tevere: Jihae, solemn with hint of smile (sunshine)Ineke ([personal profile] tevere) wrote,
@ 2010-01-02 12:40 pm UTC
Entry tags:being chinese, inspector chen, my fiction, yuletide
Currently back in Saigon after a few days in central Vietnam-- more on that later!

So, for Yuletide this year I wrote a story for Liz Williams' Inspector Chen series: This Sweet and Bitter Orange Mood, which is about Inari finding her way home. I want to give special thanks to [livejournal.com profile] the_grynne for her super-speedy help and beta services, and to [livejournal.com profile] bantha_fodder for reading my initial draft and pointing me in the right direction!

I don't think the series is that well-known, and the only place I've ever seen any of the books in a bookshop is in New Zealand-- I had to resort to Amazon to buy the first in the series, 'Snake Agent'. The premise is fabulous: a world in which the Heaven and Hell of traditional Chinese belief are real, their demons and deities coexisting with the human world. Inspector Chen Wei forms a reluctant (and mildly slashy) partnership with his counterpart from Hell's Vice Division, Zhu Irzh, to solve supernatural mysteries and occasionally rescue Chen's demon wife, Inari, from Hell's clutches.

That said-- with no criticism intended of my Yuletide recipient, or of other fans of the series (including those who left wonderful, thoughtful feedback on my story), I have to say: as a mixed-race member of the Chinese diaspora, I find the series deeply, deeply frustrating. Don't get me wrong: I love the idea of fiction based on Chinese mythology, traditional beliefs and religion-- it's what made me hunt down the series in the first place and start reading with such glee. Fantasy novels! Set in Asia! About Chinese people!

...Except, as it turns out, not so much about Chinese people. I mean, I get it: it's hard to write characters from a culture you're not familiar with. But what really hurts me-- what makes me boggle-- is the fact that while the author has freely borrowed from Chinese myths and beliefs and religion (and again: fine with that!), she has clearly chosen not to make the effort to write characters who think, act, or even live in the same physical and cultural environment as actual Chinese people.

It hurts me, and it makes me angry, that when writing about us an author can so thoughtlessly overwrite our food and replace it with her own (kale, chocolate, chowder); who can replace our cultural and pop-culture references with her own (repeated references to dated American TV shows-- to the exclusion of any references to Asian literature or media); our language with her own (characters explicitly searching for and using Western proverbs and sayings, when Chinese equivalents exist); our names with those of her own creation (why use keymash constructions when Chinese demons traditionally have Chinese names, e.g. Yan Luo, Meng Po); who can randomly insert elements from other Asian cultures into a supposedly Chinese narrative (why does Zhu carry a katana rather than a jian?); who replaces our own bureaucracies with foreign structures and concepts (SWAT units, guilds, Seneschal, American police ranks e.g. Captain Su Sung); and who blithely makes statements that are just factually wrong and/or culturally inappropriate (Chen telling Ma that Hell is called the Yellow Springs because it's named after an actual yellow spring; "Little Pearl Tang, trussed like a sacrificial chicken"; "The thought of Tang's freedom chafed him like a yak-hair shirt").

Perhaps, with the feelings I have towards the canon, I shouldn't have offered this fandom in the first place. But at the same time-- isn't fanfiction the chance to at least try and make some things right again? I hope my Yuletide recipient enjoyed the story anyway, regardless of why I chose to write it.

If you are a fan of the series, or read it in the future, please just be aware that while it is a story about Asian characters (which is always fabulous to see in fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi), those characters are seen very much through a white, Western, American lens. [ETA: Apparently she's British, which makes the constant Americanisms perplexing as well as infuriating.]

If you like Chinese tales of the supernatural, I love Pu Songling's classic Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. These tiny old-school stories are touching, perverse, instructional, and often have a surprisingly frank eroticism-- two of my favourites are the tale of a relationship between a young male fox-spirit and a human scholar, and a delightful and tender threesome story about a man who accidentally marries both a ghost and a fox-girl.

If you like Chinese crime series, I like Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series (yes, confusing; there are two Inspector Chens). These are smart, political crime novels set in Shanghai, and Qiu's modern verse translations of Tang and Song dynasty poems (scattered throughout) are wonderful. [ETA: [personal profile] bravecows also thinks The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang looks good.]

