31 Vulpine Cyborgs: Imperialism and Blurred Identities in “Good Hunting”

A fox transforms into a woman and the woman transforms into a cyborg and the cyborg transforms into a fox. This set of transformations is at the heart of “Good Hunting,” a short story by Ken Liu and its Netflix adaptation. The huli jing 狐狸精 is a creature that flows between identity categories. In her essay A Cyborg Manifesto, scholar Donna Haraway identifies the cyborg as a similar myth. “Good Hunting” fuses the cyborg—representing Western imperialism—and the huli jing—representing Chinese culture—to explore the consequences of imperialism on identity and culture. The transformations of the fox girl Yan, show the pain of being shunted across categories and of being exploited. Here, the versions of the story diverge; while Liu reclaims the huli jing as a feminist symbol, the animation furthers the sexualization and reduction of agency of women. Through these similar but different takes on the cyborg, Liu’s “Good Hunting” shows how identity can be transformed after imperialism, but Netflix’s version is bleaker. “Good Hunting” uses the cyborg and fox to show how imperialism forcibly alters the identity of the oppressed and how this identity can be reclaimed and reinvented.

“Good Hunting” identifies the cyborg and the fox as two symbols of blurred boundaries and fuses them to explore hybrid identities. Donna Haraway’s “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries,” specifically a few cultural distinctions that the cyborg blurs.^[1] The cyborg “appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed,” reflecting a world in which there is no rigid distinction between humans and other animals.^[2] She connects the cyborg to identification with animals in media. As a Chinese cultural symbol, the fox is also identified with this blurred boundary. The huli jing’s transformations between a human and animal form imply the mutability of those categories. As Qing dynasty scholar Ji Yun wrote:

Man and beast are of distinct categories; foxes are between man and beast. The paths of light and dark differ; foxes are between light and dark. Immortals and demons are divergent in their ways; foxes are between immortals and demons.^[3]

Here, foxes are identified with the same blurred boundaries the American cyborg explores. Foxes do not appear along the lines of the second transgressed border Haraway proposes, that “between animal-human (organism) and machine.”^[4] However, both myths reckon with existence outside of solid categorization. “Good Hunting” fuses Haraway’s symbol of the organism-machine cyborg with the Chinese myth of the huli jing. Yan’s species is liminal; she flits between human, animal, and machine, along with combinations of all three. Yan as a cyborg fox blends identity on a metatextual level, a creature that blurs the lines between symbols of blurred lines. This fusion of cultural iconography is used to explore how colonization affects racial identity; as a cyborg and a fox, Yan represents a blurring of a Chinese and a Western identity.

In “Good Hunting’s” racial analogy, machines represent the imperialist British forces and the natural supernatural world characterizes the Chinese tradition crushed by Western imperialism. White characters ride the trains that roll up to Victoria Peak and white men are shown in charge of the machines that Liang operates. The short story the episode is based on makes the connection between Europeans and machines even more explicit. Thompson, a wealthy Englishman, refuses to change the path of the trains in order to maintain the flow of qi 氣. The Chinese are associated with the natural flow of qi, whereas the colonists bring their own paths of iron and smoke. To showcase this racial and cultural symbolism, “Good Hunting” creates a division between the natural and supernatural worlds. Yan says, “magic is draining from the world, and with it, we magical creatures grow ever weaker.”^[5] While in Chinese tradition, magical elements of the world are considered part of the natural order instead of belonging to an othered realm, “Good Hunting” creates a distinct magical world to contrast the steampunk colonization. One world represents Chinese culture and tradition, the other represents invading and colonizing English forces. As Yan says in the short story, “there don’t seem to be as many snake spirits or angry ghosts” since the English arrived.^[6] Not only are machines identified with colonization, but they are also made to reflect the brutal realities of imperialism. They do so on a metaphorical, supernatural level, where the presence of machines and European technology becomes harmful to the Chinese. The British destroy their traditions and myths, annihilating the magical creatures of the land, and destroy the people directly through spiritual means: the railroads blocking qi results in, as the short story puts it, “people losing money, animals dying, household gods not responding to prayers.”^[7] On an allegorical but not supernatural level, the “soot from the locomotive chimneys [kills] the rice” and eventually some local children.^[8] On a more literal level, the machines become tools of racism as the Europeans use them to maintain racial hierarchies. The trains control who can live at Victoria Peak; the Chinese workers on the train line take the English up but are “forbidden to stay.”^[9] In Liu’s story, automatons are invented for the express desire to “replace the Chinese coolies and servants” and create a “tropical paradise free of reminders of the presence of the Chinese.”^[10] With Yan’s cyborg form, white men are shown making machines in order to colonize and control the Asian female body. The division between the supernatural world and the steampunk world of Hong Kong becomes an allegory for the domination the British forced upon China and the harm that that imperialism causes.

