Rebecca F. Kuang studies modern Chinese history. She has a BA from Georgetown University and is currently a graduate student in the United Kingdom on a Marshall Scholarship.Kuang's new book, her debut novel, is The Poppy War.
At Tor.com she tagged five notable East Asian SFF novels by East Asian authors, including:
An Excess Male by Maggie Shen KingRead about the other entries on the list.
I study modern China, so I was really fascinated by Maggie Shen King’s dystopia about Chinese Communist social engineering in aworld where there are far too few eligible women as a result of the One Child Policy. In short: since China’s cultural preference for male heirs have resulted in about forty million unmarriageable men, women often take on two or three husbands, and the matchmaking industry has ballooned into something wildly profitable and truly terrifying. I was really impressed by the author’s grasp of the reach of Party surveillance and censorship, as well as her deft imitation of Party double-speak and twisted Orwellian logic of Communist ideals, which applies now to Xi Jinping’s China better than ever before.
The Page 69 Test: The Poppy War.
--Marshal Zeringue
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