In the Watchful City
By S. Qiouyi Lu
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TW: on page suicide, death, self-harm, body horror, gore, dysphoria
In the Watchful City, the Gleaming is a living network running through Ora that surveils the citizens to maintain harmony. Anima is one of the extrasensory humans, turned nodes, tasked with watching over Ora's citizens. Aer world is limited to what ae lives through the Gleaming. When Vessel, a newcomer, arrives with a cabinet of curiosities from the outside countries, Anima sees more than ae ever have before.
Framed as stories within a story, this novella starts strong and never loses momentum. As Anima chooses from the qíjìtáng or cabinet of curiosities, ae is given a story from Vessel’s travels and the people se meets. This framing acts like a kaleidoscope. We see Ora through Anima’s eyes but with a twist of the lens, see different parts of the world and different peoples’ stories before twisting it back to Anima.
The dedication page says “for the multitudes in each of us” and this book encapsulates that. Anima uses aer’s purpose as a node (basically surveillance for the state) to take control of animals and artificial constructs through the Gleaming. Aer intervenes in the city's crises and monitors the citizens to make sure they are happy. That is aer purpose until ae isn’t able to save someone from dying by suicide. This event makes Anima second-guess everything in aer world. To me, the actualmechanics of this are a bit confusing, but I liked the ‘vibes’ enough to put questions aside and just ride the wave of the story.
This book feels like a modern take on traditional fairy tales and mythologies. It doesn’t pull its punches dealing with heavy topics such as state supervision, cruelty, suicide, grief, and rebellion.
I’m reminded of when Ocean Vuong said that “… cohesion was not part of my generation’s imagination, nor our language, or our self identity. And I felt that if I were to write my version of an American novel, it would have to look more like fragmentation.”
This kaleidoscope, the fragmentation, isn’t just how the book is framed. Like Anima, shifting into different animals, the form also changes between narratives. There are stories in verse, epistolary sections, and others with changes in point of view. By doing this we get a deeper sense of Ora and the world beyond both in the minutia of the individuals in the stories we see and the disparate cultural aspects.
Anima epitomizes this multitude thread. In a world aer doesn’t participate in aerself, disconnected as aer is, the gift is the stories. Aer jumps from animal to animal to see Ora, and we the reader jump from story to story. They are inclusion itself. Aer and us become a part of them as they are told and in the end, Anima gives a part of aerself to the qíjìtáng.
This hope shines through otherwise dark stories. Often, stories of the diaspora have a sense of loss and pain. Those feelings are present here but Lu subverts these and reclaims them with filled stories of agency and defiance. Specifically in her acknowledgments aer thanks someone for “showing me that decolonial stories were possible”
The novella reverses the pain of losing and stolen-identity and instead shows the multitudes of possibilities in ourselves and life. The journey may be unimaginable and scary, but it can free you, too.
Some of these parts felt like they had more to say but because of the short length of the book, weren’t able to fully expand on their themes. Anima’s story, strong as it is both emotionally and action-wise, would have benefited from more depth to really get a sense into Ora.
Filled with heartache, mystery, fantasy, and longing, this book is strange and terrifying at some points and loving and gentle at others. I loved every minute of it. The inhereant queer characters, the diverse culture explorations, and nuanced writing just exempifies how good it is. It contains vivid imagery and cutting commentary that I know I’ll find even more to think about on reread I can’t wait to read more by Lu. The book is not an easy read, nor do I think everyone will love it (read the trigger warnings!), but it’s a deep examination of a city “cut off from the rest of the world by choice” and the journey of one person who wakes to “see the world.”
Further Reading:
The Singing Hills Cycle series, especially the second book, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. I’ve read the first three and each has interesting forms and storytelling narratives. They also have a focus on Asian mythology and queerness present, too.
I also think that The Memory Police would be an interesting book to read after this.
Quotes:
“Whats harder
is being yourself so completely
that there is still a ‘you’
no matter the form you hold.”
“every child in ora knows
there is nothing to want from that world.
after all,
we are provided with all we ever need
all we could ever want.
we have the longest life spans of any nation
the highest literacy rates
the best education
the best healthcare-
choose any measure
and i can tell you
how we surpass the rest of the world in it.
what of the unmeasurable?
there is nothing
that cannot be quantified
cannot be surpassed
cannot be
exploited.”
“I didn’t yet know
what citizenship was
why revoking it meant
i could no longer see my parents
didn’t yet understand
what a border was
why crossing one
didn’t always mean
you could return”
“We will never know who someone else truly is,” Vessel reflects. “We are still bounded by the limits of the material world. We still cannot enter someone’s soul to navigate the interior sea of the mind. But we can take a moment, a story, that illuminates their spirit, if only one facet. Yet that is what makes life the brilliant gem that it is: the collection of all those facets into a prism. A lens.”