I picked up An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King after heard an interview with the author on the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast a while back (this was all pre-pandemic, so this became part of my book hoard that could theoretically keep me reading for several years). I decided to read it in May as a nod to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
The Chinese government's controversial one-child policy began in 1979 and ended in 2015, but it will have a legacy for decades to come, particularly in the creation of a large class of unmarried men, namely, the excess males of the title.
King's novel takes place in near-future Beijing and begins as an unmarried middle-aged man, Wei-Guo, meets with a prospective bride, May-Ling, and her two husbands, Hann and Xiong-Xin (aka, XX). Each of these four characters gets POV chapters, some first-person and some third-person. And you probably noticed that polyandry has become accepted as a way to deal with the excess males (polyandry has been practiced in China, Tibet, and other places in the past).
As the novel unfolds, we learn that May-Ling is unhappy in her marriage, largely because she doesn't find XX attractive and Hann is secretly gay. The main arc of the plot involves the various dramas surrounding each of the four characters and their dealings with the authoritative Chinese government (Hann cares about his family despite his secret, XX is a weird computer nerd, May-Ling is overwhelmed by her husbands and her young son, and Wei-Guo just wants to get married).
A comparison with The Handmaid's Tale comes to mind, but it's not entirely apt. The government is plenty dystopian here, but the characters are really likable as they try to live within this system. This also isn't a Hunger Games type story of outright rebellion, at least not quite so overtly (there is a bit of a small-scale rebellion later that I won't spoil).
I found the likeability of the characters most surprising. Hann, despite being less than happily married to a woman, loves his family in a thoroughly Confucian way that I find endearing. Wei-Guo and May-Ling might even, as unlikely as it seems, fall in love. But my favorite is probably XX, who starts off as the type of abrasive, socially-inept tech nerd who has no friends for a reason and eventually won me over as the type of friend I might love even though he makes me roll my eyes at his awkwardness.
The novel does lag quite a bit in the middle after we get to know the characters and before the plot picks up toward the end. The end was interesting, but I think my favorite part was getting to know the characters in the first 150 pages or so.
Philosophically one interesting thing is that this is obviously drawing on dystopian science fiction in some ways, but it's also within the Confucian context of modern China (yes, the government is officially Communist, but Chinese Communism does include Confucian elements. President Xi, for example, regularly extolls Confucius. And a few decades of Communism can't undo millennia of Confucianism).
Confucianism is far too complicated to summarize here, but one might say that this novel dramatizes two different poles or interpretations of Confucianism. On one hand, Confucianism can be interpreted as an authoritarian philosophy of deference to traditional hierarchies of authority in the name of the greater good. On the other hand, Confucianism can be taken to propose an ineliminably social vision of human nature that takes seriously deep-seated human intuitions about the value of family and community. The brilliance of this novel is that it shows both of these interpretations at work.
I'm not going to defend the one-child policy, but in the face of massive population growth I can understand the rationale for it in terms of using the state's authority for the greater good. This is obviously abhorrent in terms of Western individualism, but the novel shows that it might have unacknowledged consequences in terms of human sociality and importance of family that are recognized in traditional Confucianism. What happens to all these middle-aged men without wives or families? What happens to women pressured into complicated family situations due to these demographic considerations? How do polyandrous (or polyamorous?) families figure out how to work in differing cultural contexts?
One thing I think even the most individualistically-inclined Western reader can appreciate is that we are all embedded in families, even if our families are chosen rather than biological. And this novel shows that our families create plenty of drama and love no matter where or when we live.
See also my Goodreads review.
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