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WORK TITLE: Wish Lanterns
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://alecash.net/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/alec-ash * http://www.chinafile.com/contributors/alec-ash *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016066458
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016066458
HEADING: Ash, Alec
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100 1_ |a Ash, Alec
670 __ |a Wish lanterns, 2017: |b eCIP t.p. (Alec Ash)
PERSONAL
Born in England.
EDUCATION:Attended Oxford University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Freelance writer and editor. Los Angeles Review of Books, managing editor of the China Channel; previously taught in a Tibetan village in western China, 2007. Founder and editor of the Anthill Web site.
AVOCATIONS:Playing piano, running, and tai chi.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land, University of California Press, 2012. Contributor to periodicals, including the Economist, Dissent, and Foreign Policy. Edited the Isis magazine at Oxford University.
SIDELIGHTS
Alex Ash is a freelance writer and editor based in Beijing, China. Ash studied English literature at Oxford University and taught school in a Tibetan village in western China before moving to Beijing. He wrote about the experience as a contributor to Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land. He is the founder and served as the editor of the Anthill Web site, which is dedicated to fiction, nonfiction, and poetry about China.
Ash is a contributor to periodicals and the author of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China. As literary nonfiction, the book provides an in-depth examination of the lives of six young Chinese who represent a modern generation of Chinese born after the death of Chairman Mao and with no memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre. They are also the first generation of Chinese to grow up in the Internet age and in a China that has joined the worldwide capitalist market. “I like to think of this generation as the thin end of a wedge that is slowly prying China open through generational and societal shifts, in a way that politics clearly hasn’t,” Ash told New York Times Online contributor Ian Johnson, adding: “So they are hugely important, because it is the generation that will bring about the change that we haven’t seen since 2008, when I first came to live in Beijing.”
Ash provides biographies of a disparate group of young Chinese millennials. Dahai comes from a military family and describes himself as a loser who was made to study computer science in college and works as a team leader for a tunnel project under Beijing. Xiaoxiao would be considered a hipster in the United States and is a small business owner from the frigid north. “Fred,” the daughter of a Communist Party official, studied for a year at Cornell University and was intrigued with American life. Lucifer wants to be an international rock star, while Mia is a fashionista rebel who works at the China edition of Harper’s Bazaar. Finally, Snail is a country boy who became addicted to Internet gaming and went through a detoxification program to recover from his addiction.
Ash provides details of each of his subjects’ lives growing up, attending college, and working. He also examines their personal lives in terms of love, how they navigate a rapidly changing Chinese society, and the pressures they face from their parents. “Ash’s deeply insightful exploration paints a vivid picture of growing up in China today,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Brendan Driscoll, writing in Booklist, called Wish Lanterns “a perceptive and quietly profound book that leaves open the possibility that personal disillusionment may … lead to political change.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2017, Brendan Driscoll, review of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China, p. 35.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Wish Lanterns.
Library Journal, March 1, 2017, Melissa Aho, review of Wish Lanterns, p. 95.
Publishers Weekly, January 2, 2017, review of Wish Lanterns, p. 50.
ONLINE
Alec Ash Home Page, http://alecash.net (October 27, 2017).
Beijinger, https://www.thebeijinger.com/ (March 14, 2017), Kyle Mullin, “Author Alec Ash on his Debut Book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China.”
China File, http://www.chinafile.com/ (August 19, 2016), brief author profile.
China Readings, https://chinareadings.com/ (November 2, 2016), “Bucket of Tongues Interviews: Interview with Alec Ash.”
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (May 27, 2016), review of Wish Lanterns.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (December 2, 2016), Gail Pellett, “Young Lives in New China,” review of Wish Lanterns.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 14, 2016), Ian Johnson, “A Portrait of the Millennial Generation Changing China,” author interview.
South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com/ (July 7, 2016), Nicholas Gordon, review of Wish Lanterns.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (March 31, 2016), John Pomfret, review of Wish Lanterns.*
Alec Ash
Links:
the Anthill
Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing. He is the author of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China (Picador, 2016), following the lives of six young Chinese. His articles have been published in The Economist, Dissent, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. He is also a contributing author to the book of reportage Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of While We’re Here: China Stories from a Writers’ Colony (Earnshaw Books, 2015), an anthology of stories from the website the Anthill, which he founded and edits.
Last Updated: August 19, 2016
Alec Ash
Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing. " " " "He studied English literature at Oxford University. After graduating he taught in a Tibetan village in western China for a summer, before moving to Beijing in 2008. " " " "His articles have been published in The Economist, Prospect, Dissent and Foreign Policy among others. He is a correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing author to the book of reportage Chinese Characters, the author of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China and founder of the Anthill, a writers' colony of stories from China.
Alec Ash is a freelance writer and editor in Beijing, author of Wish Lanterns, literary nonfiction about the lives of six young Chinese published by Picador in 2016. He was interviewed in the New York Times about the book here.
His articles have appeared in The Economist, 1843, Dissent, the Sunday Times, Prospect, Vox and elsewhere. Currently he is managing editor of the China Channel at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Ash studied English literature at Oxford University, where he edited The Isis magazine. In the summer of 2007 he taught in a Tibetan village in western China, which he wrote about in Chinese Characters, before moving to Beijing in 2008.
In 2012 he founded a 'writers' colony' of stories from China at the Anthill, and co-edited its anthology While We're Here. He has also interviewed over sixty authors about their literary influences at Five Books.
In his free time he enjoys reading, piano and tai chi, and writing about himself in the third person.
twitter Twitter: @alecash
ASIA PACIFIC
A Portrait of the Millennial Generation Changing China
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Sinosphere
By IAN JOHNSON JULY 14, 2016
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Young commuters crowding a subway car in Beijing. Alec Ash’s new book follows six Chinese millennials whose dreams and decisions provide signposts for their country’s direction. Credit How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency
Alec Ash is a 30-year-old British writer and editor living in Beijing who first came to China in 2007 to teach English in a Tibetan village. From 2008 to 2010, he studied Chinese at Peking and Tsinghua universities and started a blog on student life. In 2012, he founded the Anthill, a website dedicated to fiction, nonfiction and poetry about China that resulted in the recent anthology “While We’re Here: China Stories from a Writers’ Colony,” which he edited with Tom Pellman.
Mr. Ash’s new book, “Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China,” profiles six young Chinese born from 1985 to 1990. In an interview, he discussed why millennials in China matter, why a common criticism of them as apolitical materialists is wrong and how they deal with pressures to conform.
