I'm going to be so honest, for a book about my favorite pirate ever, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea manages to disappoint in so many ways by not only watering down, but drastically changing the story of her life.
The things I liked about this historical fiction, while not a short list, were not enough to outweigh the parts of it that disappointed me. Chang-Eppig is a fantastic writer with simple, yet elegant prose. It was easy to follow the story, and the plot was well written and coherent. Sek Jeong was well written and felt multifaceted, and her growth over the course of the story was done well. Her relationships with others were sweet, especially that with Yan-yan. I likewise deeply appreciated the use of Cantonese and the emphasis on the goddess Ma Tsu as someone who is Chiu Chow. It was really fun to get to read parts of my culture in this novel since we generally don’t feature in anything.
However where this novel fell apart for me was the entire characterisation of Sek Jeong. Sek Jeong, more popularly known as Chang Shih, is an incredibly famous Chinese pirate who commanded more ships than anyone else. Ever. Reading through her biographies is reading through a biography of a woman who was rarely, if ever, outsmarted. Her surrendering to the Chinese authorities, unlike in this novel, was not during a battle, and was not under rough circumstances for Sek Jeong or her pirates. In fact, at the time of her surrendering she was allowed to keep all the wealth she stole, a small fleet of ships, and she and all her crew were pardoned. She would die at ~70 years old, incredibly wealthy having lived a long life after being a pirate.
However, instead of exploring how she obtained this power and what it means for her to have this power, Chang-Eppig reduces her down to her relationship with her husbands, and her identity as a mother. It puts her in this position of moral righteousness, trying to rebel against the uncaring Chinese authorities, who is ultimately a good person trying to be a good mother.
Likewise while it did discuss her trauma, it barely touched upon it, and the actual implications of it for her, and what it means to now wield power in the way she does, when she once had none. While the book mentions she banned rape on the ships, it fails to mention that even consensual sex was banned on her ships.
In the end, the novel takes all the complicated and grey parts of her and ignores them to present a ‘good guy’ protagonist that you can root for. Instead of discussing the actual implications of her having this power and using it to both hurt and uplift others. It centers her motherhood almost trying to push a very particular narrative of what a good and happy ending as a woman means, and changes parts of her history to make her this tragic figure, when she lived a long life with her children. And I can help but ask why make all these changes? What purpose did it serve to try and fit her into, in all honesty, a more “acceptable” form of womanhood for this book?
The Sek Jeong of this book is barely a pirate, let alone the commander of 40000 men, and a thousand ships, and I just wish she had been.