To be or not to be? That is the question. To die a hero or live long enough to become the villain?
To Gaze upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang is about a young woman called Yang Ruying. She’s caught between a rock and a hard place. A Xianling living in the former Er-Lang empire, she is one of two twins born with the power of death at her fingertips. She is death personified, a sleeping tigress waiting to be awakened.
Having discovered her powers at a tender age in the most heartbreaking way, she has vowed never to use her powers again. But when Hushan, her childhood friend, drags her up a mountain and in a bout of silly boyish mischief plants a kiss on her, his friends jump out of the bushes to jeer at them. Before she is fully able to take in the moment of the kiss, then, she is startled and loses her balance at the cliff-edge. Grabbing onto Hushan in an attempt to save herself, she causes them both to both fall into the river below.
Gasping for air while Hushan laughs hysterically as if drunk on power, Ruying tries to free herself, but feels as if something keeps dragging her down. It’s Hushan’s power, which is manipulating water: he is wielding it defiantly despite the now-present crowd telling him to stop; survival instinct kicks in within Ru, and her powers of death are activated. She drains Hushan’s life-force without thinking. The laughter in the air dies and Hushan’s body is lifeless, floating on the river.
From this point on, Ru is stigmatised, with nobody wanting to play with her. Fast-forward years later, and Ru has nonetheless blossomed into a young woman despite growing up under the tyranny of Roman rule as an orphan. Life was not easy, with an abusive father who curses her and her sister’s birth: he blamed them for his wife’s death because she died whilst giving birth to them. He also wishes she’d given him sons instead, as better consolation for her death.
Ruying came out of the womb a healthy bouncing baby whilst Meiya came out looking very malnourished. Yet, where Ruying was born with the power to kill by draining qi—or someone’s life-force—Meiya was born with the power to heal. It seems that, even in the womb, while both her mother and Meiya gave life Ruying drained it—and indeed killed her mother in the process. By this logic, she also blames herself for her mother’s death.
It’s also true, however, that their father, once a respected man by birth, dragged down the family name by squandering all that their grandfather worked for: name, fame, wealth, and respect. One can argue that it was their father’s twisted way of taking revenge on their grandfather, who saw it fit to train someone else’s child into a mighty general having not seen potential in his own son. This was something Ru’s father took as a defeat of his manhood—which of course he saw as taking a further beating when he fathered two girls instead of boys.
Equally humiliating, however, is being forced to live under the tyranny of Roman rule since the invasion that left Er-Lang on its knees and at Rome’s mercy. When the Romans ripped through the sky from the other side of the veil, they came in the guise of peace, with their helicopters, guns, and science. They discovered Pangu, a city in this other world, beautiful and clean in stark contrast to their own world, which is dying due to years of neglect. Though the Romans had come in peace at first, war soon broke out because they wanted Pangu, and wanted to make it their own, or at least weaken it. The warriors of Pangu, armed with nothing but magic, bows, and arrows, suffered a crushing defeat in less than a day. Magic lost against science.
There was a ceasefire and a treaty was signed. Rome claimed half of the city. It bought more land, or took it by hook or crook, for further expansion. Pangu is now under Roman rule and its people weakened by opian, a drug that was supposed to enhance and awaken magic but has more dangerous effects, such as addiction and early death. This was the drug on which Ruying’s father wasted their family fortune, eventually dying a dog’s death when he was once born with a silver spoon.
The twins were left to be raised by their grandmother, “eldest daughter of a great general before she became the wife of a greater one. She had watched her brothers spar as children, before they grew into men and one by one lost their lives on the battlefield.’’ She imparted that knowledge to her granddaughters: war had always been with Er-Lang, before the Romans, but in the uncertain world in which they now lived, if worse comes to worse, it will be the twins against the world. Meiya, however, falls prey to opian in the hopes of doubling her strength and fighting in a rebel group called the Phantom; instead of fighting, Ruying opts to get married to protect and provide for her family, as soon as her grandmother finds a suitor.
Ruying is nevertheless forced to buy opian for Meiya from Baihu, her childhood friend. He is a man she considers a traitor, since he rose through the ranks to become the right-hand man to Valentin, one of Rome’s princes. The bastard son of a royal, he has seen the world through Ruying’s eyes once, having seen both his parents fall prey to opian—one in an attempt to survive the cancer that raged through her and the other in an attempt to ignore his responsibilities as a father and enjoy his days as a foolish royal.
In return for the opian, Baihu asks for Ru’s help. He knows of Ruying’s powers and wants to use her as an assassin. Ruying is cautious not to provoke Baihu by flatly saying no, and tells him that she will think about it, thinking Meiya will soon be off the drug and that there will be no need to visit Baihu and offer an answer. But when she steals the purse of a Roman giving money to a street beggar on the way home, draining the qi of one of the city guards who chases her, she brings a patrol of Roman inspectors to her community. Taken prisoner with other Xianlings, she is forced to show her power by fighting against her own people in the area.
In the gladiators’ dungeons, she is visited by Prince Antony, the same man she robbed that day. He offers her the same proposition Baihu had made: be his personal assassin in exchange for the safety and well-being of her family. This time, she reluctantly agrees and becomes the killer her grandmother had always feared she would be—and the one her sister wanted her to be, just perhaps fighting on the wrong side.
This question of choosing, of sides, continues to be crucial to the novel. As Antony trains her, testing her loyalty and abilities, he convinces her that, though he is a prince of Rome seemingly vicious in his ways, underneath he is a man: a human, just like her, who wants Romans and Pangulins to live in peace and harmony. He simply believes that, for this to be possible, sacrifices must be made. She will just have to assassinate both bad and good men to prevent the outbreak of a war.
Over time, and with this idea in mind, killing becomes easier for Ruying, just as Antony said it would, although she feels ashamed by this fact, and distances herself from her family. But when Baihu seeks her out to kill Antony for him, another narrative emerges: that Antony is just as cruel as his brothers, only more calculating, strategic, and vindictive in his pursuit of the throne; that thousands of Xianlings were being ripped from their homes and experimented on, then left for dead at Antony’s behest; and that Baihu is a spy, working all along for the Phantom.
Of course, Ruying discreetly changes sides once more, to fight for Pangu and their world. In this way, To Gaze upon Wicked Gods is a story about a girl finding her voice and strength in adversity. It teaches us that sometimes the heroes we look for in others can also be found in ourselves. In this story, Ruying repeatedly comes to a crossroads where she has to forsake love in order to survive. The story highlights that old saying, “In politics there are no permanent friends or enemies but permanent interests.” Antony and Ruying’s interests never change but their allies and loyalties do. And, just as she had forsaken her childhood crush back in that river, we see Ruying drowning under the tyranny of Roman rule, gasping for air, praying for a breakthrough.