Contemporary Authors

• An Excess Male ( novel) HarperCollins Publishers (New York, NY), 2017

1. An excess male : a novel LCCN 2017276454 Type of material Book Personal name King, Maggie Shen Main title An excess male : a novel / Maggie Shen King. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Harper Collins Publishers, [2017] Description 406 pages : 21 cm ISBN 9780062662552 CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Amazon -

  Maggie Shen King is the author of An Excess Male (Harper Voyager), a Washington Post Top 5 Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel of 2017, a James Tiptree Jr., and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She is Goodreads September 2017 Debut Author the Month. Her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Fourteen Hills. Her manuscript Fortune's Fools, won Second Prize in Amazon's 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award.

  Her previously published short story are available on her website MaggieShenKing.com.

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• The Qwillery - http://qwillery.blogspot.com/2017/09/interview-with-maggie-shen-king-author.html

  Wednesday, September 13, 2017
  Interview with Maggie Shen King, author of An Excess Male

  Please welcome Maggie Shen King to The Qwillery as part of the of the 2017 Debut Author Challenge Interviews. An Excess Male was published on September 12th by Harper Voyager.

  TQ: Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?

  Maggie: Thank you for having me. It is a real pleasure for me to tell your readers about my book.

  I studied English literature in college and have been an avid reader my entire life. I took one creative writing class in college and have always dreamed about becoming a writer some day. About ten years ago, when my youngest child started middle school and I had more time at my disposal, I sat down and gave writing a serious try.

  I discovered that I really liked inventing stories, puzzling together scenes and situations, and polishing sentences over and over until I got them right. Writing suited my temperament and helped me find myself after a decade and a half dedicated to raising my boys.

  I am very fortunate to live next door to Stanford University, and I started taking creative writing classes there.

  TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

  Maggie: I have been both a plotter and a pantser. An Excess Male is my first published novel, but my second attempt at writing one. My first effort, Fortune’s Fools, was written with an outline which I found very comforting at the time. I did not always follow it, but I had a fuzzy idea where I was heading.

  An Excess Male was a writing experiment and an education every step of the way. I first wrote “Ball and Chain,” a short story which was published by Asimov’s Science Fiction. I was intrigued by the experiences of each member of this potential family and wrote alternating chapters from their points of view. I liked their voices but had no idea where they would lead me. It was fun and, at times, nerve-racking.

  I thought I was writing a modern twist on the marriage plot with a male protagonist at its center. A fifth of the way into the writing, I realized that I also had a speculative dystopian novel on my hands and had to learn about the genre.

  When I was at 90,000 words, I experienced a small panic attack. I didn’t know if my year-plus effort had an ending. I still remember meeting for coffee with my writing group pal, M.P. Cooley, and the two of us forcing each other to think through to the conclusions of our respective books.

  TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

  Maggie: Not get distracted by email and all the tantalizing things on the internet is my biggest challenge. I think best with my fingers on the keyboard, and I find that if I am able to do that, the words and ideas usually come.

  TQ: What has influenced / influences your writing?

  Maggie: I think my greatest influences first and foremost were my writing teachers at Stanford Continuing Studies. I’ve had the fortune to learn from Professor Nancy Packer and Stegner Fellows Eric Puchner, Thomas McNeely, and Otis Haschemeyer. They taught me the craft of writing and much, much more.

  In writing An Excess Male, I looked to a number of books for guidance. The Handmaid’s Tale is quite similar thematically to mine. It fascinated me that the draconian measures in both The Handmaid’s Tale and in my book began as well-intentioned efforts to solve serious crises. The theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale was facing an eroding environment, sharply declining fertility rates, and possible extinction while the State in An Excess Male was contending with overpopulation and mass starvation. The original intent in both cases was good, yet the practice in actuality was the legislation of what can and cannot be done to women’s bodies.

  Another book that was very much on my mind was Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. My book also had a situation where an entire citizenry was made disposable by a national narrative, a setting where everyone was aware of the unspoken subtext in public utterances, where it was not always safe for one’s outward actions to mirror what was in one’s heart. I was really inspired by a passage in The Orphan Master’s Son—a talk every parent must have with his or her child about how they must speak and act in the way expected by the State, yet inside they must still be a family and their true selves. They must hold hands in their hearts.

  Some other books that helped me with world building and speculative dystopian novels: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Vampires in the Lemon Grove and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell.

  TQ: Describe An Excess Male in 140 characters or less.

  Maggie: Under the One-Child Policy, everyone plotted to have a son. Now 30 million of them can’t find wives, and the State must intervene again.

  TQ: Tell us something about An Excess Male that is not found in the book description.

  Maggie: The many hours I spent at children’s laser tag parties helped me dream up scenes in this book.

  TQ: What inspired you to write An Excess Male?

  Maggie: I got the idea five years ago when I opened up the morning paper and read about the gender imbalance in China brought on by its One Child Policy and cultural bias for male heirs. By the year 2030, 25% of men in their late thirties—nearly 30 million people—will never have married.

  I learned that the natural sex ratio at birth is about 107 boys to 100 girls. The skew is nature’s ingenious way of making up for the higher mortality rate among males. During the 37 years in which the One Child Policy was law, the ratio got as high as 137 to 100 in some rural provinces.

  Even with the phasing out of the law starting in 2015, this society will be testosterone-fueled, prone to aggression and crime, and plagued by an undercurrent of loneliness and dissatisfaction for decades to come. And to make matters even more intriguing, all of these unmarried men are the only children in their families, accustomed to the undivided attention of doting parents and grandparents.

  This news story had more zip than my morning coffee, and I was convinced right away that it held the premise for an interesting novel.

  TQ: What appealed to you about writing a near-future novel about what might happen due to China's One Child Policy?

  Maggie: After the Great Leap Forward, China was facing food shortages and mass starvation. Population control was essential, and the One Child Policy was China’s answer to a very serious crisis.

  This policy also became one the largest scaled and longest lasting social engineering experiment of all time. It was enforced by Chinese officials and at times, by its citizenry in ways that often violated widely accepted rules of ethics and human decency. Despite the cultural bias for male heirs and repeated warnings from census data, the law remained in effect for nearly forty years.

  It was an experiment that created serious unintended consequences, a true cautionary tale against man’s attempt to interfere with the natural order.

  TQ: What sort of research did you do for An Excess Male?

  Maggie: In the process of writing two books, I discovered that for me research could become an excuse for not writing. After doing some reading on the subject in newspapers and magazines, I did internet searches as I wrote when the need arose. I also searched for appropriate photographs online to help me visualize settings and capture moods. Researching in this manner saved me time and made me focus on the story, and the material I found was exactly what I needed for the scene I was working on.

