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Sep 23, 2021

lizzybeth1986

China, Cordonia and "Home"

(Go here to read the rest of the "Hana Lee: A Study in Erasure" series!)

"If you write about the Asian culture, be accurate between what is the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Thai, Taiwanese, Indonesian, and many individual Asian countries' cultures. While there are many similarities, the differences in cultures will set your novel apart from what is an authentic portrayal to what is a westernized version." - Kaitlin Gow, on Asian Portrayals in the Media

Daryl: You got some balls for a Chinaman.

Glenn: I'm Korean!

Daryl: Whatever.

(two seasons later)

Merle: I nearly killed the Chinese kid.

Daryl: He's Korean!

Merle: Whatever, man.

— The Walking Dead.

Now, over four years after this series began, it's almost impossible for some of us to envision Hana as any ethnicity besides Chinese (or more specifically, Shanghainese). But that wasn't always the case.

Back in TRR1, Hana's origins and ethnicity were a subject of regular debate. "Asian" was a popular guess even back then, and "where is Hana from" was a question asked often. All the fandom could glean from canon at that point was that she was "new to Cordonian society" (TRR1 Ch 6), that it was possible she could have grown up in Europe (Olivia's comment about the other court ladies being from the "best families in Europe" seemed to imply this) and most of her education seemed very European-based (the description of the young girls she associated with, the skills she teaches us). And while usually the fandom tends to look out for a character's appearance, surname and dialogue to figure out their ethnicity, it wasn't quite as easy, in Hana's case.

And the reason for that, of course, is that for a very long time the writers themselves didn't seem to know...or even care.

Ambiguous (and Sometimes Interchangeable) Asian

It's not just that TRR1 has zero indication of Hana's home, despite "home" being mentioned often in her story. It's not just that most of the cultural markers of her foreignness still revolved around European mores. It was in the way they conceptualized her too. For instance, if you look at the original label for Hana's own sprite, this is what you will find:

(Zoom picture for more clarity)

"Female_ambigious_lady_sweet". Sure, sprite labels aren't exactly accurate with regards to any character in this series (eg. Maxwell's sprite which had elements of a character from MW, was labelled "Middle Eastern", and Savannah's, "South Asian"), but it says a lot that Hana was termed "ambiguous" from the time they created her.

The other indicator is her own name.

Hana is a name used in multiple languages (with a variation in pronunciations) - in Croatian, Slovakian and Czech languages it is a variation of the name Hannah, in certain other languages it's used as a variation of Jane or Johanna. It also seems to have other meanings in Moari (shine) and Arabic (happiness). Among Asian countries, Hana means "flower" in Japanese, and the number one in Korean. But if you try to find a Chinese meaning for this name on Google, it will redirect you to other languages like the ones above, or to an appropriate Chinese word, huā (same character as the one used for "flower"). It would perhaps be hard to find someone Chinese with that name, unless we were to presume it's a Western name to appeal to European courts. But even then, we as readers are the ones putting in the work and the thought here, not the writers.

Lee is used in a lot of places as a surname, including England and Ireland. In a different way, you will find it and its variations in other Asian countries like Korea (Lee) and Vietnam (Lý) - the origin of both come from the Chinese character, which is the same as that for "plum tree". Lí is the Pinyin romanisation of the Chinese character 李, and often used as a surname in mainland Chinese. From what I've read, the romanization of "Lee" - if used at all in China - is used in certain places (like Hong Kong) and certain regions (like Macau and Taiwan), and in these places Cantonese seems to be the main language (though Cantonese uses the romanization "Lei"). Shanghai, Hana's eventual home city, has Mandarin (and before that, Shanghainese) as its main language, and the romanization that seems to be used for this language is Lí.

Hana Lee would have probably fit in as a native of South Korea, or even brought up in Hong Kong. Neither of these names point specifically to Shanghai or China, not unless the readers themselves were developing headcanons and family trees to fill in the blanks.

