Imagine you grow up in extreme poverty, the only life you have is one of smuggling opium. Your foster aunt hates you, never ceasing the stream of insults at your uselessness. Such is the life of Runin “Rin” Fang from R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War. After a childhood of abuse, Rin channels her fury toward gaining her freedom, sacrificing the scarce hours of sleep she can get to study for the national exam to attend the most prestigious military school in the country. Upon attending university, Rin is subjected to classism and colorism at the hands of her aristocratic classmates, further providing a source for her anger. The belittlement drives Rin to become the best, all in hopes of freeing herself from the vice-like grip of her past.
As a result of her abusive upbringing and being whittled down to a weapon of war, her circumstances often force her between a rock and a hard place, placing world-changing decisions in the hands of an overpowered teenager. Many readers feel Rin’s decisions in the second book, The Dragon Republic, were unrelatable, and therefore, they could not root for her. However, I think readers confuse having empathy and holding the exact same views as a character. Atticus Finch says, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” That is the point of literature: to walk in someone else’s shoes because you can’t do that in the real world. “Rin isn’t relatable” —well not many of us have fought in a war or have been exploited for our skills only to be discarded when deemed useless, I certainly can’t say I have been experimented on by enemy soldiers. Although I haven’t been through the same situations as Rin, I still empathize with her. The part of her that simply wants to be happy, her anger at the world sometimes that drives her need for revenge—these are the attributes that speak to me and many others, not because we are the same, but because Rin’s fearlessness and defiance against what is expected of her is inspirational.
While many readers claim to have empathy, they fail to grasp the true meaning: putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. The magic and importance of literature is the ability to step into someone else’s view, even for just a few paragraphs. Their experiences and stories shift the way we think, moreso if we don’t share the same experiences.