by S. Swea
Imagine this: an uneventful day, just like any other. You’re minding your own business when suddenly, your little sister looks up from her newest romance novel and declares excitedly that there’s a character in it with your name! Alarm bells go off in your head. The first “flags,” as they’re called, have just been planted for your imminent transmigration. If you don’t take the necessary precautions—burning the book and destroying all other copies, avoiding all strange encounters, or, as a very last resort, changing your name—you might soon have to bid this life of yours goodbye.
Chuanyue (lit: “transmigration”) is a genre of Chinese literature that seems, and deceptively so, quite easy to define. It’s in the name, after all: you are moved, whether physically or metaphysically, from one place, body, or time to another. Its cousin (though how many times removed, I’d struggle to say) is the Japanese genre of isekai, another type of portal fantasy that fits snugly into the science fiction-fantasy niche. But while isekai deals with protagonists being transported to or reborn in alternate fantasy worlds, the rules of chuanyue aren’t as rigid. Yes, there are sometimes white vans that round corners too quickly and send high schoolers crashing into worlds of spell-casting mages and gravity-defying martial artists, but more often than not, transmigrators end up in the shoes of someone not too dissimilar from themselves. A leading actor could, for example, swap lives with one of his rivals; a professor could find herself saddled with the heavy responsibility of educating a royal scion; an author could fall asleep at their desk one day and wake up in their latest work-in-progress.
Previously, I mentioned chuanyue in the context of books. The specific name for the subgenre of transmigration that involves a reader (or sometimes, innocent bystander who just happens to have the misfortune of knowing the reader) being transported into a book is called chuanshu, and it is one of the most popular types of transmigration fiction. Little wonder this is, considering that books have always been a primary mode of escapism. Who wouldn’t like to meet—or in certain romance-centric stories, marry—their literary heroes? Who wouldn’t want to become grandmaster of the jianghu or pearl of the imperial city?
Not all transmigration protagonists are equally enviable though. The luckier ones, the type of character known affectionately as “biological children of the author,” could potentially live out your regular rags-to-riches stories. Perhaps they had an unhappy past life, and are now presented (deservingly, think the audience, arbiter of what characters deserve by virtue of our control over suspension of disbelief) with a chance to start anew, where they’re equipped with money, power, or a love interest with both. They have some kind of leg up on the rest of the world, what is called a jinshouzhi, “golden finger,” and they will get their happy ending. How cathartic! A feel-good read for a bad day, when you just want to see some Mary Sue kicking ass and getting laid.
Still, the best chuanyue stories, at least in my opinion, are about cannon fodder: people who are dealt terrible hands and end up in utterly wretched situations. Oh, so you read all five volumes of the original book and know both the identity of the villain and his inevitable comeuppance? Congratulations! You’ve just transmigrated into his snivelling henchman! And before you think of running away and washing your hands free from sin before the hero comes, here’s the thing: you can’t. Yet another subgenre of chuanyue fiction is system transmigration, where you aren’t just zapped into another world with no strings attached. System transmigration involves rules: you must do this, you must not do that; you can’t tell anyone you’re a transmigrator or you might shatter their fragile human understanding of the world and send them into existential despair; you can’t break character or you’ll be deemed OOC (“out of character”) and punished somehow. Of course, there are some authors that get quite inventive with this, and rebellious protagonists who defy or outright destroy the systems they’re bound to are not unheard of.
And there are other perhaps lesser-known but fast-growing subgenres of transmigration. Off the top of my head, here are some examples: huchuan, where you swap bodies with someone else; chuangu, where you transmigrate into the past; kuaichuan, literally “speed transmigration,” where the same person transmigrates into many different worlds back-to-back usually for one express purpose (e.g., to fix plots that have gone astray); and fanchuan, when, in a twist of events, characters from books or movies transmigrate into your world. My personal favourite genre of transmigration fiction is guchuanjin, transmigration from the past to the present, if only because it is very funny to see an old-timey emperor tottering about the 21st century, getting spooked by roombas and becoming a Douyin superstar. Here I’d like to share an interesting comment I found when researching the term for transmigration into the future, which surprisingly is not common enough to have been given a name. A netizen replied: “Wouldn’t that be a work of sci-fi?” Joy! The acknowledgement of transmigration as a genre in and of itself, not just a subsidiary of fantasy or science fiction.
For more on transmigration in the context of time travel, you may refer to this Inverse article.
The nebulous nature of transmigration as a genre makes it so that you will almost never read the same story twice. Sure, there are oft-recurring tropes, like the aforementioned sharing a name with a fictional character you will later transmigrate into, but even these can be written in fun new ways depending on the author’s particular style of humor and awareness of genre. And that’s not even to speak of how the same story can take an entirely new direction in terms of what the actual endgame is for our plucky protagonists. Are they seeking to return to their original worlds, their familiar lives, or settle down and start afresh in entirely new ones? Are they playing a character, or themselves? And if the former, do they eventually choose to come clean? Do they start off angling for every eligible bachelor in town, only to end up in the lap of a… say, bachelorette? Will they, won’t they? When it comes to preordained destinies or unlikely romances, the permutations are endless.
I adore transmigration because it is simultaneously silly and serious; high-stakes and also, fundamentally, about nothing at all. It is as much about resignation to fate as it is about rejection of it; of having a grand adventure laid out before you and deciding you’ll play no part in it; of standing up to the big, bad narrative even as it rolls you out.
You see, in each and every transmigration story, the protagonist has a choice in what they want to be, and not just in the archetype, fighting class, or overarching narrative sense. They themself decide how they interact with the world around them, where the needle of their moral compass points, and whether they are kind or cruel to people who have no idea that they are only characters in another person’s story. It’s the dilemma of every RPG: do I set out to save everyone, even at the cost of myself, or just go along with the ride? Do my choices even matter, in a world where I am acquainted with every possible ending?
Stories about stories, characters playing characters. You get to thinking of transmigrators as “real” people as opposed to the “fictional” ones around them, and these transmigrators (and you, in turn) realize that the “fictional” characters around them are real too—in a sense. It touches someplace very tender inside, the thought. That there could be worlds and worlds of people who matter only as much as you think of them as material. That your proximity to them grants them personhood.
A mostly ridiculous notion, but still: I can only hope that if I should ever wake up someday and find myself a character in another person’s story, that they will treat me as a whole person too.