Transcript: Did Netflix Ruin The Three-Body Problem?

The following is a transcript of this week’s Sinica Podcast. Thanks to Lili Shoup for all the help with this! This week’s podcast transcript is free for all subscribers! Please consider signing up for a paid subscription if you value the work I’m doing. Thank you!

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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On March 21st, Netflix released the first season of its latest big-budget series called 3-Body Problem. It was, of course, the first part of an adaptation of Liu Cixin’s wildly successful trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, the first book of which is called The Three-Body Problem. — published originally in Chinese in 2008 after being serialized just two years earlier. Some of you may remember that I interviewed Ken Liu, a sci-fi author himself, and a very good one, and translator of the first and third volumes of Liu Cixin’s trilogy. That was way back in January 2017.

The story, which I liked, not without reservation, I liked it, though, it gained a pretty big reading audience around the world, really. And the first book actually won one of science fiction’s most prestigious awards — the Hugo. It was the first time a Chinese author, indeed, any Asian author, had won in the best novel category. Even so, popular knowledge of the story was bound to get a huge boost when Netflix put out their adaptation. The showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss are really best known for their adaptation of the hard bit and fantasy epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, which they titled Game of Thrones after the first book in George R. R. Martin’s still incomplete series. In adapting The Three-Body Problem, they made substantial changes to the story. The setting is completely shifted with the action no longer centering on Beijing, but on London, with the characters repackaged, and, in most cases, renamed, and the cast made much more diverse than the book, or the more faithful adaptation released by Tencent in Chinese. Major story elements were added while others were removed. 

So, today on Sinica, we’re going to talk about that adaptation, the Netflix adaptation, which is the subject of quite a bit of debate, not only in China, but in America and in other Western viewing publics, at least among those who pay attention to China and among those who’ve read the books, whether in Chinese or in English translation. It goes far beyond the usual arguments in the wake of an adaptation of a beloved book. We’re used to hearing grumbling over “woke” casting or deviations from the book’s story. People are still angry at Peter Jackson for omitting Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings, which I think was a really smart thing to do. But with 3-Body Problem, we’re talking about big issues of national representation, fundamental changes to the sort of allegorical intention of the author, maybe assuming there was one, and the problem of Chinese soft power.

Did the Netflix adaptation turn the dark and grand universe of Liu Cixin’s imagining into “a cheesy murder mystery with a crew of beautiful but brilliant heroes, perhaps a live action spacey Scooby-Doo,” as one of my guests today contends? Did it invert the narrative with a switcheroo whereby the aliens, which represented arguably the United States, now represent China, as my other guest suggests? To puzzle through all of this and much more, I am delighted to welcome Cindy Yu, known, I am sure, to most of you as the brilliant host of the Spectator’s Chinese Whispers Podcast, which so many of this show’s guests, I have to say, have told me that it’s their other favorite China-focused podcast.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Cindy a couple of years ago in London, where she lives and have been meaning to get her on the show forever. I actually had the pleasure of being on her show to talk about rock and roll in China. That was a ton of fun, I got lots of compliments on that. When she published an op-ed that was titled “The Problem with Netflix’s 3-Body Problem,” I just knew I had to reach out, the time had come. Cindy, welcome, at long last, to Sinica.

Cindy Yu : Thank you so much, Kaiser. Massive fan of the show.

Kaiser: So wonderful to have you. Just after reaching out to you, Cindy, I saw another really interesting piece dealing with some of the same issues, but from a very different angle. This one was in the LA Review of Books and was titled, “The Red Shredding: On Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.” And so I pinged the author, it was great, great piece, Christopher T. Fan, who teaches English, Asian American Studies, and East Asian studies at UC Irvine, and is a co-founder of Hyphen Magazine. He has a new volume coming out, Asian American Fiction After 1965, that is with no hyphen, ironically, which I look forward to seeing. To my delight, Chris said he could join us. Well, Chris Fan, welcome to Sinica.

Chris Fan: Thanks, Kaiser. Longtime listener. I’m really excited to be on the show.

Kaiser: Wonderful to have you. Wonderful to have you. Let me say at the top that this is going to contain, obviously, it’s going to contain some unavoidable spoilers. So if you haven’t either read the first book of the series, seen the first season of the Netflix adaptation, or at least seen the Tencent version, maybe you ought to wait on listening to this until you’ve done at least one of the above. 

I should also warn my guests and my listeners that I actually enjoyed the Netflix version, not more than the book or the Tencent version, but then again, I am the world’s worst TV or film critic because my brain immediately just shuts down any critical faculties that it may have once possessed. That is debatable. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what is in the theater, as soon as my ass is in the seat and the opening title sequence begins, I just like, suspend disbelief and just roll with it and have fun. It’s good for my mental health, probably. 

But anyway, so before anyone starts “shredding,” as it were, the Netflix series, I want to ask you both, weren’t you at least kind of glad that a major piece of Chinese IP made the big time? I mean, let me start with you, Cindy, you of the Scooby-Doo reference, which is just beautiful, don’t you count this as a win for that long-elusive Chinese soft power, you know? Or did this just set you up for bigger disappointment because…

Cindy: Yeah, Kaiser, if I was a glass half-full kind of girl, yes, I would be like, great. And I was like that. I was really looking forward to it. I had my reservations about Benioff and Weiss because I was a massive Game of Thrones fan, and they did me dirty there as well. But I think it did eventually just set me up for greater disappointment because it wasn’t Chinese. And to use a kind of jargon word at the beginning, it felt appropriative. It felt like, here was this amazing Chinese story written by a Chinese author. And when we talk about soft power, I think, because I want to digress that from the political angle of it, I don’t mean a Chinese government soft power, it’s a cultural thing, right? It’s cool that Westerners are seeing that Chinese writers can be just as creative and pushing out of the box as Westerners are, but they made it not Chinese, except for some very cosmetic flicks, which we can talk about. So that was a disappointment because I felt like they’ve taken this core story and they’ve set it somewhere else.

Kaiser: I think you’ve coined a new word now, “chowmein-ification.” I think that’s going to hit… it’s going to be everywhere now. Chowmein-ification. Was it the noun for it, or did you say it was “chowmein-ified?” I can’t remember what you used, but I thought it was-

Cindy: Yeah, and I think the point there is just basically, like takeaway, Chinese takeaway food in the West, it’s a pale imitation of what you would get inside China when people think. And that’s how I felt watching this show, I was like, this is not what I understand to have been a point of the story.

Kaiser: Yeah. Well, we’ll come back to whether Western audiences would like the original with the full flavor. But let me ask Chris first, because I know part of me at least was really happy to see, like Cindy said, the imaginative power of this Chinese writer shown to the rest of the world, at least that was there, right? I mean, he still gets credit. Everyone knows it was originally a Chinese story. So even if it is “chowmein-ified,” isn’t there something there to appeal to your inner nativist?

Chris: Let me just say that I really enjoy chowmein. I’m a big Panda Express fan. Panda Express is the chowmein-ified Chinese food chain here in the United States. But actually, for me, I’m wondering to what extent the audience of the Netflix adaptation actually received it as a Chinese IP, as a Chinese cultural product, as opposed to just another big budget Netflix show. The show has been so divisive. A lot of the response to my review has been, this just reconfirms my desire not to see the show in the first place. So, there’s that range of responses, and there’s also a range of responses that just really enjoyed the show, like you did, Kaiser. And so I’ve kind of, if you can bear with me for a moment, I’ve kind of sorted out the responses that I’ve heard into four categories.

