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Dropping Cantonese to focus on Korean in 2021

It’s January again! And January has traditionally been the time for setting language-learning targets. And then February-December is the time for ignoring those goals and doing something else entirely!

You probably don’t remember, but in January 2020 I planned to work on both my Cantonese and Korean throughout the year. And indeed I did my best to do what I’d said I would do.

Giving up on Cantonese

For Cantonese, I found several resources for upper-intermediate learners trying to transition to native level texts/videos. The most important and most helpful was OPLingo/Language Tools’ Cantonese Conversations, 100 native-level dialogues with transcripts and audio. They’re not paying me for this endorsement, btw. I’m genuinely giving my thoughts on a bright oasis amidst a desert of useful Cantonese learner resources. I worked my way through several of those dialogues, and if time permits I’ll give a more detailed review another time.

I also watched the usual “Peppa Pig in Cantonese” as well as other Youtube resources like “Cantonese with Brittany” and “100 Cantonese dialogues.” But after all that, I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten much better at Cantonese.

To be honest, my immersion is just too low right now. I barely watched any Cantonese movies or dramas last year, I rarely listen to RTHK these days, and the little Chinese manhua I did read raw was all in Mandarin. Furthermore, I don’t anticipate this situation changing much this year – I don’t plan to watch much in Cantonese, plus anything I do want to watch will probably be subtitled, so why should I push myself so hard to learn the original language?

That’s the problem, really. I’ve lost sight of my original motivation to learn Cantonese. Or rather I still remember it, but it’s not enough to sustain me any more. Originally I loved the sound of the language and the free-spirited culture of Hong Kong, so I just wanted to learn to speak it myself. That kind of loose motivation just isn’t enough to push me through the tough hurdles to true fluency.

Not to mention Hong Kong itself is on the decline… growing numbers of people speak Mandarin as a first language in Hong Kong, and the “free-spirited culture” is being rapidly destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party… but we can save that topic for another day.

Contrast all this with my Korean progress

By the end of December 2020, I’d become capable of reading Korean manhwa in the raw. With copious lookups in Naver dictionary, of course (I’ll explain the actual process of reading a Korean manhwa with the Naver Dictionary app in a future post). But I still enjoyed reading the raws of My Husband’s Reversal and What it Takes to be a Villainess and then comparing them to the official translated version when they come out.

I’m really happy to discover that most of the time, there are few differences between what I think a manhwa said and what it actually said. That means I’m understanding most of what I read! It’s still a struggle because I forget vocabulary between chapters (I need to use an SRS) but it’s very rewarding.

Plus I’m currently working through Billy Go’s Korean Reading Made Simple and finding that I understand 80-90% of each text even before I read the explanations and translations provided. That’s a text aimed at intermediate learners, so I can proudly declare myself to be an Intermediate Korean Learner!! Yay! Of course I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m already feeling pretty good about myself.

I’ll be honest with you guys though: knowing Japanese and Cantonese really helps with Korean! Especially if you use hanja to help you learn vocabulary! I feel like I’ve said it before somewhere but I’ll repeat it: if you have a Japanese/Chinese background and are contemplating learning Korean, go for it! It’ll be much easier than you think!

Summary

The TL;DR is that Cantonese has gotten hard and unrewarding while Korean is still easy and very rewarding. Human Behavior 101 demands that I focus on the activity that is giving me the most dividends at this point in time.

My goal for Cantonese, therefore, is to shelve it, focus on Korean, then pick it up again in 2022 if I miss it. That said, I’m not 100% dropping it. I’d lose too much hard-earned proficiency that way. So I plan to watch at least one Cantonese movie/drama episode a month. And to read through at least one of the Cantonese Conversation dialogues a week. And of course I still love Cantonese pop music so I’ll keep listening to my collection. Apart from that, I won’t push myself.

For Korean, my goal remains unchanged. I want to read manhwa comfortably in the raw! Official translation companies like Tappytoon have gotten really good at releasing accurate, high-quality chapters in a timely fashion, no complaints there. BUUUUT in most cases they’re still behind the raws, and I’m greedy and don’t want to wait.

