The Poppy War By R.F Kuang

The Poppy War 

By R.F Kuang

Ms. Kuang was born in Guangzhou, China on May 29th, 1996. In the year 2000 her father - a former student who was at Tiananmen Square - took his family to Dallas Texas where Ms. Kuang would grow up. She graduated from the Greenhill school in 2013 and attracted by the debate team attended Georgetown University. She took a gap year in China working as a debate coach and like many newly liberated students found herself feeling strange without the specter of homework hanging over her every moment (the lack of homework can lead people who've been in school too long to do strange things, like review a novel a week). So she decided to write a book. She was 19. The book was published when she was 22. She is currently attending the University of Cambridge with a Marshall scholarship to earn a Masters in Chinese studies. Much like Ms. Kuang herself, The Poppy War is a result of the global system that we live in, allowing us to see stories we would never have seen in generations past; written by a person who in the past wouldn't have been allowed space to tell her story to western audiences. I'll get to that in a bit though, first let me discuss the story itself and the world that Ms. Kuang has been kind enough to write for us.

The Poppy War takes place in the Nikara Empire; once a vast and powerful state the empire could now be more rightfully considered a creaky confederacy of semi-autonomous provinces. Each province has its own money, it's own rulers and it's own army. In theory, they are united under the rule of the benevolent Empress Su Daji but in fact, they could barely be considered to be working together at times. This is unfortunate because the Empire has powerful enemies, chief among them is the island nation the Federation of Mugen. The Empire was once occupied by the Mugen, after being defeated in a conflict called the 1st Poppy War. The wars gained their name due to a strategy adopted by the Mugen. While the island is densely populated the fact is that the people of Nikara greatly outnumber them. Facing the problem of occupying a nation larger than their own and with a greater population base, the Mugen flooded the Nikara Empire with cheap poppy drugs. This reduced a good amount of the population to the state of hopeless drug addiction and the frank fact is that poppy addicts don't make good soldiers. On top of this, the Mugen played games of divide and conquer, pitting the rulers of the various provinces (called warlords) against one another so they wouldn't be able to cooperate effectively (This whole strategy seems remarkably similar to something that occurred historically…). During the occupation, however, three heroes, the Dragon Emperor, the Gatekeeper and the Vipress arose to unite the country and wage a long war called the 2nd Poppy War and drive the Mugen out. Two of the three heroes have disappeared and now only the Vipress remains to rule as Empress trying to hold together a nation in the face of possible destruction. What really ended the 2nd Poppy War though was when the western nation of Hesperia intervened after the Mugen committed genocide on the island of Speer wiping out all of its inhabitants due to their special gifts. The Speerlies were able to summon fire and they used that to fight the enemies of Nikara, as you can imagine that made them utterly devastating. The Mugen, fearing this ability, attacked one-night using advanced weapons and wiped out every Speerly they could find. This was over a decade ago now and Hesperia's attention is elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Federation of Mugen has a new emperor fully committed to conquering Nikara and taking its lands and resources for his people. He could honestly care less if the Nikarans come with that land, however. Which if you're a Nikaran kinda makes the whole thing even worse.

Our main character, Runin Fang (or Fang Runin, as the Nikarans put the family name first) is deeply aware of that. Rin is an orphan, raised by a foster family thanks to the Empress’ decree that every family with less than 3 children should take in at least one orphan. For many orphans, this was likely the difference between life and death and for a good number of them likely delivered them to happy homes. Rin was raised by poppy smugglers, who used her as cheap labor and were planning to marry her off to a man old enough to be her grandfather as a bribe to continue their work. Rin isn't just not-excited about the idea, she's violently opposed. She's only got one shot out of this however, she needs to ace the Keju, the Empire-wide test meant to find the best youths to study at the various academies of the Empire. She can't just pass it, however since most of the academies charge for the honor of studying there. She needs to utterly dominate the scores so she can enter Sinegard, the elite military academy where the best of the best study to become of the officers of the Nikara Militia. Their nations best hope of preventing a physical and cultural genocide at the hands of the Mugen military. The military is also Rin's best hope of advancement and doing work that actually matters to her. Of course getting to Sinegard is only the start of the battle, because Rin will now be competing directly with the children of the upper class for the right to stay in an academy with a 20% washout rate in the first year. She has to deal with students who look down on her for her skin color (the south part of Nikara is darker then the northern part, the northern part of Nikara is wealthier), her accent and her class origins. She'll also have to deal with the fact that some of the instructors think teaching her is a waste of time. So she has a year to learn enough martial arts, logic, strategy and more to compete with people who have been training for this from the cradle. The book does a good job showing just how desperate Rin's situation is and the kind of lengths she has to go to make up the gap. It also shows us how such a thing builds and fuels a desire for power within Rin. A desire to be taken seriously, to be free from the constant threat of having to live a terrible life or not even have a life to live and how far that will drive her. As a fun little cherry on top of all this, Rin may also have mystic gifts that most had believed to be just empty stories told to children. Rin might just have the power to contact gods that the people of Nikara don't believe in anymore and summon their power into the material world. Such gifts are dangerous though and there's a good chance that she may lose herself entirely using them, or worse, find that there's no barrier between her desires and reality. All of this while a possible Mugen invasion is constantly looming in the background.

The Poppy War is based on real-life events, specifically, the 2nd Sino-Japanese War or as many of us in the west would call it, the Chinese front of World War II (although if we're gonna be honest it started a good two years before any other part of the war). This is a forgotten part of the war in most of the West honestly but it's not forgotten in China. Nor is it forgotten in Ms. Kuang's family, her maternal grandfather fought for Chiang Kai-Shek, her paternal grandfather lived under Japanese occupation. During that time the people of China suffered horribly, as the Japanese military had for over a decade instilled blood-thirsty fanaticism within its troops and a disregard for the lives or even the basic humanity of their opponents. This was graphically illustrated in the Rape of Nanjing, the then capital of the Republic of China, where according to Western, Chinese, and Japanese sources (including members of the Japanese Imperial Army[But denied/minimized by the Japanese government in violation of all logic.]) the Japanese Military engaged in a six weeks of utterly brutal behavior murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians, killing surrendered Chinese soldiers, along with untold amounts of torture, rape, and theft. I mention this because Ms. Kuang bases part of her book on the Rape of Nanking and she doesn't spare any punches. To paraphrase her own words in a number of interviews she has given, she felt it was important to tell this story, especially given that there is a faction of Japanese academia who either claims that the Rape of Nanking was over-inflated (some of them claiming 20,000 deaths as opposed to over 300,000) or that it never happened and it was completely made up the Republic of China as wartime propaganda. In the west, the Rape of Nanjing was virtually unknown until the 1980s and 1990s [The Rape of Nanjing was one of those rare times where a Nazi could be classified as good. A Nazi official by the name of John Rabe -he was the liaison between the chinese government, the Nazi Party, and Siemens at the time - held his swastika armband up like a shield while protecting chinese civilians with his own body. That’s how fucked up it was. Granted John Rabe was very bad at actually being a Nazi and he’d been in China prior to the Nazi takeover.] While Ms. Kuang doesn't write out explicit scenes of such behavior, she makes it clear that these things are happening in the story and doesn't pull any punches. I would honestly defend this, as unlike some stories which use such scenes in a pornographic manner, this is presented starkly and coldly. It's not meant to titillate but communicate the sheer madness being unleashed in such a war. That said, it does make the book hard to read at some places and there are parts of the books that some readers would be advised to avoid and there are some people I would tell to avoid the book entirely for their own health.

Ms. Kuang as created a very well realized world for her characters to inhabit and shows us a high stakes conflict where losing could be the end of an entire people and the vanishing of an ancient culture as it's members are raped, tortured, and murdered. She unflinching shows us the stakes of such a conflict and the very human cost of refusing to admit to the basic humanity of your enemies while asking us how far would you go in such a situation? While the internet has gifted Ms. Kuang with the title of Grimdark's darkest daughter, I wouldn't call this book grimdark. For those of my readers who are unaware grimdark is a term for fantasy and science fiction that trade heavily on dark themes and grim endings. In a Grimdark fantasy, the hero is often little different from the villains he or she fights and the world is always a brutal, unfair violent place where the best you can hope for is being the one who does unto others before they can do unto you. There is also usually no hope of any improvement or change for the better, the wide eye reformer will end up the power-hungry cynic swiftly, the pure-hearted hero will be corrupted and twisted, left more brute than man. The Poppy War, while dark, isn't grimdark. Ms. Kuang take a great amount of pain to clearly present to us that Rin has a choice at every step along her path. That there are options beyond embracing the darkness. The question is whether Rin will realize that or throw herself off the cliff in the pursuit of power? The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang gets an A, along with my hopes that future generations will find a way to avoid bringing such stories to life.

I would also like to welcome back our editor (whose comments are in the red text), who gave the hunting parties a good run but no one escapes forever.

I am the most dangerous game, many of them died at my hand, but even I am not immune to intravenous ketamine.

Next week we return to comics, via Monstress Vol III. Keep Reading!