Raucous parties… Taxis… Sex… Drugs… And dumplings.
Shanghai Seduction is a work of creative non-fiction about a wildly curious young anthropologist named Fatima who heads to the world’s most dynamic, rapidly developing, and exciting city: Shanghai, China. There, Fatima finds herself amidst a group of 20-something French Concession-dwelling foreigners hungry for opportunity of any kind: economic, professional, or carnal, sweeping Fatima into the chaos of their lives.
Written in first person, we learn that it’s 2011 in post-Fukushima radiation fallout Tokyo. Twenty-eight-year-old Fatima, a wide-eyed global traveler and anthropology grad student from America, schemes up a way to leave cesium-laden Japan for perceived greener pastures in China: research! She initially plans to spend a harmless two months doing “participant observation” in Shanghai. Already speaking Chinese, and having been to China before, it should be straightforward… or so she thinks.
She arrives with only a three-wheeled broken suitcase and an audio recorder. Street-savvy Fatima quickly finds her footing, as she connects with a group of Chinese Americans and other Westerners living in Shanghai. They’re the perfect sample group for interviewing as well as for initiating her into the city’s frenetic pace and lifestyle. Red China may be nowhere in sight, but together they’ll still paint the town red… very very red.
Of all the people Fatima meets, she’s most drawn in by Mayling, a Swedish-Chinese app builder with beauty, charm, street smarts, and an extremely wild side. As time passes, Fatima becomes part of the city’s elaborate tapestry herself: whizzing through the city via taxi, air-kissing at swanky Shanghai parties, dining on local delicacies, dating cosmopolitan men, and navigating herself through “ethnography.”
But for all the fun Fatima finds, she discovers an ugly underbelly to the city: superficiality, transient relationships, deep loneliness, drug addiction, betrayal, and dishonesty. Fatima appears to have gotten in deep enough to see the true nature of the Shanghai beast. Watch what happens when she takes participant observation to its absolute limit in the new new world: an Asian mega-cosmopolis that makes New York City look sleepy.
Taking place in a not-so-Chinese contemporary China, Shanghai Seduction appeals to the adventurous, free-thinking, and globally-inclined reader. NPR listeners, foreigners in China, and anyone seeking to travel in Asia will enjoy Stephanie Tsai Karlik's voice -- multicultural, female, funny, and frank -- as she explores what it is to be alive in an age of post-modernity, globality, marginality, and digital ephemerality.
Reading like an avant-garde anthropological study of Asia with urban street swagger, Shanghai Seduction is complete with over 30 hand-sketched illustrations. It combines the memoir-style reflections on Chinese diasporic identity à la Eddie Huang's "Fresh off the Boat," the 20-somethings' existential crises as in Lena Dunham's "Girls", and the new Chinese economy freshness of Kevin Kwan's "Crazy Rich Asians," packaging them up neatly in a Chinese red envelope and sending it out to the millennials for Chinese New Year.
