Review: Lady Tan's Circle of Women

 Alright so this review is going to be in two different sections because there are a couple of different things that need to be addressed. First I’m going to discuss my thoughts on the book itself, what I liked, and what I didn’t. Then I want to discuss the author, as well as share some thoughts my girlfriend shared about her. It’s important to emphasize that these are not disparate things, and as you read through this review it will become clear that they’re closely connected. It’s just easier for me to organize my thoughts when it’s divided up this way. 

So first, the book itself is about the titular Lady Tan Yunxian and based loosely on the real historical figure. It follows her throughout her entire life, from childhood to old age, with the bulk of the book focusing on her time as a wife in the compound home of a wealthy family. Now, I always hated being told to “write about the seed, not the watermelon” in school, but in this case, I think someone needed to tell that to the author. It didn’t feel like a real plot started until the last third of the book; everything else was pretty much just Yunxian talking about her daily life. Which I’m sure some people enjoy; personally I prefer something with more plot. That being said, for a book that didn’t have a plot for most of the length, it didn’t really lose my attention. The prose was compelling enough that I stayed engaged. 

The other thing I struggled with, though, was the relationships. The title and summary of the book sort of suggest that it’s going to be all about the relationships between women, especially Yunxian and her friend Meiling, and finding community in a society where wealthy women were kept cloistered away. And yet these relationships actually felt like a really small part of the book. Yunxian and Meiling almost never interacted, and when they did it usually involved some kind of conflict or trauma. I really wanted something that built out these relationships as complex human ones with conflict, yes, but also with joy. And the joy was very lacking in all of the relationships in this book. This actually brings me to my discussion of the author. For context, the author, Lisa See, is ⅛ Chinese. Here’s what my girlfriend sent me: 

“I don’t know about other people, but I kind of resent that she’s known as a Chinese American author and has won a lot of awards for being a Chinese American author while also having a lot more privilege than them not having gone through a lot of the problems that people who look more Chinese American have gone through. And it feels like she’s taking away space from authors who have had those experiences or are maybe less popular in the US because of being Asian because I see a lot of those awards as being used to give recognition or bolster the popularity of authors who maybe had a harder time becoming well known writers because they were Asian American. Also it kind of feels like she’s profiting off being racially ambiguous because of her name and how all of her books are about Chinese women. I’ve also heard that a lot of her books portray Chinese women as exotic and oriental. So it sounds kind of like she’s popular because her books play to the stereotypes of Asian people that white audiences want to read about but also I can’t really make that claim because I haven’t actually read her books. But it’s mostly the winning a lot of Asian American writing awards that annoys me.” 

So, I think that highlights a lot of the trouble with this author – she can write about Chinese women’s experiences without having experienced the trauma and oppression of the people she’s writing about, she can write things that reinforce stereotypes, and then she gets more awards and popularity and attention. 

Now, if her books were genuinely well-researched, fully humanizing, and cautious about their use of popularity, that would be one thing. (Yes, overall this was well-researched, but occasionally there were things that betrayed See’s unfamiliarity with the culture – for instance, at one point Yunxian makes a point of using a male pronoun despite not being willing to say she’s having a son. Except…in Chinese, both 他 (he) and 她 (she) are pronounced tā. And pronouns in general just aren’t used frequently.) But I also got the distinct impression that this book feeds into a very white “feminist” lens of understanding Chinese culture. By not allowing Yunxian to actually develop meaningful relationships, and by focusing almost exclusively on the trauma she experienced, the book reinforces the idea that Chinese women have always blindly accepted submission, that any community they found was based on trauma, and that Chinese society and the people in it were incapable of growth and remain stagnant. 

To me an excellent example of this was the way eunuchs were treated when Yunxian was summoned to the palace to assist the empress in childbirth (which, by the way, belies any claims about how this novel is just being ‘historically accurate’ – in the afterword, See says there is absolutely no chance Yunxian ever went to the palace, she just felt like including it). Yunxian talks about them horribly, even when one man helps her to save Meiling. There’s absolutely no self-reflection or consideration of her assumptions. For a woman who was clearly brilliant and insightful, this seems kind of absurd. Yes, there were broad social assumptions and practices that existed at the time period, but that doesn’t mean that no one ever questioned them. 

So overall yeah, this was a perfectly well-written book mechanically, but there are a whole lot of problems with it that stop me giving it a better rating. Here are my suggestions for some books about Chinese women that do a better job of capturing human relationships and culture. Looking for a book about the relationships between Chinese and Asian women? Try “Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remix” by C.B. Lee. Looking for a variety of explorations of Asian cultures and mythologies? Try “A Thousand Beginnings and Endings,” edited by Ellen Oh. Looking for a sweeping storyline set in China by a Chinese author? Try “The Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu. Looking for a brutal, incisive examination of not just sexism but also homophobia and classism in Chinese culture? Try “Iron Widow” by Xiran Jay Zhao. Want brutal but compelling historical fiction? Try “She Who Became the Sun” by Shelley Parker-Chan (which incidentally is about the founding of the Ming dynasty, the dynasty under which this book took place). I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. There are better books out there and better authors who deserve more appreciation and accolades.