“She was sent by god” has been stalled at chapter 9 for almost 6 months!

Besides, raw manhwa is just the first step in my ambitions to read Korean romance web novels in the raw! There are sooooo many out there that have just started being translated. There’s like 3 chapters here, 7 chapters there, 5 chapters of this other one. So frustrating!! And it’s not like there’s a regular schedule for most of these translations either. Groups just grab titles to keep them away from other groups, then hoard them for ages with scanty releases.

Plus sometimes, to be honest, the translations are completely crap. Sorry, it’s the truth. Even without access to the raws, the quality of the “English” and the nonsensical text alone tells you that it’s bad. Some of it is barely cleaned-up machine translation, and for some reason, Korean MTL is even worse than Japanese and Mandarin MTL. It’s nigh unreadable.

Sooo… for this year I’m going to focus on the manhwa and leave the novels alone. I want to get the point where I refer to a dictionary sparingly or not at all when reading basic romance manhwa of the sort I indulge myself in lately. I’m already close to that point, just need a lot more vocabulary and a little more grammar. We’ll review the situation again in January 2022 and take it from there, God willing. See you then!

A bad translation is a disservice to everyone

Should fans be grateful for whatever translations we get, or should we complain about bad translations? I’m the latter type, but many people don’t really care as long as they can read something and look at pretty pictures. Sure I’ll use Google Translate to check something out and even read series in machine translation when the fan version is too slow, but if a group sets itself as a fan translation group, I hold them to higher standards than MTL.

BTW, I am speaking strictly in terms of manga/manhwa translation and other non-essential translations. So don’t bring up real life emergency cases where a bad translation is better than nothing.

Before I continue, let me begin by defining what I mean by a bad translation. Generally a translation can be bad in one of three ways.

An inaccurate rendering of meaning. If the source text says “I hate you, Bob!” and the translation says “Bob is the best!” or if the source says “She says he loves his mother” and the target says “He says she loves her mother,” that’s wrong. The latter kind of mistake is quite common in Japanese and Korean texts because often pronouns are left out of the source text and have to be inferred.
Unwarranted omissions from or additions to the source. I added “unwarranted” because in some cases it may be necessary to add clarifications or delete repeated words to make the translation more natural. But if, for example, the text says “Don’t touch the red button. Push the green one instead,” and the translation only says “Don’t touch the red button,” that’s a bad translation.
Bad grammar and spelling. I’m not talking the occasional typo or careless mistake. I’m talking about error to the extent that the source text makes no sense or is very difficult to read. Like the infamous “mass naked child events” and “even electric pancake brain elderly” kind of nonsense. Or in many Chinese webtoons where you kind of get what is going on, but your brain has to work overtime to get it.

poorly translated korean manhwa — A romantic moment is instead reduced to garbage

Now then, why is it a problem if the translation of a manga, webtoon, etc. falls under one or all of those categories? Why shouldn’t we be satisfied with whatever we can get?

A bad translation hurts the author and publisher

Writing is hard work. Creative writing is a labor of love. A writer spends weeks, months and even years coming up with a story, refining, rewriting, submitting manuscripts and getting rejected before finally getting something published. Editors work with them to polish the final draft, tweaking words, rearranging paragraphs, scrapping whole passages. Then publishers spend thousands of dollars printing and promoting the series. All to get a certain vision out to the waiting public.

And then some rambo armed with Google Translate comes along and completely butchers the text to hell and back. There’s no way anyone who cares about their craft would enjoy seeing that. I mean, it’s bad enough for the “fans” or profiteers to take work that should rightly be paid for and giving it out for free (a discussion for another day) but if the translation is bad then they’re not even giving out the right work. It’s like baking a cake then someone steals it, smears dung on it and gives it out to passersby claiming this is what you made. No wonder Korean authors are so militant about shutting fan translations down these days.

Furthermore, although pirates like to argue that their translations help series get localizations get licensed, that hasn’t been true in a long time. But even if it were true, bad translations do more to turn people off from promising series than attract them. Once someone writes something off as “crap” or “nonsense” because it doesn’t make sense, chances that they’ll then go on to read an official version is slim.

