I don't know how to make this post, but I am going to try to anyway

[thedeadparrot]

Sometimes, I think about the way the history of colonization is written onto us, onto our skin, onto our bones.

My dad still sometimes talks about his great-grandfather, my great-great grandfather, and how he lost a lot of his land due to opium addiction. My mom still talks about opium addiction as if it were a shared history, as if my great-great grandfather's story is not unique. And it isn't for her, for the people of Taiwan. I didn't recognize the Chinese name of opium when my dad told me this story, so she had to describe it to me, how the foreigners brought it with them, how you smoke it in long pipes, and how it made rich people very poor. She didn't talk about it the way I learned about the Opium Wars in high school, like it was something that happened to someone else so long ago we barely have to remember it.

In Taiwanese airports, they have signs posted everywhere about how drug trafficking is punishable by death.

So at the end of Empire of Ivory, we get a look at how dastardly the British government is for introducing a virus to the French dragon population, and part of me can't give a shit because there was this whole theme in Throne of Jade about how trade is good yay! and how by the end of the book, Laurence is both the newest son of the Emperor and how England has secured a trade deal. Both of these things are presented as unambiguously good, though maybe that's meant to be undercut by the reveal in Empire of Ivory. Maybe even later, we will see the effect of British trade on China. I don't know.

I do know what happened in our universe when the British traded with China, with Taiwan. I can still see the scars it left behind, over a century and a half later.

Sometimes, I wonder if those scars will ever fade.

Sometimes, I wonder if we even want them to.

Comments

[nijibug]

This post really spoke to me. Although it is not locked, it has a personal ring to it. Do I have your permission to post an excerpt to the community intranationalities?

[thedeadparrot]

Sure! I'm glad to see that it resonated with someone else.

[nijibug]

Thanks!

[cephy]

...hunh. *is thinky now* Thank you very much for the perspective.

[thedeadparrot]

You're welcome. I'm not that familiar with the time period, but these things really stuck with me, and they hurt.

[swatkat]

Sometimes, I wonder if we even want them to.

Because, I think, we are afraid that if we let them fade, we forget our history and those who came before us. They do shape us, for better and for worse.

[thedeadparrot]

Yeah, I don't think we want to let them fade. I don't think we want to forget how people have hurt us before, because you're right that those hurts do shape us.

But it hurts me to see how deeply the hurt is still carried, and part of me still wishes it could be soothed away.

[lanjelin]

I also wondered about that, reading Throne of Jade (haven't read as far as Empire of Ivory yet). (Among other things - I have some real problems with how many of the non-British characters are portrayed.)

But for me it's also something distant; Asian history, especially East Asian, is only briefly touched upon in Swedish schools. I remember being horrified by the concept, but all we really learned was that it happened and the general results.

I do think talking about it is a good thing, however; it does still have an impact on the present, and why shouldn't that pain be acknowledged?

Also, colonisation shaped large parts of the world, and if you're writing an alternative historical novel you really have to acknowledge how history must change if you exclude it or change how it happened.

[thedeadparrot]

Yeah, the books are really frustrating from Laurence's POV. Most of the time, it drives me nuts how much I loathe him.

And argh, just thinking about the affect of the Opium Wars on China and the whole region is enough to make my face do funny things and possibly make me want to set things on fire. So to see that glorified? Even if it's from the POV of an ignorant Brit? I don't know if I can take it.

[lanjelin]

For me it's easier when it's obvious that certain things are overlooked because of Laurence's bias, actually (he's made me so angry at times, but in those cases I get the feeling that I should be angry with him, that that's what the text was going for). It's when it seems as if the writer herself hasn't realised the problem that things become... worrisome. On the other hand, I might totally be misunderstanding things; it's not as if I know what the author thinks, heh.

But I don't know, I just found the Chinese rather stereotypical. I mean, I'm hardly an expert on China of that era (or any era for that matter), but they all seemed so inhumanly ruled by their traditions.

[thedeadparrot]

Hmm, my main problem with the Chinese in the story was less to do with their traditions, because I know there are a lot of cultural things that I haven't absorbed properly despite growing up with two Chinese parents with a fair number of visits to the homeland, so it doesn't seem unrealistic that Laurence would not be able to grasp how completely different their points of view are. Which is how I read them.

My big beef is that by the end, you could separate out the 'good' Chinese characters from the 'bad' Chinese characters based on how much they liked/agreed with Laurence. Which I found incredibly annoying.

[lanjelin]

Yeah, it wasn't how the traditions were handled that annoyed me, but how the Chinese seemed... controlled? Hm, I'm not sure how to express myself here, but it was sort of the impression that old traditions and innovative thinking were mutually exclusive? I should reread, though, I'm really not confident that I didn't interpret that completely wrong. ^^

My big beef is that by the end, you could separate out the 'good' Chinese characters from the 'bad' Chinese characters based on how much they liked/agreed with Laurence. Which I found incredibly annoying.