  I joke with my friends that I should thank Google’s search engine in my book’s acknowledgement page, but it is really not a joke. It is mind-blowing the amount of information that is at our fingertips. Except for my visit to Beijing, I was able to find everything I needed online.

  TQ: Please tell us about the cover for An Excess Male.

  Maggie: The cover was designed by Kapo Ng. I loved it at first sight. The very modern male figure with the movie-star good looks pulled me in right away. I felt compelled to focus on him only to discover that his substance is composed of his city scape. He is a man defined by his homeland. The two bold, diagonal red stripes seem to place him behind bars, to circumscribe him in a way. Despite his winning looks, “An Excess Male” is nevertheless stamped across his visage, and the rather unforgiving, institutional labeling with the Buran USSR font (love that name) of the title further restricts him. The color scheme completes the cover by perfectly encapsulating the authoritarian elements of the story.

  When I received the finished copy of the book, I was pleasantly surprised by the gloss that was added to the red stripes and title. It made the cover even more eye catching.

  TQ: In An Excess Male who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

  Maggie: I found XX the easiest and the most fun character to write. He was on the autism spectrum and had a very distinct voice, one that was so logical it defied logic. There was no artifice to him. He began the book with the least amount of influence and power within his family, yet by just being who he was, he was able to make himself indispensable during a family crisis. Achieving that kind of reversal for a character was immensely satisfying.

  I found my central female character, May-ling, the most difficult to write. Women were so rare in this society, they became nearly subhuman, a resource to be protected, commoditized, and allocated. She was the product of greedy daughter breeders. I wanted May-ling to be true to her upbringing and environment, and I had a difficult time with her youth and naiveté. She was initially focused solely on her relationships with her husband and son, and it felt stifling to confine her powers to the domestic realm. What she most desired—true physical and emotional connection with Hann—was absolutely crucial to her marriage, and her ability to vocalize and assert her need was instrumental to her growth. But the day-to-day drama of it began to feel repetitive and petty. It was when she moved out of the domestic situation into the the bigger world—into confrontations with other mothers at the park, with MONKeyKing, and with Tommy and Quality Gao that she comes into her own for me and finds agency.

  TQ: Which question about An Excess Male do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

  Maggie: What is your favorite scene in the book?

  My favorite scene is the last merengue at the TV station. The book starts out with the dance and comes full circle in this scene. I love the cacophony of the crashing heels, the pathetic step and drag of the movement, the helplessness and desperation in the gesture, but also the power in these small acts of rebellion.

  TQ: Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from An Excess Male.

  Maggie: How about three quotes that together sum up the premise and tone of the book?

  “The government has awarded us—members of ‘The Bounty’—official status, investing in public campaigns to make the phrases ‘unmarriageable,’ ‘excess,’ and ‘leftover’ men unpatriotic and backwards.”

  “The distraction and physical exhaustion of a thoughtful exercise plan are as non-negotiable for [members of ‘The Bounty’] as sleep, food, and weekly, State-arranged sex.”

  “These days, only fools speak freely amongst strangers.”

  TQ: What's next?

  Maggie: Here is one of the ideas I’m playing with: In addition to 30 million unmarriageable men, the One Child Policy has produced yet another set of victims—girls whose hukou or household registration were saved by their parents for a younger brother. These girls, called heihaizi or shadow or ghost children, are undocumented, illegal, and non-existent in the eyes of the law. They have no rights to health care, education, or legal protection. They cannot ride public transportation, marry, obtain or inherit property, or have children. The 2010 Census estimated the number of “nonpersons” to be at least 13 million. You can read my short story at: https://maggieshenking.com/companion-story-invite/

  TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

• New Bloom - https://newbloommag.net/2017/11/15/interview-maggie-shen-king/

  Interview: Maggie Shen King
  Garrett Dee11/15/2017EnglishInterviewsNovember 2017

  by Garrett Dee

  語言:
  English
  Photo Credit: Maggie Shen King

  Maggie Shen King is a Taiwanese-American author living in the San Francisco Bay area whose debut novel An Excess Male has garnered attention from audiences and critics for its imaginative take on the long term effects of the Chinese One Child policy. In the novel, King presents a vision of China in which the government tackles the demographic problem brought on by sex-selective abortions undertaken by Chinese couples hoping for a son through the proposal of multiple-husband marriages, a policy which brings with it a host of other changes and complications in society as single men vie for the attention of scarce brides and their families.
  The novel has been compared favorably with similar works of speculative fiction and has been featured in the Washington Post and Publisher’s Weekly. The following is an interview with King conducted over email with New Bloom writer Garrett Dee.

