_nayla_ 's review for:

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

4.25

challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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 The Membranes was an odd read. The 1995 translated Taiwanese novel left me wrong footed often — and shocked at how some things, like sexuality and gender, were treated by the citizens of . . . whatever the country was at that point. 

 

After martial law was lifted, Ta-Wei was at the forefront of the queer speculative fiction movement in his country. His novel’s exploration of a woman’s self-understanding and morality, coupled with her nonchalant attitude toward her gender and sexuality, made technological regimes (MegaHard and ISM) stand out in their stasis. Namely, that while things that are ultra-controversial right now have become the norm in T City (trans/gay rights, gender conforming surgery, interracial relationships), corporations still rule the world in 2100 as they do now. 

 

Through Momo and her mother, the reader explores many aspects of the future that may seem either painfully present or wholly separated from their reality, depending on their status. Is a white reader uncomfortable by shifting social dynamics as the sun sears through the ozone layer and melanin becomes most prized? How does Momo’s particular situation, a brain in a cage unable to perceive intimacy and reality if not mediated by others, factor into current moral dilemmas regarding life support? Is organ harvesting a line people are willing to cross for the greater good — of a corporation? Wealth is wealth, even at the bottom of the sea. But at what cost? There are probably as many answers as there are people. 

 

Thirty years removed from the publication of the novel, The Membranes still poses intriguing questions about humanity’s response to disaster. They still have a slave class (androids, cyborgs) and global political influence determining where people could live, what jobs they could have, etc. Momo is the most celebrated aesthetician in T City . . . or is she? Her perception, and the readers’ perceptions, are constantly challenged; I was aware of something being off, I just couldn’t pinpoint what. By the end of the short novel, I understood why Ta-Wei is so renowned in his literary circles. 

 

Momo is plagued by thoughts of Andy, her childhood friend that accompanied her in the hospital. Even when she realized Andy (short for ‘android’) was specifically engineered to grow the organs she would need to survive her childhood disease, Momo felt a tender longing for the relationship she had with Andy, her only friend. Her mother, who she hasn’t seen since Momo “went to boarding school,” has abandoned her — until an urgent email before her 30th birthday makes her think that Mother didn’t mean to leave her alone, necessarily. 

 

As Momo’s exploration with M Skin, a second skin applied on “clients” that reads every single minute detail about their lives once inserted into a computer, becomes more complex and intriguing, she discovers that her mother is not being truthful. In fact, no one is. Actually, it’s almost like Momo as a concept doesn’t exist at all. 

 

Turns out that a childhood disease was so extensive and damaging that at 10 years old, the hospital’s invasive surgery determined that her brain was the only thing salvageable. But what was Momo’s mother supposed to do? The only answer for a grieving mother at the time: lease out her daughter’s brain to do fine motor work for MegaHard and ISM on battle-ready, radiation-proof androids waging war on one another on the barren surface of the planet. A 20 year lease where, in the meantime, Momo’s mother was able to write scripts for her brain to read and recreate in her mind. 

 

Her brain believed she is an aesthetician. Her brain is sure that Mother’s friends visit her often enough, and that she is emotionally and sexually stunted, and she is living an accomplished life despite it all. Her brain believes Mother doesn’t love her. 

 

Now, on Momo’s 30th birthday, her mother has come to take her home. The lease has ended, her brain (“a canary in a coal mine”) is caged and transported in her loving arms back home. Back down to the bottom of the sea to be plugged in to more life support. Momo will live a whole life dictated by the scripts her mother feeds her. Until, of course, the brain can be transplanted into another living body, human or otherwise. Ta-Wei leaves the possibilities ambiguous; with such technological innovation and shifting morals, perhaps Momo will be once more in a body for the first time since she was 10. 

 

The story grew on me, especially when I learned the added context of Ta-Wei’s experiences under military rule and how information flooded the island after its downfall, melding into the existing culture in a way that created a uniquely charged microcosm of artists seeking meaning and connection after such a difficult transition. A beautiful exploration of humanity. 

 

TLDR; a great foray into 1990s Chinese speculative queer literature