Definitely agree with that.

[oyceter]

Yes, thank you. I had a huge problem with Throne of Jade (which is why I haven't read further in the series), and although in my head, the dragons make a difference in the Opium Wars, I want a history in which they never happened, or in which they happened and we won and kicked people out for being drug traffickers. (Okay, I have other issues with Throne of Jade too, but that is one of them.)

I still remember learning about that period of history in Taiwan and how they called them the unfair treaties in the textbook and memorizing the eight nations that participated, all Western with the sole exception of Japan. And how angry I get when almost all depictions of opium I see in English-language books are about the venal Chinese people who smoke it, no mention of how they got that way or the territory in India the British used to grow the opium and the Indian slaves they used as well. And the English-language history books that justify what the British did because those terrible Chinese people refused to trade with them, what other option did they have? (I nearly threw a library book across the train once because of this.)

[thedeadparrot]

Oh, I do hope that is true about the dragons helping to avert the Opium Wars, but yeah, I did find Throne of Jade hugely frustrating on a whole lot of levels, not just this one.

The American school system treats the whole thing as the British being pretty shitty, but it just takes on a whole different dimension when you realize how close to home it hit. And yeah, ugh, I don't think I've run across English-language books that have been that incredibly bad as of yet, but there would probably be book-throwing on my part as well.

[issenllo]

Losing land due to opium? Sounds totally familiar. My mum and aunt get together to make cookies before every Chinese new year and they retell the stories all the time about how great-grandpa smoked away the family fortune and great-grandma gambled away what was left (or was it the other way around?) Tho' I must say my family's tales tend to be more on evil feudal landlords and even eviler Japanese invaders and later evil Communists. >_>

Reading Throne of Jade just threw up loads of orientalism vibes for me. I was really iffy about Empire of Ivory (It was fun, but my god! They destroyed a whole civilisation--at least, that was the impression I got... it's been a while). I'm not sure I really want to read the next book.

[thedeadparrot]

Ha! Yeah, I'm sure it's an incredibly common story that gets passed down from generation to generation. And that's part of what hits me the hardest.

Hoo boy. I really disliked Throne of Jade, and I had to do major skimming of the sections where Laurence gets captured in Empire of Ivory, because I could not stand to read that perspective. At all. I'm probably going to keep reading, because I do already own the next book. If I had to put more effort into it than that I probably wouldn't bother.

[issenllo]

The effects are still in existence. I read a report recenty about drug addicts in my country. Apparently one subgroup are the 70- and 80-year-olds who became addicted to opium when they were young and now remain addicted. It was a staggering fact to come across.

I figure the only way I'll read the next book is if the librarian helpfully puts it on a rec shelf at my library.

Temeraire and Western bias

[auroramama]

I can't speak for the author, and it may just be that my level of unrecognized privilege is so high that I experience as enlightening what you recognize as racist. But as a white American:

I grew up knowing that the British acted heinously in China. One of the more stomach-turning moments in high school social studies class. (I did not grow up knowing much about the awful things the US did in the Pacific islands, and I didn't find out about sweat shops in the Marianas until I read Al Franken's books.)

The impression I got from reading the series was that European nations were terrified of China and were vying for its favor. I didn't think the trade deal was anything but desired and desirable to China. The integrated human-dragon society was presented as far superior to anything in Europe, and Laurence is quite rightly ashamed of the British system. This is not forgotten by Temeraire or by Laurence, and the series seems to be progressing toward their finding a separate peace somewhere, if not overthrowing the British Empire.

In =Empire of Ivory=, in the captive scenes, I thought that Lawrence was writhing in shame at the complete justice of the King's accusations. He hates having nothing to offer beyond, "Some of us don't like the slave trade, although we've totally failed to get it stopped." As the series continues, the Tswana empire keeps on kicking slaver ass everywhere, and I sure thought the author was cheering it on.

In fact, my impression was that the author was creating a world in which Europe and European colonists doesn't get to commit many of their most heinous crimes, because in this world the indigenous peoples have more firepower. Even the dragon plague may be a counterstrike from the Dakota First Nation against the British. It's like a What If based on =Guns, Germs, and Steel=. One Amazon.com reviewer was so outraged by the idea that European domination was a mere accident of fate that he wrote screen after screen denouncing this "political correctness". He was threatened by the idea that in *another universe*, colonizers might not have had the opportunity to succeed at every horrible enterprise they began.

As I said, this may be a mere confession of my own ignorance and bias, and if it doesn't add to the discussion, you are welcome to remove it.

[trascendenza]

Here from dark_agenda, and I just wanted to thank you for writing this. I... yeah. My mother has mentioned in passing that her grandfather died young due to opium addiction, but I don't think that really clicked for me, what that really means, until I read this.