Customer Review

June 6, 2018
I'm floored. Speechless. Breathless.

I've read hundreds of books on Chinese religions, mythologies, folklores, and cultures. This might top them all, in every way.

The writing is clear, crisp, and memorable, easily understood by the general reader... yet underneath the smooth flow of her prose is a foundation of phenomenal scholarship. Most academic texts tend to focus on one single element of the cultural and religious representations; most general texts tend to force the subject matter to conform to some preexisting notions of "mythology." This is, this is SOMETHING ELSE.

I maybe should wait to write this review until I regain my eloquence. Because I'm stunned.

The scope of this project, its breadth, depth, and its ambition, are unlike anything I've seen before. Xueting Christine Ni has left no angle unexplored: when discussing a deity, she goes into the classical texts that first described it, its changing roles throughout history, the deity's presence in sacred scriptures and performative rituals, their representation in folk tales, their influence upon festivals that are still celebrated today, as well as pop culture elements like comic books, movies, tv shows, and video games.

This alone would make for a brilliant, amazing book. But she doesn't stop there, because all of this, this tremendous scholarship, this knowledge and erudition, is driven by a personal quest for understanding, and the book is made more meaningful for the personal nature of the writing; we not only see the distanced, studious, scholarly view of a deity, but also the role it played in the author's own upbringing and family history. This makes the deities COME ALIVE; readers will see so much more than the thin representations of some glossary, because through the author's eyes and personal experience and her grandmother's role and her evocative descriptions, we come to understand the real, significant place these deities occupy in contemporary life. And beyond the personal element there is also a constant revisiting of the ways these deific figures are being incorporated into the lives of people in the Chinas who are seeking to rediscover a cultural heritage. This makes the book political, not in a polemic manner, but in personal, subversive ways.

It's also worth mentioning that throughout the book, there is a commitment to drawing attention to female power. The author aims to rediscover goddesses as images of strength and capability. This makes an already-gorgeous book into something so much more.

What she has done here is phenomenal. The quantity of research is stellar. The way she has wrapped all these profound, fascinating, disparate elements together and made it her personal tale yet still a superb, accessible, general guidebook for people looking to learn, makes it so much MORE than any one thing it could be described as:

* a guide to Chinese mythological and religious figures;
* a far-ranging introduction to aspects of Chinese cultures which have rarely been made so accessible;
* an exploration of the ways in which contemporary Chinese comics, games, movies, and tv have drawn upon sacred traditions to find fresh material in the ancient lore;
* a personal journey into the author's own heritage and her relationship to that heritage;
* a consistently enjoyable read for general audiences who like learning about mythologies;
* a deep, stunningly researched look at an array of Chinese deities and their presence in Chinese lives from ancient times to the present;
* a work of genius.
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