When we look at how she is represented in the story itself, we'll find that while she is established as a newcomer to Cordonia, the writing steers clear of any indications of where her home is. The word "home" itself comes up many times in her dialogue, but never the place itself. In TRR1 alone, there is only one thing that seems to vaguely point in the direction of Asia at all, and we see it in Ch. 18 during the gift-giving ceremony at Liam's Coronation Ball. We never get to see what Hana's gift to Liam is, but she does tell us what her parents proposed to send him:

Again, elephants can be found in a whole range of places, but the stories of sending one as a gift are ones you will often find in Asia (eg. the idiom "white elephant", which is often used to describe a gift that is impractical to the point of becoming burdensome to the receiver, originates from a story about the king of Siam). In every other place where Hana could have mentioned where she came from, they made her use terms like "home" or "where I come from". An example of this is the conversation at the ruins in Ch. 13, where Hana can say, "I've visited ruins around where I'm from, and they're just as beautiful as these".

In a lot of ways, TRR1 was already writing her in the Ambiguous Asian/Ambiguous Brown mould, making her the exotic foreigner who could teach the MC the mores of European high society, while still being "Other" enough to be "saved" by MC, and therefore put her on a pedestal.

Shanghai

Our first real indication of Hana's ethnicity wasn't even from the books - it was from Twitter canon. If we were to chart this by date, the finale of TRR1 came out on August 18th, 2017, and the confirmation of (half of) her ethnicity came over a week later, on the 25th:

The second book of the series came out almost a month later, on September 22nd. And, conveniently enough, the setting is a world tour that has China as a stop. This is how Maxwell frames it in the very first chapter:

I won't say a lot about the other places we visited in the engagement tour for now - besides the observation that we spent the most time in Paris (4 chapters!), which revolved mostly around Drake reuniting with his sister (though significant progress was also made in the investigation). We will focus instead on Shanghai, which PB tells us is the city where Hana grew up. It's referred to only twice before we go there: once in the Ch. 2 Hot Chocolate scene, where Hana can tell us about the dumplings she liked eating "back home", and then just the chapter before reaching there - which is literally just to say, "hey, our next stop is Shanghai! And btw, that's where Hana's parents live!".

In contrast, the buildup for the Savannah reveal in Paris in TRR2 (Ch. 8) begins in Applewood (Ch. 4) with Kiara's conversation with Drake, and is preceded by Bertrand's confession in Italy (Ch.5). The buildup for NY involves an entire scene where the MC prepares Hana for the uniqueness of her city. Even Italy, which features something for all three main LIs, is built up through a diamond scene about the language. In contrast, while the scenes Hana gets in Paris are her best ever in that book, none of them actually build up to her home Shanghai itself (not even the library scene, which could have included something from China, not just Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and TCaTF! Why weren't we learning about manhuas here? If Chinese literature wasn't allowed for her, why wasn't she specifying that or even telling us about her reading those books as a small rebellion??)

Keeping that in mind, let's look at how Shanghai itself is written. Unlike Italy and NY which got 3 chapters each, Shanghai had only 2. But it's still possible that in those 2 chapters we'd have plenty of background material about Hana, right? Right??

(Hana's and Liam's confrontations not featured)

Let's take a look at certain prominent scenes, on the basis of scene-time and involvement from - as well as focus on - Hana. You have two major arc culmination moments that belong to Liam and Hana, and a couple of scenes with some level of local flavour:

Confrontation with Constantine (free) - If we add the buildup at the dinner, it clocks up to 7 minutes total. This is supposed to be Liam's big moment, where he not only confronts Constantine but calls him out on his harmful choices and commands him to help the MC, if indeed he cannot publicly accept responsibility.

Confrontation with Xinghai (free) - We must keep in mind that this portion is the dramatic end to a series of things that happen in the teahouse - the tea service itself, the update on the investigation into Tariq's whereabouts, the start of a sympathy arc for Madeleine via a personal chat with her mother, and short buildup to the Western Lake diamond scene for Liam. Hana's arc culmination scene itself is 4 minutes, tops. It's short and powerful, but this is in spite of the lack of buildup and real exploration into how her family's been forcing her re: Neville, not because of it. And you'll find this to be a pattern among a lot of her powerful moments. They're powerful even though the writing does them - and Hana herself - a disservice. It doesn't help either that the MC herself doesn't seem to show a lot of concern by default, either after this sequence or in NY when Hana is missing for an entire chapter.

