Hu Fang: Garden of Mirrored Flowers

Chinese writer Hu Fang offers a unique novel telling the story of a man designing a theme park, called Garden of Mirrored Flowers, which is itself an adaptation of a classical Qing Dynasty novel, Flowers in the Mirror. In an absorbing book which begins as a pictorial journey through mass-media advertisements, Fang depicts parallels between the park's actual construction and how it has been imagined, or evolved out of history. Yet, is this the author's vision, or more the result of reality writing itself through this author? Does that make it a documentary of life? ''It's a book written by a ghost writer,'' says Fang. ''Me? Just a traveler floating within the wave of globalization.''