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[REVIEW] “A Messy Magnum Opus: Mai Jia’s The Colonel and the Eunuch” by Kevin McGeary
Mai Jia (author), Dylan Levi King (translator). The Colonel and the Eunuch, Apollo, 2024. 400 pgs.
Mai Jia is one of the grand old men of Chinese letters. After spending his early adult life in the People’s Liberation Army, specialising in military intelligence, his reputation soared with the 2002 novel Decoded, which has sold over 10 million copies worldwide. His novel Plot Against won the highly prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2008.
The Colonel and the Eunuch is Mai Jia’s first novel to venture away from the spy genre, drawing on his own rural childhood experiences. Spanning several decades and employing an unreliable narrator, the novel is largely concerned with piecing together contradictory accounts of the impressive and enigmatic eponymous character.
“… a nickname is like a scar on your cheek. It doesn’t look nice but it was earned… Without a nickname… your words don’t carry any weight.”
The titular figure, a friend of the narrator’s grandfather, is known to some as an accomplished military doctor and hero, and to others as both a traitor and a eunuch. Most characters are identified by their nicknames, as an early line of dialogue observes: “a nickname is like a scar on your cheek. It doesn’t look nice but it was earned… Without a nickname… your words don’t carry any weight.”
The impressionability of the young narrator serves as an effective narrative device, as he observes the adults and gradually develops an understanding of the village and the wider world. His grandfather’s superstitions leave a particularly deep impression. In one early piece of scene-setting, the characters hear water buffalo sniffling in their pens, geckos creeping up the walls, mice chittering in the pantry, and owls hooting in the bamboo forest. “Grandpa said that all of them had been human in their last lives, but they had been born as animals and insects to repent for their sins.”
A particularly powerful scene is one in which the narrator parts ways with his grandfather:
Everything that happens to us is fate. Grandpa had said that many times before. That day, down in the hold, I regretted not saying goodbye to Grandpa. I figured he must have already died of a broken heart. Maybe that was his fate, too: to raise me for sixteen years, and then watch me slip away without saying a word. Grandpa told me once that a single kind word could erase a lifetime of resentment. I cried, but I couldn’t even hear myself over the rumbling of ship’s engines.
The title character fascinates everyone. According to one heroic account the colonel gives of himself: “I’ve been in more battles than I can count. I’ve taken more bullets than you’ve eaten sweet potatoes… my body is one great wound. I’m full of shrapnel.”
It is claimed that he saved many lives, and one observer reflects: “Saving a single life is as great as building a seven-storey pagoda. If you add up all the lives he saved, you would have a pagoda that reached heaven. You could climb all the way up it and live forever.”
An early piece of narration remarks of the same man: “The Eunuch was universally acknowledged as the greatest freak of them all. All of the other village freaks together could not compete with him for that title… the way he treated his cats was better than most people treated their children.”
Far worse than being deemed a freak, the colonel is accused of pimping and of acting as a male prostitute for the hated Japanese occupiers during World War 2. As the Constable, one of the most entertaining and outspoken characters, declares: “You know it’s one thing for a woman to sell pussy. That’s a crime, but if a man sells dick to the Japs, what would that make him? He wouldn’t even be considered human. It’s like, legally, you couldn’t even charge him with a crime! To do something like that, he’d have to be a subhuman monster… every able-bodied man should have gone to the front lines… (the colonel’s) family would be cursed for generations.”
The colonel finally meets his reckoning during the Cultural Revolution in the second half of the 1960s. The final section of the novel takes place after a 21-year interlude. Having lived overseas, as well as absorbed the wisdom of his grandfather, the narrator concludes: “life is never simply a tragedy or a farce or a romance, it contains all of these, one after the other.” The conclusion, in particular, showcases Mai Jia’s flair for ending with a flourish.
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One of the difficulties of being so well established in the publishing industry is that Mai Jia now occupies a position in which very few editors are willing to challenge him. Moreover, the role of an editor in China is often to censor politically rather than to refine for literary quality.
As a result, the editing process can overlook key issues such as plotting, characterisation, and prose style, in a literary culture that has grown accustomed to poor examples of the latter. For this reason, despite its many qualities, the book might have benefited from greater concision. Certain scenes and conversations continue for pages without advancing the narrative.
The novel is at its strongest when revealing character through dialogue. The way the male characters speak to one another is coarse yet revealing: “Oh, that’s right,” the Colonel said, “you didn’t have a mother. I suppose I’ll fuck your grandmother, then.”
Towards the end of the first half, there is an illuminating passage in which the grandfather reflects on the seasons of life, comparing childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age to the four seasons.
Since the narrator spends much of the novel at an impressionable age, he becomes a receptacle for a range of intriguing ideas, recalling: “I read in the newspaper once that love is the same as physical fitness. Some people are genetically gifted, others build it over time, and others are destined never to have it.”
… as though Mai Jia were an established Hollywood director granted a larger budget than necessary.
Mai Jia’s gift for creating memorable characters that seem to leap from the page is also evident. The disabled Blindboy occupies the lowest rung of society yet manages to build a new life online. It is said of him: “I knew him as a decrepit man begging for food, but on the internet he was something of a folk hero.”
The Colonel and the Eunuch reads as an entertaining magnum opus, as though Mai Jia were an established Hollywood director granted a larger budget than necessary. His talent for storytelling is on full display, as is a certain lack of editorial discipline.
How to cite: McGeary, Kevin. “A Messy Magnum Opus: Mai Jia’s The Colonel and the Eunuch.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Apr. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/04/20/colonel-eunuch.
Kevin McGeary is a translator, Mandarin tutor and author. His short story collection The Naked Wedding was published in 2021. He is also a singer-songwriter who has written two albums of Chinese-language songs. [All contributions by Kevin McGeary.]
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