A Tour of Issues of Appropriation and Racism in Melbourne’s Restaurants

One day I was cycling around Melbourne and I saw a delivery motor bike in front of me. On its rear it said “you ling, we bling,” and I braked so fast you’d have thought I was in a cartoon. The unfortunate thing is, Miss Chu’s is not alone amongst Melbourne’s eateries in its racist imagery. So come with me now on a tour of racism, appropriation and ‘fun’ across Melbourne’s restaurants.

I'm going to throw this pu-erh in your face
I’m going to throw this pu-erh in your face

Continue reading “A Tour of Issues of Appropriation and Racism in Melbourne’s Restaurants”

linkspam is the fatberg of the night

Hey have some feels about the lack of representation of brown people in a movie about EGYPT. ABOUT BROWN PEOPLE. I mean, I adore Geoffrey Rush as much as the next Australian in her early 30s, but never in my entire life did I imagine him as Ra the Sun God. If Geoffrey Rush can be Ra, why can’t I? All lead actors in The Gods of Egypt will be white by Ruby Hamad (an awesome writer)

Lian Low has written part 1 of 3 about the Inaugural Asia Pacific Writers Forum at this year’s Melbourne Writer’s Festival! Stay tuned to Peril for life, but also for further parts!

List of complaints against Beyond Blue campaign dismissed by ASB.

Hey there is some shit going down with the way that Muslim Australians are currently being terrorised, targeted and treated, and it is not cool.

On Numan Haider at SBS (I’m not typing out that headline and you can’t make me)

Three fans ‘humiliated’ by police treatment at Roosters-Cowboys match

A quick recap of all the times Australia treated Muslims like complete garbage (last) week at Junkee.

On the security stuff: Journalists and whistle blowers will go to jail under new national security laws; #heyasio (the only thing that got me through Friday).

Important info on FATBERGS: How bad are they; an Oxford ‘out of control’ fatberg (in April) was threatening homes. HOMES. More recently, Richmond (in Twickenham) was named a fatberg HOTSPOT. We can only aspire to that sort of ecological horror, I suppose. Good thing we have a Great Barrier Reef to ruin.

Liz wants to link us to ‘Is Agents of Shield really an interracial family show?’ Liz is appropriately embarrassed about watching Agents of Shield, but in her heart Melinda May hangs out with Lin Beifong and they trade stories about being reluctant mentors to young women, so that’s okay.

At Kill Your Darlings: Oversharing is caring: the rise of the twenty-something memoir.

SURPRISE: The AFL has a racism, sexism, and homophobia problem.

Busted flush: corruption in Queensland at Overland.

No Award loves infrastructure: The weird afterlife of the world’s subterranean ‘ghost stations’

The Australian Women’s Writers Challenge has a series at the moment, focusing on women writers with a disability. Check it out!

Also on disability, Liz on her tumblr points out a case of disability policing by those who are not really in a position to do so.

The emotion involved in caring for a parent with Younger Onset Dementia at the Dementia Research Foundation.

THINGS TO ATTEND (Melbs only; please submit links to No Award for anything else that might be of interest/relevance) (neither of these are things we have been asked to promote, Steph is just interested in them):

Key of Sea at The Wheeler Centre (free; this Wednesday at 6:15) (Steph will definitely be at this)

Join us for an emotional night of storytelling and song. The Key of Sea produces creative projects – albums and journals – that celebrate Australia’s cultural diversity. The albums pair established artists with musicians escaping war, hardship or persecution.

In this intimate evening, we’ll hear from Danny Katz, Oslo Davis, Alice Pung, Zakia Baig, Awaz and Murtaza, as they share their work. All proceeds of album and journal sales on the night will go to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

The Privacy Workshop ($65/$45; 17 October)

The Privacy Workshop is a world class symposium on digital privacy, rights, and access. A range of respected speakers and thought leaders will gather in Melbourne, Australia, for a day of exceptional discourse through lectures, workshops and panel discussions.

other places; other people; othering people

A travelogue is an old tradition; an old form of writing. There are records of travel diaries as early as the second century CE; there are Arabic travel journals in the twelfth century and Chinese travel literature in the tenth. There are diaries and journals; maps and economics; boredom and poetry.

