Magazines

Meimei on blogs: Mu Zi Mei makes another glossy magazine appearance

Meimei's December issue wishes you a merry Christmas. The cover girl is actress Huang Shengyi.

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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.

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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.

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