Title: Forbidden City by William Bell
Genre: YA Historical Fiction
Pro-Feminist content: ★
Rage-Induction: >:( >:(
This blog is supposed to focus in on feminism in YA literature, and for some reason in the conception of it, I expected to focus on female protagonists. For some reason, male protagonists usually slip through my mind easily. I mean, I can barely remember the last time I read another book with a male protagonist. However, according to my GoodReads list, this year 19 out of the 44 books I've read feature males as either the sole protagonist or one of a few voices (male or female).
It can't be because the books with male protagonists are worse than those with sole or significant female protagonists. Keeping in mind I did this only as a rough tally and didn't create graphs with statistical analyses, it doesn't appear that male protagonists set off my rage significantly more than female ones. I rated 53% of books with male protagonists a 3-star or higher review, meaning I thought the book was "good" or better, while the females came in at 55% with favorable reviews. My sole five-star rating even went to a book with a male character.
From the get-go, I wasn't expecting William Bell's novel about the Tienanmen Square massacre to have clear or significant feminist themes. I was hoping for maybe a strong female counterpart to the main character, a 17 year old white Canadian named Alex Jackson at the most.
In the early spring of 1989, Alex and his father, a cameraman for the CBC, travel to China so that his father can cover the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's state visit to Beijing (side note, I have had the privilege of seeing Gorbi speak in person. His birthmark is the most glorious thing ever). Alex gets excited since he's a military history buff and has lately been recreating battle scenes from ancient Chinese wars. Bell makes his protagonist sound like he thinks he's the only teenage boy around that is more interested in the wars/battles going on in history rather than political/social issues in history or in the pastimes of the neanderthal plebes he goes to school with, sports and television.
As Alex and his dad settle down in the hotel they'll stay at with the CBC's lead reporter Eddie Nowlan, Alex befriends the middle-aged Lao Xu that the Party provides to the foreign journalists as an interpreter. The reader is blessed with this lovely description of Lao Xu:
"He was only a couple of inches shorter than me and had a long face, not like the Chinese Canadians in Toronto... with [their] round faces and broad flat noses. Mr. Xu had quite a honker on him, a sharp, hooked nose that looked almost Arabic." (pg 14)
It's nice to see that racist caricatures of Arabs existed 22 years ago. And why is the nose described as Arabic when he could have said "aqualine"? As I recall, this was once considered an attractive European face. I know, I know; it took me all the willpower I had not to reach for my new William and Kate Royal Wedding barf bags.
This book surprised me in the almost complete lack of female characters up until the student riots. Usually there's a female sidekick or peripheral character, but the only female in the book up until page 64 is Alex's mother, who is basically described as a shallow bitch who abandons her son during the divorce and makes his dad cry alone at night. Never mind the fact that she might have needs of her own, and the very obviously absent-minded and career-focused father of Alex kind of sucks at family life. Therein lies the double-standard: a man can beget children but be super-focused on his career to the point of ignoring his family and this is seen as a mostly laudable behavior, but a woman who works thinks about a life separate from her family is a bitch who isn't fit to be a mother.
During the student riots, Alex uses his Betamax (lol Sony) camera that his father gave him to capture pictures of crowds used in intros/outros/filler for newspieces to record students' reactions and demands. Alex befriends a few of them so that when the PLA actually starts firing at the students and he gets shot, they come and rescue him. Xin-hua (which I'm not sure is a significant name in that it's also one of China's largest governmental news agencies) is the girl who helps a disguised Alex traverse the countryside to get to the airport where he can get out of the country. A brave young woman, for sure. But what I found really disturbing was the following comparison to Canadian girls, emphasis mine:
"[Xin-hua] was different from the girls I knew, too. Really different. Their idea of a tragedy was running out of mousse or breaking a fingernail.... They were almost all heavily into feminism and talked about being taken seriously as persons while they put on purple lipstick....Maybe I was being too hard on them."-pg 167
Just like that, feminism is denigrated by men who don't even have to stop and think about their rights. What I find ironic is that the entire story is about Chinese students trying to be "taken seriously as persons" and Alex's cannot think critically enough to think about why these Canadian girls want to be taken seriously as people and not objects. Notice how he also dismisses the tools of femininity--the makeup and the hair products--to dismiss feminism as a whole, as if females were a frilly, prissy monolith.
I always get irritated when people say that women should stop complaining about the wage gap, because it's such a first world problem and in Bangladesh, women still get acid thrown in their faces. Sure the problems aren't on equal levels, but feminism is fighting for the rights of all women to be equal to men in all situations, whether they are first world or developing.
Thus, with a single paragraph, William Bell obliterates nearly all the good will I had for this book (which was middling--the student riots are interesting to read about, but I don't give a rat's ass about reading it from the perspective of Mighty Whitey). But I hope I wasn't being too hard on it.
