Love of the Week: The Peregrine Falcon Flies West
I've never had a bird obsession, and at thirty-five I just learned I'm wrong. To Yang Wanqing and others like him who follow our avian brethren closely, I am sorry. Yeah, I like a bird as much as anyone who appreciates a good sense of whimsy. I've just never had a fixation on them—which, turns out, is a terrible oversight. Mea culpa.
To be real: The Peregrine Falcon Flies West isn't exactly a ten-minute read. I can picture a lot of you clocking the almost twelve thousand-word count and closing the tab. I can picture it because I almost made that mistake myself. I urge you to reconsider. This story blew my mind wide open, mingling a literary fiction style with a stunning slow-reveal sci-fi plot that is so carefully laid out, it's hard to point to any one narrative thread without accidentally unspooling the whole lot into spoiler territory. If you're looking for a story that puts you on the brink of tears with its beauty, but also has an underlying current of Big Idea sci-fi, take your time to enjoy this one.
Set in Northern China (the story takes place partially in Beijing, but includes a crawl towards Mongolia and name-drops Shandong), Peregrine is a story that constantly looks up, obsessing over the vast, limitless sky and its inhabitants. It's the kind of tale that could have relieved some anxiety during lockdown, with a strong undercurrent of freedom and cast-off inhibition that left me dizzy with its child-like take on the vast possibility of the world. Not to say it's juvenile: Wanqing explores the irony of claustrophobic social expectation in a country as enormous and variant as China in a delicate but profound manner, treating the nuanced emotional forces—the pull of duty and want—like fragile glass objects held up to the light for inspection. I can't speculate how well that specific contradiction will translate for a western audience; I'm a pasty laowai myself, so I'm sure I'm only getting a fraction of the impact its original Chinese audience (and any diaspora folks finding it in English later) will feel. However, as someone who had the privilege of living in Xi'an for a short while, and a long-time fan of Xiaolu Guo, whose work also kicks against Chinese social strictures, I was struck by how damn on the money Wanqing's observations were. Peregrine is an unmistakable sci-fi bearing literary fiction-level verisimilitude reminiscent of Guo, or for a western counterpart, Joan Didion. If that's too far out of your wheelhouse, the simple explainer is: Wanqing's truth is sharply rendered but gently delivered, the fading echo of a gut punch; the way its social commentary interweaves with its sci-fi narrative has big Octavia Butler vibes. Even if you're unfamiliar with the particular social politics he's drawing from, the broad strokes version is the classic narrative dichotomy of dream versus reality, or freedom versus survival in a world of brutal pragmatism. Don't be put off by its roots: the emotional core is a big enough tent for anyone to step in.
Then drops the other shoe: the high concept. My big beef with a lot of sci-fi is that authors struggle to balance big feelings and big ideas, but Wanqing puts on a masterclass in how to do it right. Most sci-fi outlets will warn writers that the SF element needs to be fully integrated with the story, and Peregrine's is so intertwined I really can't go into detail without spoilering the thing. Let's just say this is an unique and gorgeous take on the alien visitation trope that readers of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life (better known by its movie adaptation, Arrival) will readily recognise.
And yeah, there's birds. Christ there's birds. So many birds. I'm not going to talk about the birds, because they're at the heart of this thing, buried so deep that to show you a feather would be to flash you the ending.
Just trust me on this one: go read it. It takes faith to plunge into a story of this size, but I guarantee for anyone who loves Ted Chiang, who's ever yearned to run away, or who wants a big idea full of big feelings, The Peregrine Falcon Flies West is a great way to spend a lunch break.
THE TL;DR
What is it: the 11,790-word novelette The Peregrine Falcon Flies West by Yang Wanqing, translated from Chinese by Jay Zhang
Where is it: Clarkesworld
What's so fucking great about it: profundity, punk spirit, earnestness
You'll love it if you love: Xiaolu Guo, Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer
Notable moments: Jay Zhang's translation of peregrine as misheard by a driver giving protagonist Liang Yuan a ride. I haven't been able to find the story in its original Chinese (it was first published untranslated in April 2023 in Science Fiction World, but Clarkesworld doesn't link to it and I can't find it in a Google search), and my Chinese is basically a handful of words, but peregrine falcon in Chinese appears to be yóu sǔn—a completely different set of sounds. Zhang's choice to have "peregrine" misheard in English as "pear-green" just strikes me as charming, and gives a tiny window into the relationship between author and translator that I don't have the knowledge to expand on, but does leave me with a thoughtful smile.