Young people are important in every country. Why do we need to know specifically about this generation of young Chinese?
I like to think of this generation as the thin end of a wedge that is slowly prying China open through generational and societal shifts, in a way that politics clearly hasn’t. So they are hugely important, because it is the generation that will bring about the change that we haven’t seen since 2008, when I first came to live in Beijing. We just need to be more patient and wait for these generation shifts to come to fruition.
Continue reading the main story
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etb July 31, 2016
It takes about two minutes to persuade college students that living and working with people over long periods, talking with them about their...
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". . . it’s increasingly true of young urban generations in China that they’re . . . more intolerant of injustice . . . ."Let's hope that...
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How do you define this generation?
I would define this particular generation, born between 1985 and 1990, as being stuck in the middle. The generation before them came of age during the first flash of reform and opening up, whose idealism was very much crushed in 1989 with the Tiananmen massacre. The generation of students after them know nothing except a more confident, brash China. The transition between these two states is embodied in the lives of the generation I write about, whose childhoods were defined by the crackdown after Tiananmen.
Photo
Alec Ash Credit Christopher Cherry
You are the same age as the people you write about, but were there difficulties winning their trust?
Instead of just having formal interviews, I hung out with them, went to KTV with them, traveled with them. Of course, I was always the lanky white guy in the karaoke, literally and figuratively, and my background is different from most of their backgrounds.
But I find if you spend enough time with people, it doesn’t take too long to bridge that empathetic gap and get a real sense of someone as an individual. So it’s really a question of how long you’re willing to spend with them — not necessarily trying to nail the story, but simply building the relationship and sharing something of your own story while mining for theirs.
How much time did that take?
I worked on the book for four years. Of that, two or three were spent with the six characters, including the intensive writing and rewriting. But this, of course, is just a fraction of their own lives. The way I engineered the book, the first two-thirds — it’s told chronologically — is back-reported and then the stuff that I witnessed myself is in the final third of the book, when I catch up, so to speak. So a lot of it was delving into the past with them, digging up old photos, old videos, traveling with them back to their hometowns, talking to their parents and friends.
What can we learn from their stories?
I think they are already bringing change to China at a deeper societal level, if not on the political level, which is what we tend to read about. Han Han [a prominent blogger], who was once the spokesman of this generation, said fundamentally he was optimistic, because they are fundamentally better than previous generations. They don’t spit on the street; they don’t cut queues.
I’d go beyond that and say it’s increasingly true of young urban generations in China that they’re more liberal about social issues such as L.G.B.T., more aware of women’s rights, more intolerant of injustice and have fewer inhibitions to speaking up when they see it. They are better educated, more international in their outlook and connected online to each other.
Contrary to conventional wisdom on China right now, I’m a meliorist. I think that Chinese society is improving despite regressive politics, and I think that comes down to these new generations who are more open while they still have very different opinions from a lot of us.
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How much can we generalize about people who end up in Beijing? Would we find the same thing, or something similar, if we were in Changsha or Nanchang?
I am talking about the urban vanguard because social change has so often happened in China through those groups. But, yes, when I go out to the boondocks and talk to young Chinese a step or three down the ladder, more often than not they are totally consumed by their own personal challenges in finding a job or finding a partner and have little time to think about anything else. But that’s also true of city dwellers, and I would still emphasize the same positives.
Young people in China are sometimes portrayed quite negatively, both in China and abroad.
It comes in two varieties. First, that they don’t believe in anything. They are materialist consumerists whose political consciousness has been bought off by economic growth. And second is the opposite: that they are true believers, especially as nationalists.
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There’s an element of truth to both of these views, but it’s fundamentally wrong to think it can be so simple. First and foremost, let’s put to bed this ridiculous notion that they don’t care about their country. On the contrary, I think they’re deeply engaged with their country’s direction, even if so many feel powerless to change anything outside of their own lives.
15
COMMENTS
Toward the end of the book, your characters end up compromising with the system.
Like all of their generation except the most privileged, they face huge pressures in an intensively competitive society to a degree that is unprecedented. Compromise was a common thread I saw in their lives. Disillusionment is also a fair term to use.
They had such high hopes, and their aspirations and dreams are what defined them, as well as a major theme in the book. But in the end, many of those dreams just came up against a brick wall.
Follow Ian Johnson on Twitter @iandenisjohnson.
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NOVEMBER 2, 2016 BUCKETOFTONGUES INTERVIEWS
Interview with Alec Ash
Image via Picador.com
Image via Picador.com
Alec Ash is a young British writer and journalist in Beijing, who has been steadily making a name for himself after founding The Anthill (“a writers’ colony of stories from China”) and co-editing expat anthology While We’re Here. His book Wish Lanterns captures the lives and dreams of six young Chinese people and has received excellent reviews. I spoke to him about writing the book, expat literature and what it is to be young in China.
What made you choose Qinghai when you first came to China? Can you describe your time there?
This was the summer of 2007, a teaching exchange a month after I finished university. The other options were Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong – none of which I had been to either, although I visited them all on the same backpacking trip. Qinghai sounded like something different: far out in the west, barely mentioned in Lonely Planet, and a Tibetan mountain village that was my first real taste of China. Maybe it’s that desire from something different that brings us all out here, or makes us stay.
Can you describe about the blog you originally wrote about your friends and acquaintances there? What did you learn from doing it?
My first writing from China was all on this blog, called ‘Six’, that followed the lives of six people my age in and around Peking University, where I was learning Chinese from 2008. I was writing for free, of course, and no one really read it besides my family and a few watchers of the then China ‘blogosphere’. But I sharpened my writerly teeth on it, and it helped me process my thoughts as I learnt about China and young Chinese. The debt I owe to it is clear in that my book also follows six lives of the same generation, albeit different people and in a different mode.
When did you have the idea for Wish Lanterns, and was there anything that provoked it? Did you have any literary models or antecedents to draw upon?
The wealth of stories in China and the bookshelf of China literature inspired the idea, but my literary models were narrative nonfiction from all over the word. Katherine Boo’s wonderful book Behind the Beautiful Forevers was a direct model, in the literary style and her removal of herself from the story. Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy wove real stories together with all the narrative suspense of a novel, and also opened my eyes to the possibilities.
How did you choose the people you came to write about? Are they meant to be somehow representative of different experiences?
