Book Reviews
Issue #31
The Last Communist Virgin
By Ling Ma
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
THE LAST COMMUNIST VIRGIN
By Wang Ping
(Coffeehouse Press, $14.95, 218 pages)
Get past the tacky title and the Photoshopped Amy Tan–like cover treatment. Open to the first page. The stories in Wang Ping’s collection are not that pretty, and the backdrops against which they are set aren’t pleasantly blurred for contemplative ease.
Sequenced chronologically, The Last Communist Virgin takes place during the political tumult and social changes of 20th-century China, beginning with the Cultural Revolution. In “Crush,” a teenage girl falls for a neighborhood boy while their two families huddle together and hide from the battling factions outside. To win her crush over the warring noises of the Red Guards and the workers, she recounts the bloody fairy tale of “The Little Mermaid.”
While the child narrators of the initial stories describe personal moments in which politics acts as a mundane inconvenience, the older narrators of later stories are irrevocably shaped by it. In the title story, an ex-Communist immigrant struggles to talk herself into accepting lavish, expensive presents from a shady landlord who offers cheap rent. The clash between consumerist urges and communist ideals is also pointedly examined in “Forage,” about a Chinese salesgirl working the jewelry counter at Bergdorf Goodman. As a whole, the stories cohere as a record of the fractured relations between a country’s shifting identity and its displaced citizens.
Ping, a well-known Shanghai-born poet who now lives in the U.S., has a tendency for dramatic and ornate phrasings that sometimes come off clunky (Example: “What was the use of my education if I couldn’t read the most basic book of life — love?”). But her second collection of short stories is convincingly powered by the wandering internal monologues of its narrators, whose gnashing voices run fierce, cynical, and incisive — restlessly drifting, circling, repeating, revising, and once in a while breaking into a slow, soulful soliloquy, as if seized by a moment of homesickness.
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