Shelley Parker-Chan and Natalie Naudus (narrator) kicked my head in with She Who Became the Sun. It took a bit to get into the book, listening for 20 minutes here and there, but by the time I hit the 3 hour mark I had a hard time stopping so that I could sleep, and even then I dreamed about Zhu Chongba, General Ouyang, and Ma Xiuying (I am reliant on Wikipedia for spellings because I don’t have the text).
The unnamed girl who takes over her dead brother’s name, Zhu Chongba, and fated greatness was compelling at every stage. The tag line, “Rebel. Warrior. Hero.” feels inadequate to describe Zhu. Hero especially felt misleading. Or maybe complicated. Definitely complicated.
I read a lot of queer books, mostly romance, where queerness is a kind of freedom even in an oppressive society. In this fantastical ancient China, masculinity has such a stranglehold that there is no freedom for anyone. Girls and women are despised. The girl who becomes Zhu doesn’t even have a name before she is orphaned. Men who aren’t manly in the right way are despised. Children are disposable, or cannon fodder. Outside the monastery, there is no brotherhood for men either. Fathers hate their sons and brothers are set against each other. The landscape of The Great Yuan is a warning against unchecked patriarchy.
Zhu and Ouyang are counterpoints and reflections of each other. They are outside the expected gender norms. Ouyang is the sole survivor of a family executed for treason, castrated to ensure he would never produce heirs. While he is a trusted general, he is also relentlessly humiliated for the torture inflicted on him. Ouyang is driven by his need for revenge, even when that means destroying the person he loves most.
Destroying what someone else cherished never brought back what you yourself had lost. All it did was spread grief like a contagion.
Zhu is driven to seek greatness, because she thinks the alternative is nothingness. She makes choices, often awful choices, to ensure her own survival. Zhu’s body is often a threat to her own survival. Ouyang’s body is a source of derision to others. When Ouyang inflicts physical humiliation on Zhu, it is the despised state of her own body that saves her from nothingness. Which makes me realize that Zhu does find some freedom in queerness.
There has been some discussion about a sex scene between Zhu and her wife, Ma. Some people have felt like it came out of nowhere. But I thought the contrast between the consensual sexual intimacy between Zhu and Ma was a necessary contrast to the intimate violence of the last scene between Ouyang and Esen. Zhu seizes the fate her brother let go of and while she lets it shape her, she also manipulates it to fit her own desires. Ouyang sees only one path, and he walks it, even knowing it won’t change the past or lead to a future. It’s also important that, because others behave as if the loss of her hand lessens her worth, Zhu pleasures her wife with her remaining fist. It’s such an act of defiance to everything the men in this world hold dear.
I try to leave content warnings at the end of my reviews, but for She Who Became the Sun all I can say is, this is a cruel world. If you struggle with seeing or hearing about children starved, beaten, tortured or murdered, this may not be the book for you.
When cruelty is your weapon, you write your own ending.