I have a story to tell.
I never watched The Untamed (aka 魔道祖师/陈情令 as some of you may know) nor read the novel, but it really hurts whenever I see a relevant post on Tumblr, Twitter or any other platform, written in English or another language I cannot comprehend, how you can tell the ops are always so enthusiastic and passionate, and how you can just feel even on the other side of the screen that there is something amazing and ineffable in this kind of communication, how it feels, as a fellow Chinese (a still largely conservative and misogynistic country under a hyper-conservative regime), not only having a Chinese work that is well-known and loved by people around the world but more importantly a work that depicts homosexual relationships and is written by a young woman.
Had it not been for the fact that we still hear nothing from the author and it’s been nearly a year and a half since she just disappeared.
For those of you who don’t know the context: Publishing materials depicting homosexual (mostly m/m) relationships (better known as ‘yaoi’) with sexual depiction is almost never legal in China. There was a time when the government was relatively relaxed with this kind of things, and LGBTQ+ themes even made their way to the cinemas (Peony Pavillion, Lan Yu, Farewell My Mistress, to list but a few). And then there came another decade or so, when they had to be published ‘discreetly’, when authors publish zines and books through individual ‘unofficial’ studios (because the censorship process for official publishing makes it an impossibility).
By the time of 2012 they were common practices, meaning everyone publishing and purchasing knew that it was technically illegal, but given the increasing popularity of this practice (and the seeming acquiescence from the government), the hope of us eventually emerging into daylight was high.
Even as the political atmosphere became increasingly draconic, none of us really paid attention, just continued on writing, reading, and publishing, because we were just a small sub-group that belonged to a generation of pop-culture fans, and we did no one harm.
Until the end of the year 2017.
When the news of the police breaking into a comic-con and arresting an author right from her stall surfaced on the Internet, when it was reported by the government’s official newspapers as (roughly) ‘a serious criminal case that the police had finally resolved in joint effort, arresting all involved’ (it is hard to deliver the nuance in translation, but basically you only see the same phrasing for drug cartels), the Internet went raving. It happened that the author, 深海先生, was reported by another individual with whom she once had an online argument with. The publishers and several who worked in the publishing studios were also arrested.
I remember the nights I spent sleepless looking at her social network account. I never knew nor read her works, but seeing a young woman at your age, with a normal and law-abiding family, a kind and upright personality, a promising future, and so, so much love and passion and talent for creating beautiful stories, just got her life ruined over personal feud, all for doing something that harms no one, it was enough to break anyone’s heart.
Many people back then had said that this whistleblower just ‘opened the Pandora’s Box’, and they were not wrong. Can you imagine how all those individual publishing studios disappeared almost overnight? Can you imagine how many books just like The Untamed were waiting to be published and read and loved but never had the chance anymore?
It turned out that the Pandora Box analogy was more than accurate. For those of you who live in a democratic country and can’t imagine how this whole whistleblowing works: imagine you’re back in nursery or elementary school, with an extremely draconic and paranoid teacher who just needs to be in control of everything, they told everyone in the class from day 1, that anyone who brought sweets to class should be reported and their sweets confiscated, partly rewarded to the one who reported the incident to the teacher. Even if they know that everyone brings some sweets. How will it turn out? It doesn’t take long for the whistle-blowing to be in full bloom. You may be afraid, you may not trust anyone else. But most importantly, anyone can inflict harm upon anyone for the pettiest reasons precisely because everyone is guilty.
Now imagine in this case, you’re not facing a nursery teacher but a government that can and will ruin your life (and the stigma of a criminal record, following esp. a woman, in an ultra-conservative society) just because you wrote about same-sex love and had no legal way to get through the censorship so had to resort to underground publishing which everyone thought would have get better just a few years ago.
You start to see groups dedicated to teaching homophobic groups how to report m/m romance authors to ‘give them a few years behind bars and ruin their entire life’. You start to see readers threatening to ‘throw the author into jail’ and actually proceeding to do so because ‘I don’t like her work and she is breaking the law anyway’. You even start to see authors reporting on each other out of jealousy.
Another even worse effect of this kind of intimidation is that it absolutely destroyed whatever trust that should have been between individuals. We can leave discussion of Chinese civil society to another day, but let it suffice to say, from my personal experience, that it prevented us from standing up for each other. Many of us harbour the selfish thought that as long as we didn’t speak up for the arrested and didn’t ‘get involved’, the legal enforcement was going to take their sacrificial victim and be satisfied and leave us alone. Even worse, even if we did want to speak up, there still was the possibility that the arrested author would get punished even more severely. It was a kind of mindset the government wants to put into your mind - if you make a fuss, you will harm her even more.
So after some time had passed, we were getting used to the new norm, which, hopefully, wasn’t too different from before - no more mainland publishing studios, yes; arrest not common but now a substantial possibility, yes; the author arrested was later reported to have suffered severe mental breakdowns over the period of detention (and imagine which of us won’t, being in her position, for several years now?), yes; but the writing went on.
It went on for just long enough that some of us were starting to forget about the previous one, when another author, 天一, was arrested in 2018.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison (her appeal recently defeated and this became the final ruling), in a country where homicide and murder (especially that of women, inflicted by men) typically gets only 5 or even less.
I am expecting possible refutations in the comment section such as that ‘she writes pedophilic stories (one of her protagonist being 17) it’s COMPLICATED!’ ‘It’s not about ALL yaoi writers!’
But she was not charged for that. The judge was ‘shocked by the obscenity and abomination’ in her writings, hence the sentence, but whether it was more because of the homosexual nature, or the fact that the protagonist is 17, I’ll leave it to you to contemplate. She was charged for writing and publishing because it was illegal. The homosexuality (and her being a woman) only made it worse, of course.