A travelogue is the transcription of an adventure; of an exploration; a movement into the unknown or, less commonly, into the known. Travel literature considers one’s identity, and one’s country, and one’s world.

A travelogue is, often, a reflection of the self.

A travelogue tells the audience a lot about a traveller. Between the lines are the things the traveller sees every day, and the assumptions a traveller makes, and the joys a traveller takes from moving through the world.

writer's victoria tweet:
writer’s victoria tweet: “what drives people to suffer in parts of the world with unpronounceable names & indigestible food? we’ll ask @tomdoig”

**

In Australia, and predominantly in English-language writing, a travelogue is about the traveller; and in its way, it is about the other. This requires an assumption around who is the audience, and who is the other, for there are few other ways to represent those with whom the narrative comes in contact.

I love travelogues. I love them for what they tell you about a person, and a place, and sometimes, what they tell you about yourself. I love travelogues of Australians in Australia; non-Australians in Australia; Australians not in Australia. (I also love travel tales of people in China and Malaysia and Singapore, the other places of my heart) I love these because whether these are travel stories of people in their homes or not in their homes, their stories are always new to me, and there’s always an exploration and an unfamiliarity and a joy, of sorts.

**

I love it when people talk about their travelogues!

In other news, here’s Other Places, a thing Writer’s Victoria is hosting tonight:

What drives people to leave the comfort of their everyday lives and suffer in far-flung parts of the world with unpronounceable names and indigestible food? Is it our essentially “nomadic” nature, as Bruce Chatwin claims? Is it “The Call of the Wild”? Or is that just a bunch of pretentious First World rubbish? All of the above, according to Tom Doig, author of Moron to Moron: two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure. Come along and find out why.

The audience: clearly not me. Though I choose to leave the comfort of my inner-north Melbourne home, it’s for the comfort of the family home in Malaysia, with its squat toilets and five grown adults in two bedrooms and mosquito netting. I’m a person with a name that is, in its way, unpronounceable (certainly many people mispronounce it). My food is, to many people, indigestible. So, in the dichotomy of the audience and the other, I’m pretty comfortable in assuming I’m the other, here, despite having been born in Australia and loving a good travelogue.

People not from the “first world” travel, and then write about it. People from the first world can be pretty rubbishly pretentious.

“The Call of the Wild” is primarily a racist concept used in racist situations (white people talking about not-white people).

I really wanted to go, because I love travel writing and I’m currently working on a brown person’s travelogue (mine). Now, I really want to go and find out if this event is gonna be as casually, thoughtlessly racist as it sounds like it’s going to be, but I really can’t justify the $50 just to get angry.

If you go, let me know. I’ve got some questions.

writer's victoria tweet:
writer’s victoria tweet: “are travel writers responding to ‘The Call of the Wild”? we’ll ask @tomdoig on Monday. Join us…”

Other Places
Writer’s Victoria
The Wheeler Centre
September 8, 18:30 – 20:30
Non-member $50 / Member $35 / Concession $30

I have not made my sadness known to Writer’s Victoria, as I’m not currently a member. Lately, as I publish more and more regularly, and as I truly begin to consider myself the writer part of ’emerging writer’, it’s something I’ve been considering. But right now, after this, I don’t want to. How can I expect support from an organisation that promotes this exclusion?