“Good Hunting” makes the in-between states of transformations painful to show the pain of being stripped of agency. As Yan’s body moves between categories (animal, human, and machine), she navigates being caught in a transformation from a familiar China to a strange and hostile world ruled by the British. Her transformations allegorize race. In a world where the British have taken all the power, Yan is left without her fox form. She cannot hunt, forcing her into sex work and demanding that she become dependent on white men. Whereas Donna Haraway’s cyborgs celebrate their inability to fit into any one category, the state of existing between categories is shown to be painful in “Good Hunting.” Yan and her mother Tsiao Jung are, multiple times, trapped in liminal states between forms. Tsiao Jung is doused with dog urine to confine her to one form; the result is a body half-transformed into a fox. This is shown to be painful for her. The howl she makes is “like a dog’s but so much wilder.”^[11] Here, Tsiao Jung’s body is being controlled by the men hunting her. Her fox form is stable, gives her the power for hunting, and notably, is unsexualized. As scholar Rania Huntington notes, despite the association in Chinese stories of fox women with sex, “the fox body belongs only to the morning after.”^[12] The vulpine body is not an object of sexual desire, even if the ability to transform into a fox makes a woman more of a sex symbol. Tsiao Jung is an object of sexual desire to the men in “Good Hunting,” but the episode takes pains to point out that “a man can fall in love with a huli jing just like he can with a human woman.”^[13] Her status as a huli jing simultaneously marks how women are sexualized and objectified and gives the fox women a feminist escape from that sexualization via their ability to transform. Being forced into a state between human and animal cuts off the fluidity of these categories and denies Tsiao Jung agency and freedom. Just as Tsiao Jung is forced into a form between human and animal, Yan is forced to break the boundary between machine and organism. Her transformation might read as less natural than the transformation between a woman and a fox, as it’s a transformation she was not born with the ability to make, but it also blurs Donna Haraway’s transgressed borders. Yan notes that the man who transformed her “could only get hard for machines.”^[14] The detail that machines are not just a fetish for him but are the only thing he is attracted to is crucial. Tsiao Jung’s fox form is a desexualized form that men forcibly transform her into to cast her as the villainous tempress in their narrative; Yan is similarly forcibly trapped in a liminal form in order to sexualize her.

Netflix’s adaptation of “Good Hunting” repeats Liu’s opposition to the objectification of women but ends up sexualizing its women anyways. The animation shares much in common with the short story, from dialogue to plot beats. However, as Lydia Hansen points out, the Netflix adaptation reneges on the theme of reclaiming the huli jing from objectification due to “the way scenes of Yan’s bodies are visually constructed.”^[15] The Netflix adaptation does not censor the naked female body. On first viewing, this might seem like a choice to normalize the female body; the huli jing are representations of women who are shamed for being sexually desirable, women getting blamed for the feelings of men, and the naturalization of the female form challenges the idea that something about a woman’s body is inherently sexual or immoral. However, the sexual themes of the episode end up turning Yan into that sexual object. The camera lingers on her naked form even during scenes of sexual assault; her body stops feeling like a neutral object sexualized by others and starts to feel designed by the animators to be inherently sexual. Female nudity is a constant. Meanwhile, male nudity only appears briefly, in the form of the Governor, whose cartoonish design resists the same sexuality male viewers are encouraged to see in the naked Yan. Hansen points out that the Netflix episode diverges here from the short story. In Liu’s text, Tsiao Jung’s half-transformed body is described as having a face “between a woman’s and a fox’s, with a hairless snout and raised, triangular ears.”^[16] The description focuses on her monstrosity; the narration flicks between her face and her claws but never isolates a sexualized part of her body. In contrast, Tsiao Jung in the animation is “complete with naked breasts, hips, and crotch.”^[17] In another moment of nudity, when Liang and Yan first meet, the story describes Yan putting on a robe after transforming, but in the episode Yan seems unaware she is naked around a man, despite her explicit understanding of how men sexualize women. The Netflix adaptation parrots Liu’s subversion of the sexualized vixen but ultimately furthers the objectification.

