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A review by gracsreads
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin
2.0
at first glance, the premise is solid enough: Ming Tsu is violently and forcibly separated from his wife Ada by her disapproving family and subsequently embarks on a 10-year-long journey to kill those responsible and reunite with his wife. but for a story centered on revenge, the readers are left with strikingly little to work with — we know hardly anything about Ada, for one, and it's difficult to see why he's so singlemindedly hellbent on reuniting with her for so long when the author himself writes lines like "Ada walked into the room then and he looked at her and though he knew he loved her he could not remember why" (126). as far as we know, Ada's most prominent feature is her beauty; then, out of the blue, in the middle of the novel, Ming launches into the first detailed memory of Ada and our first glimpse into what Ada was like as a person apart from her physical appearance (describing the scene in which she figures out he is a murderer) but stops there. the issue is that the strength of the premise is contingent on Ada and Ming's relationship, but we don't know anything about it.
if Lin's intent was to explore how revenge takes on a life of its own, detached from the original purpose and sentiment to the point where Ming loses sight of what he's fighting for, it would've made more sense to explicate what Ming and Ada's relationship was like before to highlight the contrasting motivations.
the satisfaction of a revenge story stems partly from the reader's vicarious desire to see the protagonist's tormenters punished for causing him pain. it boils down to empathy: we understand the protagonist's motivation and pain, and we root for him. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu lacks this motivation and fails to invite the reader to participate in feeling and understanding Ming's pain, thereby zapping the story's premise of its power. the route that Thousand Crimes takes is to whittle the story down and strip it of its emotional context, and it would do much better as a movie rather than a book (evidenced by John Wick and Kill Bill, to a certain extent). as a movie, Lin's descriptions would certainly come to life with stunning cinematography and spectacular action sequences, which perhaps would draw the focus away from the story's striking lack of momentum.
if Lin's intent was to explore how revenge takes on a life of its own, detached from the original purpose and sentiment to the point where Ming loses sight of what he's fighting for, it would've made more sense to explicate what Ming and Ada's relationship was like before to highlight the contrasting motivations.
the satisfaction of a revenge story stems partly from the reader's vicarious desire to see the protagonist's tormenters punished for causing him pain. it boils down to empathy: we understand the protagonist's motivation and pain, and we root for him. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu lacks this motivation and fails to invite the reader to participate in feeling and understanding Ming's pain, thereby zapping the story's premise of its power. the route that Thousand Crimes takes is to whittle the story down and strip it of its emotional context, and it would do much better as a movie rather than a book (evidenced by John Wick and Kill Bill, to a certain extent). as a movie, Lin's descriptions would certainly come to life with stunning cinematography and spectacular action sequences, which perhaps would draw the focus away from the story's striking lack of momentum.