Running Through Beijing runs dry

American readers are probably more familiar with Chinese literature via novels that focus through a romantic or historical lens; Xu Zechen’s Running Through Beijing is apparently meant as a kind of antidote, intended to give readers a glimpse of gritty contemporary Chinese life. In some ways, it succeeds, as it follows twentysomething Dunhuang’s release from prison (for selling fake IDs) into a new illegal career (selling pirated DVDs). Dunhuang is neither homeless nor settled, happy to live with whomever he’s sleeping with, or to rent a shared dorm room or a cheap shack. His Beijing is filled with students and police and other illegal entrepreneurs, everybody looking out for themselves.
The reader is introduced to Dunhuang as he’s released from prison, and he immediately meets a woman, Xiaorong, who he gets drunk with and sleeps with. From there, Dunhuang wanders between women whose only real purpose is to fuck and be fucked; he also smokes cigarettes, watches The Bicycle Thief, and sells pirated DVDs. This bare bones plot might work if it took place against a sharper image of urban Beijing life, but whether that snapshot got blurred in the original or in translation, it’s still too grainy to be satisfying. And Zechen’s dialogue is functional at best; it contributes to neither characterization nor plot, serving only as a dull exposition, keeping things moving forward, but just barely.
It’s unclear whether The Bicycle Thief, which is name-dropped throughout the book, is a faulty metaphor or simply a literary accident. It’s partly this lack of intention that cripples the book—it’s easy to think that this movie might mean something to the story, but it’s never clear what it might mean. When Dunhuang needs a bike to get to one of his regular clients, a mysterious woman who only buys horror DVDs, he finds another peddler of illegal merchandise, a “secondhand” bicycle seller. A bit of clunky dialogue and some uninspired exposition put a stolen bike in Dunhuang’s hands:
“It looks exactly like the bike we looked at earlier,” Dunhuang said.