Is the Life of an Influencer Actually Worth Coveting?
Wealth — its pursuit, maintenance and display — weighs heavy in Claire Jia's 'Wanting,' although it might ultimately exert a more oppressive force on the reader than on its blithely real-estate-hungry protagonists. In this polished debut novel, the ever dependable axes of love and money, and that classic clash of romantic desire with material greed, are dramatized through the story of two friends, Ye Lian and Luo Wenyu.
The women have grown up together in the prosperous environs of 1990s Beijing, watching old Hollywood movies and 'Friends' reruns that have fostered aspirational fantasies of life in America. They lost touch when Wenyu moved to California 10 years ago, and now the friends reconnect when Wenyu returns to Beijing, no longer a scrappy schoolgirl with a shoplifting habit but a popular and extremely rich YouTube personality with a pseudonym ('Vivian'), dyed blond hair and a boring white finance-guy fiancé named Thomas.
Meanwhile, Lian — who herself once dreamed of moving to the United States to 'own an entire floor of a mall' and become 'a true capitalist traitor!' — has never left Beijing. Her life is perfectly respectable: She has a well-paying job working for a tutoring company 'that specialized in sending the children of wealthy Chinese executives to American universities'; and a totally unobjectionable physicist boyfriend (from a family slightly richer than hers) with whom she tours luxury condos and plays polite badminton matches every Saturday. But this existence is also stultifying: 'Everything in her life was too easy. Like rain falling into a pond. She was too scared to really reach for anything, so she settled for what she received.'
Wenyu's return explodes this stasis. When Lian discovers that her friend is involved in an extracurricular romance, her shock morphs into jealousy. The Ferrante-like dynamic is a familiar one: Wenyu — ambitious, headstrong, selfish, alluring and possibly bound for ruin — is a sort of Lila to Lian's more cautious, studious, good-girl Lenu. But Lian's biggest throb of envy is not for Wenyu's love affair so much as her influencer status. Jia takes an oddly credulous attitude toward this financially rewarding, spiritually nullifying way of being. As Lian obediently trails her friend through their old haunts in Xidan shopping center to help provide Wenyu with 'Chinese content,' the reader is left wondering whether a life spent posting brands and monetizing one's selfhood could really be worth coveting.
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