mantareads’s Reviews > Myths and Legends of China > Status Update

The stories I dont know are told so poorly as to be bland; and the excerpts of the ones which I DO know, like the exploits of Wukong and Gang, are told so nonchalantly as to be unexciting, uninspiring. This guy is a shit storyteller in addition to being a dishonest imperialist.

Actually this book has so much potential. It is just further ruined by the occasional additional condescending commentary that the writer feels compelled to layer on to the myths he tries to retell, so that a particular Daoist Saint or mythical hero is (often inexplicably) made to sound weirdly unscrupulous or unethical for no real reason. I'm really starting to feel such such immense distaste for this book.

It's often not that the story is boring. It's that the storyteller is mediocre.

After creating a vague, sweeping category, Werner lumps "myths" he's picked up and recites them so flaccidly that they blur into each other.

So much for characterising the Chinese as being "crude", "primitive" and "vague".

Werner writes in 1922 with so much arrogant assuredness about Chinese myth, but it has aged like milk.

The first 2 chapters are a poorly attempted, crude, lazy and ahistorical "sociology" of Chinese civilisation.

Even colonial administrators in Singapore were writing more balanced accounts of "the natives" by this time; I fail to see how anyone can write so condescendingly about the Chinese by the 1920s.

"What progress was made was due to European instruction"

Man of his time, etc. I can grant this text that, despite all the problematic statements he makes about the chinese in this early 20th-century text, just before Western imperialism fucks itself over.

But how appalling that Werner writes about Chinese opium without referencing the British role in it. What a dishonest, ahistorical pseudo-intellectual.