So, I kind of imagine this kind of four-square box. So one axis is like, “This is a Chinese show, this is a Chinese IP, and this is not a Chinese show and it’s just another show.” And the other axis is “This show is good and this show is bad,” right? And so for those who see the show as a Chinese IP and think it’s good, they usually credit the Chinese scenes, right? The Cultural Revolution scene. So, Kaiser, in your recent article, you give them a lot of credit for adapting those scenes with historical accuracy. Nan Z. Da in a review for Vulture recently did praise the show similarly for its historical accuracy. And so that’s like one category of responses. And then those who do not see it necessarily as a Chinese show, and they just see it as a show, and they think it’s good, they just think it’s entertaining, right?

Kaiser: Okay.

Chris: And then for those who see the show as a Chinese IP, but also think it’s bad, right? I think Cindy, you probably fall into this category, so you see it as a missed opportunity for Chinese soft power, it’s a failed adaptation in a lot of ways, and so Liu Cixin’s voice doesn’t come through as clearly. And then those who do not see the show necessarily as a Chinese IP, they see it as just a show, and they also think it’s bad, they blame the showrunners for doing them dirty the same way they did everybody dirty with the last season of Game of Thrones. And they often also say that it’s confusing or that it drags or that there are these other kind of faults with the show. So that’s how I kind of have divided up the responses. And I think the overarching question is, for me, do Netflix’s audiences actually see this as a piece of Chinese culture that they’re consuming?

Kaiser: Chris, would you say that in your two by two matrix that you see a lot of the respondents clustering in any one or two of the quadrants? I mean, I can’t imagine that many people saying “It’s not Chinese,” or ”I didn’t recognize it as Chinese,” and it was nevertheless really entertaining and good. I gotta think that it’s got to be the Cindy box, which is that it is Chinese and it was crap, or the other box, which is that it is… I don’t know. I mean, I guess there are probably people who just don’t recognize the Chinese-

Cindy: We need a graph for this. We need a pictorial representation.

Kaiser: It’s not working well on a podcast.

Chris: I know, I know. I should share my screen with you. 

Kaiser: I’ll do that on the podcast because I’m going to open up another dimension, unfold another dimension of visual dimension.

Chris: There you go. There you go. Nice Sophon reference there.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Chris: I mean, the responses that I’ve seen have really ranged across, just like anecdotally people, my colleagues and friends, that it ranges all over the place. I know a lot of folks just really enjoyed watching the show and took it on its own terms. But yeah, a lot of the very passionate responses have fallen into the Cindy box, right? It is Chinese and it’s also bad.

Kaiser: Yeah. Cindy, one of the interesting things that you say is that you said that it was a flop. I actually couldn’t find much about how well it’s done compared to other comparably budgeted shows on streaming sites. But how badly did it perform? Are we talking about cancellation levels of awful, or?

Cindy: Well, in my initial draft, which got edited down, I did include a statistic. So, basically when I wrote this, it had, the first week viewing data had just come out, and it said it had 11 million views in the first week.

Kaiser: Ooh, that’s bad.

Cindy: Which for the most expensive first season that Netflix has ever commissioned is not great. And by comparison, Squid Game got, I think, something like 142 million views in its first month. So, it’s a different time period, but still first month. So, it’s not on the same scale. And there were questions raised about whether or not it should be renewed, basically. I think viewers basically react, some viewers like me who are book readers reacted to the fact that it wasn’t faithful, it wasn’t Chinese enough. 

But I think even other people who haven’t necessarily read the book, don’t care about the Chinese part so much, just reacted because it was sometimes just bad, cheesy writing. There were just moments when I had my head in my hands thinking, “God, no one talks like that.” The dialogue was just sometimes so rubbish. I think viewers reacted to that.

Kaiser: We’ll get into some of that. I mean, especially about the sort of characters. I actually solicited a lot of sort of feedback just from Twitter, asked people to DM me. And I got some really interesting remarks I’ll share with you in a bit. 

But let’s assume, Cindy, that it did flop, as you say, it sounds like it did. In your op-ed, you attribute its failure to the many, many compromises that it made through its departures from the original. So, would a faithful adaptation have done better, let’s say, at the very least, one set mainly in China? Would that have done better?

Cindy: I’m not sure. Well, there was a much more faithful adaptation, as you know, Kaiser, last year from Tencent, which is many, many more episodes, much, much slower pace, but pretty much followed the twists and turns of the book. And it also was much lower-budget. I think it was only about $10 million for the whole season, which is so many multitudes cheaper than the Netflix version. I think that really does come through, actually, that it was lower-budget. I watched it with some English friends who struggled with the English subtitling, that the translation wasn’t very good. But for me as a Chinese listener, I thought it was great. 

I think basically it loses some of the original grittiness with the way that the Netflix adaptation has done it. As I said, in that extract that you read out, Kaiser, it was more about the friendship and the trials and tribulations of these five beautiful friends than about bloody aliens invading. And where it was about aliens invading, it was more kind of crowd-pleasing gore or plot twists rather than anything more cerebral than that. So I think that was disappointing. And again, I just go back to Benioff and Weiss who just don’t seem to be able to write good original scripting. I mean, we saw that in Game of Thrones as well. So, it’s just cringe at some point.

Kaiser: Every time they kind of go off script and freelance, that it’s when it gets bad.

Cindy: Yeah. Please don’t freelance. Just stick to the book, guys.

Kaiser: Chris, what about you? Do you think that it would’ve been jarring at all for Western audiences to see? I mean, look, it could be argued, I think, that by doing what they’ve done to it, they’ve at least spared Western audiences a view of China that, honestly, a lot of people would’ve found pretty revolting. There is a ton of cringey misogyny, for example, in the original books. That whole bit where Luo Ji and his whole wall starer phase-

Cindy: Oh my God, the wife!

Kaiser: Yeah, he orders up that perfect woman and all. I almost couldn’t keep reading, it was just so hard.

Cindy: I forgot about that.

Kaiser: Yeah. So, how would that have connected with Western viewers? I mean, I feel like, didn’t Benioff and Weiss spare Western viewers a truly horrifying view of China in that time? I don’t know.

Chris: Well, so that happens in the second book, in The Dark Forest. I knew that they were collapsing some of the novels into this, into these eight episodes, so I was kind of on the edge of my seat wondering how they would handle that cringiness, because I did my due diligence, and before-

Kaiser: They’ll leave it out. They’ll leave it out.

Chris: They’ll definitely leave it out. But I think they’re kind of setting it up with Isaac Gonzalez’s character, Auggie Salazar, and Saul, who is supposed to be the Luo Ji kind of character. So, we’ll see how they handle some aspects of that plot. But yeah, I reread The Dark Forest recently in preparation for writing my article, and I was just really reminded about why I block those scenes from my memory because they are so cringe. But I think the question that you asked Cindy is a really interesting one, whether or not the Netflix adaptation would’ve been more successful had it been more loyal to the books, right? So, the Tencent version, I watched all 30 episodes, it is like 90% loyal, almost directly drawing dialogue from the novels themselves.

Kaiser: Though it does leave out the Cultural Revolution scene. 

Chris: Yeah, the Tencent?

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: The Tencent version? Right.

Kaiser: The struggle session scene.

Chris: Yeah, the struggle session. That is definitely true. So, some key scenes left out, but for the most part, it’s quite loyal. One of the features of the novels that I think a lot of fans of the novels really found missing from the Netflix adaptation, which are the info dumps about the sort of, the inventive engineering solutions to various problems, the theoretical physics, all of that stuff, right? So, all of that stuff was taken out in the Netflix adaptation, but I’m not sure that a completely loyal adaptation would’ve increased those numbers. I think it would’ve pleased a lot of fans, it would’ve done a lot of fan service. But I don’t know if that would’ve increased viewership as much.

Kaiser: Yeah. Do you delight the core, give them plenty of nerd-gasms with all that physics or do you…? Yeah, what do you do? What do you do? It’s tough. I got to say, I mean, I kind of feel sorry for them taking on something like this. Cindy, you talked about the sort of focus on the human connection. One guy, a guy named Peter Lee, a very funny piece that he wrote compared the casting to Friends, though just in terms of burn level, I like your Scooby-Doo comparison for the Oxford Five.

Chris: That was a sick burn. 

Kaiser: That was a sick burn, yeah.

Cindy: I mean, people like Scooby-Doo. Scooby-Doo’s great. It’s fun. It’s just not the 3-Body Problem.

Chris: I love Scooby-Doo.

Kaiser: Yeah, my dog actually can say “I love you” like in Scooby-Doo… It’s pretty funny.

Chris: In that analogy, Jack’s Snacks would’ve been the Scooby Snacks.

Kaiser: Exactly. Right. Jack’s Snacks. Exactly right. Well, I mean, I actually thought that after because I read Cindy’s and then I finished watching the thing, so I’d only gotten to episode three, and that occurred to me, there’s like Scooby Snacks in this. I mean, this is… 

Anyway, Cindy, so do you think that it was an inevitable compromise that Netflix was going to do this? Because one thing that is absolutely lacking, in Liu Cixin’s, is any kind of human…  There’s a coldness to the thing, right? I mean, I feel like… There’s also a bunch of people who’ve argued and who’ve pushed back, I’ve seen in comments to a lot of critical pieces, that Benioff and Weiss, when they licensed the IP, they had some kind of an agreement in place where they were obliged, first of all, to shoot very little of it actually in China. And secondly, to keep the Chinese language parts below a certain threshold.

That Liu himself wanted a more diverse cast, at least in terms of gender. Have either of you heard anything like that? I wasn’t able to hunt it down with any kind of certitude but, I mean, obviously I wasn’t going to see the contract or anything, but do you think Netflix would’ve even picked it up if Liu Cixin hadn’t consented to the kind of deformations that both of you disapprove of?

Cindy: I’ve also heard that, Kaiser, in a reaction to my piece, but I haven’t managed to find the primary sources…

Kaiser: Yeah, neither have I, yeah.

Cindy: … for those claims, yeah. Also, I think a show that takes large part in a virtual reality game and sometimes in outer space can probably make a fake China?

Kaiser: Yeah, that’s absolutely true.

Chris: Exactly. The magic of movies, I mean, and CGI.

Cindy: Probably not beyond the wit of man. I think that the stipulation, even if it was true that they could only film certain parts of it in China, that’s not a reason to adapt the storyline and the characters themselves.

Kaiser: Good point. Good point.

Cindy: I’m okay with an international adaptation in terms of storyline characters if it wasn’t done so clumsily, if it was done in a more intelligent and original way, which it wasn’t. And I think when it comes to Liu, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Because I feel like I’m coming across as one of those butthurt fans who are always going on about one of these adaptations, like, not being faithful enough, because, at the end of the day, I didn’t create this thing. Liu created this thing, it’s his brainchild, it’s his success story. He can do with it whatever he wants to, and we live in a free market, man. So if he agrees to it, then that’s fine. 

But I do feel like when something goes beyond that kind of stratospheric level of success, fans and other people start to feel like they have a stake in it. That we feel like we can start commentating on it. That’s not for me to tell Liu what to do, but I also feel like I would’ve preferred it if it was the book that I loved, rather than this weird kind of chimera act that’s come out of it instead. And so, yeah. And also, when we look at kind of full language, full foreign language shows, look at Squid Game — Netflix audiences don’t mind that, what Bong Joon-ho called “one inch barrier” of the subtitling.”

Kaiser: Exactly.

Cindy: We’re more mature than that now. People are more international than that now. Squid Game is so popular, let alone the millions of other Korean dramas that are now on Netflix, who I know the most English of English viewers love that. They don’t mind the foreignness of it. So I think it wouldn’t have been a barrier if it was done in just like a bold, brave way.

Kaiser: Yeah. So I think that maybe part of the problem wasn’t the Chineseness of it then, it was the Liu Cixin-ness of it that just, I mean, it’s so male gaze-y, and it’s so… I mean, and there’s complicated and possibly toxic politics. And we’ll talk about that kind of toxic fandom of that in just a little bit. 

But while we’re on the subject of this sort of layering on of emotional depth to characters, Chris, you argued that the complexity that they added to Jin Cheng, who stands in for Wang Miao, sort of, and Cheng Xin from the third book, who we haven’t met yet, but at least they kept her surname. We’ll get to her, but this is an improvement. You suggest that it may have been done for the reasons of offsetting the, we call it the implicit anti-China stance, again, which we’ll get to in a minute. Was there a need to humanize these characters?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think one kind of general question that could be raised is like, to what extent do we want like a 100% loyal adaptation of Liu Cixin’s books, along with the cringey misogyny and the really suspect politics and towing of the CCP Party line in some instances? One of the sort of frequently critiqued aspects of Liu Cixin’s writing is that his characters are quite flat, right? And so that seemed to be a major focus of the showrunners’ adaptation that they would flesh out these characters and make them sexy Scooby-Doo ensemble or something like that, but to give them a little bit more oomph.

I think the actors do a really great job. I was really impressed with Jess Hong’s performance. I thought Benedict Wong did a great… One of the sort of most well-rounded characters that Liu Cixin comes up with himself in the novels is Da Shi, the kind of detective character that Benedict Wong plays an adaptation of in the character of Clarence Shi. So, of course, repatriated, he’s now British as opposed to…

Kaiser: I’m from Manchester, mate.

Chris: That’s right. That he’s s Mancunian. Yeah.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Cindy: Well, I have to say I disagree, Chris. I mean, I felt like Auggie Salazar had only two facial expressions, which was either sad or scared. Saul, at one point, basically says to these two random women at a bar, who we never see again, by the way, just random characters for plot device, “Shall we go do some acid?” And I was like, no one talks like that!

Kaiser: It’s pretty funny. I mean, it reminds me, so I have this great quote here. There’s this literary translator, this guy named Angus Stewart, who is actually the host of Translated Chinese Fiction, it’s a podcast, it’s actually now on hiatus. But he sent me some very, very funny quotes from a piece that he’s working on, which I look forward to reading. He talks about the Oxford Five and says, “Western social norms dominate our characters’ unshy attitudes towards sex, recreational drugs,” the acid you just referenced, “antidepressants, and dark humor are used to mark them as relatable, not criminal.”

It goes on to say, “The neoliberal ideology of the Anglosphere is alive and well in this adaptation. All five characters are childless and generally unattached from family concerns, which makes for a striking contrast with Wang Miao — the Tencent adaptation never lets you forget that he has a family to consider. The Oxford Five are individual, rational agents whose lives are entirely intellectual and economical. They are laid back, science-loving, cool-ironic global citizens imbued with liberal values and free from any dangerous, radical, or traditional dogmas. Auggie Salazar briefly falls into alcoholism, but it’s just a lifestyle choice. Her health doesn’t suffer, and her hair still looks great.”

That’s pretty brilliant. I am really curious to-

Chris: There is a resemblance to Velma, I think.

Kaiser: Okay. Yeah, Velma.

Cindy: Oh, Velma.

Kaiser: Which is Daphne’s… Wait, which one is like, “My glasses! I can’t see a thing without my glasses?”

Chris: Isn’t that Velma?

Cindy: That’s Velma.

Kaiser: That’s Velma. Anyway, I take it you guys kind of embrace that.

Chris: Yeah, I think so. I mean, there’s also, as I argue in my article, I think the neoliberal-ification, the sort of individualization, I would say the kind of Americanization of the adaptation was sort of necessary because it was brought over to Netflix. So I don’t know what sort of contractual arrangements they had with the Three-Body universe IP. The show went back up to the number one slot. I don’t know if the viewing numbers have actually really had a huge bump between the 21st and now. But it’s back at the number one slot. And I can’t help but wondering if that has to do with the breaking story of the crazy murder mystery that’s been happening.

Kaiser: Oh, right.

Chris: Right?

Kaiser: But that’s so old. I mean, it’s weird. It happened a couple of years-

Chris: It is. What’s new is that I think he was sentenced recently, is that what happened? So that’s what makes it a sort of recent news story. But that story has been making the rounds about the poisoning of the, Lin Qi, I think, is the name of the executive who held the rights to the Three-Body universe and was trying to sort of build it into the Star Wars-level franchise. So yeah, I don’t know to what extent they had that kind of arrangement, but yeah, that seemed like an important factor.

Kaiser: The criticism that I hear most often from people, and this is one that’s going to be incredibly familiar to you both, is from people who are either Chinese or are concerned with how China comes off in the Netflix adaptation. This one is from Sergio Xu , who DM’d me on Twitter to say, “As a Chinese viewer, it’s disconcerting to see the original narrative, where tragedies caused by China are averted through collective effort and ingenuity by later generations of Chinese, changed to a narrative where problems caused by China are solved by the British.” I get that.

Here’s another one. This one maybe spells it out in a little more detail. There’s several versions of this, but this one, I thought, was really good. This guy asked to be anonymous. So basically, he says, “I think the big issue is that the original San-Ti is sort of like a redemption arc for the Chinese people. That’s why the Cultural Revolution parts are so important, and also why the conflict resolution hinges so heavily on Chinese characters. It’s a statement that China has grown and developed past those dark times, that Ye Wenjie’s misanthropy is a mistaken one. It’s mistaken. I’m also aware that the Dark Forest analogies themselves wear at this explanation.” I think that’s very, very true. “But the entire thesis of the trilogy seems to be people trying as best they can to overcome that nature, to figure out some way of coexistence, even if it’s an uneasy one at gunpoint. But I think this complexity and ambiguity also serves to highlight the statement rather than as a cold rebuttal to it. If you change the main characters to an international cast while leaving the Cultural Revolution as the instigator, you’ll lose that redemption arc. It’s not China growing past its old mistakes. It’s just China doing a bad thing, and then the West saves the day again. And I think that’s the critical missing point of the adaptation.” So these lines of criticism, do they resonate with you two?

Cindy: Yeah, it definitely resonates with me. I don’t think the political messaging matters to me so much as the cultural redemption. It’s not that Chinese politics is better now than the Cultural Revolution. It’s more that Chinese culture, Chinese society has managed to pull itself out of those dire times in the late 1960s, right? And I do think that’s a missed opportunity because it could have been a chance to show the world in the way that Korean dramas show the world, to normalize Chinese people, to make them complicated, but also to make them seem relatable. It could have been a way to demonstrate how much change has happened in China between the 1960s and now if the modern day plot was set in China. And I think that’s a missed opportunity. 

So, it’s not so much that I’m feeling nationalistic about it, that China needs to have a better story told about it because the politics is so much improved. But China’s society, China’s living standards have improved, and it would’ve been nice to have that represented and to see it. I guess I was also mainly just surprised that they’d done that at all. So the shock, which I’d only realized maybe in the 12 hours before the first episode came out, hasn’t quite worn off yet.

Kaiser: Yeah, no, I love that. That was great. What about you, Chris? What does that say to you?

Chris: Yeah. One of the important aspects of Liu Cixin’s novels is that China kind of saves the day, which is a kind of running theme through a lot of Liu Cixin’s fiction. And that being lost in the adaptation, yeah, I can totally see how that hits really hard and negatively with a lot of audiences. But it also makes me think about what we were talking about before, whether Liu gave his blessing for the choices that the adaptation made. So one thing I did read is that the showrunners did actively seek Liu’s blessing for some of the changes that they wanted to make, and one in particular being the “globalization,” that’s the term that they use, the globalization of the cast.

So, making it, sort of relocating it, and also repatriating and making this multicultural Scooby-Doo or Friends cast. It seems like Liu was totally on board. And so that kind of raises the question of, what’s going on here? What was Liu’s interest? And if he’s totally open to sort of reconfiguring it in these ways, then it seems as if his interest is more along the lines of expanding the franchise, right? Expanding the Three-Body universe IP around the world. And so he’s willing to sort of relinquish the kind of “China saves the day” narrative in favor of that. And I mean, that’s just my guess. I’m not exactly sure how he feels specifically about that, but that did seem to be the kind of implication in Netflix’s sort of PR pieces that they put out about this. 

Kaiser: Yeah. Have either of you been surprised? I don’t know whether you’re watching it at all, but have you been looking at Chinese responses to this? Have you been reading stuff on like Doubanr or on WeChat groups of yours, Chinese responses? Has anything just surprised you at all?

Chris: I’ll just say really quickly, so my colleague here at UCI, Jeff Wasserstrom, started circulating my article on Twitter, so it received the Jeff Wasserstrom bump. He and I have been emailing back and forth about the responses to this. And he shared with me a kind of summary of some of the Chinese responses. And they kind of range the four categories that I mentioned. Some of them are like-

Kaiser: Yeah, I was going to suggest that. Yeah.

Chris: Some of them are like, “Hey, just watch it and enjoy it. Forget about the nationalist implications, forget about the politics. Just enjoy it as a piece of escapism.”

Kaiser: The Kaiser box.

Chris: There you go. The Kaiser box. Yeah. Just willingly suspend your disbelief.

Kaiser: I don’t do it willingly, it just happens. Automatically.

Cindy: Kaiser, I want to ask, what kind of TV shows are you into normally? Because I just find, the reason I ask that is because I can’t suspend my disbelief when the dialogue is so bad. It just brings me out of the story.

Kaiser: Yeah, I know. I can get jarred by bad dialogue. I mean, I will stop watching. I’m exaggerating, of course, I’m caricaturing myself, but above a certain threshold of tolerable, I can keep the belief-

Cindy: What’s your most embarrassing favorite show?

Kaiser: Oh, gosh. No, no, no. Okay. All right. All right, I will tell you. I will tell you right now that because I was watching Shogun and I was really, really fascinated by the protagonist, this woman played by Anna Sawai, I decided to watch, on the recommendation of somebody near and dear to me, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV.

Cindy: Oh my God, I’ve actually seen that.

Kaiser: It’s not bad. It’s not terrible.

Chris: I’ve not heard about this.

Kaiser: It’s not terrible.

Cindy: I had to stop watching that as well.

Kaiser: Yeah, I know. But she’s great. I mean, I just think she’s fantastic, though. I don’t know. 

Cindy: Yes, yeah.

Kaiser: So that’s my most embarrassing thing. I can see why people will probably unfriend me now for having admitted this, but whatever. Have at, do your worst, I’m going to own it. But no, Shogun is something I’ve been really watching and very much enjoying, and also, yeah, being very frustrated at how, goddamnit, I mean, Hulu did this, and it’s mostly in Japanese, right? I mean, sure there’s English and it’s from Portuguese originally, but they’ve even decentered it off of just Blackthorne about the white savior thing. They’ve made it way less about him. He’s kind of an ancillary character now. The main storyline is really about this guy who stands in for Tokugawa Ieyasu, right? It’s a fascinating… I don’t know, I mean, plus the cinematography is just so amazing. I could watch it with the sound off and just like, think, “Oh man, that aquamarine, that blue, the palette they use is so gorgeous.” It’s great. Yeah.

Cindy: And Kaiser, that actually reminds me, because one of the reasons I was also so disappointed with the Netflix adaptation is that the Chinese parts were really, really good. I thought they were really, really good. The Cultural Revolution scene, obviously everyone’s been going on about that, but everything that happens to Ye Wenjie in the kind of flashback, parallel plot line, they clearly had some Chinese language consultants on there because the Mandarin was very, very authentic. Some chengyu, some idioms in there as well.

Kaiser: Yep. When she writes on the board, the characters are written correctly in the right stroke order and everything, it was just very nice.

Cindy: Yeah, absolutely. And then also the characters are so much more complicated. I totally take your point about Liu Cixin’s characters being flat generally, but I just thought the Red Guard, if listeners remember, the Red Guard who beat to death Ye Wenjie’s father, and then later on was totally unrepentant, even though her hand had basically been amputated because of the horrors of the Revolution, that kind of complexity of character was… It gives me goosebumps now to talk about it. Basically, I found it-

Kaiser: Yeah, we’ve all met that spiteful bitch, right?

Cindy: Yeah, exactly. I think what was sad, because I really, really enjoyed half of the show. And then it would be flash forward to modern day, I’m like, “Oh my God, not this again.”

Kaiser: Okay. I know I’ve been dreading this, but we have to do this. Let’s talk about some of the different allegorical interpretations out there. Probably the most common one focuses on the “dark forest” theory, which, I guess this is a big spoiler because we haven’t really gotten to that yet, but it represents IR realism, right? But all sorts of stuff from IR theory comes up too, the second book, The Dark Forest is there, obviously, there’s deterrents, there’s mutually assured destruction. What is it called, the Sword-something or other? Luo Ji implements this thing that basically says that if the Trisolarans, the San-Ti, attack Earth, we’re going to broadcast to the universe the location of the Trisolarans, right?

I’m going to throw this out there and see what you guys think. I actually thought that the main thing was internationalism, right? The optimistic hope that in the face of this existential threat, humanity can get its act together. We can transcend nationalism as they really kind of do in the first and second books, right? And then the other, okay, so there’s that, but the other one that I looked at was, I read this sort of 400-year-off invasion as a metaphor for global warming. I was sure of that as I read the whole first book, and I thought that it was a little too on the nose that she reads Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, right? Aha. That’s making it a little too obvious, but I feel like nobody out there that I’ve ever talked to is like, “Yeah, it’s a metaphor for global warming.” I’m still pretty convinced that was what was in Liu Cixin’s head. I don’t know what you guys think of those ideas.

Chris: Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, I’m also not sure what was in Liu Cixin’s head, whether he had these allegorical intentions or not, but his readers certainly read allegory into it and initially saw the San-Ti, or sorry, the Trisolarans as Ken Liu’s translation of San-Ti, saw the San-Ti as a figure for the United States, this impossibly advanced civilization that is going to come and invade or totally transform Earth/China. And so the thing with the Netflix adaptation is, that gets flipped around. And so part of what I see as the rounding out, or three dimensionalization of the Chinese characters, especially those Chinese scenes in the Netflix adaptation, is kind of an attempt at softening the sharp edges, of reversing that allegory and making the San-Ti into China and Earth into this multicultural figure for America, I mean, basically, or a kind of liberal multiculturalism. I see that going on, too. 

As for the kind of allegory for climate change, there is also, I think, and this really comes through in the Netflix adaptation as well, but what runs through Liu Cixin’s novels is all these fantasies about authoritarianism and what… just sort of cutting out all of the red tape and cutting out regulation. The power that we have, if we can just do that, come together as one world under one aegis. In the Netflix adaptation, it’s Liam Cunningham’s character, Thomas Wade, who is the person who’s calling all the shots and just making sure everything happens on a very quick and efficient timescale. So, there’s this kind of… So my colleague here in the UC system, Julie Sze, has this idea that she calls eco-authoritarian fantasies of solving climate change, that if only we can submit willingly, willingly suspend our liberal commitment to freedom and deliberation. If we can only willingly submit to authoritarianism, then perhaps we can solve this climate problem instantly, as opposed to waiting for 400 years to cook.

Kaiser: This is a big live debate within the environmental community, the China-focused environmental community, the whole debate over eco-authoritarianism. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I totally see it. It’s like the ultimate triumph globally of technocracy, right? Yeah. Totally. Totally. What about you, Cindy? What allegories do you favor?

Cindy: Yeah, I actually, I feel like what you were saying, Kaiser, about watching shows, I felt like that reading the books, I didn’t really get any allegories from it. I was just enjoying the science parts of it, the idea that you can change dimensions or the idea that you might have a three sun world and what that would do, a really cool idea of rehydration as a kind of biological way of survival. 

Kaiser: They did that really well, right?

Cindy: Yeah. God, that was great. Yeah.

Kaiser: That was really amazing.

Cindy: They put on a good spectacle, you have to say. But I think the other thing that really spoke to me was basically the political parts of things, the kind of human nature, the psychology of survival, basically. The “dark forest” idea really, really spoke to me in terms of a fascinating interpretation of A, the family paradox, but also B, of politics in general. International relations in general. Can you really coexist with an enemy when you basically can’t see the world from their perspective? And then I think in the books, there was another, a third alien species whose job was basically to wipe everyone out. And that kind of notion was just so fascinating. So I think, yeah, I have to say I miss the allegories.

