China's Me Generation

摘要

Six friends out on a friday evening, the seafood plentiful, the conversation flowing. Maria Zhang—big hoop earrings, tight velvet jacket and a good deal of meticulously applied makeup— starts to describe an island that everyone is talking about off the east coast of Thailand. It has great diving, she says, and lots of Chinese, so you don't have to worry about language. Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell phone. An actuary at a consulting firm, Vicky needs to close a project tonight While she phones a colleague, the dinner-table conversation moves on to snowboarding ("I must have fallen a hundred times"), the relative merits of various iPods ("Shuffle is no good") and the sudden onrush of credit cards in China.