Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Author: Molly X. Chang
Title: To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods
ISBN: 9780593722244
Genre: Science Fiction, Young Adult Fantasy, Romance
Publisher: Del Rey, 2024
Page Count: 368 pages
Synopsis from Publisher: Heroes die, cowards live. Daughter of a conquered world, Ruying hates the invaders who descended from the heavens long before she was born and defeated the magic of her people with technologies unlike anything her world had ever seen.
Blessed by Death, born with the ability to pull the life right out of mortal bodies, Ruying shouldn’t have to fear these foreign invaders, but she does. Especially because she wants to keep herself and her family safe. When Ruying’s Gift is discovered by an enemy prince, he offers her an impossible deal: If she becomes his private assassin and eliminates his political rivals—whose deaths he swears would be for the good of both their worlds and would protect her people from further brutalization—her family will never starve or suffer harm again. But to accept this bargain, she must use the powers she has always feared, powers that will shave years off her own existence.
Can Ruying trust this prince, whose promises of a better world make her heart ache and whose smiles make her pulse beat faster? Are the evils of this agreement really in the service of a much greater good? Or will she betray her entire nation by protecting those she loves the most?
This is the longer version of my Goodreads review, in which I hit the character limit.
Death is a cartoonish hunchback under a bridge demanding Ruying solve his riddles three before she can cross to the next chapter. Unfortunately she's very stupid. So stupid, I think the hunchback just gets tired of trying to have a linear, cohesive conversation with her, so he lets her cross anyway.
That unearned but unflappable hubris takes us through the easiest 350-something pages I'll read again for awhile, but the entire time I was hoping the next bridge led Ruying to the Waffle House parking lot where I can finally make good on my threats to take her on myself.
To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods was not easy because the writing felt fluid or the story was favorable in any way. In fact, this read started as my attempt to ease into a story whose premise I liked, and stumbling five chapters into a hate read. It was that vigor that drove me to even finish at all. Had the book been anymore of a slog to read, this would have been promptly sent back to the library by chapter 10 at best. However, I had hitched myself to a buddy-read for this round, and with that I found purpose and a way to laugh through the angry tears of frustration.
If there’s any sincerity to be believed in the author’s note, Chang cares deeply for this subject. However, considering the numerous parallels to The Poppy War left on the pages and surely strewn across the cutting room floor, I’m struggling to understand what conceit to believe about the initial conception of this book. This is a point in which I’m tussling with even suggesting, as I would never want to pin an author against another. But more frankly, I’m trying to discern what led to this book’s creation (truly), and why does it feel so malformed? Why does it feel like a ploy from publishers to capitalize off the success of another Asian author with a similar concept?
Chang states: “I got to hold the book of my heart for the first time. For those of you who don't know, it took me 8 years to publish To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods.” But I’m pressing X to doubt.
In her author’s note she suggests that it was in mourning during the pandemic that she sunk into a rabbit hole about her grandfather’s stories from World War II, and somewhere along the way, this story was born. So, was it eight years or four years? It’s possible her grandfather’s tales (that she didn’t realize were rooted in history) sparked the initial idea, and somewhere along the way she retrofitted what she’d learned into her story. However, I’m feeling more inclined to believe that she was taking a swing at getting in on the popularity that The Poppy War experienced in some way.
I don’t wish to pull apart an author’s note that is full of longing, mourning, and retribution for someone’s homeland and family, but there are some key takeaways from the author’s note I must point out; I believe this note heavily informs the hollow execution of the historically fictive events that take place throughout To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods.
China’s landscape has been marred by the traumas of wars, empires falling, colonization, tortures, and enslavement. And some of the worst parts of China’s history are the parts of history that neighbors to the East and the West have collaborated to conceal. When the Western world thinks of China, it’s regarded as a Great Power or Superpower. It’s a titan. It’s a player in the Red Scare. And even more so now, it’s seen as a looming enemy with Big Brother tendencies. China has been just as much of a victim of the West as they have been an enemy when they were long before supposed to be an ally. And let us not forget the racism laden in every conversation about China, how any diseases are blamed so easily on Asian nations, how fear of China has been a scapegoat politically for as long as many of us can probably recall. Still, when we discuss something as heavily destructive to a population as Unit 731 was for Northeast China (and China as a whole), we have to think about what that time really looked like for China. It is true, that only until recently was China reanalyzed to be placed among other economic Superpowers—a point that’s still debated. But they weren’t weak or incapable of defending themselves during World War II.
