Mian Mian, 37
Birthplace: Shanghai
Books: Candy (2000), Panda Sex (2005), On High In Blue Tomorrow (2008)

This bad girl of Chinese literature rose to global fame with Candy, a portrait of the rock 'n' roll underbelly of Shanghai and Shenzhen, a world populated by heroin addicts and prostitutes.

Translated into several languages and becoming a bestseller overseas, the book is still banned by the Chinese government, although many people there have pirated copies of it.

However, since that controversial start to her writing career, she has mellowed.

She has since published Panda Sex, an open-ended book with a title inspired by the number of times a panda has sex in a year (twice, by the way); and On High In Blue Tomorrow, a collection of entries from her blog at mianmianbyeart.blogbus.com

She has laid low in recent years to focus on raising her eight-year-old daughter. The death of her engineer father three years ago prompted her to become a devout Buddhist and to retreat from the public eye.

The writer, whose real name is Wang Shen, is now divorced from the father of her child, and in her interview with Life!, conducted mostly in Mandarin with a smattering of English, she is all calm Buddhist zen. But she still manages to sneak in the occasional acerbic barb.

On her past, she says: 'I used to think that these things were important, how people received your work, how special and wonderful you are. Every female writer is a drama queen that way.

'But I've learnt that what's important is that there is love, hope and enjoyment in your writing. If you write for your ego, it is so stupid.'

This is quite unexpected coming from a writer who has never been far from controversy since she dropped out of Shanghai's elite Yanji high school.

She then went to Shenzhen, led a partying lifestyle and became a heroin addict. She cleaned up her act and used her experiences to write Candy, which caused a storm when it was published in 2000.

Famously, she also got into a spat with Wei Hui, another bad girl author who wrote Shanghai Baby, a sexy semi-autobiographical book about a love triangle in the city.

Mian Mian had accused Wei Hui of plagiarising her writing and the Chinese media jumped on the catfight. Looking back, she says she 'has no feeling about that time anymore'.

She adds: 'In my memory it's all a blur. I was pregnant at that time and it was a mess. I did too much then, I felt sick. I feel very comfortable now. I protected myself well and didn't let the media destroy me.'

She now hosts an Internet radio show called Bu Qu Club Tiao Wu (Mandarin for 'not going to the club to dance'), a throwback to her party organiser days, and runs an Internet shop selling secondhand clothes with a few friends.

She is now single and has been 'living the panda life for the past seven years'.

She says: 'I'm alone but happy. Before, I was alone but in pain. But I realised that love was the worst drug of all.'

» Readers can catch Mian Mian at The Play Den in The Arts House on Dec 6 for a meet-the-author session at 3pm. At 4pm, Mian Mian and Hitomi Kanehara will participate in a panel discussion.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Nov 6, 2008.