However the series that do get localized are the lucky ones. The vast majority of less popular series will only ever get one translation. If that translation sucks, then the series is forever marred in the fans’ eyes. And that’s really sad for the writer, editor, publisher, fans of the original and everyone who put a lot of love and care into bringing the series out.

A bad translation hurts the fans

A lot of fans take the perspective that anything is better than nothing. “Shut up and read it because it’s free.” “Why don’t you do better yourself?” And so on and so forth. But what they’re getting with a bad translation of the series is not what the series should be.

The events may be wrong, the characterization may be off. The hunky male lead (ML) may be an erudite scholar, but if the translation makes him speak “Me hungry. You woman” hulk speak, that’s a ton of characterization lost. You lose the details of the plot, the details of character development, and even a couple of brain cells if the translation is bad enough. I’ve seen fans “explaining” events to each other based on a faulty understanding of the text, which is in turn based on a bad translation. Here’s a case from a Korean manhwa known as “Your Majesty, Please Don’t Kill Me Again”:

Fans are arguing over who said what, and the emperor and future ML has been characterized as the king of boor who would call a condemned woman a slur word.

In the better translation, the subsequent words and the whole context make it clear that it is the female character who says those words to the emperor.

But in this case we only know this because “Your Majesty, Please Don’t Kill Me Again” received two translations, one better than the other. And as I said already, the vast majority of series are only translated once.

So instead of being satisfied with any kind of nonsense as long as it scratches our manga/manhwa/manhua itch, we owe it to ourselves to ensure that what we think we’re getting is what we’re actually getting. If you give yourself a headache trying to make sense of a nonsensical plot or train of dialogue and still think to yourself “well it’s better than nothing~” then good luck to you.

A bad translation hurts the translator themselves

Live Dungeon: an interesting series I dropped because the translation was junk

Firstly because their effort (or “effort” in the case of machine-translation users) is only going to earn them criticism or outright flames. Some translation groups don’t care because they’re just trying to rack up views and patreon donations, but for someone who actually cares about getting a good product out and interacting with fans, the results are going to be disappointing. Criticism of your skills, criticism of the series for sucking when it doesn’t, people dropping the series in droves, finally discouragement and despair.

Secondly, even if the translations fly under the radar or the fans take the “better than nothing” approach, a bad translation doesn’t help the translator improve their skills. Not only will they be doing injustice to a series they claim to love, but they’ll be hurting their own language skills as well. A lot of fans take up fan translation with inadequate skills, somehow assuming that it will help them to improve their language skills.

But without editors or discerning fans to give concrete feedback, they often end up producing substandard work and carving mistakes into their minds That’s why in school we write papers and do homework and get them checked by the teacher – so we can get feedback and correction and gain a better understanding of the topic. Imagine if the teacher just stamped an A on everything and returned it untouched. We wouldn’t learn a thing.

I’m all for translation as a means of language learning, but it must be done with good feedback. There are sites where you can upload texts and get feedback from native speakers (I haven’t used any of those), you can work with a teacher or a tutor. Failing all that, you can pick a series that is already being well-translated, translate your own version from the raws and then compare the two versions. There are plenty of ways to learn without butchering your favorite series in public.

CALL TO ACTION

Manga translation is just manga translation. It’s not the end of the world if the latest chapter of series X doesn’t get translated, or if no one ever picks up Super Awesome Series Y. It can feel like it when it’s a series you really like, but it’s not. For that reason, there’s no reason to put up with rushed, shoddy translations. In fact, the better the series is, the better a translation it needs to bring out its quality.

In short, what I’m saying is this: if the translation of a series is bad, don’t read it. And let the fan translator know exactly why. You’re shortchanging yourself when you read junk, you’re shortchanging the author, and you’re not helping the translator improve when you give them views and money for shoddy work.

What about machine translation a series for yourself? Honestly you (I) are still shortchanging yourself (myself) and the author, so I personally will be avoiding it in the future. But in my opinion, it’s one thing to MTL something for your own perusal. It’s quite another to publicize your translation and tell the world “This is what series X is about.”

