KUNG FU, Books Featuring Martial Arts, And A Reader Who Loves Them

My intense love for S.L. Huang’s Cas Russell series made it my first thought. Huang herself is a stunt person and a mathematician (truly, her bio is fascinating), and her love for both fields shines through in these books. Our heroine Cas is a mercenary who uses math as a literal superpower, dodging bullets and striking her opponents at the precise angle to cause maximum damage. She tries to use her powers for good, but things are inevitably more complicated than that. Then there’s her past, which she can’t remember and doesn’t want to, but which is forcing its way into her life with extremely violent results. Cas’s adventures in and around Los Angeles are page-turning, and I would be remiss not to shout out the supporting characters who are as quirky a bunch of dysfunctional found family as one could hope for. Pick up Zero Sum Game, the first book, and gird yourself for a wild ride.

Speaking of series, R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War has to be included. While the trilogy’s action sequences largely revolve around military strategy, the first book has some amazing hand-to-hand combat sequences. Rin is a poor war orphan who gets into an elite military training academy through sweat, blood, and tears, and her struggles unfortunately continue. Her fellow classmates are largely wealthy and privileged, but Rin’s determination to succeed helps her carve out a small space for herself. Her training sessions with the enigmatic and eccentric Jiang are a sterling example of the trope, as are the sparring matches Rin obsessively watches to catalog techniques. It’s also possibly one of the most morally straightforward parts of the series; this is a grimdark fantasy, born and bred, as you’d expect from a premise that is inspired in part by the Sino-Japanese War. It wrecked my heart (particularly that series ending!), so consider yourself warned.

On a lighter note is Sherry Thomas’s Magnolia Sword, which is a retelling of the story of Mulan that is entirely Thomas’s own, and I don’t know why you’re still reading this post and not reading it already. But since you’re here, this novel gave me everything I wanted from it and then some. You’ve got a girl trained to the sword from birth, our heroine going undercover, a pair of star-crossed lovers, and some of the most memorable action sequences I’ve read in years. There’s a particular scene that involves walnut-throwing that will live forever in my brain; it sounds ridiculous, but JUST YOU WAIT. And then there are all the complicated family feelings it gives me, whew!

When I think about reboots and addressing the years of appropriation, fetishization, and erasure of the Asian community in Hollywood, it is impossible not to think of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. It won the National Book Award in 2020, and deservedly so; it’s a triumph on so many levels. Written in screenplay format, the book is a satirical meta-narrative following a denizen of Chinatown, which is both a set for a procedural buddy-cop show and a location where people are born, live, work, and die. There are limited roles for Asian Americans in Chinatown, most of them demeaning, and our hero Willis Wu aspires to the pinnacle of possible achievement: Kung Fu Guy. Yu writes action sequences beautifully and cinematically, perfectly matching the book’s premise. He also complicates our understanding of the role of Kung Fu Guy, and calls out Hollywood’s and America’s many sins against the Asian American community. If you want both a fantastically engaging read and a dive into the complexities of anti-Asian racism in pop-culture, this is a must-read.