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baihe_mediaHaving enjoyed Si Bai Ba Shi Si's food-themed contemporary novel A Taste of You (食局, pinyin: shi ju), I turned with some anticipation to this earlier novel of hers, Above the Fates (万丈红尘之轻, pinyin: wanzhang hongchen zhi qing) which was billed as a smart, corporate thriller with very intelligent leads. However, I found it a bit of a letdown, despite being overall relatively competently written, and with some interesting features which comes from the author being a first-generation immigrant from China to the US.
The main couple should, on paper, be a compelling one. The main POV character is Ming Yu, who initially migrated from China to the US for her undergraduate studies, and is now a senior executive at the multi-national corporation ('MNC') Fates (named after, of course, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, because the three women who founded it fancied themselves as dictating the fates of the people they dealt with), which specialises in the logistics of moving senior staff of other MNCs from one country to another. Ming Yu has a pretty traumatic past. She's the illegitimate child of a ballet dancer and the very wealthy and influential man whose eye she caught. Her mother died young, leaving her to be slightly grudgingly brought up by her uncle and aunt. During this time, her father has been sending money to her uncle and aunt for her upkeep, though she only finds this out later. She goes abroad to the US for university and stays there, initially taking an entry-level position at Fates. During this time, she becomes romantically involved with one of Fates' directors, a married man whom we know only as Evan (the text doesn't give us his surname even though obviously he has one). Ming Yu becomes pregnant, and Evan presses her to end the pregnancy. She's ambivalent about this, and the decision is taken out of her hands when she has a miscarriage. Evan tearfully tells her that he can't possibly leave his wife and son for her, and they eventually break up. Ming Yu falls into depression, and ends up in a long-distance relationship with a woman in China named Hong Xinran, after a long period of online chatting during which Hong Xinran misleads her into believing that she's chatting to a man (Ming Yu had not, at this time, come out even to herself). The relationship fails because Chen Xinran grows frustrated with Ming Yu's failure either to arrange for Hong Xinran to move out to the US or to return to China herself, and they have a painful breakup. Ming Yu is, at the start of the novel, professionally highly competent but emotionally a secret hot mess. She has a few regular fuckbuddies, but no one that she's serious about.
Ming Yu's love interest is Chen Xilin (also styled Lynn Chin, in one of those things you get when Chinese parents try to make their kid's name fit with an Anglo system that's not set up for it), whose background we find out about bit by bit. She's the granddaughter of the CEO of the massive conglomerate Baijing (literally: white whale), where she works as a senior consultant. Specifically, she's working on a bid for a massive Pentagon (yes that Pentagon) contract for cloud-based AI services. Chen Xilin also has a traumatic past. When she was a child, her parents and younger brother were involved in a serious traffic accident that killed her brother and left her parents with serious lifelong mental disorders. She suspects her father's jealous elder brother of having orchestrated the accident, but when she confides in her grandfather, he kindly but firmly shuts her down. She then becomes romantically involved with a much older married woman named Qing Qing, who is also a distant cousin on her grandmother's side. The relationship runs on for over a decade, until Qing Qing's teenage son (who has a crush on Chen Xilin) catches them in bed together. He's traumatised, falls into depression, and eventually kills himself. Qing Qing, distraught by this, disappears.
