At 24, Guo Jingming is China’s best selling novelistThe most successful writer in China today isn’t Gao Xingjian, the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize, or even Jiang Rong, the author of the best-selling novel Wolf Totem. It’s 24-year-old Guo Jingming, a pop idol whose cross-dressing, image-obsessed persona has made him a sensation. Thousands of teenagers flock to Guo’s signing sessions. The author posts pictures of himself half-naked in the shower, in his underwear or swathed in Dolce & Gabbana accessories and Louis XIV-style shirts. Guo is hardly universally beloved. Last fall, he was voted China’s most hated male celebrity for the third year in a row on Tianya, one of the country’s biggest online forums. Yet three of his four novels have sold over a million copies each. Guo’s novels focus on the tortured psyches of his adolescent characters, who either nurse their melancholy by sitting alone for long hours under trees and on rooftops, or try to blunt it with drinking, fighting and karaoke.“My main goal is to tell the story well and have everyone like it,” Guo said. The Chinese government mostly ignores Guo and the other post-’80s writers. I met with Guo last summer in the offices of Ke Ai (a homophone of the Chinese word for “cute”), the entertainment company he established in 2004 to produce teenage literary magazines like I5land and Top Novel. An hour before the interview, I had phoned to ask if I could take his picture. He politely refused, saying an hour wasn’t long enough to prepare. Guo was born to an engineer father and a bank clerk mother who encouraged him to write. A short version of City of Fantasy was later published in a national magazine and went on to sell more than 1.5 million copies in book form. Guo’s second novel, Never Flowers in Never Dreams, a love triangle featuring harmless forays into the Beijing underworld sold 600,000 copies in its first month. Soon after, he was accused of plagiarizing the novel from Zhuang Yu’s In and Out of the Circle. In 2006, a court ordered him to pay $25,000 to Zhuang Yu and to apologise. Guo paid the judgment but refused to apologise. While the case was still in process, Guo produced a musical album, Lost, about young love. Last year, his novel Cry Me a River sold a million copies in 10 days.-AVENTURINA KING (LAT-WP)
