lizbee | (Reply)

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I suspect you may not like Kuang's first trilogy, which has engaging writing but which is similarly full of poorly stitched-together anachronisms (yes, it's a secondary world, but she combines stuff from 21st, 12th, and 20th century China very obviously) and endorses the protagonist happily committing genocide. Kuang also relies a lot on Iris Chang's discredited account of the Nanjing Massacre, which imo is unfortunate because there's no need to exaggerate the Nanjing Massacre, and rolls that up with Unit 731 in a way that doesn't really allow those horrible events their full consequence. As a writer, I think she bit off more than she could chew. And as someone with a terminal degree in the field, her calling herself a historian when she hadn't even finished her BA seemed…presumptuous. I didn't read the other two books in the trilogy because I wasn't really interested in where the book went after the protagonist happily committed genocide/fulfilled Kuang's historical revenge fantasies (worth noting too that Mao's crimes were against his own people rather than Japan).

It's interesting to hear her defending being an American writing about Oxford because in the promo for the first book she was pretty anti-American (despite being American herself by passport? Unclear). I think the defensiveness comes through in that she thinks she's pitching to a middle of the road American, when really I suspect her audience agrees that racism is bad as a general baseline (the devil of course is in the details). And yes, this is basically the view of history that the CCP endorses, so it's very ironic that Dave McCarty DQ'd this book because…he thought it would offend people? When it has a Chinese publisher? He's an idiot on top of being a corrupt toady. Insert obligatory foreign devils joke.

I'll probably read Yellowface though. Hopefully she's less antagonistic towards her audience in that book, but I won't hold my breath.