The Water Outlaws

[psocoptera]

The Water Outlaws, SL Huang, 2023 queer retelling of the Chinese classic Water Margin. I was very interested in this - queer wuxia is very relevant to some of my current fannish interests - but it wasn't always a fun read. The antagonists do a bunch of horrible things, and when it's the protagonists' turn to act, they often do horrible things also. Huang described the protagonists as "antiheroes" but also hoped the book would be "a joyous, toothy escapist adventure", which for me did not really match what I felt was a prevailing mood of grim dread through large chunks of the book. The end was definitely the most fun - the wuxia action really picks up in the last quarter - and I ended up being glad I had put in the work to get to it. And it was interesting to see how Huang approached the project - how various of the classical characters were reimagined as cis women, as trans, as not gendered at all. Huang also made what I thought was an interesting choice to include certain terms like "haojie" and "Renxia" without translation, definition, or explication, and to refer to Chinese religions or schools of thought by names like "Transcendentalist" and "Fa" that don't obviously correspond to things white Westerners are more likely to have heard of like "Daoist" or "Buddhist". I think it worked - coming to my own sense of what I thought these words meant was part of my experience of reading the book, and I liked feeling like I wasn't being spoonfed - but it definitely felt like an active choice in a genre where I would more usually expect either a glossary or an in-line explanation.