TWENTY FRAGMENTS OF A RAVENOUS YOUTH

Peasant girl leaves her rural Chinese village for a fresh start in bustling Beijing.

Appalled at the thought of farming sweet potatoes for the rest of her life, feisty 17-year-old Fenfang Wang cuts out from tiny Ginger Hill Village the first chance she gets, with a head full of big-city dreams. Arriving in Beijing after a three-day train ride, she drifts through a series of menial jobs and just as many cheap apartments before finding an offbeat kind of success as a movie extra. Along the way she cohabits with a needy young man, Xiaolin, and his family, before falling for American student Ben. Dating Ben gets her kicked out of yet another flat, but it is actually her individualist nature that gives her the most trouble. She’s hardly a good communist, and the China she describes is one at odds with itself, with wealth and development clashing with old-school Maoist values. There’s lots of food too. Fenfang’s appetite, true to the title of this series of interconnected stories, is an impressive thing, and finding enough to eat is a recurring theme. In one of the more poignant stories, she goes back to visit her aging, taciturn parents, who have—in hopes of pleasing their daughter—invested in a big modern TV jarringly out of place in their humble surroundings. Enamored with films yet tired of anonymous walk-on roles, Fenfang eventually begins writing stories of her own, desiring to “meet characters who would climb up my pen.” The writing, it turns out, feeds her soul as well. Boasting startling frankness and streetwise slang, Xiaolu Guo’s latest effort (A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, 2007, etc.) offers an insider’s view of what it means to be young in modern Beijing.

It’s tempting to greedily gobble up this slim coming-of-age narrative, much like the chive dumplings its heroine cannot get enough of.