Fantasy Worlds and Real World Commentary

Emperor Weishu Maorin Guangong Zhian, sixth of the Long Dynasty, of Yanjing, lives in a walled palace. He greets his guests in the Hall of Imperial Greeting; he has beautifully cultivated gardens of flowers and rocks. Those who see him must bow, their heads to the ground, nine times; delicately clothed in silk, fastened with silk frogs. The Master of Presentations is a eunuch. The erhu and the pipa are common instruments; Yanjingyi eat ‘water-reed shoots’ and steamed dumplings with eating sticks. Beside Yanjing lies Gyongxe, a great high plateau, where religions flourish and temples and temple dedicates are most at peace. Premier amongst the religions of Gyongxe is the Living Circle: a religion where one one feels the magic flowing through everything. It is like Qi, says one of the Emperor’s mages. Gyongxe is ruled over by the 298th God-King, implied a reincarnation, who can channel thoughts from gods and other beings.  In Gyongxe they drink butter tea and eat dumplings. Sky burial is an ancient, beloved practice, and though Briar feels disgust as an outsider, he respects their tradition.

It took me 200 pages before I put together what I was reading, because I didn’t want to believe it.

When a rose bush in the carefully sculpted gardens of Emperor Weishu, Eagle of the Heavens, the Leveller of Mountains, wilts with rot, he orders it torn up, the roses set alight, and the gardeners responsible tied up in the middle as the roses burn. His mages are dedicated to him, and his wars, and his closeness to heaven. He is the absolute ruler, and his armies are innumerable, and at their head he is ruthless. Emperor Weishu keeps prisoners; his favourite is Parahan, whose twin sister is Soudamini, who comes from Kombanpur, one of the Realms of the Sun. They speak Banpuri. Parahan is kept with magic chains across his wrists and ankles, and sits on occasion chained to the emperor’s dais.

I love representations of non-white cultures in Fantasy. I’m bored of epic European-based fantasies, reimagings of Arthurian or Greek or Roman or Christian mythos.* So this is great! A world of magic, with these cultural reference points that are familiar to me, that are home to me; or that are completely different but still belonging to someone. It’s great and rich and excellent.

Having taken the countries adjacent to his own, Emperor Weishu, Son of all the Gods, Master of Lions, is moving on to Gyongxe, the spindle of the world. He must have his empire encompass such a point. He has subjugated neighbouring Inxia, and is secretly holding the borders, preventing traders from travelling, and suppressing the Living Circle, this fantasy universe’s calm, meditative religion.

I don’t love Westerners passing judgements on issues they know nothing about; Westerners using our own political situations as the plots for their fantasy worlds; Westerners bringing horrible stereotypes into their fantasy texts, reinforcing these views.

I do not disagree with the heart of it. As an overseas Chinese living in Beijing, I kept my mouth shut on the Tibet issue, learnt the coded key words, and went about my business. I support sovereignty along religious borders, and I definitely have issues with the PRC’s methods of maintaining dominance and control, and the way it’s exterminating real world cultures. I have so many thoughts on Chinese colonialism, and its push into African countries and its railway through Tibet and its suppression of Xinjiang.

But these are complicated issues, with complicated factors and outcomes, and real world impacts. And representation affects that, too.

Borrow our cultures with respect; represent our cultures and our countries with thought and research and interest. Incorporate our fun elements and our bad elements and our mediocre elements. Have fantasy countries that look like China and Tibet and India and Indonesia, and sound and feel like it to us.

I want a less white fantasy landscape. But I don’t want this passing of judgement on a real world issue through a fantasy lens, through a White person’s fantasy lens. I don’t want to see my culture distorted so it is nothing but a stereotype; I don’t want my history disrespected and my culture manipulated so that all is left is a plot point.

I love this author (who I have not named, because she likes to have conversations with her critics and her fangirls like to pile on, but there is all the information here that you need to identify this author and series), and I have read and reread so many of her books. She works hard and works well to build an inclusive universe, that’s not a random European monoculture and is instead full and realistic (across not-ethnicity things, too). And I appreciate that. But this felt like Carthak again: I remember the Emperor Mage, who was so exorbitant and opulent he covered Daine’s bird shit covered clothes with new silk; whose slaves had their tongues removed; who felt he was heaven’s son, and closer to heaven than the gods; who wanted to invade Tortall and all that the protagonists held dear. And it makes me mad and it breaks my heart.