Food Trails (one free, one diamond): One area that seems to have some level of research done on it. By that I mean they looked up the names of street foods popular to Shanghai and their descriptions, and had Hana say those lines. At dinner, we're shown a crispy noodle tower with steamed bell peppers which also resembles certain Southeast Asian dishes with a Chinese influence (in fact PM shows us the exact same dish and calls it i fu mie, which is from Indonesia). The street market scene names popular Shanghainese delicacies such as xiaolongbao and shansi leng mian. Shanghainese cuisine seems to lean more on the sweeter side, so we see that for some of the foods besides the rou jia mo that Drake samples.

It's a pity, however, that the center of both these scenes isn't Hana at all - it's Drake. The crispy noodle scene is about his biases against gourmet food, and learning that the food is worthy of his tastes (literally. The framing isn't "I was wrong and maybe I shouldn't judge food from cultures I'm not familiar with", it's "well, this met my standards"). The street market diamond option may use Hana as the "face" of the scene, but it really is about Maxwell and Drake patching up, with Maxwell playing around with food and utensils to grab Drake's attention, and with Drake finally talking to Maxwell again. Which is stupid because this fight itself was over a non-issue, and honestly should have been resolved chapters ago. Instead it is presented here as a way for Drake to chew scenery, while Hana is made to act more like a tour guide than our friend showing us her home.

This scene lasts 7 minutes, of which maybe 2-3 minutes go into Olivia being a part of the group and insulting the place and the food before she enjoys her own xiaolongbao, and the rest of which goes into the resolution of this fight.

Hangzhou West Lake (diamond): This is a Liam-centric scene of 7 minutes (9 with the sex scene), and largely explores themes related to the new revelation about Liam's father, and his admiration for the MC's strength and survival. Throughout this tour, and indeed throughout the series, Liam has been established as a bit of a historian who loves the stories and symbolism behind monuments, so it's not altogether surprising he was given this scene.

It is, however, the one time I feel the scene should have gone to someone else, or that Hana got a parallel one. The only legend we openly hear about in this story comes from him - of the koi fish that don't give up until they reach the Dragon's Gate. While the myth of dragon koi originates from China's Yellow River, it is one that seems popular in other Asian countries (Japan and Vietnam, but Korea also has koi legends). Hangzhou West Lake itself has its own love legend - that of Lady White Snake. This legend never features.

Even if this place couldn't be given to Hana, it would have been far better if they allowed her to show us another famous place, regaling us with its folklore and her own private experiences. Shanghai has many that one can choose from - both traditional and modern.

Jade Cufflinks (diamond): This is a tiny shopping scene (approx 2 mins), preceded by an equally small scene about outfits modelled on traditional cheongsams. Pleased with Liam's gift of a pearl bracelet, the MC thinks of giving him a gift in return, and Hana recommends engraved jade cufflinks. The cultural aspect is more implied than said - jade is, after all, a symbolically-rich gemstone in Chinese culture. However, this scene, like others, is not even about her as it is about Liam, and there is more focus on the Cordonian coat of arms than on the stone. Which is alright, but that also means that the scene makes use of Hana again without actually letting her benefit.

Traditional outfits: This one is just before the jade cufflinks scene, and is another very small scene. We see Hana wearing a black traditional outfit with intricate embroidery, and red and gold detailing around the collar. It's not given as much importance in this book, and is more an opening to the MC's diamond red outfit. Both outifts were designed and made personally by Hana (with some help in the designing aspect), and in fact the beautiful red outfit that we wear is titled "Hana's Heart" in the description. We are told nothing else about either outfits, but the next book does give us a small nugget of personal history behind her black one.

Tea Service (free): China is known for its tea culture and esp its tea houses, that are often hubs for political and cultural discussions. Hana herself tells us that going to a teahouse was often a reward for a good lesson, so there is some symbolic value to her standing up to her parents to a place she could only visit if she obeyed. Serving tea here is an art in itself (and I feel like the method they were going for was the gong fu cha one) involving many steps including "warming the utensils", the first round of tea which is for the recipients to appreciate the scent of the tea leaves rather than drinking, and a second which is when the tea is ready to drink, etc. The narrative does show a simplified version of this (there is no mention of people smelling the tea, or of warming the vessels with hot water. In fact I don't know if they mention anything besides the teapot and the cups. Btw I found the Tea House Ghost a pretty incredible resource to that goes into detail about gong fu cha), as a backdrop for the group's conversations.