TL;DR – Don’t read crappy translations if you can avoid it. The end.

My Son might be a Villain Chinese web novel review (MTL’d all 100 chapters so huge spoilers)

My Son might be a Villain is one of thousands of “instant parent” web novels, where the plucky protagonist becomes the mother of one or several child characters in another world or from a book she read. Usually the children are very young and almost always male when the protagonist is a Chinese female.

Honestly I rather dislike those series with their precocious little buns. They’re just so unnatural. And no matter how badly the original mother treated the child, within three or four chapters they’re all over the protagonist, being sickly sweet and oh so intelligent despite being barely in pre-school. I mean all these series are unnatural to an extent, but because I have a lot of toddlers in my life, this really stands out.

Summary (from novelupdates):

Su Ran, a music prodigy, woke up transmigrated into a book.

At that point in time, the main story arc in the book had already been completed. As a villainess female supporting character, not only did she need to take over the original owner’s pitiful life in poverty, she also gained an instant son right at his rebellious period.

Ten or so more years from then, the son would turn into a twisted, evil villain. He would appear in one of the extra chapters to pick on the male and female lead’s children.

BTW, the MTL in the title means “machine translated.” It means I read from around chapter 30 to 100 (final) of My Son Might be a Villain using machine translations which aren’t always accurate. But at least they’re fast and free. You can run the chapters through Google translate or a similar site yourself, but it’s faster to visit a site like mtlnovel which has done all the work already.

Normally I like to wait for human translations, because they are much easier to read and understand. There’s really no substitute for competent human translation, at least not in Chinese to English, and not right now. In the case of My Son might be a Villain, however, the translator only updates a chapter a week, sometimes less, and each chapter is split into small frustrating parts. It will take well into next year to finish reading it, and I didn’t want to wait that long.

And I’m glad I didn’t wait either, because the payoff isn’t anywhere near as good as I’d expected.

Su Han (the son)

My Son might be a Villain is a little better than the usual “instant parent” romance series, because the child (Su Han) in question is 13, not 3. He is also portrayed as highly intelligent and good at sports, but not out of the realm of believability for a 13 year old. He’s not managing a conglomerate or fronting a ninja organization like some of these crazy “little buns” do. He’s not even that wordly-wise, having only the vaguest idea of things like work, business and male-female relationships.

While he does warm up unusually fast to the woman who had been neglecting him for 13 years, he never becomes a saccharine sweet “I wuv yu mum-mum♡” kind of character. He’s actually quite tsundere towards his mother, and almost antagonistic towards his dad, but since I low-key hated his dad as well, I was cool with that. Su Han is the rare bright spot in the series.

Oh, I should have mentioned earlier that there are three main characters in the series: Su Ran, the protagonist, her son Su Han, and the son’s father, Lu Shao. Su Ran and Su Han I like, Lu Shao, not so much.

Su Ran (the mother)

Su Ran is also a bright spot in the series. Even though she is the usual “oh so pretty” Mary Sue character, she doesn’t take it overboard. Sure she is so excellent at music that she makes $60,000 in an afternoon by selling songs, and sure she wins international music competitions despite the original body never playing piano before. But apart from that crazy twist, she’s not super popular or all that well-loved, nor is she exactly smart or resourceful. She’s mostly normal, really.

In the original novel, Su Han’s start of darkness was watching his mother get humiliated and murdered at a seedy party. Once Su Ran manages to avoid that ending and starts paying more attention to her son’s development, the rest of the story is basically fluffy slice of life.

Really. There’s hardly any drama after that, so if you’re reading My Son Might be a Villain hoping for love rivals, kidnappings, jealous families, etc etc, forget it. None of that will happen. Su Ran goes out of her way to avoid the original male lead and female lead of the novel – in fact she never does meet the original female lead.

Su Han doesn’t meet the OG male lead’s children either, nor does he fall in love with his daughter. And since his mother was never murdered, he has no motivation to become a villain either. So he’s just a normal junior high school boy who likes to play basketball.

When the OG male and female lead briefly tangle with Su Ran, the new male lead Lu Shao quickly takes over their businesses and effectively exile them from China about 60 chapters into a 100-chapter novel. Then they are never seen again. Lu Shao has also subdued his other business and family rivals already, so everyone is unfailingly polite to Su Ran and Su Han, end of story.

Lu Shao (the father and male lead)

So I’ve discussed Su Han, and Su Ran, now to the final major character Lu Shao. He’s the one that lets the series down, IMO. Without him, or with a better male lead, I would give it close to 5 stars. With him, it’s maybe 3.5/5. Let’s break down many flaws Lu Shao has.

He’s the generic “aphrodisiac rapist” we get in Chinese web novels. The backstory is that he was drugged with an aphrodisiac by his rivals in his family 13 years ago. He stumbled into a hotel room where he found a random 15-year old girl passed out on the bed. Due to in-story reasons, this random girl would also have been bleeding heavily from a gash in her head, but don’t let that stop you, Mr. Rapey CEO.
So he had his way with her, then his employees found him and took him away. Note that he did NOT get amnesia or anything. He just chose not to follow up on her because he somehow assumed that a heavily-injured teenager was part of the conspiracy – or whatever.
In other words, if he hadn’t randomly met Su Han 13 years later, and if Su Han hadn’t happened to look a lot like Lu Shao, he wouldn’t have bothered to look for him ever again. And in the bonus stories after the main series, the author drafts what happened to the original villain Su Han – and he doesn’t meet his father for at least 10 more years, presumably because old Lu Shao doesn’t bother to look for him.
Now then, having found Su Han, does Lu Shao bother to build a positive relationship with him? Nope! His first instinct is to just pay the kid’s child support and let him be. Or forcibly take him away from his mother if the mother is bad. Throughout My Son Might be a Villain, you will look long and hard for very rare scenes of Lu Shao seeking to get to know and interact with Su Han for his own sake, and not for the sake of getting into his mother’s pants.
Yeah, it’s all about getting Su Ran for Lu Shao. And Su Han is just the tool he uses to manipulate his way into her life. Hanging out at their apartment even when she’s clearly uncomfortable, being terse and hostile to the boy (you’ll lose count of the number of times Lu Shao sends Su Han away to “do homework” so he can hit on his mom in peace), and so on.
Meanwhile Su Ran is so naïve that she takes his interest as interest in her/his son. She’s totally blindsided when he finally makes a love confession and marriage proposal. He keeps up the pressure until she agrees to marry him, then pressures her until she sleeps with him, then pressures her some more until she agrees to have another baby. It’s just pressure and manipulation all the way through.

Having said that, Lu Shao is nowhere near as bad as the typical Chinese CEO character. Despite his pushiness, he doesn’t actually force Su Han or Su Ran to do things they don’t want to. He stops the OG male/female lead as well as the Su family from bothering his new family, and does it so thoroughly that they never show up again.

Furthermore, he doesn’t force them to change schools or residences or jobs but instead tries to incorporate himself into their lives. It’s just that he won’t take no for an answer on the “incorporate himself” aspect, so it can be uncomfortable reading sometimes.

When all is said and done, Lu Shao is the only character who seems truly happy at the end. He’s got the woman he wants, and two more children he seems a lot fonder of. Meanwhile Su Ran seemed ambivalent about him – she recognized he was a good guy (oh really?) and wanted to try to like him. In the end it seems like she does like him, but not head over heels in love with him. You won’t get any blissful “I wuv yu so much hubby-wubby♡” scenes from her. Nor will you get any scenes of her pampering or fawning over any of her kids except Su Han.

Last of all Su Han is the most pitiful of all. He dislikes Lu Shao from the start. And Lu Shao never puts any effort into being liked by the boy instead. It’s clear that if Lu Shao hadn’t taken a shine to the hot mother, he wouldn’t have bothered much with the son either.

So for 13 years Su Han had to deal with a crappy mother. Then just when things took a turn for the better, this guy from nowhere shows up, worms his way into your life using you as an excuse, and takes your mother away. At the end of the series, when Su Han is about 16, he seems more resigned to his lot and satisfied that his mother is happy than thrilled himself. It’s a bit sad, but it’s also something that millions of people with remarried parents have had to deal with, so it’s just part of life I guess.