ETA: For YA fantasy based on Chinese myths and legends, [personal profile] jonquil recommends Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon, and [personal profile] holyschist recommends Laurence Yep's Dragon of the Lost Sea series. [personal profile] jhameia recommends giving A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts by Ying Chang Compestine a try, if you don't mind some horror and gore, and [personal profile] starlady says she loves Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (for the somewhat younger crowd).

Happy new year!

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kaigou: (4 vortex of stupidity)


[personal profile] kaigou
2010-01-21 05:14 am UTC (link)
(I think this was linked via someone on my dwircle, but I've had the post open all day while doing other stuff, and now I can't even recall. So, err, meant to give credit but...)

I read the first two stories, after reading one of Williams' other stories, Nine Layers of Sky, which reads like a peculiarly bleak and morbid mashup of Joseph Campbell and Mikhail Bulgakov done through a post-Soviet lens. That book was far denser in terms of references, but here and there I could see an editor's hands: miles for kilometres, that kind of thing. I was willing to give the Inspector Chen novels a try, in part because I'm almost positive I heard/read that Williams had lived in Southeast Asia for several years. (She doesn't mention it at all in her biography, though, so now I'm baffled, or maybe doing contract work in-and-out of a region is getting glossed past or something, but I could've sworn she mentioned it in an interview somewhere.)

I was willing to give a lot of leeway, I think, because I don't believe in underestimating the extent to which some editors insist on underestimating the American public -- hence why we get "miles" instead of "kilometers" and "rosary" instead of "prayer beads", because these editors are concerned our widdle American brains might explode if exposed to too many new concepts at once. And since the power of the editor can be almighty (especially if the author is looking at another well-received but not well-sold work like Nine Layers of Sky, which many amateur reviews seemed to consider "inaccessible")... I wouldn't be surprised at all if Williams got told she needed to cool it on using too much of the research goodness.

I mean, the only big-named concurrently-published Asian-themed SFF at the time (2005) was one series that tanked (Ox something), and IIRC, Alma Alexander's Secrets of Jin-Shei. Not counting Gibson's and Dick's bizarre amalgamations that brought us New Tokyo and New Shanghai and whatnot. It made sense to me, even reading, that some of the more obtuse Americanized parts were meant for we American cabbages, who would naturally (the editors had theorized) just refuse! point-blank! to read a book that didn't refer to us or cater to us in some way. The book just wouldn't sell otherwise!, they probably cried.

I mean, okay, so 99% of Western readers wouldn't know a dan dao or a jian if it bit them in the ass, but in that case, call it a sabre or a sword. Using katana felt like someone was waving a flag at me that said, "we called it this because of you cabbages who we know couldn't be expected to know any better." Same way I felt about the fact that the demon's named Zhu Irzh -- because I do know zhu is an archaic term for 'lord', but in that case it should come after the name, not before. Except that in romance-based languages, titles come first, so I can see someone flipping 'zhu' around to make it easier for the intended Western audience to more easily intuitively grasp that it's a title, not a name. Same way I've learned to grit my teeth and ignore the bizarre mix of pinyin and wade-giles. Some editors seem to think wade-giles 'looks' better or something... sometimes. They can't be arsed to realize that it's not like you can mix-and-match.

I admit that the comments like "as they say in the West" struck me, even when reading, as a wierd kind of privilege-nod, like the author was saying, "look, I know you can't be expected to read this entire book about a culture that has nothing to do with you and don't give a rat's ass about your needs, so here's a small bone so you feel like you're still on the top of the heap." Or something. It was odd, and did feel tacked-on compared to some of the other deft touches. The mangling of mythologies, that I was expecting, because she did similar in Nine Layers of Sky -- though there, I was more familiar with the original myths, so I could see where she'd flipped things. I admit was I was less familiar with South-Asian, so was going a bit blind on that part.

(I also wonder if the Shanghai 3 and Singapore 3 are again the work of A Concerned American Editor, because even when reading -- as someone who's never been to either place -- I couldn't seem to get the geography clear in my head. I'd read the city/geography description outloud, and the SO kept saying it sounded just like Hong Kong. Ironically, that would be Hong Kong in the sixties, when he lived there -- including mention of the hilly/rural areas just past the city, the bay, and a few other details I can't recall now.)

Knowing the culture and feeling the story's untruthfulness has got to be just as bad (in a different way) than not knowing the culture and sensing, on some level, that you're being denied the full potential richness because someone out there is convinced you're just too stupid to handle the whole picture. Okay, actually, neither are much enjoyable.

Also, the second book was a complete hodge-podge, and don't even get me started on the story's concluding cop-out of heteronormativity.

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