The Legend of Mando part 2: the Way of Jianghu
In the first of this two-parter, I’ve explored how Din Djarin is the very model of a Xia, and how his quests mirror so many wuxia tales, but there’s much more to the series, and the universe of Star Wars that aligns with the Chinese genre.
Posted in Articles and tagged Chinese, fantasy, fiction, film, novel, Star Wars, The Mandalorian, Wuxia
Story Feast 2025: ESEA Futures
On the day of the Far Right rallies in central London on the 13th of September 2025, it felt momentous to be there to stand with my fellow East and Southeast Asian authors, and our diverse audiences at SOAS. It was a day packed with fantastic panels. On the ESEA Futures panel, we discussed how we first got into genre fiction, Western definitions of sci-fi imposed on ESEA literature and how legend and lore sit at an intersection between speculative genres. It was the first time I had spoken about Wuxia storytelling to an Anglophone audience in person, specifically discussing the differences and similarities in its speculative elements with similar fiction in the West.
Posted in Events and tagged Asian, authors, books, diversity, ESEA, festival, fiction, inclusivity, literature, london, POC, representation, SFF, speculative, Wuxia
Brighton Book Festival 2025: Sinophagia
One of my highlights of 2025 was being invited to the Brighton Book Festival, whose motto is “making the marginalised mainstream”, to be part of their first ever event on horror literature, an apt occasion to discuss my anthology Sinophagia, the first curated collection of translated contemporary horror from China. Alongside two wonderful fellow authors, we read extracts from our books, and discussed topics such as female horror fiction, horror literature in relation to the exploration of facets of human nature, horror fiction and the writing of grief, followed by some great questions from a very interested audience, and signing. The venue was packed with an audience that did very much, go in there!
Posted in Events and tagged anthology, books, festival, fiction, horror, literature, SFF, women, writing
Birmingham Science Fiction Group May 2025: Chinese Horror and Sinophagia
It was a pleasure to be with the Birmingham Science Fiction Group in person to give a talk about modern Chinese horror fiction and discuss my collection Sinophagia, in particular the two horror sci-fi tales featured in it, The Waking Dream and Ti’naang. The event was packed and attended by readers of different generations. This group is one of the longest running science fiction groups in the U.K., it was a great pleasure to speak with my hosts as well as the group’s founders. I will be writing about this soon.
Posted in Events and tagged books, fiction, horror, literature, SFF
On Chinese Senses of Horror (British Fantasy Society Guest Blog)
When I put the words, “Chinese” and “Horror” together, what do you think of? Those long robed and confusingly named hopping vampires? 18th century tales of beautiful female ghosts? Or the latest tirade in the popular press regarding China’s alleged nefarious intentions? Chinese horror as a subgenre of literature is very much underexplored, and as a collector of contemporary strange tales, and a writer of China’s cultures, I am on a mission to encourage the reading, enjoyment and development of this fascinating regional genre. One of the first conditions, where I must ask readers to do some work, is to set aside your preconceptions about the nature of horror fiction, and consider, what is the Chinese Sense of Horror? Read the rest of the article here
Posted in Articles and tagged books, fantasy, fiction, horror, literature, SFF
On Chinese Gothic part 1
When thinking about gothic, people tend of think of soaring castles and misshapen stone spires. But the Chinese have a sense of the gothic, which has been quietly flourishing in recent storytelling like moss on the gravestone, and harks back to literary traditions. Instead of derelict abbeys and dungeoned great houses, we have ruined temples and equally labyrinthine ancient mansions, usually enclosured with courtyards and gardens sprawling into unfathomable depths. Instead of the ghostly woman in black, we have the ethereal woman in white, for white is the colour of death and mourning for the Chinese, the white-robed woman often symbolising the innocent and pure. She is ever briefly glimpsed, through abandon quarters and desolate fields, singing, weeping, or brushing her hair. In traditional stories like Pu Songling’s Liaozhai, she’s mostly a femme fatale, a ghost or a fox demon, luring men to their demise, or leaving them to wake up cold in cobwebbed ruins. Contemporary Chinese horror inherits this aesthetic, a prime example being Cai Jun’s novella Huangcun (which you can read in Sinophagia), but the emphasis is placed more on the phantomising of victims by traditional societal constraints and expectations. This is evident in the story of the vanishing brides in Snow Tower, the ‘ghostly figure’ at the Long Clan mansion leads the protagonists to eventually discover that the women had been murdered and buried by the clan’s deranged leader on their stormy island, where the tombs of the clan’s female infants lie hidden in the underground caves. Continue Reading →
