Wednesday, April 22, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu)




Waste Tide is a 2013 novel written originally in Chinese* by Chinese Author Chen Qiufan.  Ken Liu - who people should be familiar with for his own fiction (The Grace of Kings, numerous bits of short fiction) and his work in translation (The Three Body Problm) - translated the novel for English-speaking audiences in 2019.  I've had mixed thoughts about some of the Chinese novels I've read, many of which have been translated by Liu, mainly in that the books often try to get too much into technical ideas for my liking and in that they have often had some severe gender issues with their women characters.  But after I skipped Waste Tide initially, my recent enjoyment of another piece of Chinese fiction (Hao Jingfang's "Vagabonds") made me come back to it and reserve it from the library.

To my disappointment, Waste Tide has both of the issues I've disliked in Chinese fiction in the past, with both gender issues and bursts of dry tech talk still infecting the story.  Unlike some of the other translated books I've read however, it's also a book with themes of problems of class, capitalism, and the selfishness of leadership by families,among other things, which makes it a far more interesting book to me despite these problems, and perhaps still worth reading.  Still, its story is muddled and often confusing, so I can't recommend it too highly among its other problems.


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
On the Silicon Isle, a small Chinese island, e-waste is the local business.  International companies dump all of their electronic waste on the island, and the businesses there employ migrant workers - the "waste people" - from poorer parts of China too comb through it all for valuable chips and technology in the prosthetic and other devices thrown away.  The cost of this is the island is massively polluted, with barely breathable air in the villages, and people stuck in poverty, under the control of the three local Families who control all business.  To make matters worse, after a horrific crime threatened to embarrass China, the mainland's cover-up restricted internet usage to an extreme slow rate of data transfer, preventing the benefits from global communication from reaching the island.

Scott Brandle is an American who comes to the Silicon Isle ostensibly on behalf of a major corporation whose recycling technology could overhaul the land, providing profits for the Families and the Corporation.  His interpreter, Chen Kaizong, is just out of American college, having left the island as a boy to grow up in America, and has since felt out of place everywhere he's been.

Both Kaizong and Scott's own interests lead them to Mimi, a young woman "waste person" who scavenges trash for one of the Families, and may have stumbled into the desires of the head of one of the families.  Mimi just wishes to live her own life, and somehow find something in that life better than what is for waste people, for her family and herself.  But when she encounters a strange bit of technology that is triggered by the Family's brutal actions, she finds herself with powers strange and unthinkable - powers that everyone, the Families and Scott included, will want for their own gains.  Powers that threaten to overturn the order of the Silicon Isle forever, in ways no one could have imagined....
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Waste Tide is a novel that was clearly difficult to translate, as its unusual setting - an island in which non-usual dialects of Chinese are spoken, to great import - means it's not as simple as simply translating from say Mandarin.  As Ken Liu notes in his translator notes, he tries to emphasize what is lost in translation from these dialects through footnotes, as the very dialect being used is occasionally important to the story (a character being unable to speak a dialect all of a sudden is an embarrassment, for example).  Interestingly, despite this, Qiufan uses the story and its setting to clearly be making a point about China in general, about class and responsibility and capitalism and well, other such ideas I'll try to get into below - the setting may be local, but Qiufan's ambitions are not.

It's that setting and those themes really where Waste Tide is strongest.  It's a future where prosthetics and VR tech is common-place in wealthy countries, with Americans described as swapping them out willy-nilly as part of their cultures.  But the sacrifice for such tech, which carries with it tremendous waste, is the people who have to handle the waste are forced to suffer - and when those rich nations outlaw the spread of such waste in their territories, it falls to poorer areas to suffer from mass dumping of it into their territories.  And the waste itself has value, as the chips and tech can be recycled for valuable materials, meaning that profit-seeking enterprises will employ people to work the horrible polluted areas, people who are poor and have nowhere else to go and who can be replaced upon injury or death cheaply - this book's waste people.

It should be noted that the exploiters of these people aren't just faceless multinational corporations, but also local businessmen and families - three families in particular in this book - who overlook the crimes and horrors they commit in the pursuit of their greed.  Interestingly, a large part of Qiufan's direct views about this system are put in the mouth of his American character Scott, where Scott notes how the Family head speaks in double talk about his responsibilities, and complains mainly about his own problems as if the Family had no part in creating them - and they certainly did.  The exploitation is not just foreign, but local as well, and it forms the basis for the conflict in this book in interesting ways.

The rest of Waste Tide is perhaps less effective.  The characters range from archetypes to utterly inconsistent in characterization - particularly Scott, whose secret agenda is still kind of confusing to me in what he was actually supposed to be doing for his real employers and whether he's supposed to be sympathetic with his family tragedy and whatever.  Kaisong is probably the strongest and most sympathetic, as the one character with a feet in every world discussed here, trying to do good as he wanders lost through it all as things get crazy, but even there his most prominent character trait is being "out of place."

And then there's Mimi, around whom the plot begins to center.  Mimi is the poor woman swept up in the Waste People problems and then basically has the plot happen to her, with her literally having no agency for most of the book - she is tortured (somewhat sexually) and abused and literally has her body taken control of by another.  And she's basically the only woman in the entire book!  This is not the first Chinese novel where I've seen this problem as I noted above, but it's a problem either way.  And aside from the problems with Mimi, the book quite often gets into technobabble as it explains its science fiction premises and what is happening, and well....all that feels kind of besides the point in a story mainly about class issues and conflict, and it just muddles up everything - including any attempt to build up Mimi's character.

It all ends up in a finale that wraps up everything solidly well, but for the most part a lot of the interesting aspects become a muddled mess.  So this is probably still a book worth reading to some extent for its Chinese perspective on the class issues, but it's got some major problems and you're probably better off reading other books which tackle the issues without these pitfalls.
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