What's interesting is that Hana is not even with the group here, as the narrative has her sit with her father, Neville and Rashad. This is a narrative choice that makes sense - after all the dramatic finish of this scene is Hana's fight with Xinghai. Yet, in the larger context of never getting the opportunity to show us her city on a personal level, the teahouse scene is another example of a scene that explores a culture but writes out the character that has a personal connection to it. So we see the ritual filtered through the view of the mostly-white characters, who either misinterpret its steps (Maxwell), or use that opportunity to extol their own culture (Olivia, though she compliments the tea and instead mocks the MC for liking "teabags", another knock on her social class).

Buying Champagne (diamond): Funny enough? This scene isn't about Hana's home at all. It's about the MC's. The MC gets to introduce her home with the kind of detail not allowed to Hana, and paint it as a place that is different and perhaps better than all the places they've been to so far - including her own home. Besides buying something that would gain us yet another ally, that's the main focus for this scene. What's even worse is that this is the only individual scene Hana ever got in Shanghai. And it wasn't even about her.

Panda Reserve (diamond) - if you buy the extended scene it lasts approx 15 mins including buildup (10 mins if you don't buy). The diamond scene itself involves all the LIs - Liam being adorable with pandas, Drake being wary of them, Maxwell gushing over them and Hana making things out of bamboo for them.

The scene itself has new art, and unlike every other scene I've mentioned about, actually has a personal Hana-related story that is given some level of narrative weight (even though that story does serve to soften Xinghai himself a fair bit). "The bamboo groves" were used to describe the place before we went on the tour, and pandas are the only real lasting memory after (Maxwell refers to this visit when telling us why he got us red pandas). In a lot of ways, of all the scenes I've listed so far, this is the only one intended to create a lasting impression of sorts.

Shanghai should have been treated differently. This was Hana's home. This was the place she likely spent all of her childhood and most of her young adult life growing up in. What we should have been seeing was her house, her childhood haunts, places that made her feel safe and happy. Folk tales she grew up on, local traditions she may have participated in (I mean, isn't this stop at the tour during the time of a festival?). And if for some nonsensical reason the writers wanted to alienate her from her own city, don't brush that aside like it means nothing.

An overall exploration of these two chapters in Shanghai, coupled with the only callbacks being the pets in TRR3, leads us to one shocking conclusion: Shanghai/China didn't seem to be chosen with Hana herself in mind. It seems to have been chosen more for the novelty factor of meeting a few giant pandas, since that is the one thing that we are even allowed to remember after these two chapters are over.

Additionally, while the team may have done some amount of research on the individual components of the scenes, they definitely failed in their overall research on the city itself. A glaring example of this, is this line from Hana's McDermots scene:

Funny enough, if you do even a basic Google search with the word Shanghai, you'll find dozens of articles (including its own Wiki page) that call the city an international hub, a metropolis, "classified as an Alpha+ city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network". Research of this level would only take two minutes at most. Yet somehow, the team thought it was appropriate to use an inhabitant of that city itself, to call it ancient...just to make the MC's home city sound superior. And while some may claim that the dialogue may be about how long Shanghai and Cordonia have "been around", the last line shows that she is clearly talking about the feel and aesthetics of these places. (On the other hand, with this context you can maybe see why a lot of the background art for the Shanghai chapters seemed to show it in a particularly "foreign", "exotic" light, and none of them - besides a hospital and a restaurant - actually show a city background). It's even more baffling when you remember that Hana and her family live closer to the "big financial district". Neither Luijazui nor the Bund (which, from what I read, seems to be the older financial hub) seem to fit the description that Hana is giving her natal home in this scene.

