Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War (Harper Voyager, 2018)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Somewhere along the way, I managed to receive an ARC of this title, which was coupled with a very unique pre-release publicity campaign. In this case, a pressed flower approximating the poppy was provided as a bookmark! In any case, this clever touch was perhaps a sign of how certain the publisher was that R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War (Harper Voyager, 2018) would be a literary success.

On the face of its female heroine alone, Kuang’s The Poppy War is an elaborate and epic achievement, but I was still a little bit torn on this work, which takes its time and ultimately accrues a body count higher than arguably any that I’ve read in the last decade or so. Those who don’t want a little bit of horror and war thrown in with their speculative fiction should likely want to avoid this work, especially in a later sequence involving a city that is ravaged by an enemy army (called the Federation). In any case, the basic gist of this novel is the story of a young woman named Rin who achieves ascendance in the military even though she comes from a poor background. The entrance exams are not meant for someone like her, though she manages a way to scheme herself into sitting for it and actually does so well on it that she is one of the very few from her village to receive admittance into a military academy located at Sinegard. Once there, she has to take training very seriously, otherwise, she may drop out.

What this novel makes clear is that someone like her must continually jump over hurdles that others do not and that there is no safety net for her. What fuels her rise in the academy is her desperate desire not to be forced back to a life of servitude and oppression. Rin eventually shows an innate talent for a branch of military training known as Lore. A wily and eccentric leader named Jiang takes interest in her and allows her to develop shamanistic abilities that link her with the gods. In this particular novel, the poppy is absolutely vital to shamanistic training because one must be able to use the plant to get into the altered state necessary to enter into a sort of communion with the gods. Rin certainly shows an inclination to reach the gods, but it’s only ever provisional.

Later, when her shamanistic ability accidentally unfolds at a time when all hope seems lost for her and her fellow military officers, she is transferred to a different branch of the military called the Cike, which are an elite group of assassins who operate under the directive of the Empress, who is the leader under which Rin and her fellow officers are united in supporting in order to defeat the evil machinations of the Federation. I suppose I should pause to provide the requisite spoiler warning because I’ve already revealed quite a lot about the plot, so stop reading here is you don’t want to know more.

Eventually, Rin comes to realize that she’s a Speerly, which is a race of beings known for its shamanistic abilities. Most of the Speerlies were wiped out, especially as the Federation began to experiment upon them to figure out why exactly they had such peculiar, awe-inspiring abilities. But the knowledge that Rin is a Speerly also coincides with the practical devastation of the military and her allies, along with civilian cities that she must comb through in order to find what survivors may remain. It is apparent that though there is a cost to commune with the gods, Rin is willing to pay this price for vengeance. This novel leaves us at the point where Rin has given herself over to the gods in exchange for the power that they will give her. The second novel no doubt will involve Rin’s quest for revenge, as she seeks to wipe the Federation out off the map. I’m no reader of modern Chinese history, but Kuang definitely allegorized much of Chinese history for this story basing Rin’s culture and peoples upon the Chinese. Such veiled references make this work fall under the genre of silkpunk, which I believe Ken Liu coined, especially in relation to works such as his Grace of Kings series in which China is not necessarily directly mentioned but nevertheless indirectly invoked.

In the case of Kuang’s novel, the devastation wrought by the Federation is of course the metaphorical representation or the analogic depiction of the Japanese imperial enterprise. There is a sequence meant to be Kuang’s version of the Nanjing/Nanking massacre. It is as gruesome as you might expect to be, so there is a trigger warning that must be issued. That sequence is particularly dark for anyone who has any baseline knowledge of that period of time, and it makes you wonder about the political nature of speculative fiction and what we must do not to take a novel like this one purely as some mode of entertainment. In any case, Kuang’s novel comes at absolutely the right time in this golden age of Asian North American speculative fiction written by women, as this novel adds to such notable works as Peng Shepherd’s Book of M, Ling Ma’s Severance, Rachel Heng’s Suicide Club, Thea Lim’s Ocean of Minutes, among others, that show us how much there is still to read and to cherish.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu