China High: My Fast Times in the 010: A Beijing Memoir

by ZZ

Overview

A swaggering true tale of sex, drugs and money in the new young professional class in China, a go-go country seen through the entrepreneurial and personal experiences of ZZ, an American-educated Chinese national who returned to his native land to start a business, live large, and get a piece of every lissome girl, line of coke, and bottle of Champagne China had to offer.

ZZ is the perfect guide to the new Beijing: he's got insider cred but an outsider's eye for the uniquely bizarre aspects of Chinese life. ZZ's parents got him out of Red China, but with an American education under his belt, Beijing is now his capitalist playground. ZZ starts his own company by day and by night lives large in Sanlitun's clubs, bars, and dim sum emporia. He has a gift for using guan xi (a network of favors) to carve out a coveted spot in the nighttime world of clubs and cafes frequented by the new young professional class. But in this freshly morphing world, it's not clear who can be trusted no matter how much guan xi you spread around—and ZZ's glam urban life comes to a crashing halt when he's picked up by the police for his 007-worthy "Zigarette." Suddenly there's an entirely new and gritty pecking order—and ZZ better find a way—FAST—out of a Chinese prison!

A swaggering true tale of a young man rediscovering himself in today's China, ZZ's voice is hip and fresh, and the on-the-ground looks he gives into the world's next superpower is more than just a rice cake of sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312605568
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

ZZ is a Chinese national who spent half of his life in the United States. He returned to China as an attorney with one of the top international law firms in the world, and currently divides his time between Beijing and Shanghai.

Editorial Reviews

Captures the hipster buzz of nighttime Beijing...feels like a novel.” —The Washington Post

“China High delivers in a single punch what others promise but don't provide...funny, immensely readable.” —Far Eastern Economic Review

“Welcome to ZZ's world: a whirl of good weed, wild parties, and wilder girls. In Beijing…With a chatty and assured voice, ZZ details the high jinks of his stay in the capital during China's fastest economic growth since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. His prose swaggers.” —Bloomberg News

From the Publisher

…a snappy narrative that captures the hipster buzz of nighttime Beijing…a worthwhile story, well told.
—The Washington Post

Seth Faison

Born and raised partly in Shanghai, the pseudonymous ZZ was brought to America by his parents while still a teenager, leaving him with a foot in two cultures. Since the tidal wave of trade and business flowing from modern China to America created a need for any professionals whose language skills bridged the cultures, ZZ's background and law degree assured him a job in the land of his parents. Once there, however, he quickly became more enamored with living the Beijing high life than carving out a real career for himself. Partying, overindulging and shopping became more important than holding down a job. Most of ZZ's fast-paced narrative is loaded with nonstop clubbing and serial monogamy, seen in the haze of his semiforeigner's arrogance ("Of course, there is nothing in the books that says English speakers are above the law. We just are") and his habit of smoking "Zigarettes," opium-laced joints. It's the latter that lands ZZ in trouble. Arrested for possessing drugs, he's tossed into a ludicrously packed prison cell, after which his sense of entitlement leaches away, while friends frantically bribe officials for his early release. Although ZZ's memoir can be self-pitying, for an admittedly self-centered gym rat yuppie jerk he is a cogent guide to modern China-albeit like the morning after a bar crawl, blurry and half-remembered, but streaked with neon excitement. (Mar.)

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Publishers Weekly

"ZZ"? Who's that? When you read this sassy memoir, you will see why this China-born, American-raised law school graduate might want to keep his name out of the papers. The book starts as a smartly written but unsurprising account of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in Beijing, where the night scene is hot and so is ZZ's motorcycle. ZZ starts "Foodzie's," an innovative delivery service, but the plot thickens when he is imprisoned, not, as in other China memoirs, for political dissent but because he was caught with a "Zigarette," a hand-rolled special laced with morphine. The absorbing heart of the book is ZZ's short but transformative term in a dark, wet prison, where he bonds with an assortment of criminals, his introduction to the "real" China. This prison coming-of-age reminds him of Confucius's classic admonition that a boy becomes a man at the age of 30. Although the epiphany could be more developed, this is a spiritual journey of universal, not merely Chinese, import. For any library with an interest in the genre or the topic.
—Charles W. Hayford

Library Journal

Prolix memoir chronicles Reefer Madness in the New China. The Shanghai-born but U.S.-raised author, a graduate of Brandeis University and Boston College Law School, cherished his foreigner's privileges in the rollicking atmosphere of an urban China gone mad for hedonism and consumer sophistication. His bilingual abilities made him a hot recruit for an international law firm, but his callowness and self-absorption soon led to his washout. He had more luck as an entrepreneur, launching a Western-style food-delivery service in Beijing called Foodiez. Despite cultural differences and bureaucratic hurdles, it was successful enough to allow the author plenty of time to smoke hashish and rail obnoxiously against his filthy, unreliable employees, who "looked like they had just rolled off of a coal truck." The memoir's story arc initially resembles that of novels like Bright Lights, Big City: ZZ enjoys his outsider status in a generic melange of nightlife, chums and women (characterized most superficially), but things change abruptly when he is picked up by the seemingly incompetent police for public toking. The 19th-century scourge of opium left China with a confused, punitive attitude toward drugs, the author argues, and the not-so-naive cops viewed him as a political prize when they realized he was native-born. Arrogant ZZ was chastened to learn he faced a sentence of eight months or more. His memoir describes a prison experience situation reminiscent of Midnight Express, but without that book's dramatic tension. Prodigious networking and the underground Chinese tradition of guan xi (the granting of favors coupled with bribery) saved ZZ, who wound up serving only two weeks. His account endswith a somewhat unconvincing description of his moral transformation. The author's observational strengths, such as a chilling report of what happens in China's state-sanctioned rehab, are swamped by repetitive, juvenile prose in a book that should be at least 100 pages shorter. Readers curious about the changing face of China should look for James Fallows's comparatively cerebral Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009). Colorful, but superficial and grating.

Kirkus Reviews