Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo.
Title: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.
Author: Xiaolu Guo.
Genre: Fiction, bildungsroman.
Country: U.K.
Language: English
Publication Date: 2008 (a re-working of her Chinese novel from 2000).
Summary: The story of Fenfang, a punk girl from southern China who runs away from home to Beijing at the age of seventeen. She moves through a series of jobs, ending up making a living as a movie extra and trying her luck as a scriptwriter. She negotiates boyfriends, a changing China, and tries to educate and define herself as fights with herself and with the harsh city throughout her monologues.
My rating: 7/10
♥ My youth began when I was twenty-one. At least, that’s when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life - some of them might possibly be for me.
If you think twenty-one sounds a bit late for youth to start, just think about the average Chinese peasant, who leaps straight from childhood to middle age with nothing in between. If I was going to miss out on anything, it was middle age. Be young or die. That was my plan.
♥ Then he asked my age and I asked his. That’s the tradition in China. If we know each other’s ages we can understand each other’s past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit had happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before our births, for instance, and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. In 1989 was the Tiananmen Square student demonstration. Anyway, Xiaolin was one year younger than me, so I assumed we were from the same generation. But when he said he had never once left Beijing, I changed my mind. It was clear he wouldn’t understand why I had left home. Perhaps we were from different generations after all.
♥ Xiaolin pulled off his T-shirt and jumped straight into the mossy water. I turned around and changed into my brand-new swimsuit. When I looked back, I saw Xiaolin swimming off to the other side of the pond. He didn’t give a damn that I was scared of water. In that moment, I thought that I would never learn how to swim if I stayed with him. Sometimes you just know these things, even if you can’t explain how. It’s fate, if you believe in fate.
♥ I opened my apartment door and hustled my naive foreigner inside. I felt safer once I’d got there. Humans need cages around their bodies - wombs, houses, coffins.
♥ I was seventeen when I finally left that shithole for good. Thank you, Heavenly Bastard in the Sky. Everything about that day is so vivid still: the stretch of the sky, the pull of the wind, the endless, tangled fields, the silent little village and how it burnt itself into my heart as I ran.
♥ “Such good food,” says Li Li. “I haven’t eaten for days.” Hao An is pleased. “If you think so, you should come again.” He is strangely elated. What end of the world? What UFOs? Life is good. Spicy Ma La hotpot. Busy streets and hungry customers. Li Li in his tie-dyed shirt. He has all he needs.
♥ People always say it’s harder to heal a wounded heart than a wounded body. Bullshit. It’s exactly the opposite - a wounded body takes much longer to heal. A wounded heart is nothing but ashes and memories. But the body is everything. The body is blood and veins and cells and nerves. A wounded body is when, after leaving a man you’ve lived with for three years, you curl up on your side of the bed as if there’s still somebody beside you. That is a wounded body: a body that feels connected to someone who is no longer there.
♥ I recalled what Huizi said to me: “Fenfang, never look back to the past, never regret, even if there is emptiness ahead.” But I couldn’t help it. Sometimes I would rather look back if it meant that I could feel something in my heart, even something sad. Sadness was better than emptiness.