No individual in the book is representative of anything but themselves. That said, I hope that they capture a wide cross-section of the generation, coming from such different backgrounds and locations as they do, and with such various stories. The idea is that through those six individual stories, a reader can get an impression of what it means to be young in China today, as diverse as experience as that is.
What was the reaction of the people you wrote about to the finished text? Did anyone surprise you with how they felt? Did you have revise after you showed them the text, or was it an ongoing process of feedback and further writing/editing?
I was clear from the beginning with all of them that I was writing a book, and walked them all through the first draft to get their reaction. I’ve kept in touch with them all and so far there have been no nasty surprises, although as I expected I did get a few small facts wrong here and there, which I’ve corrected for the paperback and US edition (out in January and March respectively). And yes, I always revise based on feedback. Reactions can be an invaluable part of research, as well as flagging any mistakes or other things they find objectionable.
The book excels at showing rather than telling, and has many nice poetic phrases. Which writers have most influenced you and in what ways? Had you read much expat literature and do you think any particularly worthwhile?
Thanks! I’ve read a lot of expat literature, enjoyed much of it and not enjoyed some of it, but my influences were mostly the literary nonfiction I mention above.
What were the practicalities of researching the book? How long did you spend with each person, how far you could go with them in terms of their intimate memories?
I worked on the book for four years, beginning with a lot of background research and time spent with the people I write about, getting to know them without my notebook out, before I even began writing. The questions I asked were certainly intimate, but it was up to them how intimately they replied. In a sense that dictated the frame of their stories, and I think it’s important to respect that.
It seems like some of the characters like Lucifer have to create these own paths in life. There aren’t the traditional routes of progressing into the various careers we Westerners have. Do you see these people as trailblazers, or more as idiosyncrasies?
I made a promise when I began writing the book to avoid generalisations, or at least keep them down. Lucifer’s story is certainly one of an iconoclast and a trailblazer in terms of his life decisions, but for every devil there is an angel who is following the conventional path set out by society. I would venture that it’s easier to be a Lucifer in China today than it was even five years before his time, though.
The struggles of the educated young are like a metaphor for China – they have to develop so fast, and have a burden to put things right. They are very much its future. Do you see them driving any change?
Nicely put. I certainly think that the changes we’ll see in China in the next decades will be a result of how different young urban Chinese are to their parents and other generations before them. Social attitudes are one, from women’s rights and LGBT to the role of the individual in society. Work attitudes are another, with perhaps a less rick averse attitude to entrepreneurship and goals beyond the purely material. But now we’re generalising, so I’ve already broken my promise.
Did you have any purpose in writing the book, such as aiming to give a voice to young Chinese in English? Or is that sort of thing incidental?
There was no didactic purpose! If I have narrated these lives and showed their experiences in a way which is surprising and readable, funny and touching, following all of the twists and turns of the twenties, then I’m happy. Whatever any reader might learn about China in the process is a bonus.
What writing projects are up next for you?
That’s a surprise, for me as much as anyone else.
Published in Tianjin Plus
Wish Lanterns is available at the Beijing Bookworm and Garden Books in Shanghai. Find out more at alecash.net.
Author Alec Ash on his Debut Book 'Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China'
Author Alec Ash on his Debut Book 'Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China'
Author Alec Ash on his Debut Book 'Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China'
Kyle Mullin | Mar 14, 2017 8:30 am | 2 comments | 1539 reads
Today, Alec Ash is garnering acclaim for his debut book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China, which intimately details the struggles of six Chinese millennials like Snail, who contended with an online gaming addiction that derailed his studies at a Beijing university. But before the British author began chronicling Snail’s issues in his debut book, he may very well have unknowingly witnessed some of his would be subject’s dysfunctional behavior.
“I’ve never told anyone this before,” the lanky young author says after a talk at The Bookworm in January, before continuing: “During my first visit to Beijing I would stop by an internet cafe at China Mining and Technology University – I was staying with a friend of a friend nearby – and for all I know Snail was sitting next to me playing, and becoming addicted to, World of Warcraft.”
Mia is one of the six millenials that Ash profiled in Wish Lanterns
Internet addiction was one of the major themes that Ash wanted to explore while writing the book, jotting the term on a scrap of paper and sticking it to his desk side peg board along with other major facets of Chinese millennial life like netizism, living underground and the pressure on women to marry early. To find a couple that characterized that latter theme, Ash spoke with the sort of business person that all betrothed Chinese deal with: a wedding photographer. Sitting in the hutong studio of one such Beijing chronicler of new nuptials, Ash leafed through a photo album and pointed to one costumed pair of lovebirds another, asking the photographer to share their stories.
Ash didn’t write about anyone in that album, but the exercise prompted the photographer to introduce him to acquaintances that helped him find a couple with an especially moving tale about China’s customary rush to tie the knot. In fact, the couple that he settled on had a mere month long courtship before signing their marriage papers.
“I was casting out to find the right people, because I wanted to write about these pressures through people’s stories, rather than just lecturing the reader,” Ash told a group of fans during his Bookworm talk. “There’s such an amazing canon of China books, so it was a bit intimidating to write my own. But from the beginning I knew I didn’t want to do the ‘I’m a journalist, these are my observations,’ type of a book.”
Beijing rocker Lucifer is also one of the characters in Ash's book
That urge to write about China from a fresh perspective prompted many of Ash’s literary peers to praise Wish Lanterns. Indeed, the book’s jacket and first few pages are lined with praise from heralded authors like Xiaolu Guo (I Am China), Jeffrey Wasserstrom (China in the 21st Century) and Rob Schmitz (author of Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road and NPR’s Shanghai correspondent). Of Wish Lanterns, Schmitz wrote: “Ash effortlessly dissolves stereotypes with this refreshing and nuanced portrait of individuals who are shaping the China of tomorrow.”
Ash was not only deeply flattered by such kudos, but also quick to reciprocate, citing Schmitz an influence and adding that Street of Eternal Happiness “Captures some of the same themes I was trying to capture in my own book, in terms of people’s ambitions, and the stories of what happens when people try and fail to realize those ambitions.”
“I certainly found a lot of elements in their lives that resonated with me,” Ash says of the six Chinese millennials he profiled
And while his book is being acclaimed for revealing the particulars of Chinese youth to Western readers, Wish Lanterns’ very best passages might not seem foreign or exotic at all. “I certainly found a lot of elements in their lives that resonated with me,” Ash says of the six Chinese millennials he profiled. “I wrote the book in my twenties, and while I wouldn’t presume to say my life experiences chime with theirs that much, so much of it is universal – not knowing what you’re doing with your life, punishing yourself for not succeeding enough, dealing with your parents. All of these things bring Chinese and Western twenty somethings together so much closer than the cultural gap separates them.”
