Here be dragons
The Last Dragon of the East
by Katrina Kwan
Toronto: Saga Press, 2024
$24.99 / 9781668051238
Reviewed by Jessica Poon
*
A tattoo artist I knew once consensually spoiled the first season of Game of Thrones for me. At the time, I naively believed that a series with incest, deceit, and dragons held zero appeal for me. I’ve since been proven wrong. And so, this tattoo artist, reassured I would never watch the show, said, “There are dragons.” It is hardly a spoiler for me to say there are also dragons in Katrina Kwan’s The Last Dragon of the East.
The protagonist, Sai, lives in Jiaoshan. In his mid-twenties he’s always busy either running the family teahouse or serving as a matchmaker to clients searching for their true love, or, in the lexicon of the novel, their Fated Ones. His mother’s health is ailing—only an expensive and illegally procured dragon scale crushed into her food has seemingly miraculous salubrious properties. Ironically, though Sai helps clients locate their Fated Ones—following the red thread from their fingers that only he can see—he has never been in love himself, or so his mother frets. Unlike everyone else, the thread around his finger is ominously grey—he doesn’t know what it means, but he suspects nothing good.
After chivalrously defending a stranger from a soldier working for the emperor, Sai is given a daunting ultimatum from the emperor himself: find the last dragon of the East, or die. The tyrannical emperor is indisputably, irredeemably evil. Much like the Philosopher’s Stone, the quest for mystically obtained immortality above all else, somehow eclipses the inevitability of living alone.
Given ill-fitting armour and with no real training or expectation of success, Sai’s hardly the best candidate for such a life-endangering task. It’s not long before he meets Feng, who has the same mission as Sai, though for different reasons. According to Feng, the last dragon of the East killed many of her family members.
There are few fantasy stories complete without a love story. Without giving too much away, when Vancouver-based Kwan (Knives, Seasoning, and A Dash of Love) introduces Sai’s love interest, she is beautiful, prickly, jaded, and vulnerable. Her hardened exterior persona cracks in the face of mutual vulnerability—it’s an oft used trope for a reason. Sai is guilty of using intentionally cringe-inducing terms of endearment like mooncake, his one comically unforgivable trait in a personality otherwise seemingly bereft of defects. For the most part, all romantic scenes are written about with exceedingly chaste restraint.
It’s nothing new to intersperse a predominantly English work with another language. More than one white man has told me, reverentially, that, as monolingual English speakers, they felt they suddenly understood Spanish after reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. There is, of course, Junot Diaz’s novels. And, for a televisual example, the Protective Mom skits that star Pedro Pascal on SNL.
On the one hand, there’s an argument to be made that another language not necessarily understood by the audience, could be unnecessarily alienating. On the other hand, people have deductive reasoning powers and Internet at their fingertips. Sometimes the world resembles Parisienne waitstaff. Sometimes the right word cannot be found in English and you really do need to say Weltschmertz. All this to say, though, I found the spare, sporadic inclusions of Mandarin in The Last Dragon of the East jarring. It was not an attempt to recreate the charms of Chinglish. Since these Mandarin words translated—and not meant to be interpreted with genealogical literality—as “older brother” and “little sister,” I didn’t find them particularly vital, or untranslatable. They seemed to serve more as intruding appendages, as if to remind me: this is about Chinese people speaking Chinese. I hadn’t forgotten.
Kwan’s prose succeeds in world-building and maintaining a fast-paced intensity that would likely translate well to the screen. The Last Dragon of the East is a straightforward story where you know who to root for, and whose downfall you’d like to witness. Overall, an action-packed beacon of escapism rife with blood, danger, epic romance, all helmed by Chinese mythology—and, of course, there are dragons.
*
Originally from East Vancouver, Jessica Poon is a writer, former line cook, and pianist of dubious merit who recently returned to BC after completing a MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has reviewed books by Jane Boon, Terese Svoboda, Maia Caron, Wendy H. Wong, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Sarah Leipciger, Katrina Kwan, Shelley Wood, Richard Kelly Kemick, Elisabeth Eaves, Rajinderpal S. Pal, Keziah Weir, Amber Cowie, Robyn Harding, Roz Nay, Anne Fleming, Miriam Lacroix, Taslim Burkowicz, Sam Wiebe, Amy Mattes, Louis Druehl, Sheung-King, Loghan Paylor, Lisa Moore (ed.), Sandra Kelly, and Robyn Harding for BCR]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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