We are more than antagonists in your fantasy world.

(We are more than antagonists in your real world fantasy)

*though Jesus was a black man, Christianity is still primarily a thing associated with the West and with Europe. And of course historically there were black Europeans.

love me long time ugh help i’m dying

Say you’re lucky enough to get the beautiful and talented and adorable real-life doctor AND actress, Australian-born Renee Lim [1] in your new comedy show (which is relatively funny – I laughed a lot). Do you let her natural comedy stylings shine with the words, completely unrelated to race, that you have in your script?

Or do you cast her has the heavily-accented, heavily made-up, younger Thai girlfriend of your midlife crisis white father?

GEE. I just don’t know! It’s so hard to decide! Both options are so excellent!

mae, from please like me
sorry i know it’s hard to see but you can just make out her blue eyeshadow and her finger bling

Aside from her accent and her heavy bangles, Mae isn’t even Thai – as if bangles and an accent defines a Thai woman. She could totally be Chinese-Australian! (Or Thai-Australian even though I have issues with the pan-Asian identity – but not a brand new immigrant) Later the series looks at the playful mockery that is part of the “Asian” mindset. She could totally be Chinese-Australian!

It’s not the show I have a problem with – it’s that this is how Australia sees its South East Asian women.

This is not new. South-East Asian Australian women have long been presented as sexual objects, and as objects of ridicule (within a sexual sphere or with a sexual component).

In 1994 we were subjected to Cynthia, played by Juliet Perez[2], who was born in Australia. Cynthia was “a gold-digger, a prostitute, an entertainer whose expertise is popping out ping-pong balls from her sex-organ, a manic depressive, loud and vulgar. The worst stereotype of the Filipina.” [3] She was heavily accented and frustratingly other, laughable and deplorable and completely unable to be related to.

Her Thai-ness, much like Mae’s Thai-ness, was completely unnecessary; it was defended by producer Al Clark as “a misfit like the three protagonists are, and just about everybody else in the film is, and her presence is no more a statement about Filipino women than having three drag queens is a statement about Australian men,” which, uh, fuck that shit, Al, because white Australian males are the very definition of the Australian man, but I don’t see the reverse being true about heavily accented Filipino Australian women in small desert towns, completely separated from their communities and cultural networks. Do you?

Representations of South East Asian women outside of Australia (but still connected to Australians) only reinforce this. Turtle Beach, set in Malaysia, features my beloved Joan Chen as Minou, a Vietnamese woman married to the Australian ambassador. During the movie she sacrifices herself for her children, because South-East Asian women are self-sacrificing for the family, I can only assume. [4]

In Serangoon Road (we all know how I feel about that by now), all the South East Asian women are completely separate from the Australians – there are no SEAzn Australian women in Serangoon Road, which is woah quite the factual error. Maybe my beloved Pamelyn Chee is about to get it on with an American played by an Australian, which is another issue but the point remains.

South-East Asian women on Australian TV can’t be Australians. They’re always from somewhere else; they’re always othered and markedly different. Ien Ang [5] suggests that this is also in part to present a safe multiculturalism to Australians – some SEA women can be Australian, but they’re still markedly different.

The ABS doesn’t give me the data on percentage of Australians who were born in Australia but are of SEA origin/descent/ethnicity (or if it does I’m not able to work it out). But look around your life. How many SEAzn women do you know who look like this, who act like this? Because fuck if I do (I don’t). I have a broad, hilarious Australian accent (except when I’m talking to my mother) and there’s no way I’m sacrificing myself.

This cultural stereotyping for the purposes of entertainment (AND WRONGNESS) is by no means limited to us South-East Asian ladies. There is (was) one non-Anglo Aussie on Packed to the Rafters and his family is played for stereotypical Greek family laughs [6]; Benjamin Ng talked Gangnam Style and the stereotyping of Asian males in the Drum last year [7]; Hany Lee came on board Neighbours as an exchange student (rather than, say, a Korean-Australian) – despite being born in Australia.[8]

If we seek to see ourselves, reflections of ourselves, and actual realities in our media, then Australian media is obviously not presenting us with that, and it’s for a whole lot of reasons. There’s a whole lot of stuff to say here about authenticity, perceived authenticity (and inauthenticity), accepted stereotypes, racism and the Australian identity, but it’s late and you’ve heard it all before. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was 19 years ago, and was hardly even the first cut, and here we are with Mae in 2013, migrating to Australia with her bangles clacking, loving her old white man long time. The Australian identity, if it exists, contains multitudes, and it’d be nice if I wasn’t injured by trying to find it in my Australian media.

PS I’m authentic even when I’m not speaking Manglish at a clip.

Further Reading:

This seems creepy, but Ben Law’s thesis http://eprints.qut.edu.au/29272/2/Benjamin_Law_Thesis.pdf

Asian Women in Australian Soap Operas: Questioning Idealized (sic) Hybrid Representation, Monika Winarnita, Asian Social Science Vol 7, No 8, August 2011. available at: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/download/11487/8052 …

Footnotes and References

[1] Renee Lim interview with Asians on Film, Asians on Film, (no pub date) accessed 27/10/2013 available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9xEbHDOwuk*

* WATCH HER IN THE NEWTOWN GIRLS, SHE’S ADORABLE AND QUEER

[2] JULIET PEREZ PLAYED RITA REPULSA IN THE MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS MOVIE IN 1995 HELP HELP AMAZING (imdb)

[3] More Than Just a Laugh: Assessing the Politics of Camp in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Ann-Marie Cook, (no pub date) accessed 27/10/2013 available at http://www.academia.edu/370668/More_Than_Just_a_Laugh_Assessing_the_Politics_of_Camp_in_The_Adventures_of_Priscilla_Queen_of_the_Desert

[4] The sacrificial Asian in Australian film, Olivia Khoo, real time 59, feb-mar 2004, pp15, accessed 27/10/2013 available at http://www.realtimearts.net/article/59/7336

[5] Ien Ang, quoted in Asian Women in Australian Soap Operas: Questioning Idealized (sic) Hybrid Representation, Monika Winarnita, Asian Social Science Vol 7, No 8, August 2011. pp4.

[6] All-white Australian television fails the reality test, Melissa Phillips, The Age, February 17 2012, accessed 27/10/2013 available at http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/society-and-culture/allwhite-australian-television-fails-the-reality-test-20120217-1tdbo.html

[7] Gangnam style and the stereotyping of Asian males, Benjamin Ng, the Drum, 25/10/2012, accessed 27/10/2013, available at http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4329226.html (don’t read the comments, as always)

[8] Racist debate about TV shows is not always black and white why am I even referencing this stuff properly, Colin Vickery, The Herald Sun, 04/07/2011, accessed 27/10/2013, available at http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/racist-debate-about-tv-shows-is-not-always-black-and-white/story-e6frfhqf-1226086750176

The Exotic Place as Other (and notes on cinder, by marissa meyer)

Futures and dystopias are frequently set in completely fabricated cities and worlds and planets, often but not always rising from the ashes of some war or climate catastrophe on Earth. There is extensive world-building and backgrounds established, and aside from the shared past of ‘Earth’ there is at times little else shared; Earth, and the issues of now translated into the text.

Frequently, though, those new dystopic futures are in New Something. New Beijing, New Singapore, New Istanbul. When they’re written in English and set in New Asian Something, I will bet you all the tea in my house that it is shorthand for an exotic distant (future) other; that the name of that place bears no actual relation to the plot or the world building other than something superficial like chopsticks, or the heat, and could have been set in New New York or New Londontown.

