Mina Hanbury-Tenison's book is written as a guide to "marry up." Photo: courtesy of the author

By Hao Ying

Mina Hanbury-Tenison's new book Shanghai Girls: Uncensored and Unsentimental was damned as "morally bankrupt" by a magazine editor at its launch event in Shanghai last week. The author gave it to a 55-year-old expat married to a Shanghai woman in her 20s. Now he won't speak to Hanbury-Tenison. Some female literary mavens in Beijing aren't even sure if they will buy it and read it, because they don't want to perpetuate the book's attitudes and stereotypes.

Why the outcry? Shanghai Girls is written as a how-to guide of how to "marry up." The conceit of the book is that a Shanghai woman in her 40s named Lan Lan, married three times to husbands each "richer than the last," gives romantic advice and anecdotes to the dazzled Hanbury-Tenison.

Lan Lan suggests finding a "starter husband," giving the example of a 21-year-old girl making less than $100 a month who married a 40-year-old expatriate lacking in confidence. After seven years, the woman groomed herself "into a very sophisticated lady who spoke excellent English and knew how to order Perrier with lemon at a fancy restaurant" and got her husband to fund her advanced degree earned overseas. She doesn't give him any children, because "he is not the kind of long-term investment she wanted to make." She dumps him in the end for a richer man, but she needs not feel bad, because she has given him the best years of his life, with memories he will treasure until his dying days.

Starter boyfriends, Hanbury-Tenison writes, can help you practice English and introduce you to wealthy social circles, as well as give you "clothes, apartments, cars and jewelry you can use to leverage up your status." But the trade-off, she warns, is sex "with guys who are much older and physically unattractive."

"Of course," she writes, "Shanghai girls are not squeamish about sex" and "don't mind experimenting with it and using it to get what they want." Girls are also advised to give men their secret fantasy, which turns out not to be kinky sex but the illusion "they're giving you the best orgasm of your life."

Hanbury-Tenision, who visited Beijing over the weekend to promote the book, told the Global Times that Beijing girls offer no competition to Shanghai girls: "It's about sassiness. There's a way Shanghai girls walk and hit the street. Beijing girls don't demand to be noticed in the same way."

Looking around the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel at teatime, Hanbury- Tenision said that only one of the women was up to scratch: a beautiful young girl, around 20 years old listening intently to a sweaty, short, grossly overweight businessman who resembled a frog.

Hanbury-Tenision cautioned that Shanghai Girls was about a group of women who came of age during the 1990s. She suggested today's "Shanghai Girls" would most likely be found in poorer Chinese cities.

"So I'd have to move to Wuhan to find a girl like that?" I joked. She sized me up. Middle aged. Khaki trousers. Wrinkled shirt. Journalist.

"Not even. Second- or third-tier cities," she replied. Hanbury-Tenision insists that Lan Lan, and the stories in her book, are all real.

She says she met Lan Lan about 13 years ago, about the same time she married her husband. She says she is too sentimental to use Lan Lan's advice to "leverage up" and leave him.

Does she ever regret that she didn't meet Lan Lan a little bit earlier? Hanbury-Tenision hesitates before she answers: "No. I don't think so. I'm happy to be where I am." But the pause was significant.