Print Marked Items
Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
Brendan Driscoll
Booklist.
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p35. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China.
By Alec Ash.
Mar. 2017.336p. Arcade, $25.99 (9781628727647). 951.
Profiles of six Chinese millennials reveal a hidden world of pressures, aspirations, and idealism, bringing intimate
perspective to debates about Chinas present and future. Coming of age in an era of economic liberalization and global
perspective, these young people have more options than ever before; they are also victims of a new volatility. When
Xiaoxiao's fashion boutique fails, her mother starts hounding her about getting married, worried that she will be a
"leftover woman," single after 30. An aspiring pop star who took the English name Lucifer for shock value aims high
and wins big at an international music competition, but without the financial success to match, he must repeatedly
revise his plans. A young man who calls himself Snail gets sent to detox to cure his World of Warcraft addiction. To the
extent that these are all stories about dreams colliding with reality, it's tempting to see parallels with Western
millennials caught between their ideals and the crush of the marketplace. But such similarities disappear when Beijingbased
journalist Ash turns to politics, noting the subtle ways in which Chinese youth now signal resistance. The result
is a perceptive and quietly profound book that leaves open the possibility that personal disillusionment may one day
lead to political change.--Brendan Driscoll
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Driscoll, Brendan. "Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 35. Literature Resource
Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689470&it=r&asid=7f86c7832ac2e12a6de1e7b67a369751.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689470
Ash, Alec. Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New
Ash, Alec. Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New
China
Melissa Aho
Library Journal.
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p95. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Ash, Alec. Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China. Arcade: Skyhorse. Mar. 2017. 336p. photos. ISBN
9781628727647. $25.99; ebk. ISBN 9781628727654. SOC SCI
Following the lives of six Chinese Millennials (the people profiled were born between 1985 and 1990), this work by
journalist Ash shows readers how these six individuals are coming of age in a world very different from their parents,
and in a time of great transition in China. While they all end up with a university education and have common issues
relating to their family, relationships, housing, and cultural traditions, each person is unique in their own way. Profiles
span the gamut of patriots, rebels, a college instructor, small business owners, a singer, a fashionista, and even an
Internet gamer. Readers can easily see how they are similar to other Millennials around the world, struggling to live
their lives and work toward their goals and dreams. VERDICT This entertaining look into modern China that provides
a glimpse into the experiences of its young citizens will be of interest to those seeking stories of the country and its
culture.--Melissa Aho, Univ. of Minnesota Bio-Medical Lib., Minneapolis
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Aho, Melissa. "Ash, Alec. Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 95. Literature
Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702178&it=r&asid=821b848bb6ec2e11055ecf936f87e077.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702178
Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
Publishers Weekly.
264.1 (Jan. 2, 2017): p50. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
Alec Ash. Arcade, $25.99 (336p) ISBN 978-16287-2764-7
Ash (co-editor of While We're Here), a British-born journalist living in Beijing, explores differences among China's
millennial generations in this fascinating book. The author follows six young Chinese from vastly different
backgrounds and with even more diverse ambitions. Explaining his theme, he reports the Chinese observation that the
country's rapid changes in recent decades mean that a significant generation gap opens up every three to five years.
Those born in 1980 remember a pre-prosperity China, those born in 1985 wouldn't remember Tiananmen Square, and
those born in 1990 take the Internet and China's global status for granted. Ash profiles three 1985 babies: Dahai, from
Huber province, a "self-styled loser" from a military family; Xiaoxiao, a small business owner from the Heilongjiang
province; and Fred, a party member's daughter and academic from Hainan province. He also includes Snail, born in
1987 in rural Anhui province and now addicted to online gaming; Lucifer, a pop star wannabe from Hebei province,
born in 1989; and Mia, a rebellious fashion stylist born in 1990 in Xinjiang province. Ash's deeply insightful
exploration paints a vivid picture of growing up in China today, and, by implication, this powerful and ever-morphing
nation's future leaders. Agent: Rebecca Carter, Janklow & Nesbit. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 50. Literature Resource Center,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478696537&it=r&asid=f56705ce60f208a3479f27eaa54cde2d.
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Ash, Alec: WISH LANTERNS
Ash, Alec: WISH LANTERNS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017): From Literature Resource Center.
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Full Text:
Ash, Alec WISH LANTERNS Arcade (Adult Nonfiction) $25.99 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-62872-764-7
Novelistic anecdotes reveal Chinese young people struggling with universal themes of education, employment, and
love.In alternating chapters, Beijing-based British journalist Ash (co-editor: While We're Here: China Stories from a
Writers' Colony, 2016) pursues the mostly unglamorous, daily slogs of six young Chinese, born from 1985 to 1990, and
how, as the single-child generation, they are making their ways in the new China. Initially, readers must work to
remember which character is which, and some have English nicknames. There is art student Xiaoxiao, from the
northernmost Heilongjiang province; academically gifted Fred, the daughter of Communist party apparatchiks in
China's far south island, Hainan; gaming addict Snail, from Anhui province; Dahai, from Wuhan, who was forced to
study computer science and settled for a stable team-leader position building a tunnel under Beijing; Mia, a rebel who
scored a stylist job at the Chinese edition of Harper's Bazaar; and Lucifer, who scraped by at Peking University and
only wanted to be a rock star. Each dreamed of the good life, undergoing the rigorous exams for university and
attending college and then joining the massive work force as "just another worker ant." Some, like Snail and Dahai,
discovered power in venting on the internet ("reposting is power"). Lucifer found gratification in joining bands and
screaming English lyrics, and Mia delved into the fashionista club scene. Forced to live frugally, Snail inhabited one of
the tiny spaces in the basements of cheap apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city, living with other members of the
underclass called the "rat tribe." Fred, a graduate student in politics, did a year abroad at Cornell University; while she
was intrigued by the American way, she was not tempted to stay. By their late 20s, all young people are expected to get
married; a few of Ash's subjects obliged, to enormous cost and fanfare by their delighted parents. Ultimately, the author
eloquently delineates the dreams and disappointments of young Chinese. Sensitive, fascinating reports.
