One of Zhao’s video of a funny, sophisticated critique of Disney’s Mulan has been viewed more than 3.7 million times, while another whipping through what is known about Empress Wu has drawn an audience of more than 700,000. “I really meme’d myself onto the top of the New York Times,” they tweeted after Iron Widow. In the years prior to publication, Zhao had built a strong social-media presence, not only on Twitter, but on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok – which may be tied to the success that has come their way. Its heroine can barely walk because her grandmother breaks and binds her feet, but even so, she leaves a trail of destruction behind her as she knocks off the man responsible for her sister’s death before going after everything else that pisses her off. “When I dip back into Iron Widow, I’m like, ‘oh god, I did not write this in a great state of mind.’ I think the emotion is so raw that it resonated,” Zhao said to The Globe. Meanwhile, the star of the new middle reader, Zachary Ying, is haunted by China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who guides – and sometimes misleads – him through a quest to keep the spirits of the underworld from escaping to turn the waking world into a nightmare.īut these similarities are superficial: The first book is a primal scream brimming with horror at the world its young heroine inherits, while the new novel plots a tween’s journey from zero to, if not hero, then someone of substance. Iron Widow puts a character based on, and named for, China’s only empress – Wu Zetien – into a dystopia where she must fight war against enemies at home and abroad. In both novels, the mythic past gets translated into the future. “I have the tastes of a seven-year-old Japanese boy and a 62-year-old Chinese auntie,” Zhao joked in another interview.

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