Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (Harper/Voyager)
For The Win by Cory Doctorow (Harper/Voyager)
Edward Said wrote the book on orientalism but not everyone has read it — certainly not the advertising agency serving Steers, which is currently dishing up a greedy and dumb Asian stereotype that would already be before the Human Rights Commission if the character were instead, say, Israeli or African.
Writing means taking risks. The risks for white writers portraying black subjects have been far more extensively debated than those facing occidental writers tackling Asian subjects. That’s probably why, particularly in genre fiction, white writers now make the black guy the virtuous chief of police and the black woman the capable medic, but still offer us far too many inscrutable mandarins — although these days they tend to be inscrutable businessmen in dark suits — and exotic geishas.
Both Guy Gavriel Kay and Cory Doctorow tackle subjects rife with the temptation to caricature. Kay goes back to a lightly mythologised Tang dynasty and the cover of Under Heaven borrows heavily from the iconography of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, teasing us to expect the usual swords and sorcery, plus maybe a dragon or two. Doctorow travels a little forward to an Asia entrenched as the sweatshop of globalisation, where hives of low-paid workers create wealth for the West. Both are writers far too fine to succumb to the stereotypes.
Under Heaven is a beautifully realised portrait of a society whose window-dressing may be alien, but whose central concern with moral conduct arises every day in Iraq, Afghanistan and far closer to home. Kay’s hero, Shen Tai, performs an act of virtue in honour of his dead father. He is rewarded with 250 swift, strong war horses — which, in that era’s military context, have almost the status of weapons of mass destruction. Around this dilemma, Kay has constructed an almost classic wuxia — a tale of martial chivalry centred on a nonconformist knight who tries to fight for justice while constantly beset by the demands of realpolitik.
Kay has visited many historic settings in previous books — Moorish Spain, Constantinople and the medieval French courts among them. Beyond his strengths as a wordsmith who can bring these contexts vividly alive, what he offers is empathy for the perspectives of the time. Shen Tai is a nonconformist in the terms of his era, not a modern man transplanted — and yet we recognise his ideas and emotions. He resists pressure to manoeuvre for position, but is genuinely awed as we would not be in the presence of his emperor.
The same is true of other characters, including strong, highly intelligent women forced to negotiate their paths within a patriarchy that is non-negotiable. Magic is an ingredient in Kay’s fantasies, but it is the belief of his characters in sorcery, as much as its execution, that moves his plots.
The classic wuxia gave Chinese novelists the opportunity to debate the ethics of war and rule in their era. Under Heaven allows Kay to do the same and the book operates equally strongly on both levels — as historical fantasy and allegory.
In For the Win Doctorow has written a Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists for the internet age. His protagonists, in the United States and several Asian countries, struggle against global and local exploitation and along the way Doctorow inserts incisive explanations of how the global machine works. The frame is also allegorical — a near future in which the commodity being mined and processed is the virtual wealth of computer games, which becomes a metaphor for the far more tangible globalised junk bonds of late 2008.
It’s the same economy evoked by Charles Stross in Halting State and the extent of shared perspectives among this generation of writers is also illustrated by Doctorow’s acknowledged borrowing of Ken Macleod‘s term “Webblies” for his virtual trade unionists.
The stereotype lurking in Doctorow’s path is the anonymous Asian sweatshop labourer, simultaneously portrayed as a victim and threat to “our” workers. But his meticulous eye for detail and back story mean that even the smallest walk-on gamer, drawn from the Chinese countryside to slave in Shenzen, becomes a memorable character. His leads, especially the fiery Sister Nor, belong to their societies but are sharply delineated individuals who are also citizens of the world.
Yet in the end Doctorow’s vision of a web-coordinated revolution isn’t entirely convincing. Perhaps that’s because of the news item that appeared on the day I finished the book. Describing the strikes of real sweatshop workers in Guangdong, the Guardian reported: “Off the record, workers said there had been a secret meeting the day before the strike started on June 21. Rather than leave a digital record that could be traced back to their computers or mobile phones, the organisers handed out leaflets stating their demands to the management.” Sometimes, the old ways work best.