An Excess Male author Maggie Shen King talks dystopia, inspiration, and expanding a short story

An Excess Male is author Maggie Shen King’s first novel, and she gave us some great insights into the making of the world within the novel.

It’s Emmys week, and if nothing else, the nominations for A Handmaid’s Tale prove that dystopia is experiencing another pop-culture moment. But if you look beyond TV and film (hey there, Blade Runner 2049), literature has more and more writers wading into the future and how dark it can be. Enter Maggie Shen King with An Excess Male, out today from Harper Voyager, sent to your favorite reviewer.

Yours truly had the chance to talk with her about what went into making her book, which examines a China that, faced with a problem of too many men and not enough women, has sanctioned polyandry. As he tries to become Wu May-ling’s third husband, Lee Wei-guo finds himself embroiled in a lot more than he bargained for.

This isn’t her first crack at dealing with the One Child Policy, though; she started with “Ball and Chain,” a short story that now makes up the bulk of the novel’s first chapter (she mentioned a scene was added to that first chapter thanks to her writing group). When I asked how she decided to make the jump from short story to novel, she explained:

"I sought to understand why a woman and her two husbands would want to take on another spouse and began to explore their individual stories. Whereas I wrote my first attempt at a novel with an outline, I wrote this book much like the famous E.L. Doctorow quote, with just the headlights of my vehicle illuminating what was immediately ahead. It was a thrilling and nerve-wracking ride."

An Excess Male gives all three of May-ling’s husbands a chance to tell their stories, then adds in May-ling herself for a total of four perspectives. Oddly enough, though, two of the four characters — Guo Hann and Guo Xiong-xin, brothers and May-ling’s first two husbands — don’t have a first-person perspective. Shen King revealed to me that yes, that was on purpose, although it wasn’t quite as balanced at first. Instead, she started with just XX (Xiong-xin), in third-person, but some comments from a member of her writers’ group convinced her to switch Hann’s sections to third-person. That same group also asked for more of her world-building.

A lot of input went into the book’s title, as well; she cited both the help of her friends as well as her agent. Among the tentative titles on the list she gave me was Their Own Gang of Four (which is a good modern Chinese history reference that had me laughing and Shen King revealing she liked it a lot herself), One Wife Policy, No Country for Patriots, The Courtship of a Surplus Male, and a lot more. “We weren’t certain An Excess Male was the right one when we submitted the book, but I loved the unexpected and provocative use of the word ‘excess’ and the questions it raised,” she explained.

As for those pretty-much-inevitable Handmaid’s Tale comparisons, yes, she’s done them herself:

"The Handmaid’s Tale came immediately to mind. It fascinated me that the draconian measures in both The Handmaid’s Tale and in my book were efforts to solve serious crises. The theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale was facing an eroding environment, sharply declining fertility rates, and possible extinction while the State in An Excess Male was contending with overpopulation and mass starvation. The original intent in both cases was good, yet the practice in actuality was the legislation of what can and cannot be done to women’s bodies."

Even with the idea of women in mind, writing in May-ling’s perspective proved a challenge. Shen King mentioned that “Women were so rare in this society that they became nearly subhuman, a resource to be protected, commoditized, and allocated. She was the product of greedy daughter breeders, and I had a difficult time with her youth and naiveté.” The former in particular applies pretty well to both Handmaid’s Tale and An Excess Male, and it’s in May-ling that the comparisons are most apparent, at least in this reader’s opinion.

Of course, it’s not always easy to draw one-to-one comparisons. In particular, Atwood’s Offred remembers a time before Gilead, but Shen King’s Wei-guo, May-ling, Hann, and XX don’t remember a time before the new policies. That, too, was on purpose, done to make the story “feel highly plausible” by creating “a society that was habituated to the idea and practice of polyandry and also to all the measures the State has put in place to keep the excess male population under control,” per Shen King. Indeed, even by 2015, when the policy was finally starting to be phased out, National Geographic identified quite a few problems facing China.

However, Atwood wasn’t the only influence on the novel. She also cited Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, and two works by Karen Russell (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove) as books she had in mind. Once you’ve finished An Excess Male, there’s your immediate reading list. (I know that my own list just got a little longer.)

She also summed up what she hopes readers get from reading An Excess Male:

"My deepest hope is that the grimmer realities in the story speak to some truths in my readers’ experience. I hope that I was able to immerse readers convincingly in another time, place, and culture. My goal was to write a heartfelt, well-paced, and exciting story, and I hope readers find my book engaging and emotionally compelling."

So, after An Excess Male, what’s next for Maggie Shen King? She confirmed that she has designs on more novels, and even expounded on one of her ideas:

"In addition to 30 million unmarriageable men, the One Child Policy has produced yet another set of victims—girls whose hukou or household registration were saved by their parents for a younger brother. These girls, called heihaizi or shadow or ghost children, are undocumented, illegal, and non-existent in the eyes of the law. They have no rights to health care, education, or legal protection. They cannot ride public transportation, marry, obtain or inherit property, or have children. The 2010 Census estimated the number of ‘nonpersons’ to be at least 13 million."

This idea, too, started life out as a short story, one you can check out on her website.

Finally, since I had to ask, she also gave me the traditional characters for her main characters’ names, and I’ve taken the liberty of converting into simplified where necessary for those of us who are more familiar with the simplified set:

"Lee Wei-guo: 李偉國 (simplified: 李伟国)Wu May-ling: 吴美伶Guo Xiong-xin: 郭雄新Guo Hann: 郭漢 (simplified: 郭汉)BeiBei: 貝貝 (simplified: 贝贝)"

Next: Book-Thirsty Thursday: Apex, Mercedes Lackey

An Excess Male is now on shelves. Keep an eye here on Culturess for my review of the novel, coming later this week, and thanks again to Maggie Shen King and Harper Voyager!