Not having read your work, this is pure speculation, but I wonder whether your readers are having issues not because “the dialogue is fluent English” per se, but because the dialogue contains specific cultural elements that clash with the Chinese setting?

For example, I like Bujold’s Vorkosigan books for their plots and characters, but just about every book has a linguistic clanger or two. If I recall correctly, in one case Miles is looking for just the right adjective to describe a woman, and finally settles on “zaftig.” Even granting the filter of translation from whatever future language Miles actually knows, there is nothing in Bujold’s worldbuilding that would suggest that Miles would have any way of knowing that word. It doesn’t fit the overall culture. It threw me right out of the book.

If this is the issue here, you might ask your readers to flag specific words or passages which stood out as problematic, and see if they contain cultural references that don’t jibe with Chinese characters in China.

Then again, it’s also possible that this isn’t the issue at all, in which case ignore this comment and go with the excellent advice other people have already offered. :-)

The elven point of ear.. err, view, becomes more understandable if you keep in mind that each elf has seen unnumbered generations of men do the same mistakes again and again, seemingly never learning.

Elves in MMORPGspeek:
“I’ve tried to help the rookies, teach them the basics, give them hints, coach them to become 133t, time after time, year after year, and every time they mess up. And every day there are new newbies, and they commit the same mistakes, time and again, and create the most awful messes. And every time they mess up me and the guildies have gone to help them clean up their mess, using up our irreplaceable legacy items, consumables and tokens. And every time we do that one or more of my guildies just throw up their hands and say ‘I can’t take this, I quit!’ and quit playing. And the guild is shrinking and shrinking. And I’m getting tired. Its not *fun* anymore. So from here on the n000bs will have to clean up their own messes.”

I myself am, as far as I know, of French-German-Irish extraction. (I’m also a full-blooded Homo-American, and descended from a long line of women on both sides of the family.) I don’t know when my French and Irish and German ancestors crossed the Big Ocean. My late father used to tell me that in his childhood (he was born in 1923), his family spoke German at home, but I haven’t confirmed this. All of the relatives I ever met from childhood on spoke American English. I’ve never been to Europe or the British Isles, and the foreign language I speak best is Spanish, with high-school French a distant second. I took one semester of college German, and hated the language so didn’t go any further.

So. Am I out of touch with my roots or my heritage? Perhaps so. But my roots are here in the midwestern mongrel USA. When you transplant a plant, its roots are where you put them, not where they were before; when a maple seed blows on the wind until it lands somewhere and germinates, its roots are there, not with the tree that generated the seed. The metaphor of roots just doesn’t work very well, I don’t think. My heritage likewise. Is that English imperialist Shakespeare part of the heritage of an Irishman, I ask you? Are the caricatures of Frenchmen in his history plays acceptable to a Frenchman? The notion that a person’s roots or heritage are many generations and an ocean away seems to me a variety of racial essentialism that I find troubling in people who are trying to be anti-racist. Robert Reid-Pharr deals with this issue in his book Once You Go Black; see page 127, for example, where he quotes a lyrical passage by George Jackson and then comments:

“I continue to return to this rather stunning quote from Jackson precisely because the beauty and economy of the prose belie the incredible sloppiness of the thought. Jackson has no recall, no memory whatsoever of the African continent, the middle passage, enslavement. Indeed in his admittedly noble efforts to reclaim the lost African body he shuts himself off from the most basic realities of Black American history and culture. That is to say, confronted with the reality that there is no authoritative history of the slave, Jackson constitutes a sort of Baroque poetics of the black body – fecund modifier substituted for stale fact.”

Reid-Pharr also addressed this point in Black Gay Man, where he noted that for most African-Americans, the slaveowner is part of their heritage as well.

For that matter, my French quarter is probably descended from another stew of ancestors. Have I lost my Roman roots, my Gothic heritage, my African foremothers? Should I make a pilgrimage to Catal Huyuk and dress in ancient fabrics to honor my matrilineal Asia-Minor heritage? I’m sure no one here would think anyone needs to go that far, but how do you decide where to draw the line? When people talk about “roots” and “heritage” they always seem to be invoking a timeless period before history, when there was no change, when bloodlines were pure — and there is no such period. Some commenters here have pointed out that Chinese culture, for example, is not monolithic but contains many subgroups; I’d only add that those subgroups didn’t keep themselves as separate as their current representatives might like to think.

Has anyone here mentioned Marge Piercy’s pioneering proto-cyberpunk feminist/multicultural sf novel Woman on the Edge of Time? One of many details that made a big impression on me when I first read it was the importance of breaking the link between skin color and culture, so that there would be pinkish-grey-skinned and black-skinned Mattapoisett Indians and pinkish-grey-skinned and brown-skinned and black-skinned Harlem Blacks. One of the primary aspects of racism, it seems to me, is the assumption that skin color is somehow connected to, if it doesn’t cause, cultural traits. I think that one thing that has hurt anti-racism in this country is that so many anti-racist activists have been nervous about breaking that link altogether. The notion of “ethnic group” has been one way of sneaking the link back in surreptitiously. Vijay Prashad has also discussed such questions, in The Karma of Brown Folk and <iEverybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting.

And to me, one of the most memorable passages in LOTR was when Sam and Frodo see the Oliphaunt, and the dead Southron warrior who is clearly intended to represent an African. They find him magnificent and are convinced that he was coerced or deceived into joining Sauron’s forces. I believe that Tolkien had two intentions in writing this: to make clear that the use of darkness as a metaphor for evil was _not_ intended to be racial, and to put a human face on individual opponents, which, for his time and culture, bespeaks enormous thoughtfulness and care.

It can be difficult to own one’s white privileged position, especially when a true desire for goodness is at heart, but still the active word is “own.” It is a choice. One that is more easily made in venues such as this one, and in the end, the information, resources, and considerations have reached a portion of the intended audience. I can at least speak for myself, and say: “I hear what you’ve said, and it will stay with me.”

Again, thank you for this. It is a model by which I hope many follow. I certainly plan to do so, myself.

Just speaking generally, if I cracked open (or booted up) a long book or series that dealt with an issue of cultural identity, I’d expect at least a well written and thoughtful vignette right near the beginning that indicated a sophisticated approach that the author is going to take throughout to such an important theme. Even if I wasn’t personally offended, just to convince me to keep reading.

That might be a general issue related to all these multi-book series. I prefer – am more used to? – each book keeping me involved in a compelling story in and of itself – but that may not fit the business model.

It seems that even though the serious and urgent problem of race in sf has been around for a long time (can someone ask NYRSF put the 1998 Delany piece online? I couldn’t find it), one reason we are seeing so much discussion now is that the dead tree biz that has dominated science fiction since the beginning is losing its grip. New forms of reader-author-publisher relationships are about to be negotiated. It is really fascinating.

Can I add another word of thanks to MAM, as far as I can see is really the one who has walked up to the plate and engaged the larger sf community about a conversation that began mostly on livejournal where it has been hard to follow. She deserves even more praise than she has already been getting. What I really appreciate is that she and so many other people politely continued to engage in a serious debate despite some nastiness that might have derailed the thread.

…secondary to me getting why she’s so pissed off, and being supportive of an atmosphere that works on fixing that…

Yep, that’s the bunny!

I’m a fix-it kind of person, too. Among the empathy-motivated reasons for wanting to fix it, I tend to go looking at the mechanics of fixing it in my writing.