It’s been a while since I’ve read a novel. Though if I’m honest, it’s been a while since I read, period. So I’m glad my jump back into fiction was with “An Excess Male” by Maggie Shen King, because this was an interesting meditation into what-could-be if China were to maintain its one-child policy (also if the world didn’t end in the next 20 years due to climate disasters).
“An Excess Male” is set in the not-so distant future – the blurb says 2030 – and in China, the country’s one-child policy and preference for boys have resulted in a society overrun by men. About 40 million are unmarried, and will likely never have a family of their own. To help alleviate the problem, the government has allowed for women to have up to three husbands in order to address the lack of spouses and to better the chances of procreation.
Forty-plus-year-old Lee Wei-Guo is hoping to become the third husband of May-ling, and the book opens with him and his family (his two fathers, who he refers to as Big Dad and Dad, his biological parent) having a matchmaker-arranged lunch with May-ling and her two husbands, Hann and XX. He is initially quite taken by May-ling, and fantasizes being the strong one preferred for making love as Hann is quite a bit older, while XX appears to be… different. Yet as he spends more and more time with them, and learns their quirks and secrets, Wei-guo realizes that the entire family, as a unit, provide him something he’s never felt before – a sense of belonging.
But as the chapters slowly unwind this alternate universe, we learn that the world they inhabit is unsafe for anyone who thinks differently, loves differently, and even toes slightly out of line. For a man like Wei-Guo who’s long believed that he must do what he can for his country, he learns it can be fatal for anyone who even has the merest objection to what is the approved narrative.
Yes, I’m being vague on purpose because I don’t want to give too much away as Shen King’s book is really absolutely worth a read, and I think discovering the layers within it is part of the joy. Her world-building in it is also so fully realized in its details, and I was so keen to absorb it that I finished the book in three sittings. (Which is crazy, given that I’ve barely read a single thing in the past year.)
A couple things stand out for me (which aren’t spoilers) – in Shen King’s future of China, I found it so telling that even as they are a valued commodity, women still sit so low on society’s rungs. The women are merely broodmares to their husbands, and even as they have the pick of 40 million men, they have to defer to their families’ – their husbands’ – choices. There is still a subservient quality to May-ling’s conversations to Hann, even though he does love her deeply and says he treats her as his equal. There are also no women in the workplaces, which I found interesting as it implies that the government might regard their mere presence as a safety issue.
Another thing I noticed is that the chapters in Wei-Guo and May-ling’s point of views are written in the first person, yet for Hann and XX, they are in third person. Of course this is intentional but why? Do Wei-guo and May-ling’s voices mean more because they are the ones most naive about their society, and the ones entering in a new relationship? Does having Hann and XX’s inner monologues in the third person show that they’re more accustomed to masking their real selves to outsiders?
Truthfully, I’m not sure what the benefit is of making their chapters in different points of views, other than slightly jostle the reader out of their world. And while the plot and character development is really interesting – save for the final third wandering into thriller territory when it could have simply gone down a route of quiet exploration – I don’t think Shen King’s writing is intentional enough to pull off the stylistic choice of making the reader hopscotch between first- and third-person. She’s pretty matter-of-fact with her language, which can make it difficult to truly get in the headspace of any single character. Though perhaps that could be on purpose too.
Finally, I’d like to point out that this book was published in 2017, and that Shen King is Taiwanese-American. I mean, of course she’s Taiwanese – from the moment I started reading “An Excess Male”, I thought, “Wait a second, is the author Chinese?” and had to look her up, because the thought of a Chinese author writing something that is so blatantly anti-PRC means they would essentially be living in exile.
And while in our reality, China has finally revoked the one-child policy (stopped in 2016, by 2021 the government was encouraging couples to have three children), Shen King’s world isn’t a faraway outcome. I don’t think 2030 was a year that was a mere stab in the dark. In some ways, the society she envisioned – in which women still have little decision-making power over their bodies, in which gay people in government have to live in fear of being outed, in which neurodivergent individuals are considered an asset to a workforce yet still looked down on, and in which people are looking for love at any cost – isn’t all that foreign.
