Most first-time trips to China fall into two categories: either an organized tour that spoon-feeds tourists a sanitized panorama of venerable cultural highlights or the backpacker's fascinating, if haphazard, maze of puzzling experiences. I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, a collection of six stories by one of China's most talented young writers, offers an alternative means of travel for adventurous couch potatoes – backpacking, from the comfort of our armchairs, through the back alleys of The People's Republic.

Set among the mundane landscapes of 1990s China, Zhu's stories immerse the reader in Kafkaesque tableaus rife with the tragicomic details of daily life that rush by in this fast-changing country. Backdrops for the author's eccentric comedies include a worn Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital operating by dated socialist norms. Zhu enthusiast University of Southern California professor Xiaobing Tang rightly promises “you will find yourself drawn into situations not all that different from what has made the TV show Seinfeld so memorable.”

Like Seinfeld writers, who found inspiration for their idiosyncratic story lines on the New York subways, Zhu goes prospecting in the industrial suburbs of Nanjing and its environs for material that he crafts into stories that ring with absurd truths. His subjects range from provincial mafiosi to nightmarish families and oppressed factory workers in claustrophobic narratives that depict a spiritually bankrupt society rocked by spasms of uncontrolled violence.

Robin VisserZhu Wen's own career path has followed a nomadic journey of its own. Born in 1967, he worked for five years in a thermal power plant before becoming a full-time writer in 1994, when the publication of the title novella, "I Love Dollars," created a literary sensation. Several poetry and short story collections and a novel later, Zhu turned to filmmaking, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Venice Film Festival for Seafood, and the NETPAC Prize at the 2004 Berlin Festival for South of the Clouds. Zhu Wen's prolific translator, Julia Lovell is a research fellow at Cambridge University whose Ph.D. research focused on China's quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, resulting in her recent book The Politics of Cultural Capital (See World Books review). Her superb translation of I Love Dollars deftly replicates Zhu's wry sense of humor.

The title novella features a semi-autobiographical freelance writer obsessed with money and casual sex, who encourages his father to join him in his escapades. Although the erotic carpe diem attitude of I Love Dollars shocked the Chinese literary establishment, its post-socialist attempt to turn Maoist conservatism on its head (while adding an ironic twist to the notion of filial piety) is one of the hallmarks of 1990s Chinese urban fiction. Crude depictions of women and gay men as sex objects so dominate the title story it is tempting for the reader, like the fictional father and some critics, to dismiss the work as the puerile spewing of repressed adolescent desire. Zhu's cleverness can lapse into the gratuitous, but generally his works critique, rather than exploit, the hedonism of a society shorn of ethical moorings.

Zhu Wen and other Nanjing writers told me during a 1997 interview that writing “demands a degree of courage which few in society can muster, impelling them to gaze directly upon the purposelessness of modern life.” Underlying this tongue-in-cheek tale is a serious warning about the strange fruits of China's market-fueled pragmatism, where the government “creates desire” and money becomes the sole token of happiness:

The red taxi plowed down the busiest street of the city. Most stores hadn't yet shut for the night, encouraged, maybe even forced by the government to keep their doors open later and later. We're all businessmen now, and the world is turning into one enormous mall, it gets bigger every day. If this city of ours is going to make it into modernity, it needs nightlife, twinkling lights, glorious Technicolor, consumption, it needs you – yes, you – to abandon all sense of restraint and moderation, to drive these outmoded concepts further and further from your mind, to fit into a future in which both will have been abolished, in which doomsday looms ever closer – closer and closer.

The remaining five stories are mired in incongruity, their idiosyncratic characters and events all too (sur)real. Anyone who has traveled third class on a state-run Yangtze River boat or spent a night attending a hospital patient can attest to inhumanity and paranoia induced by the settings' claustrophobic lack of boundaries, their bedeviling fluidity. Like Lu Xun (1881-1936), the “father of modern Chinese literature,” Zhu Wen diagnoses the national psyche, in his case the psychology of a nation on the make, its neuroses generated by the accelerated rise of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics. “ We're merely along for the exhilarating ride.

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Robin Visser is an Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture in the Department of Asian Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book on contemporary Chinese urban aesthetics will be published by Duke University Press.