朝三暮四

1) I enjoyed Babel and also feel like there’s no way of critiquing the book without coming off as being all #NotAllWhiteSinologists about it.

2) I love the conceit at the center of the book, and really love the way Kuang stealthily drops a good overview of issues in translation theory on her unsuspecting readers. Ditto for the disguised intro to center/periphery and its subsequent payoff. These are things that should be common knowledge, and this is a really cool way of getting us to that point. Language nerds will love this book and translators will find themselves seen and depicted by someone who gets it. This part is so good, you guys. I'd recommend the book for this alone.

3) But it feels like the worldbuilding falls short of its own standards: the world of Babel operates according to extremely different rules, and has for centuries, but somehow ended up geopolitically and socially in sync with our own as of the mid-19th c. Obviously this is necessary for Kuang to tell the story she wants to tell, but it feels less than fully satisfying. This is even more the case, in ways that I think are worth unpacking, for all the anachronisms of fact, speech, and thought: Babel's footnotes and general attention to contemporary events and pop culture recall Susanna Clarke, but Clarke's characters had 19th century brains in 19th century bodies and it is impossible for me to imagine them using the word "feminist" in any sense, let alone a positive one.

4) There were real people in the 19th century who accurately perceived and courageously fought the injustices of their day, and for Babel to have its characters speaking and thinking in the ways they do feels very much to me like 21st-century Twitter Discourse colonizing 19th-century justice movements. The problem is not that the characters are always saying things like "non-zero chance" or that they're opposed to the exploitation and degradation of their homelands by the British Empire; it's that in their speech, actions, and thoughts they flatter the contemporary reader instead of honoring people who actually existed. In a less ambitious or more carelessly written book, this probably wouldn't have been as noticeable, but Babel does itself the disservice of being otherwise thoughtful.

5) Would it replicate colonizing dynamics of knowledge production to note that by the book’s own logic Robin should have been speaking Nanking Mandarin as the prestige dialect, that even in Beijing those velars hadn’t fully palatalized before high front vowels yet, and that the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system used here wasn’t invented for more than a century and reflects pronunciations that didn't become the official standard until the early 1950s?

(Obviously the above is all nerd shit. But Babel is thoughtful and well-researched, so things like this jump out much more than they would in a book whose author had not invested the same quality of thought and care.)

I actually do mean this as a live question. When a person who looks like me makes comments that look like this about work by a person who looks like Kuang, it is ~~uncomfortable~~ for very good reasons. Reading Babel as a white sinologue is discomfiting, and the book does a good and (to my mind) convincing job of explaining why that should be. But I worry that in doing so, it will encourage at least some readers to adopt the sort of weird zero-sum views that disguise truculence and intellectual laziness as social justice and anticolonialism. I'm pretty sure that's not what Kuang was out to accomplish with the book -- but it's a clearly identifiable tendency, especially among the kind of people who post about YA fiction online. I love Twitter and am already grieving it, but there's a reason I didn't post this there.

The word "problematic" is, as a noun, an invitation to examine and think through complex issues. As an adjective, it is mostly deployed as a verdict: "problematic (adj.)" registers discomfort and prevents further discussion. Babel does a good job of describing a problematic (n.), but it does so for an audience mostly inclined toward the adjectival use of the word, and if I were to phrase my concern in terms of the book's devices, I guess I'd say I'm worried that in translating complex and discomfiting issues into the idiom of YA, Kuang creates a "problematique / problematic" match-pair that risks backfiring.