At a particular historical juncture, traditional Chinese vernacular fiction seemed to encapsulate the voice of a nation. Twentieth-century reformers saw the genre's lively and relatively accessible prose style as a suitable alternative to the “classical” language of the literati. Recent scholarship, however, has increasingly situated the genre within the context of the greater early modern world. Ning Ma, for example, has shown how Plum in the Golden Vase was shaped by the same world historical trends that shaped Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the fiction of Ihara Saikaku.Footnote ¹ William Hedberg has traced the influence of The Water Margin in Edo Japan.Footnote ² Rivi Handler-Spitz has shown how the late Ming figure Li Zhi—himself strongly associated with vernacular fiction, and The Water Margin in particular—can be understood as the product of the same “unruly age” that produced Montaigne.Footnote ³

Yuanfei Wang's new monograph, Writing Pirates: Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China, is an exciting addition to this body of scholarship. Like its predecessors, it shows the connections between the titular genre and the early modern world beyond the borders of the Ming Empire. Moreover, the connections it shows are not merely between Ming China and one or more other nations such as Spain, England, Japan, or France. Rather, they are with the vast and unknowable sea—the realm of pirates. The sixteenth century was the era of the “Japanese” wokou pirates. In unofficial writings such as vernacular fiction, such outlaws could be celebrated for their rebellious qualities. They carried the potential to become symbols of unrestrained authenticity rather than merely menaces to society.

In the introduction, Wang lays out a comparativist framework for approaching the late Ming vernacular literature of the sea. She notes that the sea has been linked to the European experience, and that seafaring captains and pirates are long-standing features of Western literature. The sea calls such characters to adventures both lawful and unlawful, and its vastness is a great equalizer: as Wang evocatively puts it, “The sea does not care where you are from” (p. 5). There, the standard hierarchies fall. Drawing on Foucault, Wang traces what she alternately refers to as the “Chinese discourse of the sea” (p. 6) and the “late Ming discourse of pirates” (p. 7) found in fictional and historical narratives of the era. The net is cast wider than the titular “vernacular fiction” might suggest; provocatively, she suggests that this discourse is also partially composed of official narratives harboring a colonialist expansionist mindset.

The book is divided into three sections, each consisting of two chapters dedicated to a particular region of the maritime world. The first section focuses on Southeast Asia. Chapter 1 provides a fascinating historicized reading of the influential Ming masterwork The Water Margin as informed by maritime trade networks. It also reads that novel's sequel not as an idealized utopia but as a fictional stand-in for the real Siam, where Chinese and Japanese diasporic communities contended and locals were eroticized. Chapter 2, which concentrates on depictions of Java, places the understudied novel Eunuch Sanbao's Voyages on the Western Ocean (ca. 1598) alongside three unofficial histories; Wang uses these texts “to dissect the construction of the late Ming empire's self-image in the discourse of Japanese piracy and Yuan/Ming/Java foreign relations” (p. 83). It is the fictional work, according to Wang, that is best able to depict the Ming in the face of its others.

The second section is on Japan. Chapter 3, while not concerned with “fiction” per se, is concerned with the “vernacular”: it discusses how rampant piracy spurred coastal officials to compile Sino-Japanese materials, including translations of waka poetry, for linguistic reference purposes. Chapter 4, meanwhile, returns to more familiar “fiction” territory, the vernacular story; Wang uses a Feng Menglong story, among other texts, to illustrate “Japanese racial and ethnic differences” and the “fluid boundary between captives, slaves, pirates, traders, and migrants in a rapidly evolving maritime world” (p. 109). The two chapters that make up the third section, on Jiangnan, China, are both about pirate kings. Chapter 5 is about varying historiographical accounts of their raids, while chapter 6 is about their fictional romances. Finally, in the conclusion, Wang points to some possible future directions for research based on the proceedings. Most intriguingly, she suggests extending the approaches of Sinophone studies to premodern literature.

At times, Writing Pirates could further highlight the complex intersection of vernacular fiction and “elite” discourse. For example, it names the provocative figure Li Zhi (1527–1602) as the first writer “to equalize the lowly genre of vernacular fiction with the highbrow genre of historiography” (p. 51), when Li Kaixian (1502–68) and his literati coterie had compared The Water Margin to Records of the Grand Historian half a century earlier. Nevertheless, by drawing rich connections between fiction and a wide variety of other writings, Writing Pirates casts new light on the genre and the broader “discourse of pirates” running through it. It fuses historiography and the imagination of the other, opening the door for a range of further inquiries for scholars of late Ming literature and comparative early modernities alike.

It is also notable that Writing Pirates is published under a Creative Commons license and freely available online as an open access publication. These developments increase access to scholarship, and they are to be applauded.