HATE Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui. Picked it up at a convenient store in White Sands Beach on Ko Chang in Thailand this summer. I had been curious about it since hearing of it's prohibition in China two years ago. I always thought I wanted to read it in Chinese, for good practice. But I never found a Chinese version (though looking for a picture of the book today, I stumbled across a site with full text of the Chinese version here), so when I was looking for a summer beach read and it just happened to be on the shelf of that little convenient store, I plunked down the 350 baht for it (okay, actually Tak bought it for me). Touted as "dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love," I found it suprisingly mild and very cliche, and even annoying. Perhaps being a wild American, I just can't fully understand just how "naughty" her sexcapades are to the Chinese. And at the same time, perhaps having lived in China for for so long, and being exposed to the 'sleazy foreigner hooks up with Chinese girl with long black hair' phenomenon on a daily basis, has also desensitized me to her shocking tale of having an affair with a German expat that speaks perfect Chinese. And her Chinese boyfriend could not perform in bed. There is a reason why all the dorkiest men from Western countries become hot commodities in Shanghai. A pedantic display of artists an writers she finds inspiring. I found myself rolling my eyes through the book.