  Garrett Dee: The Chinese government started phasing out the One Child policy in 2015, but it was agreed upon by researchers that the effects of the policy had already fundamentally changed the demographics of Chinese society, particularly in the area of the imbalance in gender and the lack of women, which your novel focuses on. What was it about this particular phenomenon that drew you towards turning it into a novel?
  Maggie Shen King: I started writing the novel five years ago, a few years before the phasing out of the policy. When I heard about the change, I was very happy for the Chinese people, but worried about its effect on the premise of my book. I soon remembered that these excess men are already born, and doing away with the policy will not alter the fact that 30 million men will have difficulty finding a mate.
  This topic intrigued me because the One Child Policy is one of the largest scaled and longest lasting population control measures in human history. Originally designed to be a one generation fix, the policy stayed in effect for nearly 40 years. The original intention was good, but it created a host of unintended consequences. In this case, reality was stranger than fiction. The One Child Policy ultimately became one of the most radical social engineering experiments of all time.
  Maggie Shen King. Photo credit: Maggie Shen King
  GD: The novel’s setting of a near-future China is one that is recognizable enough to readers to feel familiar to the present day, yet at the same time can be almost Orwellian in its description of government use of surveillance technology and general distrust of the people around you. Would you describe the setting you wanted to portray as a dystopia and, if so, do you believe that this is a real possibility for China’s future?
  MSK: Dystopian novels present a version of the future that the writer would never want to see take place and in that way, serve as cautionary tales. I am not proposing polyandry as a solution to the gender imbalance problem, nor do I see it as a real possibility for China. It is a provocative means in my book of generating discussion about the cultural preference for boys and its creation of 30 million excess males. I am interested in telling the story of excess men and giving voice to these unintended victims of Chinese patriarchy, sexual discrimination, and the One Child Policy.
  GD: You grew up in Taiwan before moving to the United States. The novel is set in Beijing but could also be seen through the lens of having a connection with culture and notions of family and society throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Was there anything specifically Taiwanese that you brought into the process of writing the novel?
  MSK: Taiwan and China share a common language, heritage, and culture. I was born in Taiwan and lived there the first sixteen years of my life. I like telling unusual stories from my homeland, and my early life and education in Taiwan give me a perspective from which to make sense of that part of the world for the Western audience.
  I am very proud to call myself Taiwanese. I’m very proud of the significant strides that Taiwan’s government has made since the 1990s toward a multi-party political system and toward human rights. Taiwan ranks 18th in the world in terms of GDP. It is also the first country in Asia to recognize gay marriage.
  Taiwanese citizens enjoy all the freedoms of a democratic nation today, but during my entire childhood, the country was under martial law. My parents discussed politics in hushed tones out of my earshot. My father sent me off to college in Boston with the warning not to join any Chinese student organizations—Kuomintang student spies were known to infiltrate these groups—and to keep my opinions to myself. I grew up with the understanding that political discussions and open speech were dangerous activities that were best done in private.
  These lessons from my childhood are deeply ingrained. Looking back, I think choosing to set this story in a speculative future grew out of that environment and upbringing. Speculative fiction offers a wide and somewhat safer space in which to grapple with politically sensitive topics.
  GD: The novel centers in on issues surrounding gender equality and homosexuality in China, with the society being quite patriarchal and discriminatory despite there being a huge shift in the traditional notions of a family. China is a primarily male-dominated society at almost all levels of authority. What have you seen as some of the difficulties surrounding the acceptance of these issues in society?
  MSK: Homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997 and declassified as a mental illness in 2001, but it still carries a great deal of social stigma. I think the One Child Policy plays a part in the difficulty of its acceptance. The continuation of one’s family line is a filial duty, and by limiting each family to one child, homosexuality of that only child takes on added significance. It is estimated that 80% of gay or bisexual men have married a straight woman and live in sham marriages.
  If we put aside the governmental intrusion into women’s private reproductive matters, the overall status of women has benefited from the One Child Policy. On the home front, singleton daughters by default received all of their parents’ attention, wealth, and pride. Government slogans strongly pushed the idea of male-female equality and the importance of both girls and boys to the country’s future. Improved education levels for women opened the door to greater opportunities. The policy’s strict population quotas forced women to delay marriage and childbirth and as a result, women extended their education and careers.
  GD: Several people have compared the central themes of the novel with the similar themes of feminism and personal freedom presented in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which has entered into the public discourse more prominently lately thanks to the television show produced by Hulu. What do you think about these comparisons?
  MSK: The Handmaid’s Tale was definitely one of the books I admired and thought about when I wrote An Excess Male, and I’m thrilled my reviewers saw similarities.
  Both the creation of handmaids and the institution of polyandry in my book were attempts to solve serious crises. The theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale was facing an eroding environment, sharply declining fertility rates, and possible extinction while the State in An Excess Male first contended with overpopulation and mass starvation and then with social imbalance and unrest. The original intent in both cases was good, yet the practice in actuality was the legislation of what can and cannot be done to women’s bodies.
  Both The Handmaid’s Tale and An Excess Male are examples of societies built on the sacrifice of a select few for the public good. Such societies are ultimately untenable. The human survival instinct dictates that until the basic needs and rights of all its citizens are protected and valued, a society cannot be at peace.
  GD: Several times in the novel the clash between personal desire and the responsibility one has towards the society as a whole plays a pivotal point in the plot. The book touches on the Chinese government’s push to get citizens to see personal and familial sacrifice as their patriotic duty. What do you see as the role of these forces in modern China?
  MSK: The rights of the individual versus the public good is an age-old struggle not just in China but in every situation where people come together to form a society. Societies cannot function without laws and rules. In an ideal situation, all people enjoy equal rights, believe in the cause, and voluntarily work in service of the greater, common good. Problems arise when citizens are forced to abide by laws that are designed for the public good, but infringe upon the individual rights.
  Cover of An Excess Male. Photo credit: Maggie Shen King
  GD: What has been the reception to the novel in the United States and overseas? Was there anything about readers’ reactions that surprised you?
  MSK: In America, individualism rules. People live with the conviction that they are at the center of their own narrative, their rights and values paramount. The thought of having to surrendering one’s most private rights to the State is difficult to conceive, and this audience finds stories based on the One Child Policy curious and highly interesting.
  I’ve lived in the U.S. for nearly four decades now, and my sensibilities cannot help but become more Western. When I think of the One Child Policy, I think about how it has affected the individual, most specifically how it has intruded upon women and their reproductive rights. I assumed that most Chinese people felt the same way. The reaction that most surprised me came from a Chinese citizen who reminded me that in implementing the One Child Policy, Chinese people made a great sacrifice for their country and their country, in turn, made a great sacrifice for the entire world. This sacrifice is not one that ought to be taken lightly or criticized.
  GD: What do you have planned for future writings? Do you think you will ever explore these issues again?
  MSK: The more I learn about the One Child Policy, the more I am haunted by another set of its victims—girls whose hukou or household registration were saved for a younger brother. These girls, called heihaizi or shadow or ghost children, are undocumented, illegal, and non-existent in the eyes of the law. They have no rights to health care, education, or legal protection. They cannot legally ride public transportation, marry, obtain or inherit property, or have children.
  I’ve been exploring this subject as a possible next novel. You can read my short story at: https://maggieshenking.com/companion-story-invite/

• Unbound Worlds - http://www.unboundworlds.com/2017/11/maggie-shen-king-dystopian-novel-excess-male/

  Maggie Shen King on Her Dystopian Novel An Excess Male
  By Matt Staggs
  November 9, 2017

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  “Please for the sake of your country, use birth control.”
  By Venus (China One Child Policy) [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons
  Maggie Shen King is the author of An Excess Male: a dystopian tale of love and rebellion. In near-future China, the nation’s One Child Policy and cultural preference for male heirs have created a society overrun by 40 million unmarriageable men. An Excess Male is the story of one of these men, and his search for love and freedom in a country intent on squashing both. We recently spoke with King about the book, and the real events that inspired it.
  Unbound Worlds: An Excess Male is a tale of speculative fiction, but it is based on the real-life consequences of China’s One-Child policy. When did you realize that the situation had potential as a story? Did the events speak to you particularly, as a woman writer?
  Maggie Shen King: I read a newspaper article five years ago about the gender imbalance in China, a consequence of its One-Child Policy and cultural preference for male heirs, and knew right away that the situation had great potential for a story. It was an instance where the reality was stranger than fiction.
  Initially, I set out to write an updated marriage plot, one with a male protagonist at its center. As I delved into the subject matter, my writing became darker and darker. The policy had unintentionally produced not only 30 million excess males, but also a ruthless monitoring system rife with corruption, sex trafficking in poor neighboring nations, a huge underclass of uneducated illegals, and a destabilized workforce. I discovered that the premise of my book held all the necessary elements of a classic dystopian novel.
  In particular, I was stunned by the intrusiveness and inhumanity of the policy’s enforcement. Local birth officials were issued baby quotas, and the pressure to remain within those quotas was tremendous. They charted the menstrual cycles and contraceptive methods of individual women under their purview and granted birth permission. Should a pregnancy occur outside of plan, they pressured women to have abortions, sometimes interfering in their workplace, confiscating their family’s means of livelihood, and jailing relatives to coerce their intended outcome. The original intent of controlling population in order to avoiding mass starvation was good, but the practice in actuality became the legislation of what can and cannot be done to women’s bodies.
  UW: It is my understanding that you grew up in Taiwan: a political state that has a complicated relationship with China. I realize that this is a sensitive topic, but has that influenced the way that you write about the nation and its history?
  MSK: I’m probably not the best person to talk about my subconscious writing impulses. This is a complicated and sensitive topic, and there are a number of conflicting perspectives to bear in mind when you read An Excess Male.
  One, China considers Taiwan a runaway province, a rebel nation. When I was in elementary school in Taiwan, we were taught that our mission was to one day conquer China and take back the mainland. The Communist were our adversaries, the usurpers of our homeland. They confiscated homes and personal property and separated children from parents.
  And two, Taiwanese citizens enjoy all the freedoms of a democratic nation today, but during my entire childhood, we lived under martial law. My parents used hushed tones around my brother and me when discussing politics and political leaders. I remember overhearing that a distant relative was framed and jailed for political dissent. We moved to the U.S. when I was sixteen, and my father sent me off to college with the warning not to join any Chinese student organizations and to keep my opinions to myself. Kuomintang student-spies sometimes infiltrated these organizations. I grew up with the understanding that political discussions and open speech were dangerous activities.
  Today, the people of Taiwan are made of two camps. The first (mostly Taiwanese people) has moved on from the rhetoric of retaking China to a desire for independence for Taiwan. The second (mostly Chinese of Mainland descent) seeks unification with China.
  I am of Taiwanese descent. I’ve lived in the U.S. for nearly four decades and take for granted the freedom of speech. Censorship is a fact of life in China, and the lessons from my childhood are deeply ingrained.
  UW: China seems to be going through a renaissance in science fiction literature. I’m thinking of Liu Cixin’s works, among others. I had read that at one time China’s Communist Party had considered science-fiction to be subversive, but now it is everywhere. More writers who aren’t Chinese seem to be incorporating the nation and its history into their own works. What do you think has changed?
  MSK: In China, the State controls most of the publishing houses, and science fiction was rarely published in the latter part of the 20th century. The rise of the internet changed everything. It gave science fiction writers a forum for sharing and receiving feedback on their work, a community, and a training ground. Thru the internet, sci-fi writers gained traction and found fans, and their great popularity eventually won them institutional recognition. Today, the State cites science fiction as a means of improving its people’s scientific literacy and has established national science fiction awards.
  In the last decades, China has enjoyed meteoric growth. Much of this recent Golden Age of science fiction grapple with rapid modernization and its effect on people’s values, lifestyle, tradition, identity, and emotions and the exchange of morality and personal freedom for surging wealth. Science fiction provides a means for social commentary and a wide and somewhat safer space for politically sensitive topics.

• Maggie Shen King Website - https://maggieshenking.com

  Maggie Shen King is the author of An Excess Male (Harper Voyager), one of The Washington Post's 5 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of 2017, a James Tiptree, Jr. and Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She is Goodreads September 2017 Debut Author the Month. Her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Fourteen Hills. Her manuscript Fortune's Fools, won Second Prize in Amazon's 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award.
  Maggie took one creative writing class when she was a freshmen at Harvard, but did not begin writing in earnest until 2004 when her youngest child started middle school. She has studied with Nancy Packer, Eric Puchner, Thomas McNeely, and Otis Haschemeyer at Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program. She shows her work regularly to two writing groups, one of which was formed at the conclusion of her first course at Stanford.
  Maggie grew up in Taiwan and attended both Chinese and American schools before moving to Seattle at age sixteen. She has managed the coffers of PTAs, a gardening club, and a local political campaign. When she is not writing, she can usually be found hacking her way around a golf course. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1292.Maggie_Shen_King

  Debut Author Snapshot: Maggie Shen King
  September, 2017
  14 likes · 3 comments
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  The debut novel An Excess Male is set in a near-future China in the aftermath of its One-Child Policy and cultural bias for male heirs. In the book 40 million men are unable to find wives, and the government has mandated that its families demonstrate patriotism and help solve the crisis by taking on additional husbands.

  An Excess Male presents a new twist on the age-old marriage plot. It's the story of one excess male, the less-than-perfect family he seeks to join, and the fight for their version of home as well as the country they have lost to a regime that aimed to control reproduction and define the boundaries of marriage in the name of the public good.

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  Maggie Shen King began writing a decade ago when her youngest child started middle school. "At first I learned the craft by working on short stories. I wrote every day when my children were at school," she says. "An Excess Male is not my first novel. Like so many writers, I have a maiden attempt sitting in the depths of my hard drive, crying out from time to time for attention."

  King spent the first 16 years of her life in Taiwan before moving to the United States.

  Goodreads: Why were you inspired by China's One-Child Policy?

  Maggie Shen King: The One-Child Policy was one of mankind's longest-lasting and largest-scaled feats of social engineering. It was enforced by Chinese officials, and at times by its citizenry, in ways that often violated widely accepted rules of ethics and human decency. Despite the cultural bias for male heirs and repeated warnings from census data, the law was allowed to continue for nearly 40 years, resulting currently in 30 million unmarriageable men and more men on their way. It was an experiment that created serious unintended consequences, a true cautionary tale against man's attempt to change the natural order.

  Abolishing the policy, however, will not eradicate the problem. The fact that all these men are also the only children in their families, accustomed to the undivided attention of parents and grandparents, makes this situation doubly fascinating. China will be dealing with the fallout of this policy for many decades to come.

  GR: How did you develop this idea for your debut novel?