Unsurprisingly, there was also a whistle-blower.
By the year 2019, in just less than 2 year’s time, most of us were used to the new-norm. To some of us, the new-norm meant that writing and publishing yaoi could really risk arrest, that writing and publishing smut material involves much hassle because we need to find a place (oftentimes AO3 or other overseas sites that required vpn) to put them and not get noticed by the algorithm.
To some others, it meant the knowledge that you could now threaten anyone you don’t like with a similar fate as 深海先生 and 天一, and there is actually a promising chance of you succeeding, especially if you get the noises up.
Now back to the author of 魔道祖师, 墨香铜臭Mo Xiang Tong Xiu was once acclaimed as a rising-star of Chinese yaoi writing back when 人渣反派自救系统 came out. What many of non-Chinese readers do not know or do not see on a regular basis, perhaps, is how much hate her fame entails. There were, of course, dubious issues regarding her handling of certain materials in her stories, but we can leave that, too, to another day. What goes without saying is that the immense group of haters also consisted of, as I mentioned above, hard-line homophobes and their large following, haters who simply ‘don’t like her work and her noisy fans’, or, at times, fellow authors, out of jealousy. (She was a common target in a forum dedicated to web-novel authors discussing writing techniques and stuff, and the words they use are the ones I won’t use on my worst enemy.)
Well, we think, with the huge success that is The Untamed 魔道祖师, which already had anime, live action drama, and Blessing of Heaven’s Officials 天官赐福’s animal adaptation in the line, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu must be the safest author within the circle. And she may well be, despite the fact that her publisher (a Chinese web-novel site called JinJiang, which has become notorious for exploiting authors to the very extreme), actually claimed full ownership of the author’s writing, the author’s pen-name, so that authors who signed contract essentially have NO say over their OWN works and adaptations and one can only speculate on the division of incomes.
Oh, did I mention that she just left a post asking people ‘not to worry’ and just disappear since May, 2019, with many of her haters celebrating her alleged arrest at the time, claiming with pride that ‘months after months of collective reporting to the police has finally yielded fruit’?
Of course we don’t know if she is indeed under arrest. Best case scenario, she is safe and sound and may be back any time, and you can all dismiss this post as paranoid rambling, which I anticipate will be torn to shreds by some of my fellow Chinese once they stumble upon this for ‘bad-mouthing our beloved country and giving Chinese pop-culture a bad name’.
Worst case scenario, I might have just harmed her unintentionally and irretrievably by writing this very post, and I’d be a bitch just like those haters who seem fixed on ruining her life, because the legal system here don’t like fingerpointing, especially don’t like letting ‘foreigners’ know about what they’ve got behind closed doors.
But it is really painful, thinking of what have been happening these past few years and not being able to speak up, or speaking up and having to face severe backlashes because most people take a utilitarianist approach and decide it’s best to be silent. It is painful seeing that what used to be a solidarity of (dominantly female) writers and readers now turn on each other, some are full of distrust, some write with fear, some blinded by petty hatred and the addictive, empowering feeling that they can ruin a person’s life for good if they try. Some are afraid, some are cynical, some are hopeful, some are still fighting. But what’s the same is that we are all vulnerable now, to a kind of mistrust and hatred, to fear, and, perhaps less conspicuously, to a kind of cynicism that is simply contradictory to what we claim to celebrate - the right to love and love freely.
It is painful because it makes all the celebration of love and sexual liberation almost meaningless, if we so easily make peace with the fact that several innocent young women are suffering at this moment simply for doing what we love doing, for creating the things we love reading.
It is painful because, no matter how beautiful a story The Untamed and the like is, and how many people’s heart it has indeed reached, how widely an audience, French-speaking, English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese-speaking, it has, there are actual suffering that lies so close to it and cannot be dismissed from the picture as irrelevant.
Stories are human creations, and their beauty lies in their ability to connect our hearts, across cultures, borders, languages, ethnicities, even just for a moment. But now, if we have to turn our eyes away from the sufferings that contextualizes the creation of such stories, if we allow our hearts to be touched by the story itself but not by what happens around it, then what will such stories become?
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Edit on 9/5
Okay since someone raised the possibility of my wording perhaps being too emotionally charged and biased and verging on fearmongering, a few more things to say:
I have stated above that Ms. Mxtx has disappeared from public view since May 2019 with rumours, some from her haters, that she has been arrested. Everything from that point on is mere speculation unless she returns at some point. How incredibly arbitrary, secretive and wishy-washy the Chinese legal system can get will be an entire story on its own, but just let it suffice to say that people have such speculations because it is China and there are all sorts of things in China that will blow your mind in a bad sense.
What is beyond doubt is that there already are several creators (two authors, their publishing and distributing staff) suffering because of this increasingly draconic and ultra-conservative turn of policies, that things are probably only going to get worse, and that there is really nothing we can do about it at the moment.
My main intention is to bridge the possible gap of knowledge, that all these amazing works do not come out of a vacuum. Even for the most celebrated ones among them, being targeted and jailed for writing this kind of stories is a real concern and a tangible risk now. Webnovel companies like JinJiang regard authors and their works little more than money cows.
China is a big country with many aspiring and talented creators. So there will always be one or two lucky franchises surviving this rigorous censor and come out there for people to love, (some may argue that they are even needed by the government to put up a deceptive facade - just as the government official media’s Twitter account posts pro-LGBTQ+ content for the outside world to see while they allow homosexuality to be described as ‘sexual perversion’ in texbooks) but it doesn’t mean that everything behind the scene in a distant place is normal and fine and flourishing.
Maybe there’s nothing we can do at this point about any of these. But it will be enough just to think of those arrested and those threatened from time to time and remind oneself that stories do not come out of a vacuum.