TL;DR – read My Son Might be a Villain if you want a straightforward, no drama rags to riches kind of series. Especially the kind where a kid’s long lost dad suddenly shows up and is so rich and famous no one can touch him and yet is head over heels in love with his son’s young and beautiful mother. There are plenty of similar Chinese web novels, but this one rocks because of the lower levels of drama and the higher IQs of all characters concerned. Even the antagonists are smart enough to know when they’re outmatched.

The only hitch is the pushiness of the male lead and his unfriendliness towards his son. I’ve seen people online fault Su Han for being rude or a tsundere, but honestly his reaction seems normal for a 13-year old who just had a cold father-figure barge into his life. Read for the romance, not for the family warmth because you won’t get that.

Beware of the Brothers manhwa review – Another bait and switch

In the post before this one, I posted about a Chinese web novel that promised one thing, delivered for a while then switched it out for something else. Chinese web novels are not the only culprits. Beware of the Brothers is a manhwa based on a Korean web novel that does the same bait-and-switch.

It offers a tale of a woman who goes back in time to her childhood to try and make sense of her difficult and tragic relationship with her adoptive parents and siblings. And it delivers that for a while in sometimes heartwarming, sometimes painful and sometimes frustrating detail. But then… Ugh. Anyway, here’s the summary first:

Summary: Hari, a destitute girl, got adopted by Duke Ernst at 7 years old when she lost her mother. The Ernsts had themselves lost their youngest daughter Arina and sought Hari due to her resemblance to the late girl.

After suffering all kinds of persecution in 20 years of life at the Ernst estate, Hari is about to escape by getting married. But right before the wedding, she wakes up to find herself back to her childhood in that hellish household. Well this time she’s going to live how she pleases and not repeat the tragedies of the past!

Or so she claims, but if that’s what you’re expecting, forget it. While most “back to the past” protagonists use their knowledge and maturity to change things and improve their lives, Hari in Beware of the Brothers isn’t one of those.

So prepare yourself to see a supposed 27-year old acting like a kid most of the time. Sulking, fighting, arguing with her young brothers Eugene, Cabel and Erich. What you won’t see is a former adult trying to prepare herself for an independent life through education, hard work, networking or anything other kind of common sense behavior. When help is needed, she doesn’t even offer to perform basic bookkeeping or writing tasks even though as a former adult she should have been able to do all that.

While she does try and fail to prevent one great tragedy, that’s the limit of her efforts in that regard. It goes to ridiculous levels when she blandly endures physical abuse for no good reason until her brothers save her. What’s the point of the “adult returned to kid” setting if she keeps acting like a kid? The author would have created a better story by simply having this be her first and only life. There are a lot of series like that, where the “isekai” or “reincarnator” setting feels completely tacked on.

Regardless, none of that is my main beef with Beware of the Brothers. For all her clumsiness and helplessness, Hari is still a pitiable figure who thinks her family never cared about her in the first or second life. The slow, frustrating but ultimately rewarding process by which they all admit that they all care about each other, and the brothers explain that they see Hari as their real sister… it was very sweet and heartwarming to read. After all the annoyances, it was like FINALLY! Phew! And the fandom rejoiced…

…until the timeskip…

…which made it clear that the whole “brothers” thing was a lie…

…and Hari is going to end up in a romantic relationship with her older “brother” Eugene.

hari seducing eugene in beware of the brothers — That’s my line, author.

Back up and let’s review. Beware of the Brothers spent the first 30 or so chapters building a warm and solid family relationship. Then after that it apparently turned into an incest romance series. In other words, the author built the family just to have incest – can’t have incest without family right?

I say “apparently turned” because I stopped reading once I saw a suspicious scene. The usual “bump into each other, ooh he’s so cute” kind of scene. I did a quick search for spoilers, saw the Eugene x Hari ending and noped right out of there.