You would think this was great setup for a huge amount of delicious angst, of the two women overcoming their traumas to finally end up together, possibly with the help of big dramatic moments to show them that they should be together despite many qualms. You'd be wrong. These traumas have a surprisingly limited impact on the development of their relationship, which they kind of drift into, with Chen Xilin doing the active pursuit. It's not clear why they're attracted to each other, beyond that... they're both good-looking competent professional women. In Chen Xilin's case, it's later explained that Ming Yu reminded her subconsciously of Qing Qing (Ming Yu is a distant relative of Qing Qing, via her father), but surely that should have set alarm bells going off in her head, rather than make her go 'hm, I will give this woman an overly intimate marksmanship lesson at the hotel shooting range'. In fact, it's odd that neither of them seem to have much in the way of qualms about embarking on the relationship, given what's happened to them in the past. Ming Yu has much more of a violent PTSD-flashback reaction when one of her fuckbuddies persistently demands a more serious relationship with her. There is one high dramatic point, which comes when Ming Yu finds out that Chen Xilin spent her formative early adulthood years embroiled in a decade-long relationship with a woman who is also Ming Yu's distant relative. All of Ming Yu's insecurities about being 'second best' and 'a substitute' flare up to the surface, and they break up. I was hopeful for more drama going forward, but they eventually get back together again without what I felt was the requisite big moment of epiphany for resolving the issue. Later in the book, Chen Xilin meets Qing Qing again through Ming Yu's intervention, and again I was hopeful that this would have some emotional impact on their relationship. But again this is resolved very lightly by Chen Xilin saying that while she'll always care for Qing Qing, she's in love with Ming Yu now. Why let the air out of your setup like this, author?
The thriller aspect of the plot I didn't find particularly compelling either. For one thing, it revved up very, very slowly, and I basically had no investment in whether lesbian billionaire Chen Xilin won her Pentagon bid or not, or whether she would successfully construct a refugee village in a fictional ex-British colony in Africa in part to assuage her guilt over the Pentagon contract and in part in the memory of her ex-girlfriend (who enjoyed spending time doing Good Works in that part of the world). It didn't help when, towards the end of the book, Chen Xilin herself lost most of her personal investment in accomplishing these things, because her relationship with Ming Yu became the only thing that mattered to her. In fact, it became increasingly difficult for me to see who these two women were, and what their goals/life philosophies were, beyond the fact of their relationship, which I had already found not particularly compelling. Late in the thriller plot, there's an interesting part where the people scheming to undermine both of Chen Xilin's projects spin a quite plausible story to convince her that Ming Yu is the mastermind behind her downfall, and also spin Ming Yu a quite plausible story to convince her that Chen Xilin is using her, Ming Yu, as a scapegoat for a nefarious scheme for getting even with Chen Xilin's family. I desperately wanted at least one of these to be true, because that would at least make the story interesting. Neither of them were, of course. There was also very little demonstration of either Chen Xilin or Ming Yu's vaunted professional competence, other than a big press conference where Chen Xilin cleverly deals with the geo-political tensions underlying her Pentagon bid. Also, and this may be because I'm a nerd in one of the possibly nerdiest professions of all time, I felt Chen Xilin spent far too little time obsessing over the finer details of her cloud AI project. The fact that everyone is magnificently rich (even Ming Yu is so comfortably upper-middle class in terms of income that she never needs to worry about money, plus you know her father's wealthy family is never going to let anything bad happen to her, especially after she semi-reconciles with her half-brother) also made me feel as if there were no real stakes regardless of what happened to the main characters.
What was perhaps most interesting to me is the fact that we have an author from China, who presumably studied in the US and is currently living and working there, writing about Chinese people in the US and other parts of the world where they are an ethnic minority. Relative to examples of Asian-American literature I have encountered (a very small sample of the whole, I'm sure), the narrative and characters care almost breathtakingly little about white people, the white gaze, and the fact of people being white. When Evan tearfully breaks up with her, for instance, Ming Yu doesn't think about it in racial terms at all as a white man abandoning her, an Asian woman, in order to stay with a white woman. He's just a standard c-novel disappointing ex. The novel is, of course, set in elite jet-setting circles which are very international and where much more weight is given to class than race, which explains some of this, but it's still very striking.
In short, if you fancy trying your first Si Bai Ba Shi Si novel, go for A Taste of You. In that one, the POV character has a wry, funny narrative voice, you will read about a lot of delicious food written in interesting ways that tell you why a particular dish is tasty and/or meaningful (which is different from a lot of Western-published genre novels which people go 'omg all the food!' about, and which turn out on closer inspection merely to contain a list of foods served at feasts and so on), it's grounded in the big-city lesbian scene, and has actual real stakes. Also features Yorkshire, always a win in my book.
