douqi | Entries tagged with reading

One of my (many) unattractive traits is my obsession with William Morris' and Emery Walker's Kelmscott Press. It is my eternal sorrow that almost none of their books are available as facsimile editions that retain the original (very beautiful) typesetting and illustrations. The most high-profile one I'm aware of is the Kelmscott Chaucer, facsimile editions of which were published in 1974 by Basilisk Press, and more recently in 2002 (as a limited edition, bound in goatskin) and 2008 (as a standard edition) by the Folio Society. Periodically, I trawl the internet for these, then gaze sadly at the astronomical prices for the 1974 and 2008 editions for a long while before closing the browser tab.

It was on one of these trawls that I learned that a facsimile edition of another Kelmscott Press book, The Poems of John Keats, had been published as a facsimile edition by Nottingham Court Press in 1979 (it seems to have been sold in unbound form). A search revealed that the average copy seemed to be selling between £200 to £250... until I came across a listing with no pictures other the plain outer binding, and no reference to the Kelmscott Press in the description. But the listed date of publication, the name of the publisher, and the name of the editor (F.S. Ellis) were all correct. The stated price was £15, so I decided to take a punt. I didn't want to ask the seller further questions that might make them realise what they had on their hands.

The book arrived today, so I can now confirm that I am, in fact, the proud owner of a facsimile edition of the Kelmscott Press Keats for the low, low price of £15.

Title page from the Nottingham Court Press facsimile edition of the Kelmscott Press Keats

Finally started reading this (after owning the book for at least a couple of years) and this Goodreads review was right: it IS much more rewarding and meaningful reading it as an m/m book rather than an f/f one (despite the first book in the duology being pretty heavily pushed as part of the 'sapphic trifecta' of fantasy novels that came out that year, alongside The Jasmine Throne and The Unbroken). It cares deeply about the relationships, romantic/erotic and otherwise, between its major male characters, and very little about femininity despite also having an uneasy awareness that it should, perhaps, care a little more about femininity. It cares so little about its nominally central, nominally lesbian couple that it Highlight for spoilers!*keeps them apart for large swathes of the book, has both halves of the couple sleep with men (for plot-relevant reasons, but still), and depicts relationships and sexual encounters between just about everyone else in more detail and with more emotional charge than it affords them. Also, an important plot/emotional point from end of the last book that seemed as if it was going to have a deep impact on their relationship seemed to have been dropped completely!* Most of the major male characters angsted deeply and constantly, in a sophomoric way that felt as if (as another Goodreads reviewer put it) they were Experiencing an Emotion for the first time Highlight for spoilers!*Wang Baoxiang (a man far from the epitome of masculinity), to his dead brother (the perfect embodiment of masculinity): YOU HATE ME??? FINE I WILL GO AND DEBASE MYSELF BY GETTING FUCKED UP THE ARSE BY A MAN! WE'LL SEE HOW YOU LIKE THAT!*

It also feels very much like a book not written for me, where me = person fluent in chinese language and culture (or at least one version of it) and having extensive familiarity with c-media of all kinds. This is perfectly fine; I've made my peace with the fact that a lot of genre books with Chinese historical/fantastical elements published in the West are not written for me.

Incredibly, the levels of terfery on TERF Island are somehow still managing to rise day by day from their already stratospheric baseline (together with the levels of racism, homophobia, misogyny and general fascism). I was being furious about this as I edited the latest chapter of my To Embers We Return translation this morning, which led to the following:

British TERF (I have a particular one in mind which is probably not the one most people will have in mind, but it's the one I feel most personally and professionally betrayed by, but really we have so many of them around and they're all deeply unpleasant human beings, so feel free to imagine the TERF of your choice) who has been isekai'd into cyberpunk Tang Dynasty and somehow hasn't quite realised that they're no longer in the Home Counties, Toto: CAN A WOMAN HAVE A PENIS?

Shen Ni: Lady, this is TangPro. A woman can have *glances at readout* up to thirty-two penises if she wants, easily. If you want more than that, and you want all of them to be fully functioning, as it were, it starts getting tricky because there's a risk of overloading, but with a bit of clever engineering I don't see why you couldn't get up to at least a hundred and twenty-eight—

I saw a post about the TV adaptation of Jin Yong's The Young Flying Fox (飞狐外传), sequel to the more famous Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain (雪山飞狐), which reminded me that it's the only historical c-novel I've ever come across that does a credible instance of the 'girl disguised as boy lets down her hair, everyone realises instantly that she's a girl' trope.

