches in a series of snapshots capturing the poverty and indignity of China's provincial backwaters, the snug comforts party officials enjoy, the materialism of a new urban generation, and the tension between Chinese values and the transplanted cultural heritage of the West."

In 2006, Wang published her second novel of Chinese life. In a modern Beijing, China, four affluent, educated women regularly meet to ponder love, status, and life in The People's Republic of Desire. As they move through a culture obsessed with celebrity and status, the four sustain their own desires for sex, upward mobility, and coveted trappings of Western civilization. Narrator NiuNiu is a journalist recently returned to Beijing after being educated in the United States. Her friends and collaborators are a beautiful fashion editor, LuLu; a gutsy entertainment executive, BeiBei; and a public relations professional who wants love and status in equal measure, CC. Struggling to reconcile herself with the dramatic cultural differences between China and America, where she was born, NiuNiu seeks insight through her association with her friends and the stories they tell about their daily lives, loves, and experiences. All four ponder questions important to them, not only in terms of their relationships but what it means to be a woman in modern China. In their personalities and their actions, the women reveal their attitudes toward Chinese culture and their place in it. Since discovering her husband was cheating on her, BeiBei has regularly had younger lovers. LuLu has endured the trauma of three abortions to please her indifferent, sometimes abusive boyfriend. And somewhere in that vast Asian country is NiuNiu's lost lover, Len, and she wonders if she will ever see him again. In Publishers Weekly, a critic labeled the book "a trenchant, readable account of a society in flux." Reviewer Shirley N. Quan, writing in the Library Journal, commented that "what makes this novel interesting is that while it may dispel certain stereotypes about life in China, it highlights the disparities between city and countryside." A Kirkus Reviews critic called Wang's novel "a charming collection of modern fables that offer an intriguing glimpse into a world where modernity has arrived with a bang."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 2001, Elsa Gaztambide, review of Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen, p. 1669; March 1, 2006, Allison Block, review of The People's Republic of Desire, p. 70.

Economist, August 11, 2001, review of Lili, p. 73.

International Herald Tribune, June 5, 2001, Thomas Crampton, "A Novel of Sex, Violence, and Tiananmen Square."

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2006, review of The People's Republic of Desire, p. 160.

Library Journal, June 1, 2001, Shirley N. Quan, review of Lili, p. 219; April 1, 2006, Shirley N. Quan, review of The People's Republic of Desire, p. 88.

Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2001, Sorina Diaconescu, "A Kaleidoscopic View of China from a Street-smart Whiz Kid," p. E1.

Ms., October-November, 2001, Mai Hoang, review of Lili, p. 71.

Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2001, review of Lili, p. 58; February 13, 2006, review of The People's Republic of Desire, p. 63.

Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 2002, Frances Wood, "An Untamed Soul," p. 23.

Washington Post Book World, July 22, 2001, Lisa See, "Interesting Times," p. T04.