I read the Taiwanese print edition of the novel (traditional Chinese, uncensored). The web version of the novel can be found here on JJWXC.
The main couple should, on paper, be a compelling one. The main POV character is Ming Yu, who initially migrated from China to the US for her undergraduate studies, and is now a senior executive at the multi-national corporation ('MNC') Fates (named after, of course, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, because the three women who founded it fancied themselves as dictating the fates of the people they dealt with), which specialises in the logistics of moving senior staff of other MNCs from one country to another. Ming Yu has a pretty traumatic past. She's the illegitimate child of a ballet dancer and the very wealthy and influential man whose eye she caught. Her mother died young, leaving her to be slightly grudgingly brought up by her uncle and aunt. During this time, her father has been sending money to her uncle and aunt for her upkeep, though she only finds this out later. She goes abroad to the US for university and stays there, initially taking an entry-level position at Fates. During this time, she becomes romantically involved with one of Fates' directors, a married man whom we know only as Evan (the text doesn't give us his surname even though obviously he has one). Ming Yu becomes pregnant, and Evan presses her to end the pregnancy. She's ambivalent about this, and the decision is taken out of her hands when she has a miscarriage. Evan tearfully tells her that he can't possibly leave his wife and son for her, and they eventually break up. Ming Yu falls into depression, and ends up in a long-distance relationship with a woman in China named Hong Xinran, after a long period of online chatting during which Hong Xinran misleads her into believing that she's chatting to a man (Ming Yu had not, at this time, come out even to herself). The relationship fails because Chen Xinran grows frustrated with Ming Yu's failure either to arrange for Hong Xinran to move out to the US or to return to China herself, and they have a painful breakup. Ming Yu is, at the start of the novel, professionally highly competent but emotionally a secret hot mess. She has a few regular fuckbuddies, but no one that she's serious about.
Ming Yu's love interest is Chen Xilin (also styled Lynn Chin, in one of those things you get when Chinese parents try to make their kid's name fit with an Anglo system that's not set up for it), whose background we find out about bit by bit. She's the granddaughter of the CEO of the massive conglomerate Baijing (literally: white whale), where she works as a senior consultant. Specifically, she's working on a bid for a massive Pentagon (yes that Pentagon) contract for cloud-based AI services. Chen Xilin also has a traumatic past. When she was a child, her parents and younger brother were involved in a serious traffic accident that killed her brother and left her parents with serious lifelong mental disorders. She suspects her father's jealous elder brother of having orchestrated the accident, but when she confides in her grandfather, he kindly but firmly shuts her down. She then becomes romantically involved with a much older married woman named Qing Qing, who is also a distant cousin on her grandmother's side. The relationship runs on for over a decade, until Qing Qing's teenage son (who has a crush on Chen Xilin) catches them in bed together. He's traumatised, falls into depression, and eventually kills himself. Qing Qing, distraught by this, disappears.
You would think this was great setup for a huge amount of delicious angst, of the two women overcoming their traumas to finally end up together, possibly with the help of big dramatic moments to show them that they should be together despite many qualms. You'd be wrong. These traumas have a surprisingly limited impact on the development of their relationship, which they kind of drift into, with Chen Xilin doing the active pursuit. It's not clear why they're attracted to each other, beyond that... they're both good-looking competent professional women. In Chen Xilin's case, it's later explained that Ming Yu reminded her subconsciously of Qing Qing (Ming Yu is a distant relative of Qing Qing, via her father), but surely that should have set alarm bells going off in her head, rather than make her go 'hm, I will give this woman an overly intimate marksmanship lesson at the hotel shooting range'. In fact, it's odd that neither of them seem to have much in the way of qualms about embarking on the relationship, given what's happened to them in the past. Ming Yu has much more of a violent PTSD-flashback reaction when one of her fuckbuddies persistently demands a more serious relationship with her. There is one high dramatic point, which comes when Ming Yu finds out that Chen Xilin spent her formative early adulthood years embroiled in a decade-long relationship with a woman who is also Ming Yu's distant relative. All of Ming Yu's insecurities about being 'second best' and 'a substitute' flare up to the surface, and they break up. I was hopeful for more drama going forward, but they eventually get back together again without what I felt was the requisite big moment of epiphany for resolving the issue. Later in the book, Chen Xilin meets Qing Qing again through Ming Yu's intervention, and again I was hopeful that this would have some emotional impact on their relationship. But again this is resolved very lightly by Chen Xilin saying that while she'll always care for Qing Qing, she's in love with Ming Yu now. Why let the air out of your setup like this, author?