In the Netflix adaptation, women have restricted agency and cannot escape having their lives controlled by men. Hansen notes how, in the Netflix adaptation’s ending, “Yan is, to a degree, empowered. But her transformation and new goal—revenge—are both driven by men.”^[18] Her cybernetic return to a fox form does not give her any sense of a reclaimed identity, even as her body transforms into one similar to her true form. In Liu’s story, Yan’s transformation into a mechanical fox is an act that allows Yan to restore her own agency. Liang follows the plans that Yan has drawn. His role in her transformation is to actualize her ideal body. The narration uses the first person plural—“We spent every evening and all of Sundays working.”^[19]—to reinforce Yan’s active participation. Hansen notes that in the Netflix adaptation, however, she drinks tea while he works, “sitting back and letting a male character make the decisions for her.”^[20] In the original short story, Yan’s transformation is a reclamation of female and Chinese sexuality. Just as the fox is a symbol for a temptress that Liu appropriates into a symbol of objectification and how women resist it, the cyborg becomes a symbol to represent the tacking back of agency over a marginalized and manipulated body. In the Netflix version, Yan is not allowed to take back her body. She can place it in the hands of men who will treat her better, but ultimately she is still controlled by men. In both versions of “Good Hunting,” Yan’s status as a cyborg is not chosen. The identity of being a machine is thrust upon Yan by a patriarchal and racist system. In Liu’s text, however, her choice to further augment her body into one of her own choosing grants her more agency over her identity. One key line reveals the difference between stories; when Liang proposes trying to reverse the mechanization, Liu’s Yan replies with “That’s not what I want.”^[21] Netflix’s Yan, however, only bemoans that “It’s too late for that.”^[22] In the Netflix adaptation, the cyborg—and the huli jing—are not turned into the feminist reclamations of identity that Liu’s text has.

In the huli jing, we see the emergence of what Haraway might refer to as a fractured identity. Haraway draws on Chela Sandoval’s understanding of the phrase woman of color. For Sandoval, being a woman of color is not a group with a defined criteria for inclusion because “the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation.”^[23] This means a reclamation of being stuck between a rock and a hard place: “The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white women; ‘black’ negated all non-black people, as well as all black women.”^[24] Sandoval’s exclusion from women and black people led her to understanding women of color as a group composed from wildly different people who have all “affirmed their historical identity as US women of colour.”^[25] The transformations in “Good Hunting” similarly negate identity. The huli jing is not quite a fox; they can be sexualized as women. The huli jing is not quite a woman either; she returns to fox form to turn her into the folkloric archetype of the seductress. With the introduction of Yan’s cybernetic transformation, her true vulpine form is further abstracted away. She is a robot, but has a form and lived experience to a human woman and is truly a fox. She is a human woman but is denied a human’s body. She is a fox but has been forced out of that body by the British in multiple ways. The allegory of race is important here. The invading English forces sexualize Yan in order to pluck away at her Chinese identity. For the first part of the story, before the first train arrives, Yan might simply be identified as a woman or a huli jing. This is still a marginalized class, but race has yet to make its appearance. She is marginalized for being a woman, allegorized through the seductive figure of the huli jing. Once the Europeans arrive, however, Yan sits at the intersection of two marginalized groups. The Europeans and their trains prevent her from turning into a fox, denying her a full connection to her huli jing identity. Being transformed into a machine only furthers this. Her cybernetic body ties her visually to the Europeans, but she cannot become one of them; the British control the machines but are not cyborgs themselves. Yan’s status as an Asian woman in a colonized country creates what Haraway would term “a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsiders identities.”^[26] The ways in which her transformations are controlled by men, especially white men, uses the cultural symbols of cyborgs and foxes to highlight how colonization impacts this intersectional identity.