When you give the name of a place, you conjure connotations of that place, images and memories and ideas. When you name a place and there is nothing similar between the place you describe and the place you have named, what connotations exactly are you trying to conjure? In many cases, that image is other, and the exotic.

Exotic as Shorthand and the Place as Other

Exotic is a problematic term all on its own, particularly so when it’s applied to some culture you don’t know; in English-language Science Fiction, that’s almost always a place that isn’t a Western place. Tori Truslow wrote a great post in 2012. It’s got totally racist connotations, especially when we’re talking about beauty, particularly women; it separates us, and it others us. It’s frustrating when it’s applied to your food and your culture (as I wrote about five years ago). These are all different topics, but you see the connection: the exotic as other.

And the exotic in a text assumes an audience; but more importantly, it makes assumptions on who is not considered the audience.

In Australia, the term ‘exotic’ is used to refer to introduced species of plants and animals; primarily, English species. Roses are exotic; as are rabbits. I delight in this usage; particularly in my industry where this is the correct terminology.

The words ‘New Place’ are not required to create this artificial and lazy sense of place as other. Firefly, the Joss Whedon space western, is set 500 years in the future when the USA and China have combined to form one governing body and there’s nary an Asian city or country name in sight. There are swearwords in ear-twitching Mandarin, though, and comments about cooking bao and some kitschy East Asian set dressing. There’s no actual evidence of the alleged Chinese upper class, and despite claiming to be a fusion universe the show features no actual Asians (and indeed, described as Pan-Asian rather than the logical outcome of Pan-Chinese). It creates this great sense of place, of other, of how our dystopic future might turn out without resorting to green skies and triple moons…if you’re not sitting there, foaming at the mouth while someone appropriates your culture for its trappings and none of what it could actually contribute (say, actual Asians. And 100 kuai says terraforming was invented by an Asian scientist. Because have you met the Asian monolith?).

Dystopic future Los Angeles as represented in Blade Runner (you know what’s great about Blade Runner? Edward James Olmos) is like the perfect summing up of my point. It’s so perfect, I found some lecturer’s class notes on the internet that agree. This 2019 LA has lots of East Asian elements and non-English languages, and a whole lot of brown people, which reflected a (1980s but still relevant today!) fear of East Asian growth (Japan then, but China now) and an increase in white flight, which in Blade Runner are used as short hand for dystopia.

My disdain for The Wind-Up Girl remains strong, for many reasons, and in my original review I noted that (sorry, I’m totally quoting myself here):

there is really no point to setting the novel in Thailand. Thailand in this novel is othered just like many of the characters, and at most point it feels like any old made up exotic back drop. There’s very little about the setting that is really clearly a future Thailand, except from some mythology stuff. It could have been any old country, so why make it Thailand? Except I guess to make use of its sex trade issues WHY OH WHY. Some reviewers (okay, one commenter on one review) mentioned that it could be because Thailand is the only country that was never colonised by some white dude, which, okay, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still totally The Other.

And as Jaymee points out in her review, there is not only no justification for this geographical choice, there is also no explanation for inexplicable changes in neighbouring geography, such as the xenophobic fundamentalism of Malaysia (called Malaya in the book) which is inconsistent with a nuanced understanding of Malaysia’s history and racial politics. This oversight highlights the other issue with the exotic as the other: a necessary understanding not only of that one city, but of all its other interactions in the world.

Hilariously, I discovered this review of The Wind-Up Girl (which includes a review for River of Gods, which is a book I really want to read to see how terribly it uses India as a dystopic future setting) which completely disagrees with me, on the grounds that a good future dystopia based on an existing city should be totally different due to science and technology and in fact let me quote from this review, because this bit I agree with:

The right way is to recognize the historical fact that no country reaches the tech frontier without undergoing serious social changes. The faint echoes of samurai and cowboys in the Panasonics and Googles of today are just that – faint echoes. Writers who realize this will try to preserve some element of the spirit of the old in the form of the (imagined) new, rather than trying to cut-and-paste.

