Good, bad, beautiful, ugly. Innocent, guilty, sophisticated, naive.
Who am I?
To my mother and father, I’m the epitome of a good daughter, hardly a disappointment. ("You could win the Ulirang Anak Award," my friends tease.) To my friends, I‘m a virgin who blushes at green jokes but quite the bitch when the situation calls for it. To most men, I’m an interesting piece of work entailing good conversation – in other words, "a woman who thinks too much." (Which is too bad because most men don’t like to get involved with women who think too much.) To strangers, I’m no more than a pretty face. But I’m really just a regular girl trying to get by, coping with the vicissitudes of life.
Anyway, I belong to that generation of Filipino women sandwiched between The Seventh Heaven and Sex and the City. And at 19, I found myself furtively indulging in foolish games with the audacity of a young adult and the naiveté of a child.
My world was a flood of make-believe – of dreams and nightmares, of demons and angels of my own imaginings. Yet I found myself strangely drowning not in the flood of fantasy that comes in rescue against the intoxicating intricacies of life but in bittersweet reality.
I was living on the edge, caught in the battle between my instincts and my superego.
Swept away by my burning desire to soar, I was blind to the hurt I inflicted upon myself. And when I looked at the image on the mirror in front of me, what I saw was a woman I barely knew.
I was lost.
Shanghai Baby, with its thought-provoking honesty, brought me to the realization and, finally, to the acceptance of my vulnerabilities as a young woman of my generation in search of moral grounding in a world where superficiality is fast becoming the name of the game. It taught me to embrace my frailties as much as to take pride in my strengths.
On my road to self-discovery, the novel offered me a glimpse of the sort of person that I am, the sort of person that I’m not, and the sort of person that I can became.
Wei Hui‘s dynamic, provocative depiction of the modern, liberated Chinese mirrors the plight of many Asian women in cultural transition as they try to find their place in a changing, angst-driven society with a penchant for both hopeless romanticism and ruthless cynicism.
Suffice it to say that I found comfort and delight in Wei Hui‘s alternate reality. Shanghai Baby, with its vibrant voice and captivating narration, seemed more real to me than fiction. Beneath its poetic exploration of life’s little ironies and seductive eccentricities lies a picture of my own reality.
I thought that life was like the movies. That somewhere along the way, as scene after scene unfolds, something big is going to happen that will ultimately define who I am. But I was wrong.
Things happen and all of a sudden you find yourself caught in a whirlwind or falling into oblivion – the object of life‘s twisted humor. But Shanghai Baby made me realize that it’s not just the big scenes that make you who you are. In reality, it‘s the little things and the countless details that make life worth living.
Wei Hui‘s beautiful prose attests to this. With "a literary star shining down on [her] and a belly full of ink," she shares to her readers the pleasure that fine details can bring to an ordinary day: "the golden sunlight dripping outside the window like melted honey"; that delicate feeling "when fingers touch the seductive white petals" of scented lilies; the loss of all inhibitions when dancing to the beat of techno music is a sexually-charged atmosphere; a look, a smile, a kiss, a touch.
And in the person of Coco, Wei Hui’s young, magnetic protagonist, I found a kindred spirit who matched my zest for life. "Full of energy and ambition," she wanted "to burst upon the city like fireworks."
"[I] see the world as a ripe fruit just waiting to be eaten," she says.
Like Coco, I struggled to find myself amid conflicting emotions, frustrations, betrayals and death. The novel ends with a simple yet mystifying question: "Who am I, indeed? Who am I?"
I pause in search of my soul for the answer. And in a burst of inspiration after reading the novel, I write:
I am North; I am South; I am East and West. I am the direction that can lead you to anywhere, and to nowhere. I am your compass to heaven and hell.
I am Wind; I am Water; I am Earth and Fire. I am Woman. And I too shall "burst upon the city like fireworks."
Shanghai Baby celebrates womanhood if nothing else.