Meimei’s December issue wishes you a merry Christmas. The cover girl is actress Huang Shengyi.
Note the coverline: ‘Did you blog today? The popularity of weblogs’. The article profiles several bloggers bloggers who are all white collar sweethearts, as well as our old friend Mu Zi Mei.
Here are some roughly translated excerpts from Mu Zi Mei’s self-description in the article:
– I started my blog on June 19, 2003. The first post was called ‘Killing myself rather than him killing me’. I decided to start my blog this way because I was depressed at the time and I wanted a way to record it. I called my blog ‘Left Love Letters’ (yi qing shu).
– All the people whose real names appeared in my blog, well, something actually happened between us in real life.
– Everything was fine at the beginning. Then on August 6 when I was in Hong Kong on for work, a friend phoned me and said that there was a big fuss about a post I put up at the end of July describing intimacy with the singer Wang Lei, and there was a big deal about me writing his real name. I had written about him before, and about other people, very naturally, just like you write in a diary, and nobody bothered about it… I realized I had caused trouble for other people, so I gave my blog password to a friend and asked her to remove the post [about Wang Lei]. What I didn’t expect however, was that a bunch of people had copied my blog entry and posted it all over the place, so the post was already our of my control.
– My blog is my own space. I throw junk in it, I put emotion in it, I put days gone by in it, I put myself in it.
Meimei is based in Shanghai; the magazine’s website is here. Moving north, Tianjin-based blogger Brainysmurf comments that Mu Zi Mei is certainly not banned: the China Daily has a story about the ‘Nanchang-based 21st Century Publishing House’ releasing a bowdlerized digest of her writings. Brainysmurf’s post is here, the China Daily story is here.