Soupy Deman

10,000 Chinese Malls Soupy Deman

Based on the author's real-life experience as an English teacher in Wuhan, China during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic!10,000 Chinese Malls is the story of "Roger", a young man who boards a flight to The Unnamed Sprawling Chinese Metropolis to teach English. There, he struggles with the absurdities of bureaucratic life at the school while becoming enmeshed in a bizarre conspiracy involving an appetizer mafia, secret orders of mentally disturbed men, and interdimensional beings bent on destroying the universe. Along the way Roger learns a thing or two. The novel closes as a plague sweeps the city, forcing Roger to evacuate. The book is filled with bawdy puns, toilet humor, and sexual entendres. The low-brow humor counterbalanced by its sporadic forays into deep, esoteric philosophical matters concerning the value of life, the meaning of death, and man's place in the universe. Much of the novel depicts the absurdity of life carried out in inane bureaucracies. To that end, the novel has been compared to Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Critics have noted that 10,000 Chinese Malls is a much, much, shittier piece of literature than Catch-22. Self-reference and circularity is a common feature of the book; for example, at one point this article is printed in full. Reportedly, DeMan wrote the article before most of the main text. Characters in the book have conversations about fractals. There is even a story-within-a-story that Roger writes to pass the time. The book makes repeated references to religion and to metaphysical cosmology. These themes include the esoteric origins of the universe and the unity of Nothing and Everything. During one conversation, characters discuss the origin of the world in the Word, as explained in the Bible. In another conversation, the origin of the universe is described in Gnostic terms, as the creation of an ignorant god. However, the book takes an offbeat, humorous approach to such descriptions. Critics universally panned the novel. It wound up at the head of numerous "Worst novels of the 21st century" lists. Many critics even referred to it as "the worst thing ever written." Complaints centered around the novel's inconsistent internal structure, sophomoric humor, cliche plot elements, and unnecessary overuse of profanity.