This blog is supposed to focus in on feminism in YA literature, and for some reason in the conception of it, I expected to focus on female protagonists. For some reason, male protagonists usually slip through my mind easily. I mean, I can barely remember the last time I read another book with a male protagonist. However, according to my GoodReads list, this year 19 out of the 44 books I've read feature males as either the sole protagonist or one of a few voices (male or female).
It can't be because the books with male protagonists are worse than those with sole or significant female protagonists. Keeping in mind I did this only as a rough tally and didn't create graphs with statistical analyses, it doesn't appear that male protagonists set off my rage significantly more than female ones. I rated 53% of books with male protagonists a 3-star or higher review, meaning I thought the book was "good" or better, while the females came in at 55% with favorable reviews. My sole five-star rating even went to a book with a male character.
From the get-go, I wasn't expecting William Bell's novel about the Tienanmen Square massacre to have clear or significant feminist themes. I was hoping for maybe a strong female counterpart to the main character, a 17 year old white Canadian named Alex Jackson at the most.
In the early spring of 1989, Alex and his father, a cameraman for the CBC, travel to China so that his father can cover the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's state visit to Beijing (side note, I have had the privilege of seeing Gorbi speak in person. His birthmark is the most glorious thing ever). Alex gets excited since he's a military history buff and has lately been recreating battle scenes from ancient Chinese wars. Bell makes his protagonist sound like he thinks he's the only teenage boy around that is more interested in the wars/battles going on in history rather than political/social issues in history or in the pastimes of the neanderthal plebes he goes to school with, sports and television.
As Alex and his dad settle down in the hotel they'll stay at with the CBC's lead reporter Eddie Nowlan, Alex befriends the middle-aged Lao Xu that the Party provides to the foreign journalists as an interpreter. The reader is blessed with this lovely description of Lao Xu:
"He was only a couple of inches shorter than me and had a long face, not like the Chinese Canadians in Toronto... with [their] round faces and broad flat noses. Mr. Xu had quite a honker on him, a sharp, hooked nose that looked almost Arabic." (pg 14)
It's nice to see that racist caricatures of Arabs existed 22 years ago. And why is the nose described as Arabic when he could have said "aqualine"? As I recall, this was once considered an attractive European face. I know, I know; it took me all the willpower I had not to reach for my new William and Kate Royal Wedding barf bags.
This book surprised me in the almost complete lack of female characters up until the student riots. Usually there's a female sidekick or peripheral character, but the only female in the book up until page 64 is Alex's mother, who is basically described as a shallow bitch who abandons her son during the divorce and makes his dad cry alone at night. Never mind the fact that she might have needs of her own, and the very obviously absent-minded and career-focused father of Alex kind of sucks at family life. Therein lies the double-standard: a man can beget children but be super-focused on his career to the point of ignoring his family and this is seen as a mostly laudable behavior, but a woman who works thinks about a life separate from her family is a bitch who isn't fit to be a mother.
During the student riots, Alex uses his Betamax (lol Sony) camera that his father gave him to capture pictures of crowds used in intros/outros/filler for newspieces to record students' reactions and demands. Alex befriends a few of them so that when the PLA actually starts firing at the students and he gets shot, they come and rescue him. Xin-hua (which I'm not sure is a significant name in that it's also one of China's largest governmental news agencies) is the girl who helps a disguised Alex traverse the countryside to get to the airport where he can get out of the country. A brave young woman, for sure. But what I found really disturbing was the following comparison to Canadian girls, emphasis mine:
"[Xin-hua] was different from the girls I knew, too. Really different. Their idea of a tragedy was running out of mousse or breaking a fingernail.... They were almost all heavily into feminism and talked about being taken seriously as persons while they put on purple lipstick....Maybe I was being too hard on them."-pg 167
Just like that, feminism is denigrated by men who don't even have to stop and think about their rights. What I find ironic is that the entire story is about Chinese students trying to be "taken seriously as persons" and Alex's cannot think critically enough to think about why these Canadian girls want to be taken seriously as people and not objects. Notice how he also dismisses the tools of femininity--the makeup and the hair products--to dismiss feminism as a whole, as if females were a frilly, prissy monolith.
I always get irritated when people say that women should stop complaining about the wage gap, because it's such a first world problem and in Bangladesh, women still get acid thrown in their faces. Sure the problems aren't on equal levels, but feminism is fighting for the rights of all women to be equal to men in all situations, whether they are first world or developing.
Thus, with a single paragraph, William Bell obliterates nearly all the good will I had for this book (which was middling--the student riots are interesting to read about, but I don't give a rat's ass about reading it from the perspective of Mighty Whitey). But I hope I wasn't being too hard on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment