[This post contains spoilers.]
It’s rare for me to read a book that so sharply diverges from my worldview. And by that, I don’t mean I disagreed with Iron Widow’s feminist and queer-positive messages. Far from it. Neither do I claim that I’m right and the novel is wrong.
In fact, I starting to doubt my perspective was ever accurate.
In Iron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao shows us a society fundamentally broken, fundamentally irreparable, one that must be forcibly pushed aside before hope can ever blossom. Their protagonist, Wu Zetian, lives a life of constant pain — thanks to her ritually mutilated feet — and constant abuse, thanks to her violent father and misogynistic culture. Her country is rotten at its core, grown from the ground up to force women into subservience and martyrdom. There’s nothing to be saved.
Yet, it took me til halfway through to get on board with that notion. I remember turning to my sister, who’d recommended the book, and saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever rooted for the torturer before.”
In the weeks after, I kept coming back to the novel’s central idea, expressed best by Wu Zetian herself:
Some of us were born to be used and discarded. We can’t afford to simply go along with the flow of life, because nothing in this world has been created, built, or set up in our favor. If we want something, we have to push back against everything around us and take it by force.
For much of my life, I’ve insisted the latter isn’t true—that people are basically good, that evil is bred by pain, not malice, and that if we all just sit down and talk it out, we’ll solve the world’s problems. I’ve clung desperately to that sliver of faith, but I’ve also watched pleas for science and cries for justice fall on deaf ears. I’ve watched Americans scoff at 1.2 million deaths, valuing their own comfort over a statistic. I’ve watched as, one by one, people I care about fall victim to insidious rhetoric—either as its carriers or as its victims.
And, for the first time in my sheltered life, I’ve started to think, “maybe everything won’t be okay.”
Many people don’t get three decades before they start planning for the worst. I’ve never had to hunch my shoulders and drop my eyes in white neighborhoods. I’ve never had to lace my keys between my knuckles in case someone attacked me on the way back to my car. I’ve never lived in a place where I couldn’t, at the very least, expect food on the table and a roof over my head. Even when I was bullied, it was never physical because I've been 6’4’’ and over 200 pounds since I was fifteen. And so it’s easy for me to sit in my air-conditioned ivory tower in my middle-class suburban neighborhood and wax poetic about hope and love. Optimism comes naturally when life has been comparatively easy.
But the opposite is also true. Is it any wonder that people are angry? Is it surprising that anxiety and depression have skyrocketed? The kids aren’t oversensitive; the kids aren’t alright. We’re looking at a world made finite by denialism and greed. We’re sticking up for the folx we love and getting nothing but mockery from one side and platitudes from the other. We’re watching as, slowly but surely, the values our country is supposed to stand for are twisted out of shape.
I mean, for God’s sake, a former president of the United States of America went live on the Internet for millions of voters and laid out his step-by-step plan to disenfranchise and destroy an entire group of people. And his base cheered.
We’re not Huaxia, just like we’re not Oceania. But things are getting tenser every day, and sometimes I wonder how long it’ll be before the world is no longer “worthy of [our] kindness or compassion.” What will we do when we wake up one morning and the planet’s on fire and the State is ascendant and our friends are Undesirables?
I doubt we’ll content ourselves with “I told you so.”