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  MSK: I first considered how China might solve its problem of 30 million unmarriageable men. Looking at the gender imbalance as a math problem, I saw three basic ways to try to balance the equation—import women, export men, or ask women to take on more than one husband. I thought the last option posed the most provocative and disturbing questions. I began to build a world in which the government implemented policy and created incentives to normalize polyandry.

  Next I was curious as to the kind of people who would enter into such an arrangement. Men without adequate financial or educational resources were most likely to share a wife, and I made that the background of the "excess male" in my book. I freed my other characters from financial confinement and explored other reasons that would compel men and women to polyandry. I told the story from the point of view of every member of one marriage, giving each nearly equal weight. Even though my novel is called An Excess Male (the "excess male" has one more chapter than everyone else), it is really the story of an entire family and this arrangement made out of urgent, individual necessities.

  GR: Your book has drawn comparisons to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Why did you decide to write a novel about the government's control of people's bodies and relationships?

  MSK: I find it fascinating that the draconian measures in both The Handmaid's Tale and in my book were efforts to solve serious crises. The theocracy in The Handmaid's Tale was facing an eroding environment, sharply declining fertility rates, and possible extinction, while the State in An Excess Male was contending with overpopulation and mass starvation. The original intent in both cases was good, yet the practice in actuality was the legislation of what can and cannot be done to women's bodies.

  One of the tasks of speculative fiction is to serve as cautionary tale. Both The Handmaid's Tale and An Excess Male are examples of societies built on the sacrifice of a select few for the greater good. Such societies are ultimately untenable. The human survival instinct dictates that until the basic needs and rights of all its citizens are protected and valued, a society cannot be at peace.

  GR: You spent most of your childhood in Taiwan before moving to Seattle at age 16. How did your memories of living under martial law (which was lifted in 1987) inform this novel?

  MSK: Taiwanese citizens enjoy all the freedoms of a democratic nation today, but during my entire childhood, we lived under martial law. When I was growing up, my parents often discussed politics and political leaders in hushed tones when they did not think my brother and I were listening. I remember overhearing that a distant relative was framed and jailed for political dissent. I grew up with the understanding that political discussions and open speech were dangerous activities that were best done in private.

  I think my desire to tell this story by setting it in a speculative future grew out of that environment and upbringing. Speculative fiction offers a wide and somewhat safer space in which to grapple with the actions of a repressive government. It gives voice and meaning to suffering. Fiction has the power to address the unspeakable and unearth dark and deep truths.

  GR: In what ways does the world of An Excess Male upend common thoughts on marriage? How does this inform the characters in the book?

  MSK: I do not think my book upends the fundamental truths about marriage and family. Polyandry was, for the most part, imposed upon my characters by their government and/or family. If allowed to be true to themselves, they would not have chosen to share a spouse. In the instance where it was a conscious choice, the decision was a reaction to unbearable circumstances caused by factors outside of their control.

  An Excess Male demonstrates that without a mutually satisfying emotional and physical connection between spouses, a marriage is in name only, an empty shell. In the book May-ling had two husbands. Even though XX tried, he did not possess the emotional tools to sustain a marriage, and there was no physical spark between them. Hann was May-ling's emotional harbor, but a best friend does not a marriage make when the sexual needs of both parties are not met. Finding that true partner can be the rarest and most elusive of feats. Not only does May-ling discover that ideal combination with Wei-guo, he also finds emotional connection with the rest of her family, and we are filled with hope for their future together.

  The book also hammers home the notion that family does not always have to be the people we are related to by blood or marriage. Anyone we hold close to our hearts becomes our family. By placing their own safety on the line for each other before the certainty of marriage, my four main characters show that the people for whom we would sacrifice ourselves and go to the ends of the earth ultimately form our family.

  GR: What writers are you influenced by, and how do those influences show themselves within An Excess Male?

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  MSK: Here are a few of my favorite writers: I love Louise Erdrich's novels, their beautiful and at times overlapping stories, and the complicated characters who live and breathe in them. The way her body of work reflects the scope of her heritage inspires me.

  I admire the energetic prose in Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son and the way the book seamlessly introduced the Western audience to life in another country. Like Johnson's book, An Excess Male tells the story of a citizenry made disposable by a national narrative, men whose path to self-assertion required defiance of the State, men who ultimately chose love and family over their own safety.

  I also deeply admire Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Her fantastical short stories are brilliantly inventive, each of them a strange yet emotionally resonant world. Each story is rooted in raw human yearnings.

  I aspire to write books like theirs—mesmerizing, moving, full of heart, and true to my heritage.

  GR: What are you currently reading, and what books are you recommending to your friends?

  MSK: I just finished Jade Chang's The Wangs vs. the World and loved it. I'm completely jazzed by the recent show of force by debut Chinese American writers—Lisa Ko, Weike Wang, Jenny Zhang, Rachel Khong, etc. I can't wait to read them all.

  Here are some books from the last few years that I loved and have been recommending to friends—We the Animals by Justin Torres, The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, Red Notice by Bill Browder, and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.

  GR: What's next for you? Any preview you can give readers?

  MSK: The more I learn about the One-Child Policy, the more I am haunted by another set of its victims—girls whose hukou, or household registration, were saved for a younger brother. These girls, called heihaizi, or shadow or ghost children, are undocumented, illegal, and nonexistent in the eyes of the law. They have no rights to health care, education, or legal protection. They cannot legally ride public transportation, marry, obtain or inherit property, or have children.

  I've been exploring this subject as a possible next novel. You can read my short story here.

• Mercury News - https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/06/an-excess-male-novel-probes-disturbing-results-of-chinas-one-child-policy/

  ‘An Excess Male’ novel probes disturbing results of China’s one-child policy

  LAURA A. ODA/STAFF Peninsula-based author Maggie Shen King was deep into her novel “An Excess Male” before she realized she was writing “speculative fiction.”
  By Clay Kallam, Correspondent |
  PUBLISHED: September 6, 2017 at 2:00 pm | UPDATED: September 7, 2017 at 4:38 am
  It’s a cold hard reality that China will soon have 40 million more men than women – but Maggie Shen King’s near-future novel, “An Excess Male” (Harper Voyager, $15.99, 402 pages) brings those demography-as-destiny numbers to life on an emotional and personal level.
  “It’s a dystopian novel — but it’s not a vision of China I hope will happen,” says King, who lives on the Peninsula.