The thriller aspect of the plot I didn't find particularly compelling either. For one thing, it revved up very, very slowly, and I basically had no investment in whether lesbian billionaire Chen Xilin won her Pentagon bid or not, or whether she would successfully construct a refugee village in a fictional ex-British colony in Africa in part to assuage her guilt over the Pentagon contract and in part in the memory of her ex-girlfriend (who enjoyed spending time doing Good Works in that part of the world). It didn't help when, towards the end of the book, Chen Xilin herself lost most of her personal investment in accomplishing these things, because her relationship with Ming Yu became the only thing that mattered to her. In fact, it became increasingly difficult for me to see who these two women were, and what their goals/life philosophies were, beyond the fact of their relationship, which I had already found not particularly compelling. Late in the thriller plot, there's an interesting part where the people scheming to undermine both of Chen Xilin's projects spin a quite plausible story to convince her that Ming Yu is the mastermind behind her downfall, and also spin Ming Yu a quite plausible story to convince her that Chen Xilin is using her, Ming Yu, as a scapegoat for a nefarious scheme for getting even with Chen Xilin's family. I desperately wanted at least one of these to be true, because that would at least make the story interesting. Neither of them were, of course. There was also very little demonstration of either Chen Xilin or Ming Yu's vaunted professional competence, other than a big press conference where Chen Xilin cleverly deals with the geo-political tensions underlying her Pentagon bid. Also, and this may be because I'm a nerd in one of the possibly nerdiest professions of all time, I felt Chen Xilin spent far too little time obsessing over the finer details of her cloud AI project. The fact that everyone is magnificently rich (even Ming Yu is so comfortably upper-middle class in terms of income that she never needs to worry about money, plus you know her father's wealthy family is never going to let anything bad happen to her, especially after she semi-reconciles with her half-brother) also made me feel as if there were no real stakes regardless of what happened to the main characters.
What was perhaps most interesting to me is the fact that we have an author from China, who presumably studied in the US and is currently living and working there, writing about Chinese people in the US and other parts of the world where they are an ethnic minority. Relative to examples of Asian-American literature I have encountered (a very small sample of the whole, I'm sure), the narrative and characters care almost breathtakingly little about white people, the white gaze, and the fact of people being white. When Evan tearfully breaks up with her, for instance, Ming Yu doesn't think about it in racial terms at all as a white man abandoning her, an Asian woman, in order to stay with a white woman. He's just a standard c-novel disappointing ex. The novel is, of course, set in elite jet-setting circles which are very international and where much more weight is given to class than race, which explains some of this, but it's still very striking.
In short, if you fancy trying your first Si Bai Ba Shi Si novel, go for A Taste of You. In that one, the POV character has a wry, funny narrative voice, you will read about a lot of delicious food written in interesting ways that tell you why a particular dish is tasty and/or meaningful (which is different from a lot of Western-published genre novels which people go 'omg all the food!' about, and which turn out on closer inspection merely to contain a list of foods served at feasts and so on), it's grounded in the big-city lesbian scene, and has actual real stakes. Also features Yorkshire, always a win in my book.
I read the Taiwanese print edition of the novel (traditional Chinese, uncensored). The web version of the novel can be found here on JJWXC.