Normally that trope does not make obvious sense in Chinese historical settings because everyone had long hair, for Confucian reasons (I've come across doubtfully-sourced social media posts claiming there are visible differences in hair length for women vs men; please point me to any that you know of to be reliable). However, The Young Flying Fox is set in the Qing Dynasty, when Han Chinese men were required to wear their hair in a queue — shaving the front of their scalp and putting the hair at the back into a plait. So when Cheng Lingsu, who's been roaming the jianghu in boys' clothes, plucks off her cap and unties her hair, revealing the absence of shaved forehead/scalp, onlookers realise instantly that she's a girl.

In university I took a course on twentieth century women's literature in English. One of the books we read for that was Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own. In it, as part of constructing a critical historical account of women's writing in England, Woolf discusses the Restoration era writer Aphra Behn, one of the first women to earn her living by writing professionally.

At the time, our lecturer gave us a brief autobiographical sketch of Aphra Behn to contextualise the reference. What he did not tell us was that she wrote at least one genderfucked lesbian poem. Or that she may have been bi. I had to discover that for myself at my current great age. Thanks, Malaysian higher education.

Found myself discussing with

yuerstruly which of the pairings in To Embers We Return was most likely to want kids/be good at kids, which led to the following conclusions:

Shen Ni/Bian Jin: Bian Jin would probably be an excellent parent in an eldest sister way, but she would not seek out parenthood, unless Shen Ni wanted it. Shen Ni would decidedly NOT want to be a parent, and if she somehow had parenthood thrust upon her, she might theoretically be quite competent at it if she tried, but she would not try.
Diwu Que/He Lanzhuo: Diwu Que MIGHT be enthusiastic about parenting, but would be deeply inept at it. He Lanzhuo would go along with it and discharge her parental duties competently, but mainly because of Diwu Que's enthusiasm, not because of particularly strong feelings for the child or desire to be a parent herself.
Li Ji/Zeng Qingluo: Li Ji would try HARD at parenting but would mess up badly, due in part to trying too hard. Zeng Qingluo would just be Anxious the whole time.
Li Si/Dou Xuanji: Not to stereotype, but I could kind of see Li Si being a Dad (I'm not sure whether she would particularly want to, but there are plot-relevant in-world reasons for why she might become one). I have serious trouble envisioning Dou Xuanji as a Mum. So maybe Li Si could be the Fun Dad with Dou Xuanji being the Grumpy Dad.

It also occurred to me that it would be highly entertaining to see Shen Ni having to look after a small child for a day. This led to my generating the English-language world's first piece of Embers fic:

Shen Ni, to child: This is a rocket launcher. Can you say 'rocket launcher'?
Child: warbles something semi-coherent, in the way of children
Shen Ni: Good. Now take it and go play by yourself. Jiejie is busy.
Bian Jin: is horrified
Shen Ni: It's FINE. I put the safety on, and I even improvised a child lock. Didn't have time to test it of course, but there's no reason it shouldn't work.

Mpreg in slash has never done very much for me. I would go so far as to say that pregnancy in fic has never done very much for me, as I cannot stop the nagging worry about who is going to look after the offspring that will ensue, and how terribly overworked they're going to be. Look, I'm one of nature's jiejies, this is just how my brain works all of the time.

And then, while scrolling idly through JJWXC, I came across a plot synopsis for a xianxia yanqing that ran basically like this. A young, powerful female cultivator has just beaten her male nemesis (and eventual love interest, though she doesn't know it yet) in a duel. She's about to deliver the coup de grace when he screams 'DON'T DO IT I AM PREGNANT WITH YOUR CHILD.' The female cultivator, shocked by this news but determined to take responsibility for her eventual offspring and their gestational parent, stops short of killing her male nemesis, installs him in a comfortable house and tells him in what I imagine is a gruff male lead voice, 'Don't worry about anything, just focus on taking good care of yourself and the baby.'

In that moment I thought: yeah, I get it now.

I don't really want to interrogate too deeply at this point what this says about how I think of pregnancy and how I think of 'straight' relationships. I do want to note that my favourite f/m pairings across c-media are the ones in Eldest Princess Above and Dong Lan Xue. Yes, they are mini-dramas and there are issues with production quality and plotting and pacing, but I utterly love that gender role subversion and the fact that the female leads are allowed to be wild and violent and sexual in a way I have not really encountered in all my years of drama-watching.

