'Candy' by Mian Mian

It took me 4 years to find a version of this book translated into English...I knew I *had* to read it...and it has me spellbound and for some reason it's really taking me forever to read it....it was banned in China and it is basically one young girl's story about sex, drugs and rock-n-roll in a post-counter-revolutionary way - and it's about desperation and hope; it features, drugs, prostitutes, crime and culture...
I want to share some of it with you...it's like 'Candy', but by 'Candy' I mean heroin...
"Sometimes, when I'd had a lot of heroin, I would think about men. I longed for a man's lips."
"But I absolutely loved watching any kind of man taking off his clothes in front of me. I was a moment of lyricism, the only moment of lyricism, and it always happened in a flurry and was over in the blink of an eye." pg #120
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"The smell of air-conditioning, the smell of heroin, real and bogus, the smell of condoms, the smell of blow jobs, the smell of fast-food take-out containers, the smell of frozen fruit, the black-and-white Cantonese movies, the smell of table lamps, the smell of sweet rice porridge, the smell of paper money, the smell of the hotel manager, the smell of vomit." pg #122
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"My street was gone; those warm but terrifying sounds were gone. The stores also disappeared, and new high-rises went up on either side of the road. Their dark eye sockets came to occupy a place in my life, their lights going on, their lights going off. They were always there, in my grey times, in my brightest hours, and there was nothing that could separate me from this secret. Sometimes I suspected that this secret had robbed me of the strength to wait for the future" pg #124
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Her words echo in my brain, become a fever, a virus, a 'buzz', intoxicating, and I can't escape; like the worst car-accident, I can't look away either - so I have to read the book in 'small doses' lest I completely OD on it....
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