Cinder || Marissa Meyer || Dystoian, YA, Sci-Fi
☆☆☆☆☆
Are you kidding? I’m not summarising this piece of shit.
There are a few things you should know before you read this review:
I am predisposed to hate this book.
I DNF’d this at like 33%.
“But,” you say, “Nora. Nora. N O R A. How can you judge a book after reading only a third of it? How could you give it zero stars? Don’t you know how hard authors work? Don’t you realise how much heart they pour into their novels? Where did your compassion go?”
My answer to that is that my compassion went down the toilet where she flushed my culture, and that I’m not predisposed to think well of authors who give absolutely no respect to my heritage. I was born in Beijing, and Marissa Meyer is lucky that I read this through my Scribd subscription, or else I’d be asking for a refund on my time and my money for whatever that “New Beijing” was supposed to be.
Shall I inundate you with a few choice excerpts?
Did Melissa – Marissa – IDGAF, because if she can’t be bothered to respect the naming traditions of my people, then I can’t be bothered to respect whatever her name is – think she could just throw a few “Chinese” sounding syllables together and hope that no actual Chinese person would read her book and tell her that her shit stinks? Because the smell assaulting my nose right now is somewhere between rotten eggs and stinky tofu, but at least stinky tofu tastes better than this book reads. 1) Chinese children’s rhymes are not English children’s rhymes. When I was young I sang 找呀找呀找朋友, not Ring around the Roses. I don’t know if you knew, but the Black Plague was Not a Thing in Yuan Dynasty China. We knew how to wash our hands. 2) Chinese parents place an incredible amount of thought into their children’s names. Some parents go so far as to consult astrologists regarding their children’s 生辰八字 for the most auspicious name. My parents didn’t go so far, but hot damn at least my name is beautiful and full of my parents’ hope for me. At least it came from poetry. What the shit is Sunto?*
And man, I don’t want to talk about this, but I have to. Kai is a perfectly reasonable Chinese name. Here’s a Kai of the Wang variety. (Swoon.) Here’s a Kai of the Zheng variety. (Scream.) Here’s a Kai of the Jun variety from the family Wang. (What a tiny bab.) So there’s nothing wrong with a Kai of the To variety who rules over East Asia (Because We Are All The Same), right? RIGHT?
Wrong. I don’t even want to talk about the ridiculous notion of wearing kimonos at balls. We don’t have balls. You want to know how consorts got chosen in imperial China? Girls from influential families were sent into the palace and lined up before the emperor and from those he would have his pick. Of multiple. They were polygamists. Chinese emperors were polygamists, so you can take your romantic one true love and shove that elsewhere. And given the violent overthrow of our royal family a hundred and four years ago, it’s quite frankly offensive to propose that we would somehow adopt a new royal family. A Japanese royal family. Even after a nuclear fallout.
What I do want to talk about is the fact that Meyer feels suitably divorced from the issues of imperialism that still plague East Asian geopolitics to this day to write a novel about a Japanese emperor ruling not only all of East Asia, but also “provinces as far flung as Singapore** and Mumbai” and not think twice about it or be called out on it by her editors and agents and publishers, which is precisely her problem and the problem with this novel. She is too removed, and she does not care to get any closer, or to use her brain to think about the messiness of real life East Asia, the scars that have persisted only two generations out of traumatic war. She is content with East Asia remaining this pale and inscrutable mysterious place, and has no vested interest in doing us justice.
Linh is, to the best of my knowledge, a Viet given name. For it to be used here, as a Chinese family name, is laughable. Lin, Lim, Liem, Lam, Lum – these are the romanisations of 林. Not Linh.
“Linh Cinder” is not the way East Asian naming order works. When we use Western names, we use Western name orders. Cinder is not a Chinese name. We would not call her “Linh Cinder.”
Just aside from the sundry cultural inaccuracies (and there are too many to list comprehensively), the lack of even a little self awareness is startling. Names like Peony and Pearl (the stepsisters) are heavy with Orientalist undertones, but this never seems to have occurred to Meyer. Western and “Romanised” names populate the cast of characters with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Great care is taken, however, to separate Cinder from the Asian masses. Meyer is careful to note that our special, beautiful, oppressed protagonist is not like those other boring normal Asians, she is actually European.
China itself feels cursory in this novel. The whole gimmick is that this is Cinderella set in post-apocalyptic China, but truly this novel could have taken place anywhere for all that the setting mattered. It’s there to act exotic, be exotic, and nothing more. The city itself has no character, needs no character, because it’s only function is to be a place of Other which the reader can be a casual voyeur and come out feeling cultured without actually having absorbed any real culture. And I came out thinking: what was the point? Why set it in China if you are not prepared to engage with Chineseness? Why write about us if we are inconvenient to you? You could have set it in Paris or New York for all the difference that would have made.The worldbulding itself was similarly shitty, but that could have just been the fact that I did not get past the first third of the novel. I don’t know; I don’t care enough to find out.
Having taken the time to do cursory research on the fact that Chinese is a tonal language, Meyer does not seem to have taken even five minutes on wiktionary.org to figure out that the correct tone for [shi] is the first, not the fourth.***
There is absolutely no respect given in this novel to East Asians, specifically Chinese people. Not to our names, not to our cultures, not to our histories, and it is a kick in the face every time I see this included on diversity shortlists and recommended by people I normally trust. It is a kick in the face every time people disregard the offensiveness in the novel just because they enjoy the lackluster plot and mediocre love interest. It is a kick in the face to tell us that the respect that we deserve is secondary to the enjoyment you derive. There are books that are not my type. There are books that try, but don’t quite get it right.
And then there are books like this, which, save for the most superficial of attempts, do not try at all, and which use marginalised people, our cultures, our experiences, as gimmick-y backdrops to allow the novel to stand out against a sea of similar premises. Most of all, though, it’s a kick to the face to think that she got famous off of our backs while not engaging with our truths at all, even while actual East Asian authors writing about our experiences, be it in the homeland or in diaspora, remain in relative obscurity. It’s not fair. And I don’t have to like it. And I don’t have to give this novel an iota more respect than it’s given me and mine, which is to say: none at all.
I tried, guys. I really, really wanted to finish this book and read it to the end and not write it off as racist claptrap before I finished it, but I’m not going to waste my time on a novel like this one. For all Cinder is the actual alien, the only people who are actually alienated are the Asians. And for all this novel is set in the future, Meyer is unable to leave her own prejudices behind.
*’To’ is not a sound in Mandarin. And before you go ‘BUT THERE ARE DIALECTS NORA,’ I speak the Beijing dialect. Which is, as it happens, a Mandarin dialect. The one off which Standard Mandarin is based, actually. So, no.
** For those not in the know, the Japanese Imperial Army rounded up all the males of Chinese ancestry in Singapore they could get their hands on and systematically massacred them for their support of the anti-Japanese war effort in China. But you know. Whatever. Ancient fucking history.
*** I’m not even going to think about the atrocity that is “Linh-mei.”
