The Mystery of the “3 Body Problem” Home Reception

It is hard to assess the complexity of a sci-fi world. One way to help is by making it accessible. But for those already inside, the efforts could seem humiliating, especially when it involves cross-cultural interactions.

When “The Three-Body Problem” was first published early this century, it gained a cult following, but not big enough for its author to ponder the commercial value of this property. As a result, he sold the movie/television rights for a fixed, paltry sum.

When Netflix launched the March premiere of its eight episodes, now spelt “3 Body Problem”, there was bated breath in the sci-fi community, and in the home country of Liu Cixin, the person who conjured up this gigantic narrative universe, the anxiety of waiting has inevitably led to a cacophony of disbelief, derision and diversion.

While no one is hailing the new adaptation as a masterpiece, the difference in general evaluation in China and the rest of the world is palpable. The series has scored 7.8 on IMDB and 76% fresh rating on Rotten tomatoes, but on Douban, the Chinese equivalent platform, the number 6.7 is at a lower notch. And negative commentators seem to be more vociferous online.

Many have difficulty accepting the now multiracial cast.

“What? A black Luo Ji? And an Indian Zhang Beihai?”

Only now they are named Saul and Raj.

Funny that few have found fault with the sickly nerd Wang Miao turned into gorgeous Latina Auggie Salazar. Apparently, appearance does count.

The few glimpses of love scenes have also taken many Chinese by surprise. The key figure Ye Wenjie had a brief marriage with Mike Evans, a Western character that exists in the original novel, but the marriage is an invention by the script writers.

Some have joked that Netflix should have made Ye an American Indian who saw white conquerors wiping out her village, thus sowing the seed of hatred for humanity. Overall, political correctness in casting does not have a good name in China.

I’m sure there’ll be someone jumping at this mountain of evidence as Chinese viewers as racists. But the truth is not that simple.

When a cultural product ventures out of its intended market and seeps into a wider realm, it goes through a transformation, which affirms and excites the original target demographic, and at the same time upsets or even offends them.

This is a process worth a close examination, especially for those cultures on the cusp of worldwide recognition. And the same model is applicable to other forms of breakout. For example, “The Lord of the Rings” was a huge literary success. But compared with the audience size of the movie franchise, fans of the books were small and loyal. They wanted those who never touched the book to learn of the charm of the story, but any deviation from the original, which is inevitable, would annoy some of them, to say the least. They would want the movies to be exactly like the books. Never mind that, if Peter Jackson had done that, the movies would not have been such big blockbusters.

It turns out that “The Three-Body Problem” already has an adaptation last year, the 30-episode series produced by China’s own juggernaut Tencent that covers the first book of the trilogy. It hews extremely close to the original. Still, the few changes, such as adding a female assistant to Shi, the investigator, received bad notices. This character infuses a little bright color to the predominantly male cast, and more importantly, helps explain the plot and its convoluted science.

Of course, all the liberties the Tencent series took can now be forgiven because its modifications are dwarfed by those of the Netflix version.

• When authenticity gives way to multiplicity

One must remember that not every literary classic would receive multiple adaptations that include those from overseas. When that happens, authenticity may be the first thing to fly out the window. That is the price you pay for a wider market.

Take food for example. Chinese cuisine in China is generally better and more authentic than, say, those in Chinatown across the world. But non-Chinese consumers often find Panda Express more to their taste. Likewise, I believe that the tacos and nachos sold in American fast-food chains cannot hold a candle to those in Latin America. But they are often the first Latino taste by a random Chinese.

A better analogy could be Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables”. France made a 210-minute film in 1958, starring Jean Gabin. It was shown in China, winning audiences from mostly book fans. When the 134-minute English version was released in 1998, with Liam Neeson and Jeffrey Rush as the leads, it became a much easier stepping stone for those who wanted to crack the forbidding edifice of the magnum opus. Though I don’t have any supporting data, I’m positive the English version gained a wider reach and brought more people to the work.

Since we’re on “Les Mis”, I’ll go one step further: Even the musical version shows this dichotomy. The original French was very successful by French standard, but only when it was revised, with rewritten English lyrics, did it evolve into this mammoth stage hit that has been sweeping across the worldwide stage. The difference here is much smaller as the music remains the same.

Were there French voices deploring the toning down of Frenchness in the retelling? I don’t know. Possibly there were, but they were muffled by the waves of applause from beyond the seas.

Another example: The legend of Zorro took place in Mexico, back when California was still part of Mexico. But many in China associated the character and his tales with France. Our first encounter with the masked hero was the 1975 French movie starring the very handsome and debonair Alain Delon. We didn’t have any idea whether he spoke French, English, or Spanish, and we didn’t really care. It was dubbed into Chinese anyway. Was it cultural appropriation or misappropriation?

There are thousands of such cases. The Disney retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales left no trace of the original’s dark tone. Akira Kurosawa did not even retain a line from his adaptations of Shakespeare, but somehow still conveyed the Bard’s themes, scope and depth. And any resemblance “The Lion King” has with “Hamlet” is purely skeletal in narrative structure.

Something has got to give. Every creative person makes his or her own choices. The adaptations rise or fall mostly on their own virtues, or the lack thereof.

To enter a literary pantheon as palatial as “The Three-Body Problem”, some kind of hand holding is necessary. If we divide the time line roughly into three parts, the first, set in the past, is purely Chinese, rooted in the culture-annihilating “Cultural Revolution” of 1966-76; the present, set in 2008 Beijing in the Tencent version and 2024 London in the Netflix series, is the easiest to open up for a touch of globalization, multi-racial cast and all; and the third part, the future, finds the world without borders. So, for me, the Netflix changes are quite sound and reasonable. And the reassigning of the characters mainly serves to illuminate the story. (And I’m speaking as one who have read both the Chinese books and English translation as well as the Tencent series.)

There are big chunks in the books set in foreign lands. Had Liu Cixin known the worldwide appeal his work would receive, and had he possessed the familiarity of London life, he would have probably moved the present part of the timeline to a place like London. This is a sci-fi story, not one of martial arts. The changes make sense.

That said, I would not criticize the Chinese critics for being “narrow-minded”. The reason they nitpick is largely because precedents have been far and few between. There have been a few foreign series based on Monkey King, all altered beyond recognition. The “Kungfu Panda” franchise took elements from Chinese film culture, but created its own original setup and story. There was a whiff of jealousy that outsiders pulled off the feat of fusing the unlikely elements (Kungfu and panda) into a wildly entertaining tale. Most Chinese writers would not even dare to imagine that the father of a panda is a duck.

When a culture spreads, it flows like rain water on the ground. There is no way you can control its purity. English did not become a world dominating language by insisting on the queen’s version. And Spain could do nothing when Latin America got rid of the second-person plural “vosotros”. Maybe someone inside an ivory tower in Oxford or Instituto Cervantes was weeping for the vulgarization of their beloved lingua franca. But most people would care less and less.

One can divide the spreading of culture into several stages: First comes the original and authentic, reaching only a few eager for something foreign. Then is the translated version, changing the undecipherable and retaining the rest. This is often followed by some form of remaking, which adds more local colors to the import. And finally it’ll reach various degrees of merging, treating the foreign cultural elements as one’s own.

The more you arrive at the later stage, the bigger the new audience you’ll gain and the more diluted your product will become. If you want to control the narrative, so to speak, you have to settle for a few academicians who have mastered your language and spent their lifetimes poring over every detail of your culture.

For me, cultural interactions are always interesting because they bring new perspectives. They would never damage the authenticity of the original works, but rather, add to their richness.