Rebels Without a Cause

When Wei Hui wrote Shanghai Baby in 1999, she launched not just a book but a genre: confessional, and often sexually charged, works of fiction and nonfiction by young, neophyte women trying to capture the Zeitgeist of hard and fast living in a roller-coaster China. The latest to let it all hang out is teenage iconoclast Chun Sue's Beijing Doll . This semiautobiographical novel, first published in 2002 when Chun was just 17 and which was recently released in English, chronicles the turbulent life of Chun, a high school dropout who shares the same name as the author. For Chun, school is...