Beijing-born Tom Lin on the gunslinging Chinese anti-hero of his Western debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu
- Lin, a 25-year-old English PhD student, says he wanted to create a character through which he could narratively place himself in the history of America
- The result is Ming Tsu, a vengeful Chinese outlaw in the American West, and a book whose descriptive writing has been likened to that of Cormac McCarthy
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin, pub. Little, Brown and Co
Everyone knows how the West was won. Brave white settlers conquered a vast, hostile territory, California dreamin’ all the way to the ocean. Other brave white pioneers – cowboys – supervised security arrangements, weeding out bad elements among their number and obliterating savage natives; and still other brave white visionaries risked severe backache panning for gold while their infrastructure-minded comrades toiled in the searing sun to build the railroad.
And from the throng emerged one of American culture’s most resilient champions: the lone gunslinger, the cowboy’s cowboy, honourable, decent and a decidedly pale-faced arbiter in all disputes. Although of course it wasn’t really like that.
Any “victory” against the West was achieved by an unknowable concoction of heroes, villains and misfits of various nationalities, creeds, races and colours, even if only one shade took all the credit. Which is where author Tom Lin comes in with his debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Subverting the usual thrust of Wild West stories, Lin makes ruthless Chinese-American outlaw Ming the anti-hero, dispensing vengeance-flavoured justice to those who, in traditional Westerns, are lionised no matter how vicious or racist: sheriffs, judges, bounty hunters, railroad tycoons and their foremen.
These are the people who rendered Ming an outlaw, so it makes sense that Lin (while not on any sort of anti-white crusade) wastes little sympathy on them, however gruesomely each is dispatched from Ming’s hit list. And behind all the bloodshed lurks a question: what does it take to be American?