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I don't remember all this colonialism...

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I wasn't going to do this post. For me, the majority of stories involving narratives that I see differently from someone else would involve failed relationships, broken marriages, and sexual assaults, and given the other posts on the docket for this week, I just couldn't add to that.

 And then I had a conversation with my husband, who can be kind of genius sometimes. When I told him that I was skipping this one because my PTSD couldn't handle it, he said "Hmmm. How you felt about a book at 16 vs how you felt rereading at age XX?" and I knew exactly what to write about. 

 I went through a really weird phase when I was 16 and spent that entire summer (1992, if you must know) reading romance novels. This was back before paranormal romance was really a thing so I was reading straight-up, bodice ripping, heteronormative Harlequin bull****. I bought them from the grocery store, and checked them out by the armful from the library. I was a very romantic girl, and these stupid things just pulled me in. But there was one... there was one I loved above all others.

Too Deep for Tears, by Kathryn Lynn Davis was huge and sweeping and epic.... and so much more problematic than I knew when I was 16. I mean, it's just REALLY f***ing problematic.

Essentially, the book is about three sisters in the 1800's who share a father but not a mother. The father was an Englishman, of high birth who fell in love with a poor Scottish woman. He got her pregnant but couldn't marry her and left. She raised their daughter alone, in the highlands and they both had beautiful red hair and it was all very poetic and magical being poor in the Scottish highlands.

The father though, he received a diplomatic post to India, where he met an unhappily married English woman and had an affair with her, producing another daughter that he summarily abandoned. Bad things befell the mother, the husband didn't want the daughter so she was raised by another couple in India and became improperly close with the daughter of her Indian nanny.

And the father went on to a post in China where he fell rapturously in love with a Chinese woman and proceeded to make another daughter, who looked Chinese, except for her blue eyes. He was forced to flee China and left another daughter behind, in really terrible circumstances.

The girls were separated by miles and also many years but they had a...*gasp*... psychic dream connection and came to each other in times of great emotional distress. It was all very tragic and romantic.

The father eventually found his way back to his truest love, the poor highland lady. All his daughter's came together to be with him as he was dying and they all forgave each other and there was healing and...


So I re-read it maybe a few years ago, as a much older and wiser person who is much more aware of things like cultural appropriation, and colonialism, and the way that the British stomped all over the world. I know now how they crushed rebellions in Scotland, and India, and China. I know about the Highland Clearances, when so many were forced from their homes by the English. I know about the Sepoy Rebellion in India which happened because they rightfully chafed under the control of the British and how that was brutally put down. I know about the Opium Wars and what flooding China with opium did to the economy and the people.

This book that I loved so much at 16, that I read and re-read so many times, was no longer so romantic. Now it was just tragic, and heartbreaking, and f***ing offensive to think of this British dude touring through the scenes of British imperialism and knocking up women and leaving them behind, in some incredibly precarious positions with no help and never another word. 

And that's not even touching on the unbelievable racial stereotypes within the book. I can't truly go into all of them but I do remember that the daughter in India gets into some inappropriate behavior with her nanny's daughter and it turns out that the daughter is using her and is actually evil or just really sexually adventurous? I think I blocked most of it out after the recent attempt to read it but I remember something about her "dusky skin" and "sly eyes". So there's that. 

It hurts, in a way, to learn that something I loved so much is actually really bad. I think that's why I haven't bothered to revisit more old favorites. But it's good too, I think. It helped me to see how much I've grown, and how much I've learned, and how much I've benefited from expanding my worldview. I spent so much of my childhood and teens in books. Learning to live among actual people was hard, but it helped me to see that the narrative I was remembering was wrong, in so many ways. And while that's painful, it's also necessary for growth. 


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