Seoyeon Lee is a third-year Ph.D. student majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. She graduated from Ewha Womans University with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature. Her current research centers on science fiction literature in Korea, mainland China, and Sinophone worlds. She is particularly interested in the intersection of contemporary Korean and Chinese science fiction in the works of women writers while exploring possibilities of imagining an alternative world beyond the boundaries of gender and race.
The film, The Wandering Earth (2019), is loosely based on the award-winning novelette by the same title by Liu Cixin, the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award in 2015, and it revealed China’s emerging soft power in the field of science fiction (hereafter SF), which has long been regarded as a Western-dominated genre. Along with the rapid technological development in Asia under neoliberal capitalism, China has recently emerged as one of the visible competitors for technological innovations while producing and consuming SF cultures through various kinds of media platforms. Acknowledging President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on “telling good China stories and spreading good China voices” in the age of globalization, nuanced research on contemporary Chinese SF films shifts the discourse of (re)producing the national and patriarchal representations of Chinese SF culture. In this regard, my research explores the complex entanglements between capitals, technologies, and state censorship in relation to SF representations of space/earth travel, rather than obsessing with a nationalist perspective in Chinese SF films. This paper analyzes the adaptation of The Wandering Earth while examining whether this film conforms to or deviates from the state guidelines. The paper, accordingly, addresses how the collective practice of “wandering” Asia imagined through the SF film relates to the Sinocentric world-building of the present and future. By focusing on the female character, Han Duoduo, who is newly adapted in the post-apocalyptic movie as an image of an orphan and a savior traveling from China to Indonesia, the paper focuses on the tensions between the Chinese national identity and hybrid embodiments beyond family structure, gender, and language. In doing so, this paper analyzes the female orphan character, Duoduo, as a political signifier that not only represents an alternative family structure of modern China but also reproduces a binary image of a woman embedded in Chinese patriarchal society. Moreover, this paper delves into the cinematic representation of a savior when Duoduo calls for global solidarity in tears by using the official Mandarin language. In terms of an exercise in cultural propaganda, I analyze how a unified Chinese language mobilizes transnational and multicultural individuals to participate in the China-centric order of mapping a new world/space. Ultimately, this paper explores various border crossing experiences of travelers across Asia in the SF film to re-imagine the geographical and geopolitical territories of Asia and to reconsider the multilingual and transcultural boundaries of Asia.