IN THE WATCHFUL CITY by S. Qiouyi Lu
- Publisher: Tordotcom, August 31st 2021
- Genre: Fantasy, Novella
- Format: Paperback (eARC)
- Page Count: 192 pages
- My Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)
Click on the cover for my review on Goodreads.
In the Watchful City is an Asian-centric adult queer fantasy novella about living (and death) with a heart-racing ending.
The main character Anima (æ/ær/ær) is part of the city’s surveillance system the Gleaming (think The Matrix), one of the eight nodes in the inner sanctum. When æ meets Vessel (se/ser/ser), who carries a qíjìtáng full of knickknacks and memories from different people, ær curiosity brings ær to realize that there is more to life than guarding the city of Ora.
I don’t think I completely understood everything that had happened. And yet, I enjoyed the storytelling so much! Lu’s overall concept and execution of bringing mostly Asian history and culture into the story are so satisfying. There were maybe five non-English sentences, including Mandarin and Manchu (both languages were renamed in the story), and some of the terms are real things like Bǐyìniǎo (比翼鳥: birds that fly in twos; the word is used to describe soul mates). Also, I love the political animosity between countries and that a lot of the side characters’ names were of different romanizations and languages (Spanish, Mandarin Pinyin with tones, Mandarin Wade–Giles with tones, Cantonese, Hokkien, Japanese, Thai, etc.). Another thing I was happy to see was that for Mandarin names, family names come before given names!
In the Watchful City consists of fragmented stories. Ocean Vuong once said that “[…] cohesion was not part of my generation’s imagination, nor our language, or our self identity. And I felt that if I were to write my version of an American novel, it would have to look more like fragmentation.” (video here) Through Anima’s story, ær interactions with Enigma (e/em/eir) and Vessel, all the stories in the qíjìtáng, we get the themes of mental health and grief, assimilation, growth and living. Lu mentioned in ær acknowledgments that the narrative is focused on agency and it is also a decolonial story.
One last thing I’d like to mention is that the relation between Ora and Skyland sounds like that between Taiwan and China. Given that the history in our world was interwoven with the fantasy world in In the Watchful City, to me, this part feels especially close and real. “Why prevent Orans from seeing Skylanders? History? Are politics worth separating families and lovers for?”
content warnings: on-page suicide (drowning), on-page assisted suicide, loss of sibling, on-page foot binding, mention of hanging, consensual body mutilation, physical abuse of sentient beings, blood, assimilation
I received a digital review copy from Tordotcom via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Quotation may change upon publication.
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