Book Review
Robots, Revolution, and Mayhem in Chen Qiufan's The Waste Tide
I got into Chinese science fiction (SF) like most people do. Some otherwise quiet corner of the internet whispered into my ear. Next thing I knew, I was staring at an online magazine offering a translation of one of Chinese SF's early stars, Hao Jingfang's Folding Beijing. I research urban sanitation in developing countries — where it sits at the intersection of rapid urbanisation, laggard public service delivery systems, weak local governance, and unrelenting social hierarchies. Naturally, Folding Beijing, an imagining of what urban centres, bursting at the seams but still aspiring to fulfil all the 'world-class' functions that we often associate with cities could look like as they self-preserve, drew me in.
In Jingfang's imagination, Beijing, the city in question, does this through the creation of a folding version of itself, reminiscent of Origami, and apportioning time between the three classes of its citizens. In such a system, the class comprised of waste processing workers receive one-third the time of the most privileged class, to attend to their business. Lao Dao, a waste processing worker from the third stratum and the protagonist of the story, races against time in the complex city-machine to earn some extra money for sending his daughter to school.
I blazed through the novella in a sitting, but I can see and hear the cogs turning as the city folds in on itself even after months. A colleague recommended The Three-Body Problem next, and although I got around to reading only the first book in the trilogy, I knew I had found something with Chinese SF — which, while I can't put a finger on exactly why — I find endearingly bespoke. Maybe it's the centring of contemporary socio-spatial inequalities in stories about dystopian societies, very much like Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide. And doing what I do for a living, I can tell you with confidence that there is no inherent reason to assume that the hierarchies, the exploitation, and the stigma associated with waste-work go away with advances in technology or the reshaping of the physical world around us.
The low-down: an e-waste generating world gone awry
The events of Waste Tide unfold on Sillicon Isle, a Chinese island serving as the e-waste dumping grounds of the developed world. Qiufan opens the book with a poignant excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on the Basel Convention (as in the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal) that describes how the United States, the leading producer of electronic waste, has never ratified the Convention. The quote, combined with the book's prologue, unduly raised my expectations from Qiufan, who, despite his visceral depiction of Sillicon Isle and its corruption, left me high and dry.
The conversation Qiufan wants to have is important and more a construct of reality than mere fiction. His own hometown of Guiyu, once, and purportedly still, the world's largest e-waste inspired the corrupted and contaminated Sillicon Isle. Yet, despite the inevitable viscerality of his portrayal of the Isle, Qiufan endows his characters and the story with only a modicum of the complexities that one prima facie associates with his chosen topic.
In a nutshell, an American corporation sends Scott Brandle to convince the Isle's leaders to replace its primitive recycling systems with safer, more modern, and greener American recycling technology. Chen Kaizong, a Chinese American with roots to the Isle, accompanies Mr. Brandle on the trip and yearns for a homecoming while acting as his interpreter. He runs into Mimi, a migrant waste-worker for one of the three clans — Chen (Kaizong's extended family), Luo, and Lin — that control all e-waste processing on the Isle. Kaizong and Mimi eke out friendship from disparate presents and pasts, spending more and more time with each other until one day, Mimi disappears, only to reemerge as the masthead of a social revolution.
On characters and context: a nuanced setting and missed opportunities
Waste Tide evinces Qiufan's adeptness at isolating urgent global themes, internal migration, class conflict, environmental degradation, capitalism, to set the stage for a fictional narrative (referencing Roman myths while he is at it too!). One of my favourite lines in the book comes as part of Mr. Brandle's pitch to the Chinese bureaucrat, “We’ll return your home to its former glory: blue skies and clear water”. The misadventure is not the American's first for Mr. Brandle was the shadow-hand that pushed Papua New Guinea to crack down on illegal logging as a pretext for creating a more favourable monopoly on the lumber supplies.
Qiufan uses geopolitical tensions to justify the aggressive American ambition — the future in the book has witnessed the emergence of a Greater China Economic Sphere, the Chinese acquisition of Ibiza, and the dissolution of the European Union. But, in a serious case of missed opportunities, he states these ideas as mere facts of a new world order that do not ultimately have any bearing on the plot. The hypothetical absence of all this context would not impact or necessitate the alteration of the story in any meaningful way.
Qiufan attempts to paint some of the characters - Boss Luo, Director Lin, Mr. Brandle — with grey tones. However, their fate at the end of the book belies any attempts to moral ambiguity early on. On the other hand, the protagonist, Chen Kaizong, has the depth of a mirage and is especially unlikeable. He morally detests his father for trading life on the Isle for the American Dream with the reasoning that such migration was only an article of famine or war, and unjustified in a time of prosperity and peace. In comparing Mimi to all the women he had known before, he insinuates that the latter, “well-bred, fashionable, socially adept East Coast classmates"…"lacked a soul" unlike the former.
Mimi, the only female character in the main cast and a possible imagining of a modern day Lucretia, undergoes a drastic physical transformation halfway through the book to emerge as a transhuman and yet continues to exude blasé till the very end. Moreover, I could not comprehend the need for a character that in Qiufan's words is the "prettiest and smartest woman in the history of the human race. She was the inventor of CDMA, sharp, sensual, and she lived a life of endless adventure and glamour." Why the particular mix of superlatives when the subplot would have functioned just the same without either one of the two?
To read or not read: A solid maybe
Waste Tide is not a book for everyone, but I do not regret reading it. While it did not deliver on its premise, I enjoyed and am more educated for details on the Chinese culture — from tea to the occult — that Qiufan brilliantly interweaves into scene-settings and subplots. Although this one may have been a miss, Chen Qiufan is onto something, and I am here for it.