Well it does say “Beware of the brothers” in the title. It just didn’t use the full version: “Beware of the brothers who may be secretly lusting after their adoptive sister who is a dead ringer for their late little sister.” Eugene is nuts for considering it, but Hari is even harder to understand. For a lifetime and a half, over 40 years, she has seen Eugene as nothing more than a somewhat distant older brother. She was all gung-ho about marrying another, very decent guy. And now it’s suddenly “hey, time to marry my big brother”???

If I were a masochist I would want to see them explain things to their friends, siblings and the society at large, but I’m not one so I dropped out long ago. If you still want to read the series after this spoilerrific post, then clearly incest doesn’t put you off, so enjoy yourself. As for me, and hundreds of fans, we’re just pissed off because the author hid her true purpose so cunningly. If that incest tag had been there from the start, I would never have touched the series. Thus this post is here to warn innocent victims like myself.

On to better, less immoral series!

My Fantastic Chef Wife – Not fantastic at all! (Chinese web novel review)

Just like Japanese isekai series often have the hero winning the natives over with superior Japanese food, Chinese time travel/other world romance series often have the heroine cooking her way to riches and/or her man’s heart. My Fantastic Chef Wife by Di Qiu is just one of many in the cooking isekai genre and doesn’t do much to stand out. However the fact that it had over 180 chapters translated made me try it in hopes of getting a long and satisfying read out of it. Rapey start aside, it could have been really good if it had wrapped up early. As it is… well, I will explain in a bit, but first the usual blurb:

Summary (from Flying Lines):

The five-star chef unexpectedly caught up with the debris flow… When she woke up again, she found herself become a peasant’s wife… Aunts constantly came to bully her families, and there were crazy relatives seeking troubles. Did they really think her strong husband was just a decoration or something?

Her “decorative” husband: “when we get everything done, how will my fantastic chef wife thank me?” “Braised chicken, stewed eel, sesame butter roll, fried meat with fermented bean curd, roasted pheasant…just name it!”

He gave her a smirk and said, “Tonight, I want something different…”

Content warning: As I said, like 80% of Chinese “romance” manhua, it starts with a rape. Worse than that, it starts with the original body of the MC Ye Xiaoxian dying of a drug overdose after being drugged with a pig aphrodisiac by her mother-in-law. I think it’s the novelist’s way of weeding out intelligent and conscientious readers. “Can you make it past this hurdle? Then welcome to the show.” Check your brains out at the door and dive in.

The male lead Xiao Baoshan was also drugged by his mother and thus was a rape victim as well. And he feels much worse about it than Ye Xiaoxian does. That’s the reason I gave this series a pass and decided to keep reading. If he had turned out to be one of those creepy, abusive “You are now my woman” kind of guys, I would have high-tailed it out of there. For her part, Xiaoxian just gets up the next day, dusts herself off, says she understands why the mother-in-law drugged them (?!). Then presto, the story moves on.

In fact Xiaoxian doesn’t even understand why Xiao Baoshan feels guilty and uncomfortable about the whole incident. Even though it’s normal for him to feel bad, seeing as he was DRUGGED BY HIS OWN MOTHER and ended up sleeping with the woman who was originally supposed to be his sister-in-law before his brother died. It’s a really weird and unnatural situation, but if you’ve made it past chapter 2 then you already left common sense behind, so keep moving! Full speed ahead!

First the good parts of My Fantastic Chef Wife

-Once you get past the first two chapters, there’s not much objectionable content. Just FYI.

-The series is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s about a chef and she’s fantastic at what she does. You will see all kinds of people totally bowled over by her fantastic cooking skills, and there are a lot of different foods cooked in almost every chapter early on. Later on she trains others to cook her dishes and innovates less because she has a busy business, but she still cooks often.

-The MC and her family are very hardworking and entrepreneurial. They wake up early to sell food in town, try new ideas, take advantage of gaps in the market, etc. The story is a bit idealistic and there’s a lot of luck involved, but eventually they move from a small roadside stall to their own little restaurant in town.

-Ye Xiaoxian is pretty and talented, but not a complete Mary Sue. Not everyone loves her, not every idea she has is successful. It’s plain that she’s good at cooking and has a decent head for business, but is bad at personal relationships. She lets things slide when she shouldn’t, doesn’t pay enough attention to potential danger and isn’t diplomatic when she should be. Her willful ignorance about how business and bureaucracy works later leads to disaster.