  Cultural pressures favoring sons and a political dictate in China created the real-life crisis that fuels Maggie Shen King’s novel, “An Excess Male.” LAURA A. ODA/STAFF
  But how is such a huge gender imbalance even a possibility, much less an all-but-certainty? Two imperatives, one cultural and one political, combined to create a situation that can’t help but fundamentally alter the structure of families and the relationships between men and women, which are the essence of “Excess Male.”
  The first was the One Child Policy instituted by Mao Tse Tung in 1979 in the face of imminent famine and an exploding population. “You start out with the best of intentions,” says King of the policy. “Right after the Great Leap Forward, China was facing starvation — they were trying to get to 700 million people,” and in that situation, limiting families to just one child made sense.

  At the same time, however, there is enormous pressure in Chinese and other Asian societies to have sons rather than daughters, if only because sons are the ones who take care of aging parents (there is no version of Social Security in China). “I think most Chinese people think of sons as their own and daughters to be given away,” says King, as daughters traditionally move in with their husband’s families.
  “The worst thing that happened was that ultrasound became possible, and it was very easy to see if you were going to have a boy or girl,” says King. Even though families were not supposed to take steps to make sure that the one child was a son, the cultural imperative was too strong to overcome. With the ability to determine whether an unborn baby was a boy or a girl, parents took whatever steps were necessary to have sons, and a critically imbalanced society is a result.
  The most obvious impact is that 40 million males are unable to find a mate, and King’s novel is an exploration of how Chinese society will adjust to that harsh reality. One premise is that polyandry (several men sharing one wife) becomes the norm. Oddly, however, even though it might seem that women would have the power because of their scarcity, in “Excess Male,” they shift further into the background.
  “Power is physical power, and men and women will never be equal there, so what you’re left with is economic power,” explains King — and despite the shortage of women, men don’t let go of that economic stranglehold.

  In fact, economic power is the key for men to find a family to become part of, since only a relatively wealthy man can afford to join a polyandrous marriage. One of the protagonists of “Excess Male” is Wei Guo, a man who has worked hard and finally accumulated enough resources in his late 30s to be able to literally bid for a wife. He must be approved by the existing husbands (in this case, two) and the potential wife, and it’s an arduous process.
  King, who grew up in Taiwan but moved to the United States as a teenager, was a bit surprised at the direction “Excess Male” was taking, as her background was much more in literature than in genre writing. “Maybe a third of the way into the novel,” she says, “I realized I was writing speculative fiction.”
  And her speculations include an increasingly authoritarian China, an increasingly conformist China, where male homosexuality is a serious crime, and there’s an almost Big Brother-like supervision of daily activities.
  Even today, King says, “Chinese society relies on a great deal of conformity. They don’t want anyone to stand out.” The pressures of the excess males, though, double down on that conformity and emphasis on wealth. Families favor potential husbands who are both rich and comfortably dull, as they will bring a maximum of resources and a minimum of conflict into the marriage.
  In “Excess Male,” however, King uses an unusual family as a lens to focus on how families must adapt to the imbalanced genders and the increasingly authoritarian society. The family Wei Guo has a young wife, May-ling, and two older husbands, one of whom, XX, is autistic. XX is from a wealthy family — May-ling’s parents essentially sold her off to the highest bidder. But money can’t help him adjust to married life.
  “He was actually my favorite character to write,” says King. “He had so much voice once I got him — he was very, very logical, with no artifice whatsoever. He couldn’t help who he is.”
  The other husband isn’t as normal as Chinese society would like either, so conflict occurs both inside and outside the marriage.
  May-ling, however, is not that much in focus. “She wasn’t a driver of the story, because she doesn’t have a lot of power,” says King. “And the protagonist of the story isn’t a woman looking for happily ever after; it’s a man looking for happily ever after.
  “I started out to tell a marriage story,” says King, “and it became a story about people finding family, a family coming together against all odds.”
  In near-future China, however, the extra 40 million men have no choice but to try and beat the odds — and “Excess Male” exposes just how long those odds are likely to be.
  Contact Clay Kallam at clayk@fullcourt.com.

  From Page One
  “Wei-Guo”
  “I sneak another glance at Wu May-ling, my potential bride and the guest of honor at this matchmaking lunch. It may be years before I get another opportunity to be so near a young woman, and my eyes dart from the plump curves of her pink lips to the delicate point of her chin to her narrow cheeks and lush eyebrows. I drink in the warmth behind her eyes, the feminine loveliness in her every gesture, the electric charge she produces in me. Both angular and soft, delicate and strong, her face could beguile me for a lifetime. I imagine myself her master and subject for an entire night at a time.
  “Someone clears his throat, and I jerk up to find my two dads glaring at me. My face hot, I sit up taller and glance around the table to see if May-ling’s two husbands noticed my indiscretion. There is a scowl on Husband One’s face, but he’s been scowling ever since he sat down. Intent on transporting a soup dumpling to his plate intact, Husband Two appears to have mostly food on his mind. I suddenly understand what it’s like to be Dad, my mother’s second husband and my biological father. But then, he has only one husband who outranks him, while I will have two to mind if I marry into this Advanced family.
  “Dad bestows a fatherly smile upon May-ling. ‘Our Wei-guo has impeccable health habits. He weight trains three times a week and swims and runs as well. He can bench a hundred kilos. You should see his biceps.’
  “Sitting on my other side, Big Dad stiffens. ‘You’re embarrassing our guests,’ he says to Dad with forced levity. With both hands, he offers up the ribbon-and-lace-adorned tin of individually wrapped moon cakes Dad spent hours choosing.
  “We have honored MaMa’s dying wish, staying together under one roof as a family. I think she would be comforted to know that my two dads have become steadfast companions and that through Dad, I continue to hear her opinions. Her two men have taken to wearing the same shirts, both pouncing upon whatever happens to be clean. Even their paunchy and stooped silhouettes have started to look alike.
  “May-ling beams at the gift, her good nature evident in her twinkling smile. ‘I have a very sweet tooth. Thank you.’ Her smoky eyes and translucent silk dress could not be a more enticing blend of intrigue and grace. Despite having birthed a child, her manner and air remain maidenly, a printed canvas inviting defining strokes of paint.
  “Which, I admit, I desperately want to apply.”
  Excerpted from “An Excess Male.” Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Shen King. Used with permission from HarperCollins. All rights reserved.