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th Edition)
"Ash, Alec: WISH LANTERNS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357467&it=r&asid=26892676829f46d9baf5da4e9f526ed0.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357467
Young Lives in the New China
By Gail Pellett
105 0 1
DECEMBER 2, 2016
AMERICANS ARE OFTEN highly opinionated about China, yet reveal an embarrassing ignorance about the Chinese. Alec Ash’s new book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China is the antidote — a masterfully crafted collection of interwoven portraits of six young Chinese. Three men, three women. Millenials born between 1985 and 1990. Their journeys from childhood, balancing parental expectations against personal desires, hopes, dreams, achievements, and stumbles. And although it is not a political book, at its deepest core lies the question of dissent.
Ash [who often writes for this magazine] reminds us that there are over 320 million Chinese in their teens and 20s in mainland China. “This is a transition generation, the thin end of the wedge that will change China, whether slowly or suddenly. Millennials coming of age as their nation comes into power.”
Ash warns us that the young people he profiles are not representatives or spokespeople for their generation. They all acquire university degrees and aspire to live in Beijing, the nation’s capital. There are no minorities here, they are all Han. There are no Chinese who now live abroad although one, the privileged daughter of a high Communist Party of China official, had the opportunity to do postgraduate studies in the United States. None are admittedly homosexual, bisexual, or transgender. But through the telling of these six stories, Ash cleverly weaves information about demographics, government policies, political history, as well as social and cultural trends.
I have to admit that I had an ulterior motive in reading this book. I had lived and worked in Beijing in 1980 and 1981, when Western diplomats, journalists, scholars, students, and tourists were just beginning to take a peek. China had been closed for 30 years. The Cultural Revolution had just ended four years earlier. And traumas suffered during that dramatic upheaval were just beginning to appear in literature and movies. All resources were rationed: food, clothing, and housing. There was little or no job mobility. Your work unit controlled where you lived, dispensed ration tickets, and granted permission to marry, give birth, or divorce.
All of that is ancient history. That China has been eclipsed by the economic boom that began in the 1990s and continues today, accompanied by the greatest movement of people from the countryside to the cities in global history. I couldn’t imagine any continuity between “my” Beijing and the contemporary experiences of Ash’s gang of six. And I was ready to judge them before knowing squat about their lives — believing they would be apolitical, apathetic, and focused on getting rich. I also suspected that because of government censorship — the many forbiddens — they would be ignorant of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests and aftermath.
What I discovered in reading these compelling stories was a more complicated set of life trajectories. Some of my assumptions were partly fulfilled, particularly the amnesia or ignorance of revolutionary and resistance history (of course, they share that with many American students), but I was surprised by the continuity of issues from early 1980s Beijing — problems their contemporaries also face in the United States.
Ash’s youthful cohort were all only children, all from the first generation of the one-child policy. Pampered initially, they were then disciplined rigorously to study for the brutal college entrance exams in order to secure a place in a university. Expected to succeed there, then find employment and marry. All this by the time they reached their late 20s.
Back in 1980, the universities were just beginning to rebuild after the crippling decade of the Cultural Revolution, when schools were closed or reduced to slogans from Mao’s Little Red Book and many university facilities were destroyed, and professors beaten or killed or humiliated into suicide. At Radio Beijing, where I worked, we reported on the new “television universities” where Mao’s Red Guard generation who had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution — now in their mid-20s and returning to the city — could sit in giant warehouses watching TV lessons, trying to make up for some of their missed schooling. It was a daunting effort and there was much talk of a “lost generation.”
The economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s have provided an opportunity for more young Chinese to attend university than ever before and several of the kids profiled here are the first in their generation to have that opportunity. The problem for today’s millenials, with their improved schooling and vast array of options to study after high school, is that once armed with their degrees, there are not enough jobs. And most jobs available pay miserably. All of Ash’s characters struggle with finding appropriate work for their studies, and most important, making enough money to afford to live in Beijing. Sound familiar?
Several stress lines that Ash bores into resonate with my period in China. The most obvious is the frustration of finding housing in Beijing. In 1980, no new housing had been built since the early 1960s. From the early 1980s to today there has been a steady and then explosive focus on creating new high-rise apartments for a population in the capital that keeps ballooning. Yet for young people today, Ash writes, most rents and certainly sale prices of apartments are out of sync with their meager salaries — even if they can find work. One of the characters who has a good job with a state construction company, still sleeps in a workers dorm (1980s workers would recognize that situation and its cramp on personal, romantic, and intimate lives) and another sleeps in one of the endless, windowless basement cubicles created for the urban working poor in the subterranean layers beneath the new high-rises, where it is easy to read the physical hierarchy of class and status. Another commutes two hours by bus to the fringes of Beijing to find something more humanly palatable and affordable. That’s where legions of Beijing’s young working force and its unemployed live. I am thinking of the march of New York City’s youthful workforce moving further and further to the far reaches of Brooklyn or leaving the city altogether because of real estate prices that don’t jive with their service-economy wages. Young people in Beijing — like those in the United States — confront an increasingly unequal economic landscape.
While Ash’s lens traces the idiosyncrasies of each of his characters’ path to adulthood, one common theme is the parental and societal pressure to marry by your late 20s. It is especially heavy-handed for women, and exacerbated by the gender imbalance caused by the one-child policy. In a traditionally patriarchal society, boy children were preferred, so there is now a ratio of roughly 118 men to every 100 women. In the meantime, many young women are going off to college or earning their own money and are less interested in early marriage. The Communist Party of China has been merciless in its pressure on women. The term “left-over women,” Ash tells us, was actually coined by the official All-China Women’s Federation that is closely tied to the party. During Mao’s era, the federation promoted women’s rights to equality with the famous slogan “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” overseeing a sea change in many women’s lives with rights to education, jobs, and divorce, along with government child care.
At Radio Beijing, I worked on a program about the government’s revision to its 1950 Marriage Law, which granted women the right to marry whom they wished and to divorce. The 1980 revision recommended that young people delay marriage until their late 20s and to reconcile rather than divorce. Both recommendations, one colleague explained, were driven by the most pressing problem of the time — the housing crisis.
We are left to wonder about the government pressure today. Are they concerned about the dangers of an unsatisfied population of bachelors or women gaining too much power? Are they nervous about the urgency for a new generation of workers to fuel their economy, and therefore need women to settle down and become mothers? Is it still a housing issue? Old-fashioned patriarchy? Nostalgia for traditional women’s roles? That everlasting concern of the Communist Party — stability and harmony? Most likely a tangle of all of these things.
