Painful past gets a novel approach

Writer’s debut uses fantasy to tell China’s forgotten story of WWII

NEW YORK — Not a single copy of was left, even for Rebecca F. Kuang herself, after a signing event at BookCon 2018 held in Javits Center over the weekend.

A total of 300 plus copies were sold and signed in a single day. That was a pretty good record for the debut novelist, who just graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

The historical fiction tells the story of 20th century China — the opium wars, the Sino-Japanese war and the Nanjing Massacre — in an alternate fantasy setting.

The dark-skinned war orphan Rin strives to escape her fate by rising into the highest echelons of the finest military academy in the Nikara Empire. Tutored by the renegade Master Jiang, she leads the fight against the invading Mugenese.

In an interview with Xinhua, Kuang said she wrote the book to draw attention to China’s historical issues that “have not been traditionally represented either in Western fiction or in American classrooms”.

“People have forgotten the fact that China was one of the allied powers and fought on the allied side during WWII,” said Kuang. “And related to that is the Rape of Nanjing, which has been referred to as the forgotten holocaust, because 300,000 people died, and we just don’t teach that in the West.”

This painful episode in history is deeply tied to Kuang’s family. The young author who moved with her parents to the United States from China at the age of five still pays visits to her father’s hometown in Leiyang, Hunan province, from time to time.

“When I visited my father’s home village, you can see the bullet holes in the walls left by Japanese soldiers during the WWII, and they’re still there, and that’s a history that has stayed with them,” Kuang said. “This sort of intergenerational trauma, and this suffering that hasn’t really been given voice to.”

‘Straddle the line’

To this day, the Japanese government has repeatedly refused to apologize for war crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre, committed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the WWII.

The Poppy War, she said, warns about the possible consequences of overlooking or denying this painful past for both Japan and China.

“The only way that we can learn from this is to acknowledge and forgive,” she said. “Acknowledge that it happened, and educate younger generations about what happened so that it doesn’t happen again. But that doesn’t mean forgetting, because that just runs the danger that it happens again.”

Writing a book about China for an audience that is largely Western is a challenging job for Chinese American authors alike, Kuang said.

“I have to straddle the line between just writing a book for a Chinese audience, and also explaining some things so that they can be swallowed by a Western audience,” she said.

Kuang finds this is an uphill battle. Chinese-American authors would be told by publishers that “Asian stories won’t sell”, or they don’t need to publish another Asian author.

“They think that all Asian stories are the same, and that’s not true. Not even all Chinese stories are the same. But they just sort of categorize everything into one box, one diversity box, and that’s not fair.”

Yet this battle has seen small victories, thanks to the previous hard work of authors of Chinese descent, Kuang said.

“I’m lucky because I’m riding the coattails of people like Cindy Pan and Ken Liu who broke those barriers for the first time and proved that Chinese fantasy does sell,” Kuang said.