An Excess Male

Rachel Colias
Booklist. 113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p41+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
An Excess Male. By Maggie Shen King. Sept. 2017.416p. Harper/Voyager, paper, $15.99 (9780062662552); e-book (9780062662576).
Poisoned by years of a cultural preference for sons, China's Communist government has been forced to reinvent family dynamics to cope with its lack of female citizens. Households are created under contracts and consist of up to three husbands for every one wife. Millions of unmarried men spend their lifetime saving up a dowry to patriotically join or begin a marriage of their own, but even with these new arrangements, strict conservative values remain the norm. Homosexuality and intellectual disability are considered taboo and "treated" with forced rehabilitation, relationships outside of marriage are illegal, and any form of resistance is met with public humiliation. Despite this extreme pressure, Wei-guo feels destined to join a household as an upstanding, successful citizen at almost any cost. He and his fathers have saved a dowry, but the internal problems plaguing the household Wei-guo is matched with may be too steep a price to pay for marriage. King imagines a frightening reality, in which forced cultural norms run counter to basic human rights, leaving readers exceedingly uncomfortable with its feasibility.--Rachel Colias
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Colias, Rachel. "An Excess Male." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 41+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718838/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3512c9a8. Accessed 10 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718838

King, Maggie Shen: AN EXCESS MALE

Kirkus Reviews. (July 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
King, Maggie Shen AN EXCESS MALE Harper Voyager (Adult Fiction) $15.99 9, 12 ISBN: 978-0-06-266255-2
In her provocative debut, King imagines a world in which China's One Child Policy has created a dystopian future of longing, inequality, and constant surveillance.At 40, Lee Wei-guo is a well-established physical trainer. He's even been "voted one of Beijing's top master personal trainers the last five years in a row by The Worldly Bachelor." Like the other men he knows, Wei-guo longs for the companionship of marriage, but China's One Child Policy and preference for male children has created a future in which it's notoriously difficult--and expensive--for men to marry. Women are allowed to take multiple husbands to try and breed more daughters, an authoritarian State has criminalized homosexuality and mental illness, and men are provided with State-regulated outlets for both pleasure and aggression. But when Wei-guo meets Wu May-ling through an expensive matchmaker, he intuits that she and her Advanced family may be the ticket to his future happiness. Despite his growing connection with May-ling and her two husbands, brothers Hann and XX, Wei-guo's hopes for a straightforward marriage contract are thrown into chaos when a battle in the Strategic Games turns unexpectedly deadly. Can Wei-guo outsmart the State-sponsored violence that has rendered men like him so dispensable? Told in alternating viewpoints, King's novel takes its cues from classic sci-fi dystopias, from The Handmaid's Tale to Ender's Game, to demonstrate the repressive control mechanisms already at work in everyday life. An intelligent, incisive commentary on how love survives--or doesn't--under the heel of the State.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"King, Maggie Shen: AN EXCESS MALE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199743/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6115333b. Accessed 10 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199743

An Excess Male

Publishers Weekly. 264.28 (July 10, 2017): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
An Excess Male
Maggie Shen King. HarperVoyager, $15.99
trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-06-266255-2
In King's thoughtful, heartbreaking debut, set in near-future Beijing, China's one-child policy and cultural preference for boys have led to 40 million more men than women. Wei-guo, in his early 40s, is hoping to become part of a polyandrous "advanced family" while navigating a stifling society that considers him unnecessary. Leading his team at Strategic Games is no longer entirely fulfilling; he's ready to fall in love. He's thrilled to be matched with a family made up of the big, brash Hann; the socially awkward, brilliant Xiong-xin, aka XX; and, most importantly, the lovely May-ling. The narrative toggles among the main characters, offering insight into each. May-ling is overwhelmed by their rambunctious toddler son, BeiBei, and in love with Hann, even though he is secretly gay, or "willfully sterile." XX and May-ling don't really want to be married to each other. A scary twist in the third act keeps the pages turning. King expertly explores the myriad routes to family, hope, and love in a repressive country. Agent: David Fugate, LaunchBooks Literary. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"An Excess Male." Publishers Weekly, 10 July 2017, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499720075/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4b2346a9. Accessed 10 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499720075

Colias, Rachel. "An Excess Male." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 41+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718838/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3512c9a8. Accessed 10 May 2018. "King, Maggie Shen: AN EXCESS MALE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199743/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6115333b. Accessed 10 May 2018. "An Excess Male." Publishers Weekly, 10 July 2017, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499720075/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4b2346a9. Accessed 10 May 2018.

• The Verge
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16185024/an-excess-male-maggie-shen-king-one-china-dystopian-child-policy-science-fiction-book-review
  Word count: 1370

  Maggie Shen King’s novel paints a picture of future China that’s not far away
  1
  comment
  Men must share wives as a result of the one-child policy
  By Shannon Liao@Shannon_Liao Sep 12, 2017, 8:10am EDT

  Share

  Photo by Andrew Liptak / The Verge
  For three decades, China has been running what amounts to a huge social experiment: a one-child policy that limits each family to have only one offspring. The policy has led to a greater gender imbalance than the global average. In 2015, Beijing relaxed this policy to allow two children per family. But in Maggie Shen King’s debut novel, An Excess Male, China continues to face this real-world dystopian scenario.
  In an alternate timeline set in the near future, the one-child policy has continued for several decades, radically changing the social structure. In this world, a woman can take up to three husbands, depending on how “patriotic” a family decides to be and how desperately in need of cash they are.
  Mild spoilers ahead for An Excess Male.
  In this political climate, May-ling has an unlikely family structure: she has five other sisters. Her parents used all kinds of shady methods to get away with violating the country’s one-child policy, including smuggling and bribery. But this initial problem pays off for her parents in this future: they can collect male dowries from each child when they’re given away to husbands. To maximize their profits, May-ling’s parents usually pick out grooms with some kind of social or physical flaw, so the husbands’ families have to pay more for the extra burden.
  Their greedy attitude has created for May-ling what has gradually descended into a marital nightmare. She’s married to a gay man, Hann, and his brother, Xiong-xin, a man with a probable mental disability. This is a marriage born out of convenience and greed, but May-ling naively believes it can work out. In the first years of her marriage, May-ling is deeply in love with Hann, but he retreats from her bedroom over time and May-ling comes to realize that he’ll never become sexually attracted to her. When this dawns on her, she grows angry and threatens to add a third man to their arrangement.

