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| (Cover Artist: Victor Mosquera) |
Chen Qiufan's novel Waste Tide is marketed in part as an eco-thriller, and while I don't necessarily disagree with that characterization, while reading the book I sometimes felt that the label undersold the themes of the end work. Even when used with the best of intentions, eco-thriller can imply a one-dimensionality to a book's subject--asserting that the novel is concerned very specifically with creating an environmentally themed action-adventure story.
Instead, while Waste Tide is a near-future dystopia whose plot revolves around the improper disposal of electronic waste, the core question of the novel is one that has much broader social implications. Imbedded within Waste Tide's plot about a town in China where fictional crime syndicates buy and sell recycling rights to the world's garbage is also an examination not only on the consequences of industrialized global economies built on the exploitation of disadvantaged communities, but the ways in which the combined social and political responsibilities of individuals can in the wrong contexts compel even well-meaning people to commit acts of harm. As such, Waste Tide isn't so much a novel featuring an ecologically themed adventure story, as it is a look at how the corporate and social forces that are responsible for environmental destruction are also related to the forces that keep many communities living in forced poverty.
Written by then first-time novelist Chen Qiufan back in 2013, and recently translated into English by Hugo award winning author and translator Ken Liu in 2019, Waste Tide is set in the semi-fictional town of Silicon Isle--a coastal village in China whose primary industry is the disposal of the world's electronic waste. Based heavily on the real life town of Guiyu, the fictional Silicon Isle is populated almost entirely by migrant workers searching for a stable livelihood. The majority of Silicon Isle falls under the jurisdiction of one of three waste recycling clans, all of whom to varying degrees abuse the underpaid workers under their employment. As the novel opens, the character of Scott Brandle (a wealthy American businessman) arrives in Silicon Isle to meet with the leaders of these clans, intending to found a "state-of-the-art recycling plant" that will displace these deadly industries, but also render millions homeless in the process.
It's in this context that we are introduced to Chen Kaizong, a Chinese-American interpreter who arrives in Silicon Isle along with Scott, and who hopes to rediscover the idealized village that he and his parents left nearly two decades earlier when he moved from Silicon Isle as a child. Almost immediately Kaizong encounters Mimi, a young woman pursued by representatives of Lou Jincheng, the leader of one of the more infamously sadistic gangs that rule Silicon Isle. After rescuing Mimi from certain death, Kaizong inadvertently touches off a chain of events resulting in an uprising that pits the three clans against the thousands of "waste people" who work in the town.
On top of all this, Scott Brandle's plans to construct a recycling plant on Silicon Isle quickly encounter an additional snag when a mysterious virus appears in the community -- a pathogen that somehow exists with both digital and biological components, and whose "patient zero" seems to be none other than Mimi herself. As the plot develops and the eyes of various multi-national interests slowly turn Silicon Isle's way, it becomes clear that Mimi stands at the center of a turbulent storm of events that could either herald the next step in human evolution, or the final precursor to the extinction of the human species.
Like the best examples of the cyberpunk genre, Waste Tide's plot is often dense and chaotic, and interweaves many real-world social issues with an eclectic mythology of fictional conspiracy theories that give further texture to the book's setting. By interspersing the story of Silicon Isle with an often disorienting network of subplots and backstories regarding everything from classified experiments in mind control, failed attempts to digitally augment the intelligence of chimpanzees, and the unexpectedly varied career of a (real-world) Austrian-American actress from the 1930s, Waste Tide soon becomes a novel which the reader can't help but simply absorb, unable to predict the flow of the narrative the author has constructed.
