mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This is the first part of my book club notes on The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an anthology of SF/F written, translated, and edited by Chinese women and nonbinary people. Now we're back to reading stories from a culture no one in the group belongs to, so lots more speculation on what things could mean and what might be going over our heads.

I am just going to name here that "women and nonbinary people" can be a problematic label when it is used to imply that nonbinary people are kinda "women lite," and especially when it is used to exclude AMAB nonbinary people. I have no idea whether either of those things are an issue here; in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm taking the creators' terminology in good faith. The contributor bios don't state anyone's gender identity, though they do give their English pronouns (two are she/they, all the rest are she/her).

These initial stories were all very different in style and themes, and all were well-written, well thought out, and provided plenty of material for discussion. If they're representative of the whole, this should turn out to be a strong pick.


"The Stars We Raised" by Xin Xinyu (2017), tr. Judy Yi Zhou

Children raise baby stars, but are pressured by adults to grind them into "useful" materials as they and their stars get older. This is a clear allegory for having the magic of childhood stamped out of you by adults who want you to "grow up" and lose your sense of wonder, and it made a fascinating contrast to how similar themes are handled in Western literature. Often Western authors will focus on a protagonist's specific situation, how they are sensitive to things others aren't, or give them a mentor relationship with a special adult who helps them. This story has more of a systemic perspective. The stars are valuable because they are useful to the state, and in fact are literally made into mortar—the stuff that holds the status quo together. There isn't a clear escape or even an obvious means of one, but rather an emphasis on the intense social pressure experienced by the child who doesn't want to see the stars destroyed, and the moral crisis he faces when he can't both protect them and live up to societal expectations.

The story takes place in a rural area, and it's stated that stars aren't raised in the city. Of course that makes sense when you think about light pollution making stars invisible, but it also made us think about what else the story is saying about rural life and rural childhood—maybe touching on the experience of farm kids naming and becoming attached to animals that are going to be eaten? The author's bio says she lives in Beijing but doesn't say if she's from elsewhere, so it's unclear if the story actually reflects a rural perspective or if it's a city person's idea of it.

Another aspect that elicited a lot of discussion was the character of the class president, who seems to have a very important social role even when the kids are in grade school. He's a bully, but he still gets deferential treatment, and when he gets in trouble and blames a lower status kid, the adults are okay going along with that. This also feels like the children are being prepared for what to expect in adult life, and it's clear that the author doesn't endorse it.

I have a funny story about a class president from my school days, but I kept it to myself because I didn't want to derail the conversation. Maybe I'll tell it here later.


"The Tale of Wude's Heavenly Tribulation" by Count E (2011), tr. Mel Lee

A fox in his fifth century of cultivation faces a trial by lightning. I enjoyed this rambling fantasy folktale. It gave me the cozy feeling of a grandparent spinning a story to keep the kids entertained while the adults listen in and chuckle at the tongue-in-cheek bits.

Cultivation stories are a massive genre so there was probably a lot here that none of us picked up on. It was noted that the contrast with the first story is so striking that it really sets the tone that the book could go anywhere and we shouldn't expect stories that are all the same. I'm on board!


"What Does the Fox Say?" by Xia Jia (2022)

Flash fiction that explores collaborative storytelling between humans and AI. This story predates ChatGPT by a few months, but it's impossible as a reader not to bring our knowledge of it and everything that's happened since then to the piece. The author imagines AI taking notable quotations from human-written literature and recombining them into a new narrative, while the human provides both the initial seed of creativity and the interpretation of what the story means. One person said it reminded him of a Tarot spread, where you take archetypal pieces of meaning arranged with an element of randomness, and a human has to interpret the results.

To me it seemed very significant that the AI uses exact quotes and the text attributes them to their sources. Unlike ChatGPT, it doesn't paraphrase or try to create the illusion that it's writing independently of the human input it's trained on. The human input is foregrounded. It was mentioned that Chinese discussions about plagiarism have a lot of differences from how it's talked about in the West, so what this meant to the author may be different from how it lands for us.

(And yes, the author is aware of and explicitly refers to the song, which is going to be in my head for days now, thanks.)


"Blackbird" by Shen Dacheng (2020), tr. Cara Healey

An old woman in a nursing home refuses the call of death. I found this really atmospheric and creepy. It's not quite horror, but there are horror elements. To me it seemed to explore the tension between anxieties about the aging population of China and the cultural priority of respect for elders. The woman who won't die is seen by the young nurse protagonist as both a figure of reverence and a disturbing threat. Another group member added that having so many elders in a nursing home raises questions about why their families aren't taking care of them and could be an implicit commentary on the reverberating consequences of the "one child policy" era.

Some felt this read more like literary fiction or magical realism than speculative fiction. This sparked a spirited discussion of what the difference is, which is a conversation the group has had before about other stories, and not one I expect to ever reach a final resolution. :) It was also pointed out that when you read cross-culturally, the lines could fall in different places.