Kaiser: Yeah. It’s great how that species just does it with this sort of clinical bureaucratic kind of, this completely dispassionate, well, there-

Cindy: Just another day at the office.

Kaiser: Exactly. Collapse these guys into zero dimensions. There’s just all sorts of allegorical potential just packed into this book. And some of it’s pretty obvious, but I got to push back against these, the Liu Cixin sort of Industrial Party fanboys. We’ve talked about, well, I don’t think we’ve mentioned her yet, but Chenchen Zhang wrote this really, really great piece that you referred to obviously, Chris, in yours. I actually have reached out to her before, I’ve wanted to interview her forever. She says she’s super busy right now and can’t, but missed an opportunity to do that with this because this would’ve been really great for her to talk about, but I do encourage everyone to read her piece. It’s in the Made in China Journal . And she talks about this 工业党 gōngyè dǎng, this Industrial Party. And you flicked at that earlier when you were talking about this idea that America is this, you know, super technologically advanced nation, but let’s get the timetables right.

This wasn’t what was on their minds in 2006 to 2008 when the serial came out and then when the book came out. That wasn’t the thing, that couldn’t have been the allegory that came to mind. Now, after the Biden administration has cut them off from advanced semiconductors, it’s a very, very powerful allegory. Actually, I am not in the habit of quoting Niall Ferguson. In fact, when I have in the past, it’s almost always with very strong disapproval of what he has to say. But I was at Davos, this is two years ago, as a writer, I’m not somebody who gets to go there as… I’m a hired gun. I just go there and I write stuff for them. But Niall Ferguson was on a panel with Adam Tooze and a couple other people. He actually said something pretty smart and didn’t even have to explain. He just said, very dryly, what the U.S. is trying to do to China right now with advanced semiconductor export restrictions is what the Trisolarans were trying to do to Earth. That. He just said that.

Chris: So he actually said that.

Kaiser: He said that. He didn’t just say that, he said it without explaining it. Like everyone in the room had presumably read, knew who the Trisolarans are, what they’re trying to do. Yeah. I think he went on…

Cindy: He’s a big sci-fi fan. He’s written for The Spectator about his love for sci-fi quite a few times.

Kaiser: Ah, okay. I mean, that’s not far off from the Liu Cixin Industrial Party fanboys, right? Chris, I want to go back to this idea that they invert or reverse the central allegory. That’s what you say, that somehow the U.S. becomes China in the Netflix version. I can see why you would say that, but I didn’t pick up on too much for this allegorical inversion. Is China really “the bad guy” in this? I mean, is it just something that happened in China 50 years ago that set this chain of events off? I mean, China then afterward doesn’t figure in, but there are at least a lot of ethnic Chinese people trying to solve the problem afterward, right? I mean, and we don’t really know where they’re going to go after this.

Chris: I don’t want to sort of say that I can read the minds of the showrunners or know what happened in their discussions when planning this out, but it does seem like what they’re kind of channeling, and certainly, Chinese audiences have reacted to what they have seen as the negative portrayal of China, that the Netflix adaptation is sort of out to negatively portray China, not just in terms of the Cultural Revolution and that history, but just as a kind of ideological position. So, there’s that angle, but it also seems like what the showrunners are kind of tapping into is this emerging characterization of China as a technological threat, right? And not just as a copycat nation, but as a country that itself is innovating and perhaps outpacing the United States in a certain way.

And perhaps the reason that they’re doing that is because of the sort of authoritarianism. So, there’s this kind of grim admiration for the threat that China is now producing. So, I think that there is that level of reframing going on. Yeah, so I think that that is, in some ways, necessitated by how they have chosen to adapt the series as this ensemble cast that’s supposed to sort of stand in for definitely not China anymore, right? But something more liberal and internationalist and multicultural, which, I think, in the sort of framing that they’re using, is definitively not China. I feel like that element is definitely very clear.

Kaiser: That’s fair. That’s fair enough. Oh, let me ask kind of maybe a more fun question before we plunge into more of this sort of really grim stuff. But are there scenes from, okay, again, spoilers because we’re going to be talking about stuff that hasn’t yet been shown on Netflix, but are there scenes from The Dark Forest and Death’s End that you guys look forward to seeing adapted on the screen from these subsequent novels that we haven’t seen yet? Cindy, we hinted at some of this already, the dimensions and stuff. I mean, it seems like it’s going to be pretty damn challenging. So, even imagining it in my head while I was reading this stuff, it just… It also seemed like it’d be pretty damn cool. Yeah. What are you looking forward to, Cindy?

Cindy: Yeah. Well, oh, I don’t want to give your listeners too much of a spoiler, but-

Kaiser: They’ve been warned. They’ve been warned.

Cindy: The droplet.

Kaiser: Oh yeah.

Chris: The droplet. Yeah.

Kaiser: The droplet.

Chris: That’s what I was going to say.

Cindy: Because when I read that, I was like, “Oh my God. Nobody saw this coming.” And yeah, I think Benioff and Weiss do put on a great spectacle. They’re very visually driven so I think they could do a great job with that, especially if they do the lead-up to it properly, the human hubris part of things, which I think really kind of leads to how shocking a plot twist that was.

Kaiser: Have you seen that Chinese droplet animation? Have you guys seen this? Look it up sometime on YouTube, you’ll find it. There’s this, somebody did the droplet scene. I think it was in some sort of CGI animation kind of thing, but it was pretty darn cool. I mean, it was about like you would imagine. We won’t spoil it too much by saying exactly what the droplet was or what it did, but wow. Yeah, that’s one I’m totally looking forward to. What about you, Chris? Any scenes from the books?

Chris: Yeah, the same. And then also in Death’s End, in the third novel, the other-dimensional creatures and civilizations, that’s going to be really cool too. But also, I’m not sure. I just want to know how they do it, how they visualize that.

Kaiser: Half of Death’s End is taken up with them just sort of sleeping their way, Cheng Xin and her faithful sidekick, who is like the worst drawn character in the whole darn book. I mean, that was just embarrassing.

Cindy: He’s not good at women. He’s really not good at women.

Kaiser: No, no, he’s terrible.

Chris: Yeah. Very not good.

Kaiser: But when they sleep their way into these futures, and there’s like the four or five different scenarios, these worlds that they land in, I’m curious about how they do those. There’s the androgyny future and there’s the… Those could all be… the underground future. Oh, they should be all pretty, pretty interesting, yeah?

Chris: Yeah, the underground stuff, the underground cities in The Dark Forest, there’s a real danger that those are going to look really, really cheesy if they’re not done right. But this is one of those things that I really trust the showrunners for being able to do. I think they’re, as Cindy says, good with the visualization, good with the spectacle.

Cindy: You guys can tell me how it is because I don’t think I’m going to watch anymore.

Kaiser: Oh, we got you, we got you, just so you can write another piece.

Cindy: No, seriously. Life is too short, man.