World War II kicked off in the East thanks to the Second Sino-Japanese War in which Japan invaded China. The Empire of Japan infiltrated and committed numerous atrocities I won’t recount in detail against Chinese people—from the Rape of Nanjing to Unit 731.
Northeast China were demonstrably vulnerable and bleeding. However, China also won battles. There were Chinese warlords and rebellions, there were armies, there was artillery. China had more than just people the enemy could humiliate and harm. They had an abundance of goods as hardy manufacturers, they had raw materials, and Northeast China was blossoming with its own industrial growth. Japan found its way there because of implicit imperial audacity. China had many resources—the railroads Japan could exploit and build, the natural resources they could harvest, and the longer Japan could maintain its foothold there, the more they justified their stay—shifting interests to more hideous efforts such as Unit 731, where human exploitation and experimentation in the name of chemical and biological warfare became commonplace. People were stolen in the middle of the night, experiments were formed not from scientific curiosity but evil and malice, and there were no survivors from this encampment. But this was all after five months of fighting. Japan might have been technologically superior as a byproduct of their advantage in an invasion they led, but China was almost double the size of Japan in its combined armed forces. What the Chinese didn’t have at the time was unification. Even between forces, there was too much division. It was the disunity and miscommunication that played a major role in their vulnerability. Japan exploited that and proved they had no qualms violating any law of man to inflict whatever they could on the enemy.
All of that to say, when Chang focuses so hard on Until 731 in her author’s note, only to then draw a comparison to China’s power as bringing bows and arrows to a gunfight, I couldn’t help but stall for a while. The imbalance was hardly that significant despite the destruction they faced, but that misunderstanding (metaphor or gross understatement at best) of the time period makes it clearer why Chang attempted so feebly to suggest that a world built on magic—a resource that should be anything but finite—was completely incapable of holding up to purely tangible creations like technology.
“Because what if the magic of our ancient stories about Gods and heroes were true? What if we had that magic to fight their science?”
Unfortunately, I can’t answer that question, and I don’t think Chang can, either.
Pangu has magic. However, instead of considering the impact magic would have on this world, it’s treated as a sometimes-thing. Occasionally it exists, at some point it existed more, but it only affected the person who contained these Gifts. Later, Ruying suggests that the Xianling numbers were falling before the Roman Empire invaded. It would be nice to know why Xianlings were even sparse before the Romans seized the city. There are mentions of temples and monks. No one person has the same gift (or often), and these resources would be integral to trade, to habitation and migration, to fantastical-scientific discovery… Pangu would be stronger than China in so many more ways. Or at the very least, Jing-City would have stood a chance.
A world of magic would have been shaped and adorned by these Gifts in its decoration, architecture, ways they produce and harvest plants and other life. I just don’t get why there was no impact on Pangu by magic, to the point that the Romans showed up with bullets and that was enough to take them out. I am fully on board with the idea that Pangulings would have been caught off-guard by this destructive technology. However, Chang also states that the empires across this realm have fought amongst themselves before. So, where's the fight? The armies?
The desecration of temples and reaping of Xianlings is not helping Pangu’s ability to hone their magic, share their knowledge, and mobilize together. I will fully grant you that. And politically speaking, it even makes sense for the Romans to have even more of a reason to reap the Xianlings—to harvest their powers and diminish the other side’s weaponry. But this all culminates to nothing in To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, where Chang wants desperately for you to believe that simply showing a fractured continent is enough to explain away every step the Romans took to get here and why staying would have mattered to them at all. Ruying drawls on endlessly about a world before she doesn’t know but that her grandmother told her about. Ruying’s world is one of ruin, but Chang constantly changes the perspective on you—shifting between a past that was paradisiacal to just as ridden with war and disinterested in maintaining what should be their most prominent resource: their magic. Pangu was never a paradise.