From this, we can pretty much work out a pattern of how Hana is written in a place PB claims is her home. What the narrative essentially does, is explore the city like it's just a tourist location - similar in pattern to Italy and Paris - but keep Hana so separate from it that we see it only as "a stop in the itinerary", and not as her home.

Erasing Shanghai

Once Hana leaves home for good, we never see the city again, and it's very rarely ever referenced. If one observes Hana's scenes - esp the LI scenes post TRR3 Ch. 9 - closely, one will notice the predominance of European traditions and fairy tales in some of her scenes (with the exception, perhaps, of the martial art form Mara suggests for her: judo, which is from Japan). At the Costume Gala, Hana shows us a tradition from her (presumably maternal) great-great-grandmother's time that involves throwing a gold, silver and copper coin into a fountain, to signify the importance of friendship, love and belonging. In the ice room at Lythikos, LI!Hana tells us a fairy tale reminiscent of The Snow Queen. She is constantly equated to fairy tales (eg. Her gift to the MC is a customized blue slipper, definitely symbolic of the MC's "Cinderella-like" rise to power) but those fairy tales are mostly derived from European folk traditions.

On the other hand, TRR3 speaks of Shanghai only twice before Hana's mother Lorelai's entry, and in both cases it's in the chapters just before she appears. Only one of these two scenes is for free - where Maxwell can present the MC with red pandas, while recalling their visit to the panda reserve in the previous book.

(Interestingly, Hana is the one to name these two animals, and the names she gives them come from other Asian countries - Iniya means sweet in several Indian languages, and Pabu seems to mean "puff-ball" in Tibetan. Given the history between Tibet and China, I'm also not sure her giving the red panda a Tibetan name was the wisest choice)

The other instance Shanghai is mentioned, is in TRR3 Ch 13, in the diamond scene where you tour the estate - if you're marrying Hana. Even then, it's a mere mention of Lorelai growing up in Cordonia before moving to Shanghai post marriage. Interestingly enough - for someone who has probably spent 20+ years living in China, and for a person who will eventually become the more prominent parental figure in Hana's character history, Lorelai herself is written in a way that she never acknowledges the place, nor do we get to know much about her natal home which would have been Hana's one connect to Cordonia before the events of TRR1.

TRR3 Ch 15 does try to cobble together some sort of backstory for Hana's traditional outfit, but only as buildup to a "fun" diamond scene:

Once she retrieves the outfit from her mother, with the MC's (optional) help, the history behind it becomes a non-factor almost immediately, and the focus pivots straight back to the MC needing the Lee family's support.

This outfit, perhaps, was perhaps our first indicator of how TRH would erase Hana's Chinese heritage - except it was hidden so well you could hardly notice it unless you were looking at multiple playthroughs. If you don't buy this scene, the story will feature it only once by default (at the wedding, if you aren't marrying her). After that, you never see it again - at the TRR3 finale, she doesn't get to choose between this outfit and her Costume Gala springtime gown, and in TRH Ch. 4 (the last time this outfit ever appears) it is replaced by the short black dress Hana wore for her bachelorette.

This may seem like an insignificant point, if we did not take in the context of the scene where we take the dress back. That outfit was one of her last links back to her natal home, and was the treasured last reminder she had of her Chinese grandmother. Taking this dress away from her meant that symbolically, Hana was being stripped of everything she called her own. In the light of Lorelai's apology later on in the same chapter, the outfit should have been given back to Hana by default, yet making it disappear completely after her parents return to China makes it look as though they realized their mistakes yet took that outfit, and all its rich personal history, with them anyway! Yet the TRR3 Ch. 15 diamond scene is coded such that you'll never see it again after the wedding, and by default it disappears completely after TRH1 Ch 4.

This is hardly the only indication of Hana having her Chinese heritage erased. In TRH, almost no mentions are made of her home city or home country. In Book 1 there is a heavy focus, again, on the European-influenced skills she grew up learning like horseriding and dainty tea parties. We see this even in her childhood scenes, that show her practicing teatime English-style with inanimate objects, and where her mother focuses on preparing her for her debut in English courts, and teaches her Cordonian dances. In the movie based on Maxwell's book, the production team whitewashes Hana by casting a far-fairer skinned Asian actress, Cassandra Leigh. Even the dossier that Amalas compiles on her, lists Cordonian Societies she has a connection to and a goth phase, but not a single word about the place where she grew up.