Kaiser: Okay. Okay. So, Chris, you might not agree with me, but I thought Chenchen Zhang had this really important point in her Made in China Journal piece about the whole Gongyedang, where she talked, I’m going to quote from her here, “The potentially dangerous dualism of humanity/morality/democracy/destruction,” that’s hard to take in, but I’ll do it again. “Humanity/morality/democracy/destruction versus animality/reason/autocracy/survival.” In other words, this kind of dualism between this first cluster, which is sort of a liberalism that leads to destruction, ultimately humanity is morally grounded, that is democratic and ultimately fails. And in Liu Cixin’s weird kind of Social Darwinian world, this animality, this sort of cold, clinical reason, autocracy, authoritarianism, and then ultimately survival, that is what the plot rests on. That’s what the character development rests on. That’s according to Chenchen. The more strident Gongyedang partisans, these techno-nationalists, they hate the character Cheng Xin precisely because she does end up embodying the kind of humanity version of it, right? Leading to…

Chris: Right.

Kaiser: As we know. That I thought was so fascinating. That’s, to me, the core kind of politics in this. And we’ve touched on that already. What did you think of that idea?

Chris: Well, I think that that’s right that that binary is running through the story. As I think I say in my article, like the one version of this binary phrased as a question is, human survival but at what cost? Right? So, that’s sort of the persistent philosophical question that is constantly returned to in the novels. But I think this goes back to what we were talking about before about the eco-authoritarianism and the fantasies about it and the envy over it. Just like, how can we survive as a species without some degree of authoritarianism? How can we, but also, at the same time, like, isn’t it impressive?

There’s a kind of that grim admiration that I was talking about before. Look at the wonders that authoritarianism can produce. So, I think it taps back into that as well. And just one of Chenchen’s important points, I think, also is that part of the reason that the Gongyedang hated Cheng Xin has to do with the fact that it’s a ”she” as well. Her openness to that side of the binary, the deliberation, the liberalism or whatever, is her feminine failing.

Kaiser: Maybe if Liu Cixin had been able to write women a little better, there wouldn’t be a strong streak of misogyny. God.

Cindy: How is his own love life? Who are the women in his life? 

Chris: Yeah. But according to the lore, the novels would not have been as popular without being as attractive to the Gongyedang or this kind of techno-nationalist crowd that apparently had a lot to do with…

Cindy: That’s so interesting.

Chris: … increasing its popularity. And it’s interesting because it’s sort of high level or like high-profile fans in the West are like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg who put the novels on…

Kaiser: They’re hardly incels.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. And interesting fact, I saw this headline the other day that the showrunners invited Barack Obama to make a cameo in the Netflix adaptation, but he turned them down.

Kaiser: Oh, man.

Cindy: Man.

Kaiser: I’m bummed. Any glimpse of that guy-

Chris: That might’ve been a shark-jumping event, though. 

Kaiser: Yeah. No, it would’ve been. That would’ve been all anyone talked about, and it would’ve been completely…

Chris: Yeah, exactly.

Cindy: He should have been Mike Evans.

Kaiser: It’s like, what’s it, when like when Ed Sheeran showed up in Game of Thrones, right?

Chris: Yeah. As that bard. Yeah.

Kaiser: Hey, so…

Chris: Delightful moment.

Kaiser: Cindy, first of all, your reaction to that; that whole sort of binary. I know, it’s…

Cindy: Oh, sorry. I thought you meant the Ed Sheeran in Game of Thrones.

Kaiser: That too. Either. One of the two. Go for it.

Cindy: I’m still so sore that they ruined Game of Thrones. I think I am biased as listeners may have figured out. Yeah, it’s so interesting about the binary. I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but yeah, it makes total sense. And I personally really hated the Chen Xin character too because I just thought she was a classic case of someone who couldn’t make a hard decision. But actually, her decision made things much, much worse by her metrics in a sense of like the death toll it would cause. It was, from a utilitarian perspective, I just thought she was weak and boring. But I don’t think I’m a techno-nationalist. 

And actually, when it comes to the Trisolaran themselves, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, I think they have quite an absolutist political system too, right? And then obviously, their scientific development, their survival as a species in very challenging times is probably made possible by that kind of rigidity. So yeah, I hadn’t quite thought about that binary before, but it’s super interesting to see the story in that lens.

Kaiser: I’ve just been made a softie by my life in the West, and I had a lot of empathy for her. I mean, I think it’s just, there’s this beautiful human tragedy that, is life even worth having if we live it without humanity and dignity and love?

Cindy: Yes.

Kaiser: Man, I love you, Cindy. That’s great. That’s fantastic. But the other question is, from the point of view of Chinese soft power, would it have been better for this not to have been put out at all? I mean, I still come back to this is not a loss, this is a win. I still think, I think, it’s ultimately a win that it, at least it shows that there is a piece of Chinese that… because we’re so used to this sort of Asiatic stereotype — incapable of creativity, that one I hate. I mean, just, at least there’s a piece of Chinese IP that is now being recognized in the world. I don’t know.

Chris: Yeah. I think that’s definitely true. I guess the point I raised earlier, which is I don’t know how much people, Western audiences or Netflix’s audiences, are generalizing this to Chinese soft power, Chinese culture, Chinese creativity as opposed to just either narrowly seeing it as just another science fiction show, or just narrowly seeing it as the singular production of this person, Liu Cixin, who’s now like the world’s most famous science fiction writer. I don’t know if they’re extrapolating that to be a win or I don’t know if it’s making them curious or more open to other products of Chinese soft power.

Kaiser: All right. Cindy, what do you think? Is it- 

Cindy: Well, I was just going to say that I think you are right, Kaiser in that it does raise awareness of Chinese history as well. The reaction to the Cultural Revolution scene, as well as the various other flashbacks. And I know Kaiser, you’ve got opinions on this as well. But I have so many friends coming up to me and going, “Oh my God, is that what it was like?” Which to us seems so stupid. And I’m like, “Do you not listen to my podcast?” But also, it’s like, it is good to kind of do that in a stylistic, westernized way and raise awareness of China’s recent trauma. And so I do accept that.

Kaiser: Except for the fonts on the character, I’m a big fan of this. I don’t know how they could miss that detail. They were just so jarringly anachronistic. I mean, it was… Every little detail was right except for that. Goddamnit. Okay. All right. Let me thank you both first before we move on to recommendations. What a fun and really enjoyable conversation with you both. 

Let’s move on to recommendations. Just a quick shout out to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for helping me make this possible this year. All right. Let’s go on to recommendations. Cindy, let’s start with you. What do you have for us?

Cindy: Yeah, so I am reading a book at the moment, which I’m really loving. I’m about a third of the way through. It’s quite a big one. It’s called The Overstory by Richard Powers.

Kaiser: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Cindy: Right? And I think that kind of relates to our points about climate change and eco-authoritarianism because this whole book is a love poem, a love letter to trees. There is a series of different vignettes where various types of trees take the center stage in a story about humans and their relationship to the natural world. When I was first picking it up, I didn’t think I’d love it so much, but it’s so poetically written that, God, yeah, I’m a tree hugger now too.

Kaiser: Good. Good for you. I love Richard Powers, and I’m one of these people, I discovered him back in the early ’90s, okay? I’ve been reading… First book I read of him was Galatea 2.2, which I highly recommend.

Chris: Yeah, that’s a great one.

