She Who Became The Sun: Interview with the Author and Review
Fantasy is an expansive genre which offers, besides swords and intrigue, the radical potential of imagination. As Black, queer, and trans folk, we have historically sustained ourselves through similar forms of world-building; imagining and creating universes which allow us freedoms unmitigated by our identities. It comes as some surprise, then, that only more recently have we seen traditional publishing push substantial narratives which explore – or for that matter, include – such queer and trans voices.
I am always hesitant to read fiction, especially fantasy, which boasts LGBQT+ characters, as most of them are written by cishet authors who cannot engage with these identities beyond pain and trauma inflicted by an unyielding world. It is not to say that our negative experiences cannot be reckoned with, but there is no imagination here. There is no space for the joy or euphoria that keeps us alive, that reminds us in our darkest moments that we are here and that while we are surviving, we are also living. Every now and then, I come across a book which tackles this precarious balance with care and love. Every now and then, you read a book that rebirths you. This is She Who Became the Sun.
Comped as ‘Mulan’ meets ‘The Song of Achilles’, Shelley Parker-Chan’s debut novel follows the rise of a young girl destined for nothingness who takes on her dead brother’s identity, and thus, his own destiny for greatness. Zhu, a magnetic character in her own right, navigates a world determined to squash her spirit, whilst grappling with the complexities of her own identity, some of which are mirrored in other protagonists. Described by the author themself as “a story about desire, and what we’ll do to get what we want”, there is something for absolutely everyone in this epic tale.
Parker-Chan shared that she began her writing with fanfiction. “Fanfiction was a cradle of queerness in a time where there was so little of it in mainstream media. It was where we subverted the texts to add our queer selves back in. It was a sort of communal yearning, but also a source of communal joy. It taught me to write what I liked and how to express my authentic self on the page, and that if you wrote truly you would always find people who would recognise those words as true for themselves too.”
Even though, as they explain, “hardcore fantasy readers encountering She Who Became the Sun are sometimes like: where’s the magic?” it feels entirely realistic given the themes and characters that it fits into the fantasy genre. “It has a fantasy voice,” Parker-Chan comments, which is inarguable when readers approach “the ambition and cynical ruthlessness of the OG Zhu Yuanzhang… Kenshin’s combination of playfulness and deadly competence, and Gen’s hidden identity” which all are expressed through the character of Zhu, and her body itself.
Most decidedly, the protagonist Zhu’s exploration of her own gender and identity amidst her ambition and struggles for power is what cinched the novel for me as a fantasy narrative. “Zhu was so hard to create! A lot of that is because she didn’t spring out a familiar archetype, the way the other characters did. Although maybe that’s not completely true. She does have an archetype: it’s the underdog trickster king.” Parker-Chan references the inspiration she found from Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo, Kenshin Himura from the Ruroni Kenshin series, and Gen from Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief. “But those characters are men,” they add, “and their character traits are entangled with the way they understand their gender, their masculinity, and how they consciously or subconsciously perform it to the world – and how the world reacts to that performance.”
We’re all embodied beings, with all the pleasures and miseries this brings. The way our bodies move through space, the way we experience the world and other people through our bodies, the way emotion originates in the body, the way people project gender and other social constructs onto our bodies… I’ll always want that embodiedness to be a part of the stories I tell.
So infrequently do we get such a complex investigation of gender in a fantasy protagonist without grounding this turmoil in a baseless aspiration to cisnormativity. Her identity goes beyond her gender, but it is inextricably linked to who she is and who she becomes; Zhu’s experience is not wrapped up in her pronouns but in her ambition. “I think a lot of trans people feel an ambivalence about the past. Zhu literally runs from her girlhood, from the person she was, and she has a visceral fear about acknowledging that past self as contiguous with her present self. Her insistence on forging ahead, on making something entirely new, can be inspiring - especially compared to the older generation (of men), who just want to recreate a time in which they and people like them were always at the top.” Parker-Chan spoke to this idea of femininity and masculinity when I asked her whether Zhu’s ambition drives her towards or away from a sense of compassion and female rage: “I’m currently reading this book, Amateur, by Thomas Page McBee, who’s a trans man. He takes up boxing as part of his quest to better understand masculinity, because it seems to him that aggression and masculinity are inseparable. But as he learns to box, he struggles to access the aggression that’s expected of him. And he starts to wonder: if aggression and masculinity go hand in hand, perhaps he doesn’t want that masculinity. But what does it mean for his identity as a man, to reject masculinity? I think for Zhu, ambition and masculinity are—initially, at least—entwined in a similar way. But as Zhu grows into her identity, what she develops is a flexible masculinity—one that, unlike Ouyang’s, can absorb femininity into itself without collapsing. Zhu looks at Chen Youliang and sees the image of what she would become if she adopted rigid, ruthless, ambitious masculinity. And what steers her away from that future is her understanding that Ma’s (feminine) compassion has value.”
Indeed, there is something so beautiful and powerful about Zhu’s romance arc with the formidable Ma, and the way that the relationship allows Zhu to grow in herself and into her own identity. It would have felt amiss to not ask Parker-Chan about the fisting scene (spoiler alert, lesbians!) but when I asked about why that appeared to be the only sex scene with Ma and her husband, her response was somewhat sobering. “I’m so amused, but also kind of sad, at the reaction this one very tame sex scene gets! The spaces I come from - romantic fanfiction spaces - are ones in which writers never shy away from using the erotic to explore identity, and queer identity in particular. We’re all embodied beings, with all the pleasures and miseries this brings. The way our bodies move through space, the way we experience the world and other people through our bodies, the way emotion originates in the body, the way people project gender and other social constructs onto our bodies - that’s what interests me. I’ll always want that embodiedness to be a part of the stories I tell. Zhu is probably somewhere on the ace spectrum, but her body still interacts with other bodies and their (erotic or otherwise) desires.” It interests me that Zhu is supposedly asexual, another queer experience little explored in fiction beyond typecast sex-repulsed characters. So it follows that Zhu having sex with Ma is an exploration of bodies and being: “they’re inventing pleasure for themselves.” It’s not about what they do, Parker-Chan adds, but rather it matters because “it’s an act of connection and trust and desire.”
Queerness is not simply embodied within fulfilled sexual desire either. One of the most fascinating pairings, General Ouyang (known commonly as the Eunuch General) and Prince Esen, encapsulate the pain in unbalanced yearning. The slave and the master, their positionalities are precarious, and so too are their desires. “Ouyang and Esen’s doomed romance is a story of toxic masculinity. For the sake of this ideology, which they’ve placed at the core of their identities, they’ll destroy what each of them actually wants.” Why did she make them unequal? “I wanted broken, imperfect Ouyang to look up to Esen as this idealised vision of a masculinity that is always unattainable to him - either physically or as an object of desire.” Even Esen has sacrificed, for his “embodiment of the masculine ideal is the source of his power over the world,” and “we see that he has made sacrifices to conform to that ideal.” As she adds, “It’s not possible to be ideally masculine within that framework and still be a whole person. You have to kill a part of yourself to do it.”
A part of me perhaps was killed when I finished the novel; my paperback found itself being flung across the room in rage. But it is not all pain. (Mostly). For the first time in a long time, I felt the potential that fantasy holds, and it was a welcome reminder of the power of our voices combined with gorgeous writing. The world Parker-Chan creates is a vivid and vibrant reality, immersive from the moment you begin reading. Interwoven political struggles and intrigue, questions of spirituality and deities, and notions of identity and relationships are all neatly-tied up into this spectacular debut. And if a first is anything to go by, the publishing world of fantasy is better for Shelley Parker-Chan’s emergence into it.