Also, similar to how Hana is sometimes made to invoke something from other Asian countries (like the martial art form or the names for red pandas) in other books, we see her take the MC out on a sushi date in TRH2 because the MC misses having fish. In fact, we even see a return to the kind of language she used to describe her home in TRR1:

(JUST SAY SHANGHAI FFS!!!!)

These vague indications are, frighteningly enough, a constant in the story. In the few times Hana speaks of her upbringing or growing years, the name of the place never comes up, and furthermore the writing tries to make her sound as if she always grew up among nobility without explaining why there would be so many European nobles hanging around Shanghai (eg. in TRH2 Ch 11, Hana talks of how, "even as a noble" she did not spend much time in the public eye until she got to Cordonia. Even if this was in reference to her introduction to European royal courts, it doesn't make sense that a foreigner wouldn't catch press attention). The book continues the practice of assuming her home city to be "ancient" - in the screenshot above, Hana even implies that Cordonia is more modern.

Out of all the books in the series so far, we see only one example of anything Chinese - and that's in the finale of TRR2, if you're not married to her and if you buy the library for the house in Valtoria:

Featuring manhua in this book was a pleasant surprise, since not only is manhua a Chinese form of comic art, its debut in the 1920s also came about in a Shanghai magazine! (as written in the book Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn, by John. A. Crespi). It was indeed heartening that in the middle of all the European-style skillsets, and rebellions featuring science fiction and Charlotte Brontë, that the narrative allowed her a moment to indulge in something from her home. Unfortunately, it's the only moment of its kind, and that's not a good thing in a book that constantly shied away from even naming her home city and erased every possible mention of the time we visited it. It almost seems like - once we won the favour of her parents - the narrative wanted Hana to magically turn back into the "ambiguous Asian" that she was at the beginning of the series. And given that TRR2 didn't ever allow us to view Shanghai purely from her perspective, there is really no word to call it but erasure.

Hana's Cordonian Background

Since we've established how Hana's Chinese roots have been treated in the narrative, it would help to look also at how her maternal background is explored. One could claim that perhaps the foreign connection was diluted so that her more Cordonian connections could gain some focus, but is that really what happens in the story?

One cannot say for certain whether Hana's family connection to Cordonia was planned from the start. The narrative ensures we assume that her parents are her sponsors, living in some other country and keeping themselves updated via the news. We never see any other family during her time in Cordonia, and all the things done to make her stand out during the social season (the fancy yacht party at the Regatta, the opulent carriage during Coronation Ball) have their direct involvement and no one else's. In fact, we never even get to know about her mother's Cordonian roots until TRR2 Ch. 12, when Justin informs the MC that Hana's mother is from a minor noble house in Cordonia. We do not hear more about this estate or noble house in this book, as the narrative had Lorelai conveniently written out of the Shanghai chapters by having her attend "festivities" (we're never told what festivities) when her daughter is visiting.

In TRR3, the book where we get to see the sigils and house colours of a number of provinces, including Lythikos, we don't still don't get to know much about the house Hana's mother came from. Between this book and TRH, we might glean only these things about Hana's maternal home:

1. An old lover's ritual that involves tossing a gold, silver and copper coin into a fountain could come from this region. Hana refers to it as a Cordonian ritual, but she also mentions it as one from her "great-grandmother's time" and the MC has the option of referring to it as a local legend as well. Vague, but one can infer it to be a ritual from her mother's place.

2. In TRH1, Ch. 3, one of the Lythikos children hands Hana a flower necklace with a pattern modelled on "the Lee family crest". Again, the confusion here lies in how TRR handles surnames (Walker, for instance, is used for both Drake's mother Bianca and aunt Leona, as well as his father Jackson), but one can infer this crest to belong to her mother's house, since her father is referred to as a businessman rather than someone with any relation to nobility.

3. Lorelai's bedtime fairytales may or may not be specific to her home - we honestly do not know. But since the only source for them is Lorelai herself, one may assume that these tales may have come from there (a stretch, sure, but stretches like these are all we are allowed when it comes to Hana).