Even in the way Ruying speaks of the old gods, she doesn’t seem to regard them with any sincere reverence until “magically” towards the end of the book when Antony suggests it’s all fairytales and she pulls a fast, “I can say that, but you can’t” on him. Perhaps trauma to their continent has led her to adapt a nearly atheist's approach to religion and her ancestors’ folklore, but you know Death is real. He’s your patron. And you have powers. Those two things already validate the mythology. Chang won’t let me forget Death’s presence—in the most flat, uninteresting way she can. She even renames most of this world with Chinese mythological references, so it’s not just China but Pangu, Er-Lang—a creative technique I like but one she doesn’t practice or even try to invoke with the Romans. They’re just, jarringly, The Romans, on the page. Using the lore more universally would seed these worlds and their people more firmly amongst the rooting of mythological gods and creatures who are very much real in this story—not fairy tales. It would be a chance to attribute their magic to specific gods in more concrete ways. Any sense of the magic system would be an improvement from where we are now given we’ve established nothing.
Ruying spends an asinine amount of time reminding the reader magic can’t do anything against Rome’s technology. Which seems so dismissive of the endless impossibilities of magic. However, in another example of Chang switching sides at convenient times that only betray the rest of her storytelling, Ruying says: “And without magic, what weapons did we have against the might of science?” I would love to know the answer to anything, Yang Ruying. I really would. Especially considering you’re just going to say the opposite, again, later on.
“Science” is not a catch-all term for things that light up and make noise. In this case, the science Romans most often have demonstrated is their artillery and use of electricity. Perhaps even the horrific side of medical science that informs biological warfare. But in not saying what scientific devices or studies Rome is employing at any given time, it only infantilizes Ruying and her worldview even more when she calls everything just “science”. Where did the word science come from? What did Pangu call guns/technology before they learned the Romans’ words for them? Are we just not willing to stretch creatively to come up with uniquely survivalist language to talk about the oppressor? The amount of flavor that could have been added to Pangu would have helped so much in even showcasing how oppressed Er-Lang was (because like most things in To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, we were told everything ad nauseum and rarely shown). Science encapsulates so much. In its definition alone, science is a study. It’s structured and is often associated with beakers and labs and new technologies, but science has existed since the dawn of man. Our first fire was the beginning of curiosities and discoveries. Even keen observation is science. So, with that I must ask, what science and discovery does Pangu have? What is their word for science?
They can be a world of solely magic. What a fun, interesting dichotomy: technology vs magic. But what of the science that drives their ability to multiply the work of either labor or magic? Even if someone possesses plant magic or water magic, or ways to multiply supply, or whatever else a world needs to survive, there still must have been curiosity and earnest study and devotion to those topics. These Gifts were given out seemingly at random. Not every mother and father was blessed with ways to supply their entire household with everything they needed. Neighbors and communities would likely learn to communicate and rely on one another. Agriculture, basic physics, nutrition, hydrology, geography and geology. These are all sciences that have certainly developed further because of their technologies, but are matters of studying, testing, and recording learnings about the natural world. Even if Pangu’s gods inform a fantastical answer to creation, discovering ways to improve these Gifts and develop further is a science that would impact their society and embolden them.
Infuriatingly, Antony Augustus suggests to Yang Ruying that the reason progress never really was in Pangu is because its people wanted for nothing because of their abundance of magic. But that just truly can’t be so. Those with these gifts would have had some wherewithal to trade and build an economy around their skillset—the ways they could positively (and perhaps even negatively) affect their communities. And let us not forget we are in Jing-City. A world that may not be lit to the stars by streetlights and marbled skyrises, but it would certainly be anything but small given it is the home of the Emperor. Creating a world that is both crippled with and without magic is quite boring. What would there be to protect or seize? Romans might still have had some interest in reaping Xianlings, but I highly doubt they would have stayed otherwise. So, I ask again, what is their means for progress and cultural impact?
Yet again, Chang betrays her own writing by having Donghai showcase their ability to work with their magic to share and commune with one another. Don’t worry, though, we don’t linger on the Sihai empire long or get to see a society in action that knows what they’re doing. We’re back in Jing-City before you know it.
