A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet (review)

Abstract

“Chinese” girl refers to the Ming-loyalist regime of Koxinga/Zheng Chenggong鄭成功 (whose father is Chinese and mother Japanese) in Formosa/Taiwan (1661-1683), also colonized by the Dutch. Extrapolating from this episode of cultural exchange putatively and beautifully mediated through Taiwan or any such “country of waters,” Liao’s use of Western theory in deciphering the classic Chinese novel is then not only ancillary, but necessary. All this is made possible by the feminine (“the girl”) and the queer space (Baoyu’s Garden), which could precisely be a space such as Taiwan – currently the LGBTQ+ champion in Asia, mediating between China and the world; the loss of which would be, as Dream and Liao showed, tragic. To sum up, Liao’s innovative reading of the Chinese masterpiece helps us grieve the ungrieved in today’s China as in the Sinosphere. As Liao testified in his comparative approach, Dream’s affect powerfully and queerly traverses the boundary of past and present, male and female, China and the world, as well as East and West. While the book’s rigorous contextualization of Dream in the Ming and Qing culture will delight Redologists and Sinologists, those scholars specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese culture as well as gender studies, Sinophone studies, and ecocriticism will discover new research pathways with Dream, thanks to Liao’s theoretical intervention.