Book Review: Inside The Red Mansion- On the Trial of China's Most Wanted Man.
Author: Oliver August
By: Vickie J. Rubinson
"Inside the Red Mansion," is a suspenseful, slyly entertaining journey into the heart of the new China. Due to a mix-up on a routine reporting assignment, Oliver August stumbles onto the hunt for China's most wanted man, Lai Changxing, an illiterate tycoon on the run from corruption charges. Sensing something emblematic in the outsized tale of Lai's rise and fall, August sets out to find the self-made billionaire, hoping that if he can understand how Lai reinvented himself, he will also better grasp the tetonic forces transforming modern China.
Lai embodies the story of China's recent success as well as its Achilles' heel: its command economy, blended with the free market, is riddled with corruption. Moving ever closer to the elusive tycoon, August introduces us to a people in the midst of head-spinning self-transformation.
We meet a nightclub hostess and her gaggle of "Miss Temporaries"; powerful businessmen on a debt-settling round of nocturnal golf; and a foie gras king who markets his goose liver by the ton and prefers it deep fried. This is a China seething with desire, engaged in a slapstick fight with its past, and hell-bent on the future.
Food is serious business in China. It reveals plenty about an eater's identity. "You are what you eat," read a newspaper headline. In a restaurant, the higher the bill, the greater the credit in the favor bank. Equally, the type of rice grain one eats is an indicator of class. Lowly tricycle riders described themselves as "sandy rice eaters."
Food is a status symbol more potent than, say, the car one drives. And just as Chinese identify each other by what they eat, so they do with foreigners. A man asked about his views on President Bush told the author,"Everyone says the United States is good. But their chicken is terrible. To eat American chicken is no different from chewing wood shavings."
When newly minted tycoons visited "Lily,"an elite private club, the dancers could earn more in an evening than their parents did in a year. One such tycoon was Lai Changxing. Everyone was familiar with his transformation from a rice farmer into one of the country's richest and most powerful men, all without joining the Communist Party.
On his first visit to the club, Lai had everyone's attention immediately. Before he ordered his first garland, the dancers knew he was no mere bureau official doling out public money. Lai asked for a bottle of Hennessy XO cognac costing close to a thousand dollars-an urban worker's annual salary-to play drinking games. In modern China the letters XO were associated with free spending, indulgence, supreme wealth, and previously unattainable aspirations.
When he came to the club, Lai sat on a sofa close to the stage surrounded by XO bottles, dressed in an XO suit, with his XO limo outside and XO aftershave in the air. There could be no mistaking his status. "He looked like money," said one dancer at the club.
Inside the Red Mansion is the first book to capture the giddy vibe of contemporary China and its darker vulnerabilities.
Author: Oliver August
By: Vickie J. Rubinson
"Inside the Red Mansion," is a suspenseful, slyly entertaining journey into the heart of the new China. Due to a mix-up on a routine reporting assignment, Oliver August stumbles onto the hunt for China's most wanted man, Lai Changxing, an illiterate tycoon on the run from corruption charges. Sensing something emblematic in the outsized tale of Lai's rise and fall, August sets out to find the self-made billionaire, hoping that if he can understand how Lai reinvented himself, he will also better grasp the tetonic forces transforming modern China.
Lai embodies the story of China's recent success as well as its Achilles' heel: its command economy, blended with the free market, is riddled with corruption. Moving ever closer to the elusive tycoon, August introduces us to a people in the midst of head-spinning self-transformation.
We meet a nightclub hostess and her gaggle of "Miss Temporaries"; powerful businessmen on a debt-settling round of nocturnal golf; and a foie gras king who markets his goose liver by the ton and prefers it deep fried. This is a China seething with desire, engaged in a slapstick fight with its past, and hell-bent on the future.
Food is serious business in China. It reveals plenty about an eater's identity. "You are what you eat," read a newspaper headline. In a restaurant, the higher the bill, the greater the credit in the favor bank. Equally, the type of rice grain one eats is an indicator of class. Lowly tricycle riders described themselves as "sandy rice eaters."
Food is a status symbol more potent than, say, the car one drives. And just as Chinese identify each other by what they eat, so they do with foreigners. A man asked about his views on President Bush told the author,"Everyone says the United States is good. But their chicken is terrible. To eat American chicken is no different from chewing wood shavings."
When newly minted tycoons visited "Lily,"an elite private club, the dancers could earn more in an evening than their parents did in a year. One such tycoon was Lai Changxing. Everyone was familiar with his transformation from a rice farmer into one of the country's richest and most powerful men, all without joining the Communist Party.
On his first visit to the club, Lai had everyone's attention immediately. Before he ordered his first garland, the dancers knew he was no mere bureau official doling out public money. Lai asked for a bottle of Hennessy XO cognac costing close to a thousand dollars-an urban worker's annual salary-to play drinking games. In modern China the letters XO were associated with free spending, indulgence, supreme wealth, and previously unattainable aspirations.
When he came to the club, Lai sat on a sofa close to the stage surrounded by XO bottles, dressed in an XO suit, with his XO limo outside and XO aftershave in the air. There could be no mistaking his status. "He looked like money," said one dancer at the club.
Inside the Red Mansion is the first book to capture the giddy vibe of contemporary China and its darker vulnerabilities.