For all that it’s frustrated me to read a story that misses its marks in worldbuilding so voraciously, I have to admit that this fragmented view of Pangu in many ways parallels China during the same time period it seeks to mimic in this fictitious retelling. If miscommunication, in-fighting, disunity, and an egregiously mismanaged continent of armed forces also affected China’s survival, it’s not hard to see how even in a universe such as this, this fragility would halt any progress and communion in Er-Lang and beyond. However, where I might fill in these gaps and lend credence to this kind of worldbuilding for another author, I hesitate to ever give such credit or submission of pride to Chang. For an author who did nothing but overstate, overshare, and overexplain through every page of the book where it didn’t matter, she rarely explained or explored what mattered to encourage me to connect with Pangu and this story.
There was such a striking lack of depth everywhere you looked for a world that was supposed to be magical. Where Chang focused heavily on the bruising, cracking, and scarring of the wood and clay of the city, she also never considered beyond that. What lay beyond the ruin—the relics and fractures and evidence of a life before Roman invasion? Even through the eyes of someone who has mostly only known Pangu through the Roman invasion, there must be things Ruying remembers from earlier on before they took such an aggressive place in this world. Or things she could connect to her grandmother’s stories in specific, detailed ways, that could show us more than the wallowing misery of Ruying’s psyche we’re left with as our companion through the story. Ruying’s regard for her realm is surprisingly irreverent and dismissive of the culture that would breathe through the streets, even if some of it remains only in tatters and debris. I can only remember one positive thing Ruying regarded about Jing-City, and it was the love and joy she witnessed in the night market: a spark of something that probably once was abundant. And yet, when it came to painting the landscape of Jing-City, the night market, or the view beyond, she seemed to only land on the vibrant color of the paper lanterns before moving on.
By lewd contrast, the way Ruying regards the Roman architecture with such awe and horror glamorizes their culture in ways that makes me believe Ruying is more infatuated than she is horrified. (And given the underdeveloped yet outlandish ways that she has regarded Antony’s countenance and person from the beginning, I believe that.) Ruying takes note of every etching, every golden and marbled detail, the shapes of their vaulted ceilings and domed towers. It's all there, clearer than I could imagine the Pangu side of Jing-City. What blanks I've filled derive from my own fictional and nonfictional glimpses of China through media. It's enough to paint a picture, but I would prefer the person who wants to showcase their love of this world would want to be my tour guide.
I have wondered if Chang’s time in the UK influences this to some degree. Perhaps in her author’s note she’s even stating outright this is a disheartening look at her disconnection with her country—only now seeing it for the pain that seethes from her grandfather’s stories and pandemic travel restrictions to touchdown on its paths herself (because I fully sympathize as a southern “expat” how difficult it can be to not be near home or family). Perhaps in Europe, with its unmistakable inspiration from ancient societies in its historical buildings—marble and arches crafted into collegiate, important, and breathtaking shapes—she sees some fondness or intrigue in that influence and style. This, if true, might be why Ruying gazes upright (not towards the portal or the gods, but the magnificence of Rome’s settlement) and takes in every golden embellishment and smooth stone as something to behold. Something new. Something wonderful (but ultimately empty and shallow, as she’ll try to convince you, the reader).
However, China—and shared in various ways across Asia—have even more striking shapes, artistry, and lore built into the temples, the streets, and the way it’s all transformed by its religious and aesthetic adornments. I will give some leeway to Chang it was long-since established that the Romans burned down Er-Lang’s temples, so perhaps she was suggesting these were their most prominent monuments to their culture. However, I would think there would be evidence of it everywhere—anywhere they could pay their regards to the old gods or tell a story through the art that coats the walls. Surely, even in their desperation and selfishness, an entire city of people aren't all just living in complete irreverence like Ruying.