I read this to recover from the very emotional experience of reading Burn (which I wrote about here). This was advertised as a fun, fluffy food-focused novel, and for the first 55 chapters or so, it was precisely that. The last 25 chapters were a confusing out-of-character rush as the author for whatever reason hurried to wrap up the novel.

( spoilers for the novel under discussion )
I read the Chinese original of the novel on Changpei. There is also, as mentioned previously, an ongoing manhua adaptation, which I hope will wrap up in a more satisfying fashion.

I decided to read this Thai GL novel ahead of the release of its live-action adaptation on 19 November (link to the trailer here). I read the Taiwanese-published Chinese translation. There is an official English translation available (link here), but the summary did not fill me with confidence.

( spoilers for GAP Pink Theory )

- 'once you've experienced ocean, nothing else is considered water — this is neither grammatical nor does it convey the meaning of the original line with sufficient immediacy.

- why is Beijing Beijing, but Guangdong Canton.

- 'sampan boat' like chai tea but nautical.

- 'oiled paper brightening the windows speaks to the comforts we offer — a warm cup of tea and a place to gather with friends'. Very eloquent that oiled paper.

- This page alone contains: Nai Nai (no diacritics, no hyphen); Mei-Mei (hyphen, no diacritics); dìhuáng (with diacritics). The following page contains: Yéye (one word, diacritics, no hyphen). What the hell, book.

- 'a lady who matches her clothing to her jewellery is seen as demure and intelligent' — intelligent maaaaaybe but why and how demure??

- why is the MC calling this hair ornament a BROOCH.

- 'mother isn't in a position to send me to court in the Forbidden City even if I had wanted to' — I think author has a serious misconception about the imperial concubine selection process. Especially since this is set explicitly in the Qing Dynasty (explicitly the year 1826), when the process was super formalised.

- 'Everyone ... is milling about and walking with purpose' — did no one copyedit this.

- 'paintings of courtiers modelling the latest fashions in the Forbidden City' — I can accept the idea of fashion plates in mid to late Qing, but the idea that they would be PAINTINGS instead of format capable of being mass produced is mind-boggling, as is the notion that 'courtiers', by which I can only imagine the author meant noblewomen, would be doing the modelling. It would make much more sense for actors or courtesans to be doing the modelling.

- 'no one in our village had bothered to style their hair in [the Manchu fashion]' — right right, that's a thing you can just 'not bother' to do after 250 years of Manchu rule, not a treasonous political statement and symbol of rebellion.

- this book now has me googling 'when were disposable chopsticks invented'. The answer is: more than 50 years after this book is set, in Japan.

- it was Canton before, why is it Guangdong now???

- why does this 'Ming Dynasty fashion' sound more like Tang Dynasty fashion, as described. Also why are they wearing Ming Dynasty-style clothes 250 years after the fall of the Ming. Also the characters keep expressly calling them 'Ming Dynasty style' and I keep wanting to hiss 'do you want to be arrested on suspicion of treason and insurrection?'

- this pirate woman is being described as an 'ex-courtier in the Forbidden City' but she clearly wasn't an imperial concubine or a palace maid because she also says she had 'many suitors' and later a husband who clearly wasn't the emperor so what gives.

- ...you know what I think it's easier on my sanity if I just accept that the author thinks the Qing court worked exactly like a European court.

- now we have a Ming Dynasty HAIRSTYLE. Starting to wonder if author understands how dynastic change happens, and how specifically the Ming to Qing dynastic change happened, and that it would be politically dangerous to display nostalgia for the most recent last dynasty, and DEFINITELY to display nostalgia for the Ming Dynasty while living as a subject of the Qing Dynasty.

- there's an author's note where she explains her romanisation choices but that only makes things even more confusing: 'names, places and words are spelled with respect to their origins, whether they be Cantonese or Mandarin. Xiang, who grew up in the Guangdong province...' BUT XIANG IS MANDARIN. In Cantonese, it would be Heung. And her mum's name is romanised as SHI YEUNG. It should be Shi Yang in pinyin or Sek Yeung in Cantonese.

- also this book is meant to be a 'remix' of Treasure Island but it's not even a bit Treasure Islandy. Except for the part where there's a treasure. On an island.