Chinese web readers are forever urging authors to "drive"—meaning, to write full-on sex scenes—and for reasons everyone already knows, that's a good way to land an author in prison. Since the demand clearly exists, you may as well go read American smut instead. You might even pick up some English along the way.
In 2016 I stumbled across an American novelist on Goodreads: a housewife from Texas with three kids, who started writing in 2006. At the time she had 50-plus books (I checked again recently—it's now 70-plus), and plenty of them had made the New York Times bestseller list.
Her ratings were all four stars and up, out of five—higher than novels with realistic plots and deep social backgrounds (a few of Arthur Hailey's books only scrape 3.6 or 3.7!).
I read a few of them. The plots and dialogue were basically the American version of early Chinese web smut. I suspect smut from every country looks more or less the same. For example, the blurb of one book opened like this:
Ash, Jace, and Gabe: three of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the country. They're accustomed to getting anything they want. Anything at all. For Ash, it's the woman who changes everything he's ever known about dominance and desire…
It's been a while, so I can only describe the ones I read from memory.
In one, the male lead's best friend—like a brother to him—has died, and the friend's father suspects the heroine was responsible. He asks the hero to investigate. In reality the heroine is innocent, kind, and pure, but the hero assumes she's a venomous femme fatale hiding behind a wholesome exterior, so he plots to seduce her and expose her true nature. Then come the oohs and the xxs, and the inevitable heartbreak: she discovers that the perfect man who dropped into her life was only getting close to her out of revenge.
Another one: the hero has brothers one through six (the author wrote a book for each). The heroine escapes from her abusive father with her younger siblings in tow, and the father sets a massive dragnet to catch them all. The hero keeps helping her, one time after another, until he falls hard. More xxs and oohs follow. If I remember right, the gut-punch comes when the abusive father shows up and the heroine leaves the hero, apparently to keep him from getting dragged into it? (Not entirely sure.)
A third: the hero is one of the brothers from the previous book, and the heroine is the daughter of a mob boss, sent out as a spy and assassin. In between there are more oohs and xxs. The hero and heroine are natural enemies, so of course the love is anguished and deep, and in the end she breaks free of her father's control.
On Goodreads, apart from the one-star reviews from people who wandered in and went WTF, the ratings are mostly fours and fives, with comments about how moving and deeply touching it all is. There's even a photo of her at a 2015 American romance writers' conference on Wikipedia—it looks exactly like the annual gatherings of Jinjiang, Hongxiu, or Xiaoxiang. She has said that a lot of the plot points in Fifty Shades of Grey resemble hers, except she wrote them first, so she gets visibly unhappy whenever an interviewer brings up Fifty Shades.
She also interacts with readers on the site, where people keep asking when the next book in each series is coming. Her answer: sixteen planned.
Within a few pages of my first one, I'd picked up a whole vocabulary of body parts. The first word I remember learning was "delta"!
How did I find this author in the first place? At the time I was working through leveled-reading material, and I'd downloaded a spreadsheet rating 12,000 novels. Someone had written an algorithm to calculate how difficult each book was to read. The novels I'd been reading were all around 1.5—higher scores mean harder—so I went looking for books around 2.0, just to see what was out there. That's when I found this author: difficulty 2-plus, Goodreads ratings all 4-plus.
Seeing that combination, I was stunned. I thought I'd found a writer for the ages. Turned out she was a smut writer for the ages.
Her name is Maya Banks.
(Second installment: January 2023 roundup, with English smut recommendations, part two.)