The inside cover shows artwork with buildings that possess the iconic Chinese hip and gable roofing structures. If you look closely, some of them are even tiered and tower like pagodas. Where did they come from? Why is there such a stark disconnect between the imagery in the story and love that goes into showing a city split between Roman and Chinese (Panguling) influence? The attention to detail Ruying gives to Roman architecture is also strange to think about when you realize how complex and unique something like a pagoda is. If Panguling architects can create such structures, and their Er-Lang emperor’s palace is supposedly one of the most beautiful places in the continent, why do we never linger on these moments and places? Why is everything in Jing-City or the greater Er-Lang nothing but decay, beaten into me in repetitious assault? If Chang wants to describe the trauma the land and buildings breathe with Pangulings, she can do that in far more specific ways than she has. One that makes me believe Ruying longs for anything. For now, our main character seems to be nothing more than an inconsistent caricature who claims to only know survival with no reason for why that might be important—what are you surviving for when your world is a wasteland and you've long since been disconnected from it? Who are you trying to protect and survive for when you’ve spent no time trying to prove to me there is love and devotion to her family there? Ruying is a coward, but in more ways than Chang wants to admit. She’s not an unreliable narrator, she’s shackled by an author who fails at every turn to tell a linear story that isn’t ravaged by internal monologue that completely takes you out of the scene or yet again has characters doing everything they can to spoon feed you the plot and gaslight you out of trying to follow along in a meaningful way.
Chang has tried fervently on her social media to poise this as a story where the protagonist must choose the villain's side over the hero's side to survive, setting Ruying up to be a flawed character. However, Ruying's motivations are completely at the whims of whatever is most convenient for Chang to write chapter-to-chapter.
My mind wandered, eyes glossing over, pain shooting through the hands clutching this book as pages upon pages never sought to give me answers but merely repeat the same sentiments in exhaustive, redundant detail. I felt imprisoned by Chang’s prose, suffocated by the endless dialogue, and hoping for Dawson to appear with that shock remote to yank me out of every scene and relieve me of the nightmare that was either someone speaking or Ruying’s internal monologues. Conversations felt like fever dreams, where characters would just conveniently know more than they should, imply where there was no context, and eat up pages with strange comebacks that not only felt stilted in their phrasing but felt like far longer than human beings would ever spend speaking at one time.
(I will indeed never forget Antony walking up to Ruying and whispering in her ear for what was supposed to be seductive, but he speaks for almost an entire page so close to her he might as well chewed her ear off. These two were not even alone when he did it. In what world would anyone doing something like this be normal?)
Even in anger, even as a rant, what could have been a haughty reply to keep the pacing of the conversation active, Chang would cuff me again to a cell wall and make me listen to characters speak at me (sometimes Ruying was also a victim to this, though I never can tell if she’s present in a scene with the way she responds to anything). These same characters bore witness to Ruying’s infantile relationship with the world around her and her inability to understand basic strategy and logic, yet they were desperate to make me see her as smart. Or believe she'd ever been smart.
I could go through line-by-line and really map out how unbelievable all her relationships are; how Chang did nothing to guide me through the story or provide a narrative form that would give the reader an understanding of what’s happening versus what Ruying is babbling about; how unbelievably stupid it was to watch Ruying fall for Antony when even Chang couldn’t write him consistently or with any charisma and made sure to have every character tell me he’s a bad boy; how Chang spends an egregious amount of time repeating herself, having the characters try to desperately convince me of something and pull back the curtain to show me the plot right in front of Ruying while she just closed her eyes I GUESS; how Ruying spends more of her time lambasting others for the roles they play only to find herself choosing the most egregiously selfish and stupid role in the entire book for no reason other than it was there, and unfortunately I was supposed to see something to connect with her about it or find her heroic; how Chang very violently stamped all over her grandfather’s stories to whitewash the enemy, neutralize the true gore and violence of it all by never showing you anything just telling you bad things happen sometimes, and otherwise making a mockery out of a history whose reality has already been covered up enough by both the perpetrators and the ones who were supposed to be China’s allies. This is not historical fiction. This is not adult fantasy. This is a Wattpad self-insert reimagining of a very unfortunate person I’m forced to listen to page after page make a joke out of some of the world’s worst atrocities—a parallel of which could have been meaningful and explored something deeply necessary about vulnerability and generational trauma. Instead, it was all the Romans and their big, bad guns, who really did everything for completely positive and altruistic reasons I swear, Ruying.
There is so much more I could analyze, but I think I've exhausted my patience.
“Except I didn't want to be here, to take part in any of this,” Ruying thought.
Girl, same.
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