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Shanghai: A Goldrush Town of Adrenalin and Silt - Tony Parsons PDF Print E-mail
 

By Gary Bowerman, London, on 16-04-2008 03:06

Published in : The News, News April 2008

In the first of a short series of articles from the London Book Fair about publishing and China, BizChinaUpdate talks to 'My Favourite Wife' author Tony Parsons. | Publishing China Week |

 

"The world seems to be on course to ruin the Olympics," says British author Tony Parsons. Speaking at the London Book Fair, the former punk music journalist and television host turned 'bloke lit' novelist argues that the violent human rights protests that have marred the Olympic torch relay in several cities could prove to be counter-productive. "I am pro-China and try to write compassionately about the country," Parsons says. "The only way to change China is to engage it. If China is humiliated and the Olympics are wrecked, then it will crack down much further. That could be catastrophic."

Parsons most recent novel, My Favourite Wife, is set in modern-day Shanghai, a city he describes as "iconic of what is now becoming the Chinese century." The book centres on a young lawyer and his wife and child as they swap London for a big salary, large-apartment and the life-defining realities of China's commercial capital. For many people who live and work in China, it makes for uncomfortable reading for, if it does read uncannily like a movie screenplay at times, it is widely regarded as an accurate fictional representation of the corrosive elements of expat life in Shanghai.

It was for those reasons that Parsons chose to migrate his characters from his normal urban London setting to a Chinese city he first visited 20 years ago. "I wanted to write an Asian novel. I've spent a lot of time there. But I was waiting for years to find the right theme, story and city," Parsons says. "I felt I could write a good contemporary novel set in Shanghai. It's not my favourite city in the world, nor even in Asia, but it is almost shorthand now for how the world is changing. It's like the industrial revolution on crack, and this is what I wanted to write about. Shanghai is like a meeting of sex and economics on an epic scale."

Just like any major city in history, people from all different backgrounds are migrating to Shanghai to change their lives, Parsons says. "It's an exciting place, a boomtown, and there's a real energy about the place, a shot of adrenalin. But like most gold-rush towns you must sift through a huge amount of silt and dirt. Dickens' London wasn't a pleasant or just place, it too was full of greed, avarice and inequalities of wealth."

While researching, and since publishing, My Favourite Wife, Parsons says he has noticed a changed perception of how the world seeks to understand China. "A few years ago, people wanted to know about the economic miracle in China and how that was changing lives," he says. "But now it is more negative. People only want to know what's bad about China."

Parsons spent three years researching and writing My Favourite Wife, and for some of that time he lived in Shanghai. "It was too long," he says. "The next book will be written more quickly." That next novel will focus around a young man who has a heart transplant, which leads to him assuming a different emotional persona, and is due for publication in 2009.



   

Keywords : Tony Parsons, My Favourite Wife, London Book Fair, Publishing, China


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