Jordan, Sherryl - The Hunting of the Last Dragon
Mon, Jan. 12th, 2004 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterYet 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 ;).
(no subject)
Tue, Jan. 13th, 2004 08:11 am (UTC)But it was a very interesting distraction.
(no subject)
Wed, Jan. 14th, 2004 02:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Tue, Jan. 13th, 2004 04:40 pm (UTC)I'm teaching an Asian literature class this semester. Can I show my students this? I think it would be a great start, even though they won't know the book.
(no subject)
Wed, Jan. 14th, 2004 02:16 am (UTC)Feel free to show it to your students *immensely flattered*
"A Thousand Pieces of Gold"
Tue, Jan. 13th, 2004 10:40 pm (UTC)Anyway, the novel had a foot "unbinding" sequence at the very beginning that was extremely integral to the character development. The girl's (the novel takes place over the course of her life-time) father needs help with the farm or else the evil landlord will take everything. She doesn't have any brothers who can help out, so she asks her mom to help her uncurl her feet. It's been a while since I've read it... but from what I recall, the foot unbinding wasn't about westernizing the character--but more about the girl's loyalty and love for her family. She unbinds her feet, not for looks... but for function. The novel also made it clear that unbinding her feet wasn't going to make them look more westernized... she ends up with a permanent limp and she never says anything like, "Golly, I wish I had big ass feet so I can attract a sexy white guy."
Overall, the novel was fairly so-so. Just about everything you can think of happens to the her over the course of her novel, so it seems a bit soap opera-ish... but it's supposedly based on a true story.
Oh, and she gets a cool pet mountain lion.
Re: "A Thousand Pieces of Gold"
Sat, Jan. 24th, 2004 04:38 pm (UTC)Heh. Just read an article on the airplane on the wearing of high heels and how some doctors think it's about the worse thing to happen to feet since foot binding!
Re: "A Thousand Pieces of Gold"
Sat, Jan. 24th, 2004 05:11 pm (UTC)Something about scenes in which the upper-class girl decides to buck the system... they've never really rang true for me... they always seem waaaaaaay too modern for the time period they're set it.
But if she's taking off her corsett or de-binding her feet in order to do some actual *work*, then I find it far more believable.
Re: "A Thousand Pieces of Gold"
Sun, Jan. 25th, 2004 01:29 pm (UTC)Very much agree on the upper-class girl bucking the system thing. It's always felt too Mary-Sueish for me.