Liu’s text creates a cyborg affinity to show how colonized peoples can reclaim a community, whereas the Netflix adaptation’s restriction of Yan’s agency creates a bleaker ending. If machines are accepted as a symbol of European imperialism, being turned into a cyborg represents the ways that Yan’s body is exploited by the British. Her choice to further transform into a vulpine body then becomes a reclamation of identity similar to Sandoval’s cyborg identity in Liu’s text. Here, her motivation is not revenge, but freedom; she seeks to find other magical creatures and use machinery to bring back China’s magic. Liu argues that imperialism cannot be undone, but can be reckoned with and a new community can be created in a colonized population. The text says “The old magic was back but changed: not fur and flesh, but metal and fire.”^[27] Imperialism has destroyed how China used to work, the superstitions and spirituality shown through the huli jing. Yan’s cyborg body cannot be turned back into a human. However, through her cyborg body, she can connect back to the fox she truly is. In-between states are intolerable. Tsiao Jung’s hissing as a half-human and Yan’s nonconsensual surgery are used to argue that the state of being in between identities is alienating and painful. Being alienated from culture and tradition under colonization is painful. Liu argues with Yan’s final transformation that once incorporated into an imperialist society, even as an object of exploitation and abuse, one can use the tools of this new world to connect back to their traditional identity and find affinities. The Netflix adaptation, however, understands race and culture differently. Yan’s lack of agency in this story and male-oriented end goal creates no affinity. Her cyborg identity is still reclaimed as a symbol of her power; she can still free herself from the Governor and take revenge on those who hurt women like her. Her robotic form feels, however, like a mimicry of her original form instead of a transformation of it. Liang’s robotic hare, an invention not present in the original story, shows the differing understanding of reclamation; Liang’s inventions in the animation are made unique by their recreation of fauna, allegorically identified with China before imperialism. Machinery only becomes reclaimed through an evocation of the past. In Liu’s text, however, Liang’s only mentioned automatons have been tools of imperialism, used to displace the Chinese workers in Hong Kong. When he crafts a robotic and vulpine form for Yan, this is not reclamatory due to his own work but because it is used to help a friend take back her body. In Liang’s story, a colonized identity must transform in order to find an empowering connection to a pre-colonized community. In the Netflix adaptation, there is no community to be found in a colonized group, only a shallow attempt to return to the past.

Liu’s text is a reclamation of the huli jing. The fox, traditionally a symbol of dangerous seduction, is given agency and an identity beyond fetishization. When women in “Good Hunting” are sexualized and have restricted agency, Liu is exploring how misogyny and imperialism harm Chinese women. Through an exploration of cyborg transformations, between animal, human, and machine, Liu argues for the creation of a transformative Chinese identity in light of imperialism. Chinese people cannot return to a world without British imperialism, so instead they should transform their identities accordingly to take their community back. The Netflix adaptation parrots Liu’s dialogue, but in sexualizing Yan and restricting her agency, it ends up failing to argue for a brighter future. Yan might be able to use her mechanical body to take revenge on her abusers, but there is no freedom or community. “Good Hunting” argues that imperialism necessitates a transformation of identity. The differences in versions show how these cyborg identities are linked to the empowerment and affinity of Chinese women.

Bibliography

Wu, Jinhui. “Foxes (I & II).” LITC330: Chinese Ghost Stories. Lecture, Reed College, Portland, OR. April 18, April 20, 2023.

Thomas, Oliver, director. Love, Death, + Robots. Season 1, episode 8, “Good Hunting.” Written by Philip Gelatt. Aired March 15th, 2019, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81424941?trackId=255824129.

Huntington, Rania. “Foxes and Sex.” In Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative, 171-223. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991): 149-181.

Liu, Ken. “Good Hunting.” In “2012 Fund Drive Special,” special issue, Strange Horizons, accessed May 8, 2023, http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/good-hunting-part-1-of-2/.