Back in 1980, I interviewed a group of English-speaking journalism grad students — all in their mid to late 20s — about romance, premarital sex, marriage, and divorce. Their responses to sexual questions were conservative by today’s standards — at least those revealed in these six portraits of millenials. While premarital sex was absolutely taboo in 1980 and Youth magazine published articles with titles like “Honor Your Virgin” and recommending cold showers to young men, Ash’s cohort feels free to bed down when they have an opportunity. The greater problem is finding a suitable mate to marry, especially for the men.
When the subject of marriageable partners came up for the 1980 journalism students they argued that young couples should consider political compatibility in making the right choice in a mate. During the Cultural Revolution, some husbands and wives had betrayed each other, leading to exile, prison or worse, and families in ruin. But as I listened to these students, something else was already at play — the desires unleashed by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform (literal English translation from Chinese: opening and reform) policies. Young women in the 1980s were starting to judge an ideal husband prospect on whether he had, as the saying went, four things that went round: a watch, a washing machine, a sewing machine, and a cassette player. Three and a half decades later, the pressure for a potential groom is to have a job, a flat, a car, and savings. All of Ash’s male characters struggle with those material standards of success and desirability.
By far the most colorful stories in the book have to do with the cultural behavior of these six individuals and the trends that seduce or repel them. They are the first generation of netizens, gamers, cosplayers (yes, my senior comrades, look that up!), skateboarders, graffiti artists, tattoo boasters, punkers and rockers, barristas, fashionistas, and small-business owners. And it is here, in the cultural realm, that rebellion finds space. It may be in the rejection of being predictable “ant people,” college grads who commute like sardines long distances to work at underpaid jobs. They are mostly outsiders — not from Beijing — and live at the edges of the city.
The Chinese love for coining names is an insight into Mandarin culture — the delicious interplay of characters that are similar in design but with different tones imply different meanings. Ash tickles us with this new vocabulary. Those living in the windowless underground basement cubicles are called the “rat tribe.” There are also the “working grunt tribe” and “urged tribe” — the nine-to-fivers pressured into conformity — and the “bite the old tribe” living off mum and dad. All of this naming implies a critique. A consciousness of conformity versus nonconformity.
If the language offers up an ecology of resistance, the more profound venue of that rebellion exists online. “There was no justice but keyboard justice,” Ash claims, as at least one of his characters (Dahai) takes to the web with millions of other netizens to complain and protest corrupt cadres, environmental degradation, forced late-term abortions, or major infrastructure accidents that the Communist Party would like to literally bury. Ash argues that the underlying grievance of the netizen activists was social inequality and their anger at the riches being carted off by the party and business elites. For them, the system felt rigged.
Occasionally the online protest manifested itself physically in the streets. Usually only outside of Beijing — in the capital the consequences would be too serious. We learn that the only street protests permitted by the Communist Party are nationalistic outbursts, usually against Japan.
While it has been censored and blocked by an ever-tightening firewall, the creativity unleashed by this generation in couching politically forbidden references in a new vocabulary is mindbending.
Xi Jinping’s coming to power in 2013 put an end to much of the creative resistance in blogging by defanging Weibo and arresting those who used forbidden language. Then technology changed again. WeChat (like WhatsApp) became the new communication vehicle. More personal.
By far the most sophisticated exploration of political consciousness comes with Ash’s story of “Fred” (the English name for a daughter of a high party official who pursues a PhD in politics at Beijing Normal University). Through her evolution — which includes joining a campus Christian discussion group for a while — we see how ideology works. She leans toward different perspectives on campus: free-market neoliberalism, central authoritarian control, and Mao-era egalitarian idealism. When Fred does postgraduate work in the United States — to study the American constitution — she is attracted to some American values and legal protections, but she concludes that systems that work in the United States wouldn’t necessarily work in China. She, like the Communisty Party, fear they would lead to chaos. Perhaps more revealing is her conclusion that the US and China have much in common: “Both had a strong sense of exceptionalism. Both wanted to be number one. Both were obsessed by personal and national quests for money and power.”
If there is a frustration with the book and its gaggle of characters, it’s my desire for at least one of them to tap into the riskier territory of dissent. In the West, we hear about human rights lawyers who have been jailed, journalists who have lost their jobs or quit over government heavy-handed censorship, journals closed down, feminist activists who have been arrested for raising issues of women’s rights. None of Ash’s cast indicate any interest in these events.
Perhaps I only want one of Ash’s protagonists to acknowledge the courage and ideas of former generations of dissenters. When I arrived in Beijing, the democracy movement had just been crushed. Wei Jingsheng, the most eloquent voice of that movement, had just received a 15-year jail sentence for calling for democracy and referring to Deng Xiaoping as the new dictator. Artists were marching in the street for the right to free expression. Most of these actors were former Red Guards. Many participants in the Beijing Spring movement went on to lead or participate in the Tiananmen Square protests. They were part of a continuum from the student-led May Fourth Movement of 1919. Where is that impulse in China among the millenials? Or am I missing what Ash is trying to tell us with his selection?
The richness of Ash’s book is in the character development, the details of everyday life, dreams, frustrations, and contradictions of these particular individuals. Ash enters their worlds as a peer (he is their same age) and he’s a sensitive listener, reporter, and storyteller. Through this particular constellation of players, we sense that the fact that China is gaining strength in the world complicates their instincts for rebellion and resistance.
Or perhaps we just see what happens to dissent when the driving forces of survival — work, commuting, finding housing, and building a family — consume most of one’s new adult life. Just like in much of the rest of the world.
¤
Gail Pellett is the writer, director, and producer of award-winning TV and radio documentaries and the author of Forbidden Fruit — 1980 Beijing, a Memoir.
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‘Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China’, by Alec Ash
A closely observed study of China’s millennials offers a provocative portrait of a fast-changing society riven by internal contradictions
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MAY 27, 2016 by Review by Jonathan Fenby
Alongside the flow of books on China’s politics, economy, history and international relations, a considerable literature has grown up in recent years describing the lives of the people who inhabit the new superpower. Young Chinese have come in for particular attention in works about and sometimes by the country’s millennials, the generation born after the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s that transformed the country — and the world. They did not know the privations and terror of the Mao Zedong years and were only infants when the tanks rolled through Beijing in 1989 to suppress the student demonstrators, and kill many more of the residents living along the route to Tiananmen Square.
