What would it take to make a whole nation of CEOโs and bankers wake up one morning in an existential funk, then decide theyโll be much happier if their share their wealth? Ms. Mingโs Guide to Civilization is a tale of two young women, Ming and Zoe, who do just thatโ in the hyper-capitalist nerve center of the world, contemporary China. Their feat requires some sleight-of-hand, a lot of private equity, and the talents of a handsome mythical character who just happens to believe one of them is his immortal love. But all is not what it seems in this land called the New China, where business leaders look up to artists and thinkers, calling them societyโs civilizers, and the strangest words you can hear are, โI canโt afford it.โ
The rebirth begins in the ghostly Sichuan village where Ming was born in 1976, the same year Mao Tse Tung died. In Mingโs mind, the improbably named Sunshine Village is the worst place on earth. The changes afoot in China allow Mingโs family to move away, but by the time sheโs in her early 20โs she isnโt much happier in a country where much of the population have become born-again believers in the pursuit of money. Mingโs parents want her to go to America and get an MBA, like her brother has done. For Ming, business school is a ploy to escape to New York and become the writer and love vagabond sheโs always wanted to be.
But New York turns out to be running on capitalist excess too, aside from a small struggling-against-extinction circle of friends Ming meets there. Among her friends is Zoe, who grew up with an actress mother in a home that was like an off-off-Broadway stage set with perpetual funding problems. A search for her real father has led Zoe to become a China scholar, however, and she happens to have a plan to write her dissertation on the fog-shrouded outpost where Ming was born. Both twenty-somethings are finding that their dreams get second billing to their 24/7 worries about how to get by when everything costs so much. But when they travel together to Sunshine Village, they discover a mysterious Chinese immortal hanging out in the shadows who just might be able to help them. That immortal, albeit in human form, is none other than the thousand-year-old Monkey King, a popular Buddhist character in Chinese mythology.
The mischievous immortal is equally fed up. Long ago, when he reached Nirvana, it was a place where philosopher kings lived the good life, and he spent his days contemplating the universe and indulging in the occasional menage-a-trois with Virginia Woolf. Since then, though, developers and investment professionals have taken over even this sacred territory, and now you have pay exorbitant prices to occupy your cloud. Confucius himself has been evicted and lost his mind.
Ming first met the Monkey King when she was young girl in the village. She knows his tricks, and she figures out a secret heโs hiding: heโs in love with Zoe. Though heโs down on his luck and living in the body of an emaciated beggar, he can still turn himself into everything from a gnat to a man with the eyes of an accomplished seducer. And he has a plan to use his shapeshifting body to radically alter the society they live in. The only problem is that, like almost everyone with a great idea, he needs an investor to make it happen. Making use of nanotechnology from Sunshine Village Silicon Works Enterprises, capital from the private equity firm that Mingโs brother runs and the Monkey Kingโs ability to morph into a tiny bug, the three co-conspirators are able to implant a few privileged brains with nanochips. As a result, one morning Mingโs brother and other financiers and CEOs all over China wake up wondering whatโs missing in their lives. Hyper-capitalist China becomes a paradise for Ming and Zoeโs ilk. A short-lived paradise, anyway. Artists can grow drunk with power too, and for the rest of the population itโs a lot easier to be a capitalist than a thinker.