Just in case there was any doubt, dragons are still my JAM. I should clarify that it’s specifically the dragons in Naomi Novik’s world that I am adoring. I’ve never encountered such interesting characters inhabiting and giving personality to such mythic bodies. Sure, lots of great stories have dragons, or dinosaurs, or talking frogs, or whatever. But these dragons are the heart and soul of this corner of the multiverse and I am ON BOARD. Throne of Jade picks up just a few weeks after […]
The Ties that Bind Us
During the 1960s Chinese Cultural Revolution an old woman fainted at a train station. While going through her belongings to identify her, police found scraps of paper with strange writing they’d never seen before. They assumed she was a spy and arrested her. But scholars sent to identify the characters realized the script was nu shu-a written language written exclusively by women in remote areas of China. Literally meaning “Women’s Writing” nu shu had very little in common with the “traditional” Chinese characters that men […]
Exploring a sprawling, new world
I’ve never read anything quite like Ken Liu’s debut novel The Grace of Kings.I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain it for a week now and the closest I can come to is this: Chinese history meets The Iliad meets Game of Thrones. Sometimes it reads like a history book…and then our heroes wage their wars on the backs of whales or from steampunk-inspired hot air balloons. Sprawling and ambitious, I couldn’t help but cheer for this book, even when I didn’t love […]
“We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live”-Joan Didion
When I was in college, I remember taking an international politics class. It was an Intro class, populated by a lot of students who heard it was a skate class. We ended up talking about North Korea one day, and one waste of valuable mass stood up to proclaim that if he were a North Korean, hewouldn’t be taking any of “ this Kim Jong Whatever’s shit.” When our professor (I hope trying to amp up our fremdschämen, and as a slight tangent, seriously God […]
Totalitarianism, up close and personal in post-Mao China
The Vagrants has got to be one of the grimmest novels I’ve read this year, and yet it is a book I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. The author grew up in Beijing of the late 1970s, the tumultuous post-Mao period in a China which had emerged from the horrific Cultural Revolution without plans to replace it with anything positive. The population was splintered between those whose humanity had been virtually destroyed by the bludgeon of Maoist doctrine, those who were struggling to enter the modern […]
Tan’s story of courtesan life in China not quite up to The Joy Luck Club
Another examination of complex mother-daughter relationships, this one set against the backdrop of 1912 Shanghai, then moving to the U.S. west coast and back again to China across a span of 40 years. The primary narrator is Violet, a little girl living in Shanghai with her savvy American mother turned madam of a highly specialized courtesan house which caters to Chinese and American businessmen and politicians, and successfully mixes business deals with sex. Violet is proud of her American heritage, until she discovers one day […]
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