Besides these vague hints, we know absolutely nothing. We have never seen the place. We don't know if she has relatives there. We have no idea what its culture and influences are, nor its geography or people. We don't even know its name!

Why do I see this as important, and therefore the double-negligence as unforgivable? Because even though she seems to have comfortably settled in Cordonia, we never have a clear idea where she lives or whether she feels a sense of belonging there, unless she is married to the MC! The MC may have offered her a room in Valtoria before TRR2 ended, but post wedding whenever Hana features, she looks more like she is visiting the estate than living there. We don't even have a real clue where she does live, which is not the case for any other LI in the books who have established living places from before (Liam in his palace, Drake possibly in his palace room as well, Maxwell in Ramsford). For a person whose story was not only about self-discovery but also finding a sense of belonging, not meeting that need in her "single" playthrough is an awful reminder that nothing in Hana's story is written with her in mind.

Home

Hana is the only foreigner in the group besides the MC, the only character with no physical history connected to Cordonia, and the only one to leave her former home in the course of the story and start over completely. In my previous essays I have mentioned how Hana's connection with Cordonia makes her an asset to the MC in terms of knowledge, yet her foreignness makes her relatable because she understands the MC's alienation. Yet, as this essay has established so far, she is the only character who seems to stay essentially rootless, if the MC does not marry her.

It's not as if the narrative has her perfectly fit in the moment she comes to Cordonia. There are clearly certain aspects of the country that catch her by surprise, or that she has little more than academic knowledge of. For instance, she is as taken aback by the taste of the Cordonian Ruby apple as the MC (to the point where she cannot even mask her shock). In TRH2, when the group visit the Castle Thorngate at Castelserraillian, Hana's perspective is heavy on the history of the place, while the other three talk about visiting there and the games they played. Hana speaks - more often in her married playthroughs than in her single one - of Cordonia as the place that she now considers home. However, a lot of this focus on home seems to revolve around her relationship with the MC (which is why she gets to say this more if she's married), and none of it actually attempts to figure out what that home would look like if she wasn't married to her.

It is interesting how - for a character who started out with a foot in two worlds - the old one that belonged to her parents and the new one where she would find the MC and, possibly, herself - the narrative did very little work on exploring those feelings, or even in seeing those places from her perspective. Her birth home, Shanghai, was viewed only as a tourism destination with the pandas being the most important aspect of the visit, and her mother's estate hasn't even been given a name. We don't even know where she lives when she isn't with us.

One may assume that this is the case with all LIs, but that would not be true. Drake, for instance, is identified as half-American in the first book itself, which leads the MC to make an impromptu birthday outing for him at a cowboy-themed bar. We're given story after story after story about his father's love of the simple life and later, his mother's ranch, to the point where he is given his own special "country-themed" wedding before his official one, and his sister's wedding at Walker Ranch leads to a whopping nine chapters spent in Texas. The country culture and vibes are explored in excruciating detail, to the point where we find this group of nobility fall over themselves to make sure they satisfy their hosts' "country tastes".

Finding a sense of home is explored heavily in Drake's playthrough, in a manner very different from Hana's. He is someone who chooses not to fit in, who chooses to stay in a place that makes him so unhappy. He has grown up in the palace and has people there that he has been close to for years, yet the narrative never misses the chance to explore how out-of-place he feels. Drake speaks of having a room in the palace, yet never feeling like he belonged there, and this thread is explored all the way from TRR3 to TRH2. We are even told that Liam encouraged him to find an apartment because he knew how uncomfortable Drake was in the palace, yet Drake stayed because he wanted to "look out for Liam". The narrative focuses heavily on his sense of alienation and tries to ensure that his arc culmination involves him being settled, comfortable and accepted for who he is. What's more - the narrative writes this in a way that ensures that Drake benefits from this storyline, and not the MC - whereas anything in Hana's storyline that doesn't directly benefit the MC is rarely considered worth exploring.

Seeing home explored in such a way in the case of Drake, who at least grew up in this place and had friends, makes the raw truth of what Hana did not get, even more stark.

