Suffer a Waste Change: Reading Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide and Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes along the Lines of Discard

Abstract

This paper advances a comparative reading of Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide (2013) and Wu Mingyi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011) that is informed by the matter of waste. The former a dystopic, cyberpunk tale about the transnational circulation of electronic waste written by a former Google engineer from the Chinese mainland, the latter an eco-fantasy novel by a Taiwanese environmental activist and artist, these two novels “explore,” as Anna Tsing would have it, “the ruins that have become our collective home.” Lingering on waste processing sites and migrant worker communities, floating garbage patches and displaced indigenous populations, these texts transcend national boundaries and geopolitical dichotomies, to unfold instead on the common grounds generated by waste. Defined by it, they foreground in material terms the planetary networks, “webs of life” (Moore 2015), and more-than-human spatiotemporal scales within which life in late capitalism is entangled, envisioning radical possibilities therein.