As Xi Jinping tries to impose a new conformity on the nation, one key question is of the reaction from people in their twenties and early thirties who are accustomed to a way of life very different from that preached by Communist party orthodoxy, one that values a large degree of individual freedom of thought, internal mobility, foreign travel and access to the internet.
Alec Ash’s book is a fine addition to the field, one of the best I have read about the individuals who make up a country that is all too often regarded as a monolith, but which abounds in diversity on multiple levels. Fluently written with nice touches of humour, Wish Lanterns focuses on six members of the younger generation, contemporaries of Ash himself. Some are identified by unexpected English names such as Lucifer, Snail and, for a woman academic, Fred, but all are recognisably part of the new China.
Their lives are skilfully interweaved with the course of events in modern China, from the revolution that overthrew the empire to Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella protests, along with glimpses into such varied spheres as karaoke parlours, the far western territory of Xinjiang and the stultifying rote education system. The half-dozen characters are all interesting in their different ways, be it the aspiring punk rock star who goes to London to win a “global competition” that does not fulfil his dreams, the deeply serious Fred, who moves through successive political stages and concludes that “the only ideology left was pragmatism”, or the tattooed fashionista who carries a knuckle duster and whose mobile phone case is inscribed “BITCH: Beautiful Independent That Can Handle anything”.
This is not a complete picture; there are no factory workers or migrants labouring in menial jobs, nor any representatives of the plutocratic families who have prospered so enormously from their country’s growth. But generalising about China is a dangerous game, as shown by the way in which forecasts of boom or bust have repeatedly come unstuck. There are many Chinas, divided by regions, sectors and by individuals, nowhere more so than among the country’s 300m inhabitants aged between 16 and 30. Eschewing generalities, Ash hopes that “single dots can form an image, and six notes can make a melody”.
Politics as such plays little part in the narrative, except for in the switches and ruminations of Fred, who ends up in a boring teaching job, with a Taiwanese boyfriend who gives courses in classical Chinese culture. But the book inevitably provokes the reader to ponder how this restless, ambitious generation can be contained by the mantras offered by Xi Jinping.
Aspiring punk star Lucifer goes to London to win a ‘global competition’ that does not fulfil his dreams
Ash’s subjects grew up in a privileged time. Economic expansion was strong in the early part of this century and was then bolstered by a huge credit programme launched at the end of 2008. The hangover is now kicking in, with the state-sponsored press in disarray about how to respond given the need to preserve party power.
In contrast to that top-down ethos, the people whose lives are charted in this book have retained their individuality within the system, able to duck and weave to make their way in life.
Ash recalls that, watching the television broadcasts of the National Day ceremony in Tiananmen Square in 2014, “many of the elder generations shed a patriotic tear [but] among young Chinese there was a combination of cynicism and genuine pride in their country — often at the same time”. His subjects are apolitical in the sense that they have been brought up to accept the party’s post-1989 bargain that it will ensure people get richer so long as they leave the power politics to it. But the real scope of politics reaches far more widely in today’s China, where people have become liberalised in their everyday lives in many ways, even if the regime continues to lock up human rights lawyers and dissidents. Growth and job creation comes mainly from private companies; meanwhile, Xi calls for innovation but defends the state.
The people in this book are not rebels in the classic sense; even Lucifer, the punk musician, has an eye for the main chance in the system. But they display a degree of free-spiritedness that may surprise those who believe conformity must rule in the last major Leninist state on earth. How those spirits will coexist with the preservation of a People’s Republic that bears distinct resemblances to the empires of old is a major question for our times, for which this book supplies much food for thought, informing the wider debate while retaining its value as a closely observed picture of how some Chinese live today.
Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China, by Alec Ash, Picador, RRP£16.99, 336 pages
Jonathan Fenby is author of ‘Will China Dominate the 21st Century?’ (Polity) and ‘The Penguin History of Modern China’
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Culture›Books
BOOK REVIEW
Book review: Wish Lanterns illuminates modern China by focusing on six twenty-somethings
As Alec Ash’s subjects grow and adapt over a decade, they reveal something of how China is changing, but this isn’t a study of Chinese youth in general
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 07 July, 2016, 8:03am
UPDATED : Thursday, 07 July, 2016, 8:03am
Nicholas Gordon
Nicholas Gordon
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Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
by Alec Ash
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Picador
4/5 stars
Despite the fact that they live in one of the world’s most important – and most rapidly changing – economies, the motivations and beliefs of China’s “post-80s generation” largely remain a mystery. They are certainly not “democrats-in-waiting”, as many hoped they would be. But nor do they unthinkingly support the Chinese state.
Alec Ash, in his debut work Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China, helps to illuminate the lives of some members of this generation by following six young Chinese through their twenties. Ash describes their lives as they leave for university, find their first jobs, and grow up in the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping administrations.
Hugo-nominated Chinese author Hao Jingfang talks sci-fi, inner journeys and inequality
There’s Dahai, son of a military family and an engineer toiling away at a train tunnel. There is Xiaoxiao, who sets up her own boutique café/clothing store after graduation. There’s Fred, daughter of a high-ranking cadre who studies political philosophy in university. There’s Snail, who develops an addiction to online gaming upon leaving home. There’s Lucifer, the rocker whose aspirations to be an international superstar remain largely, well, aspirations. And, finally, there’s Mia, who jarringly matches her skinhead fashion style with a job at the glossy Harper’s Bazaar.
Wish Lanterns skillfully moves from one subject’s story to another, and Ash describes the everyday struggles of his subjects in vivid detail. From discussions of China’s demographic problems to the use of emojis among China’s youth, Ash ties his characters’ stories to other changes happening around the country.
The young people in Ash’s book end up changing their views, sometimes quite radically, during their twenties.
The book is obviously set in China, and refers to Chinese developments. The shift from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping – and the subsequent shift to a more “patriotic” and controlled society – is reflected in the lives of all of Ash’s subjects. And, like all young people, their view of themselves, of their communities, and of China as a whole, end up changing radically throughout their lives.
Fred’s story is perhaps the one that is the most “political”. Remaining an academic – and thus isolated from the day-to-day grind of the others – she is perhaps freest to have complex opinions about China’s politics. But Fred’s opinions are anything but stable. She enters college as a supporter of democracy, human rights and a strong legal system. She leaves college as a full supporter of China’s socialist government – a view she comes to naturally, and not as a result of any propaganda. She ends up somewhere in between: a professor of Western political philosophy in a Communist government college, with the firm belief that China’s system of government is, while not perfect, better than all the alternatives, yet still reads the Taiwanese press for an outside perspective.
