Tag Archives: Taiwan

Book of the month: Maggie Shen King

December 30, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments
Wedding Parade

A few months ago, to celebrate the publication of the new UK edition of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, I ran a giveaway. The terms of entry were simple: all those who wanted the chance to receive a signed copy simply had to leave a comment recommending me a book.

The response was wonderful and it was great to receive input from readers all over the planet, just as I did when I first set out to read the world in 2012. The suggestions were as intriguing as they were varied and will no doubt keep me busy for some time. However, they have already yielded some cracking reads and my last book of the month of 2022 is one of them, put forward by Lauren.

As its title implies, An Excess Male by Taiwanese-American author Maggie Shen King is built around imagining a world in which there are too many men. Set in an authoritarian, near-future mainland China, it envisions a society where the gender-selection practices driven by directives such as the one-child policy (but also at play in countries like India) have skewed the ratio of women to men so drastically that government-sanctioned polyandry is instituted in order to give as many men as possible the opportunity to marry and reproduce.

The novel focuses on one family in the process of interviewing for a third husband – ‘going to the max’ as it’s known in the world of the book. Told variously through the eyes of the prospective suitor Wei-guo, wife May-ling, and her two existing husbands, brothers Hann and XX, the narrative explores the experience of being trapped in a system that controls and subverts basic human needs and desires, exposing numerous secrets along the way.

Essentially, this book is about finding a way to say the unsayable, and live an authentic life in the face of the systematic stripping of human dignity and autonomy. As with Crystal Boys, my 2012 Taiwanese read, homosexuality (which was only declassified as a mental illness in China in 2001) becomes a shorthand for this. In the world of the novel, men who love men are known as ‘wilfully sterile’ and are sent for re-education, as well as denied various rights.

The speculative, near-future setting is also a powerful tool. By creating a society that does not quite exist, Shen King is able to express criticisms, depict hypocrisy and portray tensions much more directly and tellingly than a realist novel would allow. As Megan Walsh argues in her brilliant book, The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters, sci-fi has been especially successful in mainland China partly because of the wiggle room it allows authors – it’s no coincidence that Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, became the first novel to be a bestseller both at home and abroad. For an author like Shen King, raised in a territory that has not been allowed to assert its sovereignty on the global stage for decades, the attraction is clear.

Yet any reader who interprets An Excess Male purely as a criticism of China’s approach to Taiwan is missing a great deal. Many of the anxieties around surveillance and the intrusion of technology into private relationships find their echo in contemporary anglophone society. The same can be said of various approaches to categorising and labelling people, and thereby limiting their freedoms and opportunities. The fact, for example, that being placed on a mental-health watchlist is seen as the first step towards being excluded from mainstream society resonates uncomfortably with many practices in the so-called Free World. Much as many anglophone readers might like to, we cannot get away with simply branding China as the villain here: there are problems to address in our societies too.

This subtlety is also evident in the writing and in the way the story plays out. As the best dystopian fiction tends to do, the novel reveals flashes of beauty in brokenness. Suffocating though it is, the tightly controlled system of polyandry allows for closeness and even whole kinds of intimacy unknown in more liberal societies; the fraternal bond between some co-husbands, for example, is a touching and sustaining thing, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. There are also some lovely touches in the writing, such as the foreign nuns who appear at one point, speaking a kind of accented language riddled with the habits usually associated with Chinese stereotypes. XX’s perspective, as a character on the autism spectrum, is also, for the most part, deftly handled.

The result is a compelling and thought-provoking read. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of both Taiwanese and US society, Shen King creates a story that neatly bridges the gap between the two. In so doing, she brings readers everywhere face to face with one of the most fundamental human dilemmas: how to survive when your personal needs go against what is perceived to be the greater good.

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King (Harper Voyager, 2017)

Picture: ‘Wedding Parade’ by Cormac Heron on flickr.com

Taiwan: living on the edge

August 9, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 16 Comments

Taiwan is the country with the most tenuous claim to be included on the list of independent countries I’m reading books from this year. It was a member of the UN until 1971, when the dispute between its government, the Republic of China, and the Chinese government, the People’s Republic of China, led to the UN voting to withdraw its recognition of the ROC and thus Taiwan. From that time onwards, although Taiwan governs its internal affairs independently and many countries around the world maintain informal diplomatic relations with it (the UK government sent a parliamentary delegation to visit the country in 2011, for example), the nation has officially been part of China. Only 22 UN members recognise it as a separate sovereign state.

I was curious to see what literature from this disputed land might be like, so when @markbooks suggested Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys, I was quick to add it to the list.

Claiming to be ‘the first modern Asian gay novel’, the 1983 book portrays the lives of a group of young male prostitutes in Taipei’s underworld. Following A-Qing, a teenage run-away who was expelled from school and thrown out of home for being found in a compromising position with a supervisor, the narrative explores the precarious lives of these young men, peeling back the layers to show the tenderness, vulnerability and hurt within.

The subject matter and suggestive cover picture of a half-naked Taiwanese youth set up an expectation of explicitness that is actually quite misleading. In fact, beyond passing references, the book doesn’t feature a single sex scene. Instead, all the drama and extreme experience is played out in the dialogue between the characters, in which cruel insults and desperate appeals are laughed off in a welter of banter. There is the boy Wu Min who talks about his plans for suicide only for his friends to think he is joking until he goes home to slash his wrists and the chief who pushes the youngsters into encounters with seemingly heartless abandon.

Yet, beneath the hard shell that nights around the lotus pond in Taipei’s New Park and later at the Cosy Nest café force them to develop, the boys possess a great deal of warmth and tenderness that often expresses itself in surprising ways. When Wu Min is in hospital and unable to meet his medical bills, the boys all donate blood to keep him alive – ‘what we share in common are bodies filled with aching, irrepressible desire and hearts filled with insane loneliness’, observes A-Qing, articulating the bond that ties him to his friends. In addition, A-Qing, who misses his younger brother Buddy, is forever adopting and protecting younger boys who remind him of home.

Indeed, by far the most daring and subversive aspect of the book is not its presentation of sexuality and prostitution but its use of those things to express ideas about nationhood, sovereignty and identity. As homosexuality was illegal in mainland China until 1997, it is effectively off-limits, out-of-bounds and dangerous territory in the book. This enables Pai Hsien-yung to use the crystal boys’ world as a powerful metaphor, as the opening lines of the novel show:

‘There are no days in our kingdom, only nights. As soon as the sun comes up, our kingdom goes into hiding, for it is an unlawful nation; we have no government and no constitution, we are neither recognised nor respected by anyone, our citizenry is little more than rabble. […] It’s as though our kingdom were surrounded and hidden by a tightly woven fence – cut off from the outside world, isolated for the time being. But we are always keenly aware of the constant threat to our existence by the boundless world on the other side of the fence.’

At times, the narrative becomes a little stilted and episodic, with too many characters crowding in one after the other. Pai Hsien-yung’s tendency to stress the emotional suffering of the boys can also be a little repetitive and could have done with some tighter editing.

However, none of this detracts from the fact that this is a courageous and fascinating work from a writer not afraid to speak out against the majority. The book is a gripping insight into a fragile and contested world. Powerful stuff.

Crystal Boys (Nieh-Tzu) by Pai Hsien-yung, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (Gay Sunshine Press, 1995)