The People's Republic of Desire

This is a girl's book, not recommended for men.

Pros

Cons

The novel by Annie Wang tells the stories of four professional women in Beijing who are well-educated and doing well by Chinese standards. The stories are mainly love stories, talking a lot about men and sex. Some of the stories can be traced back to news, reports and discussions on Chinese media and the Internet in recent years. But the four women are not ordinary Chinese women so it is better to read it as fiction. Some of the stores tend to be shallow and quite farfetched.

Since it is a novel, I don't need to comment on the remarks in the book. But I do want to point one thing out here. The book has a small paragraph about coffee. The question in the book is "Why has coffee become so expensive in China? It's virtually a luxury item." Here is the answer from the book: "My answer is simple: coffee is culture, coffee is fashion, and drinking coffee is a symbol of status. You pay thirty or forty yuan not just for the coffee but also for the background music..." Actually this is caused largely by the exchange rate, i.e., Chinese yuan vs US dollar. Starbucks sells coffee at the same price no matter where it is (in China or in the States), so does McDonald's. Thus Starbucks coffee and McDonald's hamburgers are all very expensive for the ordinary Chinese since four dollars is about 32 yuan, considering the average salary of a Chinese urban worker is about 18,400 yuan in 2005 (or about 73 yuan a day).