True! I will buy this theory, or some of it. However I disagree that The Wind-Up Girl has done so, primarily because I ask this: who are you to make the decision that it is sufficiently echoey? The biggest problem with this theory is that we are writing in the today. As an author not from these cities (as every author I am talking about in this blog post is), can they ever truly be trusted to make these sorts of judgements on a city? Instead, they pick and choose and turn up a city that is never quite right, precisely because it could just as easily have been set anywhere and it has brought nothing to the story other than the exotic as dystopic and different, particularly as the stories are written today, in our actual current world politics. (Thanks once again for making Thailand a stereotype of poverty and sexual slavery, Paolo! It’s not like every Western produced text that features Thailand makes the same statement!)

The Accidental Exotic is My Backyard

There is a flip side to this: the unintended Exotic. Elizabeth Knox suggests that non-USA/English in English writers may do this by accident or even consciously, where one’s normal is in fact the “audience”‘s exotic and different. This again makes assumptions about audiences, and asks what we can expect a reader to know and to understand. Famously Avatar: The Last Airbender was considered by some viewers to be entirely fantasy, including some elements taken directly from Japanese, Chinese and Korean myths and traditions. How much of this is because readers (and viewers) are used to the completely familiar, and the exotic as other?

New Beijing, Imagined (No, Seriously, Imagined) in Cinder, by Marissa Meyer (spoilers included)

Despite its capital of New Beijing, the Eastern Commonwealth is not a China. It can’t be, not with far-flung provinces such as Mumbai, an Emperor named Kaito, and kimonos as formal wear. The emperor eats with chopsticks at one point, and Cinder’s sisters are named Pearl and Peony, and family names before personal names. In the market is a sweet bun baker named Chang Sacha, which I guess could potentially be a pan-Chinese name. There is a moon calendar celebration.

Some reviews mentioned how Chinese it all sounded but it is so not Chinese sounding that I cannot even. It is not even very pan-Asian, which I wouldn’t forgive but would at least be something.

Pearl and Peony are Western stereotypes well before they’re actual Chinese names, especially in a text that’s Linh and Chang and Kaito. Their mother, Adri, makes no sense in this context as a name. Indeed their names even translated, with no naming schema, confuse rather than clarify. There is an Emperor, and with that Japanese name and the Changs and the Linhs (Vietnamese, by the way, if you’re wondering, and also usually a personal name) we’re moving solidly into pan-Asian territory.

The likelihood of China entering an alliance with Japan is as always slim to none for varied historical reasons; I would believe a China-Korea alliance before a China-Japan alliance, though the Singapore I’ll grant, especially if it were a one commonwealth two systems deal.

It’s a lot for me to say that it can’t be New Beijing because the names are broken, but it’s basically all we’re given. This New Beijing could be any North American city that I’ve seen on a tv screen (but surely even then the USA, with its history, is unlikely to accept a hereditary ruler so perhaps not even then). The chances of it being even pan Asian, let alone Chinese, are unlikely. There is nothing in Cinder that gives a sense of place, let alone a sense of a sprawling Chinese city. There is no ridiculous architecture, no noisy press, no constant flux. There is a cluster of apartments rising high into the sky, kids playing in corridors and in my head I imagined Chungking Mansion, the Hong Kong monstrosity, but that was more me than the text.

Awkwardly for me this New Beijing is in a far-flung renumbered distant future, so a defence of this book could be that Earth politics has changed so much that Emperor Kaito (Japanese) could indeed peacefully rule the Eastern Commonwealth of (unnamed) China and Singapore and Mumbai at least, living in New Beijing, and it’s all good.

But uh we live here, in the real politics of the world, and to imply that there is a Japanese ruler of a combined China and Singapore and India is there are no words, imagine me lying on the floor making choking noises as I bury my head in my arm and laugh and laugh and laugh.

