Mian Mian

Mian Mian is the only writer who’s ever really gotten into me the way she does. I keep her books within reach—Your Night, My Day and La la la—because I need to disappear into those rough, unflinching stories about sex and drugs and people trying to make sense of being alive. There’s no distance in her prose, no safety. It’s all exposed nerve.

She writes about Shanghai’s party scene with this combination of tenderness and wreckage. The characters are young, they’re looking for connection, and they’re using whatever’s available—sex, drugs, each other—to feel something true. The writing is casual and brutal at the same time, which is how actual living feels if you’re paying attention.

Her new book, Panda Sex, came out in German recently. It follows two sisters and their friends through that same Shanghai underworld, this time involving some literal virus that throws everything into chaos. It’s vintage Mian Mian—the setup doesn’t matter as much as what it lets her explore: desire, risk, the gap between who you want to be and who you actually are. Her publisher describes it as tracing a generation that craves love but can’t face the vulnerability it requires. That’s close to right, though can’t face it undersells the active running away.

I don’t know what makes one writer land with you and another bounce off. But Mian Mian landed. Everything she writes feels like the conversation you actually want to have, the one nobody pretends to have in public.