Sword, Dao, and Katana: Thinking About Cultural Appropriation and Orientalism

Recently, I finished my Masters in Chinese History. Nice! So, with lots of food to eat and no money to buy any, I looked for jobs and found that a Table Top RPG publisher was looking for East Asian themed adventures. I thought I'd apply and, lo and behold, the publisher was interested. So I wrote up a pitch for an adventure and general world building and sent them in. Even in the initial email exchanges I was already getting somewhat frustrated because the vision that the publisher and I had about what "East Asia" actually meant were totally divergent. "East Asia" in, this case, is really just a product of Western imagination. The goal really wasn't ever to create an East Asian world, but instead to create a fantasy of East Asia compatible with Western tastes. Moreover, the publisher was very interested in historical fidelity which is, I think, quite foolhardy in a game.

So... I've got all this material now and have been thinking about finishing up a polished adventure. This got me thinking about cultural appropriation and Orientalism. MALMURIA in their substack Familiar Waves posted a review of Yoon-Suin, a Tibet inspired setting by David McGrogan. In it, MALMURIA quotes McGrogan as saying "Yoon-Suin is not an analogy for anything or anywhere. Words actually have meanings, and an "analogy" does not merely mean something which just takes inspiration from another thing, or which happens to superficially resemble another thing in some way." This is a piss poor defence. MALMURIA explains that "if we are using Edward Said’s Orientalism as the theoretical frame, the question of analogy is not really relevant. Orientalism is about the topos that Europeans create about the ‘East.'" More to the point, MALMURIA condemns Yoon-Suin for, above all else, being boring. They write that: "while voluminous, the setting strikes me as bland. Where a writer like Zedeck Siew makes creatures that are evocative of a different way of thinking about and inhabiting a world, McGrogan provides statted-up baddies for the PCs to kill."

I think most products of Orientalism by necessity end up this way because they are based on stereotype, divorced from the land/culture in question, and relate primarily to the author's exposure to the culture via popular depictions. I am going to assume that, broadly speaking, good art must come from a personal place. If your creation comes purely from your relation to consumer products (i.e, popular portrayals of Asia) it is probably going to be pretty facile, especially if it contains no critical element.

On the OSR Discord, when I asked some questions about Orientalism/Appropriation, Retired Adventurer (Blog can be found here: https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/) provided much needed clarification on the issue of appropriation. He wrote: "Appropriation as a concept in economics, which informed the original sense of "cultural appropriation", is about the transference of public property into private hands. One appropriates common land by enclosing it, asserting property rights over it, and denying others the use of it except at one's sufferance." Using this definition, I don't think that RPG adventure writing is really at risk of appropriation unless the creator attempts to copyright or claim legal ownership of the concepts within.

This doesn't mean a Canadian dude should just go ahead and mine Chinese culture and history for gameable content. I think there are two issues here: How and why is the content being presented? And what is it that is actually being presented? All too often, Eastern Fantasy settings are just completely and utterly generic -- DND but with top knots and katana. I don't think the solution to this is doing exhaustive research and trying to recreate a "historically accurate" fantasy China. Even if the creator does do an excellent job at this, they have no control over what happens at the table where players, in all likelihood, are not really interested in exploring complex historical issues in their role playing games. Moreover, it's not like DND and other fantasy games are even close to 'accurate.'

Instead, I think the approach ought to be based on an individual's personal relationship to the culture/s in question. Like, I think a game world that explores my China would be more original and interesting than a game world that explores an extremely generic China. I think that's probably how you get actual merit out of this exercise, and go beyond mere aesthetics. A sword is a dao is a katana, and the name doesn't mean much without substance.

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In the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, some character names are rendered in English while others remain Chinese. Big Mother Knife is Big Mother Knife and Sparrow is Sparrow. On the other hand, Lu Yiwen and the protagonist Jiang Li-ling remain Chinese. This discrepancy is one that I hadn't seen in a while. Old translations of Chinese books to English, like Dream of the Red Chamber, were typically inconsistent in this regard. Characters like Lin Daiyu are rendered as Black Jade, while others with less romantic English translations for their names are rendered in Chinese. Do Not Say We Have Nothing decision to translate some names into English stuck out to me because it was an active decision by a contemporary author, rather than the typical style of translation found in the mid 20th century. Sparrow's name becomes a symbol for the character and the book frequently makes use of Sparrow-related imagery in reference to him. For some, like Big Mother Knife, her name perfectly describes her personality. The interesting bits of character development come from how she subverts that title, while never straying too far away. If these names were left in Chinese, then English readers would not really be able to understand the character in the same way even if their meanings were described in a footnote. The protagonist of the book exists in a liminal space between Chinese and Canadian, as well as past and future, and has to tease out the meaning of her existence by delving deep into her family's history. The use of language in the book helps to strengthen this core conflict by, at times, embracing the English reader and at other times holding them at arm's length.

I thought about this book because I recently ran into a short article by Zedeck Siew titled "USE KING WHEN YOU MEAN RAJA; KEEP A KERIS IN YOUR DAGGER (https://www.singpowrimo.com/features/use-king-when-you-mean-raja). I found this article, by the way, because the Yoon-Suin review above led me to looking into Siew's stuff. I found the article extremely moving. It is written with so much emotion that I find it difficult to talk or write about (Almost like speaking about it will somehow "damage" Siew's expression), so instead I'll let it speak for itself. In the article, Siew examines their relationship to their language in writing and explores multiple modes of writing about their culture. In regards to their own tongue, Siew writes: "For most of my life I treated Bahasa like a forest to be cleared, so I could grow the cash-crop plantation that English is. Now I survey devastation. The eight or so years I’ve spent relearning Bahasa, returning to it -- it is not yet enough. Even if a forest returns, will it return the same?" In a dialectical process of sorts, Siew comes to this conclusion:

"Let English become overgrown. Let the tiger who lost its forest claim the plantation for its own. English is mine, my forest, growing in my homeland. It is my mother tongue, as much as Hakka, or Hokkien, or Bahasa.

I am not a periphery. Instead: if people like my stories, Maybe they can be invited into my shade. Maybe they can learn to understand my patterns, my meanings. Maybe they should re-learn their own.

Let the metropoles find their own words for fire-breathing winged serpent or European feudal monarch. Let them italicise “misericord”.

I will use “dragon” to talk about the naga. I will use “king” to mean raja. I will say “dagger” when I speak of a keris."

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In both Siew's article and Do Not Say We Have Nothing the authors have to negotiate the relationship between their own culture, colonialism, and language. The works are both deeply personal and engage critically in the problems of colonialism.

A sword, a dao, and a katana are all the same things: dao and katana even share the same character. Yet, for many westerners the presence of a 'katana' specifically is what makes a setting Japanese. Marcia B., whose blog Traverse Fantasy is probably the best in the RPG space, says that "The connection between taxonomy and power, that nerds find it empowering to possess an abstract knowledge which they impose onto things, seems related to what has been identified as phallic desire." (https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/09/d-obsession-with-phallic-desire.html). This is also basically the function of Orientalism described by Edward Said: Orientalism sorts, categorizes, and (in doing so) diminishes the life of real people and places into an abstraction. In my setting pitch to the publisher, one of the issues he had with it was that I used more familiar terms instead of Chinese terms. Despite the fact that most players would not be able to read Chinese.

A very basic lesson in writing is that one should generally describe rather than tell. It means very little to say "the man is very beautiful." Contrarily, if you say that the "Sweat beads formed on his cheeks like morning dew on the grass" then you are saying something concrete (Excuse my poor prose lol). Similarly, I think that the tendency of East Asian fantasy settings to hew so closely to stereotypes and to lean into well known loan words basically betrays a lack of literary talent and knowledge about the subject matter. Instead of signalling East Asian flavour with pagodas and samurai, perhaps one can simply describe the world in concrete terms and, if the substance is there, then it will seep through.

Siew and Thien write about their own cultures and do so confidently because it is theirs; they have lots to say about it because they've engaged with their cultures for their whole lives. Personally, I think westerners trying to write a sort of catch all fantasy East Asian adventures are basically doomed to recreate the extremely problematic Oriental Adventure books. Instead of creating something generic, I think people interested in writing about East Asia ought to explore their personal relationships with the cultures in question. Instead of exploring tired aesthetics, explore what it is in the culture that interests you. And, frankly, if someone's relationship to another culture is entirely on based popular depictions of said culture then... Maybe that person just shouldn't be writing bout that thing? Or, more charitably, if you're inspired by popular culture then write something inspired by those works of fiction rather than trying to write about the culture itself. Like, if your relationship to China is insipid then you are probably going to produce an insipid work.

When I was clashing with the publisher mentioned above, it was because I didn't want to produce a pseudo-realistic take on fantasy China. What I really wanted to explore was goofy and idiosyncratic, mystical and anachronistic. My fantasy China is populated with endless Shanghais, writers living in on the cheap in pavilion room, decapitated heads swimming through the air, giant mosquitoes, unopenable cans of spam, and seemingly everpresent old men who cough up a lung and spit on the side of the road. Magic ought to be magical, and gods and men ought to have a comically transactional relationship. There is nothing I love more than a contrast seriousness of the context and ridiculousness of content. The wild comedies of Hong Kong cinema speak to me more than overly serious wuxia or Shaolin films. I want to explore the works of Lu Xun and Lao She rather than Confucius or Laozi! I have a lot more to say about my China then I do about a China.

I do think some cautions need to be taken, even if the approach is more personal:

1. Idiots online will whine and cry about them, but I think sensitivity readers are actually pretty important. So, any published work based on Chinese culture I produce will include a sensitivity reader to help make sure I didn't write something dumb.

2. I think that writing a good preface which situates the writer in relation to the work and the culture's being referenced is a good idea.

3. I think that in a tabletop game less is basically more. The writer of the adventure can not control what happens at tables or how their work is used, so I do not intend to dive deeply into Orientalist issues or colonialism in the content itself. I think it can be done in a game, but academic, cinematic and literary works are generally better vehicles for this. More specifically, I just don't think I'm the person to produce such a work. Instead, I'd like to write an adventure that can hopefully inspire people to look at Chinese culture a little differently, and a little more closely. Otherwise, I hope to make a fun adventure for people to play.

Writing this has made me think that, perhaps, I ought to go through and review Oriental Adventures and other East Asian inspired RPG setting books. In particular, I'd interested in changes in how "the east" has been presented in RPGs overtime. It may be helpful for others, and I'm not sure if anyone has done a thorough literature review of this sort before.

I don't know how to hyperlink lol, so I need to learn how to do that.