The Book Smugglers in a review note that the story is set in New Beijing but really fails to capitalise on that and in addition the story goes out of its way to make Cinder first assumed European, and then Lunar (and we assume, caucasian) – what even is the point? they ask. The point is to use the city as shorthand for characterisation and move on, and this is why representation and research and every thing else is so important. We are not making a needlessly big deal! We are making an actual facts big deal.

Our dystopic future is very scientifically unlikely to be white, because of genetics, and science, and look white people are a minority already, you know? And climate change and the sun and recessive genes, and a lot of our scientific breakthroughs are coming out of Asia and Africa. Do you know how advanced Chinese alternative energy research is? And the fact that authors continue to write our dystopic future as white, or as white hero in a pretend brown world, simply proves the point that we’re used as a backdrop and there’s no actual real reflection of our dystopic future (or our current) in these texts.

(It’s funny how easy it is to misread a thing. Another review claimed that for the ‘sensitive readers’, there was nothing to worry about, unless you were offended by cyborgs. Oh sure, nothing, except the explicit medical trauma where Cinders is offered up for medical experimentation by her step mother, and then we are treated to pages and pages of her tied to a lab table, panicking, having her blood drawn by med robots, her protesting and saying she was not a volunteer, having a disembodied voice telling her too bad. Sure. Nothing to worry about for anyone.)

Imagined World Politics and Their Implications in 2013

New Beijing is in the Eastern Commonwealth, which is ruled by the hereditary ruler Emperor Kaito. An emperor of any Chinese-something alliance is unlikely, given China’s history with hereditary rulers and though the Emperor was such for nearly 2000 years, it will take much to move him back again. The Emperor lives in a palace in New Beijing, so we can assume that New Beijing is the capital of the Eastern Commonwealth. This book was published in 2012, so we can assume that New Beijing implies something about the original power of China moving into this commonwealth, particularly in light of page 28, at which point I gasped out loud: “Subjects had been carted in from provinces as far-reaching as Mumbai and Singapore.”

The provinces of Mumbai and Singapore. The author’s website implies that the ‘Eastern Commonwealth’ is basically Asia, and that there are other similar conglomerates (Africa, Europe and Australia, ruled by a Governor-General).

Speaking of Africa, one of the key components of Cinder is the deadly plague which found its first outbreak in a small village in the African Union. This is revealed to be a disease brought to Earth by refugee Lunars, who have fled to the African Union’s unpopulated areas. It’s problematic that ‘unpopulated Africa’ is the location selected for runaway Lunars (and not, say, unpopulated Europe or unpopulated North America), due to its implications of a continuing ’empty’ or backwards Africa.* It’s problematic that this feeds into the concept of dirty brown people.

In the previous section I talk about why implying the Japanese-China alliance or commonwealth or whatever is a completely ridiculous notion given our real world politics. This conglomeration of the Eastern Commonwealth which I cannot even take seriously because it then refers to the province of Singapore (as opposed to the country of Singapore, which surely is the point of a commonwealth) just continues to give rise to the idea of pan-Asianism, a particularly vexing problem when we are talking about the representation of Asian people in Western texts; that is, we are interchangeable.

My Face

I could really do without authors choosing to set stories in my exotic different cities and then choosing to make the city some random Western smush, with no real need to be set in that city and no real understanding of how my city works.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not all up on my rant horse because she’s ruining my city or my feelings or whatever. But this is definitely a personal issue as well as an intellectual one. It assumes that a non-western audience is not your audience; it assumes unfamiliarity with the setting, because it’s a short-hand; it assumes that my city is short-hand for cool and exotic. And it is lazy and unnecessary and occasionally it makes me very angry.

*a footnote! I’m trying to avoid footnotes but this one is important and definitely a foot: I hate ‘#firstworldproblems’. you know what African countries have? commutes to work that are so short you can’t listen to a whole song, the movie you pirated being only available in poor quality so looking bad on your tv screen, and really expensive socks (all items I have taken from the hashtag right at this moment).