Seeing Pink

by Audrey Snow Matzke

Little Pink Book: A Bad Bad Novel

by Oliva Kan-Sperling

Archway Editions, 164 pp., $14.95

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To read Kan-Sperling is to be denied . . . redemptive catharses, and to bask instead in her almost romantic eye for empty-looking women

“Gossip is a fearful thing,” wrote the “Chinese Greta Garbo” Ruan Lingyu, before getting her revenge on the tabloids by overdosing on barbiturates at the age of 24. Or so the story goes. In the near-century intervening it’s been speculated that the note was forged after the fact, by Ruan’s tea-tycoon boyfriend Tang Jishan, who hoped to make some kind of public sense of his young lover’s suicide, and maybe clear his own name in so doing.

“Fanfiction,” writes the novelist Olivia Kan-Sperling in an essay for n+1, “hinges on creating a difference internal to its subject, on alienating us from familiar names and images.” Her latest Little Pink Book: a bad bad novel (Archway Editions), charts the fortunes of Huang Limei, a barista and blogger-musician who—in spite of her apparently vacant nature, or rather thanks to it—is plucked from obscurity and thrust into stardom by a rapey talent agent. Odd-numbered pages are in English. Even-numbered pages contain what I’m told are their Mandarin counterparts, translated by Chen S., but I can only read the former, so I cannot confirm that it’s the same story both ways. Limei could be so much more, or so much less, than I’ve managed to read into her.