In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 227.
Current dialogue in the West around diversity in the arts tends to focus on superficial markers, on the faces and names of characters, creators, and performers. As important as that is, diversity can and should be about more than just plopping different faces into stories that are 100 percent Western in spirit.
Such a plopping in of faces and names results in clumsy adaptations like Disney’s animated Mulan (1998), an example of a story with Asian characters (and some voice actors of Asian descent) that utterly fails to understand or embrace its Chinese source material in any meaningful way.
In the original Chinese poem, probably written around 400 BCE by an anonymous writer, Mulan loves her family and her quiet domestic life with them. She disguises herself as a man and enlists in the Emperor’s army only to save her elderly father from having to do so. She is not rebelling against the patriarchy. The original poem emphasizes that Mulan also enjoys wearing her gowns and makeup. The first thing she does when she returns from the war (which itself only occupies a handful of lines in the entire poem) is get dressed up as beautifully as possible. The Chinese text sets up a nonbinary notion of femininity: Mulan can both fight in a battle and wear makeup and dresses. Strength and prettiness aren’t mutually exclusive. Being “girly” is not incompatible with being strong.
Disney’s animated film turns this material into a rote Western story that sets up a cliché binary between being “girly” and being “strong.” It sneered at traditionally “feminine” qualities and had Mulan single-handedly saving the empire and the emperor, along with his subjects, bowing to her. It is a wholly Western story wearing an Eastern costume. It demonstrates what happens when our only definition of diversity is based on cosmetic things like faces and names.
My apologies for taking a swing at a film that some readers might love. I admit that I, too, enjoyed the film. However, I also understand the difference between a guilty pleasure and a meaningful exploration of a culture.
A completely opposite example is the novel The Grace of Kings (Saga Press, 2015), by Ken Liu, the first in his Dandelion Dynasty fantasy series. Liu deliberately erases the cosmetic markers that might identify the story as being set in a fantasy version of China. The physical descriptions and names of characters don’t sound Chinese. There’s no great continental empire. Instead, the story takes place in the geographic opposite, an archipelago.
Nonetheless, The Grace of Kings draws lovingly from Chinese lore and history, such as the historical figure Lady Xuan, a bold and shrewd noblewoman known for sharp and salty statements who ruled the state of Qin in the fourth century BC, and classic Ming dynasty novels like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. The author’s affection for this cultural heritage is evident in the book’s characterizations, the central war plot’s sweeping arcs, the tender and bittersweet relationship between the two main male characters, and the jokes, tricks, fables, and lessons that sprout throughout. The Grace of Kings doesn’t have a Chinese face or name, but it has a profoundly Chinese soul.
Writers who wish to move beyond faces and names in exploring diversity should start by asking some of these questions:
1. How are storytelling styles and structures in a particular culture different from Western storytelling’s standard structures?
2. What are the differing cultural values that account for those differences in styles and structures?
3. How do differences in style and structure reflect the recurring themes in that culture’s storytelling?
People might be people the world over, but culture runs deep, which means that cultural differences in storytelling can as well. A world of discovery awaits those willing to go beyond faces and names.
Henry Lien is a speculative fiction author and writing instructor who teaches classes on Eastern storytelling. His writing has been nominated several times for a Nebula Award for speculative fiction. Born in Taiwan, he now lives in Los Angeles.
image credit: Kasper Rasmussen