  This third man is Wei-guo, and he’s the audience surrogate. From chapter one, he narrates how beautiful May-ling is and how he longs for a wife. This is where King works her magic. Once we’re introduced to all four of these characters, King then flips the script on us once more. We learn that Xiong-xin, or XX as he calls himself, is a genius hacker with more social awareness than others give him credit for, and we learn that people think Wei-guo isn’t that bright. King continuously introduces nuances to these characters and builds them slowly into three-dimensional humans.
  Wei-guo, like May-ling, Hann, and Xiong-xin, is an unreliable narrator who is limited by human fallacy from knowing that May-ling is partially manipulating him, and that Hann is gay. Misunderstandings abound between the characters and only the reader gets to experience everyone’s true self. And as characters sometimes close their hearts to one another, the government’s constant surveillance and extremely prescribed way of living takes a toll on them as well. Divorce, while not illegal, is nearly impossible to accomplish. If the government finds out about Xiong-xin’s disability and deems him a “Lost Boy,” he will be institutionalized.
  the government’s constant surveillance takes a toll
  An Excess Male is also a way for King to explore China’s treatment of LGBTQ people and women —- two groups in dire need of governmental support and literary attention. Like ex-communist and communist countries Russia and Cuba, China currently has its fair share of homophobic policies, including censoring all queer content online. In King’s future China, queer folks have been designated as “Willfully Sterile,” which sounds relatively progressive until it’s revealed that the designation means queer people are deemed unfit to be parents. So gay men like Hann who use their wives as beards and raise children are risking everything.
  King has the opportunity here to indulge in the reversal of a patriarchal society’s status quo in her reimagined China. After all, with women so high in demand, it follows that their value in society has risen and it’s the men who face stigma if they can’t marry and remain “leftover” men. But as King tells it, the ill treatment and abuse of women remains common in future China. May-ling and her first husband, Hann, play this sick psychological game where May-ling tries to use heterosexual and conservative Chinese norms to control Hann and Hann uses his maleness to order May-ling around. Their screwed-up relationship becomes a reflection of some of what’s wrong with Chinese society.
  King draws from a well of Chinese modern history to craft a rare English language story that has a weight that other works translated from Chinese might not hold. The phrasing and diction feel comfortably American, as King is, while the plot points are borrowed from modern China. The hook of the story, that many of these men could share wives, is actually something that King picks up from the Qing Dynasty when impoverished rural villages used to practice polyandry to save resources. Wielding this material in her hands, King grants a new kind of access to the Western audience that they’ve never had before.
  Yet caught up in pointing out every twist of this family drama, King sometimes doesn’t go quite far enough with her depictions of future China. For a dystopian novel, it rings fairly optimistic. And for a novel that builds upon history, that optimism diverges from precedent. Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who protested in the Tiananmen Square Massacre, died in July of liver cancer while he was being held in state custody and was reportedly kept from chemotherapy and proper treatment. China’s harshest internal critics have always been silenced by authoritarian powers but King gives us a China where some critics can merrily escape.
  she hopes for a happy future for China
  Just take the example of another author who addresses the one-child policy in fiction, Ma Jian, a Chinese writer who’s living in exile in the UK. His novel The Dark Road, unlike An Excess Male, is not a sci-fi dystopian, but journalism thinly disguised as fiction. He writes vividly of actual abortion hospitals that he visited under China’s one-child policy. Ma Jian’s gory and dark novel makes King’s writing look like a delicate romantic drama in comparison. King could go darker, more gruesome, and more bloody and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration of reality. It’s almost as if she hopes for a happy future for the China of today though, and one has to respect that.
  An Excess Male dwells in happiness that feels unearned. None of the members of the family can successfully break out of their dystopian conditions and eke out their freedom, but at least they have each other. Even though Wei-guo, as a straight, able-bodied male, has a better political standing than the other three protagonists, he too gets into a whole mess of a political drama, where he ultimately becomes an enemy of the state. For each of her characters, Maggie Shen King presents such an insidious, totalitarian trap that each person is only able to wiggle out with a mixture of luck and bluffing. You end up wanting them to do more, but understand that these characters can’t challenge the status quo without winding up dead. It’s exactly the kind of life-threatening conundrum that people in modern China face today, and the exact reason why this real-life dystopia still continues on. If no one can rise up, then people can only settle for what they’ve got. I want King’s characters to stop settling, too, but if they can’t, someone else should pick up the baton and run with it.

• SFRevu
  http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=17455
  Word count: 630

  An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King
  Review by Bill Lawhorn
  Harper Voyager Trade Paperback / eBook ISBN/ITEM#: 9780062662552
  Date: 12 September 2017 List Price $15.99 Amazon US / Amazon UK
  Links: Author's Website / Show Official Info / ShareThis

  Over the years since the start of the One Child Policy, there was a skewing of the number of male to female births. Over time, that led to a strange change of in the value assigned to males and females. When there are few women available for marriage, the long held beliefs and cultural standards need to change. In this future, women may choose to take an additional husband. But even this setup, does not improve ratios, and there is a movement to allow women to have a third husband. Not everyone approves.
  Wei-guo is a fitness trainer who has been saving money and growing his business in order to afford the bride price. His first meeting with May-ling goes very well, and there seems to be a spark, and her son BeiBei doesn't mind his presence. Her other husbands are not as big of a concern as he feared. He decides to pursue the match, even against his fathers' wishes.
  May-ling is struggling with her marriages. Hann is almost everything she wants, but he doesn't feel the same way. Her other husband Xiong-xin is more concerned with his job and computer games. So May-ling is left to care for her son and look for something more in the chance for a third husband.
  Hann loves May-ling but he has different goals. His foremost goal is to protect his brother. He also enjoys his time playing badminton with friends. He knows he can't give May-ling the relationship she desires, so he is willing to risk everything to give her happiness.
  Xiong-xin is very good at what he does even if he doesn't always recognize the consequences of his actions. He accepts his relationship with May-ling, but would prefer to be on his own. He sees Wei-guo as his chance to get away from a home where he lives but doesn't fit.
  The story develops as each of the four characters live and struggle with the courtship and the rules both tacit and implicit. Although legal, a third marriage is not considered to be socially acceptable. The government also plays a role as it tries to keep the people in line. As the multiple threads intertwine, each of the characters faces challenges which threaten both their lives and position in the relationship.
  I chose this novel because I was very interested in seeing how China could overcome its shortage of females. In this case, foreign brides are not considered acceptable. This one potential outlet being gone creates additional value for females. You would think that this empowerment would improve the lives of females, but in this setting, it isn't as good as one would expect. The families are the ones who profit from the bride price, not the women themselves. In this future, having daughters is a good thing. The dynamics developed for the marriages seem to be logical although I don't know how well many people could handle a shared marriage, although this form does eliminate the child brides as the men need to have a stable financial situation.
  This is a stand-alone novel and as such can be enjoyed without any prior reading. This isn't a feminist utopia, it is a dystopia created by real choices and cultural norms which lead to a huge imbalance in the population. The story is well written and King did a nice job developing the characters. Readers who want to explore the emerging Chinese influenced Science Fiction should take the time to read this novel.

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