I just finished reading a comic book that was written by an Asian writer and I was sorely disappointed by its content. I don’t want to name names or even give away the title of the book because it’s not very good and not worth reading. Why give the book publicity when it’s not good, right? The book’s characters are incredibly one dimensional and the ending of the book was exasperating and unsatisfying. The only part that I enjoyed was the illustrations of ghosts.
In the book, a teenage girl befriends a ghost who has lost her memory. With the help of a male friend (because women cannot figure out things on their own), they find out why the ghost hasn’t moved on to the afterlife. The premise is great and I was intrigued to see the Chinese Ghost Festival as a central feature of the story. However, the attempts at foreshadowing are weak and have a rather tenuous link to what the ghost is up to at the end.
Spoilers below, even though I refuse to name the book.
When the main character discovers that there is a ghost in her house, the ghost doesn’t remember who she is and how she came to be. With a few clues, the main character tries to figure out who the girl is, but to no avail at first. I found this rather unnecessary because her male friend, whose father is a medium, leads them to some witch(?) and the witch tells them that something is hunting a ghost.
This turns out to be a lie, because the at the end of the book, the ghost turns into this strange half-human half-spider hybrid, and I see nods to Journey to the West because the main character’s best male friend is compared to Sun Wu Kong quite a number of times. Moreover, the male friend has a hand in subduing the demon because he provides the main character with aid.
We don’t see the ghost talk to the main character about her memories returning, but at the climax, she suddenly gets her memory back. This is jarring and abrupt. She moves form innocent girl to monstrous being in three second flat and starts attacking her abusive and alcoholic father who caused the family to break up. However, after the father pleads with her for two panels, the ghost girl forgives him — just like that. It also turns out that the ghost girl’s mother’s soul is stuck to the girl. There was no foreshadowing for this at all and this seems needlessly tacked on and functions as a poor way to unite a splintered family.
What grinds my gears is how easily the ghost girl forgave her father. For anyone who has been through abuse, it takes years of healing and perhaps some kind of magnanimity to forgive one’s abuser. Although there are supernatural elements to it, it’s still highly unlikely that a girl (and by extension, her mother) would forgive her physically abusive father simply because he begged them to. This reeks of incredibly poor character development.
And this book isn’t an isolated example. In many Asian TV series, women are either depicted as ghosts or monsters or just simply the “wife”. Sometimes, these roles overlap — the wife dies and becomes a ghost or a monster, particularly if she died of a miscarriage or was unfaithful or fails to adhere to the patriarchal standard of what makes up a good woman. This doesn’t only appear in Malay dramas, but rather, supernatural Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Indian dramas. This is a symptom of perhaps, a male director’s point of view. And although there are progressive shows that give this trope a twist, there are still regressive depictions out there. For every regressive depiction, there is a new to tell 10 more progressive stories because the poisonous ideas pander to our internalised misogyny more.
Of course, the solution is to write more well-rounded characters all around — as seen in the example, women don’t turn from innocent girls to vicious man-eating monsters or temptresses at the snap of a finger. Women cannot be virgins in one moment and sluts in another. It doesn’t work that way. A woman is who she is, with strengths and weaknesses. It’s also good to remind ourselves that a woman, like any person, is on a journey of discovery, and that she acts the way she does because of events in the past.
It really is laziness if a writer doesn’t do background work for a character and relies on stereotypes. Women deserve better than that. The world deserves better than that and it’s time for a change.
Featured image by Marco Nürnberger