Content with Joy

Content with Joy is a collection of essays and short pieces by Tianjin writer Wang Xiaorou, gathering the vignette-style sketches she wrote for newspaper and magazine columns and about everyday life. The book is divided into six sections: "Us," "Men and Women," "Private Matters," "Fragments," "Current Affairs," and "They Say." She looks at the world through the eyes of an ordinary city resident, turning shopping for groceries, home renovation, commuting to work, blind dates, waiting in line, and socializing into joke-packed little stories: people keeping up appearances, people boxed in by prices, people caught between a rock and a hard place in their social dealings, and people quietly dazed by the city's transformations. The author treats the title "Content with Joy" as a declaration of attitude: this is how I choose to live—what business is it of yours? The book offers both laugh-out-loud teasing and a faint melancholy after the laughter, using unpretentious humor to satirize the affectation and pretension fashionable in the city. Compared with her earlier books, the "Current Affairs" section here shows a stronger concern with reality, touching on the social topics of the time—the economic crisis, boosting domestic demand, housing prices, entrepreneurship, adjustments to the personal income tax threshold, TV matchmaking—and comments on the news with her trademark "moth"-like wit, giving serious issues a punchline. Cartoonist Wang Yuan drew illustrations for the book, which complement the text nicely.