Jordan, Sherryl - The Hunting of the Last Dragon
Yet another fantasy with Asian bits in it! And it was kind of cool when I realized the girl was Chinese. The way the book was written kind of annoyed me -- the premise is that the main character, Jude, is telling his story of killing the last dragon to a monk, and the monk is copying down every single thing he says! This includes all the "Well, hi monk, it's been a good day today... are you still writing down everything?" I got a little used to it after a while, and I kind of liked the little notes on the format of the book -- Jude would tell the monk that the illuminated letters were very pretty (the book had pretty capital letters for every chapter).
And now I'm getting all tangled up in thoughts about portraying different cultures, because the main things about Jing-Wei are her bound feet, her skills with gunpowder and kites, and her personality. Her personality is the only thing that isn't stereotypically Chinese, I feel. And it was cool having the gunpowder and the kite and a very new way to kill a dragon, but I was also thinking, is it reducing things? And she decides to unbind her feet, to rebreak them and shape them so she has big feet, and she marries Jude instead of the Chinese guy courting her in the end. So if you kind of read it like that, you've got a character almost renouncing her ethnicity.
And there's the thing with the foot binding. I feel like it's almost so controversial an issue that it's tough to write about -- make someone like Jing-Wei, and they feel a little too advanced and PC for the times. And I wonder, Jing-Wei kept saying she was free with Jude, but poor, while if she married Chinese guy, she would have been rich, but caged. I don't know that much about medieval Europe, so I don't know how constricted females were at the time. And I'm guessing a big part of it had to do with class, so being poor would mean more freedom? But then, if you've got a character who accepts it as beautiful, as her worldview, is it anti-feminist? What of Scarlett's corset-pulling scene and the sixteen-inch waist in Gone With the Wind? Is that any different from foot-binding?
Of course the other part of my mind is just telling me to shut up, because there are few enough Asian bits in fantasy/sci-fi as is ;). I dunno. It's kind of like when I was reading The China Bride, by Mary Jo Putney -- I got so pissed off at the sometimes spiritual, sometimes incredibly oppressive to female Chinese society portrayed there. It was like Putney had two China's in her head, both stereotypes! Then of course the heroine does this dumb thing in which she tries to kill herself blah blah honor blah blah at which point I actually chucked the book against a wall. Hey, hello, I bet even the samurai weren't even that bad!
It's also weird because it's kind of like our own cultural myths about ourselves feeding back on each other -- the Japanese idea of an ideal samurai who probably never existed, like the ideal cowboy or pioneer here, and here comes other people who have only read about that ideal in fiction and literature and go make a movie about the ideal while saying it's about historical fact (Last Samurai, I point at you). So it is kind of like that here, when Jing-Wei and Old Lan (another old Chinese woman in the woods -- lots of Chinese people here for medieval Europe!) brag to Jude about gunpowder and kites and movable type and their science. It sounds like my old Chinese history textbooks extolling the wondrous advances of the Chinese. And of course, they were pretty cool things to come up with. I don't know. It's a thin line I think most East Asian Studies people have to walk, for fear of glorifying the "other" Asian country too much, or to overly lambast it as oppressive and restrictive when people are coming from different cultural criteria. And yet, how can we remember that there are these differences in culture without essentializing and saying that all differences in Japanese and American cinema or Chinese and American science or whatnot is the result of these cultural differences? I mean, I wrote my whole thesis on how that disregards the readers/viewers/audience -- if an American reads Japanese manga and has some emotional connection, can it be said that the manga only works on a Japanese cultural level? What about the author's intent? I mean, how often does an author go about saying, I will write this work as an example of my culture. What about time -- Japanese avant-garde film of the 70s is arguably more similar to French avant-garde of the same time than it is similar to Japanese big studio films of the fifties (Kurosawa, Ozu).
I just got completely distracted from the book ;).
And now I'm getting all tangled up in thoughts about portraying different cultures, because the main things about Jing-Wei are her bound feet, her skills with gunpowder and kites, and her personality. Her personality is the only thing that isn't stereotypically Chinese, I feel. And it was cool having the gunpowder and the kite and a very new way to kill a dragon, but I was also thinking, is it reducing things? And she decides to unbind her feet, to rebreak them and shape them so she has big feet, and she marries Jude instead of the Chinese guy courting her in the end. So if you kind of read it like that, you've got a character almost renouncing her ethnicity.
And there's the thing with the foot binding. I feel like it's almost so controversial an issue that it's tough to write about -- make someone like Jing-Wei, and they feel a little too advanced and PC for the times. And I wonder, Jing-Wei kept saying she was free with Jude, but poor, while if she married Chinese guy, she would have been rich, but caged. I don't know that much about medieval Europe, so I don't know how constricted females were at the time. And I'm guessing a big part of it had to do with class, so being poor would mean more freedom? But then, if you've got a character who accepts it as beautiful, as her worldview, is it anti-feminist? What of Scarlett's corset-pulling scene and the sixteen-inch waist in Gone With the Wind? Is that any different from foot-binding?
Of course the other part of my mind is just telling me to shut up, because there are few enough Asian bits in fantasy/sci-fi as is ;). I dunno. It's kind of like when I was reading The China Bride, by Mary Jo Putney -- I got so pissed off at the sometimes spiritual, sometimes incredibly oppressive to female Chinese society portrayed there. It was like Putney had two China's in her head, both stereotypes! Then of course the heroine does this dumb thing in which she tries to kill herself blah blah honor blah blah at which point I actually chucked the book against a wall. Hey, hello, I bet even the samurai weren't even that bad!
It's also weird because it's kind of like our own cultural myths about ourselves feeding back on each other -- the Japanese idea of an ideal samurai who probably never existed, like the ideal cowboy or pioneer here, and here comes other people who have only read about that ideal in fiction and literature and go make a movie about the ideal while saying it's about historical fact (Last Samurai, I point at you). So it is kind of like that here, when Jing-Wei and Old Lan (another old Chinese woman in the woods -- lots of Chinese people here for medieval Europe!) brag to Jude about gunpowder and kites and movable type and their science. It sounds like my old Chinese history textbooks extolling the wondrous advances of the Chinese. And of course, they were pretty cool things to come up with. I don't know. It's a thin line I think most East Asian Studies people have to walk, for fear of glorifying the "other" Asian country too much, or to overly lambast it as oppressive and restrictive when people are coming from different cultural criteria. And yet, how can we remember that there are these differences in culture without essentializing and saying that all differences in Japanese and American cinema or Chinese and American science or whatnot is the result of these cultural differences? I mean, I wrote my whole thesis on how that disregards the readers/viewers/audience -- if an American reads Japanese manga and has some emotional connection, can it be said that the manga only works on a Japanese cultural level? What about the author's intent? I mean, how often does an author go about saying, I will write this work as an example of my culture. What about time -- Japanese avant-garde film of the 70s is arguably more similar to French avant-garde of the same time than it is similar to Japanese big studio films of the fifties (Kurosawa, Ozu).
I just got completely distracted from the book ;).