Book review: A Billion Voices asks: is there such a thing as ‘the Chinese language’?
But Ash’s subjects are concerned with more day-to-day problems. They need to find, and hold, a job – and then, when they find one, they find the work dull and unfulfilling. They need to find an apartment – a challenge in increasingly expensive Beijing. And finally – but no less importantly to some – there is the challenge of dating. With China’s changing demographics, the men struggle to find and attract a partner, while tradition encourages women to “settle”.
These are stories about “growing up”. It’s a time when people mellow – what seemed like an injustice at the age of 21 is more tolerable at 29. It becomes more difficult to challenge a system – political, economic, social or otherwise – when one becomes a part of it. Ash’s subjects gain responsibilities. What they want from life changes. China, with all of its opportunities and social pressures, moulds Ash’s subjects into very different people by the book’s end.
The exception that proves the rule is Lucifer, whose ambition to become an international superstar is admirable, despite life constantly throwing up obstacles to his success. His story ends with a reaffirmation of his dream to make it big. There is no evidence to suggest he will succeed. But his resistance to social pressures is commendable – if perhaps unfounded.
Wish Lanterns looks at six young people out of many hundreds of millions.
Reading Wish Lanterns can be, for lack of a better word, eerie. It follows young Chinese people as they enter university, graduate, find their first job, their first apartment, first partner, and so on. All are challenged. All are forced to make compromises, with themselves and with others.
It’s not a book about what China’s youth are like in general – what they want, what they believe, what they hope China will become. There is a trend in Western media to paint anyone under the age of 35 with a broad brush and label them “the young” (or, worse, “millennials”). One assumes that many both inside and outside of China say the same when talking about China’s youth. There may be good evidence for making such claims, but this can obscure a great deal of variance among the larger population.
Ash avoids this problem with his in-depth narrative exploration of his subjects. Each of his subjects face the same challenges in different ways, making it one of the best explorations of the topic that I have read.
Asian Review of Books
Exploring the dreams of China’s pampered and restless millennial generation
By John Pomfret March 31
John Pomfret, a former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, is the author of “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present.”
John Pomfret is author of a history of U.S.-China relations, “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,” and editor at large at SupChina.
In the past 100 years, there have been three great generations of Chinese. The first were those who were born in the last years of the 19th century, went to the United States to study and returned to China to establish all of the modern Western disciplines from law to medicine to the sciences. The second embraced Marxism in the 1920s, founded the Chinese Communist Party and, profiting from Japan’s invasion of China, conquered China in 1949. China’s third great generation emerged in the 1980s from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution and came of age in a country that had finally embraced market-oriented economic reforms. Steeled by years in China’s poverty-stricken countryside where they had been banished by Chairman Mao Zedong, they returned to China’s cities to drive the changes that have turned China into the world’s second largest economy.
The only thing great about China’s millennial generation, born after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, however, appears to be its size. There are 320 million Chinese between the ages of 16 and 30. Raised in a China far richer than that of their parents, with scant knowledge of the epochal events of China’s recent history such as the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution or the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square, China’s millennials are the cause of endless hand-wringing among their elders and even the Chinese Communist Party. Children of the “one-child” policy, they are said to exhibit symptoms of what the Chinese call the “little emperor” complex. As single children, they garnered excessive amounts of attention from their parents and grandparents, making for grown-ups with weak social skills, incapable of independent thought. Pampered by their relatives, Chinese young men, in particular, face what Tiantian Zheng, a professor of anthropology at State University of New York, has called a “crisis of masculinity.” Some party officials have even expressed the concern that China’s “effeminate generation” threatens to return China to its colonial past when it was bullied by the West. China’s ministry of education has even issued a handbook — called “Little Men” — to encourage China’s boys to be, well, boys.
Against this angst-filled backdrop, Alec Ash has written one of the first books in English about China’s millennials. “Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China” is an intimate portrait of six young Chinese — three women and three men — on a journey from high school into the workforce. We meet a rock-and-roll wannabe, a tattooed fashion stylist, an engineer, an addict of online gaming, a girl desperate to leave the confines of her one-rice-paddy town and a budding nationalist who calls herself Fred — after her muse, Frederic Chopin. About three-quarters of the way through, two of the main subjects meet and marry — but I won’t spoil it. Lyrical, with its characters finely drawn, Ash’s book paints a telling portrait of this most restless generation raised in a system that has provided them with unprecedented personal opportunities while denying them political ones.
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Ash gets a lot about China very right. Several decades ago, Western writers were agog with the fact that the Chinese liked rock-and-roll and had sex. Ash takes these in stride. His subjects inhabit a globalized youth culture in a highly caffeinated country (yes, young Chinese drink more coffee than tea) where, as Ash writes, there’s “a generation gap every five years.” Ash’s most interesting character, Mia, grabbed one of her nicknames from the film “Pulp Fiction.” Another character, Lucifer, takes his inspiration from South Korean pop and Japanese porn. Ash parses the particulars of China’s hookup culture and has written probably the best paragraph in the modern Western oeuvre describing how Chinese women approach dating, getting just right how they often feign helplessness to make their male friends feel strong. Ash is also attune to the yawning divide between country-bumpkin climbers and the urban cool.
"Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China," by Alec Ash (Arcade)
Reading the book, I had two questions: Are these really the men and women who are going to help make China into a world power? If so, China doesn’t really seem like such a threat. Ash identifies the restless energy and furtive search of this Chinese generation. But he also has discovered that, as he writes, “to get anything worth having in China . . . either you had to play dirty or bend to the system completely.” All of his characters seem bereft of idealism or dreams bigger than themselves. “He was thoroughly disabused of the belief that he could better his society,” Ash writes of one man. “Instead, he focused on improving himself.”
This leads to my next question: What does Ash think about this generation that will have a key voice in China’s future? At only one point in the book does he express an opinion about his subjects, noting that they were “mollycoddled to comic extremes during infancy,” then “helped up after every fall, and wrapped in more layers of protection than a porcelain vase in transit.” But that’s it. Ash has said that he purposely avoided passing judgment on the generation because it would be unfair to generalize from such a small sample. But I’d argue that especially because Ash is a fellow millennial and such a gifted observer, he’s uniquely placed to draw conclusions about this group. The fate of a large portion of humanity turns on the answer. He should have given it a try.
WISH LANTERNS
Young Lives in New China
By Alec Ash
Arcade. 320 pp. $25.99