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jiuweihuHere's a short summary for people who don't want to read the entirety of this: Yan is a mythological figure whose magic is lost due to the rape and pillage of European colonization. She is forced to become a sex worker in order to survive in the "modernized" British world, and she has frequently been abused in this process. The governor of Hong Kong drugged her and forced her to undergo surgical modifications to replace 90% of her organic body with machinery. She maintained her face, sexual organs, and sensory system (because sci-fi bullshit). I may or may not play her in the chrome form Liang builds for her, which allows her to transform into her former fox body.
Quoted text is taken from this amazing essay.
Yan is a huli jing – a figure from Chinese folklore, typically viewed as the equivalent of a succubus. However, in her presentation in Ken Liu's original text and her appearance in "Love, Death, and Robots," this trope is quickly identified as a male means of damning female sexuality, of a fear of a woman's sexual freedom.
As Yan and her mother are introduced, it's very quickly made apparent that the huli jing are not evil spirits, hellbent on stealing a man's vitality and virility. Instead, Yan explains to the son of a spirit hunter (Liang) that men are the ones who call a huli jing. Their persistence and unwillingness to relinquish the spirit's autonomy constantly calls the spirit back.
Liang's father hunts Yan's mother, on the behalf of a merchant's son, who has become fixated on Yan's mother. When she tries to flee, Liang and his father pursue, and Liang encounters Yan, still a pup and desperately trying to hide from the spirit hunters. Yan explains the reality of huli jing, and after Liang's father brutally decapitates Yan's mother, Liang protects Yan's existence, and allows her to go free.
”Good Hunting” focuses on the narrative of colonialism and the violence enacted on the native population, subjected to British control. As the British “modernize” and bring steam-powered machines to China, the magical creatures – like Yan – suffer from the pollution and destruction of their homes. Magic fades, and Yan is trapped in her human form. She flees to Hong Kong in order to survive, and finds work as a sex worker – the only opportunity available to her, as a Chinese woman, in a colonial world.
Yan endures a multitude of mistreatment and assault at the hands of the British men she services, and she’s given no choice. She exists in a world of exploitation, and in the way that the British have taken her land and destroyed her culture, they see that same entitlement to her body, after they’ve already taken her magic. Yan serves the governor, and initially, he doesn’t expect her to perform sexual services. After multiple visits, he drugs her, and she awakens to find him surgically replacing her organic body with steam-powered prosthetics.
Yan eventually murders the governor when he beats her for vocally rejecting him. Though she’s lost her magic, the governor has inadvertently returned some of her prior strength and ability – and Yan takes the prosthetics that have been forced upon her and uses them against her abuser. She strikes back, overpowers him, and rips his face in half.
After killing the governor, Yan goes to Liang and asks for his help. By embracing the means that has stripped her power, autonomy, and magic – the steam-powered body – Liang helps her replace the pieces from the governor’s experiments. She is given a shifting body that allows her to take her former huli jing body. With strength renewed, Yan vows to return to hunting – to hunt the men who think they can own her, who think they have a right to the bodies of women and the land that they’ve stolen.
Quoted text is taken from this amazing essay.
Yan is a huli jing – a figure from Chinese folklore, typically viewed as the equivalent of a succubus. However, in her presentation in Ken Liu's original text and her appearance in "Love, Death, and Robots," this trope is quickly identified as a male means of damning female sexuality, of a fear of a woman's sexual freedom.
The huli jing is a figure heavily entrenched in the Chinese psyche as promiscuous, immoral, and sexually devious, to the extent that it even permeates the language: “huli jing” is widely used today as an insult against sexually deviant women (usually against 小三 / 3rd party / side woman, like slut / bitch).
As Yan and her mother are introduced, it's very quickly made apparent that the huli jing are not evil spirits, hellbent on stealing a man's vitality and virility. Instead, Yan explains to the son of a spirit hunter (Liang) that men are the ones who call a huli jing. Their persistence and unwillingness to relinquish the spirit's autonomy constantly calls the spirit back.
“She liked her freedom and didn’t want anything to do with him. But once a man has set his heart on a hulijing, she cannot help hearing him no matter how far apart they are. All that moaning and crying he did drove her to distraction, and she had to go see him every night just to keep him quiet.”
Liang's father hunts Yan's mother, on the behalf of a merchant's son, who has become fixated on Yan's mother. When she tries to flee, Liang and his father pursue, and Liang encounters Yan, still a pup and desperately trying to hide from the spirit hunters. Yan explains the reality of huli jing, and after Liang's father brutally decapitates Yan's mother, Liang protects Yan's existence, and allows her to go free.
”Good Hunting” focuses on the narrative of colonialism and the violence enacted on the native population, subjected to British control. As the British “modernize” and bring steam-powered machines to China, the magical creatures – like Yan – suffer from the pollution and destruction of their homes. Magic fades, and Yan is trapped in her human form. She flees to Hong Kong in order to survive, and finds work as a sex worker – the only opportunity available to her, as a Chinese woman, in a colonial world.
For the native woman, due to the colonial sexual appetite – the tradition of rape and pillage – violence occurs at the intimate meeting point of her body, on which white expectations of her race are burdened – note how the stereotype of Chinese industriousness is used to pressure her into sexual labour. The colonizers feel entitled to the servitude of both native bodies – the man’s labour, and the woman’s sexual subjugation.
Yan endures a multitude of mistreatment and assault at the hands of the British men she services, and she’s given no choice. She exists in a world of exploitation, and in the way that the British have taken her land and destroyed her culture, they see that same entitlement to her body, after they’ve already taken her magic. Yan serves the governor, and initially, he doesn’t expect her to perform sexual services. After multiple visits, he drugs her, and she awakens to find him surgically replacing her organic body with steam-powered prosthetics.
To further cement this idea that the colonized woman’s body is conflated to the land, Yan’s body comes to receive the ultimate abuse from the figure of the governor (or the governor’s son, in the original text). Her sexual perpetrator is not an everyman, but the political representative of the British colonist; where Yan embodies native Chinese culture, her rapist embodies the British colonial administration. He ravages and consumes her body as a colonizer takes and devours territory – I think the showrunners deliberately portrayed him as obese to evoke a grotesque image of imperialist greed and over-consumption of the colonies’ resource. (Of course, this has problematic real-life implications on public perceptions of fat people.) He takes her organic body apart and reconstructs her to his own fetish fantasy of steel and chrome – just as Britain fragments, reforms, reshapes China’s trade, opium economy, and territory (e.g. Hong Kong), to its own will. Yan’s rape and reconstruction is thus conflated to the political conquest of China and Hong Kong.
Yan eventually murders the governor when he beats her for vocally rejecting him. Though she’s lost her magic, the governor has inadvertently returned some of her prior strength and ability – and Yan takes the prosthetics that have been forced upon her and uses them against her abuser. She strikes back, overpowers him, and rips his face in half.
After killing the governor, Yan goes to Liang and asks for his help. By embracing the means that has stripped her power, autonomy, and magic – the steam-powered body – Liang helps her replace the pieces from the governor’s experiments. She is given a shifting body that allows her to take her former huli jing body. With strength renewed, Yan vows to return to hunting – to hunt the men who think they can own her, who think they have a right to the bodies of women and the land that they’ve stolen.