Posted in Articles and tagged books, Chinese, drama, fiction, gothic, horror, literature, storytelling, TV
Love and Sword: A Dream of Jianghu
Love and Sword (directed by Cha Zhuanyi, starring Xuan Lu, Gao Weiguang), is a Tencent wuxia romance series released earlier this year. Loosely a chuanyue (Chinese for isekai) story, its protagonist Fang Yi, a young woman in contemporary China, gets transported into a dream world after being in a road accident. The woman with whom she shares her name, whose body she ends up in, is one of the greatest fighters of the land. She is being held to ransom within an inch of her life, and rescued by the dashing swordsman Yanshao (literally “dashing youth”), on a white horse. They make a hazardous journey back to her clan. At first, our heroine is anxious to get home, but as she recovers fragments of traumatic memory of her world and bonds with the people of this one, she begins to like it here, rather a lot.
Sound like a typical wuxia story? Well, it’s meant to be. The show doesn’t hide the fact it’s a dynastic world of the wuxia imagination, adopting an only slightly more sophisticated title of “A Mere Dream of Jianghu” than the novel it’s based on “Sleeping with Yanshao”. And it delivers all the romance, excitement and mystery that we typically find in wuxia novels. This is precisely why I am writing about it, from its archetypal trappings, characterisation and tropey plot developments, we can see much of what makes wuxia storytelling popular, and learn about the genre in contemporary times. As an enthusiast who grew up with wuxia TV, went on the read the novels, and now write about it as an author, I’ll be tapping into my considerable research (recently more focussed and academic). Heads up that because I’m taking the story apart, there will be spoilers.
Posted in Articles and tagged chinese drama, fiction, jianghu, martial arts fantasy, novel, TV, Wuxia
On Horror and Identity
I love speaking at conventions. This whole career as a sinologist started with talks to anime crowds about the films, foods, myth and music of China. In the midst of the buzz around my upcoming collection, Sinophagia, I was excited to be included on the panel of “Horror and Identity” as part of this year’s Flight of Foundry, especially with such a diverse collection of fellow guests to talk about the genre, and how our lived experiences and outlooks informed it.
Posted in Events and tagged china, Chinese, fiction, genre, horror, identity, literature, SFF, translation
Half the Universe: More On Chinese Women SF Writers
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article highlighting some of China’s female science fiction writers . It is a well-known fact that women in the SF community have been heavily overlooked in China, where a hard-science-heavy tradition took root in the genre’s first ‘golden age’ of the 1950s, which in itself was a continuation of a nation-building role for sci-fi that could be traced all the way back to the beginning of the century. Although women have been active contributors to the genre since at least the 1970s, with writers such as Zhang Jing and Ji Wei, their inclination, or perceived inclination to write ‘soft science fiction’, meant they have not been as visible as male writers in previous eras. In the twenty-first century however, kēhuàn (Hanyu for sci-fi) has diversified as a genre, branching off into more character driven fiction, which integrates science with story, shifting away from works that centrally focused on science theory or concepts.
Posted in Articles and tagged china, Chinese, culture, equality, feminism, fiction, literature, science fiction, SF, SFF, women's writing
How SFF Is Changing
I have always maintained that diverse writers must be included in the main discourse of subject matters, rather than seconded into special interest groups, thus making them feel like oddities, rather than fully part of the community. It was with this in mind that I was so pleased to be invited to FanfiAddict’s author livestream on How SFF is Changing, which put me on a panel with a wonderful selection of authors from very different backgrounds, all writing about and working in different styles, content and traditions. There were a few points in the discussion I did not get to address at the time, or may not have been concise on, and thought I would take the opportunity to expand on them here.
Posted in Events and tagged Asian, china, commentary, diversity, fantasy, fiction, literature, livestream, mythology, representation, SFF