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Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu is a bitter take on love and life in modern China. It’s the story of three young men, Chen Zhong, Li Liang and Big Head Wang and their tragi-comic struggles to make their way in Chengdu, China’s fifth most populous city. Despite their aspirations in the newly capitalist China, the trio’s lives are beset by dead-end jobs, gambling debts, drinking, drugs, and whoring. Complicated relationships with women, whether pregnant mistresses, angry wives or passive lovers compound their misery. This is an unflinching and darkly funny look at the pressures of life in modern China, where riches and sex abound, but not for all. Plot summary Three years after graduation, Chen Zhong works in a dead end job as a sales manager for a motor oil company, Li Liang has quit his job and becomes rich gambling the stock market, and Big Head Wang is head of the local police station. Chen Zhong has been married for three years to Zhao Yue, who he met under the bizarre circumstance of saving her from being raped. Although he loves her, he is not satisfied and plays around with other women. After a late night session of ma jong, Chen Zhong has a fling with Li Liang's soon to be fiancee Ye Mei, creating bad blood between the friends. Meanwhile, Chen Zhong has troubles at work, where his slimy colleague Fatty Dong has managed to manipulate his way into being Chen Zhong's boss, initiating a period of struggle between them. Chen Zhong seizes the opportunity to strike when he discovers Fatty Dong out whoring one night, and calls the cops to the brothel. Fatty Dong vows to get revenge. However, Chen Zhong has other things to worry about... a large debt to the company, a wife having an affair, a mistress pregnant and a best mate debilitated by drugs. To make matters worse Chen Zhong’s wife divorces him leaving him an emotional wreck. Now Chen Zhong aims to humiliate his ex wife Zhao Yue but ends up destroying himself in the bitter process. Reviews The enfant terrible of Chinese literature. Murong's perceptive take on China's social malaise makes this novel as literary as it is page-turning. It’s difficult to appreciate how startling Murong’s harsh vision is in China, where the media pumps out a constant barrage of mindlessly positive stories about economic growth and saccharine praise of political leaders. Unsurprisingly, the writer’s frank descriptions of corruption and random fornication have provoked considerable ire. Murong presents vivid images of a new China, a China in transition, where traditional values clash with the cut-throat individualism of a particularly raw type of capitalist ideology. That kind of an anomaly enlivens other aspects of this fascinating book. Chen Zhong is a portrayal of modern man. He represents the helplessness of human beings, and the helplessness of society. Leave Me Alone… is a sign, representing an extremely important turn in Chinese literature: from the 1980s onwards Chinese literature unceasingly found strength from struggles against external forces. Struggles against history, against big narratives, against the persecution of intellectuals, physical struggles. But what we have now discovered is that the thing we really need to struggle against is ourselves. For Murong...the most savage of battlefields is that inside a person’s heart. The world’s problems basically start with the problems of individuals. - from a review by contemporary China’s most respected critic, Li Jingzi, published in Southern Weekend Published Murong Xuecun One of China’s most famous young authors, Murong was born in 1974 in China’s North East and spent his childhood in Jilin province. In 1996 he graduated from China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. Working as a lawyer, and senior sales manager for a car company, he started to write in 2001. In 2002 his novel Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu took China by storm. Murong gave up his job, and devoted himself to writing full time. As he declined to join the China Writers’ Society, he is regarded as an ‘independent’ writer. In the past few years he has travelled around China, living in Chengdu, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Hainan. Currently he lives in that most mysterious of places – snow-bound Lhasa.
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