Kaiser: But my favorite is actually one called Operation Wandering Soul. If you get a chance to read that, it’s a Vietnam War era one. And another one that I really love, because he always… his shtick is he writes at the sort of intersection of really cutting edge science and the humanities. That’s his whole shtick, and he is very, very good at it. But one that I absolutely love, it’s kind of his best known one, is called The Gold Bug Variations. It’s kind of a pun on the Goldberg Variations and on The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe. It’s about cryptology and DNA, right? So, CGAT kind of runs through this whole thing. He’s a masterful writer, kind of a show-off, but he’s a great writer. And Cindy, I don’t know how far you’ve gotten into it, but there’s a Chinese American woman character in there, obviously, right?

Cindy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mimi.

Kaiser: I think she’s written amazingly well. I mean, her dad, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve gotten far into it.

Cindy: Yeah, I’ve got to that part. Yeah.

Kaiser: We did that. I mean, I feel like when my brothers and I read that, we’re like, did one of you talk to Richard Powers? Because the whole sort of going to all these campsites and Dad having this meticulous log of what was good and what was bad about each campsite. That’s my dad.

Cindy: That’s hilarious.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, just his sort of same aesthetic appreciation for nature and being like a hardcore scientist too, that was just…

Cindy: And also this Chinese man who left China before the Communists took over and then never spoke Chinese again. It’s a beautiful set of characters.

Kaiser: Yeah. Oh boy, that’s a great book. I’m really glad that he finally gets the notice that he’s long deserved. A wonderful book. Thanks. Great recommendation. Chris, what do you have?

Chris: Alright, so it’s the new novel by Ed Park. It’s called Same Bed Different Dreams. So, it’s wonderful. It came out last year. So, it’s actually three interlinked novels in one. And I don’t know if I’m going to be able to describe it in a nutshell, but one of the stories is this metafictional story about an Ed Park-like Korean American writer. There’s another one that’s an alternate history in which the Korean Provisional Government, which was this real government-in-exile that emerged during Japanese occupation, so the Korean Provisional Government continues to exist after Japan’s defeat in 1945 and starts to recruit new members, unlikely members, like Marilyn Monroe becomes a member of the Korean Provisional Government, for instance.

Kaiser: Because why not, right?

Chris: Yeah, why not? And then there’s this third story about a Black American science fiction writer who is a Korean War vet. And so, like, a lot of the pleasure of this, of reading this novel, is tracking the kind of historical rhymes in like surprising coincidences that seem too good to be true, too amazing to be true. So, just for instance, so Ed Park is from Buffalo. So, he’s a Buffalonian. He’s a big fan of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team. The Buffalo Sabres play a very important role in this novel in linking these stories. So, the Sabre was actually a kind of fighter plane that was flown in the Korean War.

Kaiser: F-86.

Chris: It was flown by that science fiction writer that I mentioned. And the Buffalo Sabres hockey team had this fictional, in the 1970s, there was this entirely made-up player named Taro Tsujimoto. This is real. And Taro Tsujimoto was actually the alias of Thomas Ahn, who was the person who assassinated Itō Hirobumi, who was the first prime minister of Japan. 

Kaiser: Oh my God. Yeah.

Chris: And also the resident general of Korea. And so the novel is full of these wild coincidences, and it’s a really fun ride. So, Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park.

Kaiser: Oh, that sounds fantastic. Yeah. I’ve been in the market for a new novel right now because I just finished this one called Run and Hide, which is my recommendation. It’s a novel by Pankaj Mishra. He just put it out last year. He’s probably better known for his nonfiction. I’ve read a bunch of his stuff like Age of Anger, which is about the rise of right populism, which I highly recommend, I’m sure I’ve recommended on this show. I interviewed him about a book that he wrote called From the Ruins of Empire, which is just fantastic also. This is like his first novel in 20 years, but it is powerful and absolutely beautifully written, and also just edifying. I mean, it’s set against the backdrop of the rise of Narendra Modi and Indian globalization. But it’s about these three Indian men from very, very different backgrounds.

In fact, one of them is a Dalit. They meet in the ’80s at IIT. It just sort of traces their lives. Like when I said one of them is a Dalit, his name is Virendra, he becomes a Wall Street white-collar criminal, basically gets in all sorts of trouble. Although there’s Aseem, who is this really charismatic journalist, he’s sort of like half of the Pankaj Mishra persona put into him, the sort of Pankaj who shows up at… that sort of, not literally, but the Davos and Ted Talk kind of side of it, rubbing elbows with the sort of cultural elites of the world. A very globalized guy. And then the other half is Pankaj has lived in a tiny village in the Himalayas for a very long time, for long stretch of his life, and other biographical details with the third character who’s this guy named Arun, who, like Pankaj, small Himalayan town, a father who’s a railway worker.

But he is the narrator of the whole thing. And he tells it, I mean, the conceit is that it’s an epistolary novel. It’s written to a woman who he has a very interesting relationship with, who is another one of these sort of glitzy, glamorous, wealthy family, big flat in London, but an Indian Muslim woman who’s beautiful and with whom Arun briefly sojourns in London before running and hiding back to his Himalayan retreat. Anyway, I think it’s… I keep thinking, man, why hasn’t somebody done this same thing for the Chinese experience, for… There’s all these people who went to Beida and Tsinghua and then went abroad for their MBAs or for whatever, and some of them come back and forth, they start companies, they’re on that same circuit. And against the backdrop of another rise of a powerful personal dictatorial leader. I mean, maybe I’ll try it one day. 

Anyway, Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra, I highly recommend it. Actually, Rana Mitter, who, I think, I know Cindy you must know, recommended the book to me when we were together in Austria recently. Anyway, check it out. It’s great. It’s short, too. It’s great. Thanks once again to my two wonderful guests, Cindy Yu of The Spectator, who hosts, again, the excellent Chinese Whispers podcast. And Chris Fan, assistant professor at UC Irvine, with a book coming out on… It’s a compendium of Asian American fiction.

Chris: Yeah, it’s a reframing of Asian American literary history after 1965.

Kaiser: Okay. So, it’s not an anthology of fiction, it’s about fiction.

Chris: Yeah, it’s literary criticism. Yeah.

Kaiser: Oh, good. I can’t wait to read that.

Chris: If that’s your cup of tea. Yeah.

Kaiser: I mean, I’m woefully ignorant about it. Having lived in China for 20 years, I just sort of didn’t… I missed a bunch, so it’d be good to catch up. Anyway, let me also thank-

Cindy: Kaiser, thank you so much for having… I’m sorry.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Chris: Thanks, Kaiser. Thanks, Cindy. It was awesome.

Kaiser: Let me quickly thank all the people who answered the call and sent their opinions via Twitter and elsewhere. I think it made for a good sort of unofficial sample. I should plug them into the four-way box that Chris created. But man, some of you guys can write too, some of these people who… They’re really, really, really great writers. It was really enjoyable. So thanks a ton. Anyway, Cindy and Chris, I hope to have both of you on the show again soon.

Cindy: Thank you so much.

Chris: I appreciate it.

Kaiser: All right. And tell me what you think of the next season. Oh, okay.

Chris: There might not even be a next season show.

Kaiser: We shall see. We shall see.

Chris: Yeah, that could be the end of it.

Kaiser: You’ve been listening to the Sinica Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Kuo. Support the show through Substack at sinica.substack.com, where there’s a growing, terrific offering of original China-related writing and audio, or email me at sinicapod@gmail.com if you have ideas on how you can help out or on ways I could improve the show. And don’t forget to leave your review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.