-Unlike most “face-slapping” novels of this sort, her extended family is not that bad. They’re greedy, selfish and stupid, but not actually evil. That leaves room for future reconciliation. While they never become very close, they do eventually develop a mutually respectful and even helpful relationship. Special props go to the mother-in-law Li Hongmei, who is Xiaoxian’s biggest supporter despite being her straight up murderer. She’s also one of the smartest, kindest and most perceptive characters in the book. My Fantastic Chef Wife is weird like that.

-The male lead Xiao Baoshan is a very decent sort who is much more concerned for Ye Xiaoxian’s comfort than she is for his or even her own. He’s neither overly pushy nor overly distant, doesn’t interfere in her business but doesn’t ignore her when she needs help. While he’s no romantic, he still does his best to do what he thinks Xiaoxian will like. This makes it all the sadder to read when she pushes him away and gives all kinds of confusing signals early on. Just talk to the man, woman!

Then the bad parts that made me stop reading (MAJOR SPOILERS)

🚩A hard reset of almost all progress is going to occur around the chapter 180 mark. Due to the combination of a corrupt official, an evil business rival, Baoshan’s own dark past and a looming war, Ye Xiaoxian is separated from her husband and loses her restaurant, her property and her reputation as a good, safe cook.

-This wouldn’t be annoying if it had happened very early, but to hit the reset button after so many chapters of watching Xiaoxian struggle from scratch and build her relationships, that’s just too much. I went and checked to see how many chapters the series has and it turns out there are over 450 out now! In other words, a story which could have been very nicely wrapped up in 200 chapters is being artificially restarted with more drama thrown in just to keep us reading. NO WAY.

Btw, thanks to My Fantastic Chef Wife, now I always check the chapter count of a series before starting. If it’s over 500 chapters and not fully translated, sorry, not reading.

-Since the title has “Wife” in it, you might expect a lot of romance, but you won’t get much. Early on Baoshan is too shy and uncomfortable, then once he warms up to the idea, Xiaoxian is too tsundere. She knows he’s shy and not smart about these things, but she still acts like a kid around him. If he pays attention to someone else, she gets jealous and snippy. If he tries to get affectionate, she finds him clingy and annoying. He runs, she pulls, he comes closer, she pushes him away. The poor man doesn’t know what to do. The reader doesn’t know what she wants. Even she doesn’t know what she wants.

Eventually, and it takes a while but eventually they work through their misunderstandings. They find their way into each others’ hearts (and beds) and things seem to be going well. Then the author forces the reset. Baoshan has to run away and leaves Xiaoxian a divorce note so his enemies won’t bother her. And instead of understanding his intentions, Xiaoxian gets mad and upset and says she doesn’t want anything to do with him any more. Which means we’re going to have to endure another 100-200 chapters before they meet again, and another 100-200 till they work things out, and so on. NO WAY.

-While it can’t be helped due to the way the story plays out, it is clear that as the series progresses there will be much less cooking and much more drama, war, political intrigue, etc. If that’s your kind of thing, sure. But if you just wanted to read a simple countryside romance with some cooking and business – like the series originally promised – then you’re outta luck.

And so for all these reasons, I decided to quit reading My Fantastic Chef Wife. The main character seems to have a screw loose with how quickly she jumps to conclusions, but that’s how she has been since the first chapter so that much would have been bearable.

The bigger problem was the bait-and-switch the author pulled. It’s like getting offered a steak, digging in, and having the plate snatched away and replaced with a salad. Nothing against salad, but that’s not what I ordered. If you give me 180 chapters of the cooking romance you promised and then expect me to read another 250+ chapters of political drama then no, I’m walking away.

TL;DR

Read My Fantastic Chef Wife if you’re looking for a rather frustrating experience (here’s a link to the series btw). Things take a while to go well, then when they do, reset! Back to square one. If you like slow buildups and many challenges in the way of a romance, go for it. Me, I’m out!