The general world seems somewhat historical with references to things like the Protectorate and guns, making it colonial-era nineteenth century-ish, but I don’t know enough about the time period in Chinese history to really know how issues of religion and mysticism and magic might have fit in. What I don’t quite get is the presence of magic in this world it’s clearly a part of the world, but it’s never quite clear how real or imagined the magic or witchcraft or mystic powers actually are. This novella is really more about the characters learning about each other, but there’s still plenty of plot too. Plan B is of course pretty risky, and it too does not quite go as planned, but thanks to a minor twist, things might work out sort of, except that it means some big changes for the group, but maybe not bad ones. The bandit group has to avoid law enforcement and pretty much the general public since they’re wanted, and get to a delivery of the goods they are currently transporting, and naturally things don’t ever go quite as planned.
The key thing is ‘on the surface’ most characters have some kind of secret that at least some of the others don’t know, but the cool thing here is that said secret is not always the kind of thing you’d expect in an adventure story, which this partially is. There’s the really good looking bandit (Lau Fung Cheung), the gruff but honest bandit (Tet Sang), the feisty girl with something mysterious about her (Guet Imm), the illiterate one who wants to learn (Ah Hin), the sort of doctor (Ah Boon), etc. This much seems pretty standard, and on the surface, so are many of the characters. The general premise is that a bandit walks into a coffee house, tries to stop a customer from harassing a waitress, starts a fight, and the waitress who happens to be a religious devotee (a nun) decides to join the bandit’s group hijinks ensue.
I don’t really know much about wuxia but I do think that The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water has the flavor of it at least. Zen Cho said that was because she meant for the novella to be a fan-fic of an imaginary 50 episode tv series of that genre.
I saw the author post something on social media before this was released about how some early readers didn’t think the novella had enough fighting to be wuxia.
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