On anger, vengeance and justice: The Poppy War, by RF Kuang

 Sometimes you pick up a book at exactly the right time.  You have had this experience, I am sure.  RF Kuang published The Poppy War, the first in her trilogy, in 2018, so as usual, I am a bit behind, but better late than never.  My reading stack never diminishes, it just grows.  Anyway, this is a good one, which I had intended as a bit more of an escape from modern politics 'n stuff, but not only did it have more unexpected resonance with world events in 2022 (keeping in mind that it was published in 2018), I picked it up before, well... it's been a couple'a days.  So let's get into this, with spoiler-y stuff, obviously.

Set-up is as follows.  The novel takes place in Nikara, which is the fantasy world's stand-in for China.  There is also a Japan stand-in (Mugen), America (Hesperia), and Africa (Speer).  Your main character is Rin, who is a "war orphan," from Speer, who somehow wound up in rural Nikara raised by drug runners.  She wants out, and the only way out is to test into the top military academy.  She could test into lower schools, but the only one with the full scholarship is the top military academy.  That test is insanely hard, but she does it, and then she has to deal with the academy itself, until war breaks out.

There had been previous wars between Mugen (Japan) and Nikara (China), having to do with the poppy trade, and the last time around, the only thing that saved Nikara from Mugen was that Nikara let Mugen go into Speer (Africa), which was a Nikaran territory, and commit genocide.  This brought Hesperia (America) into the war because Hesperia was so horrified that they came in and kicked Mugen out of Nikara, but Nikara did this as an intentional strategy, knowingly sacrificing Speer to get Hesperia to intervene.  This time, Hesperia is just staying out of it.  Problem being, Mugen has built up a massive military, preparing for this, and their new emperor just wants to wipe out Nikara.

So what does this have to do with Rin?  Obviously, she has to be the genius, badass hero.  "Mary Sue?"  Not... quite.  Is she a genius?  Yes.  Badass?  Yes.  Psychopath?  Quite possibly.

Here's the thing.  It becomes clear very early that she has narcissistic tendencies, and oh does she crave power.  She shows up at the military academy, and you get some expected, trite story-lines, and one of the instructors is initially presented as crazy, slovenly and detached, so obviously you know he's the biggest badass, and he's destined to be her teacher, and yes, of course.  He's the most totally zen of the military instructors, for a variety of reasons.  Mainly, he channels the power of the gods, and that's absurdly dangerous, so if you aren't chill, bad shit happens.

The problem is that Rin runs a little hotter than chill.  The god to whom she is connected?  She's a Speerly, so that'd be the Phoenix, who is the god of vengeance.  Burning fire and vengeance and conflagrations and mass death and cackling all the fucking way.  Rin's teacher, Jiang, tries to get her to chill the fuck out, but she wants that power.

So when the war starts, she finds herself attached to, let's call it a special unit run by Altan Trengsin, who had been the star student at the academy when Rin arrived.  Altan is also a Speerly, but he knows how to channel that fire.

They head off to a port city to try to defend a strategic location from a Mugen onslaught, until they realize that the whole thing is a diversion.  They've been wasting their time, resources and lives as Mugen goes straight for the new, makeshift capitol.  By the time they get there, Mugen has already destroyed it.

What now?  Path of destruction, and all Rin can do is let loose the Phoenix and let it burn.

She... nukes Japan.  Technically, Japan is an island, so the Phoenix blows its volcano, which kills every single person there.  Kills 'em all.  Yes, this is very clearly a WWII/Sino-Japanese War thing.  Kuang even took her descriptions of Mugen's war crimes in the capitol from what Japan did to China, in historical documents.  I noted this in yesterday's post.

Not a light book.

So let's all take a moment, and be Jiang.  Not with the drugs.  He's a druggie.  I don't recommend that.  More the don't-blow-shit-up thing.  'Cuz this is some heavy shit.

Anyway, I do recommend The Poppy War.  I'll probably read the sequels, but obviously I have no opinion on those as of now.  First book?  Good.  Flawed, but good.  Let's contemplate.

It does, alas, have the obligatory woke bullshit that the sci-fi/fantasy community requires as a precondition for publication.  How, you may ask, does a book that is an allegory for the Sino-Japanese War have anything to do with wokeness in modern America?  Well, just you wait!  Everything is wokeness!  Actually, some of it winds up being more clever and complex than it initially looks.  Some of it is just lefty, woke bullshit, though.

And I gotta do that first.  'Cuz.

Let's start with Rin's path to Nikaran West Point.  There's a test.  A hard test.  The premise is that the test is so hard that the only way to get that high a score is to spend your entire lifetime studying with the fanciest tutor that money can buy.  The idea of the test creates the lie of a meritocracy, but since it's really all about money, the whole thing is a lie to tell the poor that they have a chance when they don't.

Sound familiar?

The thing is, this is what we call "bullshit," speaking from the perspective of having grown up without money, not studying at all for the SATs, getting good enough scores anyway to get into several highly selective, "needs-blind," elite schools, and dot-dot-dot...  Hi, my name is "Anecdote."  Moving from "anecdote" to "data," what do we know about the effect of standardized test prep?  It doesn't do much.  Sure, some gullible, rich parents might throw away money that looks like serious change if you don't have any on test prep for their trust fund brats, but the before-and-after comparisons don't move that many points, and the prep-vs.-no prep comparisons show bupkis.  Bull is to shit as... OK, I can't think of where to go with that one, but you try it.

So what's the deal?  In the novel, the reason the kids need tutors and test prep is to memorize a bunch of old texts and interpretations for which there are no easy mnemonic devices.

Yeah... no memorization or anything like that for the SATs.

This is all bullshit.

The next bit, well, I'll introduce it, but Kuang deconstructs it to some degree.  When Rin gets to Nikaran West Point, the star student is Altan Trengsin.  One of the observations I have made about virtue-signaling is that you do it by creating a "perfect" minority character.  A... "model" minority, if you will.  One might almost see such a thing as a tad offensive, in the right light!  Just sayin'.

Anyway, so Rin gets to the academy, and there's Altan Trengsin.  Smartest student in the history of the academy, greatest living martial artist, untouchable in the fighting ring, handsome, strong, silent, even the guys are clearly kind of into him.  Oh, how gorgeous his dark skin.  Perfection, embodied, all played against the historical stereotypes of people from Speer being somewhere between illiterate barbarians and monkeys.

Just a bit over the top.  Virtue-signaling alert!

Until the war starts, and Rin finds herself under his command.  You see some cracks.  Why?  As it turns out, he's an opium addict!  And as the pressure mounts, his need to rely on that escape increases, and there is a bit of a downward spiral!  Combine that with the insight that he is basically a rage machine and you have a much more nuanced character.  At this point, Kuang is stepping away from pure virtue-signaling.  Cool!

Unfortunately, she doesn't let it go at that.  Why is Altan an opium addict?  She can't let that be his own fault.  Not only was he turned into an addict by evil empires to make him what he is (first, Mugen in their experiments, and then Nikara to control and manipulate him), all of Speer had opium pumped into it by Nikara as a mechanism of control.

The crack-cocaine epidemic was a CIA conspiracy!!!  Really?  We're going there?  We can't just have Altan be an interestingly flawed character?  We had to go full conspiracy?  His one flaw has to be someone else's fault?  Granted, when you make the flaw a drug addiction, you've got a racial stereotype, so either that gets turned into someone else's fault, or you're playing in stereotype territory, so she kind of wrote herself into a corner.  I get that, but still.

But even then, we have something interesting about Speer.  All of Speer.  Speer is not a place that had a culture of justice.  It was vengeance they worshipped.  Altan and Rin?  Their core was rage.  Vengeance, not justice.  The conclusion was the destruction of all of Mugen, not because it was necessary to save Nikara, but to enact vengeance.

Rin is not the good guy.  Neither is Altan.

Jiang is.  The tragedy of the book is that Rin doesn't listen to him.  OK, that's one tragedy in a book with many tragedies, so let's turn to those.

When I picked up the book, I did not expect it to resonate with the events in Ukraine, but... well.  Mugen picks a port city and just decides to demolish it, because they can.  The Mugenese worship their emperor, and follow him to commit war crimes that are historically rooted in what Japan did to China in the second Sino-Japanese War, and it is hard to read now without thinking about Russians just worshipping Putin, as he sends his psychopathic soldiers to commit war crimes just because they can.  To demolish Mariupol because they can.  To surround a factory with a few civilians trying desperately to hold out, to starve them out, just because they fucking can.

And none of this is even close to the worst.  Not in Ukraine, not in the book.  The Mugenese cheer on their emperor, the Russians cheer on Putin, and one looks at Rin.

At Altan.

In World War II, Harry Truman made one of the hardest decisions in human history.  He became death, destroyer of worlds, in the great migration of a phrase.  Was he right?

Rin did more than that.  What's more, she did it, not to end the war, or save Nikara, but to enact vengeance.  And in so doing, she unleashed the Phoenix.

Jiang didn't want the gods loose.  Jiang would have let Mugen win, taking the bigger picture perspective that the world is more dangerous with the Phoenix loose.  Jiang's order?  They can channel the gods, but the problem is that the gods take over and slip out, so when a member of that order loses control, they are supposed to immure themselves in stone to keep the world safe from them.  From them, and the gods.  But of course, you can't prevent math from getting loose.

Kill baby Hitler, and maybe you do prevent the Holocaust.  Kill baby Einstein (not that scam, but the physicist), baby Oppenheimer and the rest, and you don't prevent nuclear weapons.  You just delay them.  That says nothing about the moral calculus of Truman's decision, nor Rin's, but Rin's decision had two other elements.

First, she wound up wiping out all of Mugen rather than two cities.  Second, to the degree that we consider this, she was out for vengeance.

Not justice, vengeance.

Not saving Nikara, not ending a terrifying war with the minimum number of casualties, but vengeance.

From a literary perspective, that makes Rin interesting.  Not a hero, not by a longshot.  And it makes the portrayal of Speer interesting, as a stand-in for Africa.  Actually, kind of brave, when you think about it.

So I'm going to follow up on yesterday's post.  In yesterday's post, I wrote about Germany, Japan and Russia.

Our focus on the European Theater tends to obscure just how evil Japan was through WWII.  That alliance with Hitler?  It was basically, hey, you're evil, I'm evil, let's be evil bros.

Today, Japan is part of the civilized world.  Kind of xenophobic, if we're honest, but if you are a foreign tourist in Japan, the worst thing likely to happen to you is that you breach their highly formalized etiquette and get stern look.  Ooh, scary.  Yeah, Japan?  These days, kind of just part of the world, and hopefully you're glad that as many people survived as did.  Otherwise... the fuck is wrong with you?!

Would you have expected to see that, to think that, to feel that, from the perspective of 1945?  Particularly if you were Chinese, and had an up-close, personal, first-hand connection to their war crimes?

So be Jiang for a moment.  Not Rin, but Jiang.  Russia.  And here's the problem.  The challenge.  The question.  In 80 years, where will Russia be?  Will it transform?  I doubt it, but who would have predicted, in 1945, what Japan is today?  What Germany is today?

As I argued yesterday, the difference is that Germany and Japan faced the music and accepted the consequences of what they did in WWII.  Russia never accepts responsibility.  Or at least, they never have so far.

And now here I make a math/social science correction.  Russia isn't a thing.  One thing.  Russia is soylent green.  It's made out of people.  Mostly, very bad people.  Some day, all of those people will be dead.  In 80 years, the vast majority of currently living Russians will be dead, and none of the currently living Russians will have any memory of what is happening now.

What kind of people will 80-years-from-today Russians be?

Yesterday, I made an assertion.  I asserted that the American South has been influenced by past generations' unwillingness to accept responsibility for the Civil War.  So if the current generations of Russia continue refusing to accept responsibility for the last 100 years of evil shit that Russians have been doing, same-old-same-old.

Then again, in 1945, I would have offered a very pessimistic prediction about Germany, so what do I know about that kind of prediction?

And within that uncertainty lies the wisdom of Jiang.  Remember, Rin isn't the hero.  She "saves" Nikara, by some definition, but when she finds her old college buddy, Kitay, and he learns what she did, he is fucking terrified of her.  Rightly.  Rin is an interesting literary exploration of the ideas of narcissism, anger and vengeance.  But she is not the hero.

While Mugen's invasion was modeled on some of the most vile acts of the 20th Century, the fact that Rin ended the invasion does not make her the hero.  It is not merely that her actions were tainted by motive.

Fuck your taint.

That came out wrong.

She unleashed hell.  She didn't go Oppenheimer on Mugen.  She went full Shiva.

Yet Shiva is not vengeance.  Death is not vengeance.  Fire is vengeance.  Everyone dies, eventually.  Fire scorches.

There is no solution to Russia.  I understand exactly why one wants to scorch them.  I have nothing but contempt, not only for Putin, but for the Russian populace, yet I would have said the same about Germany in 1945, Japan...  I think the picture is more bleak for Russia's moral future.  But I would have said the same for Germany & Japan.  In practical terms, none of this is relevant, since there are no moves.

We can sanction, we can arm Ukraine, but Putin is adding his name to the list.  And we don't have a move to stop it.

And vengeance?

The value of rational choice theory is that it removes such considerations from the calculus.  Because all fire does is scorch.

Jiang takes drugs, and shit.  Kids, don't do drugs, do math.

And I sincerely hope that you never encounter someone who just wants to watch the world burn.  Unfortunately, I still need to figure out how to deal with such a person.  Invest in fire extinguishers, and fire-protective gear.

But the only winning move is not to play.

Magraw Gap, "Fireline," from their self-titled album.