There are the newbies looking to get started in China, the ambitious striving to make their mark while others just try to get by. There are local and Western characters, the former divided into Cantonese and non-Cantonese Chinese, and the latter including white, black, and American-Chinese, presenting an interesting mishmash of perspectives. Location aside, the book is also unique in featuring a dozen main characters, each named for a different animal of the Chinese zodiac, each trying to make a living somehow in the fast-paced delta region. It can be easy to forget that South China, specifically Guangdong, was among the first Chinese regions to come into contact with Europeans through trade starting from the 17th century. While it is China’s manufacturing powerhouse and the world’s factory, this region is rarely featured in China literature, which often are set in Beijing or Shanghai. SCMB (as I’ll call the novel from this point) takes place in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, the 3 giants of the Pearl River Delta. He’s lived in both Guangzhou and Shenzhen actually, and he put his abundant Cantonese experience into use in a recently released novel South China Morning Blues, for which I gladly put aside my China cynicism and dug into to review. Ray Hecht is an American writer based in Shenzhen who I know through his personal blog about his varied experience in China’s metropolis of the moment (and perhaps future).
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