ximen:

eastiseverywhere:

Jeremy Tiang
Peak white privilege: an American history professor criticises my play, which is set in 18th Century China, for not mentioning America.
US (2016)
[Source]

Bruce Chadwick writes:

There are not enough plays about Chinese history. We need more. This one, as an example, tells you a lot about family life and the deplorable positions of women in China who are not concubines or royals. They have no rights at all in an era where, particularly in the United States and England, feminism was starting to thrive…

It was during this time, too, that America began to trade with China. Following the American Revolution, the U.S. made Samuel Shaw, a retired Continental Army officer, its first China Consul. He arrived in China in 1784, set up offices and began to participate in trade with China, mainly involving China’s vast tea production. Some more of this story should have been told in the play.

Just to be clear, the play was an adaptation of Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber / Hong Lou Meng / 红楼梦, one of the four great classic novels of China. 

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE WEST.

But Tiang has a possible solution:

[Source]

Also worth noting that HLM (imo one of the greatest novels  in human history, not just China) is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the author’s childhood in the Yongzheng reign, aka the 1730s. BEFORE THE UNITED STATES WAS EVEN A COUNTRY! We don’t know for sure who exactly Cao Xueqin was (we have it narrowed down to a couple of guys in the Cao family), but he probably died in the 1760s, before the Declaration of Independence was even written!

And this is not even to get started on the utter BS of “[Women in China] have no rights at all in an era where, particularly in the United States and England, feminism was starting to thrive.” This is just incorrect. It’s incorrect about women in Chinese history (which I can expand more on if people want), and about Chinese vs American history at the time, and equally importantly, it’s incorrect about the world of the novel, where nearly all the women are educated, highly literate, and have a fair degree of freedom inside the household.

I don’t expect every reviewer of a play or movie to have read the original work, or to know the historical context of the work they’re reviewing. But if you’re going to criticize the historical accuracy of something, at least get it right!

Anyway, the real moral of this story is that you should all read 紅樓夢, preferably the David Hawkes/ John Minford Story of the Stone translation, because it is one of the great achievements of human literature.