Book review: Legendary Chinese pirate queen Shek Yeung’s life gets half-hearted feminist retelling

Deep As The Sky, Red As The Sea

By Rita Chang-Eppig
Fiction/Bloomsbury Publishing/Hardover/281 pages/$24.08/Amazon (

amzn.to/46V4UoK

)
3 stars

The tale of Chinese pirate queen Shek Yeung – also known as Madam Ching, Ching Shih and Cheng-Yi Sao – is ripe for reclamation especially in the post-#MeToo era and with interest in Asian stories at an all-time high in Western publishing circles. 

Shek Yeung’s life is proof that fact can be stranger than fiction. Born in 1775, she was a brothel worker before she married pirate king Cheng Yat. Upon his death, variously recorded as drowned or murdered during a typhoon off Vietnam, Shek Yeung inherited his fleet and married his adopted son Cheung Po. 

To top it all off, the wily Shek Yeung was smart enough to barter a pardon from the Qing authorities while the going was good, retiring to run various brothels and gaming enterprises till her death at 69 in 1844.

All this is, of course, catnip for contemporary authors eager to map modern muscle onto the skeletal remains of her story.

Debut novelist Rita Chang-Eppig, who comes armed with a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from New York University, seems eminently qualified to retell Shek Yeung’s story. 

Yet Deep As The Sky, Red As The Sea never quite takes flight. Various authorial decisions, despite gestures at contemporary liberation, ironically succeed only in keeping Shek Yeung earthbound. 

The story begins promisingly enough, with Shek Yeung witnessing first husband Cheng Yat’s death at the hands of a cutlass-wielding Portuguese soldier. Yet what should be a cinematic opener never flowers into bloody action.

Instead, the dominant tone is one of introspection as she muses about her own ambivalence towards the man whom she both loves and fears, doubts and believes, questions and obeys.

The narrative switches between following Shek Yeung’s schemes to retain control of her half of the fleet and flashbacks to her childhood, interspersed with stories about Ma-Zou, worshipped not only as the goddess of the sea but also a deity with a mortal origin story.

This attempt at drawing parallels between the lives of Shek Yeung and Ma-Zou, despite initial promise, never pays off. 

Chang-Eppig’s writing attempts some ornate flourishes to capture the period feel and she is only intermittently successful.

Shek Yeung’s distant relationship with her young son is conveyed in one line: “She stroked his back falteringly, her cold hand a disembodied thing haunting the stone path of his spine.”

But some attempts are just strained similes: “Lam Yuk-Yiu’s whip was tucked into her sash and trailed on the ground behind her like a line of thought she’d lost interest in.” 

Where the author excels is in the careful weaving in of evidently extensive historical research so that Shek Yeung’s world pops off the page vividly.

It is one of constant famine, a weak and distant emperor unable and unwilling to alleviate the people’s suffering, and the creeping rapacity of Western powers nibbling at the edges of the rotten Qing empire. 

It is also a casually globalised world where a Chinese pirate crew includes a South-east Asian Muslim and a Filipino; where the fleet’s hideouts include Taiwan’s Fort Zeelandia, built by the Dutch East India Company, and the port city of “Maynila”; where a pirate’s life offers chances to encounter exotic marvels such as Taiwan’s coral stone houses and gourmet treats of rambutans and guavas. 

The major factor crippling the story is Chang-Eppig’s decision to focus on Shek Yeung’s vulnerability in a patriarchal system. The idea probably is to emphasise her resilient courage to survive in a world where a woman’s power is always wielded obliquely. 

However, this blinkered approach diminishes Shek Yeung’s agency.

The real woman must have been a power to reckon with, to have enforced strict discipline and earned respect from a fleet estimated at some 1,000 large junks and 800 smaller boats crewed by some 80,000 people.

Among her unshakeable rules, one of which is emphasised here, is that rape is punishable by death. 

Occasionally, the author’s zealousness in trying to impose a contemporary gloss results in jarringly modern language.

A line about why Shek Yeung’s in-laws dislike her is explained in discordantly 21st-century speak as “some women who, having had no choice but to perform femininity for men all their lives, began to confuse their roles for reality”. 

The book also ends abruptly, with Shek Yeung’s successful negotiation with the Chinese government to win amnesty for her crew and herself. The rest of her long life, her real triumph in surviving against the odds, is not addressed, leaving the reader hanging on something of an anti-climax. 

There is a better book to be written about this fascinating woman who ruled the South China Sea so thoroughly that it threatened the Qing empire and all the colonial powers.

In the meantime, Deep As The Sky is merely an amuse-bouche that barely whets the appetite. 

If you like this, read: She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (Pan Macmillan, 2022, $18.25, Amazon, go to

amzn.to/3O8Zzlg

), both a nuanced character study and a rip-roaring palace intrigue about an unnamed girl who takes over her dead brother’s identity, finagles her way into a monastery and rises in the ranks to become the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty.