Author Xiran Jay Zhao's books speak to her obsessions with both anime and Chinese history and mythology.Supplied
Xiran Jay Zhao knew their first novel was going to be a bestseller.
After all, hundreds of thousands of social-media followers said Iron Widow would reach such success, and they logged lots of preorders of the book. And so it was, debuting in the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list for young-adult fiction last October – and it’s been there for more than 30 weeks so far.
“I knew it would do well, but damn,” the Vancouver-based author and internet star said to The Globe and Mail in a phone interview from Vancouver. The fantasy novel’s deal came through just as they (Zhao’s preferred pronoun) finished a biochemistry degree at Simon Fraser University.
“My author friends said not to get too excited, because after a few days the hype will die down and there’ll be total quiet. … It still hasn’t died down. It’s been surreal.”
Last week, a mere six months after the book’s release, Zhao put out Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor, a novel of the same genre targeting slightly younger readers. Like Iron Widow, it’s the first of a projected series of books.
“I wrote it in a frenzy, in two months,” they said. “I wrote it in part to convince my parents, who weren’t sure this was the right path. They didn’t think lightning could strike twice.”
The two books speak to Zhao’s obsessions – both with anime, the visual storytelling popularized in Japan that’s gone global, and with Chinese history and mythology.
“I have the tastes of a seven-year-old Japanese boy and a 62-year-old Chinese auntie,” Zhao joked in another interview.
In both novels, the mythic past gets translated into the future. Iron Widow puts a character based on, and named for, China’s only empress – Wu Zetien – into a dystopia where she must fight war against enemies at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the star of the new middle reader, Zachary Ying, is haunted by China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who guides – and sometimes misleads – him through a quest to keep the spirits of the underworld from escaping to turn the waking world into a nightmare.
But these similarities are superficial: The first book is a primal scream brimming with horror at the world its young heroine inherits, while the new novel plots a tween’s journey from zero to, if not hero, then someone of substance.
“When I dip back into Iron Widow, I’m like, ‘oh god, I did not write this in a great state of mind.’ I think the emotion is so raw that it resonated,” Zhao said to The Globe. Its heroine can barely walk because her grandmother breaks and binds her feet, but even so, she leaves a trail of destruction behind her as she knocks off the man responsible for her sister’s death before going after everything else that pisses her off.
Zhao has nodded towards The Handmaid’s Tale for some of its inspiration: ”How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves?” Wu Zetien asks herself. “You tell them they’re meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they’re born.”
Though Zhao can’t speak much about it, the book looks set to become a movie: “I can’t announce it yet, but let’s just say I have a deal in a place that rhymes with Ollywood.”
Whether the second, gentler book will hit the same heights remains to be seen.
“I found it easier to write, with my personality – it’s wacky, quirky, superfun,” they said. Still, Zachary Ying also has some toughness to it, with a father killed in his struggle against anti-Muslim bias. Zhao’s family is Hui, one of China’s long-time Muslim minorities. The book speaks carefully to the reality of the oppression that Muslims experience – in both China and the West.
In the years prior to publication, Zhao had built a strong social-media presence, not only on Twitter, but on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok – which may be tied to the success that has come their way.
“I really meme’d myself onto the top of the New York Times,” they tweeted after Iron Widow.
One of Zhao’s video of a funny, sophisticated critique of Disney’s Mulan has been viewed more than 3.7 million times, while another whipping through what is known about Empress Wu has drawn an audience of more than 700,000. Such edifying videos go on YouTube, while Instagram and TikTok have Zhao in fancy dress, sometimes cosplaying anime-type characters.
Zhao is one of many authors on TikTok who have rose with the sales and readership influence of the #BookTok hashtag and community, which now boasts 57.1 billion views. In May, Iron Widow was the first book to launch on TikTok Canada and Indigo’s virtual book club.
“I was raised by the Internet. I have an instinct for what goes where, depending on the climate of the social-media platform. You can’t really teach it,” they said when asked about the secrets of virality.
Zhao’s online presence is rooted in a passionate and informed interest in China’s history and mythology, which started at a young age as a way to find “nuggets of representation.”
Like the character Zachary Ying – a boy who is mocked by bullies at his mainly white school for his difference – Zhao, who identifies as non-binary and queer, says they were bullied after arriving in Canada.
“It took me years to unpack the shame,” they said. So Zhao ransacked the past to find rebels against gender and sexuality norms.
In Iron Widow, the Chinese empress is put into a huge mechanized fox to fight aliens.Supplied
“In my history I was able to find them, even though they weren’t always the happiest stories. There’s the emperor who wants to give up his throne for his male lover, that sort of thing.”
Zhao brings this history to their fiction: In Iron Widow, the Chinese empress is put into a huge mechanized fox to fight aliens (named for creatures from Chinese myths), and she also battles the tradition that has male pilots using up the qi of their female co-pilots. In Zachary Ying, other than the focus on China’s first emperor, a side-scene has Emperor Qin, the warrior king who unified seven kingdoms into one, and essentially built what is now modern-day China, the author said.
For all their differences of mood, the novels rescue what is valuable to Zhao in Chinese history and myth, and project it forward – creating artistic acts of cultural reappropriation.
“It can be really powerful to find out these things about your heritage, when previously … all your relationship with that heritage has come from other people making fun of it.”
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