Another example comes to us from an unlikely source - TRR 2.0, the version of the first book that had revamped the first four chapters. One of the many changes made to this book was to allow the MC to openly express homesickness, but the other foreigner in the court - Hana - doesn't even get any substantial extra scenes. In fact, the narrative even forgets that canonically, Hana arrived in Cordonia before the MC did and would have appeared at the gates with the other ladies. It allows the MC her feelings about coming to a new country for the first time but never even considers that Hana Lee may be going through a similar conflict.

This is not limited to the LIs and MC. Even side characters who have lived in Cordonia get more focus on their homes, and their relationships to these places, than Hana does. We have seen every other duchy at least thrice. Olivia's duchy Lythikos has been shown to us numerous times in the series - including being the center of a 5-chapter holiday-themed book called The Royal Holiday. Not only do the books deal with Olivia's discomfort at how her family is seen, and her need for friendship - it also explores the winter traditions that Lythikos is known for, whether it's the trees that shed poisonous sap or blood hymns, the writers took a huge amount of effort to build this image of Lythikos as a society of survivors. It clearly involved a lot of work: planning, research, writing, art.

Yet somehow they couldn't be bothered to give the one place Hana had roots in, in Cordonia, a name, nor did they place even half that effort on an already existing, real-life place.

A possible argument for the latter situation at least...is that the team may not have known enough about China or Shanghai, and may have been reluctant to step on the toes of people who did. In which case, why choose a country you don't know, and don't want to do proper research for? Because calling a city that's capable of moving entire buildings with the help of robot walkers, isn't one that anybody in their right mind would call "ancient".

Another possible argument is that the lack of exposure esp in Shanghai makes sense for Hana, since her parents did mostly try to isolate her. The lazer-focus on European mores could be put down to how badly her parents wanted her to succeed in those courts. Yet this argument wouldn't take into account that she is familiar enough with Shanghai to know her way around, is very familiar with the language, and has even consumed steeet food. She clearly was able to engage with familiar society and people there.

If we were to chart how Hana's identity is viewed in the series, it would go something like this - Hana is an Ambiguous Brown/Asian foreigner in TRR1. The narrative then tells us she is half-Chinese in TRR2, but only for a handful of chapters before beginning to erase this part of her identity. There is more importance given to the exotic animals they see in China, than there is to her own Chinese identity. Once we are done viewing China as some...idk...ancient-era source of entertainment, we don't even mention its name. The other part of her identity - the Cordonian one - is invisible. She is allowed to speak about having a sense of home and belonging, but only if the MC chooses to marry her.

It goes without saying how harmful this level of carelessness is. Representation isn't just about slapping an ethnicity onto a character and calling it a day - where that character comes from - especially if they grew up someplace other than the story's location - is central to who they are. Often, their place of origin determines how they view home, how they view their identity - and leaving it can be both a painful and an eye-opening process. Hana was eventually uprooted from hers in an incredibly painful way, yet the narrative never seems to examine her origins, her struggle to find herself or even her foreignness, for her. And it isn't as if the team didn't know how to center a character in their own fight for identity - they managed to do so for Drake, even at the cost of the story.

It is also harmful because among the many awful stereotypes Asian characters tend to be saddled with, is the one that treats Asians themselves as a monolith. Which is why when a Korean actor is called in to play the role of a Chinese character, it promotes the view that Asians can be seen as interchangeable and there is no value to those individual cultures as they are. Brian X Chen, in his NY times article "The Cost of Being an Interchangeable Asian" speaks of the largely demoralizing impact of these assumptions in the real world, therefore highlighting the harm of representation that doesn't see that individual identity as worth proper, researched representation. Hana may have been established as Chinese in canon, but the narrative works far, far harder at erasing that part of her, than it ever did on exploring her own identity.

Hana - the woman with the Japanese first name, Korean surname, "ambiguous" body sprite, Chinese home and European education - is never even allowed a deep dive into her identity even when it would have benefited the story. And that is because her struggle to carve her own identity...was never treated as her story in the first place.

After 9 full essays on every aspect of Hana, one thing is clear. Not a single thing about Hana's characterization, was ever built by her writers with Hana in mind.

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