And yet, the most interesting element of Waste Tide is perhaps Chen Qiufan's approach to a single reoccurring theme that spans the entire novel. Over and over again, the characters of this story are confronted with the same simple but starkly stated moral conundrum -- a sort of catch-22 in which they must choose between their own personal, political, or financial interests, or the interests of people who (they believe) lack power and agency in the novel's world. This is demonstrated directly in the novel's opening scene, in which the idealistic member of an environmentalist group seeking to reveal to the world the corruption and human rights abuses occurring in Silicon Isle almost succeeds in boarding a ship carrying toxic waste to this community, but only subverts his efforts at the last moment when he chooses to turn his protest into an ego-driven parkour stunt. In a similar manner, as the plot of the main story develops, it's revealed that while Scott Brandle's expensive recycling plant could put a stop to the deadly industries that comprise Silicon Isle's economy, it would do so by rendering millions homeless, and also turn the entire region of Silicon Isle uninhabitable due to the toxic waste that the facility (ironically) produces. Even Lou Jincheng (the leader of the gang pursuing Mimi, and ostensibly the novel's most clear-cut villain) is in the end revealed not to be a greedy businessman, but instead a figure aware (and even perhaps remorseful) of the consequences of his own family business, but unable to imagine a world in which that business does not exist. In the end, Lou Jincheng's true motive is shown to be less a mindless need for profit, and instead an understandable if not misplaced desire to ensure the future prosperity of his (and only his) children.
I don't think it's hard to see how this theme of moral culpability relates to this book's subject. Using the disposal of E-waste as it's backdrop, Waste Tide is a novel that repeatedly presents the reader with characters confronted by the same core moral paradox: whether its right to sacrifice their own morals for the sake of fulfilling the immediate professional and familial responsibilities levied upon them by their individual contexts. In presenting its readers with a cast of characters who struggle to differentiate their own immediate interests from the interests of humanity as a whole, Chen is able to draw a link between the moral failings of his protagonists, and the broader systemic issues the novel's setting elicits. As one character whose identity cannot be revealed without risking major spoilers states very late in the text:
"The diseased think of life as some zero-sum game in which there must be winners and losers, even at the expense of the interests of others." (p.326)
That is, in this novel about a town whose residents suffer under the combined weight of garbage shipped to them from all over the world, Chen Qiufan probes questions of personal responsibility and systemic injustice, examining how individual context can warp even the best of intentions if we don't guard our actions properly.
The primary failing of Waste Tide is in the novel's portrayal of Mimi. Having had the potential to become one of the book's more interesting characters, Mimi instead seems to alternate between two extremes over the course of the plot. One moment presented as an extraordinarily self-sufficient character, and the next as an unsettlingly child-like adult, the romantic relationship that soon forms between Mimi and Kaizong quickly starts to feel problematic. The result is that the sole female character in this novel's main cast suffers from a strange amalgamation of the most prevalent tropes regarding women in male-centric science fiction stories. In part a permanently infantilized heroine in constant need of a "male savior" to protect her, and in part man inhuman being gifted with an incomprehensible wisdom and intelligence by a supernatural virus that is nevertheless actively killing her, Mimi's fate in this story quickly comes to be defined less and less by her own actions, and instead by the contrasting needs of the male characters who surround her. Bouncing back and forth between the "clutches" of Scott Brandle, Lou Jincheng, and Kaizong, Mimi never quite manages to find time in the book's 350 pages to act in anything other than simple in-the-moment self-preservation. Even as she gradually morphs into the central deity of a new religion and leads an uprising in Silicon Isle against Lou Jincheng (the virus compelling her to become a sort of messianic figure) this woman whose only stated goal in the text is to one day buy a house for her parents is ultimately never allowed to exert a meaningful influence on this story.
This shortcoming is significant, but I think that if the reader acknowledges it then Waste Tide can still be read as a unique take on many other common tropes in the cyberpunk genre. Employing a setting that astutely merges contemporary social issues regarding electronic waste with cyberpunk story elements like commercially sold prosthetic limbs and brain-computer interfaces, Chen Qiufan manages to produce a social commentary that is simultaneously approachable and scathing in it's implications. Ultimately, Waste Tide is a novel which examines the manner in-which entire communities can come to be seen as disposable, as well as the ways in which such a morally abhorrent assumption can seep into the minds of otherwise well-meaning individuals.
In the end, Waste Tide is a novel about morally compromised characters who try to do the best they can given the circumstances available to them, but whose actions nevertheless are ultimately turned against even these altruistic ends by broader systemic forces. It's a book whose story is exceedingly bleak, and doesn't necessarily end well, but does leave the reader with quite a lot to think about once they've reached the final page.